Nightlines

XXXI

B y the time they let Nudger leave Headquarters it was just past dawn. The wavering orange sun hadn't yet burned off the haze of pollutants that had drifted across the river from the heavy industry on the east side, obscuring the graceful curve of the Arch above the downtown skyline. He crossed to the City Hall lot, where his car was parked, and sat behind the steering wheel for a minute before starting the engine.

Springer had prodded and goaded, and cracked the whip of the law, sending him through smaller and smaller hoops with the skill of a practiced interrogator. But Nudger had passed through them all. Finally, with the usual instruction to stay available, they had released him. The police might still be an aggravation, but they were no longer a threat.

Exhausted though he was, talked out though he was, Nudger needed to tell someone about what had happened, to share it with someone who cared. Some things not shared ate like acid.

He started the car and drove to see Claudia.

When he entered the old apartment building on Spruce and reached the second-floor landing, Coreen stuck her head out of her doorway and called his name. Nudger picked up something disturbing in her voice, a kind of vibrant apprehension. He stood for a moment with his hand on the banister, then turned and took a few steps toward her.

"You going to see Claudia," Coreen said, looking concerned, "I'll go with you. I been trying to call her on the phone, but she don't answer." She stepped all the way out into the hall and closed her door behind her.

"Maybe she's not home," Nudger said.

"She's home, all right. I seen her come in."

"Come in from where?"

Coreen shrugged. "Early morning walk, I guess." She led the way up the stairs, aggressiveness in the swing of her arms and the roll of her wide hips. "I wondered what she was doing out that time of morning. That's why I been trying to phone her, to find out."

"Maybe she couldn't sleep and felt like getting out," Nudger said.

Coreen snorted dubiously. "Anything else you feel like believing, Nudger? It ain't like Claudia to go roaming around in the early dawn. Not unless something's bothering her."

When they reached Claudia's door, Nudger rapped loudly on it with the edge of a half dollar. Slow minutes passed and Claudia didn't answer his knock. There was no sound from inside the apartment.

"Maybe she went back to bed," Nudger suggested hollowly, trying not to let Coreen's foreboding infect him.

Coreen wasn't having any of that explanation. She reached around him and rattled the knob. The door was locked. "You got a key?" she asked.

Nudger nodded. He dropped the half dollar back into his pocket, then reached deeper and drew out his key ring.

He opened the door to silence. He and Coreen stepped into Claudia's apartment like two people entering a swamp of unpredictable sinkholes.

Maybe she wasn't home after all, Nudger thought. The place had the unbroken quietude of rooms unoccupied. A cup and saucer sat on the table by the sofa, the cup tilted crookedly half up on the saucer rim, the brown liquid inside it level and still. For some reason it occurred to Nudger that the coffee was exactly the muddy brown color of the sliding current of the Mississippi just a few blocks away.

Coreen had moved around him and was standing in the doorway to the bedroom. Nudger saw her body stiffen and jerk backward as if she'd been struck. Her voice was the softest, saddest, he had ever heard. "Aw, Lord, no, no!…" She braced herself with both hands on the doorjambs.

Nudger leaped to her side, pulled her roughly out of the way and charged into the bedroom, knowing what was waiting for him.

He recognized the two ties that he'd left here, one brown-striped and one blue-striped, to go with either of his suits. Claudia had tied them end to end, knotted one around the inside doorknob of her closet, run the other tie up over the top of the door, and wrapped its end around her neck. She was nude, hanging limply against the door, like some kind of grotesque masquerade costume that had been casually placed there the night before, too real to be real. The blue-striped tie around her neck had dug deep into her flesh. Her eyes were bulging beneath closed lids, her tongue purple and distended. The kitchen stool she'd stood on and kicked aside lay upside down a few feet from her.

Nudger's soul was a thousand pounds of cold lead, for a moment weighting him motionless where he stood. Then he rushed to her, his agony welling from his throat in a stricken, pitying moan. He saw that her toes were barely touching the floor. Clasping his arms around her hips and buttocks, he raised her to relieve the tension on the taut ties, and hugged her to him as he pressed his head against the cool flesh between her breasts.

He couldn't be sure if the heartbeat he heard faintly was hers or an irregularity in his own racing heart.

"Call nine-eleven!" he shouted to Coreen. But she was already at the phone by the bed, punching out the emergency number.

Nudger reached up and flipped the blue tie out from over the door's top edge, allowing enough slack for him to lower Claudia gently to the floor. Hurriedly, but with a calm that remotely surprised him, he dug at the knot against the side of her neck. His fingernail doubled back, jolting him with pain, but the knot gave slightly. He couldn't undo it, but he managed to get enough of a grip on the material to pull the tie loose from around her neck. He felt a helpless fury when he saw the wide red gouge where it had sunk into her flesh.

After arranging Claudia carefully on the floor, with her hands at her sides, he pressed her tongue back into her mouth flat. Then he pinched her nose between his thumb and forefinger, bent over her, and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He worked frantically, rhythmically, pumping air from his lungs into hers. Breath for breath, life for life. Feeling her chest rise and fall mechanically with his effort. He was vaguely aware of Coreen standing over him, saying something he couldn't comprehend. Nothing mattered other than that he must not stop lending Claudia breath. When he stopped, her life would be gone, irretrievably. He learned the meaning of forever.

Claudia's shoulder twitched!

He saw it from the corner of his vision-not his imagination!

She vomited then. He tasted the bitterness of it in his mouth and jerked away, turning and spitting. Claudia was gagging, her head lolled to the side. The gagging stopped and she began gasping with a bellows rasp, kicking one leg feebly, slapping the floor with rigid hands. Breathing! She was breathing!

Nudger crawled over and held her hand, watching her chest heave as she sucked at the air. Sirens were screaming their frantic prolonged yodel outside, close by. Her eyes sprang open, rolled wildly.

He heard the sirens growling animal-like to silence, and seconds later the clatter of footsteps on the stairs and in the hall.

"We'll take it now," a voice said above him. There were pants legs and shoes all around him. A pair of scuffed brown slip-ons edged closer. He let himself roll out of the way, and someone gripped him firmly beneath the arms and helped him to his feet.

Nudger rode with her in the ambulance all the way to Incarnate Word Hospital, while a paramedic kept an oxygen mask pressed to her face. Claudia's eyes were open, unmov- ing. If she was still drawing breath, it was too shallow for Nudger to see the rise and fall of her breast. Her arms and hands, her fingers, were still.

The paramedics and an RN wheeled her away and out of sight immediately, and Nudger was told to go to the Emergency admittance desk.

He signed Claudia in, scrawling his signature on a flurry of papers, assuming responsibility for payment. A stout redheaded nurse assured Nudger that the hospital would check with Kimball's Restaurant to see if Claudia had any employee group insurance there. None of that mattered right now to Nudger. He couldn't make them understand that, so he only listened to them, staring and nodding numbly.

For over an hour he sat in a molded plastic chair in a waiting area. Half a dozen other people waited there with him. Everyone's eyes followed the white uniforms who came and went through wide swinging doors. No one in the waiting area spoke except in soft and polite monosyllables. No one wanted to shatter the crystalline vessel of hope held out for whomever they knew behind the doors. Tattered Newsweek and Time magazines lay untouched.

Behind the admittance desk, the redheaded nurse sat joking with a bespectacled man wearing a white outfit with a name tag. Nudger thought he could make out the "Dr." before the name. Didn't the bastard have something more useful to do than chat with the admittance nurse? People in the building were suffering, dying. The man said something through a crooked smile and the nurse laughed like a giddy teenager. Nudger felt like walking over and punching them both through the wall.

Then the nurse busied herself separating carbon copies and placing them in the right file folders. The "doctor" straightened up from where he'd been sitting on the edge of her desk, came out from behind the low partition, slung a pushbroom and mop over his shoulder, and meandered away down the hall. Nudger told himself to take it easy.

His bout with Springer and Company at Headquarters had drained his body of resilience, but left him mentally hyped up and dazedly overreactive.

He slouched low in his plastic chair, closed his eyes, and half-dozed, his mind a writhing mass. He didn't like what he saw behind his eyelids, but maybe time would pass faster this way.

Snatches of the interrogation kept coming back to him: "You knew from the beginning that Jenine Boyington was out for revenge, didn't you, Nudger?…" "Co-conspirator…" "Withholding evidence…" "Hang your ass out to dry…" "Helped a potential murderer…"

Finally a louder voice said, "Mr. Nudger? I'm Dr. Antonelli."

Nudger opened his eyes and looked up to see an unkempt, frazzle-haired man in a dirty green smock. He looked as if he should be mopping floors.

"How is she?" Nudger asked, standing up with the slow tentativeness of an arthritic.

Dr. Antonelli narrowed his eyes and appraised Nudger. "Right now, she's not much worse off than you appear to be. The area around the cricoid and trachea wall is badly bruised, the hyoid and larynx to a lesser degree. And there's some muscle and tendon damage from the weight of her body. All that isn't as bad as it sounds. So far there seems to be no brain-cell damage from lack of oxygen. I think she'll be all right, Mr. Nudger, but we'll make her ours for a few days to be sure."

Nudger ran a hand down his face and grinned. He felt thirty pounds lighter.

"The ties she tried to hang herself with were cheap polyester," Dr. Antonelli said, "so the material stretched far enough to allow her toes to touch the floor and take some of the strain off her neck. That saved her life. If they'd been expensive silk ties, she'd be dead."

"Can I see her?"

"Sure. But not for long. She's under sedation. And she shouldn't try to talk for a while." Dr. Antonelli ducked slightly so he could see Nudger's neck more clearly. "Excuse me for asking, Mr. Nudger, but has someone been trying to strangle you?"

"What room is she in?"

Antonelli shrugged. He was busy enough with patients who wanted his help. "Four-o-five. Elevator's at the end of the hall and around the corner."

"Thanks," Nudger said. He patted the doctor's arm and hurried away.

Four-o-five was a semi-private room, but the other bed was empty. The walls were pale green, to go with the room's faint medicinal scent of mint. There were two small white metal cabinets, white bedside tables, and matching blue chairs for visitors. A framed print of snow-draped pine trees silhouetted against a moonlit lake hung on the wall between the window and the door to the lavatory. A cool room, in decor and purpose.

Claudia lay on her back beneath a crisp white sheet. When Nudger entered the room, she didn't move her head, but her eyes picked him up when he got close to the bed. Her pupils were dilated and Nudger wasn't sure she could see him, but she smiled weakly, with obvious pain. She was barely conscious above the pull of the sedative, and her neck was swollen and turning a livid purple. She moved her lips, said nothing.

"We'll talk later," Nudger told her. He bent down and kissed her forehead. A nurse pushed into the room, made a note of something, then turned with a sole-squeaking swivel and dutifully scurried back out.

Nudger rested his fingertips on Claudia's cheek. "Don't try that again," he said. "Please. For me, don't try that again."

She nodded. The effort hurt her. Nudger shut up and just sat there with her. Neither of them moved. Claudia closed her eyes as the sedative gained ground on her.

Half an hour passed that way, and then the door swung open and Dr. Antonelli slouched into the room. When he saw Nudger he shook his head in a gesture of hopeless disapproval.

"She's going to be fine," he said. "Go home, Mr. Nudger. You're useless here. Come back this afternoon. She'll be awake. Bring flowers."

"What time this afternoon?"

"One or two o'clock. It's not visiting hours, but I'll see they let you up here. Right now, go home. Get some sleep yourself. I can see that you need it."

Nudger realized the doctor was right. It was pointless for him to be in the room now. Nothing more could happen to Claudia while she slept. He would come back later, when she was awake and aware.

"The nurses are watching her," Dr. Antonelli assured him. "She's getting good care. The best. Believe it."

Nudger stood up and almost fell. He'd been sitting in such a way that he'd impaired the circulation in his right leg. It had become numb, and was reacquiring feeling now with a tingling sensation. While he was waiting to be able to walk, he fished in his pocket for a scrap of paper and a pen. He scribbled his apartment and office phone numbers and handed the paper to Dr. Antonelli. "If there's any change, any trouble, have somebody call me, okay?"

"A solemn promise, Mr. Nudger. Go. Put ice on your neck. Sleep. Come back later. Goodbye."

Nudger nodded and limped from the room, gaining strength and feeling in his leg as he navigated along the hall. Through his weariness and his concern for Claudia, he began to feel a burgeoning optimism, only hazily suspecting that this cycle of harboring hope and then being disillusioned was his blessing and his curse.

He'd have to wait to put his mind entirely at ease about Claudia. Right now, he'd follow Dr. Antonelli's persistent advice and finally allow himself to rest. Claudia was alive. For the moment, at least, luck was on the rise. Life's direction was up.

He stepped into the elevator and descended.