by John Lutz
“Got a guy waiting upstairs in your office, Nudge,” Danny said, flicking at a fly on the counter with the grayish towel he always had tucked in his belt. The fly spiraled up and out of haim’s way and was probably smiling at the clumsy human effort.
Nudger wasn’t smiling, though. He experienced a flare of fear.
Then he decided that if one of the diamond thief/killers was waiting for him up in the office, he wouldn’t have checked in with Danny. People plotting murder simply didn’t act that way. Usually.
“Client?” Nudger asked, wondering if this was the D.D.S. who’d left the note on the Granada.
“Didn’t say. Might be, though. He bought a Dunker Delite and took it up with him.”
Great! Nudger might have another corpse on his hands. He didn’t give voice to that thought; Danny was fiercely proud of his baking ability and sensitive about his cholesterol-packed product. Anybody who’d injure Danny’s feelings would most likely kick a blind dog. “What’s this guy look like?” Nudger asked. He usually got a brief rundown from Danny on whoever he’d directed upstairs to Nudger’s office to wait.
Danny absently wiped his hands on the towel, as if they were wet. “Oh, I’d say a businessman type. Probably in his early forties. Nice suit. Carried a skinny little briefcase. Didn’t seem nervous or anything. I seen him go in next door and heard him tromp upstairs and try your office door. Then he came back down and in here. Asked if I knew where you could be found. I told him you’d probably be here soon and asked if he wanted me to let him in the office to wait, just like you instructed about anybody who might be a client. He said sure and then he bought a Dunker Delite and coffee and I took him up and got him settled in the chair by your desk. Switched on the air conditioner so he wouldn’t suffocate.”
“How’d he seem?” Nudger asked. Danny sometimes displayed an innocent’s clear insight into people.
“Comfortable enough, I’d say.”
“Swell. How’d he seem in other ways?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“He strike you as being angry or nervous or what?”
“None of them things. just seemed ... kinda normal.”
“Like a Nazi dentist.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
The old guy at the counter lurched down off his stool and went outside, carrying his doughnut in a white paper napkin. Body odor couldn’t be overpowered even by the pungent, sugary aroma in the doughnut shop. Maybe he was a veteran and mention of the Nazis had scared him away. Or maybe he was the one who’d scrawled the end-of-the-world graffiti and didn’t want to miss the show.
“Wanna cup of coffee, Nudge?”
Here were conflicting emotions. Nudger desperately needed some coffee, especially with a prospective client waiting upstairs, but the stuff Danny brewed in the complicated big steel urn was barely that. On the other hand, it did contain caffeine.
Nudger nodded. “Sure. Thanks, Danny.”
Pleased, Danny twisted a valve near the base of the gigantic stainless steel urn. It hissed. Pipes snaking up the side of the thing made a gurgling sound. Black liquid oozed from a spiggot into a foam cup.
“Here you go, Nudge,” Danny said, placing the cup on the counter. He bent over and reached into the glass display case. Plopped a Dunker Delite onto a napkin and set it next to the cup. “One of the fresh ones.”
Nudger thanked Danny again. Then he said, “If I don’t phone down here in half an hour, give the police a call, Danny.”
Concern made Danny’s basset-hound face fall to new sagginess. “Huh? You got some reason to be scared of this fella?”
“I don’t think so, but you never know. Nudger wrapped the white napkin around the doughnut. What he’d created reminded him of a shroud-wrapped corpse. He picked up the weighty object in one hand, his cup of coffee in the other. Then he went upstairs to meet, most probably, the D.D.S. who’d left the note on his car last night. Thinking as he climbed the narrow steps about the Dropp Inn Motel. All that blood. How Vanita had been killed, what had been done to her so skillfully and dispassionately. D.D.S. Doctor of Diabolical Surgery?
Nudger’s stomach lurched at the thought, and he almost dropped the Dunker Delite. But he kept climbing.
9
The man in the chair by Nudger’s desk remained seated when Nudger entered the office. Glanced up. Finished chewing and swallowed a mouthful of Dunker Delite. Actually seemed to enjoy it. Said, “You Nudger?”
“Me,” Nudger confirmed. He walked around and sat down behind the desk. The man didn’t blink when the squealing swivel chair yowled at him. Maybe he’d tried it out before Nudger arrived.
He stood up to average height and brushed a few crumbs off his white shirt, not seeming to care if they fell on the floor. He was wearing a brown suit with almost indiscernible pinstripes, a red tie with a knot the size of a fist. He reached in an inside pocket and withdrew a little leather case from which he snapped a fancy gold business card, and handed the card to Nudger. It was sticky from Dunker Delite icing, and it said the man’s name was Bill Stockton and he was a representative of Sloan Trust Insurance.
Nudger placed the card on the desk, next to a batteryoperated digital clock he’d received for subscribing to a magazine last year. The little plastic clock hadn’t worked right for months; it flashed angular numerals from one through fifty-nine over and over, as if the earth were skipping on its axis and screwing up the passage of time.
He said, “Have a seat again, Mr. Stockton.”
Stockton picked up his coffee from where he’d put it on the desk and sat back down. Crossed his legs. “Good coffee,” he said. That put Nudger on his guard.
“Good doughnut, too,” Nudger said, nodding toward the half-eaten Dunker Delite resting on a napkin next to where the coffee had been.
“Can’t agree,” the man said. Confusing.
Nudger pried the lid from his own foam coffee cup and set the cup on the vinyl edge of the desk pad. He didn’t drink any, though. Had to build up to that.
Stockton had a round face with small brown eyes and a tiny, thin-lipped mouth. A short but hawkish nose made him somewhat resemble a puffed-up bird. He smiled and revealed miniature sharp teeth, the kind birds would have if they had teeth. He said, “Diamonds, Mr. Nudger.”
“Which and what about?”
“Stolen diamonds I’ve been trying to recover for my insurance company for the past month and a half. That’s which diamonds. The what-about-them part is that my search has led me here.” He glanced around the office.
Nudger decided to be careful. What did this guy know? Nudger had run across insurance investigators before, and some of them were tricky as Houdini in their pursuit of percentage. He said, “I never stole any diamonds, Mr. Stockton.”
“Nope, not that I know about. But you did have as a client one Vanita Lane, who was murdered last night at the Dropp Inn Motel.”
“Ah, you read the morning paper.”
“Didn’t have to,” Stockton said. “I knew about Vanita Lane hiring you, and I went by the motel last night after the police had arrived. What I’m doing here is asking what Vanita Lane told you about the diamonds.”
It was no longer a secret among insiders. Nudger decided to level. “She said they were on the plane that blew up at the airport two days ago.”
“Not so.”
“Not so that she said that?”
“That the diamonds were on the airliner.”
“Maybe they haven’t been found yet,” Nudger suggested.
“My guess is they were never on the plane.”
“She said differently.”
Stockton laughed. He sipped his coffee as if he needed some to keep from choking on his amusement at the roundabout and evasive conversation. “Crude as it is to speak ill of the dead, Mr. Nudger, Vanita Lane was a woman who’d tell anyone anything that suited her. Even sometimes if it didn’t suit her. She was a pathological liar.”
Nudger saw hope here. “You mean she real
ly had nothing to do with the diamond theft?”
“Oh, she had enough to do with it. Knew about it beforehand and said nothing. She and Rupert Winslow were lovers.”
“She told me about the relationship with Winslow. Also said things between them had cooled down.”
“That’s not the story I got from people at the Meridian Hotel in New York, where she spent most of last week with him wearing out a bed.”
Nudger did sample his coffee now. Aww! Terrible! Maybe something had crawled into the urn and died. “She didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, like I said, she’s selective. But if she told you Winslow was a murder victim instead of a suicide, she was speaking the truth there.”
“She was scared,” Nudger said.
“Was she?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t faking that.”
Stockton gave his itty-bitty smile. “Neither are you, I bet.”
“You mean because the thieves might think I have the diamonds ?”
Stockton shrugged. “If you see it as a possibility, they must, too.”
Nudger squeaked back and forth in his swivel chair. “What about you? How do you see it?”
“Well, Vanita Lane was more than just a liar. She used sex any way she could in order to get what she wanted. Something Rupert Winslow didn’t care about, because often what she wanted was what he told her to want. But she was plenty promiscuous on her own. ‘Nymphomaniac’ isn’t too strong a word.” A confidential leer. “How ‘bout it, Mr. Nudger? You get it on with Vanita Lane?”
Nudger stared hard at Stockton. He kept his tone casual, though. “Naw. I don’t generally do that with my clients. Do you?”
“Sometimes. I think maybe when Winslow was killed Vanita got scared and hired you to take care of her and the diamonds. Used sex to make the arrangement more intimate and reliable. That’d fit her pattern.”
Nudger was getting tired of this. And more uneasy by the minute. “There was no sex and no diamonds. Which means I’m out of this affair.”
“That would be living in a fool’s paradise, Mr. Nudger. But not for very long. Better believe the people who stole these diamonds are the type who’d do anything necessary to get the truth outa you. Me, I’m bound by ethics and the law, so I can only politely inquire.”
“She told me the diamonds were on the plane,” Nudger said. “When I took the case I figured they’d be found by the crash-site investigators and get mentioned in the news. At that point my job’d be over.”
“But they weren’t found and aren’t going to be. And you’re in big trouble with some very dangerous folks. Only thing that will keep them off your back now is the news that the diamonds have been recovered and returned to their rightful owner. Which means your way to continued health and long life is to hand them over to me.”
“I would if I had them.”
“They’re worth approximately a million dollars, Mr. Nudger, but they’re worthless if you’re not around to spend the money. What’s Rupert Winslow buying these days? Does Vanita Lane figure to go shopping again?”
Nudger picked up his foam cup, started to sip, then put it down and shoved it away. “You really think I’ve got those diamonds?” ”
“Honestly, I don’t know. But if you do have them, or know where they are, do us both a favor and get them to me. You’re in deep and dangerous waters, Mr. Nudger, and I’m your life preserver.”
Nudger said, “You make me wish I did have them or knew where to get them. But I don’t.”
Stockton stared at him for a while in the way a person looks at an inanimate object, such as a laid-out corpse. Finally he said, “Too bad,” and stood up. “If you need to get in touch with me, I’m staying downtown at the Clarion Hotel. Or you can call the number on my card and the company’ll forward a message.”
Nudger picked up the card again and looked at a 212 area code. New York, he was pretty sure.
Stockton buttoned his suitcoat and walked to the door. Sort of strutted, actually. He turned and said, “You take care,” and then went out.
Nudger listened to him clomp down the stairs. Heard the street door clatter open and closed.
He sat for a long time in the swivel chair, gazing out the window and thinking about what Stockton had said, wondering how much of it he should believe.
Vanita hadn’t seemed nymphomaniacal. If she had been, surely she’d have put some moves on Nudger there in the motel. Surely.
Stockton was on target about one thing: It was probable that whoever was searching for the diamonds might think they were in Nudger’s possession.
Might try to get them back. Gulp!
A pigeon flapped down and perched on the window ledge. It puffed out its chest and stared in at Nudger. Something in its mocking gaze seemed to be goading him to take action. It looked remarkably like Stockton.
Nudger didn’t know what to do, but he had to do something.
He looked down at the calendar desk pad, where a name was scribbled in the margin.
Marcy Lou Dee. Vanita’s baby sister, Marlou.
Nudger picked up a ballpoint pen and drew a circle around the name.
It was time to talk with Marlou.
10
Finding Marlou Dee’s address provided Nudger the opportunity for a little genuine detective work. But very little, as there was only one M. L. Dee in the phone book.
Nudger dropped the directory back in the desk drawer with a thunk! and shoved the drawer closed. He stared at Marlou’s address and phone number he’d scrawled on the back of a Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes envelope he’d retrieved from the wastebasket.
He decided it might be better not to phone first, but to go directly to where she lived and try to talk with her; he couldn’t be sure what or how much she knew about her sister’s business and romantic life, or how much she’d be willing to tell, and it might be better to catch her unprepared. That way, if she lied, it would be less imaginative and more obvious.
He told Danny he was leaving for a while, then got in the Granada and drove down Manchester to Chouteau and turned south on Grand. Brilliant sunlight struck the windshield and penetrated the car as heat. The air conditioner tried hard but couldn’t cope.
Nudger’s hands were slippery with sweat on the steering wheel by the time he reached Shenandoah, Marlou Dee’s street. He drove a few depressing blocks and parked in sun-dappled shade across from the brick, tar-roofed, four-family building that bore her address like a grudge.
This was a rough section of town that was undergoing early stages of renovation. Gentrification hadn’t quite set in and real estate was still cheap; the renovators were still bringing the rows of similar old brick buildings up to code so they’d qualify under a city plan for subsidized low-rental units. The street was racially mixed, though it seemed to be occupied mostly by poorer white families, some of them not far removed from the country. A lot of the lower-floor windows of the rehabbed buildings were equipped with iron grillwork to keep out intruders. The early-bird urban pioneers who’d moved into the area knew the score and were being careful while biding their time waiting for property values to rise, hoping they’d guessed right.
Nudger locked his car and crossed the street toward Marlou’s building. It needed tuck-pointing, and the green paint on the gutters and window frames was peeling. There was a slanted metal awning over the cracked concrete porch. A circling squadron of wicked-looking wasps droned overhead, up near the sun-heated awning, threatening to break formation at any moment and peel off like fighter planes to dive at Nudger.
He saw Marlou’s name beneath the doorbell button of the second-floor-east unit. Pressed the button and waited, glancing upward now and then at the lazily maneuvering wasps. Thinking, if there really was a god, why would He have created such insects? But then, He’d created pigeons.
After a minute or so he heard someone descending the steps on the other side of the age-checked door. A floorboard creaked.
The door swung inward, and a woman wearing ti
ght Levi’s and a baggy white blouse stared out at him. She was average height, maybe even on the short side, but a kind of lankiness made her seem taller. About thirty, she had carrot-colored hair, wide green eyes, and a tiny nose that didn’t quite turn up. She didn’t have the complexion you usually saw with red hair. Her skin was creamy and not a freckle was evident except for a light dusting across the bridge of her nose. She was barefoot; her feet were small, with short, squarish toes, and they were dirty, as if she’d been walking through dust. She cocked her head at him, waiting for him to speak. He noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. She’d been crying.
“Marlou Dee?”
She looked puzzled. Pursed her full lips and kept them that way for a few seconds before deciding to answer. Slightly protruding front teeth kept them from meeting all the way. “Mostly it’s only family and friends call me that.”
“Your sister, Vanita, told me you went by that name. I’m sorry about what happened.”
Marlou studied him, something sad in those wide green eyes. “I just come back from the morgue,” she said. “I identified Vanita’s ... Identified her.” For a second the flesh beneath her eyes danced, then she took a deep breath and regained control. “You gotta excuse me,” she said. “I’m still a mite shook up.”
Nudger had to resist the compulsion to hug her and pat her head, assure her that grief would lift and life would eventually brighten. She had about her a kind of child-woman vulnerability and probably would have all her life. What he did was stand there awkwardly and say, “Musta been rough.”
She smiled morosely, revealing a wide gap between her front teeth, and shook her head. “Wasn’t so bad as I feared, actually. Almost like looking at somebody else. I still gotta remind myself Vanita’s gone. We didn’t see each other much, but we was close enough.”
“She told me you two were close.”
“Did she? Why?”
“She hired me to help her.”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘help her’?”
“She was afraid.”
Marlou squinted suspiciously. It caused her nose to crinkle and made her look like a twelve-year-old. “You ain’t some friend of Rupert’s, are you?”