Nightlines

XXX

Night hadn't fallen, but it was teetering, when Nudger turned the Volkswagen into the driveway of Agnes Boyington's fashionable white brick home in the central west end. In the dusk the house appeared even larger. The wide lawn, still damp from the afternoon rain, had been mowed recently and was rich with the sweet, pungent scent of summer. Deepening shadows softened the symmetrically manicured slope of the grounds. Lindell Boulevard didn't seem to be there at all beyond the spreading, sheltering oaks and maples. The area surrounding the Boyington house had about it the atmosphere of a groomed golf course.

When Nudger parked the Volkswagen near the columned front porch and got out, locusts in the nearby trees trilled like crickets, only deeper, more hoarsely. Katydids, children called them, mimicking their urgent rattling buzzing. The locusts existed noisily and briefly after long hibernation, then died and left behind only their dry husks. Nudger knew people who had done that.

As he stepped up onto the porch, he saw that there was a lamp burning at one of the front windows. Disdaining the brass knocker this time, he rang the doorbell, hearing chimes toll faintly inside. He waited for what seemed like five full minutes before Agnes Boyington came to the door.

She was wearing tight black slacks and a ribbed white sweater adorned with heavy gold chains. Her hair was rigidly engineered, as if she'd just returned from a beauty parlor. Earrings that matched the chains gathered and gave light as she moved her head. Nudger wondered if she'd been notified of Jeanette's arrest.

"It's time for us to talk," he said.

She studied him in the faint light, gazing at him as if he were a trespassing dandelion on the unbroken plane of green behind him. Finally she said, as if it were an order, "Come in, Nudger."

He entered, closing the door behind him, and followed Agnes Boyington through the hall and into an impeccably decorated, high-ceilinged room with pale, tiny-print wallpaper. There were soft blue chairs and a sofa with lots of light wood trim, and a dainty antique secretary desk with elegantly curved legs, just inside the door. The plush carpet was dead white and might have been laid yesterday.

"Sit down," Agnes Boyington said, pointing to a straight- backed chair with a modicum of upholstery. It seemed a device contrived by sadists.

Nudger sat. He was even more uncomfortable than he thought he'd be, but he made the most of it, scooting down and extending his legs, crossing his ankles. The chair creaked softly beneath his weight and then was quiet, as if afraid of being reprimanded for complaining. It was that kind of room.

Agnes paced to an advantageous position near the secretary and faced Nudger with the poise and presence of a stage actress. "I know about Jeanette," she said. "The police notified me this afternoon."

"How much did they tell you?"

"That she was being held for brandishing a deadly weapon."

"As soon as the prosecutor hears the facts," Nudger said, "the charge will be attempted murder."

"Oh? Murder of whom?"

"Didn't you talk to Jeanette?"

"No. I intend to do so in the morning, with my-her lawyer."

"She was going to kill someone named Luther Kell, the man who murdered your other daughter. I happened along. She was also going to kill me, as a bonus."

Agnes pursed her lips and tilted her head sideways, as if thinking over what Nudger had said, not liking it, but not disliking it all.

"I figured out some things," Nudger told her, watching her closely. He could hear the locusts screaming away their lives outside.

"That's your job, figuring out," Agnes Boyington said.

"Would you like to hear how well I've done my job?" Without waiting for an answer, he continued. "When Jeanette was out of her head with rage, about to squeeze the trigger, she said something about killing all the men she could. '… Before they kill me again,' she said."

"Not surprising, if she was as hysterical as you describe."

"No, but it caused me to recall some things about her, like her familiarity with her dead sister's apartment the day she and I went there to search it. And the expensive but uncharacteristic piece of blown-glass erotica on the curio shelf in her apartment."

"Erotica?"

"Then, when I was about to leave her apartment last night, I happened to see a nightline number scratched on the base of her phone, the number Jenine had used, scratched on the bottom of her phone in exactly the same manner."

"Nightline number?" Agnes's voice was up an octave, oddly plaintive. Something in her was bending, and must break.

"Such a lot of questions," Nudger said. "You know what I'm talking about. Obviously, I was meant to find that number in Jenine's apartment when Jeanette took me there to search. The police hadn't found it because it had been scratched on the base of Jenine's phone after they searched the apartment."

The squareness of Agnes Boyington's deceptively youthful carriage melted. Her shoulders were slumped, narrow, and bunched. Her right hand flexed spasmodically and knotted into a fist around her thumb.

"How did you get the idea?" Nudger asked. "How did it happen?"

She sat down on the uncompromising sofa across from Nudger, a middle-aged widow by lamplight. To see her age that way, almost with the rapidity of movie magic, depressed Nudger.

Her voice was a defeated monotone now, lacking entirely the cold fire and authority of only five minutes ago. "Two months ago Jenine made an appointment on the nightlines with a man-Luther Kell, as I've learned today. Kell was alone with her in her apartment, but someone interrupted them. They made another date; Jenine gave Kell a key and he was to let himself in and wait for her to arrive home the next evening. But Jeanette dropped by unexpectedly to visit her sister. Kell arrived, assumed she was Jenine, and murdered her." Agnes drew a deep breath and thrust out her chin. "My slain daughter is Jeanette."

Nudger felt a melancholy satisfaction. He had figured things right, but it was as if he'd lost something in the process. Kernel of wisdom, kernel of sadness. He was familiar with the sensation.

"Jeanette was dead," Agnes continued. "Nothing could alter that. But why couldn't tragedy also be opportunity? Jeanette's death was a chance for Jenine to shake free of her sinful past. The twins had done everything together, gone to the same schools, acquired the same meager skills, so it was simple for Jenine to slip into Jeanette's itinerant part-time office work; and Jeanette hadn't lived long in her apartment, so it was easy for Jenine to begin living there as Jeanette without attracting suspicion." She dropped her gaze and frowned in annoyance. "If only she'd listened to her mother! I figured out everything for her, every minuscule detail! If only she'd listened!"

"Jenine wanted something more," Nudger said, "something you might not understand. She loved her twin sister, felt as one flesh with her. She identified with Jeanette to a greater extent than either of you had planned. The masquerade was complete; a part of her became her murdered twin, breathing and walking around. She wanted revenge."

"Yes," Agnes said, "revenge." She stared at the white carpet. "But that posed problems. The double of the victim is handicapped in searching for the killer. And any radical change in Jenine's appearance would have caused the neighbors-Jeanette's neighbors-to look closely at her, requiring explanations and making her impersonation of Jeanette more difficult. Jenine realized this. She realized she had to hire someone like you."

"Someone to be her bird dog," Nudger said, "to track down and point out her twin's killer without arousing his suspicion. When I told her about following and losing Kell the day she was to meet him, she decided it was time to act on her own. She talked to him again on the nightlines, without my knowledge, and made another appointment. She didn't anticipate me following Kell to where she was to meet him in her disguise, meet him wearing a dark wig and makeup to obscure her resemblance to her dead twin."

Agnes said nothing, still staring at the spotless white field of carpet.

The identity switch would have worked, Nudger realized, except for the power of Jenine's obsession to avenge Jeanette's death, for which she must have felt responsible. And it would have worked if Agnes Boyington had been able to buy or scare him off the case and prevent him from running Kell to ground.

And there was more. Something was bothering him, something darkly laughing and obscene.

"How much did you know," Nudger asked, "about what Jenine had planned for tonight?"

Agnes raised her head high and her eyes glinted in the lamplight with their old brittle disdain. If she was in league with the devil, the devil had better watch out. "Everything!" she snapped.

Nudger felt his breath leave him, his stomach contract. It was true, then. He hadn't really expected this, even from Agnes Boyington.

"You!" she said accusingly. "When you wouldn't be reasonable and drop the case, I had no choice but to change tactics. So you might well blame yourself for what's happened!"

For an instant Nudger felt a rush of guilt, almost buying her twisted perspective. Then, "No," he said. And unbelievingly, "How could you let your own daughter sink into this?"

"Jenine didn't take advantage of her opportunity after Jeanette's death, Nudger. The opportunity I gave her. She fell into her old sinful ways, began seeing men, virtual strangers. Doing… things with them! I know; I had Hugo Rumbo follow her, report to me. Everything."

"And you had Rumbo follow me. When he stopped me at the mall today, he was really trying to prevent me from following Jenine and Kell."

"Of course he was!" Agnes Boyington said, as if Nudger were a slow study and she was becoming impatient. "And on my orders. I knew where Jenine and Kell were going, and what she was going to do-or he was. It was the kind of life Jenine lived that killed Jeanette. I gave Jenine a chance to straighten out her life, to recapture purity-"

"To become Jeanette," Nudger interrupted. "For you."

"Yes! Of course! And when she turned her back on decency and respectability, what choice had I left? She visited death upon her own sister with her sin and negligence. And when she failed her test with God, I planned on letting her live only long enough to avenge Jeanette's murder!"

"You really do believe in God," Nudger said incredulously. But he knew he shouldn't be incredulous. The damnedest people quoted the Bible. And, if it suited them, the Constitution and Rod McKuen.

"Of course I believe in Him. Don't you?"

"I don't think so," Nudger said. "I'm not sure I want to."

He understood now. Understood more than Agnes would approve. Agnes had used Jenine as Jenine had used Nudger, to find Jeanette's killer, the man who had dared to violate Agnes by invading her ordered world and murdering her pure daughter. She intended to let the soiled-beyond- redemption Jenine perhaps meet the same fate as her twin, before she herself would enter the apartment and exercise her own righteous revenge on Kell. Or on Jenine. Whoever was the survivor. It was the puritanical Agnes who had prepared the bathroom for butchery. She was the woman in the hat who'd confused Hammersmith's man watching for Jeanette. Probably she'd left the building when he was phoning Hammersmith. She had been waiting outside the apartment, but she hadn't entered when she'd seen Nudger, then the police, arrive.

There were depths to Agnes Boyington, and depths and depths. If she was capable of planning the murder and dismemberment of her own daughter… Nudger didn't move. Suspicion drifted into his mind through doors suddenly sprung open; awareness bloomed from memory: the momentary whiff of the mingled, distinctive scents of cigarette tobacco and perfume that clung to a room long after Agnes had left it, the way death clung. The killer who wore gloves; the murder that never quite fit. How likely is it that a woman engaged to be married?…He didn't want to believe it, but it wouldn't go away.

"You killed Grace Valpone," he said, finding the revelation left him short of breath.

He'd surprised Agnes. She tilted her head back and to the side in the Boyington manner. Her wary eyes registered confusion. Then a new respect for Nudger flared in them like a fierce, cold light.

"What you did to her," Nudger said softly. "What you did with the knife. I mean, how could you? What sort of monster lives in your skin?"

"The sort that does what is necessary. The Valpone murder, done the way it was, proved necessary. It was what a man would do."

"You killed Grace Valpone because of her dissimilarities to your daughters," Nudger said, "because she was older, led a different kind of life. You murdered her because she wasn't a talker on the nightlines, and if she became a victim in the series of murders, her death would lead the police away from the lines as a factor in the bathtub slayings, away from Jenine's nightline conversations and meetings with men. Away from closer investigation and the discovery of Jeanette's true identity. From stigma reflected on you. But where did you know her from? What was she to you?"

"Why, nothing. A stranger."

An icy sea engulfed Nudger, stunning him. "You murdered a complete stranger?"

"I murdered the Valpone woman precisely because she was a stranger," Agnes said. "So there would be no personal connection between us and thus no apparent motive. I chose her name from the list of recent marriage licenses in the Daily Record. If she was going to be married, she'd hardly be talking on the nightlines as Jenine had. I eavesdropped on her life to make sure she suited my purpose, then I killed her in the manner of the nightline women's murders. She might have been anyone. I simply wanted to alter the pattern of the murders, but not so much that they still wouldn't be tied together in the minds of the police. That way the investigation would be diverted away from the nightlines. It didn't have to be Grace Valpone. It was nothing personal."

Nudger realized he was squeezing the arms of his chair. Nothing personal. He was in the almost palpable presence of genuine evil; evil found out, unmasked, real. He was awed.

"The police will piece this together," he said, "from what Jenine will tell them, from what I'll tell them."

"And from what I'll tell them," Agnes Boyington said. "Do you think anything really matters to me now? My daughters are shamed, one of them is dead, everything I've existed for is dirty, dirty, part now of your soiled and grimy world. Do you think what happens now actually makes a difference?"

"Not to you, I suppose it doesn't," Nudger said. But he knew better. He knew her. She would think about it. She was a fighter, and she'd pull on her white gloves and see her lawyer and make denials; she'd make whatever moves she had. Which in today's crazy-quilt legal system might be enough to let her walk away from the game free.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

"I have always done what I must in this world," she said firmly.

Nudger went to the white phone on the secretary desk and dialed Hammersmith's number. He told him, briefly, the nature of the deception and the true identity of his female prisoner.

Then he hung up the phone and sat quietly with Agnes Boyington in her calm, ordered home, listening to the hoarse screaming of the locusts, and waiting for the police.