I shrugged. “I just got here. I’m gonna talk to people, see what they’re looking for.”

“Well, give me a shout if you need me. I’ll wander.”

I found Lawrence checking out a Saab convertible, then looking it up on the sheet he’d been given listing the items available for sale.

“Interested?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to talk to some people,” I said.

“Knock yourself out. Auction doesn’t start for another half hour.”

I meandered with my notebook open, pen in hand, chatted people up. Some were civil servants of one stripe or another—cops or firefighters or clerical workers—who had an inside line on when these kinds of auctions were held and made a point of attending them. And there were general members of the public who were on mailing lists, or signed up at Internet sites that, for a fee, let one know when and where these types of sales were going to be held.

One guy, an accountant, told me he thought it was cool that his current car, a Lexus, was once owned by some notorious cocaine dealer. “Gives me something to tell my lady friends, gives me a little cachet,” he said. Sort of like being a badass by association, which struck me as pitiful.

Even though a lot of these cars were going to go for rock-bottom prices, I didn’t see much in my price range. Most of the vehicles were listed with a suggested opening bid, and maybe a loaded 7-series BMW at $25,000 was a good deal, but it was still a lot more than I could spend.

I’d just finished talking to a guy who planned to bid on a 1998 Land Rover that had sustained a lot of damage in a police chase and was going for next to nothing (“I can rebuild anything,” he said) when I spotted the silver compact four-door that Eddie Mayhew had pointed to earlier. Nice flowing lines, but not too flashy. Bucket seats, a sunroof, reasonably roomy backseat.

A couple of other potential bidders were checking it out as well. A woman I guessed to be in her early sixties, and a short, balding guy built like a fire hydrant. He brushed past me as he rounded the car, and I noticed he was dressed in an expensive suit that didn’t fit him worth a damn. You spend that much money on clothes, you figure you could spend a few more bucks on alterations. He coughed, took a swig of juice from a glass bottle in his right hand, coughed again. There was a jingling noise coming from his left hand, which turned out to be full set of keys hanging from his index finger. I guessed they must have been a set belonging to his wife or daughter. You don’t see that many guys with a two-inch Barbie doll hanging from their key ring.