by John Lutz
The man turned and gave him a long look. He had bushy dark eyebrows and high cheekbones. He would have been craggily handsome if it weren’t for a skinny kind of meanness in his features.
“She’s not home,” he said, jerking his head toward Claudia’s door. “I’ve been knocking for five minutes.”
“I see,” Nudger said, not knowing what else to say.
The man noticed Nudger’s discomfort and stared at him with new interest. “You her boyfriend?”
Nudger followed his detective’s instincts. “Yes, I am.”
“I’m her husband,” the man said.
Ho, boy! Nudger’s stomach went into a spasm and made a sound like a cat meowing.
The man narrowed one eye and took a step toward Nudger, his suit coat open and flapping as if there were a breeze in the stifling hall. Or as if he were prepared for quick-draw gunplay, his holster in easy reach.
“You tell her when she gets home that I was here,” he said. “And that I’m leaving town with the kids and she can’t see them this weekend.” He pointed a slender forefinger as if he could shoot lightning from it. “You got that?”
“Got it,” Nudger said, trying to keep calm and size up what was happening, not having much success doing either.
The man clenched overdeveloped, bunchy jaw muscles, then strode past him and down the stairs. Nudger stood listening to his echoing, receding footfalls on the wooden steps, then heard the vacuumy clatter of the vestibule door opening and closing.
Nudger looked at 4D’s closed door, its layered enamel cracked like the door to C. Davis’s apartment, then rapped his knuckles on it three times, hard.
He stood stiffly, waiting.
No answer. No sound from the other side of the door. No hint of movement behind the peephole. No one home.
Maybe it was just as well, he thought, looking at his watch. He was sure now that this was Claudia’s apartment. Claudia Bettencourt’s. He repeated her full name to himself. Say it often enough and it became musical. Like Greta Boechner’s, the girl he had loved in high school.
He knocked again on the door, in case she was home and for some reason hadn’t heard his first knock.
Still no reply. He backed away from the door and started walking down the narrow hall. He would return this afternoon and try again to see Claudia Bettencourt.
On the way down the stairs, he waved again to the wife of C. Davis, who was standing staunchly outside her door staring. But he didn’t take time to stop and chat. He was in a hurry. It was almost eleven-thirty, and he had a noon appointment with a nightline Romeo named Jock at Twin Oaks Mall.
FIFTEEN
Nudger took up his position near the Twin Oaks Mall fountain and waited. Between twelve and twelve-thirty, he saw four blond men wearing dark slacks and beige sport jackets. All of them could be ruled out for one reason or another as Jenine’s murderer, and none of them appeared to be waiting for someone.
It occurred to him that the description Jeanette had given him was exceptionally vague for the basis of a rendezvous of strangers. For the first time, he wondered if Jeanette was playing their game totally within the rules he’d laid down. She was a manipulator, like her mother, and might act out of some devious scheme of her own, or only for the satisfaction of control over other people. Nudger had met other compulsive manipulators. High-level corporate executives, politicians, and tournament chess players usually had that kind of streak in them.
And it ran like a broad, deep current in the Boyington women.
Nudger craned his neck and glanced up and down the mall. Other than a young salesclerk lethargically applying a squeegee to the display window of a shoe store, there wasn’t a blond man in sight. Nudger let himself relax.
He found it restful sitting in the cool indoor mall, listening to the gentle splashing of the fountain and watching the shoppers walk past. There was a controlled, protective atmosphere in a large shopping mall. It was a practical place of constant temperature, where rain never fell but where flowers and ornamental trees flourished. Inside every store’s wide entrance were people paid to be polite, and almost every facet of suburban life was catered to here. There were several restaurants, a bank branch, drugstores, dime stores, department stores, and specialty stores. Bookstores, hardware stores, and software stores. Card shops, food shops, and antique shoppes. Merchandise for everyone from birth through all the stages of life. Everything but a funeral parlor. Shopping malls wanted no truck with death.
Nudger’s pelvis felt as if it were grafted onto the hard concrete bench he was sitting on. It was twelve-forty, and still no blond Jock. Jeanette had been stood up again; Nudger had waited long enough.
He got to his feet and dodged a pert young woman pushing a baby stroller, then joined the stream of shoppers walking toward the escalators. From a shop that seemed to sell only electric organs, an elaborate but repetitive beat was drifting into the vast mall. It sounded like someone playing drums that wheezed, but it was kind of catchy and Nudger noticed that most of the shoppers were unconsciously walking to its relentless jaunty rhythm.
Nudger stopped suddenly. A man walking behind him bumped him, mumbled a “ ’Scuse me” and walked on, giving a little skip to recapture the beat.
Moving over against a display window, so he would no longer be an impediment in the flow of shoppers, Nudger stared across the mall.
There was Hugo Rumbo, standing next to a bullet-shaped trash receptacle, looking at Nudger with his dreamy half-smile and squeezing his rubber ball in perfect rhythm with the wheezing organ music. As Nudger watched, Rumbo slid the ball into his jacket pocket and drew out an orange. He held the orange over the trash container and smiled more broadly at Nudger as he slowly squeezed it, compressing it to juice and pulp that oozed from between his fingers to drop into the container. Then he wiped his fingers with a handkerchief very deliberatively, never looking away from Nudger. Here was an unmistakable message not of good cheer.
Nudger’s stomach was tight, but he felt safe in the mall, surrounded by hundreds of people, standing right in front of B. Dalton. He walked across the red synthetic stone floor to where Hugo Rumbo towered motionless.
Rumbo hadn’t expected that. His novocaine smile disappeared and he tried to look mean. He only managed ugly, but he managed that very well.
“I could show you how to peel one of those,” Nudger offered.
Rumbo’s little eyes darted around like blips on a video game, taking in the throng of shoppers. “You better watch out I don’t peel you,” he grunted.
“Did Agnes Boyington send you to follow me?” Nudger asked. He tried but couldn’t imagine being peeled.
“Nobody sent me anyplace. This is a free society. I can go anywhere I want, and if it happens to be where you are, that’s just too bad.”
Nudger crossed his arms and looked up at Rumbo. “How long did it take you to memorize that?”
Rumbo crossed his own leg-sized arms and sneered. “You’re pretty brave here, Nudger, with all these people around us.”
“I’m not pretty brave anywhere,” Nudger said. This conversation was stirring playground memories. “Tell Agnes she shouldn’t have gone to the police and lied about me. And that you following me around isn’t going to make me change my mind about her proposition.”
Rumbo flexed his bulging biceps by way of a shrug. “I don’t know nothin’ about any of that stuff. You tell her whatever you want her to know.”
“I already have. She doesn’t seem willing to accept it. She’s a headstrong woman, your employer. Or is she more than just your employer?”
Rumbo didn’t respond to Nudger’s probe. He got his rubber ball out of his pocket, looked for a moment as if he might ask Nudger to play catch, then hunched his powerful shoulders and began his rhythmic squeezing, working the red ball as if it were a tiny detached heart that he had to keep pumping.
“The kind of people who wear white gloves usually have flip sides,” Nudger said. Silence. In, out, in, out went the ball. Talki
ng to Rumbo was some chore. Nudger decided to be direct. “Do you sleep with Agnes Boyington?”
Rumbo stopped working the agonized ball. His glittering little eyes widened in shock as color rose on his bull neck. “That ain’t a very nice thing to say, Nudger.”
“I didn’t say it, I asked it.”
Now Rumbo was shuffling his huge feet in embarrassment. Like Agnes Boyington’s, his was a puritanical heart, capable of limitless cruelty for a cause thought just. That really was the thing about the massive and ineffectual Rumbo that frightened Nudger.
“Same thing,” Rumbo mumbled accusingly.
“Maybe so,” Nudger conceded, still wondering if what he’d suggested happened to be true. The prospect was enough to make the imagination run riot. But Rumbo probably would have responded to the question the same way whatever his relationship with Agnes Boyington.
“I like you less every time I see you,” Rumbo said, using bluff to regain his composure. “But that’s okay.”
“Why is it okay?”
“ ’Cause eventually the time’ll come when I’m gonna enjoy your company, Nudger, but you ain’t gonna enjoy mine.” Rumbo flipped the ball into the air, caught it one-handed, and walked ponderously away in the direction of Sears.
Nudger thought that, considering Hugo Rumbo’s obviously limited mental capacity, his message had been succinctly put. No doubt he and Nudger shared a piece of the troubled future.
Trying not to think about that future in graphic detail, Nudger turned and resumed walking toward the parking lot.
Halfway there, he noticed that he was walking too fast and made himself slow down. He had places to go, but since Jock hadn’t shown up and occupied his time, there was no need to hurry.
Fools didn’t always rush in.
SIXTEEN
Nudger drove out to Westport, a modem business community five miles beyond the western city limits. Most of the buildings had been constructed ten or fifteen years ago—brick, squarish single-and multiple-story office buildings and warehouses, many of them still sitting vacant with FOR LEASE signs in front of them. There were also a high-priced pseudo-English Tudor-style shopping mall and apartments, on the western edge of Westport next to the interstate highway. The developers had wanted to attract all manner of businesses, and had. Westport was a profitable venture, with a number of thriving companies located here, not a few of which would thrive only briefly before being forced into liquidation or relocation by the fastrising rents. Law of the three-piece-suit jungle.
Several of the streets in Westport were named after astronauts. Javers’ Tire-O-Rama was on Grissom Drive, in a low tan building that was shared with an electronics distributor. Nudger parked in the freshly blacktopped parking lot and listened to the soft tar suck at the soles of his shoes as he walked to the east entrance.
He found that he’d opened the wrong door and was in the warehouse. A sign proclaimed that Javers’ Tire-O-Rama made direct retail sales here at discount prices. An equally large sign read MOUNT YOUR OWN AND SAVE! Tires were piled high and leaning crookedly in hundreds of stacks, fitted into and on top of metal tier racks. Against one wall rose a mountain of used tires. The acrid, oily smell of all that rubber was overpowering.
A hefty little man with a clipboard and an air of authority came over and directed Nudger to the door of the office.
Nudger thanked him and shoved open a green swinging door. He found himself in a large room containing an even dozen desks in two rows of six. Behind each desk sat someone working diligently, either poring over papers or talking on the phone. The oily rubber smell was as strong here as in the warehouse. It had probably permeated the entire building.
At the far end of the room, near the entrance Nudger should have come in, sat a receptionist at a curved counter. Nudger walked over and smiled down at her. She was a startlingly pretty dark-haired girl with rimless glasses and a turned-up nose. There was a decal of a tire with arms and legs and a happy hubcap face on her IBM Selectric.
“How long does it take to get used to the smell?” Nudger asked.
“What smell?”
“Never mind. Is Mr. Javers in?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. My name is Nudger.”
She rang her boss’s office with apparent trepidation.
“Tell him it concerns Grace Valpone,” Nudger added.
The receptionist did, then hung up the phone.
“Mr. Javers says to come right in,” she told him. She seemed relieved that Javers had agreed to see Nudger. “Through that door on the left.”
As Nudger crossed the room he overheard some of the phone conversations. Most of the people behind the desks were salespeople, using WATS lines to coax orders from out-of-town retail tire outlets.
Javers stood up from behind his desk when Nudger entered. He wasn’t a very tall man, though well proportioned inside an expensive gray suit. He was about fifty, balding, with jet-black wings of hair that were meant to disguise protruding ears. Though his complexion was swarthy, there was an underlying pastiness to it. A small, neatly trimmed mustache writhed in an attempted smile that evolved into more of a grimace. Grief had made inroads on his face, lending it a wise but helpless expression that might soon become permanent.
Nudger introduced himself and shook Javers’ hand.
“I thought you were from the police,” Javers said, sitting back down behind his desk.
“I used to be,” Nudger said. “Right now I’m working for a woman whose twin sister was murdered in much the same way as your fiancée. I’m sorry to intrude on such short notice, but I thought it would be a good idea if I asked you a few questions.”
The mention of Grace Valpone’s murder brought a momentary look of deep anguish to Javers’ face. Nudger wouldn’t have blamed the man for asking him to leave. Misery didn’t really love company.
But Javers had as much control over his grief as he had over his employees conducting business as usual in the next room. He leaned forward over his wide desk. There was nothing on the gleaming surface of the desk except a pen set, a small Lucite clock, and an ashtray ; Javers hadn’t been hard at work. “Do you think the same man committed both murders?” he asked.
“It’s an odds-on possibility,” Nudger told him. “There are parallels. There are also inconsistencies.”
“If you think one case might have a bearing on the other,” Javers said, “I’ll be glad to tell you anything you want to know. I want more than anything to see Grace’s killer ...” He let the words fade away, then swallowed hard and bowed his head. Light glanced off his taut, bald crown between the black wings of hair.
“I understand,” Nudger said. He felt like walking over and patting Javers on the shoulder. But he didn’t. Sympathy from a stranger was sometimes more confusing than comforting. He wondered how he’d be able to ask Javers what he needed to know.
“I want the man caught and punished,” Javers said in a level voice, sitting up straighter. He had himself back in check.
“Had Ms. Valpone recently mentioned anything that struck you as unusual?” Nudger asked. He knew the police had already asked Javers the same question, but sometimes people overlooked things. Sometimes people answered the same question differently.
“No, she said nothing at all unusual.”
“Was her behavior in any way out of the ordinary?”
“Grace’s behavior right up until ... she was found, seemed perfectly normal. Of course, I hadn’t seen her for almost a week. I was in Honolulu, at a convention.”
“What did she think of you going off to Hawaii alone for two weeks?”
Javers smiled sadly. “She didn’t mind. I asked her to go with me, but she refused. She wanted to wait until after the marriage for that sort of thing. Grace didn’t mind being thought of as old-fashioned, Mr. Nudger. In fact, she didn’t mind at all what other people thought about her, as long as she felt she was doing the right thing. It was one of the reasons I loved her.”
�
��Then things were going well between the two of you.”
“Very well. We were both in love for the second time in our lives, enjoying it more than the first time.” The acute anguish gouged its way across Javers’ face again. “Romance tempered by maturity has a sweeter, more lasting quality than youthful love.”
“I guess it would.” Nudger paced nearer to the desk and wiped his perspiring hands on his pants legs. “Did Ms. Valpone ever mention any late-night phone conversations?”
Javers appeared puzzled. “Conversations with whom?”
“Anyone.” Nudger tried a smile, couldn’t tell from his side of it how well it worked. “It’s probably nothing, Mr. Javers, but it might tie in with something else.”
Javers accepted that weak explanation for Nudger’s question. “No,” he said, “she wasn’t one of those women who enjoy talking for long hours on the phone, either day or night.”
Nudger asked a few more questions, none of them really pertinent, all of them polite. It wouldn’t hurt to sow a little goodwill, in case the police objected to his talking to Javers. If the police ever learned of it. Besides, Nudger liked Javers, and talking about Grace Valpone seemed to provide some sort of relief for the man. People didn’t lose fiancées the way they did socks in dryers.
When Javers had wound down somewhat, Nudger thanked him and shook hands again, offering his condolences and meaning it. Javers got up from behind the desk and saw him out, assuring Nudger he’d do anything possible to cooperate in the investigation, so please to call on him. Nudger thanked him again and left Javers’ Tire-O-Rama, using the right door this time, nodding somberly to the pretty receptionist with the insensitive nose.
What Nudger had learned here was that Grace Valpone by all outward appearances simply wasn’t a candidate for the nighttime lines. Her future had been in order, her nights of loneliness numbered.
Or maybe there was a side to her that Javers didn’t know about. That no one knew about. A hidden, agonized side. Wasn’t that true of most of the nightline people?
He hurried across the blacktop parking lot to his car, breathing deeply of air that didn’t smell like new rubber. The humid summer day seemed to have gotten ten degrees hotter during the short time he’d been inside the building. A bead of perspiration zigzagged crazily, like a disoriented insect, down his rib cage.
