telephone pole enfolded in its driver’s side and the driver – a young woman, a cosmetology student – dead in her seat.
Witnesses reported that the Ford had been waiting at a red light. The timing of the stop light relative to the collision was impossible to verify, but even if the light had been green, the driver of the Mercury had an obligation to attempt to slow and stop, and there was no physical indication that the driver had touched his brakes. Also, the driver admitted fault. In fact, he told police that he had accelerated into the impact. He said that he had been
At issue had been whether the Ford should have protected its occupant better, but through an evaluation of crush damage Ellis and Boggs had calculated that, at impact, the Mercury was travelling at about 70 mph, far exceeding any governmental test standard. The Ford had also deposited a set of tyre marks that swooped across the intersection and which he and Boggs had carefully documented, but were now long erased from the asphalt by weather and passing traffic. Ellis crossed the road to the telephone pole. At about waist height he found an impression of crushed and splintered wood where the Ford had struck. He remembered photographing it years before.
Scuffing at the base of the pole he found bits of glass – maybe from the Ford, maybe from some other collision. He watched several cars move by. None were Boggs’s. Although the case had never gone very far, he and Boggs had referred to it often. The notion of demon possession came in handy when faced with inexplicable driver actions.
He drove up the road to the Cloverleaf Lounge. Inside, the dimness made it impossible to discern the colour of the walls or the tables or even the tie of the short, broad bartender who stood projecting an attitude of everlasting patience. Ellis ordered a beer. When it was set before him he asked if there had been anyone here who looked like Boggs – tall, big, with bright blue eyes and a brownish beard. The bartender, studying a point behind Ellis, shook his head.
Ellis hunched at the bar, sipping his beer, looking around whenever the door opened. He wished he had brought a photograph of Boggs. He felt tense with futility. He drank up and ordered another. The space was filling, mostly with men in blue jeans, boots and bas-relief belt buckles, slouching, laughing, turning from time to time to stare at the TV in the corner where a baseball game played.
‘You lose something?’
Ellis discovered at his side a man with a circular face and quarter-circle shoulders from which hung a sack-like T-shirt.
‘Me?’
‘Saw you standing around on the corner like you’d lost something.’
Ellis hesitated.
‘Maybe you found it,’ the circle-faced man offered. He smelled of armpit and deodorant.
‘There was a bad accident there,’ Ellis said. ‘Years ago.’
‘Sure, there’s been plenty of accidents there.’ The circle-faced man grinned – tiny, even teeth with gaps between. ‘My girlfriend and I met in an accident there.’
Ellis stared.
‘Love works in mysterious ways.’
‘I guess so,’ Ellis said.
The man introduced himself: Mike. He said he knew a guy who was deer hunting and accidentally shot some woman’s dog, and that was how he met her and fell in love. He knew another guy who broke into an apartment to steal a stereo and was surprised by a woman coming out of the bath, so he ran his mouth like crazy to keep her calm, ended up marrying her.
Mike talked on like this and led Ellis to a table under the little TV, where a woman with heavy shoulders and breasts and gleaming wide eyes sat over a glass of cola. Mike said her name was Lucy, and she said hello. When Ellis glanced around everyone in the bar seemed to be watching him – but it was the TV overhead. He searched the faces, and when he began listening again Mike was saying that after four years he and Lucy still had not married, which was his own fault. ‘I just can’t seem to settle into the idea of being a claimed man.’ Lucy sat sipping her cola. She peered at Ellis as if he were a figure atop a far hill and she was trying to decide whether she had anything worth saying considering the distance to be crossed.
A sheen of sweat flashed on Mike’s forehead in time with the TV. He asked Ellis what he did, and Ellis explained – reciting his usual answer – that he analysed things like tyre marks and crush depth to determine the movements and velocities of vehicles involved in crashes, and that his analyses supported the work of his boss who testified as an expert witness in civil litigation. He described, for an example, the accident that had occurred just down the road, and as he spoke of it he recalled a police photo of the Ford at its point of rest, with the cosmetology student slouched over the steering wheel, eyes closed, skin pallid, blood seeping from her mouth and ears.
‘Sure,’ Mike said. ‘That’s the same one. That’s the crash where I met Lucy.’
Ellis looked at Mike, then Lucy, and she did an odd thing, curling herself, as if she hoped to fit into a crate.
‘I was turning left,’ Mike said, ‘and Lucy was turning right and that first car was hit by a truck and came spinning through and whacked Lucy then me and she spun and I spun and we came together -’ He clapped his hands and held them. ‘My door against hers. Our windows were broken, and I looked over and said, “Are you all right?” and she said, “I think so. Are you?” and I said, “Except for my heart. My heart! I’m in love!”’ He grinned at Lucy. ‘Anyway, the truck turned turtle in the ditch. I knew the guy that was driving the truck, too, by the way, my step-uncle. When I was a kid he carried worms in his pockets to scare me.’ Mike giggled and showed his teeth.
‘It didn’t roll into the ditch,’ Ellis said. ‘And the driver was demon-possessed.’
‘What?’
‘And it was a Mercury Grand Marquis, not a truck. I think we’re talking about different accidents.’
‘No, no,’ Mike said, with the enunciation and patience of a gentle man speaking to a moron, ‘the first car was stopped and hit from behind and came bang into her and me and then the first car went flying off the road. Killed a girl.’
‘Well, that is similar.’
‘Sure it is. What did you figure out about it?’
‘We had the Mercury going seventy.’
‘A truck all right, a GMC. I know that because it was my step-uncle’s. Seventy? No. I don’t believe that.’
Ellis shrugged. He wasn’t sure if they were talking about the same accident or not, but it didn’t seem to matter. ‘Step-uncle?’ he said.
‘Banged the jeebus out of my old Monte Carlo. Never aligned right again. And my uncle’s still getting his tighty-whities sued off by that dead girl’s family. Some good came of it, though, since we met.’ He flickered a smile toward Lucy.
Ellis shook his head. He said that he was looking for someone that might have been through that intersection recently, and he described Boggs and Boggs’s convertible.
‘Going to be tough to find the guy,’ Mike said, ‘if that’s all you’ve got to go on.’
Which was right, Ellis knew. He wished everyone in the bar weren’t looking toward him. He felt small and suspect, and the image of James Dell kept coming up before him. The air here smelled like urine. He had not eaten all day, and the beers were moving in him.
‘Could be I saw him,’ Lucy said.
‘You did not,’ Mike said.
‘It was a blue convertible.’
‘It’s green,’ Ellis said.
Mike laughed. But Lucy said, ‘Sure. Green. He had the top down, and he was playing the radio loud.’
‘Did you hear it?’ Ellis asked.
‘Someone talking,’ she said. In the crowd noise and the noise of the television and the thud of a jukebox, they were now leaning close over the table, and Mike’s little, bright teeth stood only inches from Ellis’s face. ‘I saw him pulling away from the corner there,’ Lucy said. ‘Went south.’
‘Did you notice the licence-plate number?’
She only stared.
