Old Schmidt was under a car with his pale legs sticking out like those of a chicken. When he heard my errand he crawled out. He was a small, chunky man of about seventy. White-haired and with the ruddy round face of a cherub. There was grease on his face. It was a good face. He reminded me of a little German pastry cook I had known when I was a kid. The bakeries had gone out on strike. The little cook marched in the snow with all the others. He was an old man who should have been home with his pipe, his grandchildren, and his memories. But there was a principle at stake: his fellow men needed him, so he marched. When two company toughs knocked him down he got up and went back to the picket line without a word. Schmidt looked like that kind of man.

‘I am worried,’ the old man said. ‘Jo-Jo is good boy, work hard. He go and he don’t tell me? That is funny. I am worried.’

‘Kids get ideas. Maybe he just got tired.’

‘Not without he tell me, no. And the bike. There it wait.’

The old man pointed to a motorcycle in the corner of the garage. A motorcycle carefully covered by a heavy plastic cover. It shone through the plastic like a jewel. Jo-Jo took good care of his motorcycle.

‘I call by his old man,’ Schmidt said. ‘He say Jo-Jo take a trip. I should mind my sauerkraut. His kind I know, ja! I am worried.’

‘What do you know about Tani Jones or Patrolman Stettin?’

‘The woman who was killed and the policeman? I know what I read, hear. No more. You think Jo-Jo? Never! No!’

‘Did he have any trouble you know? Any new friends, maybe? Any girl trouble? A sudden need for money?’

‘No. Thursday he work here all day on the bike, Friday he don’t come to work. He don’t tell me. I don’t like that.’

‘What about a girl named Driscoll?’

‘Driscoll? So? She come here one, maybe two times. She want Jo-Jo. She talk to Petey and Jo-Jo. Jo-Jo go away. He don’t want her.’