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

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.

She looked up at me. She’d probably once been pretty in a honky-tonk sort of way, but Time had thrown a flying tackle at her and mashed her looks into the AstroTurf.

I tried a smile on her. “I’m Bill Riley. I’m with the insurance company.”

“Don’t you boys ever stop coming around?” she asked.

“It’s part of the service.”

“Well, it ain’t much of a service for me, particularly since our own insurance company is completely different.”

“You don’t know. They might be interconnected. You’d be surprised.”

“I’d be surprised if you boys ever pay off on our insurance claim.”

“These things take time,” I said.

“I wonder how much time it’d take if I complained to the state insurance commission.”

“Look, I’m just here to look at the damage. Why don’t you let me do that?”

She came out from behind the desk. She was big-breasted and big-assed, and she looked like if she put a shoulder to you, you’d go bouncing right across the floor.

I followed her outside and around the back of the building. There was a tractor parked there that I hadn’t seen before, and it had a trailer attached to it.

“That’s her,” she said. “See what you can make of her.”

I gave her a smile and got out a notebook and walked around to the rear of the trailer. Maude Blaney followed me and stood behind me as I squatted down.

“That a hearing aid in your ear?” she asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Tiny little rascal. I didn’t know they made them that small.”

“They do a lot of things these days.”

“Except settle insurance claims.”

I examined the trailer. The high bumper was pushed in a little and had yellow paint scrapings on it. There’d been some damage underneath, too, but not a whole lot. Hitting this thing with a Honda Civic was about like me hitting Mike Tyson with a jelly donut.

I made a lot of unnecessary notes. Maude Blaney got bored after a while and drifted away. I rose cautiously out of my squat. The rear doors of the trailer had a padlock on them, but it was hanging open. I slipped it out and laid it down on the gravel.