by John Lutz
“Claudia doesn’t need a feather boa in her wardrobe to be attractive, Nudge.”
“I’ll tell her you said so.” Nudger stood up. He knew he’d better not mention guided missile systems. Hammersmith wouldn’t know anything about those, either, except that Claudia didn’t need one. “Thanks for skipping that visit to the morgue, Jack.” He edged toward the door.
“Where you going, Nudge?”
“Work to do. I’ve got other cases to worry about.”
“Your biggest worry is that some other investigator’s working them. Some guy who’s competent.”
“I’m going someplace where I don’t have to hear insults,” Nudger said, a little nettled, even though he knew Hammersmith and was used to his remarks.
Hammersmith unclasped his hands, then sighed and leaned forward in his chair. It was as if a mountain had shifted. “Okay, Nudge. Thanks for coming in on short notice.”
Nudger nodded and went to the door.
As he was going out, he heard Hammersmith say, “I think the feather boa as a serious fashion statement is as dead as Aaron Smith.”
Nudger knew what he had to do. Where he might find some indication as to what was really going on. With Aaron dead, he wasn’t so afraid, and if King Chambers had killed Aaron, as Nudger suspected, Chambers would be making himself hard to find.
At a drive-up public phone in the corner of a service-station parking lot, Nudger tried to look up the number of Mirabelle Rogers. But the R’s were among the many pages ripped from the weather-faded directory dangling on a chain. He called Information and asked for the number, and was told it was unlisted.
That made sense, Nudger thought, for a woman who looked like Mirabelle. Her kind of beauty was a magnet for ugliness.
He decided to take a chance.
When he reached Mirabelle’s apartment, the silver Mercedes was parked in the same spot on Waterman. He didn’t think that was significant.
He parked across the street, chewed two antacid tablets, then climbed out of the car and strode over the sun-warmed pavement to the opposite sidewalk.
His strategy was simple. He’d ring Mirabelle’s apartment from the vestibule, and if anyone answered on the intercom he’d leave fast.
If there was no answer, he’d go upstairs and force his way into the apartment. Guilty or innocent, King Chambers was sure to know the law would be looking for him after Aaron’s murder, so it was unlikely he’d be here, at the home of his lover. And wherever Chambers was, Mirabelle was almost sure to be with him.
Nudger held that thought as he stood in the quiet tile vestibule and pressed the button over Mirabelle’s brass mailbox.
No voice came over the intercom.
He pressed the button three more times, waiting a full minute between buzzes.
No answer.
Good! He hoped.
The building wasn’t equipped with a security door, so he simply climbed the stairs to Mirabelle’s apartment door. He glanced around to make sure he was alone in the hall, then got his honed Visa card from his wallet. He might be able to slip the lock easily, if it was one of the cheap brands on so many apartment doors.
Apparently it wasn’t. It ate his Visa card. He bent over and picked up the shattered plastic so his account number wouldn’t be lying on the hall carpet. The problem was that the other half of the card, with his name on it, had dropped on the other side of the door, inside the apartment.
In a gesture of futility, he twisted the doorknob and cursed silently. He was surprised to find the door was unlocked. Either it had been unlocked from the beginning, or the Visa card had done its job.
He opened it a few inches and peered inside.
Cool air flowed out against his perspiring face. The apartment looked unoccupied from his perspective. All he could see were a white leather sofa, a matching chair, and a glass-topped table with slick and colorful magazines fanned out on it like a hand of face cards.
He swallowed the fear that kept trying to crawl up his throat, opened the door the rest of the way, and stepped inside.
His stomach and his heart lurched at the same time and seemed to collide.
Mirabelle Rogers was lying on the floor, looking up at him, surprised.
For an instant Nudger thought he’d interrupted her while she was exercising, stretched out loosely on her back and cooling down from a strenuous aerobics routine. Then he saw that no, she wasn’t actually surprised, or even looking at him.
She was cooling down, though.
Because she was dead.
CHAPTER 32
Nudger didn’t have to examine the body to be sure Mirabelle Rogers was dead. She’d been brutally beaten. Her nose was incredibly crooked and her jaw wasn’t hinged quite right. The worm of black blood trailing from her left nostril joined a congealed pool of blood beneath her head. Nudger was sure the back of her skull had been crushed, but he didn’t want to lift her head to verify that. His imagination was having a violent enough effect on his stomach without bringing reality into the picture.
His next move, he knew, should be to phone Hammersmith. That would be proper and legal, even though it might be like the first step into quicksand. Or maybe he should get out of the apartment and make an anonymous phone call to the police, thus remaining as uninvolved as possible. That would be the safe thing, the Nudger thing to do.
But he didn’t have to make up his mind immediately. He could look around the apartment and try to learn something. It was a good time for the detective to detect. Thinking that way, he knew for sure that he’d leave and make the anonymous phone call—at least a part of him already knew it.
What he was doing now was staring at Mirabelle’s feet. One of her sequined, open-toed shoes was missing. He glanced around and saw it near the wall on the other side of the room, where it must have been flung during her struggle with her attacker.
It hadn’t been much of a struggle, Nudger decided. A throw pillow had been knocked off the sofa, and one of the white leather chairs was propped sideways against a small glass-topped table. There was a sprung, empty leather attaché case on the floor alongside the table. Mirabelle, the petite beauty, hadn’t lasted long once the attack began. There was no blood visible anywhere other than beneath the body. He imagined she’d run about the room trying to elude her assailant, and when he’d caught up with her, he’d killed her quickly near the spot where she’d fallen. Nudger found himself glad she probably hadn’t suffered. He wasn’t sure why; he hadn’t known the woman, and she’d slept with scum like King Chambers.
A faint sound made the back of his neck feel as if a carpet of ants were moving across it. He rubbed his hand over it and tried to quell the creepy sensation, all the time backing toward the door.
The sound came again.
A low moan. One of pain, of helplessness.
Feeling less threatened, Nudger edged forward. Again he heard the sound. He crept to an Archway leading to a short hall and stood listening. When the moan came again, he was sure it was from the nearest room on his left.
The room’s door was open. Wishing he weren’t afraid of guns and had one with him, he moved into the hall and peered inside.
It was a large bathroom, mostly pink and gray tile. The fixtures were gray marble, the plumbing gold. Everything was bathed in pale fluorescent light. On the floor was a torn plastic shower curtain, white with a pattern of gray and dark brown.
No, not brown actually, but a red so deep that it looked brown. The color was the result of blood smeared over the curtain.
Nudger looked in the medicine cabinet mirror and saw King Chambers nude. and lying in the bathtub. Chambers was smeared with the same color that was on the shower curtain. One of his legs was draped over the side of the tub, as if he’d tried to climb out but hadn’t been able to muster the strength. The leg was smeared with blood like the rest of him. He opened his eyes halfway and saw Nudger in the mirror.
“Well, don’t you have some balls,” he said admiringly. His head didn’t move bu
t his gaze flicked downward. “I wonder if I still got mine.”
Nudger stepped forward. He saw that the bottom of the tub was a soup of blood and water. Fresh blood was seeping slowly from the slash wounds on Chambers’ body. He understood why Chambers hadn’t the strength to work his way out of the tub.
“I was taking a shower when the bastard came at me,” he said in a whisper.
Nudger said, “Mirabelle’s in the other room, on the floor.”
Chambers might have shrugged, as if that hardly concerned him. In the gray tub, he looked pale as bleached bone. “It was a big guy. Crazy.” Something rattled deep, deep in his throat. “Musta been hired by that double-crossing asshole Rand. He kept saying Luanne’s father was getting even, all the time working on me with the blade.”
“What do you mean, Rand double-crossed you?”
Chambers actually smiled. “Some detective you are. Rand engineered a major drug deal with a Central American cartel. Deal went sour because Luanne fucked up. Product was stopped at the border. Some people went down hard.”
Nudger saw a portable phone on the toilet tank. He got it and dialed 911, gave them Mirabelle’s address, and said a man was badly hurt. When the emergency operator asked his identity, he gave King Chambers’ name.
“Too late for nine-one-one,” Chambers said.
“Maybe. Tell me more about this drug deal that went bad.”
“I been laying here a long time, listening to my blood trickle down the drain.”
The phone rang. Nudger knew who it was. He lifted it and repeated his information to the 911 operator, who’d phoned back to authenticate his call before dispatching emergency vehicles. Nudger told her he’d stay at the scene. Well, he was pretending to be King Chambers, and the real Chambers would stay at the scene.
Nudger hung up the phone and laid it back on the smooth gray lid of the toilet tank. “The drug deal,” he reminded Chambers.
“Never mind that. Too complicated to talk about, and I haven’t got that much talk left in me.”
“You said the man who did this to you was big. How else did he look?”
“Mean. Outa control mean.” Chambers’ voice was getting weaker. His paleness and his skeletal bone structure made him appear already gone.
“You never saw him before?”
“Never. He was heavyset but not fat. Thinning red hair. Arms thick as telephone poles.”
Nudger didn’t want to believe it. The ants were back at the nape of his neck, beneath his skin this time. “Did he have any tattoos?”
“Some. On his arms. One was an anchor, maybe. Couldn’t tell you about the others. Too busy trying to get the knife away from him. Some kinda fucking hunting knife. He had me twice under the ribs before I even knew what was going on. Bastard cut me so deep.” His tone had suddenly changed to that of a child about to ask for a wound to be kissed and so, healed. Then the hopelessness returned to his eyes as he remembered he was beyond childhood and beyond healing forever.
Nudger knew he had to get out soon. “What about Aaron?”
“What about him?”
“You kill him?”
Chambers closed his eyes and didn’t answer. He wasn’t the sort who’d feel the need for a deathbed confession. Or maybe a bathtub didn’t lend itself to that kind of thing.
“Chambers?”
“You Catholic, Nudger? You got a key to heaven?”
“No. Why?”
Nudger stared at Chambers. There was no longer any discernible rise and fall of his chest, no longer the desperate faint whisper of breathing. All Nudger heard was the trickle of water-thinned blood finding its way down the drain. It made a regular ticking sound, like time passing.
Then he heard distant sirens.
He backed out of the bathroom and hurried across the living room, not looking at Mirabelle. As he left the apartment, he wiped the doorknob with the bottom of his shirt to smear his prints, realizing as he did so that he was tampering with evidence in a homicide. It had suddenly become doubly important that he get out of the building without being seen. He wished now he’d simply played by the rules and phoned Hammersmith, then put up with the complications, maybe even the suspicion, the hard line Springer was sure to take with him.
The elevator seemed to take forever reaching the lobby. Nudger kept swallowing, feeling as if he might vomit.
The sirens were deafening as he crossed the foyer and pushed opened the door to the street. He made himself slow down, walk normally. Though he saw no one around, he felt as if a thousand eyes were on him as he opened the black iron gate, strolled past the unconcerned stone wolfhounds, and crossed the street to where the Granada squatted like a rusty safe haven in the sun.
The car’s engine failed to start the first time.
It started on the second try, though. Nudger almost broke the ignition key twisting it to get the damned thing to kick over and power him away from there.
The motor clunked and sputtered as he fed it too much gas. Then it evened out and and continued to run, just as he was about to have a heart attack.
The sirens were screaming in his ears like taunting banshees as he drove to the intersection and turned the corner.
He’d driven only a few blocks when he had to pull to the curb while an ambulance and two police cars roared and wailed past, traveling in the opposite direction.
Instead of steering out into the flow of traffic again, Nudger sat there with the Granada’s engine idling, sweating in the hot glare of sun blazing through the windows. The things his job brought him, he thought. He tried not to get involved in these kinds of cases, knowing it wouldn’t be much different from when he was in the police department. Although it was possible to know too much about people, you still could never know enough.
He should have figured it out a long time ago. Norva had mentioned that Luanne’s real father had joined the Marines. Bobber Beane had a Marine anchor insignia tattooed on his arm. Bobber, Norva’s cousin. Well, maybe it wasn’t all that unusual in a place like Possum Run.
Nudger was sure that Bobber had killed Mirabelle and Chambers, and probably Aaron, and that he was Luanne Rand’s biological father.
CHAPTER 33
Nudger thought he understood. Luanne had soured a major drug deal, possibly by talking too much to the wrong party, so Chambers had instructed Aaron to make her pay with her life. Probably Chambers had seen it as a business decision, to guarantee future employee dedication. Norva had attempted to kill Dale Rand, and that made her a perfect patsy for the Luanne murder. Chambers had no way of knowing she was Luanne’s mother. When he’d found out, he realized that eventually Norva would escape conviction and the case would remain open, so he deemed it wise to silence Aaron permanently.
After Aaron’s death, Chambers probably thought he had control of the situation, when along came Bobber Beane. He’d known from the beginning that Norva hadn’t killed her own daughter, and he was the one who’d originally tipped off Norva that Luanne was involved with the wrong people in St. Louis. If he’d known that, he probably knew about the aborted drug deal, and he’d figured out that King Chambers was Luanne’s murderer. So Bobber had paid Chambers a visit and worked his revenge, lost his temper, first with Mirabelle, then with Chambers.
It was possible that Norva Beane, Nudger’s one and only client at the moment, knew nothing about what Bobber had done, possible that she was guilty of no crime other than taking a shot at Dale Rand. Possible.
Nudger decided to visit Rand and lay out enough of what he knew so that Rand would fully realize Norva hadn’t killed Luanne. Maybe Rand would somehow get the police to ease up on their search for her. Then Nudger could locate her, or she would come to him, and he could put her in touch with Gideon Schiller. The savvy attorney could convince her to surrender herself to the law, and if she did know anything about what Bobber had done, to testify against him when he was caught. It was the only way for her to go now, Nudger knew, cut a deal so that charges against her would be dropped in return for
her cooperation. She had a chance to walk away clean. She was his client and she was in deep water, and he needed to guide her in the direction of a life preserver.
He steered the Granada through a McDonald’s and ate a Big Mac and fries for lunch as he drove toward Ladue. His stomach didn’t approve of food on the run and let him know about it, so he chomped a couple of antacid tablets for dessert.
A black and orange Monarch butterfly was flapping around the shrubbery as Nudger made his way to the porch of the luxury house that cost more than he had probably earned in his lifetime. The butterfly got snagged in the thorny branches of one of the bushes. It beat its wings with a frantic and rhythmic speed. Monarchs migrated by the thousands to some remote place in Mexico, Nudger had read. This one had wandered into hostile territory, if it was indeed migrating. He didn’t know what time of year the delicate and beautiful insects made their journey to Mexico.
As he watched, the butterfly tore itself free, but it didn’t seem to be flying with the same elegant ease.
Sydney Rand answered his knock and stood silently, beautiful and delicate like the injured Monarch, only faded. She was wearing a pink robe and fuzzy pink slippers. Her eyes were pink, too. And not very focused. The gin on her breath explained why.
She peered at Nudger from the dim interior of the big house and said, “You work for that horrible woman.”
“Yes. Is your husband home, Mrs. Rand?”
“Offish.”
“Pardon me?”
“At the offish, downtown. He’s always at the offish. He’ll live in hish offish every goddamn day till Labor Day, is what he told me.”
She was obviously very drunk, and he knew he shouldn’t take advantage of her condition, but Nudger sensed opportunity here. “Why Labor Day?”
She stepped back and appraised him. “You don’t know?”
