by John Lutz
Moving carefully, so as not to rouse Claudia or the pain in his head, Nudger eased his body out of bed. He picked up his pants from where they were folded on a chair, ignoring the dime that fell soundlessly from a pocket onto the carpet. Then he found his Jockey shorts tangled in the sheet, remembered last night with a flush of pleasure, and left the bedroom.
In the comfortably warmer bathroom, he splashed cold water onto his face, rinsed out his mouth, and smoothed back his mussed hair with his fingers. Good enough until he showered and shaved later. He studied himself in the mirror, middle-aged guy but looking older this morning, brown hair thinning on top, faintly puzzled blue eyes. Not really fat, but his abdominal muscles had disappeared when he wasn’t looking.
“Age sneaking up on you,” he said softly to his reflection, then put on the Jockey shorts and pants. More and more frequently he found himself contemplating the passing of his years. He wondered if that was healthy. Most people did that as they grew older, he assured himself, looking again for his missing abs.
He ducked back into the bedroom, found his wrinkled shirt from yesterday, and slipped it on before going downstairs to the vestibule and picking up one of the morning newspapers the deliveryman had left there.
Back up in the apartment, he got Mr. Coffee chugging, then sat down on the sofa and enjoyed the aroma while he looked at the paper.
Lois Brown’s death wasn’t big news, but it was on page four of the front section, half a column captioned “Woman Electrocuted.”
Thinking the paper made it seem as if she’d been executed for some crime, Nudger read on. Lois Brown, who the article said had been forty-one years old, was found by a neighbor, lying dead in a puddle of water in the basement of her St. Louis Hills home. Faulty wiring in her electric clothes dryer was the cause, according to police. She’d been standing in water leaked by the washer, which was next to the dryer, and that intensified the current running through her body and proved fatal.
“Here, Nudger.”
He looked up from the paper to see Claudia standing over him holding two cups of coffee. He accepted one of the cups and handed her the front page of the paper folded to the Lois Brown story.
Still standing, she read and sipped simultaneously.
“Accidental death,” she said, giving him back the paper.
“Some coincidence,” Nudger said. He took a swallow of coffee, burned his tongue, and yanked the cup away from his lips abruptly enough to slosh some onto his shirt. “She leaves a message on my phone saying she’s afraid, and she’s dead by nightfall.”
“Put that way,” Claudia said, “it does strain credulity.” She sat down in a chair across from him, adjusting her robe so it covered her knees. “You should notify the police about the message.”
“I’ll do it after breakfast,” Nudger said. “Let’s get dressed and go to Uncle Bill’s and dine with abandon.” Already he’d forgotten his thickening image in the bathroom mirror.
“I wish I could, but there’s no time. You should have awakened me earlier.”
“No time? Are you going somewhere this morning?”
“Work.”
“But it’s spring break. You’re supposed to be off work for the next two weeks.”
“I’m aware of that, Nudger. But my bills go on. Another teacher, Nancy Rollins, has arranged for me to do part-time work where’s she’s employed.”
Nudger almost blurted out something about Claudia and Nancy Rollins going to the museum together yesterday but caught himself. He would have been forced to equivocate. And when he bent the truth, it often took the shape of a boomerang.
“It’s telephone work,” Claudia said. “I’ll be inside, with other people, and quite safe.”
“Selling things by phone?” Nudger asked.
“Not exactly. It’s a suicide prevention line.”
Nudger sloshed more coffee out of his cup and stared at her.
“I can help people, Nudger. I know what to say because I know what was said to me. I was there and can empathize.”
“But will it affect you, talking to potential suicides?”
“Not in the way you might think. Maybe I’ll tell them the gorilla joke.”
He simply looked at her.
“You told me a gorilla joke when I was on the phone with you. It was you who talked me out of attempting suicide, Nudger.”
But only for a while, he thought, but didn’t say. What had really saved her was that she’d tried to hang herself with some of his ties knotted together, and they were of cheap polyester-blend material that stretched and allowed her toes to touch the floor.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
“Of course.” She bent down and placed her coffee cup on the floor. “Toss me some of the newspaper, Nudger.” Subject changed. He knew better than to continue discussing it.
He found the comic-strip pages and tossed them to her.
She smiled sadly, shook her head at him, and began to read.
After a breakfast of bacon and eggs in Claudia’s kitchen, Nudger walked with her to her little blue Chevy and watched her drive away. Then he returned to the apartment and called Hammersmith.
“Lois Brown,” Nudger said, when Hammersmith answered the phone.
“This some kind of knock-knock joke?” Hammersmith asked.
“She’s the woman who was electrocuted by her clothes dryer yesterday afternoon.”
“Ah!” Hammersmith said. “Well, she can’t come to the phone, then. And if she’d used static guard—”
“She was on my answering machine yesterday morning, saying she was in danger and I’d be interested in knowing why. I tried several times to call her back but never got through to her. Am I getting through to you?”
“Sure. I know which Lois Brown you’re talking about. You’re telling me her death was a homicide?”
“No. I don’t know that.”
“But there is that call she made to you,” Hammersmith said thoughtfully. “Did she actually say her life was in danger?”
“No, she just said she was in danger. But that seems to amount to much the same thing.”
“Maybe. Why do you think she figured you’d be interested?”
“Betty and Loren Almer, Brad Millman.”
“Other accidental death victims, eh, Nudge?”
“Right. And don’t forget what was done to Lacy Tumulty, and almost done to me, by the pointy-headed thug.”
“We got a good composite drawing now, Nudge. It shouldn’t be hard to get an ID on the guy, considering he looks like he was just discovered in an iceberg from ten thousand years ago. He’s distinctive.”
“Don’t brush this off, Jack.”
“Well, Nudge, there isn’t any doubt about those being accidental deaths.”
“Never say any, as the politicians say.”
“That’s not exactly what they say, even when they’re telling the truth. But I get the idea. You know me, Nudge, I got an open mind.”
Nudger knew it was true and didn’t disagree with Hammersmith.
“You ever talk to Lacy Tumulty like you said you were going to?” Hammersmith asked.
“Last night, on the phone. She’s restless, and she’s got a gun.”
“Great. That all you got to tell me?”
“More or less.”
Hammersmith hung up in his usual abrupt fashion.
Nudger didn’t mind. He appreciated Hammersmith not asking him where Lacy was hiding.
He depressed the phone’s cradle button, then called the Hostelo Grandioso and asked for Lacy’s extension.
“Nudger?” she said, when she answered the phone.
“How’d you know?”
“Nobody else has the number. No best friends or cop friends or deliverymen or even relatives. I’m taking this seriously, Nudger. I want you to know that so you understand it isn’t lack of fear that makes me want to get out of here before I crawl up the walls. It’s ... well, it’s just my nature. Birds gotta fly.”
“And we gotta talk, and work something out.”
“Can’t help—Never mind. You stay put. I’ll drive over there soon as I can. It’s that old motel that looks like a ruined Mexican village up by the airport, right?”
“Yeah. I should have chosen other surroundings.”
“I don’t know, they never found Pancho Villa, and an entire army was searching for him.”
“What are you, Nudger, some kinda history buff?”
“I watch the History Channel a lot on cable.”
“Well, it’s a reassuring thought to know old Pancho couldn’t be found.” But she didn’t sound reassured at all as she hung up.
Nudger left the apartment, locking the door carefully behind him.
He hadn’t mentioned to Lacy that Pancho Villa had eventually been assassinated. Like her, the wily Mexican revolutionary could be cautious only up to a point. Rebel blood was like that.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nudger drove beneath a Spanish arch of cracked and dirty gray stucco to enter the parking lot of Hostelo Grandioso. It was a motel that probably dated back to the forties, with separate stucco cottages, each with a faded red-tiled roof, sagging gutters, and crooked, weathered red shutters. The office was a similar cottage only with a red neon sign out front featuring a man in chaps and a sombrero twirling a rope that spelled out the name of the motel. Nudger drove past the office, listening to the Granada’s tires crunch on the gravel lot.
Four of the cottages had vehicles parked in front of them, two pickup trucks, a gray Honda Civic, and an elderly pink Cadillac convertible with fins and a patched and ragged black top. There was no vehicle parked directly in front of the cottage whose number matched Lacy’s phone extension. Nudger was glad to see she was being careful.
He parked the Granada beneath a massive tree on the opposite edge of the lot, then walked over to the cottage. Ivy was growing up the cracked stucco on either side of the door, a contrast of vital green growth against gray ruin. Above the door was a rusted Spanish fixture with the glass broken to reveal a dirty yellow bug light. Nudger used a steel knocker in the form of a bull’s head to rap on the door.
The rapping sound was sharp and clear in the morning air, but there was no sound or answer from inside.
He knocked again. “Lacy, it’s Nudger.”
After almost a minute, the door opened a crack and an eye peered out from interior gloom. “Ah, Nudger.” Lacy held the door open wide.
She closed and locked it as soon as he’d entered.
“Wanted to make sure who it was,” she explained. She was wearing faded jeans with one knee worn through, what looked like a man’s pinstriped blue dress shirt, and brown sandals. In her right hand was a small blue-steel revolver.
“Are you good with that?” Nudger asked, nodding toward the gun.
“Better believe it. I shot the eye out of a gnat once, though I was aiming at its nose.”
It was warm in the dim cottage, and it smelled like the sort of place where mushrooms might flourish. The venetian blinds were lowered and their slats angled to create a constricting pattern of shadow bars across the low ceiling. Nudger’s flesh crawled.
“How do you like my new home?” Lacy asked.
“It’s like bad film noir. How can you stand it in here?”
“I can’t. Not for very long, anyway.” She walked over and pulled a cord that tilted the venetian blind slats to alter the direction of the light. Some of it fell at her feet and he could see the scars on her heels above the backless sandals. He fully understood then how frightened she was, and why. “But it’s not the kind of place people who know me would figure I’d be, so I do feel safer here and I’m gonna stick it out. At least for short stretches.”
Nudger watched her as gravel crunched and the dark shape of a pickup truck passed beyond the angled slats. He and Lacy stood still until the sound had faded.
Lacy moved closer to the blinds and craned her neck to glance out the window, like a thousand desperate heroines in a thousand old movies, then placed the gun on a table next to a rough ceramic Spanish lamp with a cocked shade. Nudger guessed that a part of her was enjoying this, but only a small part, and not enjoying it much. “We making any progress in the outside world?” she asked.
He told her about his conversation with Hammersmith.
“I don’t buy the coincidence of all those folks meeting untimely accidental deaths,” she said, when he was finished.
“Neither does Hammersmith personally, but officially he has no choice. If the Medical Examiner finds no evidence of murder, there’s no crime for the police to investigate.”
“Then we investigate,” Lacy said. Her hair was disheveled and she was wearing no makeup; he thought she looked like a pugnacious leprechaun. He admired her fire if not her wisdom. “And I mean you and me as a team, Nudger. Unless you want a madwoman on your hands.”
He figured he already had that, but he didn’t want the situation to worsen. “All right.” He looked over at the revolver on the table. “I guess I don’t have to warn you about staying on your guard.”
“No, you don’t. But whatever the danger, we need to find out more about Lois Brown. Maybe we can come up with some evidence that the police will have no choice but to take seriously.”
“We’ll look near and far,” Nudger said. “I’ll take near.”
He knew she understood what he meant. “That’s chivalrous of you, Nudger, near being more dangerous. But okay, I’ll do the safe and monotonous research, and you see what you can find inside the victim’s house.”
Nudger’s stomach did some aerobatics. “Breaking and entering, you mean?”
“Sure. If necessary.”
Nudger gazed up at the cracked ceiling and thought about that.
“I’ve got the gun,” Lacy said. “You want me to do the B and E part?”
“No, it’ll be better if I do,” Nudger said, knowing that she might shoot someone, or herself Knowing also that she was right, that whatever the danger, special circumstances made risk-taking necessary. He hated those kinds of circumstances and always did what he could to avoid them. But now they had him, and here he was agreeing to take a risk by breaking the law to get evidence against law violators while protecting the well-being of a reckless young woman who carried a gun illegally. Was chivalry the same as stupidity?
“Between us,” Lacy said, “we should come up with something. I’ve got a computer in my apartment, and I’m plugged into the Net.”
“You shouldn’t go back to your place.”
“I’ll be there only briefly to pick up the computer along with some more clothes. It’s a laptop and I can take it wherever I want to work.” She stared intently at him from behind her shaggy bangs. “We need a computer, Nudger. This is the information age, and there’s only one efficient way to take part in it.”
She made him feel like a technophobe in spats. He remembered the disturbingly familiar Art Deco office display in the museum. The typewriter that was an easily recognizable ancestor to his own. He could easily imagine himself seated at the desk in the museum display, using the typewriter to compose letters explaining why his unpaid bills would certainly soon be settled. It was disturbing.
“I’ll drive behind you,” he said, “and make sure you get in and out of your place all right without being followed.”
Lacy grinned. “My white knight. Sir Lancelot. I always thought that was a sexy name for a knight.” Now that she was about to escape the dreary little cottage, her mood had shifted to high. She had him in an even earlier era, out of spats and into chain mail.
He glanced at the old console TV squatting in a corner. “Have you been watching Camelot?”
“No, but it’s one of my favorites.” She untucked her blouse from her jeans and clipped a little leather holster to her belt, then slid the revolver into it. With her shirt hanging out, the gun wasn’t very noticeable.
“Which car is yours?” he asked,
peering outside between the blind slats.
“The Caddy convertible parked two cottages down. See it?”
“How can I not? It’s just perfect for hiding out.”
“I got a good deal on it,” she said defensively. “It rides smooth and it’s fast.”
“And large. And pink.”
She put her hand on the doorknob, then turned around. “If you find out anything and want to call and leave a message here for me, I’m registered under another name.”
“Julia Roberts?”
She shook her head no. “Guinevere Arthur.”
“Surely you joust.”
“Nope.” Before opening the door, she gave him a mock adoring gaze and said, “Thanks for looking after me, Nudger. It makes my libido sing, to know that chivalry isn’t dead.”
He wished she’d get off that knight and damsel-in-distress notion.
“That’s how I want to stay,” he said, “not dead.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Oh, did his stomach hurt!
As he drove behind Lacy, Nudger reached into his pocket and found his roll of antacid tablets. Apprehension always did this to him, gave him an aching stomach and heartburn.
And he had plenty of apprehension about trying to get into Lois Brown’s house to search for meaning in her death. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so nervous about this; after all, the house wasn’t a crime scene. But he knew that if there was no other way to gain entry, he’d have to make it a crime scene and hope for the best. Logically, he knew he could probably get in and out without arousing attention or suspicion. But his digestive tract was more intuitive than logical. It knew he was scared and wouldn’t let him forget it. He was gastrointestinally cursed.