How To Steal a Car

by Pete Hautman

  “Okay,” I said, mostly so she would stop breathing wine breath on me.

  Jen burst into alcoholic tears, and the funny thing was, I sat there and watched her and I didn’t feel bad for her or anything, just sort of mildly disgusted, like if I’d noticed a stain on her sofa after all.

  When I got home, my mom was in the kitchen talking on the phone all cheerful to one of her charities and fussing over a roast. It was a big piece of meat, which meant that she expected Dad to get home from Colorado in time for dinner. I grabbed a juice box from the fridge and started up to my room, but I’d only gotten as far as the stairs when she called me back, holding her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, smiling the way she does when she needs a favor.

  “Sweetie, your dad’s plane will be in at four-thirty and I’m going to have to leave in a minute to pick him up. Can you watch the roast?”

  “You mean like just sit there and watch it?”

  “No, I—” She remembered she was on the phone. “Betty? Can I call you back? Thanks. Let’s talk tomorrow.” She hung up. “That was Elizabeth Crowe from the MS Society. Oh my God, you can’t believe what’s going on there—oh! Look at the time! Where’s my purse?”

  Like I cared. But I did think it was interesting how bright and chatty and wild-eyed my mom was. Then I noticed the half-empty glass of white wine on the counter, a very odd thing, as my mother never drank except for one glass at dinner and on special occasions like Book Club, or with Becca. She was looking for her purse and telling me how I had to turn the roast once at forty-five minutes and turn it off at one hour twenty minutes in case she didn’t get back, and would I also make a green salad and set the table, please? I saw the wine bottle over by the stove about three quarters empty. At least she wasn’t as drunk as Jen, but what was going on here anyway? Everybody I knew was all of a sudden drinking in the middle of the day. Would my dad be loaded on scotch from the airplane?

  “Why don’t you let me drive?” I said, holding up the depleted wine bottle.

  My mom’s face fell, then instantly brightened. “Oh, sweetie, I used most of that for the marinade.”

  “I’ve driven to the airport before,” I said.

  “But who will watch the roast?”

  “Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go get Dad.”

  “Kelleigh! You don’t even have your license!”

  “I’ll be legal to drive on the way home, because Dad will be in the car.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, and you’re being drunk.”

  “I am not drunk!”

  Eventually she decided to turn the oven to low and let me drive both of us to the airport. But as we were getting into the car, she threw her hands up like she was scattering confetti and said, “Oh, this is silly. You’re a good driver. You go. He’ll be waiting at the far end of the baggage claim level. I’ll stay and get dinner ready. Just don’t get pulled over.”

  That just goes to show how alcohol can lead to bad parenting decisions.

  My dad was waiting at the curb with his overnight bag.

  “Where’s your mother?” was the first thing out of his mouth.

  “She was having a crisis,” I said. “She said it would be okay for me to drive here alone.”

  He stared at me. I could almost hear the lawyerly wheels turning in his head.

  “What sort of crisis?”

  “Cooking-related,” I said.

  He threw his bag into the backseat, walked around the car, and opened the driver’s-side door.

  “I’m driving,” he said.

  On the way home, he seemed tense and distracted. I guessed his interview with the auto thief hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped. When we got home, the wine bottle was nowhere in sight. Mom had changed her top and put on fresh makeup, and she was drinking iced tea. I watched them do their kiss/ hug/kiss/hug thing, only it was more like they were going through the motions than like they wanted to touch each other, and I got this déjà vu feeling like we’d been through all this before.

  My father’s first affair happened when I was in third grade.

  At the time, I didn’t know what was going on, only that my parents were acting all stiff and weird and having lots of long conversations in their bedroom with the door closed. I remember that time like a dream or the way you remember being really sick. I think it only lasted a few weeks and then slowly everybody started acting normal again, but it felt like months. It was the first time I’d ever imagined the possibility that our family might fly to pieces, and it scared me worse than anything.

  The short version that I eventually pieced together from eavesdropping on some of my mom’s phone calls was that my dad had an affair with one of his clients, and my mom found out about it. For a while it looked like they might get divorced, but after going to counseling they figured things out and everything was sort of okay again.

  I don’t think either of them knew how much it messed me up knowing that something had gone horribly wrong, even though I didn’t understand at the time what it was about. It helped to finally figure out the truth. I don’t think most parents realize that little kids are super-sensitive even though they might not really understand anything about what’s going on. Like Chipper, the time I was little and painted him green. He didn’t know he was green because dogs are color-blind too, but he knew something was wrong, and for that whole month of being green he slunk around all mopey and ashamed.

  The déjà vu feeling wasn’t just in my head, I decided. I was guessing my mom had found something—lipstick on my dad’s collar or whatever—and they’d had a “talk,” and that was why she’d started drinking wine and let me drive to the airport by myself and why they’d been acting civil mostly for my benefit while my dad tried to get Elwin Carl Dandridge off on a technicality. I ran up to my room and closed the door, but I was still in the same house with them so I went back downstairs where my dad was in his study on his laptop and my mom was furiously chopping celery. I grabbed the keys to Mom’s Camry.

  “I’m going for a ride,” I said.

  She stared at me openmouthed, but she didn’t say a word. Five minutes later I was on the freeway in rush hour traffic, pretending to be a commuter.

  I am not an idiot. I knew I was “acting out,” as my mother would put it. “Acting like a brat” is probably more accurate. And I knew even as I was doing it that I was doing it because I was pissed at both of my parents and because taking my mom’s car made me feel as if I had some control over things that of course I could do nothing whatsoever about.

  I also figured that I’d pay some sort of price, because taking my mom’s car was not the sort of thing responsible parents could overlook, so to make the most of it I ran around town listening to the radio until the gas gauge was lit up on empty, then drove home and left the car sitting inconveniently in the middle of the driveway. It was almost eleven at night by that time. The light in my parents’ bedroom was on, but that was it. No porch light or anything. I let myself in through the side door.

  The house was deathly quiet. I had a sudden and horrible fantasy of my mother shooting my father and then killing herself—the thought came and went in a flash, leaving behind a faint sensation of nausea. I sat down in the kitchen and waited for my stomach to settle. A minute or so later I heard a faint murmuring coming from upstairs. I couldn’t understand any words, but I recognized the sound of my mother’s voice, so I crept up the carpeted stairs and stood outside the bedroom door. Definitely my mother talking. My dad wasn’t saying anything. I could hear parts of what she was saying: “He said he frud ammin…” (silence) “No! I don’t think so, but last week—no, it was the week before I sobel greshat…force cure rattle…”

  I sat down with my back to the wall and pressed my ear to the crack.

  “…lived with the man a long time, Beck.”

  She was on the phone, talking to her friend Becca.

  I wondered where my dad was.

  “He says he still loves me but he
would say that—I mean, Beck, he’s a goddamn lawyer for Christ’s sake! The bullshit that comes out of his mouth!”

  I’d never ever heard my mom talk like that.

  “I know, I know, Beck, but I’m not going to jump before I know where I’m standing. Christ, I wish you were here. I need a martini.”

  I listened to my mother’s profane bitching for about ten more minutes, learning nothing other than that all men are scum. I wondered if she was ever going to mention the astonishing fact that her underage and unlicensed daughter had driven off that very evening in the family car, but it never came up.

  My dad, it turned out, was asleep on the sofa in his study.

  The next morning, everything was eerily normal. My mother made breakfast and my dad asked me how I had slept—he always asked me that in the morning, and I always said “fine.” Nobody said a word about me taking the car the night before. I thought that was kind of odd, but then I figured out that they were each afraid that if they brought up my car thing, we would have to talk, and if we really started talking, we’d end up talking about why Dad slept on the sofa and what was going on with them. None of us wanted that.

  The truth is that most car thefts are never reported to the police. In fact, many car thefts go undetected, as the car is often returned to its owner with nothing missing but a little gasoline.

  My parents must have had one of their “civilized” conversations, because the next night they slept in the same bed and for a few days we lived like perfect people in a perfect house where nothing bad had ever happened. I imagine their conversation went something like this:

  “I hate and despise you for your philandering, dear, but I think we should wait for Kelleigh to get out of high school before we tear each other apart in divorce court.”

  “I agree absolutely, sweetie pie! That will give me time to enjoy a good deal of illicit sexual activity during Kelleigh’s happy high school years.”

  “That’s lovely, honeybunch, so long as you promise to be discreet, and so long as you do not attempt to conceal your assets in some offshore bank account.”

  “I promise, lovemuffin, so long as I can count on you not to tear my testicles out by their roots during our time together in court!”

  Or something like that.

  What bothered me most was how happy my dad seemed. He had a guilty rapist to defend, an affair to finance, and quite possibly a divorce to engineer. He was buzzing with purpose and holy zeal, a man on a mission. I got all that not from anything he said but just from watching the way he held his mouth and the crispness of his motions even at the breakfast table, and the way he talked on his phone, very terse and efficient, as if his every second was incredibly valuable. I sensed that his happiness—my dad’s version of happiness, which was kind of the same as purposefulness, if that’s a word—was all about having something important to do.

  Two days later I called Deke. He was in a foul mood. His guy at the Mercedes dealership wouldn’t give him his five hundred dollars back and wouldn’t sell him another key.

  “He says he’s got to cool it for a couple months. Anyway, it makes no difference to you.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Yeah. You said you didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I said I wasn’t sure.”

  “That’s what people say when they mean no.”

  “Not this people.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I said, “So you can’t get another key?”

  “I didn’t say that. You busy tonight?”

  I told my mom I was having dinner at Jen’s, then had Deke pick me up at the Cub Foods near my house. He showed up twenty minutes late, wearing his standard uniform: T-shirt, ripped jeans, and motorcycle boots. I was dressed in my usual nun chic: gray blouse with black pants. Very much the odd couple. Not that I thought it was a date or anything.

  Deke was in a talkative mood. In fact, he wouldn’t shut up, but most of what he said was pretty interesting.

  “Most guys who steal cars are after those crappy ‘C’ cars: Camrys, Corollas, Cieras, Civics, Caravans,” he said. “Cars that sell in the millions. They like ’em five or ten years old, ‘cause that’s when they start to fall apart, so there’s a bigger demand for parts. Plus those older cars are easy to boost. No security systems or anything. A guy who knows what he’s doing can pop the door with a slim jim, get inside, and hot-wire ’em in like thirty seconds.

  “Anyways, they sell these crappy cars to a chop shop, where they get broken up and sold for parts. You know that junkyard up on Washington Avenue?”

  I didn’t.

  “Major chop shop. But there’s not much money in it for the guys doing the boosting. Guy steals a Honda and sells it to a chop shop for a quick hundred bucks cash, then goes and spends it on dope. Me, I cater to the classier side of the business, the Benzes and Beamers and such. Cars like that don’t get chopped. They go to Canada, Mexico, South America. Neal takes orders from all over, mostly from dealers who can give ’em a new VIN and hide ’em in a boat full of legitimate vehicles.”

  I was fascinated by the way he’d slipped into using three-and four-syllable words, like “legitimate vehicles,” and by how different it was from listening to Will.

  We were in Deke’s pickup, driving east on Highway 36. It seemed weird to me that a guy who specialized in stealing high-end luxury cars would drive a junky old pickup, so I asked him about that.

  “Camouflage,” he said. “Also, my parole officer would wonder how I could afford a nice car on my two-hundred-dollar paycheck from Wing’s Wild Wok.”

  “How about a motorcycle?” I imagined myself on the back of a motorcycle with Deke driving.

  Deke shrugged. “Bikes scare me,” he said. “I had a friend who got killed.”

  We were driving toward Stillwater, a town west of St. Paul on the St. Croix River. Danny, Deke’s backup key guy, worked at a restaurant in Stillwater called La Bellevue, a super-pricey French place. Danny was a valet.

  Fancy restaurants, Deke told me, are a great place to score car keys, because a lot of supposedly smart rich people who spend big bucks on their food and their rides are stupid enough to hand their car keys to a valet, giving him the opportunity to go through the glove compartment and get information like the VIN number, the name and address of the owner, and the dealership where the car was purchased. Sometimes even a spare key—which if you think about it is an incredibly stupid thing to leave inside your car. But a lot of people do it, according to Deke.

  Danny was just one of five guys Deke had looking for an S550 key. “I made some good connections when I was in jail,” Deke told me. “It was like going to crime school. I got a couple valets, a mechanic down at Walton Motors, a guy who works at this detailing shop, and the parts guy at Bolton Benz. Problem is, these S550s, there just aren’t that many. They cost like a hundred grand each. It’s not like there’s one on every block, and half of ’em you just can’t get to, ’cause they park ’em in garages or on ramps. Neal’s getting pretty antsy. He must have a customer breathing down his neck. He says if we can deliver this thing tonight, and if it’s clean, he’ll sweeten the pot. Two thousand.”

  “A thousand each?” I asked.

  “Minus the three bills I promised Danny for the key. But this time you gotta drive it all the way across town. Neal wants us to park it at the Byerly’s in St. Louis Park.”

  “Why there?”

  “No cameras, and it’s easy for him to watch, you know, to make sure the cops don’t stake it out like they did the other one. He’s a little spooked these days. Also, Byerly’s is open twenty-four seven, so nobody’s going to notice another car sitting there overnight. That’s the plan, anyways.”

  The road swooped to the left and down a long hill that ran along the St. Croix into Stillwater, an old river town full of touristy shops and restaurants. It reminded me of Taylors Falls, only about five times as big,
with a lot of people on the sidewalks.

  La Bellevue was on Main Street in the middle of town. Deke made a U-turn and pulled up in front of it. There were two guys dressed in khaki shorts and powder-blue polo shirts standing next to the VALET PARKING sign. One of them walked around the truck to Deke’s side and leaned in the window.

  “Sorry, dude, we don’t park crappy old pickups.”

  Deke laughed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of twenties.

  The valet let the key drop onto Deke’s lap. It was just like the key I’d used for the other Mercedes.

  “Oops,” he said, then reached for the money.

  Deke held the money out of reach. “You got an address for me, Danny?”

  “Oh yeah.” Danny handed him a folded sheet of paper.

  Deke passed him the roll of bills.

  “Gracias, amigo,” said Danny, who looked about as Mexican as lutefisk.

  Deke handed me the key and the sheet of paper, then put the truck in gear.

  “Hey!” Danny was back at the window. “There’s only two hundred here!”

  “You’ll get it,” Deke said. He popped the clutch and we were off. I heard Danny yell something not nice after us.

  “He’s not happy,” I said.

  Deke shrugged. “I’m a little short. I’ll get the rest of his money to him, plus another fifty, once we get the car. He’ll be ecstatic.”

  That’s another example of how Deke talked—one minute he says ain’t, then a few seconds later he uses a word like ecstatic.

  The sheet of paper the valet had given us was a receipt from the Mercedes dealer. It listed the owner’s name—John R. Anderson—his address, the car’s VIN, and the sticker price: $89,770.00.

  “Read me the address,” Deke said.

  I read him the address. It was in Oakdale.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked.

  “Recon,” he said.

  John R. Anderson lived in a “gated” development called Forest Glen, only the gate wasn’t real—it was permanently open. Anybody could drive in and out. The phony gate was just to let the residents know how special they were. Inside, Forest Glen was a tangle of curved intersecting streets lined with enormous houses on tiny landscaped lots—the sort of neighborhood where nobody leaves their car parked outside. Two teenagers in a scruffy pickup truck would be quickly noticed.