Nightlines

I

A wind-driven sheet of rain hit Nudger's office window, making a fierce rattling sound, like something with claws clambering to get in. Sometimes being a private investigator wasn't so bad. This was just like being in a movie. Or a dream. Or a dream of a movie. Real atmosphere.

He looked across his desk at the young blonde seated calmly before him. She had one of those passive, finely boned faces that lend an otherwise plain woman a serene kind of near-beauty. Even beneath the thick raincoat that she hadn't removed, only unbuttoned, there was disturbingly evident a petite, shapely figure, lovely swell of breast, sleek turn of ankle. Nice, nice, nice.

But it was the face that Nudger remembered, the slanted gray eyes and neatly arched eyebrows, the short, haughty nose that belonged on a department-store mannequin. Then, when she introduced herself, her name struck the same note in his memory as had her face.

"I saw your picture in the paper last week," he told her. "Under it they said you were dead."

"Obviously, that wasn't me," she answered in a cool, level voice that matched her calm demeanor. "I'm Jeanette Boyington, the murder victim is my twin sister, Jenine."

Nudger picked up a pencil from his desk and uneasily nibbled on some number 2 lead. Jenine Boyington had been found in her Beale Street apartment with her throat slashed. That sort of thing inspired abject fear in Nudger.

"I think I should tell you," he said, "that it isn't a good idea to hire a private investigator to work on the same case that the police are trying to puzzle out."

"I'm sure you're correct," Jeanette Boyington said, "but if you'll agree to take on this job, I can assure you that you'll be approaching it from an angle entirely different from that of the police department's. There'll be no duplication of effort. If that weren't true, there'd be no reason for me to be here."

Nudger's nervous stomach gave a couple of strong kicks, cautioning him to disassociate himself now from this cool prospective client. There was an indefinable something about her. He remembered the time he'd been driving along Cabanne Avenue, in a rough section of town, and almost run over a kitten. He'd thought he'd struck it, but when he got out of the car he found a small bundle of black fur cowering against the curb, uninjured but immobilized with terror. Not knowing what to do with the kitten, which was without collar and tag, he'd put it in the car and driven a few blocks, when he saw a knot of boys playing on some tenement steps. He gave them the kitten and smugly thought he'd done everyone a good turn, but as he drove away he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw one of the boys place the kitten on the sidewalk with slow deliberation and then stamp on it.

Nudger had backed up the car in a rage. The boys magically disappeared in the way of preteen boys; the kitten remained sprawled dead on the pavement, its head grotesquely misshapen. Nudger didn't understand some people. The boy who had killed the kitten probably forgot the incident by the next evening. It had happened two years ago, and Nudger still remembered it. For some reason Jeanette Boyington had reminded him. He wasn't sure if that was because of the boy or the kitten.

"Do you know something the police don't, Miss Boyington?"

She aimed her perfect indomitable nose at Nudger and smiled without candle power. "Jeanette, please. And I should hope I know something the police don't. I know, for instance, that you're often underestimated, but very good at your job. A friend of my mother, Adelaide Lacy, recommended you. She said you helped her find out what happened to her sister."

"I wouldn't say I helped her," Nudger told Jeanette. "I merely confirmed her despair." He reflected that too many of his cases seemed to end that way.

The gray eyes that zeroed in on Nudger could have sunk the Titanic. And even as he sat there he knew he wouldn't change course.

There was, besides the obvious sexual attraction, something in Jeanette Boyington that tugged at Nudger even as it repelled. Her coldness suggested an isolation, a loneliness. A slow cancer of the psyche was loneliness. It was a disease that Nudger understood. He sympathized with Jeanette Boyington because of what he assumed must be her affliction. He felt that he should help her, almost as if he were duty- bound. Weren't they in the same leaky boat? He thought again of the Titanic.

"There are two reasons I'm telling this to you instead of to the police," Jeanette said. "One: I don't want anyone else to know what I'm going to share with you when I become your client. Two: The police would be skeptical of my theory."

"Theory?"

"That Jenine was the victim of a mass murderer operating in this city."

"Then where is the inevitable mass of victims?" Nudger asked flatly, determined not to be thrown.

"Lost," Jeanette said. "Lost in the overwhelming statistics; hundreds of people are murdered in this city each year. Lost because in each case it's obvious that the victim knew her killer, yet there is apparently no link between killer and victim for the law to latch on to."

"I couldn't help but notice you said apparently," Nudger told her. He began tapping the pencil point on the desk in time with the spastic twitching of his stomach, creating a new pattern of black dots on the old scarred wood. He studied the dots as if by chance they might impart some message. They might be as accurate as tea leaves.

"Jenine had a social life no one but she and I knew about," Jeanette said. She tilted back her head ever so slightly, seemed to feel cautiously around in her mind for words. "She was… into something unusual."

"Go on," Nudger said, an edge of curiosity in his voice.

Jeanette smiled with her lips closed, enigmatically, like a cold blond Mona Lisa. Then she said, "The rest will cost me. Are you hired, or do I look elsewhere for an investigator?"

Nudger could feel himself being reeled in, sensed the danger yet couldn't spit out the bait. He was intrigued. And he needed money badly, as usual. He watched Jeanette watch him. She appeared as sublimely amused as he was uneasy.

When he opened a desk drawer and got out a standard contract for her to sign, making her his client and saddling him with the power and obligation of confidentiality, she smiled again. This time he saw that her teeth were white and sharp.

As she glanced over the contract and dashed off her signature with a ballpoint pen, Nudger noticed her shoes, silver- blue high heels with black bows. His ex-wife, Eileen, often had worn a pair exactly like them. Another disquieting omen. He peeled the aluminum foil from the end of a fresh roll of antacid tablets and popped two of the chalky white disks into his mouth.

"Ulcer?" Jeanette asked, glancing at the roll of tablets as he chewed and countersigned.

"I don't know," Nudger said. "I'm afraid to see a doctor and find out."

"That's ridiculous."

"I'm interested in Jenine's social life," he said.

For all the expression they radiated, Jeanette's cool gray eyes might have been the glass orbs of a doll. "Of all Jenine's family and acquaintances, I'm the only one who knew that she liked men more than she should have. She confided in me because we were unusually close; we were twins. And because we were twins, she… well, she thought I might have the same inclinations." The slanted gray eyes shot icicles into Nudger. "I don't."

"Of course not." Message received. "Where did she meet these men?"

"On the lines."

Nudger rolled his cylinder of antacid tablets in a tight little circle on his desk. Rain slammed into the window again. He jumped. Jeanette didn't.

She explained: "During daylight hours there are several telephone numbers that phone company repairmen and installers use to test equipment. But in the late night and early morning hours, these lines are used by people who somehow get the numbers. They get to know each other without seeing the other party. Then maybe they make an appointment to meet somewhere, usually in a crowded public place, like a shopping mall. When they get there they look each other over as strangers, without being absolutely sure who they're looking at. If they like what they see, they make or accept overtures; if they don't see someone they want to get to know personally, they simply turn and walk away without making contact. It's nothing new; it's been going on in most big cities for years. There are people who've met through the lines and later married."

"Is using the lines legal?" Nudger asked.

"Technically, no. But the phone company puts up with what's going on. They don't use the lines during those hours anyway. And if they prosecuted these people, there would be nothing in it for them other than some bad publicity. People in trouble who need someone they can pour out their problems to, someone who can't even find out who they are, use the lines. Gays use them to meet partners. So do people like my sister."

For the first time Nudger glimpsed the agony within Jeanette, and it was a nailed-down and writhing thing that frightened him. How would a twin feel about the other twin's being murdered? Maybe a bit of Jeanette had died along with her sister. Maybe the half of the twins that survived became obsessed with retribution. Nudger decided that he was getting carried away and shook these metaphysical musings from his mind.

"There is in almost every large city a secret subculture of people who regularly talk on the lines," Jeanette told him, "people who usually are in no way connected in the daytime world. It's a desperate, troubled subculture, a lonely side of life that few people know exists. Jenine was part of it and it killed her."

"And you don't want the police to know Jenine used the lines."

"If the police were to know, then the family, and maybe everybody else, would find out. I don't want that to happen."

Nudger knew the police, knew the news media, here in St. Louis. He knew Jeanette was right. And she might be right about something else.

"What makes you think a mass killer of women is using the lines to meet his victims?" he asked.

"Another woman was murdered in her apartment last year, by someone the victim obviously knew and had entertained. Jenine was upset about it because she recognized the woman's name in the newspaper, and though they had never met, she knew her well through the lines. Using the lines, Jenine checked around and found out that there were at least three other female murder victims during the last three years who had regularly used the lines to meet partners. Two were slashed to death in bathtubs."

Nudger snapped an antacid tablet in half, then changed his mind and slipped both halves into his mouth and chewed. "For now," he said, "let's concentrate on Jenine. Which of the numbers did she use?"

"I don't know for sure. They all start with the prefix six- six-six, then the other four digits vary. And I don't know where Jenine got the number. I don't even know how many such lines are in service."

"She probably had the number written down," Nudger said. "People tend to write down important phone numbers, whether they can remember them or not."

"Even a number like that?" Jeanette asked. "One she wouldn't have wanted anyone to find?" She sounded dubious to the point of incredulity.

"Especially a number like that." Nudger scratched his chin, noticing absently that he hadn't shaved today. Poverty made a man lax. "Might Jenine have used more than one of these lines?"

"It's possible, but the numbers aren't easy to obtain. Usually a phone company employee, or a bartender, or maybe even someone on the line who uses more than one number, gives them out, but not to just anyone. I think the odds are good that Jenine only used one line, but of course we can't be sure. Some of the other victims used other lines as well as the one Jenine talked on."

"Do you have a key to your sister's apartment?" Nudger asked.

"Yes, and the police are finished there."

Nudger stood up, slipped his roll of antacid tablets into his shirt pocket, and shrugged into his sport jacket and light raincoat. Jeanette sat watching him in her eerily unruffled and efficient manner.

"We'll take my car," he said.

"The police have been all over Jenine's apartment," she told him. "They would have found the number if she'd written it somewhere there. I'm sure they would have."

"The six-six-six prefix is unforgettable," Nudger said, "and unwise to include in writing if secrecy enters into it. The police see phone numbers as seven digits; we're looking for four."

With another slow backward tilt of her head, Jeanette seemed to consider this and conclude that it made sense enough to act upon. She stood, glanced out the rain-distorted window, and buttoned her raincoat. "We can share my umbrella," she said, with a few degrees of warmth in her voice but not in her eyes.

Friends at last, Nudger told himself, and they left.

He was regretting his involvement with Jeanette Boyington, both consciously and on an instinctual level beyond consciousness. A subtle motion of events seemed to be stirring around him, like the hint of violent vortex movement a victim senses at the edges of a whirlpool in otherwise gentle water.

He swam on.