Текст книги "Mulholland Dive"

Автор книги: Michael Connelly

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Mulholland Dive

Three Stories

Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company

New York  Boston  London

Begin Reading

“Cahoots”

“Mulholland Dive”

“Two-Bagger”

A Preview of The Black Box

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

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Cahoots

McMillan has the deal. The game is five-card stud, nothing wild. And McMillan, the bastard in the porkpie hat, is cheating us. There are six of us at the table. There’s him, then Swain, then Harrington, then Anderson, then me, and then, most of the time, Boyd. I don’t know if that’s a first or last name. He’s just Boyd. And at the moment he’s in the back room with the woman who makes the coffee and serves the whiskey. The bedroom. Her name is Vera Sims. Only McMillan keeps calling her Vera Similitude and he laughs uproariously when he says it. I don’t know what this name means but his high horse laugh is getting to me. That and the cheating.

This is a journal. I write it in what my partner who read it up to now calls present tense. Like it is happening right now. But everything I write down here has already happened. It’s too late. It’s the past written in the present tense. You know what I mean? I’m saying you can’t change it. It’s done.

You play long enough and you pick up the patterns and then you look for the tells. I am a man of principle. My principle is, if you cheat me, you are taking something from me. You are stealing. Maybe not my money but the chance for me to make my money. Yes, and if I let you take from me what is mine, then I am a fool. I am letting you think of me and treat me as a fool.

I don’t allow that. My principle is, if you take from me, then I will take right back from you. Only I will take more from you than you took from me. One time I took a man’s finger off when I caught him turning his ring inside to use as a shiner. One time I took a man’s woman. It’s a rule I have. I never break it. Even if it is the man with the plan.

We have been playing for four hours. McMillan has been slowly telling us his plan for what he calls the greatest heist of all time, all at the same time that he’s cheating us and taking our money. Maybe the others know this and they look at it as the price they pay for the plan, to be a part of it. This is not how I look at it. In four hours I have lost a lot. Almost enough to pay rent in one of these Bunker Hill boardinghouses for a month. I need that money back. I need to take from McMillan and his partner what they have taken from me.

McMillan has this habit I’ve been watching. He has his silver halves in a neat stack on the table in front of him. He keeps raising the stack with two fingers and then letting all the coins drop back down to the table. Ching, ching, ching, like that. I’m watching and counting the sounds and counting his coins. Every time he deals, there is one less coin in the stack.

“Hey, Boyd!” McMillan yells to the back room. “You in or out?”

“I’m in,” says the voice from the back room.

Boyd comes out quick, notching his belt just so we can see if we care to look.

“Deal it,” he says.

McMillan smiles.

“Gettin’ yourself a little Vera Similitude, eh?”

And then that laugh again. That lazy horse laugh that’s getting to me. Boyd puts a silver dollar into the center of the table with the others and says he is in. I’m starting to see McMillan with a hole the size of a silver dollar in his forehead.

McMillan starts to deal and I watch his hands while I light a Camel. I lean my head back and blow the blue smoke toward the yellowed ceiling. I see the butterfly moving on the ceiling, winking at me. Nobody else has seen it. Everybody else thinks that to catch a cheater you have to keep your eyes on the cards.

Everybody picks up their cards and my hand’s a stiff. I throw in right away but everybody else stays for the ride. I ask McMillan about his grand plan. Just to keep him thinking, to see how he handles two things at once.

“How are you going to know where they’ll be and when we can go in?” I ask.

“I have a guy,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about that part. I have a guy. The medals will be in a safe. A small safe that they can move around. At a certain point they will take the safe over to the Coliseum for the track-and-field events. It will be there. That’s when we’ll go.”

He eyes me over his cards to see if I’m satisfied. The first round of betting goes by and Swain and Boyd bet large. Swain takes no cards, which raises eyebrows. Harrington takes three, then Anderson does likewise. Boyd takes only one and McMillan goes with three.

I want to ask more questions about the plan but decide to watch and confirm my suspicions. The betting begins and Swain goes big again. He’s got the gleam in his eye, like a man who knows he can’t lose. Except I know he’s already lost. Harrington folds. Anderson folds. Boyd raises big. McMillan drops another raise on that and it’s back to Swain.

I send him a mental message. Call. Just call the hand and accept your losses. But mental messages don’t work. He goes big again and it goes around the maximum three circles and in the end Swain has pushed just about everything he’s got into the pot.

Finally, it’s showtime. Swain has a natural flush, nine of hearts on top. Boyd squeals like a pig in mud. He turns his cards and shows a flush with the queen of spades smiling up at Swain.

“Forget it, I lose,” McMillan says, throwing his hand into the discard pile without turning his cards over.

Boyd smiles and rakes the pot toward his chest. Swain watches the money go away like it’s his wife and kids leaving for good. The moment is tense, nobody likes losing, even if they might think it was on the up and up.

“What about guards?” Harrington asks.

McMillan quickly answers. He’s probably hoping to distract Swain from thoughts of the lost money and whether maybe he’s been cheated.

“Of course, there will be guards,” he says. “Why do you think you are all here? If I just needed a box man, I’d go myself. But I’m gonna need muscles and guns with me.”

Harrington nods.

“There will be full-time armed security on the box,” McMillan says. “Two men around the clock.”

“Are you sure these medals they give out are real gold and real silver?” Anderson asks. “I mean, all the way through?”

“What, you think it’s like a Baby Ruth bar?” McMillan counters. “Chocolate on the outside, bullshit on the inside? This is the Olympics, fellas. We are talking about medals made of pure gold and pure silver. Through and through, three ounces apiece. Like big fucking lollipops.”

“How do we sell them?” I ask, my eyes deadpan at McMillan. “They’re going to be hot, they probably say Nineteen Thirty-two Olympics or something right on them. We can’t just—”

“We don’t sell them,” McMillan says with proper outrage. “Boyd, you tell him.”

Boyd turns to me and smiles.

“He’s right. We don’t sell them. We melt them down and we make little bricks. That’s what we sell.”

I see the others nod their approval but I’m not so sure about this plan. I’m not even sure there is a plan.

I win the next deal with jacks trips but the pot is barely more than the ante. Only Swain and Anderson stay in and I only get in two raises before being called. I need someone like McMillan to help it along like he did with Boyd but I’m not the one he’s in cahoots with.

Swain recoups on the next deal and then Anderson wins his own deal. That might have raised eyebrows but the pot was threadbare. Nothing to get excited by. And nobody looked sideways at Anderson.

I’m halfway through my deal when Boyd yells to Vera to bring him a shot of whiskey. I knew he would do this. Whiskey or coffee. I knew he’d ask for something.

Wearing a bathrobe that needs a quick visit to the washer, Vera comes out of the back room and goes into the kitchen for the bottle. She brings it over to the table and grabs Boyd’s empty shot glass. She holds it out away from the table and fills it until the dark amber liquid laps over the side of the glass and drips to the floor.

“Jesus, what are you doing?” Boyd yells. “You’re wasting good whiskey, you stupid cunt.”

“Sorry.”

But I see through this. It is part of the cheat. He is not angry and she is not sorry. I think it is clever that he called her a cunt. It helps sell it.

Boyd puts the shot glass down in front of his money. He glances at me while picking up his cards, then he looks at what he’s been dealt. McMillan holds his cards with one hand while he’s playing with his stack of halves. Ching, ching, ching.

Swain wins again on my deal. Two pairs, kings over tens. But it’s another small pot and he’s still way down, the wife and kids haven’t come back home yet.

Now it’s Boyd’s deal. He shuffles and shuffles again, making a show of it. He puts the deck down in front of me and I cut it from the middle. He starts to deal, holding his hands chest high so he can deal over his money and his booze. I have a pair of tens. Not bad so I stay in through the first round and draw three. No help. I bail out and just watch. Anderson is out, everybody else is still in.

McMillan opens the second round big and Swain and Harrington call. But Boyd raises and McMillan raises again. Swain calls and Harrington folds rather than meet the price. It goes around the final time. Boyd, McMillan, and Swain. Then it is time to show.

Ching, ching, ching.

Swain has aces over deuces, a solid hand. Boyd shoves his cards into the pile, acknowledging defeat. McMillan puts his best look of I-can’t-believe-it surprise on his face and turns over three fives. Swain throws his cards down on the table. He’s had a bad go of it.

“I just can’t win this fucking game.”

I look at him. That is our signal. Now is the time to make the play.

“Of course, you can’t,” I say. “Not with them cheating you all the time.”

“Cheating? Who, goddamnit?”

I turn and nod toward McMillan and Boyd.

Everything happens real quick after that. Neither one bothers with the Who, me? look. They both start to rise at the same time that their hands drop below the table. But I’m ahead of their game and so is Swain.

I take McMillan, and Swain has Boyd. Swain gets off two shots from his revolver before Boyd has his gun out of his pants. I hit McMillan with one shot neat in the forehead and he goes over his chair and right down the wall.

Harrington and Anderson jump up at the same time Vera screams from the kitchen. Gunpowder burns in the air.

I come around the table to check the dead. Boyd is on the floor gurgling, hit twice in the neck. He’s got a few minutes tops. I pull the gun from his pants and put it on the table. I go to McMillan. Somehow he has fallen so that his hat is pushed down over his face, I squat down and lift the hat. His eyes are open and dead calm. The bullet hole is so clean that it doesn’t even bleed. I like that. I check his hands, both are empty. I check his pockets and find his money roll and a little derringer with pearl-inlay grips. It’s a two-shot pussy gun. I shove it back in his pocket. I look at the hat now and notice that it is a nice hat. Silk lining. Expensive. Made in Chicago. I put it on and stand up.

Harrington and Anderson stand with their arms away from their bodies, their hands open.

“Easy now,” I say.

I nod to Swain so that he knows to watch them. I turn my attention to McMillan’s place at the table. I talk as I lean down and spill the stack of half dollars.

“They were cheating. In cahoots. Didn’t you notice that when McMillan dealt, Boyd usually won? Same thing worked in reverse. Boyd deals, McMillan wins.”

I look over at Harrington and Anderson but they shake their heads. They don’t get it.

“How?” Harrington asks.

I turn over the bottom half-dollar from the stack. It’s been sanded and polished as smooth as a spoon. Like a mirror. I hold it in my palm and move it. I look up at the ceiling and see the butterfly again. The glimmer reflection flits across the yellowed plaster.

“He was using a shiner,” I say as I take a card off the table and hold it so I can see the reflection of the 9 on the polished surface of the half. “He knew every card he was dealing. He also knew what was on the bottom of the deck, if he needed it.”

I drop the coin and the card on the table like they’re poison.

“He and Boyd had signals. I think it was McMillan clicking his silver.”

“What about him?” Harrington asks, nodding down at Boyd on the floor.

“The ashtray. He’d put his smoke on different edges.”

“How did he know what he was dealing us?”

I look at Swain and then into the kitchen at Vera.

“You tell him, Vera.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about it.”

“That’s bull. What did he tell you about the bourbon?”

She hesitates but knows she has one hope. To come clean.

“He told me to fill it to the top. Whenever he asked for a shot I was to fill it to the brim and he didn’t care if it poured over the edge.”

I look at them and they look at the table. Anderson comes over, picks up a card, and holds it over the shot glass. Ace of diamonds. Reads it in the dark amber reflection.

“Son of a bitch!” Anderson yells.

He picks up the shot, takes a hit off it, and then pours the rest down on Boyd’s open-eyed face. He then turns to Vera.

“Leave her alone,” Swain says quietly. “She was only doing what she was told.”

I start collecting the money from the table. I tell Anderson and Harrington to take what they had at their places on the table. They want to negotiate for the money they already lost to the cheaters but Swain uses his gun to point them toward the front door. They take the money they are entitled to and leave. At the door Harrington looks back at us.

“What about the plan? The Olympic medals.”

“There was no plan,” I tell him. “He was just keeping you busy, hoping you were thinking about gold and silver and not the cards.”

Harrington nods—he finally gets it—and leaves. Swain closes the door behind him.

I open McMillan’s roll on the table. It’s two hundred and forty dollars. More than I thought he would be carrying. Swain and I split that and then we cut up the ninety-three dollars in cash from the table. Swain keeps the odd dollar because I took the hat. We give Vera all the silver—almost fifty bucks—and she gets to keep McMillan’s shiner. She puts it all in a flour sack that she then hides in a cabinet. If she’s lucky, the cops won’t find it when they come about the bodies.

On our way out the back door, Vera says, “You think those other two will ever figure out that you two kept winning on each other’s deals?”

Swain and I stop and look at her.

“You think they’ll figure out that you gave McMillan the shiner and taught his partner the whiskey trick? You think they’ll figure out that you then told us all about it?”

She has no answers. We go through the door and walk over to Angels Flight and ride it down to Hill Street. We cut through the Grand Central Market. We have a car waiting in the Bradbury Building’s lot. We get in and I drive.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Las Vegas.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Nevada.”

“There’s nothing there but sand.”

“I know. Good place to lay low. Nobody goes to Las Vegas. They’ve got one sheriff, that’s it. Nobody will even look for us there.”

I start driving east. After a while I remember my ring and turn it so the shiny flat part is facing outward again and not in my palm.

“Hey,” Swain says. “What does Vera Similitude mean anyway?”

I tell him I don’t know.

Mulholland Dive

Burning flares and flashing red and blue lights ripped the night apart. Clewiston counted four black-and-whites pulled halfway off the roadway and as close to the upper embankment as was possible. In front of them was a fire truck and in front of it was a forensics van. There was a P-1 standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that was open. With a fatality involved they should have closed down both lanes of the road, but that would have meant closing Mulholland from Laurel Canyon on one side all the way to Coldwater Canyon on the other. That was too long a stretch. There would be consequences for that. The huge inconvenience of it would have brought complaints from the rich hillside homeowners trying to get home after another night of the good life. And nobody stuck on midnight shift wanted more complaints to deal with.

Clewiston had worked Mulholland fatals several times. He was the expert. He was the one they called in from home. He knew that whether the identity of the victim in this case demanded it or not, he’d have gotten the call. It was Mulholland and the Mulholland calls all went to him.

But this one was special anyway. The victim was a name and the case was going five by five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right. He had been thoroughly briefed over the phone by the watch commander about that.

He pulled in behind the last patrol car, put his flashers on, and got out of his unmarked car. On the way to the trunk he pulled his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civies, having been called in from off-duty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced that he was a detective.

He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-1 left his post in the road and walked over.

“Where’s the sergeant?” Clewiston asked.

“Up there. I think they’re about to pull the car up. That’s a hundred thousand dollars he went over the side with. Who are you?”

“Detective Clewiston. The reconstructionist. Sergeant Fairbanks is expecting me.”

“Go on down and you’ll find him by the—whoa, what is that?”

Clewiston saw him staring at the face looking up from the trunk. The crash test dummy was partially hidden by all the equipment cluttering the trunk, but the face was clear and staring blankly up at them. His legs had been detached and were beneath the torso. It was the only way to fit the whole thing in the trunk.

“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”

“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”

Clewiston had to think about that to remember.

“Last time I used Arty it was a crosswalk hit-and-run case. The vic was a marine up from El Toro. He was in his fatigues and there was a question about whether the hitter saw him.”

Clewiston slung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder.

“He did. Thanks to Arty we made a case.”

He took his clipboard out of the trunk and then a digital camera, his trusty measuring wheel, and an eight-battery Maglite. He closed the trunk and made sure it was locked.

“I’m going to head down and get this over with,” he said. “I got called in from home.”

“Yeah, I guess the faster you’re done, the faster I can get back out on the road myself. Pretty boring just standing here.”

“I know what you mean.”

Clewiston headed down the westbound lane, which had been closed to traffic. In the dark, there was a mist clinging to the tall brush that crowded the sides of the street. But he could still see the lights and glow of the city down to the south. The accident had occurred in one of the few spots along Mulholland where there were no homes. He knew that on the south side of the road, the embankment dropped down to a public dog park. On the north side was Fryman Canyon, and the embankment rose up to a point where one of the city’s communication stations was located. There was a tower up there on the point that helped bounce communication signals over the mountains that cut the city in half.

Mulholland was the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the Westside and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look.

Mulholland had that Top of the World feel to it. It could make you feel like a prince of the city and that the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.

As he came around the bend Clewiston saw another fire truck and a tow truck from the Van Nuys police garage. The tow truck was positioned sideways across the road. For the moment Mulholland was completely closed. The truck’s cable was down the embankment and stretched taut as it pulled the car up. Clewiston could hear the tow motor straining and the cracking and scraping as the unseen car was being pulled up through the brush. The tow truck shuddered as it labored.

Clewiston saw the man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and stood next to him as he watched.

“Is he still in it?” he asked Fairbanks.

“No, he was transported to St. Joe’s. But he was DOA. You’re Clewiston, right? The reconstructionist.”

“Right.”

“We’ve got to handle this thing right. Once the ID gets out, we’ll have the media all over this.”

“The captain told me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m telling you, too. In this department the captains don’t get blamed when things go sideways and off the road. It’s always the sergeants and it ain’t going to be me this time.”

“I get it.”

“You have any idea what this guy was worth? We’re talking tens of millions and on top of that he’s supposedly in the middle of a divorce. So we go five by five by five on this thing. Comprende, reconstructionist?”

“It’s Clewiston and I said I get it.”

“Good. This is what we’ve got. Single-car fatality. No witnesses. It appears the victim was heading west when his vehicle, a two-month-old Porsche Carrera, came around that last curve there and for whatever reason didn’t straighten out. We’ve got treads on the road you can take a look at. Anyway, he went straight off the side and then down, baby. Major head and torso injuries. Chest crushed. He pretty much drowned in his own blood before the FD could get down to him. They stretchered him out with a chopper and transported him anyway. Guess they didn’t want any blowback, either.”

“They take blood at St. Joe’s?”

Fairbanks, about forty and a lifer on patrol, nodded.

“I am told it was clean.”

There was a pause in the conversation at that point, meaning that Clewiston could take whatever he wanted from the blood test. He could believe it or believe the celebrity fix was already in.

The moonlight reflected off the dented silver skin of the Porsche as it was pulled up over the edge like a giant, beautiful fish pulled into a boat. Clewiston walked over and Fairbanks followed. The first thing Clewiston saw was that it was a Carrera 4S.

“Hmm,” he mumbled.

“What?” Fairbanks said.

“It’s one of the Porsches with four-wheel drive. Built for these sorts of curves. Built for control.”

“Well, not built good enough, obviously.”

Clewiston put his equipment down on the hood of one of the patrol cars and took only the Maglite over to the Porsche. He swept the light’s beam over the front of the high-performance sports car. The car was heavily damaged in the crash and the front had taken the brunt of it. The molded body had been badly distorted by repeated impacts as it sledded down the steep embankment. He moved in close and squatted when he looked at the front cowling and the shattered passenger-side headlight assembly.

He could feel Fairbanks behind him looking over his shoulder as he worked.

“If there were no witnesses, how did anybody know he’d gone over the side?” Clewiston asked.

“Somebody down below,” Fairbanks answered. “There are houses down there. Lucky this guy didn’t end up in somebody’s living room. I’ve seen that before.”

So had Clewiston. He stood up and walked to the edge and looked down. His light cut into the darkness of the brush. He saw the exposed pulp of the acacia trees and other brush the car had torn through.

He returned to the car. The driver’s door was sprung and Clewiston could see the pry marks left by the jaws used to extricate the driver. He pulled it open and leaned in with his light. There was a lot of blood on the wheel, dashboard, and center console. The driver’s seat was wet with blood and urine.

The key was still in the ignition and turned to the on position. The dashboard lights were still on. Clewiston leaned farther in and checked the mileage. The car had only 1,142 miles on the odometer.

Satisfied with his initial survey of the wreck, he went back to his equipment. He put the clipboard under his arm and picked up the measuring wheel. Fairbanks came over once again.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Not yet, Sergeant. I’m just starting.”

He began sweeping the light over the roadway. He picked up the skid marks and used the wheel to measure the distance of each one. There were four distinct skid marks, left as all four tires of the Porsche tried unsuccessfully to grip the asphalt. When he worked his way back to the starting point, he found scuff marks in a classic slalom pattern. They had been left on the asphalt when the car had turned sharply one way and then the other before going into the braking skid.

He wrote the measurements down on the clipboard. He then pointed the light into the brush on either side of the roadway where the scuff marks began. He knew the event had begun here, and he was looking for indications of cause.

He noticed that there was a small opening in the brush. A narrow pathway that continued on the other side of the road. It was a crossing. He stepped over and put the beam down on the brush and soil. After a few moments he went across the street and studied the path on the other side.

Satisfied with his site survey, he went back to the patrol car and opened his laptop. While it was booting up, Fairbanks came over once again.

“So, how’s it look?”

“I have to run the numbers.”

“Those skids look pretty long to me. The guy must’ve been flying.”

“You’d be surprised. Other things factor in. Brake efficiency, surface and surface conditions—you see the mist moving in right now? Was it like this two hours ago when the guy went over the side?”

“Been like this since I got here. But the fire guys were here first. I’ll get one up here.”

Clewiston nodded. Fairbanks pulled his rover and told someone to send the first responders up to the crash site. He then looked back at Clewiston.

“On the way.”

“Thanks. Does anybody know what this guy was doing up here?”

“Driving home, we assume. His house was in Coldwater and he was going home.”

“From where?”

“That we don’t know.”

“Anybody make notification yet?”

“Not yet. We figure next of kin is the wife he’s divorcing. But we’re not sure where to find her. I sent a car to his house but there’s no answer. We’ve got somebody at Parker Center trying to run her down—probably through her lawyer. There’s also grown children from his first marriage. They’re working on that, too.”

Two firefighters walked up and introduced themselves as Robards and Lopez. Clewiston questioned them on the weather and road conditions at the time they responded to the accident call. Both firefighters described the mist as heavy at the time. They were specific about this because they said the mist hindered their ability to find the place where the vehicle had crashed through the brush and down the embankment.

“If we hadn’t seen the skid marks, we would have driven right by,” Lopez said.

Clewiston thanked them and turned back to his computer. He had everything he needed now. He opened the Accident Reconstruction Technologies program and went directly to the speed and distance calculator. He referred to his clipboard for the numbers he would need. He felt Fairbanks come up next to him.

“Computer, huh? That gives you all the answers?”

“Some of them.”

“Whatever happened to experience and trusting hunches and gut instincts?”

It wasn’t a question that was waiting for an answer. Clewiston added the lengths of the four skid marks he had measured and then divided by four, coming up with an average skid length of sixty-four feet. He entered the number into the calculator template.

“You said the vehicle is only two months old?” he asked Fairbanks.

“According to the registration. It’s a lease he picked up in January. I guess he filed for divorce and went out and picked up the sports car to help him get back in the game.”

Clewiston ignored the comment and typed 1.0 into a box marked B.E. on the template.

“What’s that?” Fairbanks asked.

“Braking efficiency. One-oh is the highest efficiency. Things could change if somebody wants to take the brakes off the car and test them. But for now I am going with high efficiency because the vehicle is new and there’s only twelve hundred miles on it.”

“Sounds right to me.”

Lastly, Clewiston typed 9.0 into the box marked C.F. This was the subjective part. He explained what he was doing to Fairbanks before the sergeant had to ask.

“This is coefficient of friction,” he said. “It basically means surface conditions. Mulholland Drive is asphalt base, which is generally a high coefficient. And this stretch here was repaved about nine months ago—again that leads to a high coefficient. But I’m knocking it down a point because of the moisture. That mist comes in and puts down a layer of moisture that mixes with the road oil and makes the asphalt slippery. The oil is heavier in new asphalt.”

“I get it.”

“Good. It’s called trusting your gut instinct, Sergeant.”

Fairbanks nodded. He had been properly rebuked.

Clewiston clicked the enter button and the calculator came up with a projected speed based on the relationship between skid length, brake efficiency, and the surface conditions. It said the Porsche had been traveling at 41.569 miles per hour when it went into the skid.