by John Lutz
“What about her hearing? She said she’d been struck in the ear.”
“Any hearing loss is temporary.”
“She started to tell me about being cut, just before you entered the room.”
Dr. Ryker frowned. “Her attacker used a knife on her Achilles tendons, just above the heel. When that tendon is severed, the foot flops more or less independently, detached from the muscles in the leg. He managed to sever one tendon entirely, and sliced halfway through the other.”
Nudger felt faint and had to lean against the wall. “My God! Why would he do something like that?”
“He apparently wanted to hobble her. Sadism maybe. Or possibly he wanted to make sure her activities were curtailed.”
Nudger felt a rage for Lacy’s attacker growing like flame in his stomach. “Will she be able to walk normally again?”
“There’ll have to be an operation to reattach the severed tendon and repair the damaged one. Recovery from tendon operations is a slow process. It will be months before she’ll be able to get around more or less normally.”
“Months?”
“Six, perhaps. She’ll be able to walk before that, of course, but with a cane, and then with a limp.” He looked distressed. “It’s a shame, a young, pretty woman like that. But she might recover faster than most. She seems to have spirit.”
Now Nudger understood why Lacy wanted him to take over the Almer case in order to preserve at least part of the fee. She’d be on the shelf for a long time, and was without medical insurance. To say she needed money was an understatement.
Maybe reading Nudger’s mind, Dr. Ryker said, “The admissions nurse said she had no relatives. Are you a close friend?”
“A friend, anyway,” Nudger said. “We didn’t see each other often. Lacy was always more than a little reckless. To know her is to worry about her.”
“At least she had the foresight to continue her medical insurance from her previous employer,” Dr. Ryker said.
Nudger blinked. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. Admissions always checks those things.”
Nudger believed him.
“The nurse will give her a sedative soon,” Dr. Ryker said. “She really shouldn’t have visitors. We’ll be operating on her tomorrow morning.”
Nudger gave the doctor one of his cards. “If there’s any kind of a problem, will you have someone call me?”
“Of course.” The doctor returned the compliment by handing Nudger one of his own cards, which was bordered in blue and gold and looked expensive enough to be a Hallmark.
Dr. Ryker shook Nudger’s hand, then walked back into Lacy’s room.
Though Lacy had lied to Nudger about not having medical insurance, he couldn’t feel angry. It was what he should have expected. A person’s character didn’t change because of serious injury. Usually.
He stared at the closed door to her room, wondering if he should go back inside after the doctor had left and confront her about the insurance lie.
But he only wondered for a moment. She’d only smile, wink with a swollen eye, and ask him what was the big deal about a small lie between friends. Her lower lip would probably start to bleed again.
Nudger turned away and walked down the hall toward the elevators, telling himself he’d merely told Lacy he’d think about taking on the Almer case by himself He hadn’t actually said he’d do it.
Or had he?
The truth was, he couldn’t remember.
He punched the elevator button as if it had punched him first.
This true-to-your-word credo wasn’t easy when you couldn’t recall what you’d said.
Chapter Five
Fickle St. Louis weather worked its wiles. Warm air had pushed in from the south, and by evening Nudger could drive with the car windows down. The engine noise was louder that way; and there was a new noise coming from the car, what sounded like the squealing of a fan belt. Or possibly a water pump about to give up and become a costly repair.
Nudger tried to ignore the squealing and listened to the Rams-Giants football game as he drove north on the Inner Belt and exited on Page Avenue. There was a lot of traffic on Page. At red lights the cars lined up and provided a cacophony of sound, music from various radios, the mingled voices of the game being announced—lost in the rising rumble of accelerating engines as the light changed to green.
Nudger drove east to Hanley Road, then wound through side streets and began looking for Loren Almer’s address in a neighborhood of modest and well-kept brick homes in the suburb of University City.
Almer, a supervisor with the post office, had been home from work for only a few hours. On the phone with Nudger, he’d seemed aggrieved by the news of Lacy’s injuries and agreed to see Nudger immediately. He wanted no time wasted in the investigation of his daughter’s death.
Nudger found the house, a small brick home with black shutters and an attached garage with a white overhead door. There was a tall oak tree in front that shaded most of the yard. A large rock with the house’s address neatly stenciled on it in black numerals leaned against the tree’s thick trunk. Nudger parked the car and made his way along a brick walk to the front porch. Ivy that had remained a rich green grew thickly on both sides of the walk and spread out for a few feet in both directions over the lawn.
Loren Almer answered Nudger’s ring within a few minutes and peered out at him through the glass in the aluminum storm door. He was a short man in his fifties, bald and with a scraggly gray Vandyke beard. When Nudger had identified himself and Almer opened the door and invited him inside, Nudger saw him more clearly without the reflecting glass between them. Almer had pained blue eyes and not much in the way of eyebrows to go with the beard.
“I hope Miss Tumulty’s recovering okay,” he said, motioning Nudger into a small living room with a blue carpet, gray sofa and chair, and a large-screen TV that dwarfed all other furnishings. He had a window open somewhere and sound from outside was sifting in with a warm breeze: a car motor running steadily nearby, kids shouting in the distance, almost certainly the crack of bat on ball. The baseball season never really ended in St. Louis. For a moment Nudger was taken back to his childhood days of sandlot baseball.
“She won’t be getting up and around for a while,” he said to Almer, pulling himself back to the present. “Which is why I’m here.” He found himself staring at the TV, wondering how someone had fit the huge, bulbous object through the door.
“How long will she be incapacitated?” Almer asked, sitting down on the sofa after Nudger had sat in the gray chair.
“Months.”
“Oh, dear!” Almer’s hand went to his head. He touched his temple lightly with his fingertips, as if checking to see if there might be a hole there. Then he looked with more interest at Nudger. “Are you handling the case now?”
Here was another opportunity for Nudger to say no, he was only here because Lacy couldn’t come, and she would be making arrangements about the investigation. That was the sort of answer he knew he should give. This was at least an opportunity to be vague.
But Nudger looked into Almer’s agonized eyes. Grief stared back at him like a trapped animal. No one every really got over the death of a child. “It looks that way,” he said.
“I had faith in Miss Tumulty,” Almer said.
“She has faith in me,” Nudger told him, wondering what kind of persuasion Lacy had used to convince Almer of her investigative abilities.
Almer looked around him as if he’d never before been in his own living room. “I’m alone now, Mr. Nudger. My wife, Betty’s mother, died three years ago. Betty was my family, everything to me.” His voice quavered and the flesh beneath his right eye began to dance. Then he looked toward a narrow wooden mantle over an obviously fake fireplace on the opposite wall. A framed photo was on the left side of the mantle, a vase of obviously artificial silk flowers on the right. The photograph was a studio portrait of an attractive young woman with an oval face and lots of wavy dark hair. Her eyes wer
e bright and she was smiling as if she’d just heard something that amused and astounded her.
“I assume that’s Betty,” Nudger said.
“Was Betty,” Almer corrected forlornly.
“Anyone can have an accident,” Nudger said.
Almer gave a sad laugh, almost a whimper. “Let me show you another photograph of Betty,” he said, standing up from the sofa.
Almer moved toward a short hall leading to the other rooms in the house. He was much frailer than he’d appeared through the storm door, and he walked with a bent-kneed shuffle, as if his legs were devoid of any strength or spring. Wading through grief, Nudger thought, watching him.
Almer returned within a few minutes carrying not one photo but a handful of snapshots and a yellowed newspaper clipping. He handed them to Nudger, then sat back down on the sofa, still moving as if his legs had been sapped of all strength.
Nudger looked at the photographs, all of the same young woman at different ages. In the first photo she might have been ten years old, with a shaggy haircut and freckles, posed in front of a cactus, a vacation shot. In the others she grew older, became a pretty high school girl in a band costume, holding a clarinet. Then came the graduation photo, posed against backlighting that formed a pale halo around her head, a fixed smile that was nonetheless beautiful.
The last two photographs showed her at about twelve, then in her early teens, in gymnast suits. In one photo she was standing poised on one leg on a balance beam, her other leg stretched out before her and held high, as if she were examining the toes of her bare foot. In the other she was doing a handstand on the parallel bars. A similar photo was in the old newspaper, along with her name and the fact that she’d placed third in the state high school gymnastics championship. Her highest score had been in the balance beam competition.
Almer had risen from the sofa and was standing before Nudger, staring down at him with a hard expression as he bit off his words. “Betty didn’t die in an accident. She never tripped over her own two feet in her life. She worked out regularly at a gym the last three years, and she and her fiancé entered dance contests. I never saw her in better physical condition or more graceful and nimble. She didn’t fall down those stairs. She was pushed. I believe that, and I think Miss Tumulty believes it.”
“Maybe she does,” Nudger said.
“The question is, do you?”
Nudger looked down at the newspaper photo, then up again at Almer.
“I believe it enough,” he said.
He kept telling himself that over and over while Almer wrote a two-thousand-dollar check as payment in advance for his services.
“This wasn’t necessary, I would have billed you,” Nudger told him, accepting the check and tucking it into his pocket.
Almer smiled grimly. “It’s better this way. I want you to feel obligated, and I know you will feel that way. I sensed right away that’s the kind of person Miss Tumulty is, which is why I hired her. You’re the same kind. With folks like you, honor’s more of a motivation than money.”
Fear was a motivation, too, Nudger thought. And grief. Both of them clouded judgment and lent an urgency that forced people into mistakes. But he didn’t mention this to Almer.
As he drove away from Loren Almer’s house with the check in his pocket, he wondered if Almer was deceiving himself about his daughter’s death the way he was about that honor business.
Chapter Six
We dig the hole,” Betty Almer’s fiance Brad Millman told Nudger the next day, ”then we put in packed sand, a thick vinyl liner, and we got us a swimming pool that’ll hold up good as a concrete one and costs half as much.”
Nudger watched a huge, awkward piece of equipment Millman had called a backhoe snort and growl and clank as it took gigantic bites out of a South County homeowner’s lawn and deposited the dirt in a waiting dump truck.
“Funny time of year to be putting in a swimming pool, isn’t it?” Nudger asked. It was unseasonably warm again today, but it was still October.
“Not at all,” Millman said. “Swimming pools are like a lot of things for sale—buy them during the off-season and you get the best deal.”
That made sense to Nudger, yet if it were true it would make the off-season the prime season, which would mean.... He stopped thinking about it.
“You say my office told you I’d be here, Mr. Nudger?” Millman asked, speaking loudly over the lusty noise of the backhoe. He was a tall man, gangly but with muscle, wearing jeans and a faded blue work shirt dark with perspiration. He had unruly straight red hair, and a thin face with the kind of craggy good looks that pudgy yuppies on exercise machines strive to achieve.
“That’s right,” Nudger said. “A woman named Judith gave me the address.”
The two men silently watched the voracious backhoe take another huge bite out of the yard.
“It’s about Betty Almer,” Nudger said. “I’m investigating her death for her father.”
“I thought that Lacy Tumulty woman was doing that. She’s some sort of private detective.”
“She got hurt. I took over the case.”
Millman scraped mud from the soles of his construction boots onto the concrete edge of the curb. “I already talked to that Lacy woman.”
“I wanted to hear for myself what you thought,” Nudger said.
Millman glanced at his wristwatch, then at the chugging and clattering backhoe. “It’s noisy here,” he said, “and it’s about lunch time. I can afford to be away for a little while. There’s a McDonald’s near here.”
“I know where it is,” Nudger said. “I’ll drive.”
“No, I better follow you,” Millman said. He touched the black beeper on his belt. “Never know when I’m gonna have to jump up and rush back here.”
Nudger waited while Millman talked to the backhoe driver, then to a man shoveling dirt in what looked like an effort to define the shape of the pool.
The Granada started right away, continuing its good behavior despite the occasional squeal from beneath the hood, and Nudger drove to McDonald’s while Millman followed in a white pickup truck that sat high on oversized, knobby tires.
It was noisier in McDonald’s than standing near the backhoe. About a dozen teenage girls in the parochial school uniform of white blouses and plaid skirts were eating lunch, secretly smoking, and practicing how to curse and be catty. They were getting it down pretty well.
Nudger and Millman carried their Big Macs and colas to a far booth and got as comfortable as possible sitting opposite each other on the orange plastic benches.
“Her dad got you convinced Betty’s death was suspicious?” Millman asked, when they’d unwrapped their hamburgers and had started to eat.
Nudger had a mouthful of food, so he merely nodded.
“Old Loren,” Millman said, “I think he loved Betty as much as I did. That’s why he keeps trying to push for a criminal investigation. He can’t let her go.”
“Can you?”
Millman’s eyes filled with tears and he looked away and swiped at them with his knuckles. If he was an actor, he was one who could cry on cue. “Next question,” he said, when he’d turned back to face Nudger.
“Do you think her death was an accident?”
“Yeah. I’ve got no choice but to think so. I mean, something like this happens and automatically you look for someone or something to blame. I reacted that way myself at first, so I know just how Loren feels. But we gotta face facts. Betty was alone in the house. She tripped and fell down the stairs and died. There’s nothing to suggest otherwise. Her death was fate, and Loren can’t accept that. I can, I guess. I know how it is, you’re living good, happy and planning to get married, then suddenly fate does a job on you.” He sipped cola through a straw.
“The banana peel theory,” Nudger said.
He immediately regretted his words, thinking Millman might think he was trivializing Betty’s death and be angered.
But Millman only nodded glumly. “I guess, if the
theory is that anything can happen to anyone at any time.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Nudger said.
Millman scrunched up his eyes so they were almost closed and the crow’s-feet at their corners deepened. “Betty’s dead, and sometimes I feel like I might as well be, too. Fate messed up both of us with that fall down the stairs.”
“Her father’s a victim of fate, too.”
“I know that. But I don’t think he knows it. Because he’s not ready to know it. He wants somebody or something other than fate to blame.”
“How’d you and your prospective father-in-law get along?”
“Just fine. Loren’s a good guy, very sincere, with his feelings on his sleeve. Sensitive, I guess you’d say. If he didn’t approve of me, he sure put up a good front. My business is doing fine, so I could support his daughter well enough, and he knew we were in love. I’ve got no problems like alcoholism, gambling, or woman beating or anything, so why should he object to me?”
“Did you object to him?”
“No. He was just Betty’s father, that’s all. I was marrying her, not him.”
“Almer said Betty used to be a gymnast, too graceful to fall down the stairs. Said she and you entered dance contests.”
“Yeah, real regular, over at Club Swan. We did Imperial Swing dancing.”
“Which is?”
“Something like jitterbug, only more acrobatic.” Millman looked over at the cluster of teenage schoolgirls. One of them took an exaggerated drag on her cigarette then blew a dense plume of smoke, sneaking a glance in the direction of the counter where the NO SMOKING sign sat and the manager lurked.
“Like I should care!” she said, loudly enough to be overheard, and the other girls giggled.
“I’ll tell you though,” Millman said, “Betty was a good gymnast in high school, and she was in great shape. Worked out three times a week at Tabitha’s Gym. It really is kind of odd that she’d die the way she did. I mean, tripping over nothing, tumbling down those steps she’d gone down a thousand times before and hitting her ...” His voice trailed off and he bowed his head, maybe trying to shake the image his own words had conjured up. Betty Almer’s death kept reminding him of her, causing fresh pain each time. Death liked to rub it in.