by Dan Simmons
“No,” said Dar.
Nothing more was said.
The first accident site was halfway to San Jose. Lawrence parked the Trooper in the crowded parking lot of a low-rent condo complex and they walked over to the inevitable yellow-taped-crime-scene rectangle around a 1994 red Honda Prelude. The accident had occurred in the middle of the night, but there were still two uniformed officers there as well as a few gawkers—mostly gang-banger-aged kids in droopy shorts and three-hundred-dollar athletic shoes. Lawrence identified both himself and Dar to the nearest police officer, politely asked permission for Dar to take pictures, and then got a statement from the officer.
As Dar shot images, the young patrolman tried to explain, pointing happily to the various pieces of evidence—the broken windows on the car, the cracked windshield, dents in the hood of the Prelude, slimy gray matter on and around the front of the car, as well as blood on the shattered windshield, the hood, the fenders, the front bumper, and pooled in a wide, dark stain on the asphalt. Obviously it had not rained very hard here during the night or morning.
“Well, this guy, Barry, he’s mad at his girlfriend—Sheila something—she lives upstairs in 2306, she’s down at the station now making out a statement,” said the cop. “Anyway, Barry’s a biker, big fucker with a beard, and Sheila gets tired of him and starts seeing other guys. Well, at least one other guy. Barry, he doesn’t like that. So he comes by here, we figure about two-thirty A.M., the reports of a disturbance come in about two forty-eight, and the first report of shots fired came in to 911 at three-oh-two A.M. At first Barry is just, you know, screaming up at Sheila’s window, shouting obscenities at her, her shouting obscenities back, you know. The main entrance, it’s got an automatic lock so you gotta buzz to get in and go up, only Sheila doesn’t buzz him in.
“This really pisses Barry off. So he goes back to his truck—that’s it, the Ford van parked over there—and comes back with a loaded shotgun, double barrel. He starts using the butt of the shotgun to bash in the side windows of Sheila’s Prelude there. Sheila starts shitting bricks and screaming louder. The neighbors call the police, but before a black-and-white can answer, Barry gets it in his mind to get up on the hood—he must’ve weighed about two sixty, you see how he dented the shit out of it just standing on it—and he begins bashing in the windshield with the butt of the shotgun. We figure, to get a better grip or something, he somehow got a finger inside the trigger guard…”
“And shot himself in the belly?” said Lawrence.
“Both barrels. Blew his guts all over the hood, headlights, front bumper—”
“He was still alive in intensive care when I got the call this morning,” interrupted Lawrence. “Do you have an update?”
The cop shrugged. “When the detectives came to take the girl downtown, word was that the medics had pulled the plug on Barry. Sheila’s comment was ‘Good riddance.’”
“Love,” said Lawrence.
“It’s a many-splendored thing,” agreed the uniformed officer.
They stopped for three obvious slip-and-fall scams—two at supermarkets and one at a Holiday Inn where the claimant was famous for slip-and-falls near ice machines that leaked—and a slow-motion parking-lot swoop-and-squat where five family members were all claiming whiplash. The last accident scene was in San Jose itself. On the way, Lawrence and Dar stopped for lunch. Actually, they just went through a Burger Biggy drive-through and ate their Biggies and slurped their Biggy milk shakes while Lawrence drove.
“So how did Barry’s shotgun sepaku relate to any of your insurance carriers?” Dar asked between sips.
“First thing Sheila did this morning was file a claim on the Prelude,” said the big insurance adjuster. “She says that it’s totaled—that State Farm owes her a brand-new car.”
“I didn’t see that much damage,” said Dar. “Some broken glass. The dents in the hood. Nothing else that a car wash won’t take care of.”
Lawrence shook his head. “She claims that she would be too traumatized to ever drive the Prelude again. She wants full payment…enough to buy a brand-new SUV. She’s had her eye on a Navigator.”
“She told the insurance people all this this morning before going to the cops to give her statement?”
“Sort of,” said Lawrence. “She called her insurance agent at four A.M.”
The last accident site was also in a run-down condo complex, this one right in San Jose. There were uniformed officers on the stairway and an obviously bored plainclothes detective on the third floor. There was also the smell of death.
“Jesus,” said Lawrence, pulling a clean, red bandana out of his hip pocket and holding it over his nose and mouth. “How long has this guy been dead?”
“Just since last night,” said Lieutenant Rich of the San Jose PD. “Everyone heard the gunshot about midnight, but no one reported it. The apartment’s not air-conditioned, so things have been getting ripe since about ten A.M.”
“You mean the body’s still in there?” Lawrence asked incredulously.
Lieutenant Rich shrugged. “The ME was here this morning when the body was discovered. The cause of death has been established. We’ve been waiting for the meat wagon all day, but the county coroner has jurisdiction on this and his vehicle’s been busy all day. Real mess on the freeways this morning.”
“Shit,” said Lawrence. He gave Dar a look and then turned back to the lieutenant. “Well, we have to go in and take photos. I have to do a scene sketch.”
“Why?” said the detective. “What the hell has the insurance got to do with it at this point?”
“There’s already threatened litigation by the deceased’s sister,” said Lawrence.
“Against who?” said Officer Rich. “Do you know how this guy died?”
“Suicide, isn’t it?” said Lawrence. “The lawsuit is against the deceased’s—Mr. Hatton’s—psychiatrist. His sister says that Mr. Hatton was depressed and paranoid and that the psychiatrist didn’t do enough to prevent this tragedy.”
The detective chuckled. “I don’t think that’s gonna fly. I’d have to testify in court that the psychiatrist did everything she could to keep this poor nut happy. Come on in, I’ll show you. You can take your photos, but I don’t think you’ll want to hang around long enough to do too careful a scene diagram.”
Dar followed the plainclothes officer and Lawrence into the small, overheated apartment. Someone had opened the only window that would open, but that was in the kitchen and the body was in the bedroom.
“Jesus Christ,” said Lawrence, standing next to the blood-soaked bed and pillows, looking at the crimson spatters on the headboard and wall. “The. 38’s still in the poor bastard’s hand. The ME says that this isn’t suicide?”
Lieutenant Rich, who was trying to hold his nose and look dignified at the same time, nodded. “We have testimony from the shrink that Mr. Hatton was definitely depressed and paranoid, also schizophrenic. The psychiatrist was aware that the late Mr. H. always slept with the. 38 Smith and Wesson on his nightstand next to his bed. He was afraid the UN was planning an invasion of the United States…you know, black helicopters, bar codes on road signs to show the African troops where to go to get the gun owners…the usual shit. Anyway, the shrink—she’s a woman, by the way, and quite a looker—says that the short-term goal of her therapy was to have Mr. Hatton bring in the pistol for safekeeping.”
“Guess that goal won’t be reached,” said Lawrence through his bandana.
“The shrink says that Hatton was extremely paranoid, but in no way suicidal,” said the detective. “She’s willing to testify to that. But the poor schmuck was on about five types of meds, including Doxepin and Flurezeapam to sleep. Knocks him right out. According to the doctor, Hatton always tried to get to sleep by ten-thirty P.M.”
“So what happened?” said Lawrence as Dar shot some regular thirty-five-millimeter stills with high-speed film.
“Hatton’s sister called him at three minutes before midnight,” said Lieutenan
t Rich. “She says that she usually doesn’t call him that late, but that she’d had a terrible dream…a premonition of his death.”
“So?” said Lawrence.
“Hatton didn’t answer the phone. His sister knew that he was taking sleeping pills, so she waited until nine this morning to start calling again. Eventually she called the cops.”
“I don’t get it,” said Lawrence.
Dar crouched by the body, studied the angle of the arm and the turn of the wrist that rigor mortis had sculpted in place, studied the wound high on the dead man’s temple, and then moved around the bed to sniff at the pillow on the empty side. “I do,” said Dar.
Lawrence looked at Dar, at the body, back at Lieutenant Rich, and then at the body again. “Aw, no. You’re shitting me.”
“That’s the ME’s analysis,” said the detective.
Lawrence shook his head. “You mean—he was all doped up with sleeping pills, his sister calls because she has a dream that he’s died, and this guy thinks he’s answering the phone but actually picks up the .38 on the nightstand and blows his brains out? There’s no way anyone could prove that.”
“There was a witness,” said Lieutenant Rich.
Lawrence looked at the empty but mussed side of the bed. “Oh,” he said, getting the picture…or at least part of it.
“Georgio of Beverly Hills,” said Dar.
Lawrence turned slowly to look at his friend. “Are you telling me that you can look at the imprint on the other side of the bed and sniff around—amidst all this stench—and tell me the name of the guy from Beverly Hills that Mr. Hatton was sleeping with?”
The police detective laughed, then covered his mouth and nose again.
Dar shook his head. “The perfume. Georgio of Beverly Hills.” Dar turned to the plainclothes officer. “Let me take a wild guess. Whoever was in bed with Mr. Hatton at the time of the accident didn’t come forward last night—either because she’s married or the situation would be embarrassing in some other way—but she’s given you a statement since then. Whoever she was, you found her this morning…and probably not by checking all of the women in Southern California who wear Georgio.”
Detective Rich nodded. “Two minutes after the patrol car pulled up this morning, she broke down and started sobbing, told us all about it.”
“What are you two talking about?” said Lawrence.
“The psychiatrist,” said Dar.
Lawrence looked back at the body. “Mr. Hatton was boffing his shrink?”
“Not at the time of the accident,” said Lieutenant Rich. “They’d finished their boffing for the night, Mr. Hatton had taken his Flurezeapam and Doxepin, and they were both asleep. The psychiatrist… I’ll keep her name out of it for right now, but my guess is that you’ll be hearing it on the eleven-o’clock news a lot in the days to come…she heard the phone ring at midnight, heard Hatton fumble around and say, ‘Hello?’—just as the gun went off.”
“She obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valor on her part,” said Dar.
“Yeah,” said the detective. “She got her ass out of here before the blood quit sprayin’. Unfortunately—for the shrink—the snoopy live-in manager saw her drive off in her Porsche about five minutes after midnight.”
“Does Mrs. Hatton’s sister know about this yet?” asked Lawrence.
“Not yet,” said the detective.
Dar exchanged glances with Lawrence. “That should make the lawsuit even more interesting.”
The detective led the way back out into the hallway. Lawrence and Dar followed readily enough. They stood on the balcony to let the breeze blow some of the smell off their clothes.
“It’s like the old story of how Helen Keller burned her ear,” said Lieutenant Rich.
“How’s that?” said Lawrence, making notes and fast sketches in his notebook.
“By answering the iron,” Lieutenant Rich said, and began laughing almost hysterically.
Lawrence and Dar did not speak for some time after leaving San Jose. Finally Lawrence muttered, “To protect and serve. Ha!”
At the end of the drive back to San Diego, Dar suddenly said, “Larry, remember when Princess Diana was killed a few years ago?”
“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “Sure I remember.”
“What did we talk about…more or less?”
The burly insurance adjuster sighed. “Let’s see…the first reports were that the Mercedes that Princess Di and her boyfriend were in had been going a hundred and twenty miles per hour. We knew that was incorrect right from the beginning. We used the TV’s freeze-frame to get some stills of the news report, remember? Then we videotaped the later scene reports and studied the stills from them.”
“And we talked about how the impact incursion wasn’t consistent,” said Dar.
“Right. The Mercedes hit that pillar pretty much dead on, so we know that the front-end incursion wasn’t significant enough to show that the car had been going anywhere near a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Also, the TV networks kept reporting that the car had obviously rolled over, but when we looked at the raw video we knew that wasn’t so.”
“You and Trudy identified the missing roof as the emergency workers’ efforts to cut the victims free, right?” said Dar.
“Sure. So did you. And the dents visible in the roof didn’t come from a rollover. They came from the rear passengers’ heads hitting the inside of the roof after the initial impact.”
“And what did we judge the real speed of impact to be, according to the video, the passengers’ injuries, and the other scene reports?”
“I said…let’s see… I said sixty-three miles per hour. Trudy said sixty-seven. I think you had the low number, sixty-two.”
“And when the final report came out, you were right,” mused Dar.
Lawrence went on. “None of the reporters seemed to want to mention it, but we all knew that Princess Diana would have almost certainly survived the crash if she’d been wearing her seat belt and shoulder harness. And they’d all be alive if the accident had happened in the United States…”
“Because?” said Dar.
“Because it’s both federal and state regulations that pillars in an underpass have to be protected by guardrails,” said Lawrence. “You know that; you mentioned it the night of the accident. You even worked out the kinetic-impact-velocity-diminution equations on our computer—showing that if it had been a guardrail rather than a concrete pillar, the Mercedes would have gone ricocheting back and forth through that tunnel, wall to guardrail and back again, dissipating energy as it went. If the occupants other than the bodyguard had been buckled in…”
“But they weren’t,” said Dar quietly.
“Uh-uh. Trudy calls that the taxi-limousine syndrome,” said Lawrence. “People who would never drive or ride in their own automobiles without a seat belt don’t even think about buckling up in a limo or taxi. For some reason, you feel invulnerable when a hired driver is behind the wheel.”
“Trudy even remembered video of Princess Diana buckling up when driving her own car,” said Dar. “What else did we discuss?”
Lawrence scratched his chin. “I’m assuming you’ll get to your point here sometime. Let’s see. We all agreed that the paparazzi didn’t have anything to do with the accident. First, the Mercedes could have easily outrun those little paparazzi motorcycles. Secondly, it could have driven over them without feeling a bump. But we all suspected that a second vehicle was involved…a second automobile, that is. That the driver swerved down into the tunnel and then lost control trying to miss another car.”
“Which turned out to be the case,” said Dar.
“Yeah. And we were sure they’d discover that the driver had been legally drunk.”
Dar nodded. “Why did we assume that?”
“He was French,” said Lawrence. Lawrence did not travel to parts of the world where all the people did not speak English. He also did not like the French just on general principles.
/> “Why else?” said Dar.
“Oh, I think it was Trudy who made the point that the swerve to the left after entering the tunnel—the swerve that sent them directly into the pillar—almost certainly had to be an evasive maneuver and that any competent driver—or sober driver—could have made it at sixty-five miles per hour without losing control of that make of Mercedes. After all, the car was trying to help the driver keep control.”
“So the three of us were right about all of the particulars of the accident, even down to the hypothetical extra car involved,” said Dar. “But do you remember any other reaction on our part?”
“Oh, I remember keeping a watch on the Net and the professional journals for a while,” said Lawrence. “The facts came trickling in that way—through comments by other insurance investigators—long before the networks or news services figured it out.”
“Do you remember us crying?” said Dar.
Lawrence took his eyes off the traffic and looked at Dar for what seemed like a long time. Then he looked back at the road. “Are you shitting me?”
“No, I’m trying to remember our emotional reaction.”
“Everybody else in the world went apeshit,” said Lawrence in obvious disgust. “Remember the TV views of the long lines of sobbing people—grown-ups—outside the British consulate in L.A.? There were church services up the wazoo and more blubbering on television idiot-on-the-street interviews than I’ve seen since Kennedy was shot. More than Kennedy. It was like everyone’s favorite aunt, wife, mother, sister, and girlfriend had died. It was crazy. It was absolutely nuts.”
“Yes,” said Dar, “but how did the three of us react?”
Lawrence shrugged again. “I guess Trudy and I were sorry the lady was dead. It’s sad when any young person dies. But Christ, Dar, it wasn’t personal. I mean, we didn’t know the woman. Besides, there was a certain irritation at their carelessness—hers and the boyfriend, Dodi—at letting a drunk drive, at playing games driving that fast just to get rid of a few fucking photographers, and for thinking that they were so above the laws of physics that they didn’t need their belts on.”
