A Brew to a Kill (8 page)

“O
KAY
, what do you have for me?” Buckman asked, smoldering cigar wagging in his mouth.

Blinking against the tobacco haze, I waited for Langley or Demetrios to answer. Buckman waited, too.

“Ladies!”
he finally bellowed. “I asked you a question!”

As I literally flinched, the two young officers exchanged anxious glances. Each had been assuming the other would reply. Now they both blurted out—

“Hit-and-run!”

“That much I know, morons. What else?”

Langley cleared his throat. “A white van, Detective. Possibly the result of a drag race.”

Buckman’s eyebrow rose at that. So did mine.

Where was Langley getting
the result of a drag race
, for goodness’ sake? I hadn’t said that! Ready to complain, I opened my mouth, but held my tongue instead. Buckman would get around to me soon enough. No need to embarrass a loyal customer in front of his superior.

“Is that the traffic template under your arm?” Buckman asked, thrusting his hand at Langley. “Give it here.”

As Buckman rifled through the template and accident report, I tried to get a handle on him. I gauged his age as fifty, maybe older. He had a hawkish nose, pronounced chin, and smoke gray eyes that stared so intently they appeared to bulge. His dark brows were heavy, his skin craggy from wear, and his hair chopped down to a crew cut.

His was not the fashionable kind of flattop that actors in my neighborhood gel molded into trendy spikes. Buckman’s bristles had marine boot camp written all over them, that or the police academy barber. In fact, after one minute in the man’s presence, I got the distinct impression that he’d received this cut at the age of twenty and, in thirty years, saw no point in changing it.

His hair color had changed, however. Though his eyebrows were black, Buckman’s head had gone salt-and-pepper, save the temple patches, which were completely white. The resulting pattern on both sides of his skull reminded me of a hot rod’s detailing.

Maybe cars were too much on my mind that night—or maybe the guy had swapped out his cardiovascular system for internal combustion and that stinky cigar really was a tailpipe.

“A van?” he barked at last, stabbing the clipboard where Langley had written the offending word. “What kind of
van
are we talking about here? A BMW? Some sort of pricey sport-utility vehicle? Got to be, if it was drag racing. This white van crap doesn’t make sense.”

“But it
wasn’t
an SUV!” Esther insisted, stepping forward. “It was an ordinary van. The kind you see on the street every day. Like the vans that deliver groceries or service food trucks.”

Buckman’s head swung. “You’re talking about an express cargo van?”

Esther shrugged. “If that’s what you call it, yes.”

Buckman squinted. “Who the hell drag races in an express cargo van?”

“I only wrote down what the witness reported,” Langley replied. “It was Ms. Cosi here who said it was a drag race.”

Here we go.
“I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could, “but I didn’t claim there was a drag race. I heard one vehicle and the sound of the engine was distinctive,
like
a hot rod drag racing.”

For an endless moment, Buckman’s gaze looked me up and down. This was a cop evaluation I knew well. The man was assessing my age, race, socioeconomic level, and my use (and value) as a witness, but most of all, my veracity.

Folding my arms, I stared back.

“So you heard a hot rod?” he finally asked.

“I grew up in a factory town. Motor heads on my block were under their hoods daily, and the muscle car engines echoed up through the valleys nightly.”

“Okay, Ms. Cosi, tell me more about what you think you heard. Take your time and be as specific as humanly possible.”

“The sound was rumbling and very loud,” I said. “Much noisier than a normal van. The driver gunned the motor, too, and made the tires squeal just a few seconds before he struck my friend.”

At the words “my friend,” Buckman blinked. He glanced at the report again then back at me, and I got the distinct impression he was digesting an important fact: The victim in this case was not some anonymous pedestrian to me, but someone I knew well; a woman I cared about.

My ponytail had come loose and, in that moment, my hair scrunchy slipped off my shoulder and fell to the pavement. Stooping to pick it up, I noticed my jeans were streaked with road dirt, my polenta-yellow blouse stained. Tears had dried on my cheeks, and (embarrassingly) my nose was running. As I straightened up, I swiped my face with the tail of my shirt.

A pristine white hanky was suddenly dangling in front of me. With surprise, I realized Buckman was offering it.

“You okay?” His voice was different, the hard edge noticeably blunted.

I nodded, taking the hanky.

“Stay put, Ms. Cosi. I’ll be back…”

As Buckman moved off the sidewalk, he waved over a
highway patrolman, removed his nylon jacket and gave it over. For the first time, I realized the detective was toting enough hardware to open a small machine shop. Webbed straps crisscrossed his chest like the bandoliers of an outlaw in some spaghetti Western. Instead of bullets, these straps anchored a set of tools—a small hammer, a monkey wrench, and a bevy of devices I couldn’t identify.

Our entire side street and two full blocks of Hudson had been sealed off by sector cars parked on either end, but the roadway was not empty. Four plainclothes detectives, wearing the same type of gear as Buckman, had started prowling the pavement.

This, I assumed, was Mad Max Buckman’s “Death Race Gang”—though the label was misleading. The bespectacled quartet looked more like professors of engineering than anything else.

With somber intensity, three of the investigators moved their flashlight beams along the street. Every so often, a man would stop, drop to one knee, and mark an area of asphalt with reflective tape. The fourth man—short of stature with a baby face behind wire rims—traveled between each marker, pushing a yellow plastic box on a long handle at the end of which were two small rubber wheels. He reminded me of Joy at age five, playing with her toy lawnmower.

Buckman watched his team work and then called them together. They spoke, they nodded, they pointed. Finally, Buckman left them and headed to our sidewalk post once more.

“You!” He waved his cigar in my direction.

“Me?” I asked.

His gray eyes locked on mine. “Yeah,
you
… follow me.” As he began to move, he threw a comment to Langley. “The rest of the witnesses can go.”

“But Detective…” Langley protested, pointing to Esther. “The young lady here. She actually saw the vehicle.”

Esther arched an eyebrow. “Young
lady
?”

Buckman halted. “Listen, sonny, what Ms. Best saw was
likely a Chevrolet Express Cargo, either a 1500, 2500, or 3500 version with a model year anywhere between 1996 to 2011. If that sounds helpful to you, then let me add that there are about twenty-nine thousand of these vehicles registered in the Borough of Manhattan alone. I know because half of them were sold by Billy and Ray Klein, off their lot on Northern Boulevard—and I’m not even counting the nearly identical Ford Econolines roaming the five boroughs, not to mention all the little Asian knockoffs.”

Esther put a hand on her hip. “Okay, Mr. Car Talk, so maybe I don’t know the make and model, but I can still identify this van. There was black graffiti painted on the side, bird poop on the roof, and—”

“And all of that is stated in your report,” Buckman said, cutting her off. “We thank you for that, and be assured that your eyewitness account will aid us in tracking down this vehicle.
However
… what you saw doesn’t begin to tell me the complete truth of what went down here.”

“So how do you expect to find that out?”

“With my
ear
-witness,” Buckman said, his gaze locking with mine once more. “Ms. Clare Cosi.”

“F
OLLOW
me.”

Without waiting, Buckman strode from the gloom of the sidewalk into the empty street, now an arena of dazzling brightness, thanks to the newly arrived crime-scene floodlights.

As I entered the center spotlight of this eerie play, I felt countless eyes on me. Were they the highway patrol? Buckman’s Death Race Gang? Local media? In the face of the tiny suns, I couldn’t be sure. All I could make out were vague silhouettes and a murmuring buzz, like a Broadway audience anticipating the curtain lifting.

Buckman moved to the spot on the pavement where I’d cradled Lilly Beth. Tape now marked a crude approximation of a human form. He halted abruptly and turned. I swallowed, bracing myself once more.

“Those sounds you heard interest me, Ms. Cosi.”

“So you said.”

“I want you to ponder my next question carefully.”

“I’ll try.”

He rubbed his prominent chin. “Do you think maybe
you heard a car fitted with a full intake system and a highperformance exhaust package? There’s a lot of that going around. Or could you have heard a real racer, some hot dog with a small block Chevy 454 under the hood? That makes a real distinctive sound… you’d know it if you listened to it again. Or is it possible that all you heard was an exhaust popper?”

I blinked. “Sorry, Detective Buckman. I don’t speak automotive lingo, not to that extent.”

Buckman chewed on the cigar, expended a blue cloud. “Doesn’t matter… because I really doubt you heard any of those things.”

“Okay, what did I hear then?”

“My guess? A piece of crap cargo van with a missing muffler.”

“A missing muffler—”
Of course.
Now it seemed obvious. That guttural sound had been so powerful that it reverberated through my body like the muscle cars from my less-than-glamorous youth. That’s why I’d assumed it was a racing engine.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I told him. “So why do you need me out here?”

“Because…” Buckman touched his ear with an index finger. “I want to know exactly what you heard—”

“But you solved it. Given Esther’s eyewitness account. What I heard must have been a missing muffler—”

“Allow me to finish, honey.” A hint of a smile touched his craggy cheeks. “I want to know what you heard and the order in which you heard it. Humor me. The proper sequence is important.”

I took a breath. “Okay, I’ll do whatever I can to help—and please call me
Clare
.”

“Sure, Clare. You can call me Detective Buckman.”

Looking down at the pavement, he began moving in a slow circle. When he was finished, he said, “Tell me, Clare: Do you see any skid marks here? Any rubber on the road?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Yeah, me neither. Just a lot of surface oil…”

“I don’t understand—”

“Bear with me. We’re going to play a round of Highway Houdini.”

“Excuse me?”

He moved closer. “Trust me, Clare. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try.”

“Good. Now first I want you to close your eyes—”

Oh, brother, did this sound familiar.
Obviously Buckman was utilizing the same interviewing technique that I’d learned from Mike. But that realization didn’t make me any more comfortable.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but can’t I do this with my eyes open?”

“You heard the perp’s vehicle, right?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t
see
it.”

“No.”

“So why do you need those pretty green eyes of yours in order to remember?”

Buckman’s bullhorn bark melted into something soothing and coaxing. I shifted in place, preferring the bellow.

“Clare? Do you want to close this case?”

“Yes.”

“Then
close your eyes
.”