Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 2, April 1961

“Are you questioning my taste or my ownership?”

“Both maybe. Let’s see your registration.”

I took out my wallet slowly, trying to think the thing through. The suburban police around Central City had a pretty good reputation. I hadn’t heard of any shake-down activities but things were beginning to look suspicious.

He was a grizzled veteran of the force with a fine coat of tan and as he studied my registration some thoughtful little lines appeared at the corners of his eyes.

“Driver’s license?”

I handed him that too. “How about the initials on my belt buckle?”

“No need to get sarcastic,” he said mildly. “I haven’t insulted you. I’m just doing my job.”

And he did it quite leisurely, circling the convertible and studying it carefully from all sides. Then he came back and said. “You’d better get out.”

I did as I was told. “Okay. What next.”

“You said this was your car.”

“It is damn it all! I bought it from King and Walter at Barton Lake. Their label’s on the rear bumper.”

“What’s your license number?”

I politely lifted the registration from his fingers and pointed to where it said, 118-B-297. “Right there. Read it.”

“I did, but the plates on the car read different.”

He was out of his mind, of course, but I decided to humor him. “Let’s look together.”

We looked together. Then I looked again, refusing to believe the impossible. The front plate read 119-B-741. I stared at the plate, then at the cop. “But that’s ridiculous!”

“Isn’t it though?”

“Somebody switched plates on me.”

“And somebody scratched King and Walter off your rear bumper too. They put Central City Motors on in its place.”

The squad car had attracted a few people from the street and now I saw Connie hurrying out of the restaurant and even at this early stage of things, a familiar face was nice to see.

“Larry. What’s wrong?”

“They say this isn’t my car. They say I stole it.”

“Why that’s ridiculous!”

“The most ridiculous thing I ever heard of but they’re right. This isn’t my car.”

When you looked close there were differences but too small to notice unless they were pointed out. And the oversight on my part wasn’t strange. A man comes out of a restaurant to get into his car and if the make, model, color, and condition haven’t changed while he was eating, he gets in and drives away — that is if the cops will let him. He doesn’t check it over for the scratch on the right rear bumper, the smudge on the left front whitewall he put there the night before, or the slight flaw in the radiator cap that he argued with the dealer about.

But I checked now and when I showed Connie that these marks were missing, her bewilderment increased.

The cop had been wearily patient. Connie turned on him and said, “Good heavens! If he’d stolen the car would he drive it in here in broad daylight right under your noses?”

The cop shrugged. “Lady, I’ve got no idea what he’d do. Maybe he’s going to claim the owner loaned it to him.”

“Who is the owner?”

“The car was reported stolen late last night — or rather early this morning — by a Miss Gloria Dane.”

Which went to show that most of what I’d gotten out of life had come by accident, not because I was smart and alert, because I still didn’t realize what was being done to me; that right there in the middle of town on a fine summer morning I was being measured for the electric chair.

I didn’t realize this even though I knew who Gloria Dane was — Gus Largo’s beautiful blonde secretary; the gal who could put him in jail for seven hundred years if she said the wrong things at the right time in Washington, D. C.

I still reacted like an idiot, thinking there’d been some crazy mistake that would straighten itself out.

“You’re taking me in?”

“It’s customary,” the cop said.

“Am I entitled to counsel?”

His manner turned a trifle colder. “Then you admit you stole the car?”

“I admit nothing of the kind.”

He had me by one arm now and Connie was clinging to the other as though they planned to divide me down the middle. I said, “Connie — do me a favor. Call Lee Henry. Tell him what happened and ask him to come to the station.”

“I’ll go right in and call — and don’t worry, darling. Everything will be all right.”

I smiled bravely. “Of course. I’ll meet you tonight.” And the gendarmes hauled me away to gaol...

Lee Henry was an able lawyer and a good friend. He handled my business affairs along with those of the other operators Largo was trying to move in on.

He was a nervous, wispy little man but he looked to me like Sir Galahad’s brother when they brought him to my cell half an hour after I was locked up.

“What sort of nonsense is this, Larry?”

“They claim I stole the car I was driving.”

“False, of course.”

“I didn’t steal it but it wasn’t my car. It was my car’s twin — identical in every detail.”

“I didn’t know you were acquainted with Gloria Dane.”

“I’m not. I never met her in my life.”

“Then how did you get her car?”

“So help me, Lee — I don’t know. I thought it was mine.”