Oops! (Alo Nudger Book 10)

by John Lutz

Two antacid tablets had been chewed and swallowed by the time he pulled the Granada to the curb and watched Lacy park her obsolete, finned fantasy of a car in front of an apartment building that didn’t look much better than her cottage at the Hostelo Grandioso. She had to parallel park, and her maneuvering of the ponderous pink car reminded Nudger of a ship being docked.

  She didn’t look at him as she got out of the Caddy and limped into the apartment building. She was getting around without her cane now. Viewed from a distance, her slight limp was more noticeable than when he’d walked beside her.

  Watching Lacy’s limp made the pointy-headed giant spring to mind. Nudger’s stomach did a flip, causing him to swallow a metallic taste that had gathered at the base of his tongue. He leaned forward to peer through the windshield at the block of similar brick apartment buildings, then he checked behind him in his rear-view mirror. Nothing unusual. No sign of the oversized assailant with the bowie knife he wielded like a scalpel. Nudger felt a little better. His stomach growled, telling him not to be a fool or let himself relax; the hard part of the day lay ahead.

  Ten minutes later, Lacy emerged from the building rolling one of those black carry-ons like airline attendants used, and carrying a brown attaché case that probably contained her laptop computer.

  This time she glanced at Nudger but didn’t change expression as she opened her car’s cavernous trunk and placed the suitcase and attaché case inside.

  It took her almost as long to cajole the long Cadillac out of its space as it had to park it. Then the huge car emitted a cloud of oily black smoke and set off with aged pomposity down the humble street.

  Nudger drove behind it for a few blocks, then figured there was no point in following Lacy all the way back to the Hostelo Grandioso. Instead he stopped at a National Supermarket and used a pay phone just inside the door to call Hammersmith and ask some more questions about Lois Brown’s death.

  Among Hammersmith’s answers was the dead woman’s address.

  Lois Brown’s house was in the middle of a block of attractive homes in St. Louis Hills, one of the better areas of the city proper. It was constructed of brown brick and had a large attached garage that had obviously been built recently. Though the house’s roof was shingled, its peaks and edges were lined with dark brown tile. The roof was steeply pitched and there were plenty of dormers. Set in the bricks around the door were pale stones. There was more fancy stonework above the windows, which were equipped with yellow shutters, awnings, and narrow wooden flower boxes sporting bright red geraniums. The architecture was remotely Gothic, like so much of South St. Louis. If Hansel and Gretel had seized title to the witch’s house and built onto it, it would have resembled Lois Brown’s house.

  St. Louis was pretending it was already summer today. The temperature was in the mid-eighties and climbing, and there wasn’t much activity on the block. Everyone with good sense who wasn’t terrified and about to commit a crime stayed inside in the air-conditioning.

  Nudger, who was terrified and perhaps about to commit a crime, parked the car across the street from the house’s driveway, which was bordered by flowers in planters atop low stone walls. His gaze caught movement and he noticed a frail, gray-haired man in the yard next door to the Brown house. He was wearing a perspiration-stained green shirt, unbuttoned and hanging loose, knee-length white shorts, and white tennis shoes, and was using a bright orange electric hedge trimmer to clip and shape bushes on the property line between the two houses. As Nudger opened the car door and climbed out, he could hear the spasmodic whir and rattle of the clippers as the man worked and perspired and improved on nature.

  The old guy trimming the foliage only glanced over at him and smiled as Nudger walked up the driveway toward the gingerbread porch. He was pleased to find that once on the porch, he was out of the man’s sight. In fact, because of the angle of the driveway, he was barely visible from the street. He’d have the time and privacy to work on the door and get inside. Maybe use his expired, honed Visa card to slip the lock. He pushed the doorbell button to make doubly sure no one was home before getting down to the business of breaking and entering.

  He was about to try the knob to confirm the door was locked, when the door opened.

  “Hello,” said a teenage girl, smiling out at him.

  “I, uh, hi,” Nudger said.

  She stood with her wide, slightly cockeyed smile, waiting for him to state his business. He guessed her age as about sixteen. Her eyes were huge and green and her red hair was pulled back and tied in long braids with green ribbons. She was wearing flower-print shorts, low-heeled white shoes, and a crisp white shirt with the name SALLY embroidered on its pocket flap. Nudger noticed that while she wasn’t at all overweight, her knees were dimpled. The detective in him.

  “I’m here about Lois Brown,” he said.

  “Oh. She was my aunt.” The girl’s smile disappeared, but she didn’t look particularly sad. “I’m Sally Brown. My mom’s here to take care of arrangements and stuff. That’s where she is now. Can I help you?”

  “Your mother is Lois Brown’s sister?”

  “That’s right. There are some other relatives, but they won’t be here till tomorrow. Did you know my Aunt Lo?”

  “No,” Nudger said. “I’m a detective, here to look things over.” Fairly vague, he thought. Let the trusting, naive youngster assume he was with the police.

  “Are you with the police?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not that kind of investigator.”

  “But you said you were a detective.”

  “And I am.”

  “So how come you’re here? My aunt wasn’t murdered or anything, was she?”

  “Probably not,” Nudger said.

  Sally’s green eyes shone. “Probably not? Then you think she might have been murdered?”

  “Might is a strong word,” Nudger said.

  “Huh? No it isn’t.”

  “I guess not, at that. But my visit is simply routine, to examine the premises, to insure that death really was accidental.”

  “Then you’re with the insurance company.”

  “Well—”

  “So come on in. Aunt Lo maybe was murdered. That’s so cool. You can talk to me about it. We weren’t close. I only met her half a dozen times. But she was my mom’s sister, so here I am. I won’t have a cow and start to cry if we discuss Aunt Lo. I’ll give you a statement.”

  “I only want to look around,” Nudger said, stepping past her into a foyer with a tiled floor. On one wall was a fancy walnut coatrack and an umbrella stand. On another what appeared to be an original oil painting of a prim-looking woman with stiffly permed hair. She was seated on a bench with her hands folded in her lap.

  “That’s Aunt Lo,” Sally said, noticing the direction of Nudger’s gaze. “She had that done about six months ago by some portrait painter down in the Central West End. Not very good, if you ask me.”

  Nudger moved out of the foyer into a living room furnished somewhere between Early American and contemporary Las Vegas, a visual explosion of eclectic taste. An overstuffed plaid sofa squatted next to a delicate white leather sling chair. On the pale blue carpet was a multicolored woven oval rug. Everything looked new and expensive.

  “Examine anything you want,” Sally said. She sounded slightly miffed that he didn’t want to interrogate her. “I’ll be out by the pool.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a few questions afterward,” Nudger said.

  She looked pleased.

  He watched her as she sashayed through the living room and disappeared down a hall. A few seconds later he heard the sound of a sliding door opening and closing.

  Nudger walked through the dim, cool house and found the doors leading to a patio behind the house, and beyond them a swimming pool with glittering blue water reflecting the sun. He saw Sally reclining in a lounge chair, wearing tinted glasses now and reading a paperback book.

  He felt considerably better about being in Lois Brown’s house, even though things h
adn’t gone as planned. He wasn’t exactly alone, and he’d been seen. On the other hand, he hadn’t entered the house illegally. And teenage girls being what they were, Sally might not think to mention to her mother or anyone else that he’d been here.

  This just might work out okay, Nudger decided, assuming the mother didn’t return while he was still in the house. His stomach growled and kicked at the thought.

  Wasting no time, he found the basement door and went downstairs.

  The basement was large and very cool. Beneath a glass-brick window, a gleaming white washer and clothes dryer sat side by side. A drainhose ran from behind the washer to a standpipe affixed to a floor drain a few feet away.

  Nudger examined the washer and dryer but could find nothing unusual about them. The floor around them was dry now, the concrete painted a glossy gray. The dryer was unplugged, but behind and above it was a 220-volt socket. The oversized three-pronged plug dangled nearby, the thick cord tucked behind a pipe. The basement was spacious, and the nearest object to the washer and dryer was a black steel shelf with an array of junk and household items on it: a very old wind-up alarm clock, a kitchen mixer with its steel blades resting in its bowl, some glass vases, a paintbrush and sponge, a bottle of bleach, another of stain remover, an opened box of detergent.

  Nudger stood where Lois Brown must have stood in front of the dryer and looked around. Everything seemed domestic, normal, and benign. Not like a crime scene. But then, not like an accidental-death site, either.

  He trudged upstairs, out of the almost cold basement, and found a study with a small cherry wood desk standing against a wall near the window. Nudger quickly went through the desk’s drawers but found nothing unusual. There was a statement from an investment company revealing that Lois Brown had owned slightly over a hundred thousand dollars worth of common stock at the time of her death. Considering the value of the house, that didn’t seem excessive.

  Nudger left the study and found the master bedroom. It wasn’t as spacious or grand as he’d anticipated. In fact, though the house was definitely upper middle class, and was in a fairly expensive neighborhood, it wasn’t very large.

  The bedroom was cohesively furnished and smacked of a professional decorator. One who hadn’t yet made it to the living room. It was done in restful grays and blues and had gray lacquered furniture, including a gleaming gray headboard trimmed in brass. Nudger went to the closet and slid open the door. Lois Brown had possessed good but subdued taste in clothes and favored blue skirts and dresses. Also hanging in the closet was a plastic shoe rack. He looked at the array of high heels, slip-ons, and sandals. On the floor was a worn pair of very expensive jogging shoes. There were stacks of shoe boxes on the closet shelf. Nudger lifted the lids of a few of them and found—shoes. She’d liked shoes, had Lois Brown.

  He closed the closet door and began examining the contents of the dresser drawers. The smaller top drawers contained jewelry and cosmetics. In the lower drawers Nudger found pantyhose, coiled belts, lingerie, and folded slacks and shorts, some dark blue sweatpants and tops. In the bottom drawer were folded sweaters, and on one side a milk-glass jar with a lid. Carver looked inside the jar and found that it was full of pennies. Beneath the sweaters he found an anatomically correct rubber vibrator and a tube of K-Y lubricant. Feeling ashamed of himself, he was about to drop the sweaters back in place when he saw a small, yellow slip of paper beneath the K-Y tube. He pulled it out and unfolded it. It was a charge card receipt from a restaurant in the amount of thirty dollars and change. Its date was faded and illegible and it was signed by Lois Brown. Written on the back of it in pencil was “Close calls.” Nudger slid it back beneath the tube of lubricant, replaced the sweaters, then closed the drawer.

  His knees popped in unison as he stood up straight, another reminder of mortality. He realized he’d been so engrossed in what he was doing that he’d forgotten to be afraid.

  Now he remembered.

  His stomach remembered. And moved slightly.

  It would be smart to make this visit as brief as possible, said his stomach.

  He left the bedroom and found his way to the sliding glass doors to the pool. Then he went out into the hot sun and approached Sally Brown.

  She sensed his approach and slowly lowered her sunglasses and gazed questioningly but wisely at him over their rims, the way she’d seen it done in movies and on TV Nudger appreciated her flair for drama.

  “Find what you were looking for?” She asked the question with wry amusement, as if it were her line in a movie. Nudger figured he must be playing the nosy, not-very-bright detective blundering along the wrong trail.

  “I wasn’t looking for anything in particular,” said Nudger the shamus. “I’m curious, though. What did your Aunt Lo do?”

  “Do?”

  “I mean, her occupation.”

  “Oh, do,” She removed the sunglasses entirely and rested them on her flat stomach with her paperback. It was a romance novel, Nudger noted. On the cover was a shirtless guy with long, wavy black hair, leaning down to scoop a woman up onto his horse with him. The woman had thick blonde hair that cascaded down over her torn dress. If this thing worked out for them and they married and had children, Nudger thought, their kids would never go bald.

  “Aunt Lo was a bookkeeper for a man who sold cars,” Sally said. “She worked for him forever, at least ten years, and when he died a year ago, he left her part interest in his business. She sold it, and I guess that’s all the money she needed.”

  “Is that when she bought this house?”

  “Yes, right after poor Mr. McClary died.”

  “McClary of McClary Motors?”

  “That’s right.”

  Nudger remembered the large used-car lot on Kingshighway. It was called something else now. “How old was Mr. McClary when he died?”

  “Oh, an old man.” Sally gazed out at the glittering blue water of the swimming pool. “At least forty-five, maybe even older.”

  Nudger listened to the breeze-stirred water lapping softly at the sides of the pool, like time itself.

  “Mr. McClary slipped on the ice and hit his head. He died the next day.” Sally smiled brightly, looking up at Nudger from the fire of her youth. “That kinda thing can happen to old people anytime, I guess.”

  Nudger glanced at the diving board. “I can still do an almost perfect swan dive,” he said, before he even thought about speaking.

  Sally smiled broadly, obviously humoring him. “I just bet you can.”

  He thanked her for talking to him, then turned to go.

  “Wait a minute,” she said behind him. When he stopped and turned around, she’d replaced the tinted glasses on the bridge of her nose and was gazing over their rims at him again. “Tell me the truth, okay? Did somebody murder my Aunt Lo?”

  “It doesn’t look that way,” Nudger said.

  “But they might have, right? Or you wouldn’t have even come around here.”

  “The world is full of mights,” Nudger told her. “This one isn’t very likely. Your Aunt Lo just got unlucky while she was drying her clothes.”

  Sally looked disappointed, but she managed another smile for him.

  By the time he’d gone out through the gate and glanced back at her, she was lost again in her paperback novel, hooked on romance.

  Nudger hoped it was for life.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  That little mutt of a woman was by here a while ago,“ Danny said, when Nudger checked in at the doughnut shop after returning from Lois Brown’s house. “She said you should meet her tonight in Spain.”Danny appeared puzzled. “You leaving the country, Nudge?”

  “Sometimes it seems that way,” Nudger said, sliding onto one of the counter stools. He looked at the Dunker Delites resting on their greasy white doilies in the glass display case and was shocked to find himself hungry. He’d skipped lunch and it was—he glanced at the clock above the coffee urn—almost three o’clock. Maybe he’d drive down the street to Shag’s or Mc
Donald’s for a cheeseburger and milk shake.

  Danny must have noticed him staring with obvious hunger at the doughnut case. A Dunker Delite thumped down on the counter before him.

  “On the house,” Danny said. “Left over from the lunch crowd.”

  Nudger couldn’t remember any kind of crowd ever in Danny’s, and he did not want a Dunker Delite. But there the thing lay like a defective brown bomb that had landed intact. And Danny, with his back to Nudger, was already coaxing a cup of sludge-like coffee from the complex steel urn with its many valves and serpentine coils.

  “I just came from a big lunch,” Nudger said, shaking his head as if in denial of his own lie.

  “So? Why not a snack?” Danny turned and smiled at him, placing the foam cup of coffee next to the Dunker Delite. Here was a one-two punch that could level Evander Holyfield.

  “I’m absolutely stuffed,” Nudger said, patting his stomach. Danny’s face fell—farther. “But it sure does look good,” Nudger added, “so if you don’t mind, I’ll take it upstairs with me. I’ll drink the coffee now, then have the Dunker Delite later as a treat.”

  Danny smiled. “Sure, good idea.” He bent down and got a small white paper sack and plunked the Dunker Delite into it. Nudger accepted the sack from him, surprised by its weight. “Need a lid for that coffee, Nudge?”

  “Naw, I’m gonna drink it right away.” Nudger swiveled around and slid off his stool. He carried the steaming coffee in one hand, the greasy little white paper sack in the other, and made for the door. “Remember to give me a call if you see or hear anybody headed toward my office.”

  “Will do, Nudge.”

  Managing to open the door with the hand holding the sack, Nudger pushed outside then turned and opened the door to the stairwell. He was careful not to trip over his mail, lying on the floor just inside the street door and bound with a dirty rubber band. A colorful supermarket flier was folded over it, advertising a sale of pork steaks to herald the coming barbecue season, so he couldn’t see if anything important had arrived. Partly out of uninterest, partly because his hands were full, he ignored the mail for the time being.