“What’re you going to be doing, Lew?”
“I got a lot of paperwork to catch up on.”
I thought: Not with the ponies running at Keeneland, you don’t. But I didn’t say it.
Lew let me use the company car. It was a little Neon, but he charged expenses on it to our clients as if it were a Lincoln Continental.
I rolled the windows down and headed south. Well, there were worse ways to spend a mild April afternoon, I thought. We were right in the middle of horse country, and there were well-kept paddocks with white fences around them and rolling wooded hills.
I thought, not for the first time, what a well-kept secret this part of the world is. The area north and south of the Ohio River, I mean. The Kentucky River with its deep rocky gorge, the steep, forested hills of southern Indiana, The Land Between the Lakes, the skyline of Cincinnati, particularly just after sunset when there’s still a glow in the sky. Then there were the wonderful old Indian names for the rivers — the Great Miami and the Little Miami, the Wabash, the Kanawha, the Scioto, the two rivers that meet to form the Ohio: the Allegheny and the Monongahela. The Indians who inhabited this region were a bloodthirsty crew, but they invented place names that roll around the tongue like a shot of smooth Kentucky bourbon.
I drove on south to the first rest area and climbed out of the car. There’s a technique to asking questions of complete strangers. If you just wade on in, half the time they’ll brush on by. What you need is a hook, and photographs are the best hook ever invented. Hold one up, and people will generally look at it. And they’ll answer any question you ask, even if it’s only to mutter, “No, don’t know anything about it.”
I’d brought along a picture of Mrs. Li and a picture of her battered Honda. People will always look at a photo of a wreck, even if it’s only out of the corner of the eye.
I set to work. From time to time I left my post beside the facilities and strolled on over to where the big rigs were parked. Truckers can go two ways — the ornery way or the talkative way — but at least with the photographs I had a way of breaking the ice.
Around four in the afternoon I took a break to chug a Coke. Then I made another stab at the truckers and, contrary to expectations, hit pay dirt.
The guy said: “Yeah, I saw that woman. Or at least, I think it was her. A lot of these Asians look alike to me. I saw her right here in this rest area. And about an hour and a half later, when the traffic began to move again, I drove past her mangled yellow car.”
He had blond hair that had mostly gone white and a face as seamed as a southern New Jersey road map.
“That poor woman — you know, she acted kind of strangely that night. For one thing, she walked her dog over here by the truck park instead of taking him out toward the woods there. I was fiddling with my trip record and I happened to glance in the side mirror and there was her dog hiking his leg against one of the tires of the next rig down. I felt like walking back and asking her how she’d feel if I hiked my leg against her car. Not that I had anything to do with that other rig — it was an Acme, I think.”
That last bit lit up the pinball machine in my brain. Acme was the owner of the truck that’d been hit.
He went on. “I go back to my trip record and the next thing I know I hear that woman shouting in Chinese. I look in the side mirror again, and her mouth’s hanging open like a gate, and just then the rig starts to pull out and almost clips her. She runs across the parking lot, dragging her dog behind her, and then, about a minute later, she whips on by in her yellow car — or anyway, I think it was her. Then right after that a big black Ford Expedition goes shooting after her. It was like everybody had just gone crazy or something.”
I asked if he’d give me a written statement and, surprisingly, he didn’t make any fuss about it. I stuck around another half an hour, then headed back to BGI. A black Ford Expedition, and it had taken off like a bat out of hell after the Honda.
But what was the reason? And why had Mrs. Li suddenly begun shouting in Chinese and then run hell for leather for her car?
I got back to the office around quarter of six. Lew was slumped at his desk with a can of Dr Pepper in front of him. It was a little soon for him to be back from Keeneland, but maybe the ponies had cleaned him out early.
He gave me his squinty-eyed Clint Eastwood look. Clint makes it come out mean and dangerous, but on Lew it just made him look like he needed a pair of glasses.
“You do any good today?” he asked.
I told him about Mrs. Li. I told him about the black SUV and the Acme tractor-trailer. I told him how all three had gone chasing off after one another.
“This is starting to look like more than an accident,” he said.
“That’s what I think, too, but I’m damned if I know what. Why did that woman start yelling in Chinese, for instance?”
“You sure it was her?”
“Who else would it have been? Her golden retriever?”
He thought about it a moment, then came up with a plan.
“Tomorrow I’m going to put Larry in that rest area and see if he can’t roust out another witness or two.”
“What am I going to be doing?”
“Acme’s located down in Rollsville. It’s just a two-bit outfit, although I guess a couple of eighty-thousand-dollar rigs isn’t too two-bit. Anyway, I want you to go down there and snoop around a little and see what you find. Tell the people there you’re doing some follow-up work for the insurance adjustor.”
“Can I use the Neon?”
“Yeah, go ahead. And one other thing, see if any of those people down there speaks Chinese.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“Hell, Bill, you’re a detective. Figure it out for yourself.”
One look at Rufus and Maude Blaney, the proprietors of Acme Long Haul Trucking, and you knew that the only Chinese they spoke was “won ton” soup. And they probably mispronounced that.
Rollsville was about an eighty-minute drive down I-75 from Lexington. Acme wasn’t in the town proper. It was located ten miles out a narrow, winding road with woooded ravines on one side of it and high hills on the other. I pulled up in front of the place and climbed out of the car and looked it over.
It was on an acre of land and had a chain-link fence around it and a cinder-block building in the middle of it. I counted two tractors in the lot, one of them with its front end hitched forward so that a mechanic could get at the engine.
I went through the wide-open gate and walked around to the tractor that was being worked on. A big, rawboned guy in gray coveralls was hunched over the engine. He looked up at me. He had electric blue eyes, the kind that tell you two things — namely, that the owner is mean and stupid.
“Bill Riley,” I said.
The guy hard-eyed me. “You looking for him or is that you?”
I handed him a card. It said I was from the insurance company, not BGI.
He squinted at the card, then at me.
“What’s this all about?”
“I got to take a look at the rig that got bent up.”
“Somebody already did.”
“Yes, but now I’ve got to do it, too.”
“No wonder people’s insurance rates are so high.”
“Don’t blame me. I’m just an employee.”
“Go see Maude. She’s in the office. She’ll take you around.”
I thanked him and headed off across the gravel toward the cinder-block building. As I did, I remembered to look around for the black SUV. All I saw was a battered Chevy pickup.
The guy working on the tractor had been Rufus Blaney. I’d caught that much from the nametag on his coveralls. Now I had my first encounter with Maude Blaney.
She sat behind a greasy metal desk, and there were a lot of yellow invoice forms on it. I caught sight of the logo printed on one of them. Mangrove Tropical Sportswear. If they had anything to do with Maude’s current attire, they’d better keep quiet about it. It consisted of denim cutoffs, work boots, and a man’s workshirt.