Nightlines

XI

Grace Valpone's apartment was in an old U-shaped brick building with ornate gray stone cornices. There was a circular area that had once been a garden in the center of the network of walkways to the entrances. Now it was bare earth with a few withered azaleas in the middle and a futile sprinkling of grass seed, bisected by what looked like tricycle tracks. A few dozen neighbors were milling around the many police cars blocking the quiet residential street and parked at crazy angles to the curb. Uniformed cops kept the gawkers out of harm's way. Some of the patrol cars' roof lights were still on and rotating, casting pale hues against the slanted late afternoon sunlight. One of the cars' radios, tuned to top volume, sputtered and crackled occasionally with code numbers, car designations, and addresses. Official stuff. The neighbors were impressed. They shifted about uneasily, exchanging comments and I-told-you-so's, excited and a little scared.

A calm, striped cat disdainfully observed Nudger from a perch on a windowsill as he gave the hard-faced cop at the building's west entrance his ID and explained that Hammersmith was expecting him. The cop nodded, stepping aside to give him room to pass.

Nudger's stomach was becoming light and queasy. "Is it a messy one?" he asked.

"She's been dead a couple of days," the cop said.

Nudger swallowed the acidic, coppery taste along the edges of his tongue. The cop smiled. The cat didn't blink.

"First floor, at the end of the hall," the cop said, as Nudger pushed open the door and entered a vestibule profaned with graffiti.

There had been no need for directions. From halfway up the stairs Nudger could see plenty of activity in the hall, and, through the wide-open door, in the apartment's living room.

As he entered, a familiar, faintly medicinal scent wafted to him, then was gone. He tried to identify it but couldn't.

The apartment was surprisingly large, sparsely and cheaply furnished, with threadbare oriental rugs over hardwood floors, mismatched furniture, and a very old console TV with a round bulging screen like an insect's eye. Large prints of show-business personalities or reproductions of thirties movie posters decorated the rough plaster walls. There was Bela Lugosi hovering over a coffin, disturbingly apropos. There was Bogie, blowing a whiff of smoke from the barrel of a blue steel automatic while a young Lauren Bacall watched with disinterest. There was King Kong taking a poke at a biplane.

There was Hammersmith, in the ample flesh, motioning for Nudger to join him. Nudger nodded to an assistant ME he knew slightly and circled a knot of plainclothes detectives to get to Hammersmith.

"C'mon," Hammersmith said. "She's still in the bathroom."

Nudger braced himself and followed Hammersmith down a short hall.

The bathroom was also a very large room, lined with green tile from floor to ceiling. Grace Valpone didn't look as bad as Nudger had anticipated. She was so pale she was almost the grayish white of the claw-footed porcelain tub wherein she reclined. One slender white leg was draped over the side of the tub. Her head was resting on the porcelain slope of the tub's back. No one had closed her eyes. She was a beautiful woman, probably more so in death than she'd been in life. Her expression was one of dignified, laconic annoyance, as if she resented the intimacy of her bath being invaded by the clods from Homicide, the fingerprint crew just now closing up shop, the police photographer still snapping shots from various angles with his instant-print Japanese camera. Horror without gore. Hitchcock couldn't have staged it better.

Nudger stepped closer and his stomach lurched. Different movie. The bottom of the tub was caked reddish brown, and the lower portion of Grace Valpone's body was slashed and mutilated. Her nipples were gone; there were several deep defense wounds on the palms of her hands.

Nudger stepped back. "Good Christ," he said softly.

Hammersmith clapped him on the shoulder. "You never could take it, could you, Nudge?"

No need for a reply. Both men knew how it was. Nudger had never become accustomed to the sight of violent death. It was one of the reasons his police career had been cut short.

They left the pale lady and went into the living room. Some of the bustle was dying down as various technicians who'd finished their tasks were leaving the crime scene, casually chatting, occasionally grinning, as if drifting away from a cocktail party. All very convivial. Soon the hostess would be removed in a rubber body bag.

Nudger and Hammersmith sat on the sofa. Hammersmith stared at Nudger for a moment and suddenly seemed uneasy and solicitous, as if any second he might try to smooth things over by offering Nudger tea.

"I didn't figure it would be such a shock to your system, Nudge. Honest."

"The hell with that," Nudger said. "Do you think this was done by Jenine Boyington's killer?"

Hammersmith drew a cigar from his shirt pocket, glanced guiltily at Nudger and then returned it. "There are obvious similarities, and dissimilarities. The picture isn't clear yet. This one's been dead since night before last; a friend found her a few hours ago. We'll know more when we get a lab report, and after we question her family and friends."

"The two crimes might tie in," Nudger said. "Fingerprints, hair, the Valpone woman's love life… any of them could make the link." Nudger imagined the killer sitting where he now sat, in the corner of the sofa, watching Grace Valpone and building to the moment. "It almost has to be."

"Fingerprints we know about," Hammersmith said. "The apartment's full of them, of course, but none of them are the killer's. The fingerprint boys said right away that whoever murdered Grace Valpone wore gloves. So there's one dissimilarity in the two crimes. And there were no correlative prints to determine the size of this killer's hands."

"What about similarities? Other than the fact that Grace Valpone and Jenine Boyington were stabbed to death in bathtubs."

"There was no sign of forced entry in either case. And the crimes were tidy. Notice there's no blood anywhere but in the tub. It was the same way with Jenine Boyington. The two women were placed in their bathtubs alive and then killed. Jenine's throat was opened up, this woman's wasn't. But who knows, maybe the lab can tie it to the same knife. There was no semen in Jenine. We'll have to wait for the report on Grace Valpone."

"Dissimilarities?" Nudger asked.

"Grace Valpone was nude; Jenine Boyington was fully clothed. They were ten years apart in age; the Valpone woman was thirty-eight, in a stage of life different from Jenine's. Jenine did temporary office work; Grace Valpone was a beautician. They lived and died in different sections of town. Boyington had never married; Valpone was divorced and had a ten-year-old son living with his father. Boyington's apartment wasn't bothered; this place was rummaged through. Boyington liked to party; neighbors say Valpone might as well have been a nun." Hammersmith languidly waved a ruddy, manicured hand. " 'It goes on and on,' as the widow said to the bishop."

"What we need to find out," Nudger said, "is whether Grace Valpone used the nightlines."

"Correct," Hammersmith said. "We're going to turn this place all ways but loose looking for one of those six-six-six phone numbers, hoping we don't find it."

Nudger understood. "You don't like the idea of a mass murderer," he said. "You want her boyfriend or a neighbor to have done it and confess and hand over the weapon."

"Exactly. The last thing anybody in this city needs, except for the news media, is a knife-happy series killer roaming around keeping in practice. I don't want there to be any connection between this and the Boyington murder, Nudge."

Nudger looked closely at Hammersmith. The sleek and handsome fat man had crescents of loose flesh beneath his eyes, and vertical frown lines above the bridge of his nose. He was deeply concerned, as well he should be. Blood was being spilled in copious amounts right here in his bailiwick. Still, Nudger could offer him no comfort.

"I think there is a connection," he said. "So do you."

"Of course I do," Hammersmith said. "Or at least I think there might be. But as long as the two crimes aren't officially related, I can move more freely in trying to solve them. The media, the Chief of Police, the mayor, the chronic confessors, all those people who make a cop's life complicated won't be involved. It's pointless to operate in a pressure cooker if you can stay out on the range."

Nudger watched two white-uniformed morgue attendants saunter through the apartment and go down the hall toward the bathroom. Conversation and laughter drifted out, then the harsh ripping sound of the rubber body bag being zipped. A few minutes later they carried out the wrapped thing that had been Grace Valpone. Residual rigor mortis kept the limbs bent in the slumped position the body had assumed in the bathtub, giving the grotesque impression that the corpse was attempting to push its way out of the black bag. She'll suffocate in there! Nudger thought inanely.

"Always a cheering sight," Hammersmith said. "I'll let you know if we come up with anything that connects Grace Valpone with Jenine Boyington, Nudge. In the meantime, is there anything you've found out that we should know?"

"I haven't learned anything that would be of much help," Nudger said. He told Hammersmith about Wallace Everest's being Jeanette's lover, and about the abortion under a false identity.

"That totally evaporates Wally Everest's motive to kill Jenine," Hammersmith observed, "and still leaves him in Cincinnati at the time of the murder."

"I told you it wouldn't help."

Hammersmith stood up. He did fire up a cigar now, concentrating entirely on that task for a few minutes while greenish billows fouled the room. For once Nudger didn't mind the cigar; its pungent odor overpowered the faint but unmistakable scent of death.

"I wanted to talk to you about this Valpone murder, Nudge," Hammersmith said, "but there's another reason I asked you to come down here. You haven't been a cop for a long time, and I know the kinds of cases you've worked as a private investigator. Divorces, dips into the till, missing library books. Weren't you even working on a dognapping?"

"I cracked that one," Nudger said.

Hammersmith regarded him with calm appraisal through a greenish haze. "The police are taking the possibility of a series killer quite seriously now, Nudge. We're very, very interested. And I wanted you to see Grace Valpone so you'd realized what you might be up against, so you'd be careful and remember not to exclude us entirely from your plans. Your police department cares."

A pale vision of Grace Valpone in her claw-footed bathtub flashed like a Kodak slide on Nudger's mind. "Your psychology is sound."

"I hope it's effective." Hammersmith crossed his arms over his protruding stomach. Ashes from his cigar dropped onto the floor. "We won't start to toss this place for another hour, Nudge. Want to go out for some supper? I'll buy."

Nudger's stomach was doing gymnastics. Not perfect ten scores, too herky-jerky. "I think I'll diet until tomorrow," he said.

Hammersmith smiled. That was the answer he'd been seeking.

As he left the apartment building, Nudger passed the same dreary graffiti, the same hard-faced cop, the same striped cat staring at him smugly, as if it knew that the way out was always the same as the way in and was enjoying the joke.

When Nudger got back to his office, he checked the answering machine and heard Claudia's voice tell him she was tired of trying to reach him and they could talk tonight in the usual way at the usual time. She sounded somewhat bemused that she would want to talk with him, maybe even slightly irritated. It was as if the recorder's tone had sounded before she could hang up, signaling go, and she'd had little choice but to be polite and postpone the conversation rather than cancel it. One of life's little electronic traps.

Quite an invention, the telephone. Nudger wondered if Alexander Graham Bell had ever suspected that someday the thing would speak back of its own accord, that it would bring so much heartache as well as convenience. He might have. Maybe he'd mentioned it. Nudger tried to remember the Don Ameche film but couldn't.

He got the phone directory from the desk's bottom left drawer and leafed through its dogeared thin pages, squinting at its headache-inducing fine print until he found a listing for A. Boyington. There was no Agnes Boyington listed. A. Boyington's address was in the city's fashionable central west end.

Nudger slid the phone over to him and began to punch out the number, then he hesitated and replaced the receiver. He decided not to use the phone.

The A. Boyington in the directory might not be Agnes, but the chance that it was made it worth Nudger's time to drive to the address to try to take her by surprise, so she'd be unprepared for their conversation.

Nudger thought it might be fun to catch her in her old clothes painting the porch glider. Or cleaning up after the dog or masturbating or watching "Family Feud" on TV.

If Agnes Boyington did such things.