Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998
Jimmy’s Car
by Mark Herr
It was a few days before we heard about Jimmy Hoffa going missing that the car turned up on the side of my field. It was at the edge of a field that I almost never go into, but I was sure I noticed it the first day it was there. Now, I’m not saying that Jimmy Hoffa’s body got parked on my field out in the middle of the Bible belt. But I’m not saying that it wasn’t put there either.
The fact of the matter is, I left it alone. People’s cars do tend to break down in the most inconvenient places, and the edge of my field would probably qualify as one of them. If my fights weren’t on up at the house, I could see where someone might walk clear into town before they’d find a place with a phone. So I just left it there, thinking a tow truck would show up for it in the next day or so.
After about a week, I guess, I started asking people if they had seen anyone come around the night the car was dropped off. Then I would describe it if they hadn’t been by my place in the past week. It was a light blue Ford with some big old fins on the back. No one remembered any strangers, and in our neck of the woods people remember strangers. So my mystery got a little bit bigger.
“A car just doesn’t appear by itself on the edge of a cornfield,” Harold said. He was the best friend I had although I didn’t care for his attitude on a lot of things. But it’s like my mama always told me, beggars can’t be choosers. And when it came to friends, I had always been a beggar. Me and Harold stood up on my back porch looking across the land at the blue hunk of junk. “Why don’t you just go over and bust the window and see what kind of registration it has in it?”
“Break into someone’s car?”
“Someone’s abandoned car.”
“Can’t do it.”
Harold stared at me, wheels in his mind turning. “You haven’t even gone over to see if it’s unlocked, have you?”
I shook my head, looking down at the ants crawling on my porch.
“Why the heck not?”
“Don’t seem right somehow.”
“I can go take a look if you want me to.”
“Don’t you dare, Harold!” I said with a quick snap of my head. “I want you to leave my car alone.”
He chuckled. “Your car? So now it’s your car, is it? Walter, you sure are a queer son of a bitch.”
“Don’t touch the car, Harold,” was my only response as I walked off the porch and away from the Ford. Truth is, I liked having the car around. It gave my mind something new to work on. Not knowing gave me cause to speculate. Not a lot happens around these parts, so when something new like this comes along, my mind just grabs hold and doesn’t want to let go. I didn’t want Harold ruining it by telling me the car belonged to some traveling salesman who lived over in Wichita. I wanted the imaginings to last as long as possible. And I still figured the tow truck would show up any day to pick it up.
It was only after the third news story I saw on Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance that my mind started to wander in that direction. Sure, we were a long way away from this Hoffa guy’s stomping grounds, but that don’t mean nothing. I mean, those mob types could take someone like that all the way to India if they really put their minds to it. Let New York’s finest try to find him over there, in the big city. Of course, they would have just as much trouble finding him around here. People not from the area often complain that we don’t have any street signs, say they can’t find their way around. Folks here say if you don’t know where you are you really don’t have any business being here. So to me it made perfect sense that Hoffa could be in the trunk of that car out there. I made the mistake of telling Harold my new theory.
“Hoffa? You have got to be kidding me, Walter.” We were on the porch again, watching the sun set off to the west. “They wouldn’t just plop him in the trunk and leave him on a farm somewhere. They would finish the job. They would bury that sucker.”
“Well, maybe they hit car trouble like I thought before and just got as far away as possible. That way, when the police do find the body, they’ll be back in their own neck of the woods.”
“Only one way to find out for sure,” Harold said, and he began to stride directly toward the Ford.
I jumped down after him and ran to block his path. “Don’t you touch that car, Harold. I mean it.”
He stopped in his tracks and looked up at the darkening sky. “You are such a dreamer, Walter. You think up these crazy scenarios, but you don’t want to prove or disprove them. You just want to go on thinking up these crazy ideas until another one comes along. Next week you’ll be saying that it’s really one of them flying saucers and the little green men left it behind and beamed on out of here.”
“I don’t want you touching that car.”
“Fine, Walter. You don’t have to worry about me ever coming near it. I’m leaving.” And he stormed off like he had never stormed off before. I was sure that old hunk of junk had just cost me my best friend.
“People disappear all the time. They just usually don’t get the coverage that Hoffa’s getting.” I was watching the Ford rust with Larry Hartford. Larry was not exactly what I would call a best friend, more like a good acquaintance. I mean, Larry and me had known each other since the first grade, but we never really hung around together. An occasional fishing trip, an occasional beer, and that’s about it. It had been about two months since the car first appeared and almost as long since I last talked to Harold. He sure could be a sorehead when he wanted to be. So I was pretty much stuck with Larry, or he was stuck with me, depending on how you look at it.
“Are you saying that some guy offed his wife, stuck her in the trunk, dropped her off here, and told her family that she took off with another man?” I was starting to like the way Larry’s mind worked. “Well, there could be a million possibilities. She runs off with some guy, and he turns out to be some psycho and kills her the first chance he gets. In the world today you never know who the crazies are.”
I paused before I said anything. “Do you think I’m crazy for not touching the car?”
“Heck, no. You could be tampering with evidence. The state troopers show up and start asking why your fingerprints are all over the car, and next thing you know, you could wind up in jail for killing some girl that you never known while the real killer runs free. Just not worth taking the chance if you know what I mean.”
I nodded my head. I did know what he meant. It made me feel better to hear that I was right and Harold was wrong. You just don’t go messing with other people’s things. You never know what kind of trouble it can land you in.
Halloween that year brought some trouble as far as Jimmy’s car was concerned. Jimmy’s car, that’s what I had come to think of it as by that point. If I ever thought too hard about it, I would tell myself that I was just being a silly middle-aged man. But then again I never tried to think too hard about it.
So Halloween night I was sitting out on my porch in the dark as I did a lot of nights when I couldn’t find anything worth watching on the television. I saw some flashlights flickering on and off along my property fine. I picked up the shotgun that I kept just inside the door. You city folk might think that’s an odd thing to do, but the crazies seem to like to leave the city lights and head out to the country. They figure we live so far apart it will be easier to get away with any danged thing. So most of us keep the heavy artillery within a quick reach.
I made a straight line for Jimmy’s place. I could tell that was where the flashlights were headed. Maybe after all these months someone was finally coming for whatever they left behind. Maybe they were using this goofy holiday to cover anything strange happening. It was the one night of the year that people wouldn’t look twice at you if you were wearing a mask. Maybe the New York mobsters had come back to see why Jimmy had never turned up in the news. Or maybe the crazed husband came back to remove all identification from his wife’s body, or maybe just to look at her one more time to convince himself he had actually done the horrible thing that his nightmares told him he had. To look at his loving wife’s face just one more time...