Nightlines an-2

by John Lutz

“He’s a stupid and dangerous one,” Nudger corrected. “Dangerous to me and to you.”

  She impatiently peeled back the top of one of her white gloves and glanced at a tiny square gold watch. “Mr. Nudger, I’m ready to leave.”

  Nudger nodded and walked past her out the door. As he stepped onto the porch, he heard a series of crisp snicking sounds coming from the side of the house. Almost like disapproving clucks of the tongue.

  Agnes Boyington pointedly locked her door, then walked past him and through another door, leading into the attached garage. Nudger got into his Volkswagen and sat there until the garage’s overhead door automatically opened. An old but mint-condition long gray Cadillac nosed out. As it emerged all the way, Nudger saw that it was even older than he’d thought, one of the models with fins. It looked like a long gray shark; it suited its owner.

  The overhead door glided closed behind the car. Agnes Boyington let the Caddy coast down the driveway and made a left turn onto Lindell. She’d known that Nudger was still there but hadn’t deigned to look at him.

  Rumbo had filled her in on the day’s activities, so Nudger’s appearance at her door hadn’t been unexpected. She’d known he’d talked to the police and she’d known he wasn’t going to accept her check, but she’d acted out her scene with him without missing a beat or a cue, reciting her lines even when Nudger departed from the script. She was one of life’s great troopers in her own long-running production, creating her own reality with the convincing force of her delusions.

  Nudger found himself envying her. There had to be a warm security in being so unalterably correct in all matters. Possibly she was on her way to church, to interpret the sermon her way and sanctify her actions. There seemed to be an ugly outbreak of that kind of thing lately.

  Snick! Snick! With the Volkswagen’s windows rolled down, Nudger could hear the sound again clearly. Metal on metal. He got out of the car and walked across the spongy carpet of grass toward the corner of the garage.

  Peering around a forsythia bush, he saw Hugo Rumbo in the side yard. He was shirtless and wearing blue bib overalls, standing about a hundred feet away and diligently trimming a squared-off privet hedge with a pair of long-bladed shears. As if sensing that a ring opponent was about to throw a sneak left hook at him, he raised a shoulder slightly, ducked his head and turned. He saw Nudger immediately and smiled his lopsided, unsettling little smile. Shifting the shears to his right hand, he took a step toward Nudger.

  Nudger did what a hedge couldn’t do. He backpedaled to the Volkswagen, clambered in, and had the engine started in a jiffy. As he backed the car all the way down the driveway to the street, he saw the overalled Hugo Rumbo round the corner of the garage, holding the long shears upright at his side, and stand staring at him in a kind of macho American-Gothic posture.

  The little car’s engine seemed to be clattering with fear as Nudger drove fast down Lindell Boulevard, as if agreeing with him that now wasn’t a good time to talk with Hugo Rumbo.

  Probably there was no good time.

  In the glut of traffic on Kingshighway near the expressway, Nudger saw Agnes Boyington’s gray Cadillac a block away, stopped for a red light. Maybe she wasn’t going to church. Instead of turning west onto the expressway, he switched lanes and stayed on Kingshighway.

  It might be worthwhile to follow Agnes Boyington. She could be on her way to meet someone else who wore white gloves.

  XIII

  Agnes Boyington drove south on Kingshighway, then took Highway 44 downtown to 55 and exited on Memorial Drive. Gothic church towers glided past Nudger, piercing the sky in contrast to the soft stroke of the Arch’s caressing curve. Agnes stayed on Memorial, passing Busch Stadium and the Arch, then cut over to Market and headed west. She made a right on Seventh Street, and found a place to park near Seventh on Chestnut. It was the only empty parking space on the block, maybe a slot reserved for the genteel, and she effortlessly maneuvered the haughty gray lady of a Cadillac into it.

  Nudger drove half a block past Agnes, hoping she wouldn’t see him, and pulled to the curb near a fire hydrant.

  He watched her in his rearview mirror as she crossed Chestnut and entered one of the office buildings that lined the block. The Hammond Building. This was the area of downtown where many of the city’s high-priced lawyers kept their offices. That made Nudger wonder. He got out of the Volkswagen, hoping it wouldn’t be ticketed or towed away, and jogged across the street and into the Hammond Building.

  The lobby, adorned with gray marble and cigarette butts, was almost deserted. Most of the offices were closed at this hour, and only one elevator was in service. Nudger watched the brass indicator arrow on the veined marble above the elevator doors. It slowed, wobbled, then rested on the six.

  He crossed the lobby and checked the building directory. There were enough law firms in the place to stall a thousand cases a thousand years. On the sixth floor there were three law offices, an architectural firm, and several businesses of nondescript corporate name. Nudger considered taking the elevator up and finding a spot in the hall from which he could see Agnes Boyington emerge from whatever office she’d entered. However, not knowing which office she was in made that too risky an idea to carry out. Besides, it was altogether possible that whatever business she had here didn’t concern him.

  He left the lobby, trudged back across hot concrete to the Volkswagen, and sat waiting. From his car window he could see the silver, soaring curve of the Arch, towering above even the newer downtown buildings. The Gateway to the West and to McDonald’s floating restaurant. The Arch was Nudger’s favorite memorial. It was so nonfunctional. Its stainless steel, inspirational arc was the sole reason for its existence. If it wasn’t a joy forever, a lot of time and money had been wasted. What was it doing here in this conservative midwestern city where commerce was king? Or maybe its creation was inevitable. Perhaps out of all this flat, staid sanity it had to spring like joyful madness, a glittering dream-reflecting ribbon unfurling skyward to an exquisitely graceful apogee and then rushing earthward, like life itself.

  Nudger was still contemplating the Arch fifteen minutes later when Agnes Boyington left the Hammond Building and got back into her car. The Cadillac glided past him. He was sure that Agnes hadn’t seen him, with the Volkswagen tucked as it was between a larger car and a van. He started the engine, waited until she’d reached the corner, then followed.

  She didn’t drive far, only to Tucker and Clark, where she parked in a visitors’ slot in the lot of Police Headquarters. After locking the Caddy, she strode with vigor and purpose around to the front of the imposing gray building and up the wide steps. She still looked cool as frozen custard in her blue dress and white gloves, and she certainly moved like a much younger woman. Nudger watched the metronome sway of her flared hips until she disappeared through the main entrance. She wasn’t quite as impressive a piece of architecture as the Arch, but then she was older.

  Nudger didn’t follow Agnes Boyington into Police Headquarters. And when she left half an hour later, he didn’t follow her disdainful finned Cadillac.

  Instead he got out of the Volkswagen and went inside the building.

  The Headquarters building was also the Fourth District Station. Nudger recognized the desk sergeant, a thirtyish, dark-haired man named Mazzoli who was on desk duty because of a hip injury he’d suffered during a high-speed chase a few years ago. Mazzoli had been assigned to the Third, Hammersmith’s district, at the time of the accident.

  Nudger figured they were acquaintances if not friends. Mazzoli gazed flatly across the wide booking desk at him and seemed not to recognize him.

  “Hey, Mo Mazzoli,” Nudger said, smiling. “I knew you when you were in the Third. Remember me?”

  “No,” Mazzoli said. His cop’s eyes stayed flat.

  Well, he met a lot of people in his job. “I’m Nudger,” Nudger said. “A friend of Lieutenant Hammersmith.”

  Ah, rank. The mention of lieutenanthood brought some amiability to Mazzoli’s
stern features. “Lieutenant Hammersmith’s okay,” he said.

  “At select times,” Nudger told him. “The woman who came in here a while ago, older, nice-looking���”

  “Wearing gloves?”

  “That’s the one. What did she want?”

  “I dunno. She wouldn’t talk to me. She wanted to see someone with authority, she kept saying, so I sent her in to Lieutenant Springer.”

  “That’s right,” a sharp, clipped voice said behind Nudger, “he sent her in to me.”

  Nudger turned to see Lieutenant Leo Springer standing just outside his open office door. He was a tall, lean man with vivid dark features built around an oversized pockmarked nose. He looked as if someone with incredible strength had placed a hand on each side of his face and squeezed. Intensity gleamed in his close-set black eyes, and there was a permanent tenseness to his forward-tilted posture that gave the impression he’d be tireless at tennis. He wasn’t one of Nudger’s favorite people in the department. Or on planet earth.

  “And I suppose what she wanted to see you about is a private matter,” Nudger said.

  Springer shot his underslung, shark’s smile. He’d have looked great in Agnes Boyington’s finned Cadillac. “Not at all,” he said. “She wanted to see me about you. She’d just come from her lawyer. I was her second call.”

  “I know.”

  “Mrs. Boyington said you’d been following her,” Springer said with an edge of triumph, like a real-life Columbo. “You just confirmed it.”

  Nudger’s stomach fluttered. He felt himself getting angry. Springer could do that to him. “I haven’t broken the law.”

  “That’s always debatable,” Springer said smoothly, verbally gliding around his prey like the ocean carnivore he resembled. “Mrs. Boyington said you’re working for her daughter, and that the girl isn’t thinking straight because of grief and shouldn’t have hired you. You shouldn’t have taken her on as a client. In effect, you’re stealing her money. And it’s a case you’ve got no business on anyway, a pending homicide. You’ve also been trying to convince Mrs. Boyington to pay you to drop the case on the sly while humoring the daughter and still collecting your fee. You tried to intimidate Mrs. Boyington; you implied threats. She has a handyman as a witness. Bunko, extortion, all sorts of laws apply here, Nudger.”

  “Then apply them!” Nudger snapped.

  Springer stared at him with a contempt usually reserved for murderers set free on technicalities. “Unfortunately, I can’t. Mrs. Boyington doesn’t want to bring charges against you. She’s too much of a lady. She only wants us to talk to you, so you’ll leave her alone and she can have some peace of mind. You’re here, being talked to. Leave this case alone. Leave her alone. If you bother Mrs. Boyington again, your investigator’s license will be up for review, and before you can say ‘Sam Spade,’ you’ll be toting a lunch bucket back and forth to work. If you can find work.”

  “Nice of you to listen to my side,” Nudger said.

  “You don’t have a side, Nudger. You’re just a guy in the way. Private investigators stir up the muck, is all. They create obstacles. Not that it isn’t personal too, Nudger. I don’t like you. You’re a smart-ass. You’ve got smart ways and a smart mouth.”

  “You forgot smart dresser.”

  “No, I didn’t. That jacket you’re wearing’s got so much synthetic fiber in it, the sun might melt it.”

  “How do you afford such high wool content on a lieutenant’s salary, Springer?”

  Springer’s face revealed nothing, but his lean dark fingers flexed around a wood pencil he probably didn’t even know he was holding, threatening to snap it. “I can possibly talk Mrs. Boyington into pressing charges,” he said. “She’s a woman who obviously has a deep respect for the law. She might go for the ‘your responsibility as a citizen’ approach.” His strained voice hissed like the sibilant opening note of a teakettle. He was coming to a boil.

  “You could talk her into nothing,” Nudger told him, turning up the burner. “She only feeds when she’s hungry.”

  Springer’s eyes were like black laser beams. Nudger was winning this joust. “Get out, Nudger! You and your class of cop oughta live under rocks!”

  “Class isn’t sewn into your designer suits, Springer. I’m surprised someone wearing white gloves would even talk to you.”

  Nudger knew an exit line when he’d uttered one. So much in life was timing. He neatly about-faced and made for the door, paying no attention to the wooden pencil that bounced off the wall in front of him. Mazzoli, who had been listening to the confrontation, turned away from Springer and winked at Nudger without moving any other part of his face.

  Nudger’s stomach felt as if it were rolling in on itself, again and again, winching his body taut. He breathed deeply as he walked to his car, trying to exhale the tension he’d built up. He hated to get angry. And he knew that Agnes Boyington and not Springer was his real problem and the deep source of his rage. He would talk to Hammersmith about Springer, who was in Vice and had no business interfering with a homicide case.

  By the time he drove from the parking lot, Nudger was calmer, but his metabolism still hadn’t returned to normal. He went to Swensen’s at Laclede’s Landing and treated himself to a thick vanilla malted milk, sitting in a booth where he could see out the window and watch the tourists wandering about, the ritual of teenagers cruising in their highly glossed cars, the pretty girls gingerly probing and picking their way across the rough cobblestone street in their slender high heels. It was relaxing to watch the rest of humanity through a sheet of glass, separated from it, ignoring the sounds of the ice cream parlor and its other customers. It lent a sense of perspective.

  Nudger sat sipping the criminally rich malted milk for almost an hour before paying and walking back to his car. The clawed creature in his stomach had retreated to wait for another day.

  He’d finally cooled down, and so had the evening. The breeze swirling in through the car’s open windows soothed him as he drove. He’d managed to put his conversation with Leo Springer in a time vault in his mind. He wouldn’t think about it again until tomorrow morning.

  As he was driving west on Walnut he heard a loud roar. He was near Busch Stadium, where the Cardinals must be playing a home ball game. And playing it right, judging by crowd reaction. Nudger wondered if someone had hit a home run. He wished he could hit some kind of home run in this life, just once. He’d even settle for a long triple.

  Not until he was home in bed, about to drift into one of his frequent dreams of the sea, did he realize the roar of the stadium crowd had a surflike roll and rush to it that he’d heard recently somewhere else.

  He was sure it was the mysterious sound in Claudia’s phone.

  XIV

  Nudger hadn’t slept well. He’d awakened twice during the night from dreams of walking on an empty beach, leaving a line of footprints just beyond the reach of crashing, hungry waves that were angrily devouring the wide slope of sand. There was no one in sight, not for miles up and down the coastline. A half-moon was so bright that it etched his black shadow in front of him, almost as if it were day rather than night. He was alone, never more alone, and gusting in from an indiscernible horizon were roiling dark clouds, dropping lower and lower, threatening to engulf and smother him when they reached the shore.

  He tried not to think about last night’s dreams as he sat eating an omelet and dry toast, grateful for the morning light cascading through the kitchen window, even though its glare worsened his dull headache. He seemed to be haunted by the same sorts of dreams, if not the same dreams. He was either by the sea, which might be in any of its varying moods, or he dreamed of falling from great heights. Sometimes the sea dreams were pleasant and reassuring. The dreams of falling always left him sweating and scared.

  While he ate, he listened to an old Billie Holiday record from what was left of his jazz collection after last year’s poverty-induced sale. That made him feel better. If he was down, Billie was lower; but som
ething in her dulcet voice affirmed that it was possible to get up.

  He left his dirty dishes in the sink, telling himself he’d wash them that evening. Sure. After switching off the stereo and replacing the record in its jacket, he draped his sport coat over his arm and left the apartment.

  As he got out of his car and crossed the street to his office he was almost struck by a van with a thousand windows. Traffic was heavy on Manchester for this time of day. He reached the haven of the opposite sidewalk and squinted to see up the street. Cars were backed up beyond the traffic light, waiting to turn into the K-mart underground parking lot. There must have been coupons in the paper.

  He trudged upstairs to his office, unlocked the door, and went inside. The place was hot, but he wasn’t planning on being there long. There was no point in switching on the air conditioner. Listening to the traffic sounds from beyond the dirt-spotted window, he sat down behind his desk and punched buttons on the answering machine.

  “This is Eileen,” said the machine. “Just a reminder-” Nudger pressed Fast Forward.

  “Jeanette here, Mr. Nudger. Only one appointment today. At noon by the Twin Oaks Mall fountain. His name’s Jock. He’ll be wearing dark slacks and a beige sport jacket, no tie. Personnel Pool sent me out on a temporary secretarial job today, so phone me late this evening and report.” Click.

  “Jack Hammersmith, Nudge. Call me at the Third when you get a chance. Some of us are pitching in for a birthday gift for Leo Springer���” Hammersmith’s cigar-distorted chortle came through before Nudger could punch the red Off button.

  He’d heard enough for now. In a way it was nice to know that the temporary office help firm that sent Jeanette out on jobs had tucked her safely away where she couldn’t bother him for a while.

  Nudger stood up and walked over to where a Globe-Democrat lay folded on the cold radiator. When he examined the paper he was surprised to find that it was four days old and wouldn’t tell him what he needed to know. Dropping the paper into the wastebasket, he sat down again at the desk and dialed Hammersmith’s number at the Third District. Hammersmith knew about Agnes Boyington and should have no trouble getting Springer to back off.