by John Lutz
“Ah, of course. But he’ll have difficulty talking. Don’t engage him in unnecessary conversation, please.” The doctor glanced at his watch. He had very delicate wrists and hands. “The nurse at the desk should know his room number by now. I must see another patient, Mr. Nudger.”
Nudger thanked him and watched him walk away and push through the wide swinging doors. Something white was stuck to the heel of one of his shoes, flashing with each step.
The redhead behind the admissions counter did magical things with her computer, then told Nudger that Danny was in Room 335.
On his way up in the elevator, he formulated the few questions he needed to ask Danny despite the doctor’s advice. Made them yes-or-no questions, so all Danny had to do was nod.
Room 335 smelled like Listerine mouthwash. Danny didn’t look bad. He was wearing a white hospital gown and was propped up on pillows. When he saw Nudger he managed a sad basset-hound grin. The red line was still visible across his throat, like an obscene necklace. There was a patch of white gauze and a strip of adhesive tape on the side of his neck where Nudger had used the knife to cut the twine, and some of Danny, to let Danny suck in some air. He was pulling more air into his lungs now.
He croaked as if he had a throat full of ground glass, “Thanks, Nudge.”
“Don’t try to talk,” Nudger said. He dragged over a chair and sat down next to the bed. “Give me a nod or a shake of your head, though, okay?”
Danny nodded. The action made him swallow. His throat made a muted sound like small bones breaking beneath a blanket. Nudger felt a thrust of rage at Roger Bobinet and the skeleton. To make sure his anger wasn’t misdirected he said, “A skinny guy or a handsome all-American type do this to you?”
Danny nodded. Held up two fingers. “Both,” he croaked. “Skinny only watched. The other guy—looked like the fella used to play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys—he was the one did the nasty work. He—”
Wait a minute. Nudger raised a hand. Said, “Just nod or shake your head, remember, Danny?”
Danny clamped his lips together and nodded.
“Did they say what they wanted?”
A nod. Danny pointed at Nudger. There was vanilla icing under his fingernail.
“They wanted to see me?”
Nod.
“They say what about?”
Danny shook his head no.
Nudger had to ask. “They seem angry at me?”
Danny managed to shrug beneath the ridiculous white gown.
“They just do that to you for kicks?” Nudger asked.
Danny pointed at Nudger again. “They said to tell you about it. Tell you they wanna talk to you.” Danny gave a strangled cough and screwed up his face in agony.
Nudger said, “Goddammit, shut up, Danny!”
Danny appeared chastised. His somber brown eyes were misted from pain. Nudger couldn’t look at him without his own eyes watering. He looked instead at the green plastic water pitcher on the tray next to the bed. “They leave any other kinda message?”
In his peripheral vision he saw Danny shake his head no.
Nudger stood up. He walked to the window and gazed outside. Traffic was streaming past on Clayton Road. The sun glanced off the roofs of passing cars, causing them to glitter like mobile jewels. It had to be hot out there. At least Danny’s . room was cool, even if it did smell like a bottle of mouthwash.
He looked down at Danny, who now had his eyes lightly closed. Maybe they’d given him a sedative. Painkiller.
“The doctor said you could go home in the morning,” Nudger told him.
Danny nodded, not opening his eyes. Slipping away.
“You be okay if I leave now?” Nudger asked.
Danny nodded again, more feebly. He raised a hand about six inches off the bed, where it hung weightlessly for a few seconds, then dropped back to the mattress.
Nudger walked softly out of the room and closed the door behind him.
He was sure Danny was safe. If Bobinet and the skeleton had meant to kill him, he’d be dead. What they’d committed was a casual act of cruelty simply to keep Nudger frightened into obedience. What Bobinet had done to the canary and the dog, and maybe Ed Franks. But it would have been bad strategy to kill Danny and call the law’s attention to Nudger so he might have to reveal his arrangement with the skeleton and Bobinet. He wouldn’t be out there searching for the diamonds if that happened, so it was best to throttle the poor guy in the doughnut shop only halfway to death.
Nudger found a phone in the hospital lobby and called Hammersmith. He was told by Ellis, the Third District desk sergeant, that Hammersmith wasn’t in his office. Nudger took a chance and called Ricardo’s, a restaurant that was partly responsible for changing Hammersmith from a lean and handsome cop to his present overblown condition.
Ricardo himself answered the phone and said Hammersmith was at his usual table, enjoying the special.
When Hammersmith came to the phone he said, “You tore me away from a plate of spaghetti, Nudge.” This conjured up a mental image that caused Nudger’s stomach to twitch.
He said, “I just came from St. Mary’s Hospital. Roger Bobinet roughed up Danny.”
Hammersmith said, “Dammit! He okay?”
. “More or less. I found him with a piece of twine looped around his neck. Same kinda twine used to hang Raggedy Ann.”
“Huh?”
Nudger explained to him what he’d found at Marlou Dee’s apartment.
“So where’s Miss Dee?” Hammersmith asked.
No harm in telling Hammersmith. “Safely hidden at a motel in Hannibal. The fewer folks who know about it the better.”
“Gotcha, Nudge. Count me as one of those you haven’t told. Danny been released from the hospital yet?”
“They’re keeping him till morning. For observation. I think he’ll be okay; no permanent damage, according to the examining doctor.”
“Danny say why Bobinet did a job on him?”
“Yeah. The skeleton and Bobinet came to see me. They were irritated when I wasn’t in my office, so they went down to the doughnut shop and used Danny to leave me a sort of message.”
“Some message. The bastards!”
“Coulda been worse,” Nudger said. “Think of Franks.”
“You’re right. St. Mary’s, you say?”
“Room Three-thirty-five.”
“I’ll drop by and see Danny. Maybe he’ll want to file an assault complaint.”
“Maybe Raggedy Ann will.”
“Only doing my job, Nudge. You come up with any of those missing diamonds?”
“Not yet.”
“Clue me in when you learn something.”
“You know I will.”
“Thanks, Nudge, you’re a gem.” Hammersmith hung up abruptly to get back to his spaghetti.
When Nudger returned to his office there was a message on his answering machine from the skeleton:
“Guess you know by now we was by to see you, asshole. (Gasp! Cough!) We’ll be looking for you again. Better be where we can find you. Have a nice day.”
Nudger slumped low in his swivel chair and stared at the wall. His stomach was roiling, so he got a couple of antacid tablets out of the top drawer and chewed on them. We’ll be looking for you again.
A wave of cold fear passed through him as he replayed the message in his mind. An amazing amount of menace had been transmitted over the phone. The skeleton had reached out and touched him.
26
Nudger was waiting for Claudia when she got home from work. She took a step into the apartment, saw him sitting on the sofa, and her lean body stiffened for a moment in alarm. Then she smiled. She was wearing a summery lemon-colored blouse and matching slacks. Had on oversized white fake pearls that draped from her neck like small but lush tropical fruit. She was dressed cool but looked warm; there was a sheen of perspiration on her face and bare arms. Nudger figured she was too beautiful to sweat; she glistened.
Standing there glistenin
g she said, “I got through the day okay. Didn’t see any sign of the police, though.”
“They were there,” he assured her. “Way it works, you’re not supposed to see them unless you need them.”
She dropped her apparently heavy attaché case in the wing chair and swayed into the kitchen. He heard her clattering around in there, and a few minutes later she came out carrying two glasses of water with ice in them. She gave one of the clinking glasses to Nudger and sat down on the other end of the sofa. Crossed her legs and began slowly pumping one of them, the way women do.
He said, “I was looking out the window a few minutes ago and saw Larry Ervine drive past. He probably relieved whoever was watching over you today.”
“I feel safe with him on the job,” Claudia said. “So what time will his relief arrive? About midnight?”
“About. But in a case like this it wouldn’t surprise me if Ervine caught some sleep after midnight and stayed in the area. He’s that kinda cop. And he’s still plenty sensitive about what happened to Ed Franks. Danny’s another matter. That happened in Maplewood, just beyond the city line.”
Claudia set her glass of water on a Time magazine lying on the table next to the sofa. She looked puzzled and alarmed. “Danny?”
Nudger told her what the skeleton and Roger Bobinet had done to Danny. He got mad again merely by talking about it.
“But he’s all right?” she asked anxiously.
“He will be. He comes home from the hospital tomorrow.”
“Bastards! Anybody who’d hurt someone like Danny ... What about the doughnut shop?”
“I hung the CLOSED sign in the window. But if I know Danny he’ll be behind the counter by tomorrow afternoon. Grease is in his blood.”
“Will he be safe? I mean, what if this Bobinet psychopath comes back?”
“That’s not likely,” Nudger said. “And the Maplewood police will have the doughnut shop under surveillance. They’d like nothing more than to collar a couple of big-time killers and jewel thieves.”
Claudia unbuttoned her blouse in a casual way that told Nudger she was merely trying to cool off, not heat up. She picked up her glass and sipped some ice water. Licked her lips and caressed the cool curve of the glass with lazy fingers.
Lounging gracefully with her bra showing, gleaming with perspiration and sipping a tall cool drink, she looked like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play. Every now and then, during long and sultry stretches of slowed time, Nudger thought of St. Louis as a southern and not a midwestern city. That was one of its schizophrenic sides: New Orleans north. Here and there you could order grits.
Nudger made himself stop staring at Claudia and excused himself to phone Marlou at Aunt Polly’s.
No answer. She was out somewhere. Eating an early supper or going for a walk or buying a magazine, he hoped. Or gazing at her favorite riverboat. Something innocent like that, in the land of Tom and Huck. He hung up the phone.
“Your friend not home?” Claudia asked.
“Not right now.” He gnawed on his lower lip, then ran a hand over the crown of his head where his hair was thinning. Pulled the hand away. Didn’t want to feel that.
“Worried about her?” Claudia asked.
Nudger rested his fingertips on the phone again, then walked away from it. “More than she is, I guess.”
He and Claudia took her car to Del Pietro’s Restaurant over on Hampton. It gave Ervine something to do, but it made Nudger uneasy, sitting where Franks had sat. Could an economy car really be haunted?
They had pasta and the house red wine. Ervine sat at the bar drinking what looked like club soda and munching peanuts, occasionally glancing at Nudger and Claudia in the mirror. Living a cop’s life. Loving it on one level, hating it on another. Nudger knew how it was.
When Nudger and Claudia were finished eating they drove to the Ted Drewes frozen custard stand on Chippewa and stood in line for a couple of chocolate chip concretes. Drewes’s concretes were delicious custard concoctions so thick that before the kids working behind the counter handed them to customers, they turned the cups upside down to demonstrate that the contents wouldn’t pour out.
Drewes was crowded, as it invariably was on warm summer nights. Native South St. Louisans ambling around in shorts and T-shirts and leaning on their pickup trucks, mixing with trendy types from West County, wearing designer clothes and lounging against their Porsches and Jaguars.
Like many customers, Nudger and Claudia sat in their car and leisurely worked on their concretes with plastic spoons. Ervine. seemed to sense they were going to give him time to treat himself. Nudger saw him buy a huge chocolate sundae and carry it to his unmarked gray Plymouth parked in the row behind Nudger’s car, eating as he walked.
Lightning was flashing in the west over St. Charles when Nudger dropped the empty waxed cups in a battered trash barrel and drove from the parking lot. It might simply be chain lightning, the kind that didn’t preclude rain. Or the illuminated sky might be the precursor of a violent summer thunderstorm. Unpredictable weather blew in from the west this time of year. Sometimes tornadoes. No point checking with the folks at the Weather Bureau, though, or one of the talking-suit meteorologists on TV news; summers in St. Louis, Nudger’s guess was as good as theirs.
A brisk wind had kicked up and was driving dust and zoysia grass cuttings along Claudia’s street when Nudger parked the car. It had cooled off and they’d driven home with the windows down. Claudia stood on the sidewalk while he cranked the glass back up. Then he climbed out of the car and locked it. He held her arm and kept looking around continually, like a fighter pilot patrolling over enemy territory, as they walked along the sidewalk to her building.
He felt better when they were inside and he’d looked through the apartment. They were alone, and everything seemed to be as they’d left it. No bogeymen seeking stolen diamonds. He nodded to Claudia standing by the door and she set the locks.
It had suddenly gotten dark outside except for frequent flashes of lightning. Thunder rolled in from the west like lowlevel cannon fire, rumbling and cracking in the bent gray sky above the apartment.
Claudia walked in her elegant way across the room and switched on a lamp. It sent a soft yellow glow over everything. The wind tossed a sheet of rain against the front windows, rattling the panes then dying to a watery whisper.
She glanced in the direction of the noise and said, “It’s dark, Nudger, but it’s still early. What’ll we do till bedtime?”
He said, “I’ve got an idea.”
Half awake, dreaming in waves, he lay on his back in the dark and felt again the warm, strong softness of Claudia’s eager body. Then he was flying. Soaring higher and higher in tightening arcs while she moaned in his ear. She screamed.
He opened his eyes.
Huh? Not Claudia screaming. Someone else.
Something else.
Sirens.
The erection he’d awakened with shrank from body and consciousness as his dream faded. For a few seconds he lay listening. He was nude. Perspiring. The sheet was damp beneath him. The room was warm and still smelled of sex. Rain was no longer falling—not hard enough for him to hear, anyway—but occasional flashes of brilliance popped soundlessly in the night sky, like celestial flashbulbs illuminating the city. The sirens were getting louder.
He rotated his wrist to look at the luminous hands of his watch, then remembered he’d removed it last night. Hadn’t wanted to scratch Claudia.
He groped around on the table by the bed. Ouch! Bent back a fingernail on the clock radio. He found the watch and looked at it. Christ! One o’clock.
A new sound. Someone pounding on the back door that led from the kitchen to the rear steps and fire escape.
Claudia awoke and sat bolt upright beside him. Lightning flashed, and he saw her in bold outline, nude and rigid, reminding him of that movie scene when the bride of Frankenstein is jolted to life by electricity.
“Jesus!” she said. “What’s that, Nudger?”<
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“Oh, just sirens, lightning, somebody beating on the door.” He struggled up out of the bed and wrestled into his pants. Almost lost his balance and fell. He wound up facing the window and realized some of what he’d assumed was lightning carried alternating blue and red hues. Revolving roofbar lights of police cars.
He said, “Stay here,” to Claudia and padded barefoot through the dancing light toward the kitchen.
The pounding on the door got louder and took on more urgency as he got closer.
Even the tile floor in the kitchen was warm beneath his bare feet, but he hardly noticed. He pulled aside the curtain on the back door’s tiny window. A dim light was burning in the landing, and Nudger felt a stab of fear before he recognized that the face just a few inches from his own on the other side of the glass belonged to Larry Ervine.
“Open up, Nudge!”
Nudger fumbled the chain lock loose, threw the bolt on the lock beneath it, and opened the door.
“What the hell’s going down, Larry?”
When Ervine started to speak, Nudger realized he was breathing hard. “Milner, the guy watching the back of the building, saw somebody climbing the fire escape. Whoever it was stopped at the window right there.” Ervine motioned with his head toward the window on the landing, directly opposite Claudia’s back door. “Milner tried to get up close, but the man on the fire escape saw him and had time to climb down low enough to jump to the ground. Took off running toward Grand Avenue. Milner radioed for help and chased the guy but the sonuvabitch could run like Bambi.”
“Bobinet?” Nudger asked.
“Yeah, who else? Milner said he was about medium size and had to be relatively young, way he could scat. Anyways, a patrol car on the way to the scene spots him on Grand and hits the siren and lights. Uniforms figure they got him. Guy stops running, all right. But he turns around and opens up on the car with something big. Magnum probably. Blew the windshield out and sent another slug through the radiator, water pump, and an oil line; a challenge for Mr. Goodwrench.”
“Anybody get hit?”
“Nope, just the car. One of the uniforms chased Bobinet—or whoever it was—south on Grand but lost him. Got off a couple of shots at him but missed. You know how it is, you run flat out and stop and plant your feet to fire your gun, you’re puffin’ and shakin’ like a train about to pull outa the station. How the hell you gonna hit anything that way?”