Ричард Деминг - Hit and Run

At two thirty in the morning there are usually few people on the streets of Buffalo. With only a half hour left until curfew, most people don’t want to waste drinking time walking from one bar to another, even when a bar is crowded. And tonight was a quiet night. The only person in sight was an elderly and rather shabbily dressed man who was just starting to cross the street a few yards beyond Calhoun. And the only moving vehicle in sight was the green Buick convertible, which streaked past Calhoun down the left lane of the one-way street, just in time to catch the elderly man with its left front fender as he stepped from between two parked cars.

The old man flew back between the cars he had just walked between to land in a heap on the sidewalk. With a screech of brakes, the green convertible swerved right clear across the street and sideswiped two parked cars.

The crash was more terrific than the damage. Metal screamed in agony as a front fender was torn from the first parked car and a rear fender half ripped from the second. The convertible caromed to the center of the street, hesitated, then gunned off as though it were on the Indianapolis Speedway.

But not before Calhoun had seen all he needed to see. The neon signs of taverns along Court Street, combined with the regular street lighting, made the street as bright as day. With the convertible’s top down, he could see the occupants clearly.

The woman was driving, her shoulder-length raven-black hair flowing behind her. If there were any doubt as to the couple’s identity, her companion dispelled it by turning in the seat to stare back over his shoulder at the motionless figure on the sidewalk, giving Calhoun a full-face view of him. It was Harry Cushman.

Automatically Calhoun noted the license number of the Buick convertible was 9I-3836. It was a New York State plate.

The crash brought people pouring from doorways all along the block. A yell of rage from up the street, followed by a steady stream of swearing, told Calhoun that at least one of the damaged cars’ owners had arrived at the scene.

“Anybody see it?” he heard someone nearby ask.

Then somebody discovered the old man lying on the sidewalk. Calhoun waited until the crowd began to gather around the injured man, then unobtrusively slipped from his car. Instead of crossing the street to join the crowd, he walked up to look over the two damaged cars.

Beyond a ruined fender on each, neither seemed particularly harmed. One was a new Dodge and the other a two-year-old Ford. He filed the license numbers of each in his mind, along with the Buick’s.

Apparently someone in the crowd had thought to call an ambulance and the police, for a few minutes later they arrived simultaneously. Calhoun crossed the street and stood on the edge of the crowd as the police cleared a path for the Emergency Hospital interne who had come in the ambulance. The interne bent over the injured man.

The man wasn’t dead. Calhoun could hear him answering the interne’s questions in a weak voice. He couldn’t make out what they said, but after a few moments the interne rose and spoke in a louder voice to one of the police officers.

“He may have a fractured hip. Can’t tell for sure without X rays. I don’t think anything else is broken.”

Under the interne’s instructions, two attendants got the old man on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance.

“I didn’t get the guy’s name,” one of the policemen complained.

“John Lischer,” the interne said. “You can get his address later. His address for a while will be Emergency Hospital.”

When the ambulance pulled away, Calhoun faded back from the crowd to stand in the light of a neon sign. He took an envelope from his pocket, wrote down the three license numbers and the name John Lischer.

He stood musing, then recrossed the street and returned to the Haufbrau. It was five minutes of three when he entered the bar. The place was now deserted except for Joe, the bartender, who was cleaning up.

“Thought you called it a night,” Joe greeted him.

“Got sidetracked by an accident up the street,” Calhoun said. He laid a half dollar on the bar. “How about a nightcap?”

Joe leaned his broom against the bar, then went behind it and mixed a bourbon and soda. “I heard the crash and looked out,” he said. “Couldn’t see much from here. Anybody hurt?”

“One guy, I guess.”

“You see it happen?”

The big man shook his head. “Just heard it and wandered up to rubberneck.”

Joe rang up the half dollar. “Couple of cars, huh?”

“I don’t know,” Calhoun said. “Couple of banged-up cars were there, but they were parked at the curb. And the injured guy was on the opposite side of the street. Looked to me like maybe a hit-and-runner clipped a pedestrian and then sides wiped the two cars.”

“Oh? Too bad you didn’t see it.”

“Yeah,” Calhoun said.

Without seeming to, he studied Joe’s expression carefully. There was no indication on the bartender’s face that he suspected Calhoun of holding anything back.

Calhoun was satisfied. He had returned to the bar solely to fix it in Joe’s mind that he hadn’t taken his tip and followed Harry Cushman and his companion.

There was no point in cutting Joe in if he didn’t have to.

By noon the next day Calhoun had learned from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles records that license 9I-3836 was registered to a Mrs. Lawrence Powers of an upper Delaware Avenue address. The address pleased him, because most of the residents of that section weren’t merely well off, they were in the top financial bracket.

He also checked the licenses of the Dodge and the Ford, learning their respective owners were a James Talmadge on Fillmore and a Henry Taft on Ferry. Then he called Emergency Hospital and asked about the condition of John Lischer.

The switchboard operator informed him that it was listed as fair.

Calhoun waited another twenty-four hours before calling on Mrs. Lawrence Powers. He picked two P.M. as the best time to arrive.

The Powers home was a huge rose-granite affair of at least fourteen rooms, surrounded by fifty feet of perfect lawn in all four directions. A colored maid came to the door.

“Mrs. Powers, please,” Calhoun said, handing the maid a card reading, Bernard Calhoun, Confidential Investigations .

She let him into a small foyer, left him standing there while she went off with the card. In a few minutes, she came back with a dubious expression on her face.

“Mrs. Powers is right filled up with appointments this afternoon, Mr. Calhoun. She wants to know have you got some particular business?”

He said, “Tell her it’s about an auto accident.”

The colored maid disappeared again, but returned almost immediately.

“Just follow me, please, sir,” she said.

She led him through a living room about thirty feet long, whose furnishings probably had cost a year of the average man’s income, through an equally expensive dining room, and onto a large, sunflooded sun porch at the side of the house.

Mrs. Lawrence Powers reclined at full length in a canvas deck chair, wearing brief red shorts and a similarly colored scarf. She wasn’t exactly wearing the scarf. It was draped loosely across her full bosom. She wore nothing else, not even shoes. Obviously she had been sun bathing in the shorts only, and had covered her bosom but a moment before Calhoun and the maid entered.

The maid left them alone, and Calhoun examined Mrs. Powers at the same time she was studying him. She was the same woman who had been with Harry Cushman at the Haufbrau. Under bright sunlight and nearly unclothed, she was even lovelier than she had been under artificial lighting. Not only was her body perfectly contoured, but her flesh was a smooth cream so satiny in texture that Calhoun had to control an impulse to reach out and test if it were real. She was beautiful clear from the tip of her delicately shaped little nose to the tips of her small toes. Even her feet were lovely.