Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The lone trooper parked on the far shoulder, got out of his cruiser, and stood with hands on hips surveying the accident scene from beyond the stream of cars and trucks whizzing past the obstruction. “Can that thing roll under its own power?” he called to Auburn.

“I think so. We’ve got a citizen down here on the shoulder between the trailer and the wall.”

“I understand that. Anybody else injured? Can’t the rescue crew handle the removal?”

Stamaty had joined Auburn in front of the cab. “Not in this county,” he called across to the trooper. “That’s a separate contract. The other guys are on the way, but their hearse hasn’t got a siren or a light—”

“All right, but you’ve gotta open up another lane. You’ve got cars and trucks backed up all the way to the Heron Pike interchange. If just one of them overheats or runs out of gas...” He started moving orange barrels aside. “I’m coming over there.”

While Myers held back the traffic, the trooper, whose name was Cullenbaugh, piloted his cruiser across the rubble-strewn closed lanes and parked it in line with the two Public Safety cruisers in front of the truck. After a rapid survey of the scene and a consultation with Auburn, he went back to his cruiser and arranged to have a driver dispatched to the scene to move Hoopes’s rig off the highway. Hoopes turned over the keys to the truck in return for a receipt signed by Auburn.

Meanwhile Dollinger had come back from his trip to the construction zone. None of the workers had seen or heard anything unusual until they noticed that the westbound traffic, which they estimated had been zooming through the constricted area at close to 60 miles an hour, had bogged down. The racket of machinery and the roar of traffic ricocheting among concrete surfaces would have drowned out the screech of Hoopes’s tires and the noise of the collision.

“And also the sound of a pellet gun up there,” Auburn told Dollinger, nodding towards the Sixth Street overpass, behind which the sun was just sinking. “I’m taking this driver to the hospital to get a scratch on his arm taken care of and have them draw some blood. As soon as Kestrel arranges to get what’s left of that cycle downtown to the garage, you and he ought to go up there on the overpass and take a look around.”

Dollinger squinted at him whimsically in the afternoon glare. “Am I supposed to give him that order, Sergeant?”

“I think if you just make the suggestion, he’ll jump at it.” Auburn jingled the keys to the cruiser. “You’ve both got to find something to do till you have a way back to headquarters.”

Auburn drove Hoopes to Chalfont Hospital to have his scratched arm scrubbed and wrapped up. While a technician was drawing blood samples for alcohol and drug tests, Auburn called headquarters and initiated background checks on Hoopes and his employer. Lieutenant Savage had gone home for the day, and no one had made any effort yet to reach Roger Mulreedy’s next of kin.

Auburn called Mulreedy’s home phone number and got no answer, not even an answering machine. Since there was no one else with the same last name listed in the phone book, his next call was to Mulreedy’s employer, Welbeck Heating and Cooling. Jerry Welbeck, the owner of the business, answered the phone himself.

“Mr. Welbeck, this is Sergeant Auburn with the Public Safety Department. I understand Roger Mulreedy is an employee of yours?”

“Roger, sure, Roger works for me.”

“I have some bad news for you, sir. Mr. Mulreedy was seriously injured in an accident a few minutes ago.”

You feed them the story in little bites and see how they swallow each one before you give them the next.

“An accident where? At the rink?” Welbeck sounded as if he might be worrying about expenses, insurance, time lost from work — anything but the well-being of somebody he cared about.

“No, sir. This was a motorcycle accident on the Interstate. Mr. Mulreedy was killed outright.”

Silence. Was the man at the other end of the line struggling to master his grief, or was he grinning from ear to ear?

When at last Welbeck spoke, his tone was almost hostile. “Why are you calling me?”

“I’m trying to trace his next of kin. I understand he was married. Do you know how I might reach his wife?”

At the end of an even longer silence, Welbeck said, “They’re separated, but I can find you her number, sure. What I’d like to know is what Roger was doing on the Interstate at this time of day.”

“We don’t know that, sir. He was traveling west through the construction zone downtown, and a witness said he lost control of his bike and rolled it. Was there somewhere else he was supposed to be this afternoon?”

“Well, sure. He’s been doing a big installation job in Wilmot, and I would have thought he’d have been tied up there till six or seven tonight.”

“Would you know if he’d had any personal troubles lately, any drinking problems...?”

“You’re thinking like a cop,” said Welbeck, not answering the question, “and I’m thinking like an engineer. I still can’t figure out what he would have been doing in that place at that hour.”

Welbeck’s reaction to the news of Mulreedy’s death seemed so cagey and odd that Auburn hesitated to pursue his inquiries over the telephone. He could hear people shouting and dogs barking at the other end of the line.

“Are you at home now, sir?”

“Actually I’m at my dad’s place by the river. We have a cookout here with some of the guys from the shop after work every Friday during the summer months.”

“Could you give me your address there?”

“Sure. You go north on Calthrop Road till you hit the river. It’s the big farm on the left — you can’t miss it. You thinking of coming out here tonight?”

“Possibly. Will you be there for a while?”

“Possibly,” Welbeck echoed. “But this is my cell phone I’m talking on. It picks up all incoming calls when the office is closed, and it rides with me wherever I go.”

According to Welbeck, Mulreedy’s estranged wife lived with her parents. Welbeck told him their name and the street they lived on, but when Auburn tried their phone number he got no answer.

He caught up with Hoopes in the office of the hospital lab, where he was sweating out a phone interview with the home office of his company in Atlanta. On seeing Auburn, he covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and asked, “Hey, am I under arrest?”

“Depends on what the blood tests show.” Auburn moved away while Hoopes relayed that message and finished his conversation.

Getting the results of the tests would take more than an hour. Since Auburn needed to keep an eye on Hoopes until he was cleared of a DUI charge, they had dinner together in the part of the hospital cafeteria reserved for visitors. Hoopes professed not to have any appetite, but then proceeded to put down an amount and variety of food that would probably have sent Auburn down the hall to the emergency room.

Hoopes had been driving professionally for twelve years. He denied ever having been involved in an accident of any description before. Auburn listened to his nervous chatter with one ear while pondering various details of Mulreedy’s death — the pockmarks on the windshield of the cycle, Welbeck’s evasive manner, and Hoopes’s highly plausible account of Mulreedy’s sudden loss of control of the cycle.

At length the results of the blood alcohol and preliminary drug screen became available, and showed that Hoopes was, to use his own word, clean. Auburn drove him to a truckers’ stop where he would stay at least overnight.

When he returned with the cruiser to headquarters, Auburn found that Dollinger and Kestrel had hitched a ride back with Myers and Bystrom. Dollinger reported that he and Kestrel had visited the Sixth Street overpass after Mulreedy’s body had been removed from the scene and the semi had been moved to the State Highway Patrol post at New Leyden. They had found no indication that anyone had lurked on the sidewalk there or used the low concrete parapet as a rest for a firearm.