When Merv Weiss called me in on the Great Candy Cane Caper, I wasn’t exactly striped with enthusiasm. His sons, the Weiss boys, or the Three Weiss Men as they were other wise known in the neighborhood, had a well-earned reputation for being a cantankerous lot. But their father was an old friend, and I’d shopped at his hardware store for over forty years. So, I put my other cases on hold for a day, while I looked into the theft of Merv’s giant candy cane.