Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Probably how it happened.

Still, from that morning on, Waldron kept an eye on the papers.

“Hey, boy,” Lundysaid. “Where you been?”

It was a cold December afternoon, overcast, with a raw wind blowing out of the northwest. The daylight ran out early this time of year but there were hours of it left. Waldron had broken his trip early just to stop at the Rodeway.

“Been up and down the Seaboard,” he said. “Mostly. Hauling a lot of loads in and out of Baltimore.” Of course there’d been some cross-country trips, too, but he’d managed to miss Indianapolis each time, once or twice distorting his schedule as much to avoid Indy as he’d fooled with it today to get here.

“Been a while,” Lundy said.

“Six months.”

“That long?”

“July, last I was here.”

“Makes five months, don’t it?”

“Well, early July. Say five and a half.”

“Say a year and a half if you want. Your wife asks, I’ll swear you was never here at all. Get some coffee, boy.”

There was another trucker sitting with a cup of coffee, a bearded longhair with a fringed buckskin jacket, and he’d laughed at Lundy’s remark. Waldron poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down with it, sitting quietly, listening to the radio and the two men’s light banter. When the fellow in buckskin left, Waldron leaned forward.

“The last time I was here,” he said.

“July, if we take your word for it.”

“I was wired that night, I’d had a clown playing tag with me on the road.”

“If you say so.”

“There were three truckers in here plus yourself. One was drinking beer and the other two were drinking coffee.”

Lundy looked at him.

“What I need to know,” Waldron said, “is their names.”

“You must be kidding.”

“It wouldn’t be hard to find out. You’d have the registrations. I checked the date, it was the ninth of July.”

“Wait a minute.” Lundy rocked his chair back and put both feet on the metal desk. Waldron glanced at the built-up shoe. “A night in July,” Lundy said. “What in hell happened?”

“You must remember. I almost had an accident with a wise-ass, cut me off, played tag, made a game of it. I was saying how angry I was, how I wanted to kill him.”

“So?”

“I wanted to kill him with the truck.”

“So?”

“Don’t you remember? Something I said, you made a song out of it. I said I could have killed him like a bug on the windshield.”

“Now I remember,” Lundy said, showing interest. “Just a bug on the windshield of life, that’s the song that came to me, I couldn’t get it out of my head for the next ten or twelve days. Now I’ll be stuck with it for the next ten or twelve days, like as not. Don’t tell me you want to haul my ass down to Nashville and make me a star.”

“What I want,” Waldron said evenly, “is for you to check the registrations and figure out who was in the room that night.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody’s doing it.”

Lundy looked at him.

“Killing people. With trucks.”

“Killing people with trucks? Killing drivers or owners or what?”

“Using trucks as murder weapons,” Waldron said. On the radio, David Allen Coe insisted he was an outlaw like Waylon and Willie. “Running people off the road. Flyswatting ’em.”

“How d’you know all this?”

“Look,” Waldron said. He took an envelope from his pocket, unfolded it, and spread newspaper clippings on the top of Lundy’s desk. Without removing his feet from the desk, Lundy leaned forward to scan the clips. “These are from all over,” he said after a moment.

“I know.”

“Any of these here could be an accident.”

“Then somebody’s leaving the scene of a lot of accidents. Last I heard, there was a law against it.”

“Could be a whole lot of different accidents.”

“It could,” Waldron admitted. “But I don’t believe it. It’s murder and it’s one man doing it and I know who he is.”

“Who?”

“At least I think I know.”

“You gonna tell me or is it a secret?”

“Not the beer drinker,” Waldron said. “One of the two fellows who were drinking coffee.”

“Narrows it down. Not too many old boys drive trucks and drink coffee.”

“I can almost picture him. Deep-set eyes, dark hair, sort of a dark complexion. He had a way of speaking. I can about hear his voice.”

“What makes you think he’s the one?”

“I don’t know. You want to get those registrations?”

He didn’t, and Waldron had to talk him into it. Then there were three check-ins, one right after the other, and two of the men lingered with their coffee. When they left, Lundy heaved a sigh and told Waldron to mind the store. He limped off and came back ten minutes later with a stack of index cards.

“July the ninth,” he announced, sinking into his chair and slapping the cards onto the desk. “You want to deal those, we can play some Five Hundred Rummy. You got enough cards for it.”

Not quite. There were forty-three registrations that had come through the truckers’ check-in room for that date. Just over half were names that one of the two men recognized and could rule out as the possible identity of the dark-eyed coffee drinker. But there were still twenty possibles, names that meant nothing to either man — and Lundy explained that their man might not have filled in a card.

“He could of shared a room and the other man registered,” he said, “or he could have just come by for the coffee and the company. There’s old boys every night that pull in for half an hour and the free coffee, or maybe they’re taking a meal break and they come around back to say hello. So what you got, you got it narrowed down to twenty, but he might not be one of the twenty anyway. You get tired of driving a truck, boy, you can get a job with Sherlock Holmes. Get you the cap and the pipe, nobody’ll know the difference.”

Waldron was going through the cards, reading the names and addresses.

“Looking through a stack of cards for a man who maybe isn’t there in the first place and who probably didn’t do anything anyway. And what are you gonna do if you find him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s it your business, come to that?”

Waldron didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “I gave him the idea.”

“With what you said? Bug on the windshield?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, that’s crazy,” Lundy said. “Where you been, boy? I hear that same kind of talk four days out of seven. Guy walks in, hot about some fool who almost made him lose it, next thing you know he’s saying how instead of driving off the road, next time he’ll drive right through the mother. Even if somebody’s doin’ this” — he tapped Waldron’s clippings — “which I don’t think they are, there’s no way it’s you gave him the idea. My old man, he’d wash his car and then it’d rain and he’d swear it was him brought the rain on. You’re startin’ to remind me of him, you know that?”

“I can picture him,” Waldron said. “Sitting up behind the wheel, a light rain coming down, the windshield wipers working at the low speed. And he’s smiling.”

“And about to run some sucker off the road.”

“I can just see it so clear. This one time” — he sorted through the newspaper clippings — “downstate Illinois, this sportscar. Witness said a truck just ran right over it.”

“Like steppin’ on it,” Lundy said thoughtfully.

“And when I think about it—”

“You don’t know it’s on purpose,” Lundy said. “All the pills some of you old boys take. And you don’t know it’s one man doing it, and you don’t know it’s him, and you don’t know who he is anyway. And you don’t know you gave him the idea, and if there’s a God or not you ain’t It, so why are you makin’ yourself crazy over it?”