The Nudger Dilemmas

by John Lutz

  This wasn't his kind of case, Nudger told himself as he drove the bone-rattling subcompact back up the coast highway. He shivered as he passed the seafood restaurant. What exactly was his kind of case he wasn't sure. Maybe no kind. He didn't doubt for a moment that he was in the wrong business, but this was all for which life had prepared him. He wished he were a sponge fisherman, so he could look in the newspaper help wanted ads, get a sane job on the bottom of the sea, and forget this sneaking around nonsense.

  But Nudger wasn't the only one sneaking around that evening, and that made the night's work easier.

  He hadn't spent more than an hour on the hill overlooking the Caruthers house when he spotted another car parked farther down the winding road, at one of the vantage points he'd noted earlier. The car, a dusty gray sedan, was pulled well off the road and would be practically invisible in the foliage from almost any spot other than Nudger's. He reached for the ignition key, then thought better of it. There was plenty of time; whoever had gone to the trouble of concealing the car was settled in for a long stakeout.

  Nudger struggled out of the subcompact and walked along the road toward the other watcher. When he thought he might be visible, he entered the shadows of the scrubby growth alongside the road and, estimating where the gray sedan was parked, cut cross-country toward it. Though he was several hundred yards from the sea, the ground was soft and sandy and clung to his soles, making him strain as if he were trudging through glue. He was short of breath and had a stitch in his side by the time he got near enough to see the parked car.

  He had emerged from the underbrush closer to it than he'd anticipated. Less than a hundred feet in front of him, moonlight glistened off a chrome bumper. Nudger put an antacid tablet in his mouth and crouched, watching, knowing that if the man seated behind the car's steering wheel happened to glance at the rearview mirror he might realize Nudger was there. Nudger chose not to think about what action that might prompt.

  On the big sedan's rear bumper he saw a rental company's decal. The driver's features were indistinguishable in the darkness. Nudger made a mental note of the license number and retreated as silently as possible into the shadows, feeling a warm fondness for the night.

  When he'd returned to his own car, Nudger settled into a cramped position behind the miniature steering wheel and waited for his breathing to even out. He turned on the car's radio, tuned in a Fort Myers station, and tried to relax.

  As he sat there with the window rolled down, he heard a door slam several hundred yards away, from the direction of the Caruthers house. Nudger scanned the place with his binoculars, but caught no sign of movement either outside the house or at the lighted window.

  Then he saw a tall, dark-clad form descending the wooden steps to the beach. When he focused the binoculars, Nudger could tell that the figure was that of a man wearing a windbreaker and a yachting cap. Despite darkness and distance, he could see the man's thick silver-white hair sprouting out from beneath the pushed-back cap.

  The tall figure strode confidently out along the rickety pier, then across a narrow gangplank onto the craft that was docked there. Cap Caruthers boarding his yacht. Yellowish light appeared in two of the portholes, but there was no indication that the yacht, which Nudger estimated must require at least a small crew, might get underway.

  At midnight a low red sports car snarled into the Caruthers' circular driveway, veered left, and disappeared into a garage whose door had automatically opened. Nudger figured that would be Candy Caruthers returning from wherever Del Moray rich girls whiled away their evenings.

  Within another hour Cap Caruthers left his yacht and returned to the house. The lights in the house winked out window by window. Nudger turned his binoculars and his attention to the car parked on the road below.

  At two a.m. the man in the gray car evidently assumed that the night's activities at the Caruthers estate had ended. The sound of the car's motor turning over rose to Nudger, mingled with the whisper of the moonshot surf breaking on the beach beyond the house. The gray sedan nosed slowly out of its place of concealment like a wary animal, turned right, away from Nudger, growled, and picked up speed. Nudger started the subcompact, almost lost a filling as the little car jarred back onto the road, and followed.

  Was this the man Candy had seen watching the house? She had glimpsed only a shadowed figure a few times, seen a light-colored car parked up the beach from the boathouse.

  The gray sedan traveled all the way into Del Moray and parked in a slot in the lot of the Del Moray Hotel, a rambling, tripled-decked, white stucco building near the center of town. Nudger parked nearby and watched a short, paunchy man with slicked-back dark hair get Out of the car. With Napoleonic vigor and purpose he strode toward the hotel's main entrance.

  Quickly Nudger unfolded himself from the subcompact. He entered the lobby just in time to hear the paunchy dynamo ask for his room key.

  "Two fifty-one," he demanded of the desk clerk, a narrow-faced, elderly man who obeyed with absentminded servility and then returned to reading a true crime magazine.

  "Restaurant still open?" the paunchy man asked, hefting the room key in a stubby hand.

  The desk clerk nodded his narrow gray head. "Open all night." He flipped a page, a glossy illustration of a desperate looking youth strangling a model who looked as if she belonged in a lingerie ad.

  The paunchy man spun like a dancer on his heel and went through the archway into the coffee shop. Nudger waited until someone else came into the lobby, then casually wandered over to the stairs, rounded a corner, and jogged up to the second floor.

  It took him less than a minute to locate the door numbered 251, less than another minute to use his honed Visa card to slip the simple hotel lock and enter the room.

  The paunchy guy was a slob. Clothes were draped all over the place; there were cigar ashes on the rumpled bed and on the carpet near the phone. An open black vinyl attaché case sat next to a cheap portable typewriter on the desk. In the attaché case were some sheets of lined notepaper with dates and times scrawled on them. There were also two large yellow envelopes, both addressed to a party in Gainesville, Georgia. One envelope was empty, the other contained something but was sealed.

  Nudger took the sealed envelope into the bathroom, ran the basin full of hot water, covered it by draping a towel over it, and inserted the top of the sealed envelope so that the flap was inches above the steaming water.

  Within a few minutes the glue had loosened its grip on the flap. Nudger withdrew the envelope and opened it. The typed pages inside contained the same dates and times that appeared on the notepaper, but they were identified as a record of Cap Caruthers' comings and goings for the past several days. There was also a request for more expense money for the envelope's sender, a paunchy private investigator named Raoul DeMent.

  While the glue was still moist, Nudger resealed the envelope and returned things to the way they had been in the bathroom. He got out his own notepad and pen and copied the name and Gainesville address from the envelope. Then he placed the envelope back in the attaché case and left the room. His stomach said, "About time!" He had learned to interpret its growls.

  Downstairs, as he was leaving the hotel lobby, Nudger glanced into the coffee shop and saw Raoul DeMent ravishing a hamburger.

  "The man watching the Caruthers estate is a private investigator observing your father," Nudger told Candy Caruthers the next morning over breakfast in a Waffle King in Del Moray. The place was built to resemble a huge crown, though you'd never know it from inside. "But he isn't working for your stepmother."

  Candy paused with her fork halfway to her open mouth, suddenly having lost interest in a large syrupy bite of her Royal Court Strawberry Special. Her blue eyes were puzzled. "Then who hired him?"

  "A man named Yasuhiro Oh, a Japanese who owns a large electronics firm in Georgia. Oh is receiving regular reports on your father's activities and the times he's away from home."

  "Maybe this Oh is a friend of Mom's."
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  "Not so's you'd notice. I checked on him. He's a businessman in his mid-sixties. His firm, El-Tron Electronics, manufactures components for a range of products from automatic pilots to pour-through coffee brewers. If there's any relationship between Oh and your stepmother, no one knows about it but them. Possible but not likely."

  Candy resumed the transfer of the bite of waffle from plate to palate and seemed to be mulling over this new information as she chewed. When she had swallowed noisily she said, "Find out more, Mr. Nudger."

  "About Oh?"

  "About everything."

  "The task looms larger."

  "So does the fee."

  "In that case I'll have another Hamlet Sour Cream Danish Delight." He signaled a melancholy waitress and reached into his jacket pocket to fondle the roll of antacid tablets he knew he would need within the hour.

  It seemed to Nudger that the most logical way to find out more about Oh's reason for hiring DeMent was to continue observing DeMent. That evening he sat parked in the subcompact in front of the Del Moray Hotel, and when he saw DeMent's gray sedan leave the lot and turn in the direction of the Caruthers estate, Nudger followed.

  DeMent parked the sedan where Nudger had first seen it the night before. Nudger drove past without slacking speed, rounded a bend, and then made a U-turn. He drove back the way he'd come until he reached the concealed area where he'd parked before. He situated his car in exactly the same spot. From it, without craning his neck, he could see both the Caruthers estate and DeMent's car. He wondered if anyone was watching the place regularly during daylight hours. Some of Caruthers' daytime arrivals and departures were noted in DeMent's report, but he seemed to be working alone, which suggested that Oh was interested primarily in what Cap Caruthers did at night.

  A swishing sound, as of something rushing through the weeds behind him, made Nudger turn. A roar, a squeal, and as a dark shape swept toward him Nudger recognized it as a car with its lights out. No sooner had he realized this than the subcompact lurched forward to the loud crunch of metal on metal and Nudger's body slammed back against the seat. Whoever was driving the lights-out car apparently had parked here before and hadn't suspected another car might be occupying the spot. Which meant . . . that this was one of those rare times when Nudger wished he carried a gun.

  A large man wearing a dark suit got out of the car and walked toward Nudger's smashed rear fender. In the rearview mirror Nudger saw that the man had his right hand in his suit coat pocket. For an instant he contemplated ducking out the door on the passenger's side and running for the dark woods, but if the man had a gun and intended to use it there was no reasonable escape route. He got out of the car slowly.

  The large man stopped a few feet from Nudger and looked him over. He was neatly dressed, not only bulky but lean-waisted and athletic, a boxer's build. His face was squarish and all-American-handsome beneath tousled dark hair. The shirt was white, the tie straight and tightly knotted. A daughter's ideal date.

  "Who are you and why are you here?" the man asked.

  Nudger's jittery stomach growled so loudly that the man glanced at it. "Maybe you should answer those same questions," he suggested, not quite managing to make his voice as authoritative as that of the figure confronting him.

  "What right have you to ask?" the man said calmly.

  "Squatter's rights, I suppose. I was here first." Nudger was feeling braver. After all, the man didn't know he wasn't armed. "By what authority do you ask me questions?"

  "FBI."

  The man identified himself as Agent Frank Slayton, flashing a classy two-tone badge of the sort Nudger had seen before. Nudger knew it was genuine. This was a genuine FBI agent. This was genuine trouble.

  Nudger showed his own identification, which at the moment seemed to carry as much clout as Monopoly money.

  "A private investigator from out of state, eh?" Slayton said with something like disdain, as if what had promised to interest him had turned out to be hardly worth his time. "Who's your client?"

  "The Caruthers woman," Nudger said. Not precisely a lie.

  "The wife?" Slayton handed back Nudger's wallet and identification. "Divorce doesn't interest us," Slayton said. "We've been trying to stay out of the way of your colleague down there for the past two weeks." He motioned in the direction of DeMent's parked car.

  "Colleague?"

  Slayton shrugged. "Maybe he's working for the husband. A PI named DeMent."

  "I don't know him," Nudger said.

  "We don't, either, but we know he's a PI and that's all we want to know. And he doesn't know about us, and we don't want him to know. If you were to tell him it wouldn't go easy for you. Do you understand?"

  "Obstruction of justice?"

  "Something like that. You wouldn't have known we were around, either, only. . ." Slayton waved a hand toward the crumpled fenders. "The point is, Nudger, we're involved in our own investigation. It has nothing to do with this divorce, and we don't want any interference."

  "You'll get none from me," Nudger said. "This encounter is something I won't reveal to my client."

  "I'll trust you," Slayton said, "since I have to." He pointed to the damaged subcompact. "A rental? Did you pay extra for the collision insurance?"

  "No. I wasn't on an expense account when I leased it."

  "Your government will pay for repairs," Slayton told him. "Keep a copy of the damage estimate." He turned back toward his car.

  "I was just leaving," Nudger said. "You take this spot."

  "No, thanks."

  "It's my patriotic duty."

  Slayton didn't reply. Probably he had an FBI sense of humor. He got into his car, backed it out onto the road, and drove it away in the direction of the Caruthers house.

  Nudger was becoming a bit boggled by all of this. The FBI was watching the Caruthers estate, along with two private detectives whom they logically assumed to be working for the contestants in a nasty divorce. And maybe Cap and Melissa Caruthers had each hired detectives to watch for extramarital meanderings that could prove beneficial in court. The area around the Caruthers estate might be teeming with agents of one kind or another, unsuspectingly passing each other in the night.

  Nudger laughed, almost uncontrollably. He leaned on the tiny fender of the subcompact and waited until his fit of mirth subsided. His stomach felt fine. Nothing was better for nervous indigestion than laughter from down deep.

  He got back into the dented car, started it, and bounced back onto the road. He drove toward town. Let Raoul DeMent and the rest of them sit in the dark and peer through binoculars while they passed the time listening on their car radios to the inane patter of all-night disc jockeys. Nudger was going back to his room and going to bed.

  In the morning he called Candy Caruthers, who said with dramatic emphasis that she was alone but that the phones in the house might be bugged. He waited fifteen minutes while she drove to a public phone and called him back.

  "You told me your father might be engaged in an illegal activity," Nudger said. "Do you have the slightest idea what it involves?"

  "Not an inkling. Of course there are the rumors."

  "Rumors?"

  "About drug-running. But everyone in Southern Florida who owns a fast yacht is suspected at one time or another of smuggling narcotics. The Ten Thousand Islands and the Keys are havens for smugglers; it's impossible for the Coast Guard to stop the arrival of drugs by boat from Mexico and South America, even from Cuba."

  "Is your father's yacht fast?"

  "The Sea Dreamer? Very fast."

  "Do you think he's involved in drugs?"

  She waited a while before answering. This was one suspicion she didn't care to voice, as if making it audible would move it nearer to fact. "I don't know. That's one of the reasons I hired you. Do you have any firm information that Daddy is into something illegal? You sounded so sure."

  "I'm not sure," Nudger told her.

  "Have you discovered anything more about Oh?"

  "Not ye
t," Nudger said. "But I will." He told Candy Caruthers he would phone her tomorrow and hung up.

  A cold shower shocked him awake completely while probably shortening his life several years. By then it was almost ten o'clock. Nudger went back to the Del Moray Hotel.

  As he drove into the Del Moray's lot, he saw DeMent's parked car in a slot near the far end of the blacktopped surface. DeMent probably had been up most of last night and was still in bed.

  He wasn't, at least, in the coffee shop. Nudger walked to a booth from which he could see into the lobby, sat down, and ordered coffee and a glazed doughnut. The coffee shop was pleasantly cool after the heat already building outside. Someone had left a morning newspaper in the booth. Nudger divided his attention among the doughnut and the lobby and reading about the latest sensational developments in the Caruthers divorce hearings. Melissa allegedly had been having an affair with a teenaged delivery boy; on the other hand it was alleged that Cap Caruthers had discussed the possibility of selling Melissa into bondage to South American slave traders. On such matters hinged the million dollar fortunes of divorce settlement. Nudger thought about his own divorce from Elaine six years ago. She had fought like fury for the color television.

  As Nudger was sipping his third cup of coffee, Raoul DeMent, looking tired and rumpled, waddled into the coffee shop and sat down at a table near the door. He was occupied with the waitress when Nudger paid for the coffee and doughnut and left.

  Within five minutes Nudger was again in DeMent's disheveled room. He had hung out the "Do Not Disturb" sign and figured he would have at least fifteen uninterrupted minutes while DeMent ate breakfast.

  The fifteen minutes yielded no new information other than that DeMent was a devotee of paperback detective novels. Nudger glanced around the room that he had carefully put back together in its original disorder. He knew he had been there long enough, maybe too long. What if he ran into DeMent in the hall as he left? His stomach said, "Get out!"