Nightlines

IV

Hammersmith sat behind his desk in his Third District office and gazed at Nudger through a greenish haze of smoke emitted by one of his incredibly foul- smelling cigars. He was a corpulent Buddha of a man now, so unlike the sleekly handsome officer who had charmed and cajoled the ladies when he and Nudger were partners a decade ago in a two-man patrol car. Time did that sort of thing to people, Nudger mused, sitting down in the hard oak chair before Hammersmith's desk. He wondered fleetingly what time was doing to him, then promptly forced such depressing speculation from his consciousness. Why stick pins in oneself?

"What are you on to now, Nudge?" Hammersmith asked.

"I need to know about the Jenine Boyington murder," Nudger said, breathing shallowly to inhale as little secondhand smoke as possible. He understood why the Geneva Convention had outlawed chemical warfare.

Hammersmith seemed to read his mind, drew on the cigar and exhaled another green billow. "Medium-height- and-weight female Caucasian," he said, "found fully clothed in her bathtub with her throat slashed. There was alcohol in her blood-what was left of it when we met her. The killing was a nice neat job. No arrests, no suspects."

"All of that was in the newspapers," Nudger said.

Hammersmith narrowed sharp blue eyes within pads of flesh. "Are you on the case?"

Nudger nodded.

"We don't like that, Nudge. Anybody else I'd tell to butt out."

"I'll stay out of your way. Really."

"No need to promise," Hammersmith told him. "Who's your client?"

"Jeanette Boyington, the victim's twin sister."

"What do you know that we should?" Hammersmith asked.

Client confidentiality or not, Nudger knew that withholding evidence in a homicide case was illegal and would at the very least get his license suspended. That was one of the reasons he had come here, to protect himself. He could divulge such information to Hammersmith and keep it reasonably confidential unless it proved to be the crux of the investigation.

"My client and I wouldn't want this information spread around," Nudger said.

"It won't be. Do I need to promise?"

Nudger smiled. "No." He wondered sometimes at the bond formed between two men who spent countless hours in a cramped patrol car, depending upon each other day after day for their very lives. "Jenine Boyington had a habit of making late-night phone calls and meeting men," he said. And he explained to Hammersmith about the phone company service lines and their bizarre and desperate nighttime use.

"All of that might not be relevant," Hammersmith said, when Nudger had finished. But both men knew better. Hammersmith was playing the game and would explore the new avenue of investigation as quietly as possible. He had always been nifty at stealth.

"Time now for the other end of the trade," Nudger said. He was aware that often the police held back some pertinent piece of information from the news media. Aside from this helping them to screen the inevitable procession of cranks who confessed to every sensational homicide, it gave them a hole card to play against the murderer.

Hammersmith didn't try to be evasive. He took another pull on his cigar, exhaled a thundercloud, and said, "There were a few strands of blond hair under one of the victim's broken fingernails."

"The victim was a blonde," Nudger said.

Hammersmith shook his head, his heavy jowls undulating. "It wasn't her hair. Jenine Boyington's hair was straight. These strands of hair were about six inches long and came from the head of somebody with very curly blond hair. They almost have to be the killer's." Another draw on the cigar. "And something else. We got a set of smudged prints, useless except that they indicate by the wide spread of the fingers that the perpetrator has abnormally large hands. Huge hands."

"Have any other women been murdered in their bathtubs during the last few years?" Nudger asked.

"Sure. But then bathtubs are a common enough place to find female murder victims. What could be more traditional?"

Nudger thanked Hammersmith and stood up from the hard oak chair. The chair was so uncomfortable that it was impossible to sit in for more than about ten minutes. Hammersmith knew it; he was a workaholic and didn't like to be disturbed for longer than that by visitors. Nudger wondered if he'd had the torturous chair custommade.

He was at the door when Hammersmith's voice stopped him.

"Your client, Nudge, is she an identical twin?"

"She looks exactly like her sister's newspaper photo," Nudger said.

"Sometimes," Hammersmith said, "one twin takes the death of the other unnaturally hard. It's like they think death ought to be shared between them like everything else."

"You worried about some compulsion for revenge?" Nudger asked.

"I'm telling you to worry about it. Keep an eye on your client. She might get cute."

"She already is cute, in a reptilian sort of way."

"And let me know if you find out anything else about those dead-of-night phone conversations."

"Some of the talk you hear on those lines can tear your heart," Nudger said. Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?

Hammersmith shrugged and picked up a pen from his desk. "My heart's been torn and torn. So has yours, but your problem is your heart grows no scar tissue. Get out."

Nudger got out.

When he returned to his office, Nudger found that Danny had let someone in to wait for him. That was the arrangement Nudger had with the doughnut-shop owner. Danny was less convenient but much cheaper than a secretary.

Even before she introduced herself, Nudger suspected the identity of the middle-aged, stiffbacked woman seated in the chair before his desk. She had to be well over fifty, but there was in her still composure, calm gray eyes, and petite curvaceousness a familiar chilly vitality.

"I'm Agnes Boyington," she said, half standing as Nudger entered. "Jeanette's mother." She offered a cool hand, which Nudger shook gently, then she sat back down and waited for him to circle his desk and settle into his swivel chair. She winced when the chair yowled.

"I assume Jeanette told you she hired me to investigate Jenine's murder," Nudger said.

"No, she didn't. But I came across your name and phone number when I was visiting Jeanette. Then I discovered that you were a private investigator."

Nudger smiled thinly. "It seems you've been doing some investigating yourself," he said, instinctively not liking this woman, not liking her at all.

"I bore Jeanette and Jenine late in life, Mr. Nudger," Agnes Boyington said, as if recalling with distaste the messy process of childbirth. "Perhaps for that reason I spoiled them, meddled too much in their affairs. Yes, I admit that. But I don't intend to confront Jeanette with what I've discovered and insist that she terminate her arrangement with you."

Nudger was ahead of Agnes Boyington. He knew she realized that dealing that way with her daughter would be futile. Jeanette would simply hire another investigator, taking pains to be more secretive. "Isn't my arrangement with her pretty much up to Jeanette, whether you confront her or not?" Nudger said. "She's how old… in her early twenties?"

"Twenty-eight," Agnes Boyington snapped, as if this were distinctly none of Nudger's business. He understood why and immediately raised his estimate of Jeanette's mother's age. "But she listens to her mother, usually."

"If you don't intend to interfere," Nudger said flatly, "why did you come here?"

Agnes Boyington leaned forward in her chair and fixed her unblinking eyes on Nudger, summoning her powers to persuade. "I'm here to try to convince you that the police should be left to handle alone the investigation of Jenine's murder. Jeanette was very close to her twin sister. Whatever she told you would be colored by her grief, and the emotional residue of her recent trouble. She would benefit from your benign neglect."

"Recent trouble?" Nudger said, grabbing at the brass ring that had been so obviously proffered.

"I regret the necessity to tell you this," Agnes Boyington lied, "and I am relying on your professional ethics to ensure your silence. Just a few months ago Jenine underwent an abortion."

"I thought you said the recent trouble was Jeanette's."

Agnes Boyington removed a long, slender brown cigarette from her purse and lit it with a silver lighter that worked on the first try. She had about her the air of a woman who was used to things working on the first attempt, a woman whose daughters, especially Jenine, had been an aggravation in an otherwise perfectly controlled existence. After making sure the cigarette was burning adequately, she condescended to speak to Nudger.

"Jeanette got into an argument with the man who impregnated Jenine," she said. "They fought over who was to pay for the abortion, and I'm sure they had other matters over which to fight. He beat her up badly, then left the city. The girls thought they were keeping it a secret from me, but of course they weren't." She sighed and gazed for a moment at the ceiling, as if seeking tolerance to cope with this world that didn't measure up to her standards. "It was I who eventually paid for Jenine's abortion, under the guise of a loan for a different purpose. I have paid for my daughters' mistakes all their lives. It's the cross God has given me to bear."

"What's the man's name?" Nudger asked.

"It doesn't matter. I want to maintain some discretion. I'm only here to try to impress upon you the fact that Jeanette isn't thinking clearly right now; she's suffered two traumatic experiences in the past eight weeks. Be advised, do not take what she says as gospel truth." She stood up. She had the carriage and suppleness of a much younger woman. Age had somehow overlooked her. Or maybe she'd made a deal with the devil, something to ease the burden of that cross.

"So you want me to drop the case without telling Jeanette," Nudger said, still seated.

She smiled very faintly, pointing her smoldering long cigarette at him as if it were a magic wand that could in a wink make him disappear if she so chose. "Exactly, Mr. Nudger. Though I don't know you, since you move with at least some competence upon the less genteel and more demanding underside of life, I am assuming that you are a man of some practical wisdom and judgment. The police will find Jenine's murderer, if he can be found." She snuffed out the just-lighted cigarette in the ashtray on the corner of the desk, a gesture done entirely for effect, theatrical yet lowkey. "Let me know what you decide, at your convenience. I'll send you a check of a more than generous amount."

Nudger was struck again by the woman's similarity to her daughter. Was there a mold somewhere turning out these shapely, cool, and distant women? He couldn't resist asking, "Are you a twin, Mrs. Boyington?"

"No. Twins run in families, Mr. Nudger, but usually they occur every other generation. My mother was a twin."

"Is Jeanette's father alive?"

"Herbert died twenty-five years ago. I never remarried. Why do you ask?"

"Curiosity, Mrs. Boyington." Nudger smiled and shrugged. "That's why I'm a detective." He didn't tell her it had crossed his mind that spiders sometimes devour their mates.

"You will consider my proposition?" she said. It was not really a question, rather a command.

"Oh, I try to consider everything. A closed mind is the devil's workshop."

"That's 'idle hands,' Mr. Nudger."

"I wasn't quoting."

She shot a withering glance at him, nodded, and stalked from the office, leaving in her wake a scent more like disinfectant than perfume.

Nudger listened to her measured steps on the narrow wooden stairs that led to the street door, heard it open and close and felt the subtle change of temperature in a draft across his ankles. It felt warmer, now that Agnes Boyington had gone.

Nudger drummed his fingers on the desk for a few minutes. Then he stood up and went downstairs, out the street door, and made a tight turn and entered the warm and cloying atmosphere of Danny's Donuts.

Danny was alone in the shop, as usual. Nudger often wondered how he stayed in business. But then he was sure Danny wondered the same thing about him. Neither of them was considering tax-free municipals.

Danny's basset-hound features brightened when he saw Nudger, and he poured a cup of his acidic coffee and placed it on the counter in front of Nudger's customary stool near the serving door.

Nudger sat and sipped. It was the polite thing to do. Danny plunked down a leadlike glazed doughnut next to the cup. Nudger knew that Danny's freebies were leftovers from yesterday's unsold pastry, and he was not so polite that he would eat that deadly morsel, despite Danny's extreme sensitivity about the quality of his product.

"I was upstairs thinking," Nudger said.

"That's your line of business, Nudge."

"Yeah. Didn't you once tell me you were a twin?"

"That's right. I had an identical twin brother. Sammy was his name. Samuel and Daniel."

"Where is Samuel now?" Nudger asked.

Danny smiled, but there was a gleam of old sadness in his brown eyes. "Sammy died when we were six," he said.

"Being twins," Nudger said, "do you think you were closer than other brothers?"

Danny began carefully wiping down the stainless-steel counter. It didn't need it. "I don't know, Nudge. How could I be sure; I never had another brother, and we were so young when he died."

"Have you ever worried about him dying young?" Nudger asked. "I mean, aren't identical twins genetically the same, so that their organs are subject to the same weaknesses, the same diseases?"

"It never worried me, Nudge," Danny said with that same sad smile that Nudger had never seen before today. "Sammy was hit and killed by a car."

"I see." Nudger sipped his coffee, burned his tongue, decided he had it coming. "I'm sorry to pry, Danny."

Danny shrugged and tucked his gray dish towel into his belt. "Been a long time ago, Nudge."

But not so long that it didn't still bring pain, Nudger thought. And Jeanette Boyington had lost her twin sister only last week.

"You mixed up in a case with twins?" Danny asked.

" 'Mixed up' describes what I am exactly."

"Well, I'll help you if I can. You know that, don't you?"

"I know," Nudger said. And he did know. Some things you don't doubt.

"That all you wanted, Nudge?" Danny asked.

"That and this," Nudger said, and girded himself and took a bite of the stale doughnut. He watched with satisfaction the slow formation of Danny's customary amiable smile.

Outside the doughnut-shop window, a hulking man in a tan windbreaker and a bright yellow, billed cap was squinting through the glass at Nudger. His coarse features-flattened nose, shelflike eyebrows, outthrust wide jaw-registered subtle satisfaction as he impressed Nudger's face upon his memory. He would know Nudger instantly if he saw him again, anywhere.

He turned from the doughnut-shop window and lumbered halfway down the street to where his car was parked. It was a brown ten-year-old Buick, faded and rusty and as hulking as its owner. As the man got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door, the rearview mirror wobbled and dropped to a crooked position from the impact. He started the car and pulled away from the curb, and was only a few blocks away when he automatically reached for a small red rubber ball on the seat beside him. He began to squeeze the ball rhythmically as he drove, exercising the already powerful forearm rippling beneath the windbreaker sleeve.

As he stopped for a traffic light, he glanced down at the ball expanding and contracting between his fingers and figured that it was probably just about the size of Nudger's Adam's apple. He smiled, not at all with his eyes, and with only one corner of his mouth.

Then the light changed and for the time being he completely forgot about Nudger. Squeezing the ball and driving occupied his entire capacity for concentration.

V

M

other has always been a snoop and an interloper," Jeanette said, later that day in Nudger's office.

Nudger made a tent with his fingers, just like Sidney Greenstreet used to do in Bogart movies, and stared candidly at Jeanette. "I'm playing this game honestly with you," he said. "Which is why I told you about your mother's visit. And I need complete honesty from you. What's the name of the man who got Jenine pregnant and beat up on you?"

"Wally. Wallace Everest. But he didn't."

"Didn't what?"

Jeanette uncrossed her shapely legs, planted her dainty silver high heels firmly on the floor, and aimed eyes like her mother's at Nudger. "You wanted honesty, and that's what you're going to get." She made it sound like a threat, and maybe it was. "Mother doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that I was the one seeing Wally, the one he made pregnant, the one who had the abortion."

"Prolong the honesty and explain," Nudger said.

"I'd been seeing Wally for several months. When he found out I was expecting his baby, he was angry instead of happy. He said he was leaving me and never wanted to see me again. Then he suggested the abortion. When I cried on Jenine's shoulder and told her what had happened, she came up with a plan."

There were curves that you could see and curves that you couldn't in the Boyington family, Nudger reflected. "Plan?" he said, and listened with some apprehension.

"Jenine confided in me that she'd already had three abortions," Jeanette said. "She suggested that rather than create a black mark against me and possibly incur the rage of Mother, she'd be the one to have the abortion instead of me. Abortion number four would mean little to her, or to Mother if she found out, considering Jenine's other activities and previous abortions, which Mother's spying might any day uncover. Mother is not a liberal or understanding person."

Some understatement, Nudger thought. "Didn't this plan pose somewhat of a medical problem?" he asked.

"Not one we couldn't solve. I simply went to an abortion clinic as Jenine, with all of her identification, including driver's license with photograph. So as far as anyone, even the doctor, knows, it was Jenine who had the abortion."

"I can guess the rest," Nudger said. "When you saw Wally Everest after the abortion, you tried to take up where you'd left off, but he still didn't want to see you and you fought." Nudger was only speculating, but he wanted to give Jeanette a version that might get her angry and crack her hard exterior so that he might gauge the truth inside. He waited for the fury of a woman presumed scorned, but it never made itself evident. Her serene yet oddly predatory features remained calm. It was as if she were a member of another species.

"I never wanted to lay eyes on Wally again and still don't," she said. "I went to him to get the money to pay for the abortion, the money he'd promised to give me so I'd terminate the pregnancy. But he backed down on the deal and refused to give me anything, got angry and called me names and then laughed at me. I lost my temper and struck him. It was all the excuse he needed. He beat me badly enough to put me in the hospital for two days. I never felt so much pain and fear."

"How do you feel about Wally now?"

"I hate him, of course."

"Have you seen him since the beating?"

"No. He left town while I was in the hospital. At least that's what I was told by his landlady and a few of his acquaintances. They said he moved to Cincinnati to start a new salesman's job. Wally sells religious textbooks; he's very good at it."

Nudger felt like reaching into his bottom desk drawer for the thermos of warm milk he kept there, but he decided that wouldn't seem very businesslike.

He waited until Jeanette had left, then he reached instead for the telephone and called Jack Hammersmith.

When he came to the phone Hammersmith asked, "Do you have something to tell me that will break the Jenine Boyington case wide open?"

"I never saw a case break wide open," Nudger said. "I don't know exactly what that expression means."

"But you do have some tidbit of information for me?"

"No. I don't know what a tidbit is, and I called to ask for information."

"You're like the rest of the world." Hammersmith sounded betrayed.

"Out here in the world away from Headquarters lives a guy named Wallace Everest. Know anything about him?"

"All I need to know, Nudge. He's the victim's ex- boyfriend. A bad sort. The mother told us about him. He's got an ironclad alibi in Cincinnati for the time of the murder. And he has dark hair."

"Thanks," Nudger told him. "You're on top of things."

"It's slippery up here, Nudge."

"I know. Everything that slides off falls on us folks down here."

He said good-bye to Hammersmith and quickly hung up before the lieutenant could reply. Hammersmith was accustomed to having the last word and would be irritated and chomp his poisonous cigar and literally fume about not having it this time. Good.

Nudger didn't dwell long on Hammersmith. He was thinking about how his options had narrowed, how the twists and turns of the Boyington women had brought him smack up against one obvious course of action. It was a plan he hadn't wanted to put into effect, because it was dangerous for him and dangerous for Jeanette Boyington.

But now it seemed to be that or nothing. In such situations, Nudger always chose that. It was the only way he could manage to stay in business.

"I want you to talk to men on the lines at night," Nudger told Jeanette that evening. "I want you to make appointments with them, if that's what they ask for. Tell them you'll meet them at some busy public place, preferably a large shopping mall."

Jeanette sat across from Nudger's desk and nodded somberly as he spoke, as if each of his words were physically penetrating her mind to be lodged solidly forever in the gray matter of her memory. He could tell, watching her, that she'd meant it when she said she wanted to help find her twin sister's killer, meant it perhaps more strongly than she had revealed.

"Do you want me to meet these men?" she asked. He saw that she was willing to undergo that danger. In fact, she was downright eager.

"No," Nudger told her, "I'll get their descriptions from you, then go to the appointed place and look them over. If one of them happens to have curly blond hair and oversized hands, I'll follow him when he leaves disappointed and find out who he is."

"And then?"

"Then we'll watch him and decide whether the fish we've hooked is legal and should be reeled in." Nudger studied her eyes as he spoke. They were flat gray in his dimly lighted office and made him wonder if her lifeless expression was the result of her sister's death; Hammersmith had said some twins thought that way.

"Jenine told me she usually talked on the lines about three A.M.," Jeanette said, "when she couldn't sleep and was depressed. She said three A.M. was the perilous hour, a time perfectly balanced between darkness and light, joy and despair, in the human soul."

"She had a poetic turn of mind."

"Had…" Jeanette repeated, twisting her lips as if she loathed the taste of the word. "I'll make my phone calls between the hours of two and four A.M. That should increase the chances of making connections with the man who killed Jenine."

"Remember that we're not sure someone she met through talking on the lines is her killer," Nudger cautioned.

"I think we're sure," Jeanette said, decisive as always. "He killed her and he killed those other women, and probably he killed more women he met over the lines."

"All right," Nudger conceded, "we're sure. Sure enough, anyway. What we're trying to do now is determine if we're right."

"Agreed," she said, obviously not meaning it. Nudger wondered if she had doubted herself even once since she had popped from the womb.

"Your phone conversations will require some convincing acting," he said.

"Don't worry, my heart will be in it." She seemed to turn her attention inward, as if seeking pain, like a method actor gearing up for a role. "Do you think this plan will produce results?"

"It might, if we have enough patience."

"Ever seen a cat poised patiently watching a mouse hole?" Jeanette asked.

"Only in a cartoon."

"Well, that's how patient I am. Like that cat." There was nothing cartoonlike about the intensity in her voice. Or in her eyes.

After she'd left with a list of phone company service- line numbers, Nudger sat for a long time at his desk, chewing antacid tablets and watching the office darken as the evening sun forsook the city.

He thought that if he were a mouse he wouldn't go outside his door.