Nightlines

XVII

The Volkswagen was an oven. Nudger sat inside it, across the street from Claudia's apartment building, and felt as if maybe he should be wrapped in aluminum foil so he'd bake evenly. The evening sun glinting off the dented hood hurt his eyes. He reached above the visor and slid his sunglasses out of their vinyl clip-on case, adjusting them with a deft tap of his forefinger to the bridge of his nose. The plastic frames were hot and sticky.

He wanted to approach Claudia before she had a chance to talk with the wife of C. Davis. She should be arriving home from work soon, and Nudger planned to get out of the car, cross the street, and confront her near the building entrance. For the past hour he'd been sweltering in the car, trying to think of an opening line. Finally he decided to let his and Claudia's impending conversation take care of itself, let it flow naturally and hope it wasn't a swirl down the drain.

A bedraggled brown stray dog trotted along the sidewalk and glared at Nudger. For a moment Nudger thought the dog might urinate on the car. It was that kind of look. But the dog paused, sniffed, then trotted on with sudden purpose as if it had business downtown.

Nudger watched it in the rearview mirror, feeling a kind of kinship with the stray dog, as if they shared the same futile destiny. He wondered what he'd do if Claudia had lied to him. What did she look like? What if she turned out to be hideous? Would they still be souls rushing toward confluence? Would he still approach her? He thought he would, but he didn't want to be put to the test.

No one had entered the building other than an elderly, stooped woman carrying a small shopping bag and advancing tediously with the aid of an aluminum walker. It was too hot today for anyone but fools and stray dogs to be meddling around outside unless it was absolutely necessary. Too hot for an aged semi-invalid even if it was necessary.

Nudger felt the vague beginnings of heartburn. He thumbed back the wrapping on a roll of antacid tablets and tried to head off discomfort before it got a firm bite on him. He was aging alone in a hard world.

He had just popped a tablet into his mouth when she arrived. At least he assumed that the woman was Claudia.

Seen from across the street, she was indeed an average sort, medium height, dark-haired, wearing a plain but attractive blue or black dress that showed off a shapely figure somewhat on the thin side. She moved well, with a dancer's unconscious grace; Nudger noticed that about her immediately because her smooth, elegant walk was in contrast to her angled, gritty surroundings. She was clutching a straw purse beneath her arm, walking fast toward the apartment building from the direction of the bus stop.

Nudger had to move fast himself if he was going to intercept her. Chewing and swallowing the antacid tablet so hurriedly that it made him cough, he opened the car door, tugged the sweat-plastered back of his shirt away from the upholstery, and climbed stiffly out.

Claudia-if she was Claudia-noticed him approaching and broke stride ever so slightly. Fear registered in the sudden mechanical deliberation of her walk, the squared set of her shoulders.

She got prettier as Nudger got closer. Dark eyes, lean face, nose straight but too large, the perfectly turned calves and ankles of a shoe model. His eyes took it all in. He decided the nose gave her a look of nobility. Nudger hoped this was Claudia.

Time to find out. When he was a few yards from her, standing between her and the building entrance, he said, "Claudia?"

She seemed ill at ease, yet somehow relieved that he knew her name. He wasn't a complete stranger, out to snatch purse or virtue, an urban predator. On the other hand, he wasn't a handsome priest.

"You're Nudger," she said, in a voice he recognized from the nightlines.

He moved closer, trying not to loom. "Are you angry because I found you?"

"No. I'm angry because you searched for me. Now that you're here, it doesn't seem to matter much."

Nudger was trying to figure out just how to interpret that remark when she stepped around him and continued walking toward the doorway. What the hell? He followed her into the vestibule. She seemed to expect it. Or did she?

"We should talk," he said, trying to get their meeting on less confusing ground. On any kind of ground at all.

"I guess so." She started up the stairs and he trudged behind her, unable to stop watching the rhythmic sway of the dark dress about her legs. He could hear the soft rustle of its material against nylon. "I'm inviting you up so I can get in out of the heat," she said, turning her head slightly so she could lob the words back over her shoulder.

Nudger said nothing as they scaled the four flights of stairs to her apartment. He decided that the dress might be a cocktail-waitress uniform. She was wearing brown sandals that didn't go with the dress but were easy on the feet, and he had a hunch she was carrying highheeled shoes in her purse.

Without looking at him, she unlocked the door, pushed it open, and with a kind of shrug motioned for him to enter.

It was a small apartment, clean but in hectic disorder. Nudger could see into the kitchen. There were dishes, apparently washed and dried, stacked haphazardly on the sink counter. The living room, where he stood, was cluttered with paperback books, magazines, and newspapers. There was a threadbare green recliner in a corner, a sagging sofa, a coffee table marked with interlocking pale rings from damp glasses. On one end of the table sat an old Sylvania black-and-white portable TV, angled so it could be watched from the sofa. A print of water lilies, a Monet, hung on one of the pale-gray walls, and that was the only wall decoration. There were patches of gouged plaster and even a few nails protruding here and there, probably left by previous tenants. At the far end of the room was a closed door, no doubt leading to the bedroom. The telephone must be in the bedroom.

Claudia crossed the bare wood floor and switched on the window air conditioner. It rattled fiercely in protest, then settled into a steady hum and seemed resigned to doing the job.

"The place cools off fast," she said.

"Good," Nudger replied. He was still hot. His face felt greasy with perspiration. He wished he knew what to say to Claudia.

"Sit down, please," she invited.

He did, on the sofa. Its springs gave a metallic gurgle and it threatened to collapse. He watched Claudia. She watched him.

Crossing her arms tightly so that she was clutching her elbows, she said, "Now what? Gorilla jokes?"

"If you want to hear some."

"I don't."

"Downstairs on the sidewalk," Nudger said, "how did you know who I was?"

"Coreen phoned me at work and told me you'd been here."

"C. Davis's wife?"

"There is no C. Davis living downstairs other than Coreen. Single woman's subterfuge. It's necessary in this neighborhood."

Nudger stood up, paced to the window with his fingertips inserted in his back pockets, then turned to face Claudia. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have tracked you down against your wishes, but I couldn't resist. It's part of my line of work. I'm a private detective."

"Christ, is there still such a thing?"

"Only the best of us survive at the trade. We're primitives. Like iguanas and cockroaches, only not so ugly."

"As which?"

"Ah, I detect a healthy nastiness here."

She smiled. "Good old Nudger talk. It comforts."

"I'm glad it does. Genuinely glad."

"I suspect that genuineness is your talent and weakness. How did you locate me?"

Nudger explained it to her. She seemed not at all impressed by his cleverness.

"Can I get you something to drink?" she asked, as if suddenly not wanting to be remiss as a hostess. But she didn't apologize for the apartment's messiness. "I think there's beer."

"Water will do fine," Nudger said. He didn't like it that she'd immediately thought of him as the beer type. Which he was.

While she walked into the kitchen and he heard tap water running, Nudger glanced at the titles of the reading material scattered around the room. There was fiction, non- fiction, mystery, mainstream, everything.

"You read a lot," Nudger told her, when she returned and handed him a drinking glass full of water. There were three square ice cubes suspended in it, very clear ones, imprisoning muted reflected images.

"It's escape," she said. "I escape as often as I can."

"From what?"

Instead of answering, she turned, went back into the kitchen, and ran a glass of water for herself. When she returned she said, "Now what again?"

"When I was here earlier today there was a man knocking on your door. A skinny, annoyed little guy with dark hair. Looked like an ugly young Frank Sinatra. He wanted me to deliver a message to you. He and the kids will be out of town this weekend, so you can't see the kids. Who is he? Who are the kids?" That should give her plenty to chew on, Nudger thought.

Claudia raised her ice water to her lips and sipped, gazing calmly over the glass rim at Nudger, not answering.

"Another painful subject?"

She seemed to deliberate for a moment, then she said, "The man is Ralph Ferris, my former husband. The kids are Nora and Joan, our daughters."

And that gave Nudger plenty to chew on. "How old are Nora and Joan?"

"Twelve and ten."

Nudger glanced around the apartment; no sign of children. "Do the girls live with Ralph?"

Something seemed to draw Claudia into herself and cause discomfort. "Yes."

"I instinctively disliked Ralph," Nudger said. "Was I right?"

"Ralph's okay. The marriage would have worked out, only…"

Obviously she didn't want to finish such a revealing sentence. Not yet, anyway.

"Bettencourt's my maiden name," she said, changing the subject just enough. All of a sudden she seemed embarrassed. She placed her glass on the coffee table. "Nudger, I never met anyone else after talking to them on the lines. I mean, I don't use the lines for what you might be thinking."

"I know why you use them. I'm glad we talked to each other. It's okay." He was trying to soothe her; she seemed seconds away from an emotional explosion. Nudger glimpsed something dark in her that had a hold on her, a voracious thing that fed on her insides and waited for opportune moments to inflict pain.

She picked up her glass and sipped more cold water. That seemed to calm the thing.

"Have you had dinner?" Nudger asked.

She shook her head no. There was a beaten quality about her that saddened him and evoked pity.

"I know a little bar near here called Zigzag's," he told her. "They serve great hamburgers. They have live music after eight o'clock. I hear it's really something."

She pursed her lips and he thought she was going to refuse him. But she said, "Let me change out of this dress, okay?"

"Okay," he said, smiling.

She smiled back, a bit whimsically, and followed her noble nose into the bedroom.

When she returned a few minutes later she was wearing very practical Levi's, the same brown sandals, and a white cotton blouse. The Levi's weren't form-fitting, but she had enough form to look good in them nonetheless.

"You're much prettier than just average," Nudger told her, as they walked from the apartment. He meant it. She seemed pleased, maybe amused, by the directness of the compliment.

As they descended the stairs, Nudger was becoming more at ease, more confident. Claudia in the flesh was becoming real to him in a way that Claudia on the phone could never be, exerting a pull on him that was sensuous and easy to understand. This was far from the darkness of their phone conversations. This might turn out to be a monumental rendezvous, yet at the same time an ordinary date, something he could comprehend, cope with, and enjoy. Normality.

On the second landing, she turned to him and held up her wrists to the light streaming through the cracked window.

"See the scars?" she said. "They're from when I tried to kill myself."

Zigzag's actually did serve hamburgers, Nudger was relieved to discover. He and Claudia sat in a dim booth near the back of the place, beyond the bar. When a barmaid came over, Claudia asked for a whiskey sour and excused herself to go to the restroom. Nudger ordered a beer for himself and a hamburger and french fries for each of them, slyly instructing the barmaid to have the kitchen hold the onions. "The future's not ours to see," according to Plato. Or was it Doris Day?

The drinks were on the table when Claudia returned. Nudger watched her walk across the room, claiming the attention of a few of the male clientele. Hers was a subtle magnetism. She was the sort of woman that wasn't striking, yet seemed more pleasing to the eye with each glance. Her features were unremarkable, but in harmony.

As she sat down, Nudger said, "I ordered burgers and fries. Now you owe me. Want to tell me about Ralph?"

Claudia didn't go deaf this time. She sampled her whiskey sour and seemed to find it to her liking, then said, "He's my former loving husband, is all."

Nudger knew that wasn't all, but that it had better be all for now. "Where do you work?" he asked. A mundane enough question. He downed half of his icy beer and waited for a mundane answer.

"I'm a waitress at Kimball's Restaurant."

"A four-star eatery. Gourmet food."

"Are you a gourmet?" she asked.

"No, I'm more of a great white shark. I like most any kind of food. Only my stomach is more particular. Tell me about waitressing. Do you enjoy it?"

"It makes your feet sore and you have to take a lot of abuse from some of the customers. On weekends, when I serve more liquor, the tips are good, but the abuse quotient rises too. There are worse jobs." She raised her glass again. She didn't seem to be a practiced drinker, and there were no physical signs of the lush about her. "Tell me about detectiv- ing, Nudger."

"Oh, it's pretty much what I'm doing now, asking questions. We detectives are a curious lot."

" 'Curious' can be an adjective used to describe an unusual object," she said.

"I know, teacher. It's been applied that way to me."

She looked at him with a faintly startled expression.

"Which daughter is how old?" he asked.

"Nora's the twelve-year-old; Joan's ten."

"Are they beautiful in the manner of their mother?"

"More beautiful. In their own manner."

The hamburgers arrived, beautiful in their own beef- and-bun way. They were as tasty as they looked, and the fries were greasy and salty, the way Nudger unfortunately liked them. He ordered another beer. Claudia asked the barmaid if she could have some onions for her hamburger.

Nudger said nothing more probing than "Please pass the catsup" until they'd finished eating. He asked Claudia if she wanted another whiskey sour, and she said she'd prefer coffee. That was easy enough to get at Zigzag's, even though the barmaid was taking a break. The same young, bald- headed bartender who had been on duty earlier today brought over two steaming white mugs on a tray.

"I see you found her," he said to Nudger, placing the mugs before them and clearing the table of dishes and glasses.

"What did he mean?" Claudia asked, watching the bald- headed man walk away.

Nudger shrugged. "I don't know. Bartender talk, I guess."

They sat saying little over their coffee, oddly at ease in each other's company, until the live music began at eight o'clock. A slightly raised stage that Nudger hadn't noticed was abruptly bathed in red and green light, and two middle- aged men with punk haircuts and steel guitars began to twang and sing insolently of petty injustices. Nudger winced and looked across the table at Claudia. She grinned. They agreed that the hard rock at Zigzag's wasn't in the same class as the hamburgers.

The barmaid had disappeared for good, apparently, so Nudger walked over to the bald-headed barkeep and paid the check. Zigzag's was becoming crowded despite the Hard Timers, as the two middle-aged punk rockers called themselves, so Nudger moved in front of Claudia, clearing a way to the door.

"I mean t'git down an' be mean!" screamed the Hard Timers in perfect discord. One of them did a screeching slide on the guitar.

Nudger and Claudia emerged from the din, tobacco smoke, and dimness into an evening that had cooled off and conjured up stars. The door swung shut and muted the music to loud.

Claudia politely thanked Nudger for dinner. First-date patter.

"Walk a while?" he asked.

She hesitated, then nodded.

He took the curbside like a gentleman and set off in a direction away from her apartment building. He didn't want the evening to end prematurely, still heavy with unanswered questions.

For a long time they were quiet as they walked, listening to the counterpoint rhythm of their footfalls. Nudger liked it that way but couldn't figure out why. There was much he wanted to know about Claudia. On the other hand, maybe he was finding out something very important this way. It seemed that there could never be an awkward silence between them. Could love be mute as well as blind?

It was Claudia who finally spoke. "You said you were a private investigator. Am I part of a case you're working on?"

"Only indirectly. The nightlines are part of the case. That's why I was talking on the lines the night we made contact; I was trying to get a feel for what was going over the wires."

"Then you don't talk regularly on the lines." She seemed pleased.

"No. Do you?"

"More often than I'd like. I can't sleep. The early morning hours are a lonely time. Occasionally I just have to talk to someone. Regardless of their reason for listening, they provide human contact."

Nudger smiled at her as they stepped down from a high curb. "You're clean and attractive. Aren't there more conventional ways to find human contact?"

"I don't want any of the conventional ways, any of their complications." She shifted the focus of the conversation back to Nudger. "Are you still working on the nightlines case?"

"Yes, but not at the moment."

"What's it about?"

"Murdered women."

"Women who talked on the lines?"

Nudger nodded. Maybe he needed human contact too. He told her about the case. Not all about it, but almost all.

She was in an understandably somber mood when he'd finished, and he wondered if he'd regret sharing that part of himself with her.

"The wages of sin," she said, of the murdered women. She said it ironically, not in a serious religious context.

"Maybe not," Nudger told her. "There's nothing solid yet to link the deaths to the same killer."

"But you think there's a mass murderer using the lines."

"There's enough evidence for me to go on that assumption. But then I'm not a bureaucracy, like the police. They can't afford to follow hunches; I can't afford not to, because sometimes hunches and a client are all I have."

Claudia suggested that they return to her apartment. It was dark now, and the downtown area they were in was comprised mostly of empty office buildings and structures in various stages of renovation or construction. The city in the turmoil of rebirth. Not a safe place to walk. It occurred to Nudger that a mugger might appear unexpectedly and crack him on the head before finding out he was dealing with a tough shamus. Another tragedy born of misunderstanding. He didn't mind when Claudia picked up the pace.

Claudia's apartment building was in sight when Nudger said, "How long have you been a waitress?"

"Four years," she said. "Before that, I taught."

"Taught what?"

"Junior high school. Seventh grade. English and social studies."

"How come you quit?"

Nudger could sense her shrinking into herself again, as if to envelop a sensitive, vulnerable core that had endured all it could stand. And now he had come along and touched it and brought pain.

"I didn't exactly quit," she said. "I was forced out."

She didn't speak again until they were back in her apartment. She'd left the air conditioner on while they were gone, and the living room was comfortably cool. The wide window, without curtains or blinds and with a few half-dead viny plants in plastic pots suspended from the upper frame, looked out on soot-gray buildings across Spruce Street. The upper floors of the buildings were used mostly for storage, and their windows were blank. Some of the windows had faded remains of business names clinging in peeling letters to the glass. A few of them were boarded over with weathered plywood. The mercury streetlight down the block cast a sickly bluish light over it all, lending some of the grime and pigeon droppings a pale luminosity. Grim, Nudger thought. Grim. It would never make a scene in one of those crystal globes that you shook to make artificial snow fly. How would it be to live here? To look out at those buildings day after day?

Claudia walked to the kitchen door and turned to face him. "Do you want me to put on a pot of coffee?"

He shook his head. "Not for me. I've had enough coffee." He went to the sofa and sat down, listening again to the tired, complaining springs. "Are you glad I found you, Claudia?"

"I don't know." She absently fingered one of the scars on her wrists. "I'm sorry. I don't." Her fingernail lightly traced the scar down to the heel of her hand.

A cold wave of apprehension passed through Nudger, a mere tremor but powerful, like the shallow, rippling raw energy of a tidal wave in mid-ocean as it made for shore and shape and size and destruction. He stood up from the sofa and walked over to her. "Maybe I will have some coffee."

But she didn't move to make the coffee. "Will you stay here with me tonight, Nudger? Without sex, without any more questions, will you stay with me?"

"You're a beautiful woman who doesn't chew with her mouth open. How can I refuse?"

"I don't care if you wisecrack," she said. "It doesn't matter."

"I know, or I wouldn't do it."

She leaned into him and he put his arms around her, surprised by her thinness and the prominent contours of her ribs. There was about her a faint, clean scent of shampoo and perfume and onions.

"You did say no sex?" he said.

She burrowed her face into his chest and he felt the wet warmth of her tears through his shirt. "I don't want to be alone tonight," she told him, with a soft, vibrant desperation.

He hugged her to him and crooned comfortingly to her, as if she were a child awake from bad dreams, gently patting her shoulder. "You won't be alone tonight," he assured her again and again. "You won't be alone. And neither will I."

In the morning, as Nudger reached the second-floor landing on his way out of the building, Coreen Davis opened her apartment door and stared out at him with unmistakable reproach and warning. You couldn't help but like C. Davis.