by Dan Simmons
“No,” snarled Lawrence, tugging at his wrist. It was firmly stuck. “I know what the problem is. These SBUs have a cheap little fuse connector that comes loose. It’s behind the headlight assembly rather than under the dash. Trudy fixed it the last time the thing joggled loose.”
Dar nodded. “Trudy has smaller hands.”
Lawrence glared at his accident reconstruction specialist. “Yeah,” he said as if biting off a dozen more pertinent and violent responses. “The opening’s funnel-shaped. I got my hand in there all right, even reconnected the damn fuse clip. I just can’t…it just won’t…”
“Let go of you?” prompted Dar, looking over at the diner. “Bromley’s calling for the check.”
“Damn, damn, damn,” muttered Lawrence. “The diner was too small for me to go in without being spotted. I pumped gas as slowly as I could. I just figured that if I worked on this awhile, it would look normal enough…”
“You look like somebody with his hand trapped in a headlight socket,” said Dar.
Lawrence showed his teeth in what was definitely not a friendly smile. “The inside of the circular flange is razor-sharp,” he hissed through those teeth. “And I think my hand has swollen with the last half hour’s attempt at pulling it out.”
“Couldn’t you get to it from under the hood?” said Dar, ready to roll up the work cloth and pop the hood open.
Lawrence’s grimace remained. “It’s sealed. If I could have reached it under the hood, I wouldn’t have gone in through the headlight.”
Dar knew that his boss was an amiable sort, easy to joke with and kindhearted, but he also knew that Lawrence had high blood pressure and a rare but fearsome temper. Noting his boss’s beet-red face, the sweat dripping from his pug nose and mustache, and the murderous intensity of his voice, Dar guessed that this might not be a good time for further banter.
“What do you want me to do? Get some soap or grease from the mechanics in the garage?”
“I didn’t want to draw a crowd…” Lawrence began, and then said, “Oh, shit.”
Four of the mechanics and a teenaged girl were walking toward them from the garage. Bromley had paid his check and was out of sight, either in the men’s room or headed for the door.
Lawrence leaned closer to Dar and whispered. “Chuckie is meeting his boss and several of the others in the stolen-car ring somewhere out in the desert this morning. If I can photograph that, I’ve got them.” He tugged at his right hand. The Isuzu Trooper held its grip.
Dar nodded. “You want me to follow them?”
Lawrence made a face. “Don’t be stupid. Across desert roads. In that?” He inclined his head toward the black NSX. “You’ve got a front clearance of about six millimeters there.”
Dar shrugged in agreement. “I wasn’t planning any off-road work today. Shall I drive your truck?”
Lawrence stood upright, his hand firmly embedded. The grease monkeys and the teenaged girl had arrived and were forming a semicircle.
“How could you drive my truck while I’m attached like this?” hissed Lawrence.
Dar rubbed his chin. “Strap you on the hood like a deer?” he suggested.
Chuckie Bromley came out of the diner, glanced over at the small crowd around Lawrence, and climbed up awkwardly into his purple Ford Expedition.
“Hey,” said one of the teenaged mechanics, wiping his black hands on a blacker rag. “Stuck?”
Lawrence’s basilisk stare made the boy take a step back.
“We got some grease,” said the second mechanic.
“Don’t need grease,” said an older mechanic with missing front teeth. “Just spray some WD-40 in there… Course, you’re still gonna lose some skin. Maybe a thumb.”
“I think we oughta take the grill apart,” said the third mechanic. “Remove the whole damn headlight assembly. It’s the only way you’re going to get your hand out of there, mister, without tearing ligaments. I have a cousin who got trapped by his Isuzu…”
Lawrence sighed heavily. Chuckie Bromley drove past them and turned west onto the highway. “Dar,” he said, “would you get that file off the passenger seat? It’s the case I need you to work on today.”
Darwin went around and picked up the file, glanced at it, and said, “Oh, no, Larry. You know that I hate this sort of—”
Lawrence nodded. “I was going to do it on the way home after photographing the desert meeting, but you’re going to have to cover for me. I may be getting stitches.” Lawrence looked at the huge, purple Expedition disappearing down the highway. “One more favor, Dar. Would you get my handkerchief out of my right back pocket?”
Dar complied.
“Stand back,” said Lawrence to everyone. He tugged hard at his hand, twice. The sharp metal ring had a firm grip in there. On the third tug he pulled hard enough to make the Isuzu rock forward on its springs.
“Aaayargh!” cried Lawrence, sounding like a black-belt karate expert preparing to break bricks. He grabbed his right forearm with his left hand and threw all 250 pounds of himself backward. A spray of blood spattered across the asphalt and almost hit the teenaged girl’s sneakers. She jumped back and stood daintily on her tiptoes.
“Arrrrrurrrr,” said the assembled crowd in unison, an orchestrated groan of disgust and admiration.
“Thanks,” Lawrence said, and took the kerchief from Dar with his left hand, wrapping it around the bleeding meat of his right hand just above the joint of thumb and wrist.
Dar put the cell phone in Lawrence’s upper left safari-shirt pocket as his boss got behind the wheel of the Trooper and started the ignition.
“Want me to go with you?” asked Dar. He could imagine Lawrence getting weaker from loss of blood just as the band of felons noticed the light glinting off his boss’s long lens documenting the stolen car scene. The chase across the desert. The shooting. Lawrence fainting. The terrible denouement.
“Naw,” said Lawrence, “just do that retirement-park interview for me and I’ll see you at our place tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Dar, his voice dull. He would rather have had the desert chase and gun battle with stolen car thieves than to go do this damn interview. It was the kind of thing that Lawrence and Trudy usually spared him.
Lawrence roared away in the Trooper. The Expedition was just a plum-colored dot on the horizon.
The four men in mechanics’ overalls and the teenaged girl were looking at the spray pattern of blood on the white concrete.
“Jeeee-zus,” said the youngest. “That sure was a stupid thing.”
Dar dropped into the black leather of the heated NSX. “Not even in Larry’s top twenty,” he said, got the engine and the air-conditioning roaring, and pulled away, also headed west.
The mobile home park was in Riverside just off the 91, not far from the intersection with the 10 that Dar had driven west on from Banning. He found the proper surface street, pulled into the entrance of the mobile home park, and parked in the sparse shade of a cottonwood tree to read the rest of the file.
“Shit,” he whispered to himself. From Lawrence’s preliminary field report and the data from the insurer, the park had been around for a while before turning into a senior-citizen community. Now one had to be at least fifty-five to live there—although grandchildren and other youngsters were allowed to visit overnight—but the age of the average resident was probably closer to eighty. It looked from the data sheets as if many of the older residents had lived there even before the park had opened as a senior community about fifteen years earlier.
The mobile home park owner was carrying a high self-retention—which was relatively rare—carrying its own risk up to $100,000 before the insurance kicked in. Dar noted that this particular owner—a Mr. Gilley—owned several mobile home parks and maintained a high self-retention on all of them. This suggested to Dar that these parks were considered high-risk, that there had been a high volume of accidents in Mr. Gilley’s retirement mobile home parks over the years, and that the insurance companies had be
en unwilling to provide the usual full coverage because of the frequency of these accidents. Dar knew that this might indicate a careless attitude on the part of the owner, or just bad luck.
In this case, Gilley had been notified four days ago that there had been a serious accident in this park, and that one of his resident tenants had died—the park was called the Shady Rest, although Dar could see that most of the mature trees had died and there was little shade left. The owner had immediately contacted his business attorney, and the attorney had called Stewart Investigations to reconstruct the accident so that the attorney could evaluate the liability of his client. A fairly common case for Lawrence and Trudy’s company. Dar hated these cases—slip and falls, negligence cases, nursing home lawsuits. It was one reason why he worked under special contract for the Stewarts to reconstruct the more complicated accidents.
No one in the file’s chain of communication seemed to have any detailed facts about this accident, but the owner’s attorney had told Trudy there had been a witness—another resident by the name of Henry—and that Henry would be expecting an interviewer at the clubhouse around 11:00 A.M. Dar glanced at his watch. Ten to eleven.
Dar read through the few paragraphs of transcript from the attorney’s phone call. It seemed that one of the elderly residents, Mr. William J. Treehorn, seventy-eight, had driven his electric-powered cart over a curb outside the clubhouse, fallen from the cart, struck his head, and died instantly. The accident had occurred around 11:00 P.M., so the first thing Dar did was drive to the clubhouse—a single-story A-frame building that needed maintenance—to check the nearby lighting. He could see the security lights that would have illuminated the walkways directly in front of the clubhouse, and there were three low-pressure sodium streetlights on 35-foot poles visible around the curve of lane. Dar was a bit surprised by the low-pressure sodium lights; they were more common farther south near where he lived, near San Diego, because they were supposed to minimize light scatter for the Palomar Observatory. Still, if all the lights worked, there would have been more than adequate lighting in this accident area. A point in favor of the absentee owner.
Dar drove slowly past the front of the clubhouse. He made a note on his yellow legal pad that there was construction going on in front of the community building: part of the asphalt street had been repaved, there were delineators and cones still in place, yellow tape restricted access to several sections of sidewalk, and some repaving equipment remained parked in the roped-off part of the street. He drove around to a small parking lot at the rear of the clubhouse and walked in. There did not seem to be any air-conditioning in the building and the heat was stifling.
A group of older men was playing cards at a table near the rear window. The view out the window was of a pool and hot tub that looked as if they were rarely used—the cover to the hot tub was lashed down and mildewed, and the pool needed cleaning. Dar approached the game diffidently even though the four were watching him rather than their cards.
“Excuse me, don’t mean to interrupt the game,” said Dar, “but is one of you gentlemen named Henry?”
A man who looked to be in his late seventies sprang to his feet. He was short, perhaps five five, and could not have weighed more than 110 pounds. His skinny, white, old-man’s legs emerged from oversized shorts, but he wore an expensive polo shirt, brand-new running shoes, and a baseball cap with an emblem on it advertising a Las Vegas casino. His gold wristwatch was a Rolex.
“I’m Henry,” said the spry oldster, extending a mottled hand. “Henry Goldsmith. You the fella the insurance company sent around to hear about Bud’s accident?”
Dar introduced himself and said, “Bud was Mr. William J. Treehorn?”
One of the old men spoke without looking up from his cards. “Bud. Everybody called him Bud. Nobody never called him William or Bill. Bud.”
“That’s right,” said Henry Goldsmith. The man’s voice was soft and sad. “I knew Bud for—Jesus—almost thirty years, and he was always Bud.”
“Did you see the accident, Mr. Goldsmith?”
“Henry,” said the older man. “Call me Henry. And yeah… I was the only one that saw it. Hell, I probably caused it.” Henry’s voice had thickened so that the last few words were barely audible. “Let’s go find an empty table,” he added. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
They sat at the farthest table. Dar identified himself again, explained who he worked for and where the information would be going, and asked Henry if he was willing to give a recorded statement. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to,” said Dar. “I’m just gathering information for the adjuster who reports to the owner’s attorney.”
“Sure I want to talk to you,” said Henry, waving his hand and waiving all his legal rights. “Tell you just what happened.”
Dar nodded and turned on the recorder. The microphone was directional and highly sensitive.
The first ten minutes or so was unnecessary background. Henry and his wife lived across the street from Bud and his wife in the park, and had since before the trailer park had reopened as a senior-citizen community. The families had known each other in Chicago, and when all the kids were gone, they moved to California together.
“Bud, he had a stroke about two years ago,” said Henry. “No…no, it was three years ago. Just after those goddamned Atlanta Braves won the World Series.”
“David Justice hit the home run,” Dar said automatically. He was interested in no sport except baseball. Unless one considered chess a sport. Dar did not.
“Whatever,” said Henry. “That’s when Bud had his stroke. Just after that.”
“That’s why Mr. Treehorn had to use the electric cart to get around?”
“Pard,” said Henry.
“Pardon me?”
“Them carts, they’re made by a company named Pard and that’s what Bud called the cart—his pard. You know, like his buddy.”
Dar knew the make. They were small and three-wheeled, almost like an oversized electric tricycle; a regular battery drove a small electric motor which powered the rear wheels. The little carts could be ordered with regular accelerator and brake pedals like a golf cart, or with brake and throttle controls on the handlebars for people without the use of their legs.
“After the stroke, Bud’s left side didn’t work at all,” Henry was saying. “Left leg just dragged. Left arm…well, Bud used to cradle it in his lap. The left side of his face looked all dragged down and he had trouble talking.”
“Could he communicate?” Dar asked softly. “Make his wishes known?”
“Oh, hell, yeah,” said Henry, smiling as if bragging about a grandchild. “The stroke didn’t make him stupid. His speech was…well, it was hard to understand him…but Rose and Verna and I could always make out what he was saying.”
“Rose is Mr. Treehorn’s… Bud’s…wife?” said Dar.
“Only for fifty-two years,” said Henry. “Verna, she’s my third wife. Been married twenty-two years this coming January.”
“The night of the accident…,” prompted Dar.
Henry frowned, knowing that he was being put back on track. “You asked if he could make his wishes known, young man. I’m tellin’ you he could…but mostly it was Rose and Verna and me who understood him and sorta…you know…translated to others.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dar, accepting the rebuke.
“Well, the night of the accident…four nights ago… Bud and I came over to the clubhouse as usual to play pinochle.”
“He could still play cards,” said Dar. Strokes were strange and frightening things to him.
“Hell, yes, he could still play cards,” said Henry, voice rising again but smiling this time. “Won more often than not, too. Told you, stroke messed up the left side of his body and made it hard for him to…you know…form words. Didn’t hurt his mind though. Nope, Bud was as sharp as a tack.”
“Was there anything different on the night of the accident?” said Dar.
“Not with Bud
there wasn’t,” said Henry, his jaw setting firmly. “Picked him up at quarter till nine, just like every Friday night. Bud grunted some things, but Rose and me knew that he was saying that he was going to clean us out that night. Win big. Nothing different about Bud that night at all.”
“No,” said Dar, “I meant, was there anything different about the clubhouse or the street or the—”
“Oh, hell, yes,” said Henry. “That’s the reason it all happened. Those chowderheads who came to repave the street had parked their asphalt rolling machine in front of the handicapped ramp.”
“The handicapped ramp out front,” said Dar. “The one in front of the main entrance?”
“Yep,” said Henry. “Only entrance open after eight P.M. We like to start our games at nine…generally run to midnight or later. But Bud always leaves so as to be home by eleven because he wants to be there before Rose goes to sleep. She don’t sleep well without Bud next to her and…” Henry paused and a cloud moved across his clear blue eyes, as if he had just remembered.
“But Friday night, the asphalt rolling machine had been left in front of the only handicapped access ramp,” said Dar.
Henry’s eyes seemed to refocus from some distant place. “What? Yeah. That’s what I said. Come on, I’ll show you.”
The two men walked out into the heat. The access ramp was clear now, the asphalt new on the street beyond. Henry gestured at it. “The damn asphalt truck blocked the whole ramp and Bud’s Pard couldn’t make it up the curb.” They walked together the twenty feet to the curb.
Dar noted that it was a standard street curb, angled at about seventy-eight degrees to be easier on car tires. But it had been too steep for Bud’s little electric cart.
“No problem,” said Henry. “I went in and got Herb, Wally, Don, a couple of the other boys, and we lifted Bud and his Pard up onto the walk as smooth as you please. Then he drove himself into the card game.”
“And you played until about eleven P.M.,” said Dar. He was holding the tiny recorder at waist level, but the mike was aimed at Henry.
