Thicker Than Blood (Alo Nudger Series)

by John Lutz

  He shook his head, smiling.

  She smiled back. With one side of her face, anyway. “Well, neither do I. Some big kinda deal he’s got cooking. Hish Labor Day venture, I heard him call it once. Businesh—ess. He lives for business in hish offish.”

  “He doesn’t live for you?” Nudger the agitator.

  “Hah! Not for me. Not for Luanne, either, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Nudger.”

  “He doesn’t live for Luanne or me or anybody but himself. Dale’s what you’d call a selfish man, through and through. It’s the buck. He lives for the almighty fucking dollar, and then for the next dollar.” She was focused and angry now, not lisping.

  “Mrs. Rand, I’m working even harder than the police to find out who killed Luanne. I know for sure Norva Beane didn’t do it. But I need more proof. Can I come in, examine Luanne’s room?”

  “You mean search through her things?”

  “No, of course not. I only want to look around and try to get a better idea of what kind of girl Luanne was.”

  “She was a damned fine girl. Confused, sure. But fine. The best.” Her face contorted for a moment as if she might begin to cry, but she stiffened and gained control of herself.

  Nudger flashed her the old sweet smile and squeezed past her into the house. She didn’t attempt to stop him, but she almost fell down when he brushed her hip. She was even drunker than he’d first thought. Well, why not? Her adopted daughter was dead and her husband had been shot at. Here she was in the land of June Cleaver and living a horrible, lurid soap opera.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Nudger said, already inside the cool house and standing as if he’d taken root.

  She blinked twice, slowly, then closed the door to the bright heat outside. “No. Why should I mind? Nothing to hide. Not me.” She teetered across the living room in her oversized slippers, almost stumbling twice. Leaning on a mahogany credenza in a corner, she poured herself a drink from a gin bottle that was almost empty. As if suddenly seeing herself in the role of hostess, she held the bottle out toward Nudger and raised her eyebrows. He shook his head no, and she finished her drink in three swallows and emptied the bottle into her glass, then added some ice from a silver bucket. “More where that came from,” she said. Nudger didn’t know if she meant ice or gin.

  “Is Luanne’s room upstairs?” he asked.

  “Sure. Top of the shteps, to the right.” She tried to walk away from the credenza but made it only a few feet and then stopped. For a few seconds she swayed dangerously, then she caught herself by leaning on the back of a dainty gray chair with elaborate wood arms. She took another sip from her glass and sat down in the chair. “You go on and help yourself,” she said, not looking at him, losing concentration.

  Nudger thanked her and went up the wide, curved stairway.

  Seeing Luanne’s room wasn’t really what he had in mind, but while he was in the house he thought he might as well take a peek. In case Sydney quizzed him when he went back downstairs. Assuming she’d be conscious. She was working hard to crawl into the temporary refuge of the bottle. A trap, like so many refuges; easier to get in than out.

  It was a typical teenage girl’s room; the normal side of Luanne had lived here, not the doper and dealer and probable victim of incest. Everything seemed blue and white and fluffy, with a flowered, puffy comforter on the bed, stuffed animals lining the windowsill like helpless observers of inevitable tragedy. There was a Tom Cruise poster on one wall, a poster of a fierce-looking black man with dreadlocks and a guitar on another. A cross-eyed, stuffed bear was propped between perfume bottles and the mirror on the dresser, clasping a sign lettered “Just Say Yo!”

  Nudger decided Yo, he’d have a closer look, since he’d made it this far. He might not have the chance again.

  Luanne’s dresser drawers revealed nothing unusual other than a pack of Zig-Zag paper for rolling joints. Well, even that wasn’t unusual these days. In a corner was a mound of clothes, wadded pink socks, panties, and a pair of jeans, as if she’d hastily changed outfits and walked out a few minutes ago. Sydney must know she had to clean up after Luanne for the last time and hadn’t yet brought herself to do it. Nudger felt a knife-thrust of compassion for her, along with guilt for what he was doing.

  Still ...

  He left Luanne’s room and looked into the rest of the upstairs rooms. He didn’t find what he was searching for. Dale Rand’s den or home offish—office.

  He went downstairs and saw that Sydney was still slumped in the dainty chair, asleep. Gin had spilled from her glass, now empty and tilted in her hand, and darkened the lap of the pink housecoat. An ice cube was melting in the fuzz of one of her oversized slippers. Standing quietly, motionless, Nudger could hear her faint snoring. He should leave now, he knew. It was the only honorable thing to do.

  Still . . .

  A few minutes of cautious exploring was all he needed to find Rand’s office. It was a large room with dark paneling and maroon drapes and carpet. In the center of the office was a large mahogany desk. Near it was a table holding a computer and printer. The desk was bare except for a fax machine with a built-in phone, a brass lamp with a black shade, and a sleek gray calculator with an intimidating number of keys.

  The heavy drapes made the room dim. Nudger switched on the lamp and conducted a quick search of the desk drawers.

  Most of what he found he didn’t understand. Stock and mutual-fund information, mystifying charts and graphs. In a large bottom drawer was a Rolodex with hundreds of names and numbers. Nudger recognized none of them. He looked under W. No Horace Walling. Tucked beneath the Rolodex itself he found a dozen or so sheets of paper, shoved toward the back of the drawer. He pulled them out and examined them. At first he thought they were confirmations of sales or purchases of stock; he’d received something like them from his own broker when he’d recently become a man of commerce. Then he saw that the forms were receipts for something called “puts,” a term foreign to Nudger. They were all dated within the past month. He also saw the dollar amounts. Without even using the calculator on the desk, he thumbed through the forms and figured they added up to over three hundred thousand dollars.

  Rand apparently intended to make big money out of these in some way. Money he probably needed to pay drug debts, or to finance what Sydney had referred to as the Labor Day venture.

  Nudger switched on the computer and tried to get the thing going properly, punching this key and that, attempting to follow the cryptic instructions on the glowing monitor. It was as if Frankenstein’s monster had somehow wandered into IBM headquarters. Nudger knew almost nothing about computers, but barely enough to come to the conclusion that some kind of password was needed to get into the thing’s brain, and he didn’t know the word. Or much of anything else about the humming, flickering object of progress before him. He switched it off before he caught a virus.

  After leaving the computer, he wrote on the back of one of his business cards the names of the stocks on the forms in the desk drawer. They included his own stocks, Synpac and Fortune Fashions. This was something he had double reason to find out about.

  He returned everything to the way it had been when he’d entered the office, then walked softly through the quiet house, back to the living room.

  Sydney hadn’t moved. She was snoring louder, though, and her glass had dropped to the carpet. The ice cube, which had been caught in the fuzz of her slipper, had melted completely and left dewlike drops on the pink fibers. She would sleep the alcoholic’s deep and dreamless slumber for hours.

  Nudger stood for a moment watching her, a woman limp and remorseless in her boozy escape, which could only be temporary, and carried its own eventual, terrible cost. He didn’t really know Sydney Rand, but he knew she didn’t deserve what had happened to her already and what would happen next. No one did.

  On some kind of inane, solemn impulse, he gently kissed her forehead before he left.

  Her husband wouldn’t mind.

  CHAPTER 34
>
  Nudger phoned Hammersmith and told him about his conversation with Sydney Rand, but not about his search of Dale Rand’s desk.

  “It could be this ‘Labor Day venture’ refers to a major drug deal that’s going to go down during the holiday weekend,” he said.

  Hammersmith agreed. “That might have something to do with Chambers’ murder.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  “Your friend Bobber Beane might be heavily mixed up in the drug scene.”

  “As a user, maybe, or even a small-time dealer. But Bobber didn’t impress me as smart or ambitious. He’s not a planner. He’s more the big, old country boy who muddles along in life buying lottery tickets and looking forward to deer season.” As he spoke, it occurred to Nudger that he wasn’t much of a planner himself. Of course, now he’d invested in the future with stocks. And maybe someday soon he’d go on a diet and become a new, sleek Nudger.

  “You only got a snap impression, Nudge. That can be deceptive.”

  “I don’t think so, in Bobber’s case. He’s not the sort who thinks with his head.”

  Then Hammersmith dropped his own piece of news on Nudger. “Dale Rand’s disappeared.”

  “He couldn’t have. I told you I talked with Sydney earlier today. She said he was at his office.”

  “He came home around four o’clock, went to his home office to do some work, and seems to have been abducted from there. Sydney was taking a nap, she said, but she heard what might have been a scuffle coming from the office, and when she went to see what was going on, Dale Rand was gone. His computer was still on, a lamp had been knocked to the floor, and the French doors leading out to a garden were wide open. She called the police.”

  Nudger sat back and tried to digest that information.

  “What do you make of it, Nudge?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What Massinger makes of it is that your client Norva sneaked through the wooded area and shrubs behind the house and abducted Rand at gunpoint.”

  “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “But it doesn’t sound wrong,” Hammersmith said, and hung up the phone.

  Nudger and Claudia were seated in a booth at Shoney’s restaurant, down the street from his office. Nudger took Claudia to dinner there often. They were having the salad bar this evening, which was the cheapest meal on the menu. They always had the salad bar. It was understood.

  Nudger said, “Do you know what a put is?”

  Claudia finished chewing a bite of cold pasta and said, “Like in golf?”

  “No, that’s a putt. A put is when you pay for the right to sell a stock at a certain price by a certain date. So if the stock’s price goes way up, you lose the relatively small amount you’ve paid for the put, but that’s okay because you’ve made more on the stock itself. And if the stock falls, the put allows you to sell it at the higher, old price and not be too badly hurt financially. That’s why some people buy puts, as a hedge, just in case the market falls drastically.”

  Claudia said, “Who told you this?”

  “Benny Flit.”

  She took a sip of her iced tea and looked quizzically at him over the glass’s rim.

  “He’s my broker. I mentioned him to you a few days ago.”

  “Oh.”

  Nudger told her about finding the receipts for puts in Dale Rand’s desk.

  She said, “So maybe Rand’s protecting himself in case the market falls.”

  “But he’s got a fortune invested in puts.”

  “Maybe he’s got an even larger fortune invested in stocks.”

  “Could be. But nobody’s that rich. Also, Benny says the stocks are all solid ones, and, if anything, they figure to go much higher. Two of them are the ones I own, Synpac and Fortune Fashions.”

  “Guided missiles and feather boas?”

  “Right.”

  She spread butter on a roll. “Get out of the market, Nudger.”

  “There’s no reason to do that. My stocks have low price/earnings ratios and sound management, and the interim and long-term outlooks are mostly on the upside.”

  “Get out while you can.”

  “That’s bad advice.”

  “Almost all advice seems that way, or it wouldn’t be advice.”

  “Anyway, you don’t know anything about dealing in securities.”

  “I know this: No one makes money in the market if his broker’s name is Benny.”

  “You’re an English teacher. You shouldn’t stereotype people like that.”

  The waitress refilled their iced tea glasses, then she hovered over the table and asked if everything was all right. Nudger could have told her a few things, but he simply nodded.

  When the waitress had moved on, he said, “All that money in puts strikes me as a desperate gamble on Rand’s part, unless he’s acting on illegal inside information.”

  “It’s also possible he’s speculating with his clients’ money. Maybe he suffered some unexpected losses and he’s struggling to pull even. You said he seems to have disappeared. Maybe he only made it look as if he’d been abducted, and he actually left on his own with whatever he could salvage from his shady dealings.”

  Nudger hadn’t considered that. It meant a new world of possibilities. “If Rand was secretly using his clients’ money to make his personal investments, maybe one of his clients found out about it and abducted him.”

  “That could be. But they’d be much more likely to report him and try to get their money back through litigation.”

  That made sense to Nudger. He added artificial sweetener to his iced tea, stirred, sipped. Just right. Cool on a hot night. “Benny said some of the papers in Rand’s desk were confirmations of short sales, too. Those are like puts.”

  “No, they aren’t,” Claudia said. “Selling short is when you sell shares of stock that you don’t yet own in the hope that they’ll go down in price by a certain date. If they do, you buy the shares at the cheaper price to cover your sale, and the difference is your profit. There are two ways to make money in the market: Buy low and sell high, in that order. Or sell high and buy low, in that order.”

  Nudger was amazed. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m repeating what my father told me, just before he lost the family fortune in the stock market. That’s why it’s painful for me to watch you.”

  “History doesn’t always repeat itself. Anyway, I’m not your father. And I don’t have a fortune to lose.”

  “My father didn’t either, actually. It was only a figure of speech.”

  Nudger reached across the table and touched her hand, smiling at her. “I’m still not your father.”

  Claudia slid her plate near his and used her fork to edge some of a lumpy white substance toward a clear space on his plate. “Want some boiled eggplant?”

  Nudger eyed the stuff with revulsion. It looked like something horrible that had been done to oysters. “No thanks. I’ve eaten enough. I’m not hungry.”

  “That never stopped you before, if something tasted good. You’re less impulsive now that you’ve become a creature of commerce. But maybe that’s one of the things you give up in order to get rich.”

  “I don’t expect to get rich in the stock market,” he told her, “just solidly middle class.”

  She stared at him. “Go ahead and have some,” she urged, scraping half of the pale stuff onto his plate. “It’ll make you smarter. It’s brain food.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “Eggplants aren’t very smart.”

  “They don’t have to be smart to make you smart. Besides, they’re only brain food when they’re boiled.”

  “When we leave here,” Nudger said, docilely eating the bland and slimy eggplant and staying on Claudia’s good side, “why don’t we go to your place? We could, uh ... forget about our worries for a while.”

  She used her fork to slide the other half of her eggplant onto his plate and said, “You’d better
eat the rest of this.”

  He did. He was that smart.

  CHAPTER 35

  Smart didn’t get him through the door. As he drove home after dropping Claudia off outside her apartment, Nudger thought about what she’d said in the restaurant. She made good sense, which was maybe the only annoying thing about her. Possibly he was in over his head, both in the stock market and in life.

  He was more than aware of his immediate predicament. He was working for a woman who was wanted for suspicion of murder, and now, partly because of him, she was possibly mixed up in the abduction of her dead daughter’s adoptive father. Or worse. Not to mention Bobber’s murder of King Chambers and Mirabelle.

  Nudger decided discretion was the better part of unemployment; he had no choice other than to go to the police with everything he knew.

  Not to Massinger, though. Or to that hostile little ferret Springer.

  Hammersmith.

  He’d talk to Hammersmith and then go to bed early, and with a clearer mind get a good night’s sleep.

  Claudia’s after-dinner kisses still at the top of his memory, he drove along steamy, darkening streets to his own more familiar but less exciting bed.

  As soon as he got inside his apartment, Nudger went to the phone and sat down to call the Third District before he changed his mind. His stomach was grinding and he was getting a headache. He hoped it wasn’t because of the eggplant Claudia had practically forced him to eat during dinner. Maybe he’d feel better after he’d talked to Hammersmith and unburdened himself. Confession, he knew, was sometimes a substitute for sex. He wondered if that vague but disturbing insight might be the result of the eggplant.

  He hadn’t quite touched the phone when it rang, startling him.

  He waited two more rings, composing himself, before he lifted the receiver and said hello.

  “Mr. Nudger. I been trying to call you all evening.”

  Norva! Nudger kept his tone matter-of-fact. “I was out to dinner, Norva. Then, uh, had some other things to do. Where are you?”

  “I can’t rightly say.”