Nightlines

XIV

Nudger hadn't slept well. He'd awakened twice during the night from dreams of walking on an empty beach, leaving a line of footprints just beyond the reach of crashing, hungry waves that were angrily devouring the wide slope of sand. There was no one in sight, not for miles up and down the coastline. A half-moon was so bright that it etched his black shadow in front of him, almost as if it were day rather than night. He was alone, never more alone, and gusting in from an indiscernible horizon were roiling dark clouds, dropping lower and lower, threatening to engulf and smother him when they reached the shore.

He tried not to think about last night's dreams as he sat eating an omelet and dry toast, grateful for the morning light cascading through the kitchen window, even though its glare worsened his dull headache. He seemed to be haunted by the same sorts of dreams, if not the same dreams. He was either by the sea, which might be in any of its varying moods, or he dreamed of falling from great heights. Sometimes the sea dreams were pleasant and reassuring. The dreams of falling always left him sweating and scared.

While he ate, he listened to an old Billie Holiday record from what was left of his jazz collection after last year's poverty-induced sale. That made him feel better. If he was down, Billie was lower; but something in her dulcet voice affirmed that it was possible to get up.

He left his dirty dishes in the sink, telling himself he'd wash them that evening. Sure. After switching off the stereo and replacing the record in its jacket, he draped his sport coat over his arm and left the apartment.

As he got out of his car and crossed the street to his office he was almost struck by a van with a thousand windows. Traffic was heavy on Manchester for this time of day. He reached the haven of the opposite sidewalk and squinted to see up the street. Cars were backed up beyond the traffic light, waiting to turn into the K-mart underground parking lot. There must have been coupons in the paper.

He trudged upstairs to his office, unlocked the door, and went inside. The place was hot, but he wasn't planning on being there long. There was no point in switching on the air conditioner. Listening to the traffic sounds from beyond the dirt-spotted window, he sat down behind his desk and punched buttons on the answering machine.

"This is Eileen," said the machine. "Just a reminder-" Nudger pressed Fast Forward.

"Jeanette here, Mr. Nudger. Only one appointment today. At noon by the Twin Oaks Mall fountain. His name's Jock. He'll be wearing dark slacks and a beige sport jacket, no tie. Personnel Pool sent me out on a temporary secretarial job today, so phone me late this evening and report." Click.

"Jack Hammersmith, Nudge. Call me at the Third when you get a chance. Some of us are pitching in for a birthday gift for Leo Springer…" Hammersmith's cigar-distorted chortle came through before Nudger could punch the red Off button.

He'd heard enough for now. In a way it was nice to know that the temporary office help firm that sent Jeanette out on jobs had tucked her safely away where she couldn't bother him for a while.

Nudger stood up and walked over to where a Globe- Democrat lay folded on the cold radiator. When he examined the paper he was surprised to find that it was four days old and wouldn't tell him what he needed to know. Dropping the paper into the wastebasket, he sat down again at the desk and dialed Hammersmith's number at the Third District. Hammersmith knew about Agnes Boyington and should have no trouble getting Springer to back off.

"I'm busy, Nudge," Hammersmith said into the phone. "Not much time for you. Ever seen a man actually foam at the mouth?"

"Only in bad movies. I think they do it with some kind of chemical."

"Springer did it with only the forces of nature. He told me about his conversation with you. I set him straight. At least as straight as possible. He'll leave you alone, but not for long. I would describe him as incensed."

"What did you tell him?"

"Practically nothing. He doesn't deserve to know anything at all." Hammersmith was definitely annoyed. "There's plenty to do in Vice. The bastard had no business meddling in Homicide. Unless of course he wants to become a victim."

"I talked to Agnes Boyington at her house last night," Nudger said. "She as much as told me she hired Hugo Rumbo to help persuade me to accept her offer of a payoff to bow out of the case without telling her daughter. I think she was expecting me. Rumbo was there in the background, to protect her and intimidate me."

"I suppose when Hugo told her about yesterday's fun in the Third District parking lot, she decided her best defense would be immediate offense. Gutsy lady."

"She wears white gloves, even in this weather."

"Springer told me. He was genuinely impressed. I know a massage parlor where all the girls wear white gloves."

"Do you have anything yet that might tie in the Valpone murder with Jenine Boyington?"

"I was wondering when you'd ask," Hammersmith said. "The search of the Valpone apartment didn't turn up a six- six-six phone number, or anything else that proved useful. The autopsy report lists death by asphyxiation, from when her throat was slashed, but she was tortured before that. As badly as she was mutilated, she would have survived her injuries for at least an hour, though she wouldn't have been able to climb out of the bathtub. Maybe she tried; maybe that's why she had a leg draped over the side of the tub. Also, the lab report says there was no semen in her vagina, throat, or rectal tract, and no evidence of violent entry. So she wasn't raped or sodomized. But, like Jenine Boyington's murder, this is the worst kind of sex killing."

Nudger knew what Hammersmith meant. This sort of murder was the giant, grisly step beyond rape. And it was a step that seldom allowed any backtracking. It was a step that led on, to more violent death. "But there's no strong link between the two crimes," Nudger said, disappointed.

"Nothing to rule it in, nothing to rule it out. But there is one other thing, Nudge. Turns out that Grace Valpone was engaged to be married. The date was set for next month."

"Have you questioned the intended?"

"Sure. Name's Vincent Javers. President of his own small company out in Westport. Guess what? He was in Hawaii at the time of the murder, at a tire wholesalers' convention."

"Hawaii, huh. Wally Everest was in Cincinnati when Jenine Boyington was killed. They're getting farther away."

"The Valpone murder has a lot of the earmarks of the Boyington job, Nudge, but there are things about it that bother me. It doesn't quite fit."

"Doesn't fit why?"

"Tell me, how likely is it that a woman engaged to be married would be setting up blind dates with who-knows- what over the nightlines a month before her wedding?"

"Not as likely as death or taxes," Nudger admitted.

"Maybe it was only a coincidence that Jenine Boyington talked on the nightlines and also got herself murdered. She and Grace Valpone could have been killed by the same perp, but the nightlines might have had nothing to do with it."

"Which would leave me way out at sea in my investigation," Nudger said.

"It's a good thing you swim well. And it looks as if you'd better start stroking." The tone of Hammersmith's voice suddenly changed. "Duty calling, Nudge. It sounds remarkably like the Chief of Police."

Nudger thanked Hammersmith and hung up.

He listened to the rest of his calls on the answering machine, hoping to hear Claudia's voice. But she hadn't phoned him. He got up from the desk and adjusted the Venetian blinds to a sharp downward angle to block the warming morning sunlight. His headache was gone. His stomach murmured something about being hungry. The omelet and dry toast hadn't been enough to eat. Nudger figured he'd been burning up a lot of calories lately just by worrying.

He closed the office, then went downstairs for a doughnut and a bracing cup of vile black coffee at Danny's.

Danny was alone except for an old woman hunched over a cup of coffee at the far end of the counter. She wore a faded dress with crescent stains of perspiration beneath the arms, and she was talking softly and earnestly to herself.

Nudger felt a current of pity for her as he sat as far away from her as possible, so as not to eavesdrop, and asked Danny for a small coffee and a Dunker Delite. Danny smiled and nervously wiped his hands on his gray towel as he headed for the coffee urn. He was glad not to be alone with the woman, who seemed harmless enough and more interested in staring at her coffee than in drinking it. Maybe it was the coffee that had caused her condition.

Nudger sipped his own coffee, then took a bite of a particularly large Dunker Delite. He used a paper napkin to wipe the grease from his fingers, then, like the woman down the counter, stared into his cup and thought about his world.

It occurred to him that the crowd roar he'd heard on Claudia's phone might have come from somewhere other than Busch Stadium. A television set or radio? Not likely. Nudger was sure he would have recognized a broadcast sound. Maybe Claudia lived near a Little League field or a park where high school or legion baseball was played.

No, Nudger decided. Not much baseball was played at one in the morning, not even major league ball. It could be that he was wrong about the source of the sound. Then he heard again the crowd's roar last night as he was driving near the stadium.

"Did the Cards play in town night before last?" he asked Danny.

Danny nodded, a gleam of interest in his dark, basset eyes. He was a baseball fan and an ardent Cardinals rooter. "They won thirteen to ten in extra innings," he said.

Nudger paused as he raised his foam coffee cup. "How many extra innings?"

"They played seventeen innings, their longest game of the season. They won the game with two singles and a home run when they had two outs. If they get good pitching in September-"

"Never mind that. What time was the game over?"

Danny shrugged and leaned on the glass doughnut case. "Oh, I dunno, but it had to be awful late. You could find out what time, I guess." He stood up straight. "In fact, I know where you could find out. I still got that day's sports page in a stack of newspapers in the back room."

Nudger was about to ask Danny to get the sports page, but the doughnut shop entrepreneur was already shoving open the swinging door by the display case. From the back room came sounds of rummaging.

"Ain't fair," the old woman at the end of the counter was absently muttering again and again. "Ain't fair, ain't fair, ain't fair…"

Age had granted her wisdom. Nudger sat feeling sorry for her, then wondered if she might actually be better off than he was. Disoriented though she might be, she didn't have to cope with Hugo Rumbo and the Boyington women, not to mention a mass murderer. Danny emerged within a few minutes clutching a grease-spotted sheet of newspaper. It featured a photo of a leaping ballplayer and the headline CARDS SMITE CUBS IN SEVENTEEN. He turned the paper so Nudger could read it, spreading it out on the stainless steel counter and smoothing it flat with a swipe of his hand.

The information Nudger sought was in the second paragraph. Forty thousand people had seen the Cardinals triumph when a ten-ten tie was broken in the bottom of the seventeenth inning by a pinch-hit home run with two men on base. Forty thousand people. How far from the stadium might the exuberant roar of that many fans carry, and still be loud enough to be picked up in a phone conversation? Three blocks? Ten?

Then Nudger remembered that the area around the stadium was almost exclusively commercial; there weren't that many apartment buildings. That would make his task possible, though not easy.

Leaving his coffee and doughnut, but no money, on the counter, he said a hasty goodbye to Danny and hurried from the doughnut shop to drive downtown.

"Hey, Nudge!" Danny called.

"Put it on my tab!"

"Ain't fair, ain't fair, ain't fair," the old woman repeated sagely, as the door swung closed behind Nudger.

Traffic was heavy downtown, the usual business crowd as well as a surprising number of summer tourists, come to see Missouri's Big City. Nudger drove around for a while, studying the buildings in the vicinity of Busch Stadium. There were only a few apartment buildings, but there were some business structures that might contain upstairs apartments.

He divided the area around the stadium into quadrants, parked the car, and began his search on foot. He felt like the love-crossed prince searching for Cinderella. All he needed was a glass slipper.

The first building was a gloomy old converted hotel. Nudger stood in the faded vestibule and studied the bank of brass mailboxes. Some of them had only last names printed on the cards showing above the slots. Nudger cursed and wiped his forehead with his forearm. Maybe he wasn't as close to Claudia as he thought. Or maybe closer. She might live right upstairs from where he stood, but he had no way to know from the mailboxes.

He began punching buttons above the boxes, asking if Claudia was home when he got an answer on the intercom. No Claudia lived here, he was told. No one in the building had even heard of a Claudia. At least no one who was home. Feeling better, but not completely satisfied that he could discount the building, Nudger moved on to the next challenge.

The day was getting hotter. He removed his sport jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and went through the mailbox procedure in a similar though smaller building two blocks away. No Claudia there. An apartment whose mailbox was simply labeled "Elwood" didn't answer his ring. He made a note of it as a possible and walked back to the Volkswagen, eager to get rid of his coat and tie in the heat.

He paid the two dollars he was charged to park, then drove to another pay parking lot in the second quadrant.

More hot, tedious work, without result. He was getting dehydrated. He entered a bar beneath a sign lettered ZIGZAG'S and ordered a draft beer. It was a tiny, dim place with an overactive air conditioner that made the ice-flecked mug of beer taste even colder than it was. The bartender was a young, prematurely bald guy in a white apron. Or maybe he shaved his head; Nudger couldn't keep up with style. There were only two other customers, a harried businessman type slouched at the bar, and a bearded man in a sleeveless shirt, cutoff jeans, and sandals. On a hunch, Nudger carried his beer to where the bartender was wrestling with some paperwork at the end of the bar.

"Help you?" the bartender asked, lifting his pencil and looking up at Nudger. His brown eyes were much too young for his bald pate.

"Does a girl named Claudia come in here?"

The bartender laughed. "The place is like a mortuary now, but girls by the hundreds flock in here before and after ball games and on Saturday nights. We got live music after eight," he added, as if that explained such fervent female clientele.

"I mean a regular customer, a girl who lives in the area."

The bartender shook his gleaming head. "Sorry. But she oughta be easy to find if she lives around here. The neighborhood's nearly all commercial." He licked the point of his pencil and went reluctantly back to his paperwork, copying numbers from a tiny calculator.

Nudger finished his beer and started to leave.

"You might try here after eight tonight," the bartender suggested behind him. "Live music," he reminded.

Nudger thanked him and pushed out the door into heat that struck like a hammer. It was still too early to drink alcohol. His head began to throb in reproach for his dissolute ways.

In the only likely building in the third quadrant, on Spruce Street, Nudger felt a cautious elation as he studied the mailboxes. There was a "C. Davis." Also a "C. Betten- court." Single women often listed their names with only first initials in phone directories and on their mailboxes, to give potential interlopers the impression that the occupant might be a 250-pound armed male with an extra Y chromosome and a taste for combat.

This was a run-down, rent-subsidized building without intercoms. It was the only apartment building in an area of closed office buildings converted to warehouses. The vestibule reeked of cooking odors and bums' urine. Most of the apartments had only round blank holes above their mailboxes, where push buttons for doorbells had been punched into oblivion and not replaced.

C. Davis was in apartment 2C. Nudger climbed the stairs, found the door halfway down a dim, littered hall. It was a heavy wood door whose dark enamel had shrunk and cracked like eroded soil, leaving a sharply angled network of shallow crevices. The "2C" was painted on the door with what looked like pink fingernail polish.

Nudger knocked, then stood patiently. A car horn honked outside. A distant siren gave its singsong frantic wail like a faraway creature in pain.

There was a change of light in the tiny glass peephole mounted in the door. Nudger smiled, trying not to look like an overheated insurance salesman or rent collector.

"Who is it?" a female voice called.

"My name's Nudger."

"So who's Nudger?" It was a black woman's voice, lilting and rich with accent.

"I'm looking for Claudia," he said. He waited.

A chain lock rattled and the door opened. A large ebony woman with wild straightened hair peered suspiciously out at him. "What Claudia?"

"I don't know her last name. I saw the C on your mailbox."

"The C happens to be my husband," the woman said. She had large, intelligent eyes, gentle and proud eyes that were measuring Nudger dubiously. Poverty, meet poverty. "You a friend of Claudia?"

Nudger tried not to show his excitement. "Very much a friend."

"She want to see you?"

"She should see me." He met the woman's soft, skeptical stare directly, not blinking. Neither of them blinked for a long time. Then Nudger blinked.

"Claudia's a good woman," C. Davis's wife said. "She don't need no bullshit."

"I know. That's why I came."

"You look like you been wandering around out in the desert, Nudger."

"I have been, like a prophet of old whose camel has died."

"Hm, yeah. Well, Claudia lives up in 4D, top of them stairs."

"Thank you. Is she home?"

"How do I know if she's home? I ain't no spy satellite. Could be she's working today. Go knock on her door, you want to find out."

"If she's not home and you see her later, do you intend to tell her I was around asking for her?"

"You better believe it, Nudger."

Nudger smiled at her. "Good. Nice meeting you, wife of C. Davis."

He knew she was watching him as he walked toward the stairs. Without looking back, he raised a hand in a listless wave and started up toward the fourth floor.

Someone else was already knocking on Claudia's door.

He was a slim, sharp-featured man wearing a dark suit and tie and carrying one of those slender leather briefcases that look like purses because they don't have handles.

Nudger didn't know quite what to do. He could hardly knock on the door to 4C and pretend that had been his destination. It could prove embarrassing, even dangerous in this neighborhood, if the door were opened. And there could be little doubt that he was heading toward 4D's door.

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.