The Right to Sing the Blues (Alo Nudger Book 3)

by John Lutz

  Nudger's stomach went into a series of spasms as Hollister stood up and glanced at the apartment as if he'd sensed someone's presence. The musician wiped one of the rolled-up sleeves of his tan shirt across his perspiring forehead. He must have been working hard for quite a while; he stood angled forward at the waist, like a man whose back ached. For a few seconds he seemed to debate about whether to return to the apartment. Then he absently massaged one of his corded forearms, picked up the long-handled shovel, and began digging the sixth and final hole.

  Letting out a long, hissing breath, Nudger drew back from the open window and stood up straight. He'd go out by the front door now, then walk around to the courtyard and call Hollister's name, as if he'd just arrived and gotten no answer at the front door and decided to check the courtyard. He wanted to talk to Hollister, to probe for the man's own version of his past.

  As Nudger was leaving the bedroom, he noticed a stack of pale blue envelopes on the dresser, beside a comb-and-brush set monogrammed with Hollister's initials. The envelopes were held together by a fat rubber band. Nudger saw the Beulah Street address penned neatly in black ink in a corner of the top envelope.

  Here was one of the nasty aspects of his work; ends justifying means, gain outweighing scruples. How much of himself did he lose each time he did something like this?

  But he paused for only a few seconds before he picked up the envelopes and slipped them into his pocket. Then he left Hollister's apartment the same way he'd entered.

  There was no point in talking to Hollister now. It would be foolish to place himself in the apartment at the approximate time of the disappearance of the stack of letters written by Ineida Collins.

  He walked up Rue St. Francois for several blocks, then took a cab to his hotel. Though the morning was still more muggy than hot, the cab's air conditioner was on high and the interior was near freezing. The letters seemed to grow heavier in Nudger's pocket, and to glow with a kind of warmth that gave no comfort.

  FIFTEEN

  Nudger had Room Service bring up a two-egg cheese omelet and a glass of milk. He sat at the desk in his hotel room with his early lunch, his customary meal that had a soothing effect on his nervous stomach, and ate slowly as he read Ineida Collins' letters to Hollister. He understood now why they had felt warm inside his pocket. The love affair was, from Ineida's point of view at least, as soaring and serious as such an affair can get. Nudger again felt cheapened by his crass invasion of Ineida's privacy. These were thoughts meant to be shared by no other than writer and recipient, thoughts not meant to be tramped through by a middle-aged detective not under the spell of love.

  On the other hand, he told himself, there was no way for him to know what the letters contained until he read them and determined that he shouldn't have. Once he'd stolen the letters, he was caught up in logic in another context. This was again the sort of professional quandary he got himself into frequently but never got used to.

  The last letter, the one with the latest postmark, was the most revealing and made the tacky side of Nudger's profession seem almost worthwhile. Here was the nugget of pertinent, illuminating information he sought—a justification for his actions. Ineida Collins was planning to run away with Willy Hollister; he told her he loved her and that they would be married. Then, after the fact, they would return to New Orleans and inform friends and relatives of the blessed union. It all seemed so quaint, Nudger thought, and not very believable unless you happened to be twenty-two and love-struck and had lived Ineida Collins' sheltered existence.

  Ineida also referred in the last letter to something important she had to tell Hollister. Nudger could guess what that important bit of information was. That she was Ineida Collins and she was David Collins' daughter and she was rich, and that she was oh so glad that Hollister hadn't known about her until that moment. Because that meant he wanted her for her own true self alone. Ah, love! It made a PI's business go round.

  He refolded the letter, replaced it in its envelope, and dropped it onto the desk.

  Nudger tried to finish his omelet but couldn't. It had become cool as he'd read the heated letters. He wasn't really hungry anyway, and his stomach had reached a tolerable level of discomfort. He knew it was time to report to Fat Jack. After all, the man had hired him to uncover information, not to keep to himself.

  Nudger slipped the rubber band back around the stack of letters, snapped it, and stood up. He considered having the letters placed in the hotel safe, but the security of any hotel safe was questionable. A paper napkin bearing the Hotel Majestueux's gold fleur-de-lis logo lay next to his half-eaten omelet. He wrapped the envelopes in the napkin and dropped the bundle into the waste-basket by the desk. The maid wasn't due back in the room until tomorrow morning, and it was unlikely that anyone would think Nudger would throw away such important letters. And the sort of person who would bother to search a wastebasket would search everywhere else and find the letters anyway.

  He placed the tray with his dishes on it in the hall outside his door, hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob, and left to see Fat Jack McGee.

  On the sidewalk outside the hotel, he heard his name called. At first he thought it was the old doorman, but when Nudger turned, the doorman studiously looked away from him, his face blank and composed in a way that alerted Nudger.

  A short, paunchy man in a rumpled brown suit approached Nudger from where he'd been waiting in the deep cool shadow of the building. He had unruly receding hair, a chubby, jowly face, and he was smiling a rigor-mortis sort of smile. Nudger wasn't surprised when he flashed a shield. He said, still smiling, “I'm Sergeant Chambers, Mr. Nudger. How about you should follow me down to the district station house so Captain Livingston can have a chat with you?”

  “How about you should give me a choice?” Nudger said.

  Chambers shook his head no, then cocked it sharply to the side. He had gum in his mouth; he began to chew it slowly with a gum chewer's peculiar insolence, not letting the effort interfere with his toothy smile. “Sorry, can't do that.”

  Nudger sighed. “Okay. I'm parked down the block.”

  “I know.” Chambers popped his gum; it sounded like a gunshot. “My partner's parked right behind your car.”

  Nudger began to walk. Chambers fell into step beside and slightly behind him. The old doorman continued to be a nonperson, “See, Hear, and Speak No Evil” all rolled into one. In his very practical world, there was safety in anonymity. Right now, Nudger wished that philosophy were his own. If it were, he wouldn't be on his way to the station house with rumpled, gum-popping Chambers to clash with officialdom.

  If if's were skiffs, as his ex-wife Eileen used to tell him sternly, we all would sailors be. Nudger was never sure what she meant by that. He thought that might have been her way of trying to get him to join the Navy.

  “Why does Livingston want to talk with me?” he asked, as they approached the parked cars.

  Chambers shrugged. “I dunno. I guess you been making waves.” He touched Nudger's arm lightly to stop him and held open the rear door of a gray-blue sedan. “We might as well all go in the squad car,” he said. “Be chummier. Save you gasoline.”

  He got into the back of the car after Nudger and settled down heavily into the upholstery; he smelled like Juicy Fruit. The driver, a broad-shouldered man with a fuzzy reddish bald spot on the crown of his head, didn't look back or say anything as he started the car and drove toward the station house.

  SIXTEEN

  Chambers ushered Nudger into Livingston's office, then withdrew without saying anything; Nudger heard the loud pop of gum on the other side of the door just after it closed.

  The first thing he noticed about Livingston's office was that it was large. The wall behind the desk was mostly windows looking out over a depressed, gloomy section of New Orleans. Which puzzled Nudger for a moment, because it was a sunny day. Then he saw that the gloom was the result of a dirty film over the windows; it was all interior gloom.

  The office w
as plush; there were two cream-colored velour chairs angled near the desk, police-uniform-blue carpet, and something that looked like a liquor cabinet in a far corner. The walls were paneled halfway up. Real paneling, not the plastic laminated stuff. Livingston sat behind his desk, the top of which was bare except for a green desk pad, some pencils, and a large clear glass vase that was crammed full of tall, bushy flowers of a kind that Nudger didn't recognize. He wondered if Livingston had a secretary, and if it was her job to supply fresh flowers for the vase every morning. He was the type.

  “Sit down, Nudger,” Livingston said brusquely.

  “And good morning to you,” Nudger told him, lowering himself into one of the creamy velour chairs. It was sneaky comfortable, the kind of chair that might not lull you into dozing, but that you'd find you didn't want to stand up out of when it was time to rise. He glanced around. “The New Orleans Police Department treats its captains royally.”

  Livingston peered at him around the bushy flowers, like a fox peeking out from deep cover. “Not really. You're just used to the low-rent ratholes private cops operate out of.”

  “I can see it was mostly tact that got you where you are.”

  “It was hard work,” Livingston corrected. “And instinct. A talent for sniffing out trouble.”

  “And I smell like trouble?”

  “You absolutely reek of it, Nudger.”

  “I'm sure you didn't call me down here just to get a whiff of me,” Nudger said, shifting his weight in the soft chair so Livingston would have to crane his neck to continue watching him around the desk flora.

  “It's been brought to my attention,” Livingston said, “that just prior to our conversation in your hotel room, you were out of town for several days.”

  Nudger nodded. “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “The private kind, I'm afraid.”

  “Concerning the job you're doing here in New Orleans?”

  “Partly.”

  “Then your business isn't so private that it isn't my business, too.” Livingston rolled his chair to the side to get a better angle of vision across the desk, save himself from a stiff neck. “Tell me about it.”

  Nudger decided it was time to give something to Livingston; if he didn't, Livingston would take and keep on taking. It was the nature of the animal. “I'll tell you whatever I can,” he said.

  “Then it should be easy for you. I only want to know three things: Where did you go? Who did you see? What did you find out?”

  “I went to Cleveland, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis. I talked to people connected with the jazz scene.”

  “Talked to them about what?” Livingston asked, when Nudger didn't continue.

  “Willy Hollister.”

  Livingston sat back and toyed with one of the sharp yellow pencils on the desk, adroitly holding its center still and rotating the ends, as if it were a compass needle that might point out the truth. “Hollister. The piano player over at Fat Jack's club?”

  Nudger nodded.

  “And what did you find out?”

  “About Hollister?”

  The pencil stopped being a compass; it became a gun, aimed at Nudger as if Livingston itched to fill him fatally with #2 lead. “Who else would I mean, Nudger?”

  “Maybe David Collins. I found out some things about him.”

  “Let's stay with Hollister.”

  “Why not Collins?”

  Livingston said nothing, looked uncomfortable, waited. There was a new hard glint in his slanted little eyes. It suggested that here was a man who, if pushed, would push back hard. He was a tough cop, even though he looked like a conniving little wimp. Nudger knew it was time to get cooperative.

  “Hollister makes women disappear,” he said.

  Livingston was unimpressed by this vague revelation. “He does magic? I thought he was a musician.” His voice had taken on the same sharp flintiness as his eyes.

  “With a certain type of woman, he does magic,” Nudger said. “They fall hard for him, have a passionate affair, then drop out of sight.”

  “You're saying Hollister has something to do with their disappearances?” Livingston asked. A coplike question, to the point and phrased to suggest the answer.

  “There's nothing to indicate that,” Nudger said. He decided to give Hollister the benefit of the doubt in this conversation with Livingston. After all, Nudger hadn't any real proof that the man had done anything the slightest bit illegal. “Maybe his women just get tired of being around all that ego,” he said. “They might be surprised when they're caught in a love triangle: Hollister, the woman, and Hollister.”

  Livingston seemed to decide not to probe deeper. He leaned back, hiding for a moment behind his vase of foliage. Nudger could see his pointy little ears through the green stems. Livingston was gauging the situation; at this juncture, he might not want to know too much about Willy Hollister's love life. After all, there were people who might ask him questions.

  “You're going to get your nose badly bent, poking it in the wrong places,” Livingston said. “What were you doing in the Golden Oldens shop earlier today?”

  Nudger shrugged. “I like old goodies.”

  “Goodies like Sandra Reckoner?”

  “She's not so old,” Nudger said. “Not a worm hole in her.”

  “Don't be so sure. I hear she gets turned on in the oddest ways by the oddest people.” Livingston gave the sly, nasty smile of a pornographer or a censor.

  “Why are you warning me again not to nose around?” Nudger asked. “Didn't we pretty much cover that subject in my hotel room?”

  “Not completely. I want to make sure you understand something, Nudger. There are certain kinds of situations where I can't help you.”

  Nudger wasn't sure if he did understand. Was Livingston jerking strings for his own self-serving reasons, or was he actually at least obliquely concerned about Nudger's welfare? Was he the snide little bought cop he appeared to be, or was he something else, something harder to classify?

  “Even strong swimmers drown now and then,” Livingston said. “They do it by getting in over their heads when there's no lifeguard around.”

  Nudger wondered what was going on. Every cop he knew seemed to be speaking in metaphors all of a sudden. “You should meet my friend Hammersmith,” he said.

  “Who's he?”

  “Oh, just a guy I know back in St. Louis.”

  “Back in St. Louis is where you oughta be.”

  “That seems to be the prevailing logic.”

  Livingston stood up; it wasn't easy to catch behind that big desk. “Keep yourself out of trouble, Nudger. My men have better things to do than tail you around the city.”

  Nudger got up out of the creamy velour chair, listening to his knees pop; he was getting old—like Billy Weep. No, he corrected himself, Billy wasn't getting older now. Nudger hadn't seen any point in telling Livingston about Weep's death. He looked out the window again at the world made gloomy by what went on inside Livingston's office, the way Livingston's world was clouded by what went on inside his head.

  “What are you staring at?” Livingston asked.

  “Nothing in particular,” Nudger told him. “Nice suit. Wool?”

  Livingston said nothing; Nudger left the office in silence, closing the door behind him softly. Wool, Nudger decided. A fox in sheep's clothing, that was Livingston. What was going on in his cunning little mind?

  Out on the sidewalk, Nudger paused. His stomach was rumbling, threatening to make itself felt in ways unpleasant. He reached for his roll of spearmint-flavored antacid tablets.

  An explosion behind him made him jump and whirl.

  It was Chambers, popping his gum. The scent of Juicy Fruit wafted to Nudger.

  The detective grinned at him, holding the pale wad of gum between his front teeth so it was visible when he smiled, like a kid proving to his mother that he hasn't swallowed it. “Give you a lift back to your hotel?” he offered, motioning with hi
s head toward where the blue-gray sedan that had brought Nudger to the station house was parked across the street.

  Nudger nodded. “Why not?”

  Chambers winced. “That's a terrible philosophy. Better to ask yourself why.” Then he shrugged. “On the other hand, people who ask themselves ‘Why not?’ keep me in a job.” Pop! went the gum.

  “They're both tough questions,” Nudger said.

  He broke the seal on a fresh role of antacid tablets and he and Chambers walked across the street side by side. Juicy Fruit and Spearmint.

  SEVENTEEN

  After Chambers had dropped him off at the Hotel Majestueux, Nudger was surprised to notice a slip of folded white paper in his message box behind the desk. He asked the towering desk clerk for it, unfolded it, and read:

  Mr. Nudger,

  I'm sorry I missed you. I'll try to contact you again as soon as possible. It's important that we talk.

  Marilyn Eeker

  Nudger examined the paper. It was cheap unlined notepaper, folded once and deeply creased as if a thumbnail had been run hard across it. The handwriting was in pale blue ink, concise and feminine, and at a slight downward angle to the top edge of the paper.

  “When was this delivered?” Nudger asked the desk clerk.

  “About an hour ago,” the clerk said, jackknifing his long body downward over the desk to pencil figures into a ledger book. He was a busy man; taking time to talk with Nudger was obviously an imposition.

  “Did the woman say anything?” Nudger asked.

  Not looking up, the tall clerk said, “Just told me to please put this in Mr. Nudger's message box.” He began applying pencil point to paper.

  “What did she look like?”

  “Oh, smallish—petite, I guess you'd say—blond, in her forties, kinda pretty. Seemed in a hurry.”

  Nudger searched his mental file, couldn't imagine who the woman might be. He couldn't remember ever hearing the name Marilyn Eeker.