Nightlines

VIII

Nudger reluctantly got out of his car and stood waiting for the big man who had emerged like Prometheus from the Buick. There was no doubt that this was the man Danny had described, the man who had waited for Nudger across the street from the doughnut shop. He was several inches over six feet tall, with a bull neck that strained his shirt collar and merged with wide sloping shoulders. He had an often-broken nose, and a brow built up by scar tissue from inept cornermen who didn't know how to treat cuts. His lantern jaw suggested he'd been a boxer who could take a punch and absorb much punishment, and who had paid in blood for his dubious ability to continue standing. He bunched his shoulders and slowly advanced on Nudger with ponderous and obvious malevolence.

When he was about ten feet away, he smiled with bad teeth. Even with good teeth, it wouldn't have been a smile to thaw cold hearts.

"Nudger," he said, "you an' me are gonna have an unfriendly little chat."

Nudger glanced around desperately at the dozens of empty cars baking in the sun. This was the lot where most of the on-duty cops left their private cars. Near the far exit were a couple of parked cruisers, representing the only city vehicles. There wasn't a uniform in sight. Nudger's stomach felt as if it were searching for a way out as frantically as he was. It emitted a growl that sounded something like "Please!" He gulped back the bitter bile of fear as he saw the huge man's powerful gnarled fingers flexing and unflexing around a defenseless red rubber ball.

"They say that's great for strengthening the forearms," Nudger said, pointing to the tortured, misshapen ball. He thought that if a ball could scream, this one would be howling.

"What they say is true," the man said. His stained, crooked smile turned absolutely nasty.

Nudger's gaze fixed for a hopeful few seconds on the double doors of the building's rear exit. He prayed that a dozen blue uniforms would pour out on their way to lunch or anywhere else. Wasn't this about the time for a shift change? Maybe the entire day shift would suddenly emerge, streaming toward their cars. Maybe the cavalry would charge right onto the parking lot. Custer, Lieutenant Reno, the Johns Payne and Wayne. All of them, riding hell-for-leather, maybe singing.

It hadn't happened yet, except on screen. And Nudger knew he hadn't paid admission or tuned in the television Late Show. He was on his own.

"This is an odd place for our conversation," he croaked, stringing out time. "Right here in the police department parking lot."

The big man's wide jaw dropped a few notches. Doubt changed to slow comprehension in his eyes as he glanced around seeking repudiation of what Nudger had said.

Nudger managed to draw a breath. Was this possible? It had never occurred to him that the man might have followed him automatically, might not know where they were standing.

The shelflike brow knotted in a frown. Nudger saw the man's lips move as he read the black-and-white sign near the corner of the building, dread words mouthed silently: THIRD DISTRICT, SAINT LOUIS METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT.

Just then a uniformed cop appeared on the sidewalk bordering the lot, munching an apple as he walked toward one of the parked cruisers.

The big man saw him and reeled backward, stunned by total realization, and the rubber ball dropped from his uncurled fingers, bounced against the side of Nudger's car, and then rolled back toward the man's size "huge" wingtip shoes. Then under one of the shoes, as the man began hurrying back toward the Buick. He slipped, grunted in surprise as he flailed backward, and hit the blacktop as if a crane had dropped him from twenty feet up. Nudger winced at the melon-hollow sound of the massive head bouncing off the hard surface.

He started to yell to attract the cop's attention, then realized that the fallen giant was blocked from view by the parked cars and decided it would be wiser to remain silent. Besides, it seemed sinful to disturb a man enjoying an apple in the Eden of the inner city.

Nudger knelt and worked the prone man's wallet out from his hip pocket, flipped it open and found identification. The man groaned and started to sit up.

Nudger dropped the wallet, stood tall and shouted, "Hey!"

The uniform had been about to climb into the nearest parked cruiser. He stared at Nudger, then slammed the car door behind him as he started to walk across the lot. When he caught sight of the large wingtip shoes protruding from behind the Volkswagen, he tossed his apple core aside and his stride became more purposeful.

"What's happening here?" he asked, when he'd seen what was attached to the shoes. He was a middle-aged cop with narrow wise eyes and an expanded waistline. There was a tiny piece of apple stuck to his clean-shaven chin, and when he noticed Nudger staring at it he wiped it away.

"I slipped an' fell," the big man said, lowering the Volkswagen several inches as he rested a giant hand on it to lever himself to his feet. "Hit my head." He was holding his yellow cap that had fallen off. He replaced it on his head at a cockeyed angle.

Nudger realized that the man hadn't actually done anything to him. Hadn't actually said anything that constituted a physical threat. Then he remembered the wallet at his feet. He stooped and retrieved it. "You dropped this." He held out the wallet for the big man to take.

The cop looked at the wallet, then looked hard at Nudger, reappraising the situation.

The big man finally grasped the meaning and treated them with his nasty smile. But the smile disappeared as slowly as it had formed, when he realized that if he accused Nudger of trying to steal the wallet, he would have to go into the station and answer some potentially revealing questions.

"Musta slipped outa my pocket when I fell," he said. He took the wallet and counted the folding money laboriously. "All there." He closed the wallet so that the two halves snapped together loudly, like voracious jaws, then jammed it back into his hip pocket so hard he almost ripped his pants seams.

"Which one of you yelled for me to come over here?" the cop asked. He was a thinker, even though unsuspecting of the truth. Probably he'd make detective.

"I called you," Nudger said.

The man who had accosted him sullenly nodded. "That's right," he confirmed. "He seen me fall, I guess, and wanted to help."

"Do you need medical attention?" the cop asked.

The big man removed his cap and probed a lump that was forming on the back of his head, as if he'd just remembered he'd been hurt. "Nope, I'm okay." He smoothed back his thinning oily black hair, straightened his clothes and brushed them off. Then he replaced his cap, nodded to Nudger and the cop, and climbed back into the old Buick. The ancient behemoth left a low cloud of dark exhaust smoke as it rumbled from the parking lot. A peeling sticker on the rustpocked rear bumper read: GOD SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, THAT SETTLES IT.

"He really ought to get a ticket for polluting," Nudger said.

"I'm not in Traffic," the cop explained.

He was still standing motionless with his fists on his hips, staring suspiciously as Nudger went inside.

Nudger inquired at the desk. Crime was slow. Hammersmith was in.

After the duty sergeant had alerted him by phone of Nudger's presence, Hammersmith appeared in the hall outside his office door and waved for Nudger to enter.

Nudger perched on the uncomfortable oak chair and waited to speak until Hammersmith had situated his bulk in his deep leather executive chair. Hammersmith's smooth, fleshy pink hand moved toward the box of cigars on his desk, hesitated, then withdrew. Only a threat.

"I was accosted in the parking lot," Nudger told him.

"Accosted. That's an old-fashioned word."

"I almost went into an old-fashioned swoon. The gunsel who accosted me was almost big enough to be snow-peaked."

"Gunsel? Really, Nudge." Hammersmith's blue eyes were as merry as Santa's in his flesh-padded cheeks. "Was the subject armed? Were threats made?"

"Implied."

Hammersmith did remove a cigar from the box now, and methodically peeled the cellophane wrapper from it. He gazed at it as if it were a woman he'd just undressed but made no move to light it. "Explain how all this came to pass," he suggested.

Nudger explained.

"Did you get the Buick's license number?" Hammersmith asked.

"I did, but we don't need it. I got the man's name."

Hammersmith did light the cigar now. He exhaled a green death cloud and raised his eyebrows incredulously, crinkling his smooth forehead. "He followed you right into the station-house parking lot without knowing it, then was dumb enough to give you his name?"

"I forgot to mention," Nudger said, "that before dropping the wallet when he started to come around, I looked inside and checked his identification. He's a Hugo Rumbo."

"Hm, sounds like a dance craze."

"His address is over on Russell, that stretch of run-down apartment buildings."

"He obviously isn't a pro bone crusher," Hammersmith said, "because he didn't know the location of the station house. And because of the way he handled the situation when he did find out where he was."

"I'd like you to goose the machinery," Nudger said. "Find out who and what Hugo Rumbo is, and why he might be interested in me."

"That might not be so easy," Hammersmith said, "with just his description, license plate number, name and address." He leaned back and exhaled another cumulonimbus. "Though in this, the age of the microchip, computers do work magic."

"You're taking this kind of light and loose," Nudger said. "This Rumbo was about to commence pounding on me right in the police station parking lot. How would that have looked in tomorrow's newspapers? Or on the evening local TV news? Remember, I used to be Coppy the Clown. I can ham it up for the minicameras even from a hospital bed."

Hammersmith extended his lower lip and somberly nodded. "You make a salient point." He placed the greenish cigar back in his mouth, clamped down on it but didn't inhale. "Don't you have any idea as to why this Rumbo thing was following you?"

"None."

"Do you owe anyone money?"

"Almost everyone, but not one who'd…" Nudger sat up straighter. "Eileen, maybe."

Hammersmith appeared disgusted. "Stay serious, Nudge." He had always liked Eileen.

"I owe her almost a thousand dollars in back alimony."

"Eileen wouldn't hire an enforcer and you know it."

Nudger nodded resignedly. Hammersmith was right. Not as right as he assumed, but right. It would be silly of Eileen to risk messing herself up in court and killing the goose that laid the brass eggs.

"Are you still working on that twins case?" Hammersmith asked.

"Sure, but I doubt if there's a connection with Rumbo."

"Oh? What else are you working on?"

Nudger saw what Hammersmith meant. But he couldn't imagine Agnes Boyington hiring a professional leg breaker any more than he could really picture Eileen arranging a serious beating for him. And it didn't seem possible that Jenine's killer could know at this point that Nudger was on his trail.

Unless the murderer knew Jeanette, or Agnes Boyington, or anyone else who had found out what Nudger was working on. Those people included Danny, Fisher at the phone company, Hammersmith, and those on the case's periphery whom he'd questioned indirectly about the Boyington murder. It might be absurd to suspect any of them, yet people talked. And people listened. Word spread like the proverbial ripples in a pond, signaling both prey and predator.

"I'll run a check on Rumbo," Hammersmith said. He said it reassuringly, reading Nudger's mind with his cop's honed insight. "We'll get some answers."

"And probably raise some questions."

"It usually works that way. But it's better than walking around in complete ignorance."

"I'm not so sure," Nudger said, "and I've walked around in both conditions. My problem is, I need to learn enough answers to be able to collect my fee. Sometimes that turns out to be a few answers too many."

Not joking in the slightest, Hammersmith said, "I have a feeling you're going to more than earn your fee this time, Nudge."

Nudger offered no contradiction. He shared Hammersmith's ominous premonition, and he had a personal stake in its accuracy.

He said good-bye and walked from Hammersmith's smoke-fouled office, down the hall, past the booking desk and outside, pausing halfway out the door to stand on the top concrete step. The early evening sky was mottled by gray, illuminated clouds, blasted with light by the lowering sun to make it look like a scene from one of those dime- store religious prints that depressed rather than inspired. A southwest breeze whispered confidentially that there would surely be rain by nightfall. In the booking area, the droning metallic voice of a dispatcher directed a patrol car to a trouble spot somewhere in the darkening city. Telephones rang in remote offices, were answered with reasonable promptness. The place was humming with efficient, well-practiced activity, comforting sounds of Law and Order.

Nudger started toward his car.

When the station house's heavy doors clicked shut behind him, he felt naked.