Time Exposure (Alo Nudger)

by John Lutz

  When he’d almost reached Clayton Road, he turned right into the library’s parking lot, slowing to avoid three teenage girls lugging stacks of books and yammering at each other. There were plenty of parking spaces in the blacktop lot, although across the street in Plaza Frontenac, an expensive shopping center, the lot was filled. Nudger supposed that for most people shopping was more fun than reading. Not for the three teenagers, apparently. Or maybe they had reports to write for school.

  As he climbed out of the Granada he saw the girls, still tirelessly chattering at each other and juggling books, jog across Lindbergh on their way to the mall. Well, maybe they were heading for B. Dalton.

  The library was a low and squarish brick structure that looked as if it had been built for easy conversion into a supermarket, just in case. When Nudger opened one of the twin glass front doors a rush of cold air roared out at him; didn’t the thermostat know it was cooling off outside? He let the door swing shut behind him and the gale subsided. The library had “in” and “out” turnstiles to herd the public, and one of those electronic gizmos that looked like a metal detector out at the airport. If anyone walked through there with a book that hadn’t been checked out, sirens would wail, lights would flash, and Library Security would burst out of the stacks with guns blazing.

  It was a spacious and well-organized library, with a large selection of magazines on wooden racks back in one corner. An inviting place to sit and read Consumer Reports, find out which was the best toaster you couldn’t afford. Nudger made a mental note to do that someday.

  Adelaide Lacy was one of three women working behind a long, low desk just inside the turnstiles. Her co-workers looked like librarians. She did look a little like Marlene Dietrich!

  Nudger walked over to the desk and tried to sound like Cary Grant. “Hello. Got a minute?”

  “Catching cold?” she asked. “It’s this weather. Keeps changing.” The other two women stared curiously at Nudger, as if he might be here to burn books. Adelaide came out from behind the desk.

  No longer Cary Grant, Nudger followed her across the library, weaving among rows of wooden tables and chairs. There were books and magazines spread out on some of the tables, waiting for a meticulous librarian to scoop them up and put them in their proper Dewey Decimal places.

  They sat in softly upholstered vinyl chairs, facing a rack that contained a disheveled New York Times and various other out-of-town papers. The chairs were the comfortable, promiscuous kind that sighed and embraced anyone who sat down in them. It had been a long day; Nudger wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to get up. A heavyset guy in a wrinkled blue business suit sidled up, selected a copy of the Chicago Tribune, and drifted toward one of the other chairs. He dropped into it suddenly with all his weight. Hisss!

  Adelaide looked hard and blue and hopefully at Nudger. “Have you learned anything?”

  “I talked to Gina Hiller, the wife of Mary’s missing boss. She told me Virgil loves her and the kids, and he wouldn’t run out on them.”

  “Think she believes that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then she probably wouldn’t believe her husband was a habitual groper.”

  “I dunno,” Nudger said. “Maybe, if you pressed her on the point. Thing is, she loves the guy, and despite his perpetual seven-year itch, he might very well have loved her back. People are nothing if not complicated. There are three sons, and I doubt if they’re neglected. Way it looks, Virgil had strong family ties.”

  “Which suggests he wouldn’t have stolen city money and run away with Mary.”

  “Suggests that,” Nudger agreed. “I also talked to somebody I know on the police department. He said Dobbs came to the law with his photographs, but nobody paid much attention to them. Too technical, and they proved nothing. Besides, as you pointed out, the comptroller and the mayor saw Hiller alive after Dobbs claimed to have photographed him at his desk. Not dead, only sleeping.”

  “The man in that photograph wasn’t sleeping, Nudger.”

  “Didn’t look like it. Not sitting up at his desk that way with a pen in his hand. Civil servants don’t work hard enough to bring on that kind of exhaustion. Of course, there’s no way to be positive he was dead; he wasn’t spouting blood from bullet holes while somebody held a mirror to his mouth. When you talk to the police, you have to talk proof or you’re wasting your time and theirs. It’s a job to them, that’s all; they have to weigh the probabilities. From where they sit, it looks as if Hiller and Mary and half a million dollars are off somewhere having a hell of a time, and the wayward lovers will turn up again when their luck or money runs out and the merry-go-round quits revolving.”

  “Mary doesn’t go to carnivals.”

  “Once in her life, maybe. Half a million dollars.”

  “Mary’s not that way about money. She doesn’t have a driving desire to be rich.”

  “Maybe that’s because she never really thought it was possible. Until hot-pants Virgil Hiller gave her the opportunity.”

  “Hiller is dead,” Adelaide said. She’d talked herself into believing it thoroughly.

  Nudger thought she was right but reserved final judgment until the funeral. He said, “And you think Mary might know something about his death and went into hiding?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Nudger knew that worse things were possible, but he kept that to himself.

  “What now?” Adelaide asked.

  “I need the key to Mary’s apartment.”

  “That’s no problem; I have one in my purse. We carried keys for each other’s apartments. Wait a minute.”

  She got up and sashayed among the tables, back toward the checkout desk. He watched her disappear through a doorway to the right, probably into a room where she’d left her purse. He wondered idly if librarians had locker rooms where they suited up in conservative clothes and tucked pencils behind their ears before trotting out to man—or woman—the desk. Laughed and snapped towels at each other before the doors opened. It wasn’t likely.

  A minute later she came back, stood over him, and pressed a brass key into his hand. Her own hand was warm and moist.

  “I’ll get this back to you soon as possible,” he said.

  “No rush. Her apartment’s in Richmond Heights, on Hoover.”

  “I know,” Nudger said, “I got the address from the newspaper.” He felt real smug, like a genuine detective in one of the books in the mystery section behind him.

  Adelaide didn’t seem impressed. She was probably always looking up things. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”

  He thanked her for the key and watched her weave among the tables again on her way to the desk.

  The library was quiet and peaceful. He didn’t feel like getting up out of the comfortable chair; he’d rather stay and check out those toasters in Consumer Reports. But, like Adelaide, his job beckoned. Both of them were victims of the work ethic.

  He pushed himself up out of the soft vinyl chair. It hissed as if telling someone to shush, this was the library.

  Hoover was a side street that ran east and west off Big Bend near Highway 64. There were a number of four-family flats on it, a few of them rundown but most fairly well maintained. Brick buildings with squarish brick and concrete porches and sun-ravaged lawns. It was a middle-class neighborhood that hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years, and just the kind of area where you’d expect a devoted and punctilious female civil servant to live.

  The vestibule smelled like most old apartment buildings: a combination of ammonia-based cleaning compounds, greasy enamel, and mingled cooking scents. Muffled classical music was coming from one of the units, a maudlin violin concerto. There were a few pieces of what looked like junk mail in Mary Lacy’s locked mailbox. She probably could win a new Buick simply by visiting a lakeside resort.

  Nudger trudged up a short flight of wooden steps with tacked-down rubber treads on them. The violin music got louder, then fell silent. He found the door to 1E and used the key Adelaide
had given him.

  The door swung open on a small but neat living room. The venetian blinds were slanted upward so the early evening light was diffused and bouncing off the white ceiling. It made everything seem dustier than it was. An uncomfortable-looking green modern sofa faced a low, expensive console TV with a vase of dead flowers on top. The space-age remote control for the TV rested on a mahogany coffee table. There were wall hangings of modern museum prints over the sofa. Cubism, they looked like to Nudger, though he was far from an art expert. He used to like those Keene paintings of the kids with the big sad eyes, but you didn’t see many of them anymore. Or those paint-by-number kits. Trends in the arts, he supposed. The air was still and stale, telling him the flat was empty and had been for some time.

  He nosed around a while, trying to get a feel for the sort of person Mary Lacy was. He figured her for a neat and controlled life. Determinedly neat and controlled. He remembered what Adelaide had told him about her. Undoubtedly Mary Lacy was too tightly wrapped.

  The bedroom furniture was black laquered wood. She slept in a very narrow single bed, but Nudger didn’t see anything Freudian in that; the bedroom was too small to contain a double bed and the rest of her furniture. The wall hangings were more conventional than in the living room, silver-framed prints of lavish flower arrangements. Somehow they seemed more funereal than cheering.

  He shoved open the closet’s sliding doors. They caught and rumbled on their runners. A subtle, spicy scent wafted out at him. He saw a sachet dangling from a red string tacked to the edge of the wooden shelf.

  The closet was full of modestly priced conservative dresses, several matching skirts and blazers. A wire rack on the floor supported a dozen pairs of sensible, medium-heeled dress shoes. A working woman’s wardrobe, apparently complete. If she left of her own accord, Mary hadn’t packed for wherever she was going. On the other hand, half a million dollars and a new life were the sorts of things that might make a woman—even a fortyish, spinsterly one like Mary Lacy-decide it was time for a new wardrobe.

  Her dresser drawers were also well stocked, all the underwear, socks, even the panty hose neatly folded. A compulsively neat woman, all right. The bottoms of the drawers were lined with newspapers to protect against dust and splinters. Nudger lifted some lingerie and found himself reading about John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Reagan. All of the lingerie was white. No bikini panties with angels, devils, or days of the week on them. Nothing from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

  On top of the dresser was a framed photo of Mary with Adelaide. Though Adelaide was the younger and prettier of the two, it was mostly her plain dress and—even in the photograph—diffident manner that made Mary seem to merge with the background while her little sister glowed. They were standing in front of what looked like an ornate iron gate with trees behind it. Adelaide was smiling, Mary wasn’t. Both looked young in the photo. Nudger wondered if it had been taken after Mary was raped and her trust of the opposite sex destroyed.

  He stood in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle. Then he walked down the hall. Glanced into the tiny pink-tiled bathroom. Everything there was neat: folded towels symmetrically hanging from their racks, box of Kleenex with the top tissue puffed up for easy access, bathmat draped over the tub. Cosmetic bottles were precisely aligned, like chess pieces in the game of love, on a wicker shelf above the washbasin. The soap in the porcelain tray was dry and cracked. There was a single red toothbrush angled in the holder next to a water tumbler. A lonely sight.

  Nudger walked the rest of the way down the hall and into the living room, took a last, appraising look around, and let himself out.

  In one way he hadn’t learned anything in the apartment, yet in another he had. It was impossible to spend time in a place where someone lived without getting a more accurate sense of the person. Maybe it wasn’t anything the conscious mind could concretely identify, but so what? You never could tell; maybe something was there all the same, lodged in the subconscious and playing a part in the unfolding of everything you thought about that person.

  As he crossed Hoover and got into his car, he didn’t notice the broad-shouldered man watching him from inside the new black Lincoln parked down the street.

  When Nudger drove away, the man didn’t follow.

  He didn’t need to.

  He knew where Nudger lived.

  6

  Nudger drove to his office and parked across Manchester by the broken meter, then checked in with Danny at the doughnut shop.

  Surprise. No one had been by to see him.

  Clients weren’t queued up on the stairs to get to his door.

  In his office, he switched his answering machine to Play and kept his finger resting lightly on the button that signaled a jump to the next message.

  Beep! “Hi, Mr. Nudger! Arlo Smith here. With Keller Vinyl Gutter and Waterproofing. I understand you own—a fuckin’ answering machine! I wish they’d—”

  Beep! “Please call Union Electric as soon as possible in regard to the past due amount on your—”

  Beep! “This is Eileen, Nudger. About that line of bullshit you gave me instead of my alimony money. My lawyer says to tell you that if you don’t—”

  Beep! Silence.

  He switched off the machine. No important messages.

  It was warm in the office, he suddenly noticed. In deference to Union Electric, he pried the window open a few inches instead of using the air conditioner. Sound decision. A cool breeze pressed in, making the office comfortable within seconds. September. Such a whimsical month.

  Nudger sat at his desk for a while, catching up on paperwork, typing reminders to clients who owed him past due fees. It was important work, maintaining his link in the daisy chain of people who did things for people who couldn’t afford to pay them because the people they did things for hadn’t paid them. This, he’d decided, was pretty much the way society operated. His society anyway. Everything in a sort of nervous and precarious balance. Everything but the ledger books. Economists no doubt had a word for it. And another word that meant exactly the opposite. They were part of the grand design themselves.

  When it was almost six o’clock, he scooted his rolling swivel chair away from the desk and stood up. Stretched his arms and cramped back muscles. Time to pull himself away from the job. He was supposed to pick up Bonnie Beal at her place at seven.

  It might rain tonight, so he wrestled the stubborn window closed, almost pinching his fingers between it and the sill. Someone had told him that a little cooking oil rubbed in the tracks of old wooden windows made them work more smoothly. He decided he’d try it, next time he had a bottle of cooking oil in the office.

  He went downstairs, bringing his weight to bear heavily on the creaking wooden steps. The breeze that had graced the office met him like an old friend as he pushed open the door to the street. He waved to Danny through the doughnut shop window, then crossed Manchester to where he’d left the Granada parked. He was feeling pretty good.

  Pigeons had made a mess on the windshield, as if returning Nudger’s animosity. Two of the air rats were perched on a nearby second-story ledge, puffing out their feathered chests and chortling at him. God, he wished he had a rock to throw!

  He drove to his apartment on Sutton, showered and changed into gray slacks, brown sportcoat, and a paisley tie with practically invisible gravy stains on it. He still had fifteen minutes to get to Bonnie’s house.

  As he locked the door behind him, it occurred to him that he’d forgotten to shave. Nobody was perfect.

  Bonnie lived on Pleasant Lane out in Rock Hill, on a block of subdivision houses that had been built in the fifties and were almost identical. Low frame ranch houses with garages extended into concrete driveways on the left, architecturally balanced by artificial stone blending to brick chimneys on the right. They all had scraggly oak trees planted in precisely the same spot in their flat front yards. A few of the copycat houses were a color other than white. Some of them had two-car
garages instead of singles. It was a good thing they had address numbers.

  Nudger found Bonnie’s number tacked in brass numerals on one of the houses that weren’t white. It was pale blue with darker blue trim. Almost pale enough to be white.

  He parked in the driveway behind the Chevy station wagon. As he climbed out of his car, he noticed a magnetic sign stuck flat on the wagon’s driver-side door. The sign featured a serene-looking woman smiling and gazing lovingly at a fluttering white bird perched on her finger. Below the woman was lettered NORA DIVE—WITH LOVE. The bird looked to Nudger like a pigeon.

  When he was ten feet from the front door, it opened and Bonnie charged outside. She was smiling her dazzling, crinkly-nosed smile, wearing a snappy green dress, and carrying the straw purse she’d had at Gina Hiller’s. She looked her same cute self and Nudger was glad he’d asked her to dinner. Never the best at the dating game, he smiled back at her and said inanely, “Hungry?”

  “Sure am! Don’t you look nice?” As if he never had before. She was at his car, opening the door. He guessed maybe she really was hungry and not just making conversation.

  She was already fastening her seat belt as he walked around to the driver’s side. He noticed there were a lot of grease and oil stains on the driveway and stepped carefully so he wouldn’t get anything on his shoes.

  “You know your car’s leaking oil?” he said, as he backed the Granada out into the street.

  For a second she looked alarmed, her doll’s eyes widening. Then she said, “It’s okay now. I had it worked on.”

  “Is it a company car? Nora Dove?”

  “No, but most of the mileage is tax deductible. That’s fair enough of the company, I think. And if you sell a hundred thousand dollars worth of cosmetics two years in a row, they give you a white Cadillac to drive.”

  “Sounds like a good outfit to work for.” He couldn’t imagine anyone selling that much cosmetics, but maybe when they started in with the Max Hawk line.