by John Lutz
Nudger was silent, wondering if she talked to all men that way. Probably she did.
“So,” she said, “what about that drink? Or are you embarrassed to be seen with a babe on crutches?”
“No,” Nudger said hastily. He made a date to meet her the next night at Michael’s Lounge, down on Manchester.
“Some interesting sexual positions are possible with the use of crutches,” Lacy said.
Nudger hung up, wondering where the year had gone, imagining the prime of his life spiraling into the past. December! Crutches! Accidental deaths that would forever remain mysteries and roam the darkest reaches of his mind along with so much that was unresolved.
As usual, he wished Lacy hadn’t called. He tried to cheer himself up.
Jingle Bells, he thought morosely.
Chapter Twelve
Five months later, Nudger lay in Claudia’s bed gazing out at the bright April morning. Sunlight illuminated the fresh maple leaf buds outside the bedroom window, making drops of rainwater from last night’s shower glisten like sequins. The distant hum of traffic over on Grand Avenue was growing gradually louder as legions of St. Louisans made their way to work through exhaust fumes and gallantly blooming crocuses and tulips struggling to supplant the plastic flowers South St. Louisans were wont to display during winter gloom. It was a neighborhood where people understood the disconnection between mood and reality.
Nudger knew he should get up soon and drive to his office, where two days’ worth of unopened bills awaited him—and a sealed letter in Eileen’s tight, neurotic handwriting. He figured if it was anything he needed to know about, she would have phoned him. Messages in writing from Eileen he had come to view as legal documents, and since this one had arrived unregistered, he decided not to open it. That way he could face dealing with the rest of the mail, which meant he might now be able to muster the willpower to rise from the bed and meet the morning.
He was ruminating about how these acts of compromise had come to rule his life, when the newspaper next to him rattled. Claudia was propped up in bed, reading this morning’s Post.
“This is interesting,” she said.
“Is it about us and last night?” Nudger asked. The scent of sex was still evident in the bedroom.
She snorted. “I hope not. It’s in the obituaries.”
“Not us last night,” Nudger said.
“Brad Millman.”
It took a few seconds for the name to register in Nudger’s mind. Recognition was followed by surprise. “Millman is dead?”
“Two days ago,” Claudia said. “Car accident.”
“What kind of car accident?”
“Doesn’t say. This is the obituaries, not detailed news.”
“But as you say, interesting.” Nudger’s stomach twitched, trying to tell him something. He found that he was energized by Millman’s obituary, but he wasn’t sure why. He did recognize this as one of those moments when his intuition might be ahead of his reasoning. He scooched around and then sat up on the edge of the mattress, making the bedsprings squeal. “When’s the funeral?” he asked.
Newspaper rattled behind him. “Day after tomorrow. Visitation tonight and tomorrow at Holstetter’s Funeral Home.”
Nudger stood up and moved toward the bathroom. His feet and ankles felt stiff, which made him walk gingerly. Middle age, he told himself, just as Dr. Fell had told him recently. After half a dozen steps, the stiffness had pretty much gone away, though Nudger’s toes continued to make crackling sounds.
Sounding like a string of firecrackers, he crossed the cool tile bathroom floor and turned on the hot and cold spigots in the tub, then waited for the tap water to get warm enough for his shower.
He stood under the hot needles of water for a long time, letting them massage and loosen the tightness of his back muscles and his shoulder, which hurt where he must have slept with his arm twisted beneath him last night.
Claudia was out of bed and slipping into her blue terrycloth robe when he finally came out of the bathroom. It was Saturday, so she didn’t have to teach.
“You want some waffles?” she asked, pulling the robe’s sash tight around her lean waist with such abruptness and force that it appeared for a second as if her body might be pinched in half.
Nudger’s nervous stomach was still twitching after hearing of Brad Millman’s death. It knew something his brain didn’t, all right. “I’d better skip breakfast,” he said. “Things to do at the office.”
Claudia cocked her head and looked at him oddly. “That doesn’t sound like you on a Saturday morning. In fact, you usually want to drive over to Uncle Bill’s Pancake House and gorge yourself.”
“Can’t this morning,” he said, putting on some of the fresh underwear he kept at Claudia’s apartment. He adroitly kissed her cheek as she passed him on her way to the kitchen to make coffee. “But I want to take you out to dinner tonight.”
“Date,” she said, moving toward the door.
“Dress up a bit,” he told her.
“Why? Are we going someplace nice?”
“Maybe. Either way, we have a stop to make first. Wear something dark if you have it.”
Holstetter’s Funeral Home was a hulking stone building set well back from Gravois Road. Its slate roof was lined with tiny dormers with fake windows as blank as the eyes of the dead, and what appeared to be an array of lightning rods that dated from the middle ages. It was five o’clock when Nudger steered the Granada onto the lone circular driveway that led to the entrance and tall portico. He drove past the portico, where a gleaming black Cadillac sat, and made a left where the driveway branched off into the parking lot.
After leaving the car next to a florist’s van, he and Claudia crossed the blacktop lot to the baroque main entrance. Nudger held the heavy oak door open for Claudia and they entered the foyer. He was wearing his best sport jacket, the blue one that barely showed the wine stain, and taupe pants he’d just gotten back from the dry cleaners. Claudia had on her simple but elegant navy blue dress, cream-colored belt, matching high heels.
The inside of Holstetter’s was quiet and furnished in somber colors and dark wood. A placard directed them to where Brad Millman was laid out in a simple bronze-colored casket with pallbearer handles that looked a lot like the handles on Nudger’s dresser drawers. Colorful wreaths and funeral sprays were set up on either side of the casket. Only half a dozen mourners sat in upholstered chairs or small sofas arranged about the room.
With Claudia, Nudger crossed the plush gray carpet and stood for a moment viewing the deceased. Millman had died young and looked strangely vital and healthy. A clump of his dark hair stood out from the side of his head, as if he’d slept all night on it or hadn’t combed it carefully, and might at any moment raise a hand and brush it back smoothly in place. This might all be a joke, Nudger thought inanely, uncomfortable as always in the company of the dead. This discomfort was one of the reasons his nervous stomach had eventually forced him from the police department—dead bodies unsettled him to the point of nausea and paralysis. Though this kind of situation, at a mortuary rather than a crime scene or the morgue, wasn’t as bad, as there was no blood.
A tall blond man in a suit too light for mourning had moved to stand alongside them. “Were you friends of Brad?” he asked softly.
“I was,” Nudger lied. “Though I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I was shocked when I came across his obituary in the paper this morning.”
“It was a car accident, wasn’t it?” Claudia asked, perhaps deliberately distracting the blond man from asking when and how Nudger had known Millman.
“Yes, one of those unpredictable tragedies. Brad was driving along and missed a curve. His car struck a tree head-on, and he wasn’t wearing his seat belt.”
Nudger looked at the man, who seemed genuinely upset. He was about fifty and had watery blue eyes and high cheekbones, a thin slash of a mouth that arced down at the corners. His straight blond hair was combed sideways in front to conceal a r
eceding hairline but hung lankly over his forehead, as it probably had most of his life. “His face ... I mean, he looks all right,” Nudger said. “Not as if he’d been thrown into a windshield.”
“Yes, that’s true.” The blond man extended his hand, first to Claudia, then to Nudger. He said his name was Warren Tully, and that he was Millman’s business partner in Mermaid Pools. Nudger said he and Claudia were Mr. and Mrs. Mumble. Tully wasn’t listening anyway; he seemed ready to break into sobs.
“Brad’s face and head ...” Nudger persisted indelicately. “The impact ...”
Tully appeared pained. “He didn’t make contact with the windshield, they say. The impact crushed his sternum against the steering wheel, causing fatal internal injuries.” Tully shook his head. “According to the accident report, he was only driving about forty. Speeding, but not by much. You wouldn’t think this kind of thing could happen. A fender bender, some injury, maybe ... but to be killed.” Tully bit his lower lip hard and moved away.
“I’m sorry to have brought it up,” Nudger said to his back, but Tully didn’t turn around.
“You shouldn’t have kept at him relentlessly about his friend’s injuries,” Claudia admonished Nudger. She was staring at him as if she wished he would exchange places with Millman in the casket.
“I guess you’re right,” Nudger said, “but remember, we’re here to see what we can learn.”
Claudia looked around at the array of flowers, then at the few mourners. She was still obviously miffed at Nudger for his tactlessness. “I don’t think we learned anything you couldn’t have found out some kinder and easier way.”
What did she know? Nudger thought. She wasn’t in his line of work. But he didn’t give voice to his musings. “If you’re uncomfortable here,” he said, “why don’t you wait out in the foyer. I won’t be long.”
“You won’t be long doing what? I don’t see what else there is to do here.”
“I want to hang around, listen to what people are saying.”
“Why?”
“To find out why,” he said in exasperation.
She said nothing else. He watched her leave. Even in their mourning mode, the other men in the room watched her as she walked past them. She was the opposite of death.
When Nudger joined Claudia fifteen minutes later, she immediately rose from the comfortable-looking green chair she was sitting in and headed for the door.
Out in the parking lot, she said, “So what did you learn?”
He unlocked the Granada and waited until they were inside and he had the engine and air conditioner going before answering. “No one there is family. Only friends or business associates. There was mention of a sister in Omaha who was flying in for the funeral.”
“Is that meaningful?” Claudia asked.
“It might be.”
To assuage Claudia’s obvious irritation, he drove to Bevo Mill, a wonderful old German restaurant located on Gravois beneath the vanes of a large windmill.
Her mood soon improved as they were shown to a table in the spacious and ornate main dining room with its oversized fireplace and German hunting lodge motif High on the walls were mounted gigantic stag heads, trophies from long-ago hunts. One of the stags seemed to be staring at Nudger in amusement with its glass eyes, as if it were aware of where he’d just come from and knew about his delicate stomach.
The waitress came over to the table with their drinks, and they ordered from the rich and extensive menu. While she wrote in her notepad, Nudger stared over her right shoulder at the stag and it looked wisely back at him, as if about to wink.
He skipped the meat course.
“Funeral homes depress me,” Claudia said, and sipped from her glass of water left by the waitress.
Nudger realized he shouldn’t have taken her to view Millman’s body. Holstetter’s was a place of death, and Claudia and death had a longstanding love-hate relationship. Like Lacy Tumulty and her men. People on their treadmills in their cages. Such a world.
He was glad when the food arrived to brighten the mood.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, Nudger attended Millman’s funeral at a South St. Louis cemetery. The grounds were well maintained, with ancient trees that had received obvious care. All around where Nudger stood were neat tombstones and plaques whose symmetry was occasionally broken by stone angels or Gothic memorials to the dead. On his left, Mary wept, while on his right, she sat with child while Gabriel trumpeted hope eternal. To the sparrows and jays that had defaced the stonework, it made no difference.
Nudger stood off to the side of a canopy erected over the kind of green artificial turf used in ballparks. Beneath the canopy, a brief service was read by a young minister in a dark suit that fit him much too tight through the shoulders. The only mourners were those who had been at the mortuary last night. Among Millman’s pallbearers was his business partner, Warren Tully. Some of the others were probably furnished by the mortuary. There was no sign of the sister who was supposed to fly in from Omaha for the funeral. Maybe she’d missed flight connections. Or maybe she and her brother had missed more important connections long ago.
When the service was over, the mourners stood up from their metal folding chairs and drifted back toward their cars. Tully lingered and talked with the minister in the tight suit. He glanced over with his watery blue eyes and saw Nudger but gave no sign of recognition.
Trying not to tread on any of the ground-level brass grave markers, Nudger turned and walked back across the damp grass to where his car was parked at the tail end of the gleaming and sedate line of black mortuary limos.
In his office half an hour later, he dredged up Ollie Bostwick’s business card and phoned the insurance investigator at First Security. It was Sunday, but Bostwick struck Nudger as more of a workaholic than a churchgoer.
Bostwick was there. He had no trouble remembering Nudger; in fact, he didn’t seem at all surprised by the call.
“I guess this is about Brad Millman’s death,” he said.
It was Nudger who was surprised. “You knew about it?”
“Of course. In my line of work, you have to keep up on those things. I read the obituaries as faithfully as you might read ’Ziggy’ on the comics page.”
Nudger was surprised again. He did like Ziggy, unfortunately even identified with him. “I just came from Millman’s funeral.”
“Why?” Bostwick asked.
“Because it’s been less than a year since the deaths of Betty and Loren Almer.”
“Statistically speaking, that isn’t so unusual.”
“Gastronomically speaking, I’m not so sure about that.”
“Gastronomically?”
“My nervous stomach tells me something is wrong here. It knows things before the rest of me does.”
“Does it have a pretty good record for accuracy?”
“Almost infallible.”
“Millman’s death was a one-car accident, according to the news item, which I took the trouble to look up. Visibility was clear, the road was dry despite a recent rain, and he drove too fast into a turn. His car went off the road and hit a tree.”
“Maybe someone tampered with his car’s brakes.”
“The police check those kinds of things, Nudger. And if Millman’s life was insured, you can bet the insurance company will check, too, if they haven’t already. One thing I do know: That’s a dangerous stretch of road. He isn’t the first driver to lose control and smash up there.”
“He didn’t leave much family, they tell me. Only a sister, but I don’t think she made it to the funeral.”
“If Millman left no will,” Bostwick said, “she’ll inherit after probate court drains the estate almost dry. If she’s the beneficiary of a life insurance policy, I see no way the company can refuse to pay her, barring some dramatic development like mechanical tampering and a murder case. I can tell you, Nudger, that sort of thing happens more frequently in detective novels than in real life.”
�
��In real life,” Nudger said, “if Millman’s car was tampered with, the sister would be the prime suspect.”
“If she stood to profit by his death.”
“Can you check and see if she’s the beneficiary of Millman’s insurance policy?”
A lot of time passed before Bostwick replied. Then he said, “You got a client in this case?”
“No.” But Nudger was thinking about the two thousand dollars paid by Loren Almer. Almer hadn’t received anything for the advance, and it couldn’t be repaid. It wasn’t right, taking an advance that size and not delivering, even if the client was dead. But Nudger wasn’t about to mention to Bostwick that he had scruples. He had his professional reputation to protect. People hired private investigators for their pragmatism, not for their ideals. “All I’m asking is that you run a computer check and see if Millman had a life insurance policy with yours or some other company. Maybe find out if his sister is the big winner in his death. Insurance companies have files on everything about everybody, don’t they?”
“Did you read that somewhere?”
“Everywhere.”
“Well, it’s the age of the computer. I can probably find out the first part, but the names of beneficiaries aren’t so easily available. I’ll work on it and call you back.”
Nudger thanked him and was about to hang up.
“I can tell you Millman didn’t have a policy with this company,” Bostwick said. “I already checked, right after reading about his accident.”
“Why would you do that, if statistically his death wasn’t unusual?”
“You’ve got a nervous stomach, Nudger. Me, I’ve gotta put up with a little voice that wakes me up in the middle of the night and nags at me. You know what it means to live with something like that?”
“I used to,” Nudger said, “before my divorce. But I suppose your voice and my stomach amount to the same thing.”
“That’s right. I had to satisfy my curiosity, so I looked to make sure Millman’s death was none of my business. For you I’ll go further and see if he was insured someplace else. I don’t like the idea of somebody beating the system and doing any insurance company out of six-figure sums.”