Ride the lightning

XXIX

Benedict would have work to be farmed out soon, he assured him, when Nudger phoned him. The proprietor of Enchanted Night Escort Service had hired Benedict and Schill to defend the service in a suit brought by a former employee who'd been fired for prostituting herself.

Nudger decided that the morning was following its established gloomy course. Everything in the office was sticky with humidity.

"The escort service is really on the up and up," Benedict explained. "It provides women to accompany out-of-town executives to social functions. The fees are high and the employees have strict, written rules of behavior; they're escorts, and escorts only."

That ran contrary to Nudger's concept of an escort service, but he said nothing. His middle-class background might be showing.

"One of the escorts, a Sandra McClain, went beyond the call of duty one night with an undercover cop, was arrested, and claimed she was a housewife working part-time and had been coerced by the escort service into prostitution. The only way she could continue working, she said, to provide food for the children; yeah, she really said that. So she and her out-of-work husband filed suit, probably hoping to save face more than anything else."

Nudger wondered if the woman might be telling the truth, caught in a trap that was perhaps so disturbingly commonplace that it had taken on the exaggeration of burlesque and people refused to take it seriously.

"How do I figure into this?" he asked.

"Ms. McClain was a prostitute before she worked for the escort service, spread her wares all over town. She might still be lying down for fun and profit even as the court date nears. We need you to establish beyond doubt that she'd been in the sporting life before. Or better yet, that she still is."

That didn't sound too difficult. If the McClain woman had been a high-priced prostitute, he knew the people who would know about it. Unless she was a free-lancer. Then he'd have to dig deeper, follow her.

"Sandra McClain is out of the city now," Benedict said. "In the Bahamas. Where else would you expect to find a woman with hungry children at home? She'll be back in a week, tan and fiesty. That's when our client will decide whether he wants a detective on her. When he gives the official okay, you're on the case."

It sounded kind of indefinite to Nudger, but he thanked Benedict.

"Tough about the Curtis Colt thing," Benedict said.

Nudger agreed, thinking that "tough" was a bit of an understatement.

"He suffered, according to the paper," Benedict said. "You'd think they'd have something like that perfected after all these years. But then, I guess executions aren't supposed to be fun."

"Why not?" Nudger said. "Don't be a wet blanket."

Benedict spoke in a careful manner indicating he was weighing words. Lawyer paranoia. The old phone-tap syndrome. "Colt can't be helped now, Nudger. I guess you're going to let that case drop."

"Yeah," Nudger lied. "Unless somebody hires me to try to raise the dead, it's over."

"I, uh, saw your photograph in the Voyeur. Yellow scandal journalism. You want me to call the rag, talk lawyer talk, throw a scare into them?"

"Thanks for the offer," Nudger said, "but you probably wouldn't scare them, only get them mad. Then they'd figure out an excuse to sue me. I'm afraid of litigation, putting my fate in the hands of twelve people I might be tearing away from the afternoon TV soaps."

"Objection sustained," Benedict said. "Take care of yourself, Nudger. Stay away from… trouble."

Trouble being Candy Ann Adams.

"I'll avoid it as if it were a downed power line," Nudger said, and hung up. Early the next morning, he began watching Candy Ann's trailer.

At eight-thirty she emerged, dressed in her yellow waitress uniform, and got into another taxi. She moved slowly, as if mired in her grief. Her hair was combed differently, parted and flung to the side. It made her appear older.

Nudger followed in his battered Volkswagen as the cab drove her the four and a half miles to her job at the Right Steer. She didn't look around as she paid the driver and walked inside through the Old-West-saloon swinging doors. Nudger waited for the sounds of a tinkling piano, of whooping, of breaking glass, and gunshots. Then he remembered the place was full of Muzak and baked potatoes.

At six that evening, another cab drove her home, making a brief stop at a Kroger supermarket. She came out of the store carrying a single small paper sack, got back in the cab, and continued on her way.

It went that way for the next couple of days, trailer to work to trailer, all by taxi. A lonely ritual. Candy Ann had no visitors other than the plain brown paper bag she took home every night.

During the day, while she was safely at work, Nudger spent his time unobtrusively talking to her neighbors. He avoided Wanda Scathers, thinking she might tip Candy Ann that he was hanging around the trailer court.

Posing as an insurance investigator, it didn't take him long to learn what there was to know in a metal-and- wheeled neighborhood where people made it a point not to meddle in their neighbors' business, but were bored and glad to gossip nonetheless-if the right questions were asked in the right way. He got a fuller picture of Candy Ann and Curtis Colt, though not necessarily an accurate one.

Sometimes, sitting melting in the Volkswagen in the middle of one of the Sultry City's legendary summer heat waves, Nudger wondered if what he was doing was really worthwhile. Curtis Colt was, after all, dead, and had never been his client. Still, there were responsibilities that went beyond the job. Or maybe they were actually the essence of the job.

Thursday, after Candy Ann had left for work, Nudger used his honed Visa card to slip the flimsy lock on her trailer door, and let himself in.

He was alone now where Curtis Colt had spent so much time with Candy Ann, and time by himself. Nudger's heart began hammering and his stomach turned over a few times. He always felt like this when he was trespassing. An unhealthy respect for the law.

Though Candy Ann had switched off the air conditioner before leaving only minutes ago, the inside of the trailer was getting warm fast. It wasn't well insulated, and the sun was beating out a rising rhythm on the aluminum roof. Nudger didn't want to turn the air conditioner back on and possibly draw the attention of Wanda Scathers, who might know that Candy Ann had left for work by this time of the morning.

Patiently, methodically, he began searching the trailer.

It took him over an hour to find what he was looking for. It had been well hidden, in a cardboard box above a loose ceiling panel in the bathroom. After examining the box's contents-almost seven hundred dollars in loot from Curtis Colt's brief life of crime, and another object Nudger wasn't surprised to see-he resealed the box and replaced it above the panel.

Curtis Colt, you desperado, you, Nudger thought. Then he thought about Tom, and he decided, heat or no heat, that he'd continue following Candy Ann. He owed her, and Curtis, that much.

He knew her work schedule, which made things much easier for him. For now, she would be safe at work at the Right Steer and didn't require his attention.

He made sure he left the trailer as he'd found it, then went back outside where, for at least a few minutes, he felt cooler. When Nudger got back to his office, Danny told him Claudia had been by early that morning, looking for him. She'd had a Dunker Delite and a carton of milk, waited around for a while, then she'd given Danny a note to forward to Nudger.

The note was in blue pen, stroked in her neat teacher's handwriting. It said simply that she wanted to see Nudger late this afternoon or tonight, and asked him to come by her apartment anytime after four. She needed to talk about something important, she said. It was signed "Love, Claudia."

Nudger didn't know quite how to feel about that. But then he didn't have a choice about how he felt. Nobody did. That was what caused so many knotty problems for so many people and kept him in business.

There was another message from Eileen on Nudger's answering machine. He listened to it only long enough to learn why she'd been trying to talk with him. He had indeed paid her only half of last month's alimony. Not only that, her lawyer had a file on the dates of all the late payments made by Nudger, and used some kind of sliding formula to calculate the interest Eileen claimed she was owed. The interest rate was several points higher than the prime rate, which Nudger always thought was really the rate banks charged their worst customers. But then there was little doubt that First National Eileen considered him to be her very worst customer.

Nudger knew he'd better pay Eileen the other half of the alimony soon. The demand for accumulated interest was probably a bluff, engineered to aggravate, and could be ignored. He wished she'd leave him alone. She had more money than he had. She could afford her pistol of a lawyer.

He folded Claudia's note and slid it into his shirt pocket. Life could be infinitely complicated. Mother hadn't told him there'd be years like this.