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best flatfoot voice Pardon me, sir, but I wonder if I might see the registration and title to this vehicle?
    Registration? Earl says. Title? We snickered like school kids sharing a dirty joke.
    He told me he’d been in Illinois for the past ten months. The close call he’d mentioned in the letter happened while he was robbing a filling station in Martinsville. He took his eyes off the attendant for a second and the man swung at him with a tire iron and missed his head by a whisker. It scared Earl so bad he shot the guy. He didn’t kill him, but he thought it wise to absent himself from Indiana for a time, just in case the fella was able to give the cops a solid description. He’d gone across the state line to lay low for a while but ended up staying longer than he’d planned.
    I said I’d bet the longer stay had to do with a girl. It did, he said, but it wasn’t what I was thinking.
    He’d been faring all right, getting by on small stickups and an occasional break-in, and then one night he met a sweet young thing in a speakeasy in Effingham. She told him she was recently divorced, and they hit it off so well she took him home with her at closing time. Earl couldn’t believe his luck. He knew he wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, plus he’d never had a smooth way with the ladies, and things like this didn’t happen to him.
    He and the sweet thing were in the middle of hitting it off even better when her husband came charging into the room and started doing some hitting of his own. Earl said it was like fighting a jackhammer in the nude. They fairly well tore up the room—breaking the bed frame and busting lamps and bringing down the curtains, everybody punching and kicking and cursing. The neighbors must’ve thought murder was going on and called the police because the next thing Earl knew the cops were pulling them apart. They slapped the cuffs on hubby and let Earl put his clothes on before cuffing him too. The sweet thing took her time about picking out some underwear toput on but the cops didn’t mind at all. She had a knockout body, Earl said, and not a modest bone in it, and she tried on two different outfits before deciding to go with the first. It was a swell show and everybody enjoyed it except for hubby, who called her a cheap-ass whore and got smacked by a cop who told him it was no way to talk to a lady. Then they all got hauled to the station.
    It turned out that hubby worked the night shift at a cement plant and got a call from a buddy who’d seen his wife leaving the speak with some stranger. Sweet thing was irked with hubby because of his recent misconduct with an office girl at the cement plant and was getting back at him by way of Earl. There was a lot of finger-shaking and loud assertion of having each other’s number and singing different tunes and what’s good for the goose and so forth, till the cops got tired of it and let them go with a warning not to disturb the peace again. Earl, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere except in front of a judge, not after the cops checked out his car and discovered it had been stolen on the other side of town earlier that day.
    The judge seemed sympathetic on hearing the details of his arrest and even remarked on the treachery of unfaithful wives and the misery they caused. His honor’s bitter tone made Earl suspect the man was speaking from personal experience. He asked if Earl had damaged the stolen vehicle in any way, and Earl swore that he had not, that he had cared for the car as if it were his own. Rather than send him to the penitentiary—which is what Earl expected, considering the state’s introduction of his previous conviction for car theft in Indiana—Judge Nicefellow fined him a hundred dollars, then reduced it to forty-two because that’s all Earl had to his name, and gave him six months on the county work farm.
    I said he’d been lucky to get such a light sentence on a second car theft conviction. Earl said if he was