by John Lutz
"Then you didn't see him leave."
"Nope." Whap! went the ball on the sidewalk, as she bounced it and effortlessly caught it. She was young, full of fire and fizz, getting impatient with this conversation.
"Was your window open?"
Whap! "Sure. It was hot last night."
"Did you hear any noise coming from here, Midge?"
"Nope."
"Think hard. Voices? Anything?"
"I always think hard. There was some comin' an' goin', maybe. Commotion. Real late. Or it could be I dreamed it. Or maybe it was Mom and Dad and they made up. They do that sometimes."
A rust-primed old Chevy driven by a black man in sunglasses turned down Rue St. Francois, slowed as it passed Nudger and the girl, then drove on.
Whap!
Nudger hoped that, whatever the source or genuineness of last night's noise, Mom and Dad had become friends again. He liked Midge and figured she deserved some regular sleep and family unity. The noise she thought she'd heard might have been Livingston's men, or Collins', searching Hollister's apartment. Or it might have been Hollister and Ineida. Or, as she'd suggested, it might have been a dream. Like this entire case; dreams within dreams. There were as many different worlds as there were people, it seemed, and maybe this world or that one corresponded to reality. Or maybe none of them did. Maybe there was no reality. All dreams. Or was that too terrifying to think about?
"Where do you live?" Nudger asked.
Whap! "Across the street there. My window's in front. I like it there; you can see everything that goes on, even real late when nobody thinks anybody's eyes are on 'em."
Nudger looked up at the second-story window she was pointing to. It was uncurtained; a crooked, yellowed shade was pulled halfway down. She'd have a good view from there, all right. "Have you seen anything unusual going on over here during the past week or so?"
"Nope." Whap! Whap! "I gotta go." She began backing away, worm of youth wriggling.
"Okay," Nudger said. He was even more anxious to get inside now. "Thanks, Midge."
"Sure, Nudger." Whap! The red ball bounced ten feet into the air, described an arc out over the street. She twirled gracefully and closed on it like a young female Willy Mays, made a perfect basket catch over her shoulder, and ran down the shadowed street and out of sight. It was a great catch, considering she'd been looking straight into the sun.
Nudger opened the door and went inside.
The apartment was still. Its air was stale, as if it had been closed up without movement all night and most of the day. There was a kind of residue of cooking-gas scent that was often detectable in places that had been sealed tight for a number of hours. Nudger could take in most of the apartment in a glance, right through to the courtyard beyond the sliding-glass-door draperies that were opened to outside, where the sun lay in slanted gold rays across the well- tended garden. A large bee of some sort was flitting around out there, sampling blossoms. In the kitchen the refrigerator clicked on, humming softly and contentedly.
Nudger began nosing around. There was no sign that anyone had searched the place before him, but there wouldn't be. The people interested in Hollister's and Ineida's whereabouts were professionals. Wall hangings, kitchen utensils, the small and unimportant trappings of living were still here, but the larger and more personal items were gone. Only a ragged wool sweater remained in the bedroom closet. The dresser drawers were empty but for lint, and the desk in the living room was cleaned out except for a few blunt pencils and a folded piece of blank notepaper. Nudger spread the paper flat and used a soft-leaded pencil to lay graphite markings gently over it and try to pick up an impression of what had been written on the last, missing sheet of paper. That didn't prove effective; it only seemed to work in detective novels and movies. There sure were a lot of misconceptions about this job.
He put down the pencil and stood up from the desk. This visit hadn't helped him much, only left a steadfastly reliable witness to swear that he'd been here under false pretenses, if the law ever forced the issue in court.
He decided to leave, yet a part of him wanted to stay. It was an eerie feeling, as if his subconscious were telling him something and recoiling from it at the same time.
From where he stood, one corner of the bedroom wasn't visible. He walked toward the open bedroom door. The bed protruded there; he couldn't see beyond it to the wall.
Slowly, he entered the bedroom and walked toward a point near the brass footboard from which he'd be able to see the other side of the bed. He'd never believed the hair on the back of anyone's neck actually rose, but his felt as if it were doing so now. He moved a few steps to the left, craned his neck cautiously, painfully, for a clear angle of vision.
The carpet on the other side of the bed lay flat and bare.
Nudger let out a long, hissing breath and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck in relief. He'd seen every corner of the apartment now; it was empty of any of the things he dreaded finding.
But when he turned to go he stopped and stood still, as if he'd walked into a wall of icy air. In the dresser mirror he could see the reflection of the hall and the sliding glass door, and beyond the door the sunny courtyard. The rosebushes Hollister had planted were still there, growing in a row alternating red roses with white.
But something was different about them. Now, at the end of the row, there were two white rosebushes in succession, then a red. Someone had dug up, then replanted the rosebushes, but had neglected to replant the two end bushes in the same order they had been in. Had reversed them.
Nudger went to the sliding glass door, unlocked it, and stepped outside. The lowering sun was warm as well as bright; some of the rosebuds on the bushes had bloomed and their petals seemed virginal and fragile in the gentle light.
In a crawl space beneath the sundeck, several garden tools were stored. Nudger rummaged around in the shadows, found Hollister's long-handled shovel, and carried it to the row of newly planted rosebushes.
He dug almost in a frenzy, feeling his arm and back muscles tighten and ache from the effort, afraid the sickening hollowness in his stomach would get out of control if he didn't work hard to keep his mind off it.
Nudger remembered a case Hammersmith had told him about back in St. Louis. A guy on the east side had murdered a woman he'd picked up in a bar, strangled her, and then buried her in the woods. He'd been seen with her in the bar, and it bothered him that when the body was found, he might be tied to the murder. It bothered him so much that after two weeks he'd gone back one night, dug up the decomposed body, and removed the head to make identification from dental records impossible. Hammersmith hadn't said what the killer had done with the head; Nudger hadn't asked and didn't want to know.
But it bothered Nudger that anyone could do that to a woman he'd buried two weeks before. And it puzzled him. What was it about people like that? What was missing in their minds or hearts? He knew he could never do what the man on the east side had done. Nudger would rather die in the electric chair than do that. Really.
He was damp all over with cold sweat. Emotion clawed at his features. He didn't want to uncover what he was sure lay beneath the loose earth. He kept digging
XXXI
Hey, old sleuth, you gotta get over here," Fat Jack told Nudger on the phone.
Nudger had only been back in his hotel room for half an hour, had stopped his uncontrollable shaking only a few minutes ago. He was washing the dirt from his hands and arms after digging in Hollister's garden. His hands were still wet when he answered the phone; he wondered if anyone had ever been electrocuted this way. "Where's here?" he asked.
"My office at the club," Fat Jack said, as if Nudger were crazy for having to ask. "I just got a phone call from David Collins."
"What kind of call?"
"I better tell you in person."
"Okay, I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"Great. Hey, I got real problems, Nudger. Ultra-problems."
"You ain't seen nothin' yet," Nud
ger said.
"Huh?"
"Al Jolson used to say that before he laid the really big number on the crowd. Same way Ronald Reagan."
"I know. So what?"
"See you in half an hour," Nudger said, and hung up.
He stood for a moment, shirtless, staring down at the dark spots of water he'd dripped on the carpet. Then he went back in the bathroom, finished washing, and hurriedly toweled his hands dry. He felt like switching on the ceiling heat lamp in the tiny bathroom; despite the inability of the hotel's air conditioning to hold back the warmth of the day, he was getting chills. He put on a fresh shirt, shrugged into his wrinkled brown sport coat, and left for Fat Jack's. "I hung up on Collins just a few minutes before I phoned you," Fat Jack said. He was standing behind his desk, twitching around as if he were too nervous to sit down. It was warm in the office, too, but Nudger's chilliness had accompanied him there.
He waited, saying nothing. That seemed to make Fat Jack even more jittery. He was visibly miserable, a veritable Niagara of nervous perspiration. Ultra-miserable.
"Collins told me he got a phone call," Fat Jack said, "instructing him to come up with half a million in cash by tomorrow night, or Ineida starts being delivered in the mail piece by piece."
Nudger wasn't surprised. He knew where the phone call to Collins had originated.
Fat Jack grimaced with fear. It wouldn't let up; it was gnawing like rats on his insides. Nudger watched, fascinated. It was something to see, a huge man like Fat Jack being eaten alive inside-out. "Collins told me that if any part of Ineida turned up in the mail, a part of me would be cut off. He told me what part; it ain't gonna be what's missing from Ineida."
"It appears he scared you," Nudger observed.
Fat Jack raised his writhing eyebrows and looked dumbfounded. "Scared me? Hey, he terrified the livin' shit out of me, Nudger. Collins is a man who don't bluff; he means to do real harm to the friendly fat man. I mean, hey, I take him at his word."
Nudger walked around the office for a few seconds, almost preoccupied, like a boxer finding the area of the ring where he felt most comfortable. Near the desk corner, about five feet from Fat Jack, he stopped and stood facing the big man. For the first time he noticed that Fat Jack had too much of his lemon-scented cologne on today; it did nothing to hide the fear, only made the unmistakable sharp odor of desperation more acrid.
"When I was looking into Hollister's past," Nudger said, "I happened to discover something that seemed ordinary enough then, but now has gotten kind of interesting." He paused and watched the perspiration pour down Fat Jack's wide forehead.
"So I'm interested," Fat Jack said irritably. He reached behind him and slapped at the window air conditioner, as if to coax more cold air from it. There was no change in its gurgling hum.
"There's something about being a fat man," Nudger said, "a man as large as you. After a while he takes his size for granted, doesn't even think about it, accepts it as a normal fact of life. But other people don't. A really fat man is more memorable than he realizes, especially if he's called Fat Jack."
Fat Jack drew his head back into fleshy folds and shot a tortured, wary look at Nudger. "Hey, what are you talking toward, old sleuth?"
"You had a series of failed clubs in the cities where Willy Hollister played his music, and you were there at the times when Hollister's women disappeared."
"That ain't unusual, Nudger. Jazz is a tight little world." Fat Jack sat down slowly in his squeaking, protesting, undersized chair, swiveled slightly to the left, and glanced briefly upward as if seeking some written message on the ceiling. He found none. He swiveled back to face Nudger, making himself sit still.
"I said people remember you," Nudger told him. "And they remember you knowing Willy Hollister. But you told me you saw him for the first time when he came here to play in your club. And when I went to see Ineida for the first time, she knew my name. She bought the idea that I was a magazine writer; it fell right into place and it took her a while to get uncooperative. Then she assumed I was working for her father-as you knew she would."
Fat Jack stood halfway up, then decided he hadn't the energy for the total effort and sat back down in his groaning chair. "You missed a beat, Nudger. Are you saying I'm in on this kidnapping with Hollister? Hey, if that's true, why would I have hired you?"
"You needed someone like me to substantiate Hollister's involvement with Ineida, to find out about Hollister's missing women. It would help you to set him up."
"Hey, set him up for what?"
"You knew Hollister better than you pretended. You knew that he murdered those four women to add some insane, tragic dimension to his music-the sound that made him great. You knew what he had planned for Ineida."
"He didn't even know who she really was!" Fat Jack sputtered. Not a bad actor; so sincere.
"But you knew from the time you hired her that she was David Collins' daughter. You schemed from the beginning to use Hollister as the goat in your kidnapping plan."
Fat Jack wrinkled his forehead, raised pained eyes to Nudger. He looked genuinely hurt by this absurd accusation, disappointed by Nudger's inability to puzzle things out. "Christ, old sleuth! Where are you getting these wild ideas about the old fat man? Hollister is a killer-you said so yourself. I wouldn't want to get involved in any kind of a scam with him."
"He didn't know about the real scam," Nudger explained. "When you'd used me to make it clear that Hollister was the natural suspect, you kidnapped Ineida yourself and demanded the ransom, figuring Hollister's past and his disappearance would divert the law's attention away from you."
Fat Jack's wide face was a study in agitation, but it was relatively calm compared to what must have been going on inside his head. During the last few days he'd realized he'd bitten off too much to chew. His body was squirming uncontrollably, and the agony in his eyes was difficult to look into. He didn't want to ask the question, but he had to and he knew it. He had to hear the answer.
"If all this is true," he moaned, "where is Willy Hollister?"
"I did a little digging in his garden," Nudger said. "He's under his roses, where he thought Ineida was going to wind up, but where you had space for him reserved all along."
Time stopped, then took a couple of extra slow ticks, the way it does when something irrevocable happens. Fat Jack's head dropped. His suit suddenly seemed two sizes too large, as if a year of Weight Watchers had caught up with him all at once. As his body trembled, tears joined the sheen of perspiration glistening on his quivering cheeks. "How could you have figured it out?" he asked.
"When I found out the letters were missing, I suspected Collins' alter egos Frick and Frack, but that didn't make sense in light of further developments. Then I suspected Sandra Reckoner, but she didn't take the letters. Nobody else I knew of could have been in my hotel room. Nobody even knew the letters were there. Nobody but you. You stole them and had them delivered to David Collins to further implicate Hollister by making it appear that he and Ineida left New Orleans together. Then there's the fact that Ineida's three months pregnant."
"Huh? Pregnant?"
"If Hollister had taken her, he'd know about the pregnancy and would have used it for leverage. But it was never mentioned in the kidnapper's ransom demands."
"Ineida's got one in the oven? You sure?"
"One in the oven," Nudger confirmed. He'd never liked that expression. "Her mother told me. Collins' former wife. Marilyn Eeker."
Fat Jack said nothing for a long time. Then he said, in a very low voice, "Okay, I guess all that leaves me in deep shit."
"The deepest."
He raised his head slowly. His question was a plea for mercy: "What now, old sleuth?"
Nudger stepped forward and leaned down over the desk so he could look Fat Jack in the eye. "Where is Ineida?" he asked.
"She's still alive" was Fat Jack's only answer. Crushed as he was, he was still too wily to reveal his hole card. It was as if his fat were a kind of rubber, lending inexhaustib
le resilience to body and mind. Nudger couldn't help it; he found himself admiring such stamina in the face of relentless pressure.
"It's negotiation time," Nudger told him, "and we don't have very long to reach an agreement. I not only did a little digging in Hollister's garden, I did some refilling. It's a busy place, that garden. While we're sitting here talking, the police are digging in the dirt I replaced."
"You called the police?"
"I did. But right now, they expect to find Ineida. When they find Hollister, Livingston will begin to fit all the pieces together the way I did and get the same puzzle picture of you. It might take him a while, since he has less than I did to work with, but he'll do it."
Fat Jack nodded sadly, seeing the truth in that prognosis. Livingston was, if nothing else, a smart cop. "So what's your proposition?" Fat Jack asked.
"We both have a stake in Ineida getting back to home base safely," Nudger said. "You release her, and I keep quiet until tomorrow morning. That'll give you the advantage of a head start on the law. The police don't know who phoned them about the body in Hollister's garden, so I can stall them for at least that long without arousing suspicion."
Fat Jack didn't deliberate for more than a few seconds. He saw the only way out of the maze and intended taking it.
He nodded again, then stood up, supporting his ponderous weight with both hands on the desk. "What about money?" he whined. "Hey, I can't run far without money." He added with supreme logic, "That's what all this was about."
"I've got nothing to lend you," Nudger said. "Not even the fee I'm not going to get from you."
"All right," Fat Jack sighed. He was pure resignation now, whipped like a tub of butter. Despite himself, Nudger kept feeling some semblance of pity for him. Something so buoyant and enormous, both physically and in talent and accomplishment, was an awesome and pathetic spectacle crashed.
"I'm going to phone David Collins in one hour," Nudger told him. "If Ineida isn't there, I'll put down the receiver, pick it up again, and dial the number of the New Orleans Police Department."
