Артур Порджес - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

The thing about losing my hearing is that it did two things for me. It introduced me to my wife Sarah, who’s profoundly deaf, and it got me my job with BGI.

My wife first. At home I turn down my hearing aid so that we’re on a more equal footing, and that’s kept me up on my lipreading and signing. A couple of years ago I ran into Lew in a bar, and we got to b.s.ing. I bragged about my ability to lipread, and with the help of a couple of fellow barflies put on a demonstration for him. Lipreading’s a real art, by the way. You only catch about half the words, and you have to put the rest together based on the context. And if somebody talks fast, you’re liable not to pick up anything at all.

Right away, Lew, who’s a degenerate gambler, dragged me off to another bar where he began making bets based on my ability. Not that he told anybody what I could do — that was the trick of it. Many drinks later, he proposed that I come to work for him. He said: “That lipreading stuff of yours could come in mighty handy in my line.” Which it hasn’t — until recently, that is, which is what this long preamble’s been about: getting to the point where I can tell you about the contraband gang and how the bastards — and bastardette — almost made roadkill out of us.

Lew plopped the file down on my desk. He looks like a big old country boy, which is pretty much what he is — a briarhopper from the hills around Paris. That’s Paris, Kentucky, not Paris, France.

I’m a Midwesterner myself, from Chillicothe, Ohio, which is an old Miami Indian name.

“What’s this one about?” I asked.

“Margery Li. She tangled with a tractor-trailer just south of here, and she’s no longer among the living.”

“A tractor-trailer will do that to you—” I opened the file and looked at the pictures inside — “particularly if you’re driving a little Honda Civic.”

“This is a weird one, and her insurance company wants to snake its way out of any liability.”

“Like all good snakes,” I said.

“Hush. Those people pay our salaries.”

“And then turn around and screw it back out of us with rate hikes.”

Lew grinned his country-boy grin. “That’s why I always ream ’em on expenses.”

“So what’s weird about this thing?”

Lew told me about the accident. It had happened about nine o’clock in the evening on I-75. Mrs. Li, an immigrant from Taiwan, had run her Honda into the back of the tractor-trailer. Since the tractor-trailor sat high and the Honda sat low, the roof of her car was crushed in, and her along with it. Then, driverless, the Honda had swung into the path of a Ford Focus and totaled it. There’d been a dog in Mrs. Li’s car as well — a golden retriever — but it had come out of the wreck with nothing worse than a limp and a bad scare.

“When they finally pried her and the dog out of the car,” Lew said, “she was still clutching a cell phone in her hand. What the State Patrol figures is that she was trying to punch in a number and didn’t realize how fast she was overtaking the tractor-trailer.”

“Anybody hurt in the Focus?”

“A man and wife and their young child. Nothing fatal, but some pretty serious hospital time just the same.”

“What about the tractor-trailer?”

“The driver didn’t even notice anything had happened. You know what those big rigs are like. A mile long and twice as heavy. All he felt was a bump, so he kept on trucking. It wasn’t till he pulled into a rest stop a couple of hours later that he spotted the damage.”

“So where’s the weird part?”

“That’s a three-lane road at that point. The Honda was in the middle lane, the Ford Focus in the right lane, and there was another car about a hundred feet back in the left lane. The driver of that car claims he saw a big black SUV come up and kiss the Honda in the rear end just before it hit the truck. Or at any rate he thinks it was before the accident. The SUV sort of obstructed his view.”

“Any black paint on the Honda?”

“Loads of it. But since the Focus was black, too, it don’t tell us much.”

“Analyze the paint. See what car company uses it.”

“The insurance company isn’t ready to go to that expense yet. And besides, if the SUV was a Ford product, it won’t mean squat.”

“What did the witness say about the SUV?”

“He said it might’ve been a Chevy Suburban or it might’ve been a Ford Expedition. Either way, it was humongous.”

“And it just ran off after the accident — like the tractor-trailer?”

“Swung into the left lane ahead of our witness’s car and vamoosed.”

“So how do we tackle this thing?” I asked.

“Look for another witness.”

“Fat chance of finding one.”

“You know it and I know it, but as long as the insurance company is footing the bills, who cares?”

Well I did, for one. There’s nothing more frustrating than chasing will-o’-the-wisps.

Lew sat his well-padded bottom on the edge of my desk. “Here’s what we’re going to do. There’s people who for business or other reasons make regular trips on I-75. Corbin to Cincinnati, Knoxville to Detroit. People like that have their favorite pit stops — places where they always pull in and stretch their legs. So you’re going to work the rest areas south of Lexington, and Larry” — one of our moonlighting cops — “is going to work the ones to the north. You’re going to see if you can’t find some regular — a truck driver, maybe — who witnessed the accident and saw the SUV.”

“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.