No Right Turn Read online

  “It’s a crime scene,” he said by way of explanation. His face was apologetic, as if he knew Ronzoni was playing games with me, so I let it slide. Ron and I took a booth in the pub and watched Ronzoni and the Beadmans wander around the massive garage. Ronzoni spent some time examining the rollup door at the end of the building that I figured led out to the sandy driveway. Then he wandered over to a long set of steel shelves. The shelves held what looked like parts for cars, but from a distance they all appeared to be far too clean to be car parts. I always imagined car parts to be covered in grime, but I supposed they weren’t like that before they were used. I thought I could see a large piston attached to a connecting rod next to a small engine block that looked like a toy. Ronzoni examined all the parts without touching them and then spoke to Dale Beadman again.

  “What do you think?” asked Ron.

  “Ten cars? How do you steal ten cars?”

  “Easy way is on a vehicle transporter. You know, a big semitrailer.”

  “Right. Or you have ten drivers and you drive them off the island. Like The Italian Job.”

  Ron smiled. He had a touch of Michael Caine about him. “That takes a lot of planning, don’t you think?”

  “I do. And banking on the weather.”

  The uniformed officer opened the door from the garage, and Ronzoni led the Beadmans in. He shook hands with Dale.

  “It’s a tough one,” he said. “Stolen vehicles are usually picked up where they’re dumped or they’re never found. Chop shops usually have them in pieces within hours. But your cars are more like art. That’s how we’ll find them. You display them like art and people will buy them like art. We’ll get the feelers out to every auction house in the state.”

  “What happens if they take them to auction in South Carolina?” I interjected.

  Ronzoni frowned. “Then it becomes a federal crime and we’ll call in the FBI.”

  “That sounds a bit dramatic,” said Beadman.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Ronzoni.

  He wouldn’t want to cross that bridge. In my experience, law enforcement agencies worked better together than they made it seem in the movies and television. The rivalries were there, but they rarely got in the way. Most law enforcement types were too professional for that. The fact was, if a local crime became a federal crime by crossing state lines, the added resources of the feds were often welcomed by underfunded police departments. In the end, if the crime was solved, the local department got to claim that as a win in their statistics even if the Bureau did the bulk of the heavy lifting. Detective Ronzoni wasn’t one for statistics, though. He liked the credit. He was a good cop, even if he was a terrible dresser, but he sure liked getting the credit, whether it was due or not.

  “We’ll need a police report for our insurance,” said Beadman.

  Ronzoni gave a look like he’d just eaten a bad pickle. “Of course.”

  Angie stepped toward the exit. “I’ll take you over to the house and get you the list of cars.”

  “And that video.”

  “Of course.”

  Angie led Ronzoni away and he gave Ron and me a nod as he passed. They stepped out the French doors into the bright sun, which bounced off the television on the wall. I saw the reflection of one of the men fixing the palapa, up a ladder, yelling something at Ronzoni below. Probably telling him to watch the hell out.

  I looked up at Dale Beadman, who stood at the end of our booth. I liked his fake little English pub. I could see myself enjoying a beer in a booth. I hoped against hope that he would offer me one.

  “If you’ll come with me,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  Dale Beadman strode across the polished concrete. Ron and I followed. I, for one, wondered if I should take my shoes off, the floor was that clean. Beadman didn’t remove his footwear, so I followed his lead. He made his way over to the long side wall where the shelves of car parts stood. He waited in front of the shelves as if they were important.

  “You collect car parts?” I asked.

  “I do,” said Beadman. “Some of my collection is so rare you can’t find parts, so when they come up I grab them. Other parts I have fabricated in my factory.”

  “So you’re wondering why someone who goes to all the trouble of stealing ten cars would leave behind just-as-rare parts for those very cars.”

  Beadman glanced at me. “I wasn’t, but I am now.”

  Then he grabbed the steel framework of the shelving unit and pulled hard. I thought for a second the whole thing was going to come down on top of us. It didn’t. The unit was fixed to the wall and Beadman pulled the wall open. It slid like a barn door, revealing another section of the garage. He repeated the effort with the second half of the shelving unit and then flicked on the light.

  It was an antechamber big enough for two cars to park side-by-side, or one car if you really wanted to show it off. The walls and floor were the same as the main area of the garage, white and black.

  “A secret room,” said Ron.

  “Not secret,” said Beadman. “Private. If you walked around the building you’d figure out this section was here. It’s not hidden, exactly.”

  “But it’s not on show,” I said. “Why?”

  “It’s a special space for a special car. It might sound strange to you, but it’s for a car I wanted to enjoy all to myself. I earned it.”

  “Okay, Mr. Beadman, I tell you what. You obviously brought us here for a reason and I’m guessing this is it. So let’s get some stuff cleared up. We’re pretty good at what we do. We’re not the Mounties, we don’t get our man every time. But our batting average is better than most. I don’t need to tell you tales like the police, reassure you that we’ll find your stuff. If you hire us, we’ll search and we’ll see what we see. That’s what I offer. All I ask in return is prompt payment and cutting the BS.”

  “I always pay my bills, Mr. Jones.”

  “It’s Miami, and right now I’m more concerned about the BS.”

  He frowned. He was a successful guy. At the top of his totem. In my experience, the closer a guy got to the top of his totem, the less honesty he heard. People generally liked to hear what they wanted to hear, so other people generally gave them what they wanted. I also knew from experience that those kinds of guys often didn’t appreciate the honesty. I didn’t care what he thought. I had a house to clean and a bar to fix.

  “I heard you were a straight shooter.”

  “Where did you hear that, Dale? I never did get to ask Angie how she came to find me.”

  “BJ Baker.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. I did it a lot better than Ronzoni. BJ Baker had been a client. He had lost something and hired Ron and me to find it. Suffice to say he was a demanding client and we hadn’t taken a shine to each other. I had certainly never expected to get a case on the recommendation of BJ Baker.

  “You know BJ?” I asked.

  “I do. We sometimes find ourselves in the same circles. I know you did the Heisman case. It was in the news. I asked him about you. He said you were a pain in the backside but he had to admit that you got the job done.”

  “You want to work with a pain in the backside?”

  “I think BJ Baker is a pain in the backside and I consider him a friend. You, I don’t know yet. But I don’t care.” He focused in on me and I noticed his eyes again. He had one hell of a steely glare.

  “Let me tell you something about my business, Miami. It’s cutthroat. There are lots of guys who want to do it and only a few who can. I have been a winning driver and a winning crew chief and a winning owner. And there’s only one way that happens. Everyone on the team is the best at what they do, but they also work as a team. There are lots of egos in racing, and not just the drivers. I learned early on that everyone has different buttons to press, for good and bad. I learned to manage quiet guys and loud guys, guys who always think they’re right and guys who never speak up but always add value when they do. I’ve managed guys I’
d lend a million bucks to and guys I wouldn’t give a dime, and I’ve managed guys that are lifelong friends and guys I didn’t care to know socially. Call them pains in the backside if you want to. I don’t care. In racing, only one thing matters. Results.”

  “I can’t guarantee results, Dale. Your cars might have disappeared.”

  “They ain’t been vaporized. They’re still on God’s green earth. You just got to find them. And I’m gonna make the job easier. I don’t care so much about the cars in there,” he said, pointing out to the main garage. “I got the police and I got insurance for that. Your job, if you’re man enough for it, is to find one car. Just one. The one that belongs in this room here.”

  He didn’t take his eyes from me, so I didn’t take mine from him. It was a pissing contest, that was for sure. We’re men, we do that. It’s primal and feral and unnecessary and it’s who we are. I believed what he said about managing guys. If he wasn’t good at it, he wouldn’t have been so successful. That was the case in all pro sports. It was certainly the case when I played baseball. You needed great players for sure, but a lot of pennants had been won by teams with less than all-star lineups. Good managers brought the best out of guys. As Beadman said, they knew how to manage the egos and press the buttons. I’d had managers I would have walked through fire for, and I’d had managers I wouldn’t have rolled over if they were on fire, and I recalled well which ones were the winners. I knew in which category I put Dale Beadman. Despite the if you’re man enough for it jibe. Danielle would have torn him a new one for that.

  “All right, Dale. I guess the question is, do you want to tell me about this hot car, or do you not? Because without the warts-and-all truth, I’m confident you’ll be paying me to find absolutely nothing.”

  “What do you mean, hot car?”

  “I mean acquired by other than open and lawful means, Dale. I have a good friend who knows a lot of people who trade in things like illicit art and Heisman trophies. I’ve picked up a thing or two. So I asked myself, why would someone who has built an entire pub designed to allow him and his buddies to look at his car collection have a private chamber designed to hide one of his cars. And if said car was stolen from him, why would that someone not include it in the list of stolen vehicles for the police? Answer? He doesn’t want the police to know about that car. Why? Because it’s hot. Stolen. Acquired by unlawful means.”

  I had said my piece and I would say no more until Dale Beadman decided which way he would go. I did keep my eyes on him, though. He, on the other hand, looked at his feet and shuffled some. It was the first sign of uncertainty I had seen in him. Then he must have come to some kind of decision, because he took my eyes again with his steely gaze.

  “The car wasn’t stolen,” he said. “By me, I mean. But there are issues with the—what do they call it? Provenance?”

  “You can’t verify the car’s ownership history.”

  “Right. No one can. Because this car isn’t supposed to exist.”

  “Okay. Tell me the story.”

  Beadman glanced at Ron and then back at me. “Can I offer you gentlemen a beer?”

  Ron looked like a Labrador with a pork chop dangling in front of him.

  We sat at the bar and Beadman poured ales from a tap. Once we had all taken a sip, he spoke.

  “Have you heard of the F-88?”

  I shook my head. “Sounds like a fighter jet.”

  “Same idea, I suppose. Those kinds of designations get given to concept projects, prototypes.”

  “Okay.”

  “This was the Oldsmobile F-88. It was one of the first concept cars. See, back in the fifties, General Motors ran these motor shows across the country they called motoramas. These concept cars were developed to show off GM’s futuristic thinking. The F-88 was one of those. It premiered at a motorama in 1954. Have you fellas heard of Harley Earl?”

  I shook my head and sipped my beer. It was good, not too hoppy.

  “Didn’t he invent the Corvette?” asked Ron.

  “Sort of,” said Beadman. “He was the head of the styling section at GM, basically the chief designer. You know all those sweeping lines and tail fin lights on those wonderful convertibles of the fifties and sixties? Harley Earl headed the team behind most of those. As you say, Ron, he was behind Project Opel, which was a secret development project that went on to become the Chevrolet Corvette.”

  Beadman took a sip of his beer. I was glad for it. I don’t trust a man who lets his beer go warm in favor of flapping his lips. Beadman continued.

  “The F-88s did the run of the motorama shows in 1954. Now, it was the policy at GM at the time that concept cars that had run their course at the shows or been replaced by a new concept should be destroyed.”

  Ron nearly dropped his beer. “Destroyed?”

  “Yeah, I think it was a liability thing. See, a lot of the cars were never built out to run on the street. They were chassis and body and then just enough of a system underneath to move them from one show to another. The brakes weren’t always production quality, that sort of thing. Lots of concept cars were destroyed. But not all of them. Harley Earl held a good deal of power in GM at the time, and the word was that a few of the concept cars found their way into the hands of his friends, top GM dealers, those sort of folks.”

  “And that’s what happened to the F-88?” I asked.

  “Sort of. Hold on a moment.” Beadman found a device under the bar that looked like a tablet computer. He wandered back out to us, tapping on the screen. As he took a stool, one of the screens above the bar flickered to life. Beadman tapped a few more times. He seemed pretty comfortable with the technology. An image of a car appeared on the big screen.

  “The F-88,” said Beadman.

  I could see his point. It was one hell of a sexy car. A golden convertible with a sweeping curvaceous hood and tail fin lights on the rear, and a wide, handsome grille like a smiling mouth on the front. It looked like something James Bond might have driven back when Connery held the mantle.

  “That is a beauty,” said Ron.

  “She is. But she’s more than a car. See, the F-88’s history gets pretty murky. Despite its popularity, it was never put into production. The rumor was that executives from the Chevrolet division lobbied against the F-88 because the Oldsmobile would steal the limelight from the newly released Corvette.”

  “Dirty pool,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Beadman. “But the F-88 had one big fan. Harley Earl. The story goes that he liked the design so much that he had a second car built from the mold for his own personal use, which he had painted red. The red F-88 was known to have made appearances at a few shows and races, like the Sports Car Club of America races at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and Atterbury Air Force Base in Columbus, Indiana.”

  I nodded toward the screen over the bar. “So this clearly isn’t the red one.”

  “Probably not,” said Beadman.

  “Probably not?” asked Ron.

  “Well, here’s the thing. The golden F-88 was reported to have returned to Detroit, but no one has been able to say what happened to it. What is known is that a shipment of crates was sent from GM to the California home of EL Cord, the owner of Cord Industries, which was the holding company behind the Auburn and Cord car brands, American Airways and plenty of other transportation companies. Those crates contained enough parts to build an entire F-88. Some say it was the golden F-88 disassembled for shipping so as to prevent it from being sent to the crusher, others say it was the backup parts machined in case anything went wrong with the show version.”

  “Why send them to this guy, Cord?”

  “No one knows for sure. But both EL Cord and Harley Earl had homes here in Palm Beach. They probably knew each other. Either way, Cord never did anything with the parts, and they were sold and on-sold a number of times. The car was partially assembled, sold again, and then finally assembled by a guy called Don Williams. It was last sold at the Barrett-Jackson auction for a touch over th
ree million dollars and now lives in a museum in Colorado.”

  Ron let out a whistle.

  “And the red one?”

  “Disappeared. Harley Earl died in 1969 and left no clue. There was a rumor that the two F-88s were being loaded onto a transport when one of the engines caught fire. The story goes that the guy transporting them didn’t know how to open the hood, so the car burned. No one at GM or Oldsmobile could recall such a fire. After that, the red F-88 disappeared.”

  I said, “Why do I think you’ve left off the words until now . . . ?”

  Beadman nodded. “It’s well known that I collect cars, especially domestic cars. I have another Chevy concept car in my museum.”

  “You have a museum?” I asked.

  “You don’t follow racing, do you?”

  “I don’t catch it as much as I’d like.”

  “He doesn’t own a television,” said Ron.

  “You don’t own a television?”

  “Nope.”

  “How do you watch sports?”

  “I go to a bar, or I go to the game.”

  “What about news?”

  “What news?”

  “Any news.”

  “We just had a hurricane, and I know who the president is. You’ve had a car stolen. What did I miss?”

  Beadman shrugged. He hadn’t yet gotten a handle on my buttons.

  “So the red car?” I asked.

  “I was approached. By an intermediary. He said he could access a concept car, one of only two. We went back and forth a bit. Eventually I was taken to see it.”

  “Where?”

  “Lansing, Michigan.”

  “Long way from home.”

  “We were at a race at Michigan International Speedway. It’s a short drive to Lansing.”

  “And you saw the car?” asked Ron.

  “I did. In a barn just outside of town.”

  I frowned. “A barn?”

  Beadman nodded.

  “So who had the car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” I asked.