Doug Allyn - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 32, No. 13, Mid-December, 1987

“And you think I might have killed him?” he said, smiling with thinly veiled contempt, “at the risk of my own life? Over twenty thousand dollars?”

“Maybe not because of the money so much,” Andy said, “but perhaps because the car wasn’t his to wager.”

“What you imply might be valid if he’d lost and failed to pay off. But he did not lose. He won fairly, and I paid the bet. And I will tell you something else, sergeant. When I learned the car didn’t belong to him, I wasn’t angry. I was amused. Chris Wilde was not an ignorant man. He knew my — reputation, and took the wager anyway. Not many men would take such a risk. I felt contempt for him before, because of what he was, but afterward—” He shrugged. “He may have been homosexual, but he was no coward. I had no quarrel with him.”

“Twenty grand might be considered cause for a quarrel.”

“To some people, perhaps,” Maraschal said indifferently, “it is not an important sum to me. And if I had wished to — arrange such a thing, I would not have done it here. There are races in Nassau and Mexico City. Wilde could just as easily have died there, and I would not have been — troubled by the local policia. And now, if you will excuse me, sergeant, I have other business. Jaime and Luis will see you out. Your weapon will be returned to you in the lobby with, of course, my sincere apologies.”

“You can keep your apologies, señor. But I’d appreciate your ‘professional’ opinion on who might’ve set this up.”

“As I said, I question that Wilde was the target, but if he was...” Maraschal paused, his brow creased in thought, one craftsman considering the work of another, “if he was, then it was done with style. A lover perhaps? An old enemy? Quién sabe? Who knows? But if it had happened in the corrida, the matador would have been awarded the ears. Good day, señor.”

McMahon took his time on the run up to Phoenix. He set the cruise control on the rental Ford and loafed along at fifty-five, trying to digest what he’d learned and to make sense of it. But he was tired, and it had been a mistake to trap himself for so long behind the wheel. As the setting sun waned and flickered behind the jumbled peaks of the Maricopas, sinister images seemed to dance in the desert just beyond his headlights, a chaotic shadow show of surreal childhood memories, gleaming racing machines, and a roiling column of smoke from a half-remembered dream.

He rolled down his window, but the rush of desert air didn’t blow away the cobwebs, so he floored the gas pedal, hoping a surge of adrenaline would accomplish what the windblast couldn’t.

The rental Ford whined in protest, swaying as he crested a hill at eighty, but there was no real sensation of speed. Nothing like what Chris would have experienced in his open roadster. And it occurred to Andy that he’d never seen Chris race. Not once. He’d always meant to, but... now he never would. He’d failed Chris, and now that failure was forever. There was nothing he could do to change it, or to make amends. Nothing. Ahead of him, U.S. 10 stretched on into the night, narrow, and bleak, and empty.

Buchek’s neighborhood was a surprise. Vintage racing was supposed to be a rich man’s game, but there was nothing upscale about the enclave of crackerbox tract houses near the Salt River Reservation. They looked like they’d been built by their owners out of scrap lumber, one room at a time. Buchek’s place was a ramshackle gray split-level ranch with peeling paint, identical to its neighbors except for the large galvanized-metal pole barn that occupied most of the back yard.

It was after ten when McMahon cruised past. Buchek’s house was dark, but there were lights on in the barn so Andy eased his rental Ford into the driveway and parked beside a battered blue pickup truck with an auto trailer attached.

He could feel the pulse of the bass as soon as he stepped out of the car, country music, white man’s blues, resonating through the steel walls of the pole barn. He crunched up the gravel driveway toward Waylon Jennings’ voice. “A Rose in Paradise.”

He didn’t bother to knock. No one could’ve heard it anyway. The barn’s interior was as crude as its shell, unpainted concrete floor, naked fluorescent tubes dangling on dogchains from metal girders overhead, scarred perf-board paneling riveted to the walls. Grease-monkey chic. There was space enough for several cars, but only two were in residence, a mid-sixties yellow Corvette minus its engine, and a gunmetal gray Morgan roadster.

The Morgan’s front end was balanced on a jack post two feet above the floor, with a pair of stumpy, overall-clad legs protruding from beneath it. A grimy, simian paw was fumbling around on the cement for a wrench just out of reach. Andy slapped the tool into the palm, it disappeared under the car for a moment, then Buchek rolled out from beneath the Morgan on a mechanic’s creeper.

He was a squat grizzly of a man in grubby gray coveralls, with a stubbled, square face and hard gray eyes topped by a greasy engineer’s cap. Andy flashed his DEA badge and Buchek accepted it without question.

“Just a sec, lemme turn off the radio.”

He crossed to the workbench against the wall and punched a button on a jury-rigged car stereo, choking off Waylon in mid-groan. Andy’s ears rang in the sudden silence.

“You want coffee?” Buchek asked, pouring a cup from an oil spattered Mr. Coffee on the bench. McMahon nodded and accepted a chipped china mug with a graphite fingerprint pattern. Black, bitter coffee, strong enough to float a bolt.

“Clutch linkage is screwed up,” Buchek said, nodding toward the roadster. “Mogs are a bitch to keep slick. You here about Wilde wipin’ out?”

“That’s right. You left in kind of a hurry afterward, didn’t you?”

“I gotta punch in at eight tomorra, wreck or no wreck, mister. Some people work for a livin’.”

“Isn’t vintage racing kind of an expensive hobby for a working man?”

“Maybe,” Buchek said, scowling down at his cup, “but it’s the only one I got. Got no wife any more and I keep racin’ as much for my boys as for me. Helpin’ with the cars keeps ’em busy, ’n outta trouble. Look, I can’t tell you no more’n I already told them guys yesterday. I seen the auto-hauler there when I took the curve, but I had my hands full tryna hang onto the lead and I really didn’t pay no attention to it. If anybody was around it I never seen ’em. ’Fraid you made a trip for nothin’.”

“Maybe not,” Andy said. “I understand you had trouble with Chris Wilde after the Mid-Ohio run.”

“Some,” Buchek nodded. “I tried to take him on a outside curve and he run me off the track. Driveshaft jammed and I lunched my engine. I was really torqued, so I got in his face about it at the banquet after the race. Funny, I never figured he’d fight, I mean, the guy’s a fag, right? Only we go outside and he cleans my clock for me. Drilled me so hard they hadda haul me off in a ambulance for Chrissake. Concussion. Bad day all around.”

“Found it a little tough to live with, did you?”

“I ah, took some static from my boys about it,” Buchek said cautiously, eyeing McMahon over the rim of his coffee cup. “Nothin’ I couldn’t handle. ’Sides, it wasn’t just the principle of the thing, it was the money. Blowin’ that mill prob’ly cost me ten grand.”

“That seems like a lot of money for an engine.”

“It wasn’t just any engine. The one I blew was the original motor. All the numbers matched.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Every car’s got a serial number stamped on the engine and the frame and like that, to identify it. If the numbers match, it means the car’s in original condition, which makes it worth a lot more to a collector. The Morgan factory still builds cars by hand, so any Mog’s rare, but the SuperSports are the rarest. They didn’t make very many of ’em, and since most of ’em were raced, only a few are still in original condition. My ’64 SS wasn’t as rare as Chris’s ’61, but it was worth at least twenny, twenny-five grand till I blew the original engine. Now? Who knows, twelve, fifteen tops.”