by John Lutz
He didn’t offer Nudger a beer, and Nudger didn’t ask for one. On TV the Cubs’ genial and optimistic announcer Steve Stone was explaining how next year had to be better for the hapless ball club. But the Cubs were winning this game against the Giants, six to one.
Ray saw Nudger staring with distaste at the shot of the scoreboard on TV and visibly suppressed a grin.
“Danny tells me you’ve got a problem,” Nudger said, fighting down his irritation.
“You bet I do,” Ray said, slumping down in a stained brown vinyl recliner. He worked a wooden lever and tilted back slightly as a footrest sprang out to support his stockinged feet. “Her name’s Heidran and she works over at Shag’s.”
“What’s she done to you?” Nudger asked. He thought he’d let Ray tell him and see if the story would differ from the one told to Danny.
“She offered me a job,” Ray said in an incredulous voice.
“Why would she do such a thing?”
“Because I gave her an application. Then she double-crossed me and said she’d hire me.”
Nudger settled back on the sofa, trying to ignore the odor of Ray’s feet and the smell of stale sweat that permeated the apartment. “Better do some more explaining, Ray.”
“Sure, Nudge. You know I injured my back while I was working on a trucking company’s loading dock, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Nudger said, “Danny told me.” He knew the loading dock job was part of Ray’s pattern of seeking out employment only when his unemployment benefits were about to expire. When sufficient time had passed and his new employer had paid in enough unemployment tax for Ray to be eligible to collect again, Ray would find a way to leave the job and go back on the dole.
“Well, I couldn’t do the work there,” he said, “what with my back and all, so they let me go and I went back on unemployment. The thing is, to continue collecting unemployment checks, I gotta show I’ve applied for work at a minimum of three places a week.”
“So you turn in applications where you know you won’t be hired,” Nudger said.
Ray’s scraggly eyebrows rose and his face screwed up in a way meant to convey pain. “It ain’t like I got a choice, Nudge. What with my back and all. I applied last week at the railroad, but when I told them about my back they turned me down. Same way at a cement plant. Now, I been eating at Shag’s off and on, and I knew this Heidran had a crush on me.” He smiled and ran his tongue across his jagged teeth. “You know how it is sometimes when a woman finds you irresistible.”
Nudger didn’t, but he nodded.
“I figured if I explained my back problem to Heidran and gave her an application, she’d turn me down and I could list Shag’s, the railroad, and the cement plant as my three places where I honestly applied for work. But she surprised me. She said she thinks I should learn to stand on my own two feet instead of the government’s. When I reminded her about my back, she said the heaviest thing at Shag’s was their Three-eighths Pounder burger.”
“So what’s the problem?” Nudger asked. He watched the Cubs lead-off man hit a home run. “Why don’t you just apply someplace else for your third attempt and not mention Shag’s to the folks at Unemployment?”
“That’s what I thought I’d do originally. But this Heidran won’t let it go that easy. She says that I’m hired, and if I don’t come to work at Shag’s she’ll notify the state employment office and my benefits will be cut off. She says it’s for my own good and I’ll thank her later. She actually told me that, Nudge, and you shoulda seen how she was looking at me! Like I was a Three-eighths Pounder and was just what she needed.”
“She could be right,” Nudger said. “About what she told you, I mean.”
Ray’s eyebrows rose almost to his receding hairline and he looked his most pathetic. “Hey, Nudge!”
“Sorry,” Nudger said. Incredibly, the next Cubs batter hit a home run on the first pitch. Nudger needed to get out of there.
“So what do you want from me?” he asked, goading Ray to get to the point.
Ray leaned forward and his red-rimmed eyes became earnest. “Just talk to the woman, Nudge. Explain to her how serious my back injury is. Hell, I even gotta wear a special brace.” He raised his dirty T-shirt to reveal a bulky gray wrapping around his midsection. It looked a lot like a bed sheet. “Tell her it might permanently injure me if I gotta do a lot of stooping and bending or scooping fries. Hey, tell her you’re from workmen’s compensation and maybe she’ll listen to you.”
“That I won’t do,” Nudger snapped.
Ray looked offended. “So okay, forget the workman’s compensation thing.”
“Why don’t you consider going to work at Shag’s?” Nudger asked, knowing the hopelessness of the suggestion even as he broached it. It simply wasn’t time yet for Ray to work.
Ray merely stared at him.
Nudger stood up and turned to face away from the TV before another Cub hit a home run.
“This is damned serious,” Ray said, writhing in his recliner so he could place a hand on the small of his back. He grimaced.
“How serious, Ray?”
“I mean, I know I cried wolf before—I admit that! But if I’m forced to twist and bend like a twenty-year-old kid, I might have to claim permanent disability. There isn’t much money these days when people don’t wanna pay taxes. I got nobody but Danny to take care of me if that happens. If you won’t do this for me, Nudge, do it for Danny. Please! Talk to the woman. She won’t listen to me because she finds me attractive, but she might listen to you.”
Nudger sighed.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said, “but I don’t know if it will do any good.”
“Just give it a shot, is all I ask.”
What Nudger felt like shooting was Ray. He started for the door, and Ray struggled to fight his way up out of the recliner.
“Don’t get up,” Nudger said. “The back, the back . . . I’ll let myself out.”
“Thanks, Nudge. I won’t forget this.”
Not until you’re off the hook, Nudger thought, opening the door and feeling the somewhat greater heat outside move in and surround him.
“Hey, Nudge,” Ray said behind him, “I meant to ask you, you been eating garlic?”
Nudger didn’t answer as he went out and closed the door.
Getting angrier by the second, he flung himself into the Granada with such violence that he wrenched his back.
The engine started on the fourth try and was running raggedly as he pulled out onto Manchester, tuning in the Cardinals ball game on the car’s static-plagued radio.
They were losing, too.
When he drove up Manchester to his office to check his messages and write checks for some overdue bills, he opened the door and saw that all of the desk and file cabinet drawers were hanging open and the floor was littered with papers.
He found it impossible to be surprised.
Chapter Nine
Nudger didn’t have to look in the phone book for Walter Blaumveldt, the insurance investigator Fleck was counting on to find Karen Dupont. The General Mutual Insurance Company was located in the General Mutual Building, a glass-and-steel skyscraper that had been a prominent feature of the downtown skyline for many years.
While the receptionist paged Blaumveldt, he stood at the glass wall looking down. The building was across the street from Busch Stadium, and he was high enough to see a broad green wedge of the field, including the mound and first base. Too bad there wasn’t a game going on, because Blaumveldt was taking a long time.
“Mr. Nudger?”
He turned. Walter Blaumveldt was a tall, thin man in his fifties, and everything about him seemed to hang down. A hank of gray hair flopped across his brow. His eyelids drooped over chilly brown eyes. His lips had a saturnine southward curl. His cheeks looked slack, as if the muscles other people used for smiling had atrophied in him. He was wearing a dark blue suit that looked too big for him; the coat hung in folds from his broad sloping shoulders. He kept his arms
at his sides. He wasn’t committing himself to a handshake yet.
Pleased to meet you would be too effusive for this character, so Nudger said, “Thank’s for seeing me.”
Even that might have been too much, because Blaumveldt showed no signs of leading Nudger to his office. He said, “You work for Lawrence Fleck.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you his regular investigator? You see, we know Fleck well at this company. He’s represented a number of plaintiffs against us. He was zealous. His clients’ injuries were imaginary.”
“I’m not his regular investigator. I was hired for this one case. Anyway Fleck isn’t against you this time. He’d be delighted if you found Karen Dupont.”
Blaumveldt thought this over. “All right,” he said. He turned his back and walked away. Nudger presumed he was to follow.
They walked down the corridor and into his cubicle, which was one cell in a honeycomb created by chest-high dividers. A babble of phone conversations drifted in from other cubicles, along with the clickety-click, hum, and shuffle of office machinery. A green plant stood in the corner, and the furniture was white, with red chair cushions. The place seemed far too noisy and bright for Walter Blaumveldt. Nudger could more easily imagine him working alone in some dim, dusty, bare office—actually, an office pretty much like Nudger’s.
That reminded him. Some time today he’d have to go to his office and clean up. Last night he’d simply closed the door on the mess his intruder had left behind and gone home.
They took seats on either side of the desk. “What does Fleck want you to do, exactly?” Blaumveldt asked.
“Find out the truth.”
Blaumveldt sighed. “If you’re not supposed to tell me, just say so.”
“No, really, that’s it. I’m going around talking to the people involved, trying to get a feel for the situation, figure out what really happened.”
The corners of Blaumveldt’s mouth turned even more sharply downward. “And Fleck’s actually paying you for this?”
Ignoring the sarcasm, Nudger said, “I wonder if you could tell me what you’ve found out about Karen so far. I want to know what she was like.”
“Is like.” Blaumveldt said. “I expect you’ll get a chance to meet her before this is over.”
“You think she’s alive, then. Why?”
“Not because I went around getting a feel for the people involved,” Blaumveldt said with a sneer. Such a charmer the guy was. “The whole insurance business is based on trusting the percentages. You look at what’s usually happened in the past, and you can be pretty sure it’s what’s happening in the present.”
“Meaning—?”
“Meaning when a beneficiary comes to us, tells us our insured is dead, but there is no body, we think we’re looking at a case of insurance fraud.”
“Has Dupont filed a claim?”
“No. But he will.”
Nudger considered, frowning. “But when the insured disappears, doesn’t the beneficiary have to wait seven years before he can collect on the policy? And won’t Roger Dupont be barred from collecting on his wife’s policy, if he’s convicted of murdering her? It’ll be even tougher for him to collect if he’s been executed.”
Blaumveldt sat back and laced his fingers together over his midsection. “All I said was, they’re trying to defraud us. Not that they made a good plan, or that it’s working for them. Karen’s alive, and Dupont’s playing games.”
Nudger nodded. “I think so, too. That Dupont’s playing games, I mean.”
Blaumveldt looked more interested now. “Why?”
“For one thing, my office was searched last night. After I’d talked to Dupont, and he’d said he wasn’t crazy about having me on the case.”
“You take this to the cops?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing was taken. I mean, there was nothing for Dupont to find. And I can’t even be sure it was Dupont.”
“Who else could it have been?”
Nudger hated to be on the receiving end of an interrogation. Especially with a cold fish like Blaumveldt on the other end. But now he’d started this subject he might as well finish it.
“Well, frankly, it’s possible that my ex-wife and her lawyer hired a thug to toss the place.”
To his surprise Blaumveldt’s expression had changed. He looked interested and sympathetic. “You fell behind a little on your child support, right? And this jerk of a lawyer treats you like a deadbeat. How many kids you got? What ages?”
“None. She was awarded alimony.”
“Man, that’s rough. Me, I’ve been paying support for twelve years. Two daughters.” There was a picture standing on his desk. He turned it to face Nudger. The photo had been snapped on a beach. Two tall, lovely, laughing teenagers stood on either side of their father, their arms around his shoulders. Blaumveldt had on a garish Hawaiian shirt and a lei. He seemed to be trying to smile. Nudger could discern a faint pucker in his left cheek, though it hadn’t been enough to lift the corner of his mouth. “They’re in college now. I don’t know why General Mutual even gives me a paycheck. They might as well send it straight to Stephens College.”
Nudger complimented him on his daughters. Blaumveldt took another crack at smiling, maybe his first since Hawaii. The atmosphere was improving: Nudger could hope for a good working relationship.
“You making any progress tracking Karen down?” he asked.
“I’ve found out a few interesting things checking out Dupont’s statement to the cops. And I’m flying up to Chicago tonight. Sooner or later I’ll find her.”
“You sound pretty determined.”
Blaumveldt nodded. “A lot of people tolerate insurance fraud. They say what the hell, it’s just some big impersonal company that’s getting ripped off. Don’t you believe that. It’s you and me who are getting ripped off. Honest working stiffs who pay our alimony and child support, pay our insurance premiums. People like Karen and Roger think they can break the rules the rest of us have to keep. Well, I’m going to prove them wrong.”
Blaumveldt had worked himself into what was, for him, a passion. His eyes were wide open, there was color in his cheeks, and he even bestirred himself to push the lock of lank hair up off his forehead.
Nudger figured Fleck was right: If Karen Dupont was alive, Blaumveldt was going to find her.
According to Fleck, Karen Dupont’s sister, Joleen Witt, worked the night shift as an assembler of stereo speakers at a small manufacturing company out in West Port. Nudger didn’t like to phone ahead and give people a chance to concoct a stew of lies before talking to him; his hope was that Joleen was one of those night shift workers who stayed awake after work and went to bed in the afternoon.
Her address on Indian Lane turned out to be in a trailer park off Highway 44 west of the city. The park was called Cherokee Estates and had an air of permanence about it that Nudger, who had once lived in a trailer, didn’t associate with them. Most of the trailers—or mobile homes, as they were more popularly referred to by the people who sold and lived in them—looked fairly new and had lattice-work around their bases that concealed wheels and axles. They had small porches and awnings added on, and the grounds around them were green and mowed and dotted with established trees and shrubs. At a glance, the trailers looked like houses.
Nudger parked the Granada across the street from Joleen’s address, which was displayed on an upright rock that looked disturbingly like a tombstone on the well-tended lawn. The trailer was white with blue trim, fake blue shutters, and a blue awning over the door. In the gravel driveway next to it sat an old Pontiac convertible that had a new black canvas top but whose paint was a patchwork of pink body putty and dull gray primer. With a fresh coat of paint it would be a good-looking old car, and Nudger found himself staring at it and thinking how much more dash it already had compared to his rusty red Granada sedan wherein he now sat breaking out in beads of sweat.
Though there was no s
ign of imminent rain to break the summer heat, the temperature hadn’t yet hit the mid-eighties, so he immediately felt cooler when he climbed out of the car and stood up. There was also a pleasant breeze pressing out of the west that would probably turn the area into a convection oven sometime around noon. As he crossed the street, the light glinting off the trailers hurt his eyes, and he could hear the sputtering and hissing of several lawn sprinklers laboring to soak the ground before the sun rose high.
A colorful flower bed was growing around the white lattice-work of Joleen’s trailer, lots of geraniums, marigolds, and low-lying varicolored pansies in what looked like fresh dark brown mulch. Nudger stood in the shade of the blue awning and had drawn back his hand to knock on the white aluminum door when a woman wearing Levi’s and a faded pink T-shirt with KILL ’EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ’EM OUT lettered across the chest walked around the corner of the trailer. She was wearing brown cloth work gloves and carrying a small spade with dirt clumped on its blade.
She was tall, with thin legs and generous breasts, and had a wide face with the kind of large, hooked nose that prompted some women to have plastic surgery. Her red hair was piled high in a wild tangle on her head except where a strand of it curled down and was plastered to her perspiring forehead. She was attractive, but there was something wary and injured in her widely spaced green eyes that for some reason reminded Nudger of Ray.
Saying nothing, she stood about ten feet from Nudger and stared at him. Something in the way she held the spade suggested she was ready to use it as a weapon if necessary.
“I’m looking for Joleen Witt,” Nudger said.
“She’s found you,” the woman said, still unmoving.
“I’m an investigator looking into the Karen Dupont murder,” Nudger said. Let her conclude he was assuming Karen was murdered, if not by Dupont, by someone else. Which was possible.
“I thought the investigation was concluded. Time now for the trial, conviction, and execution.”
“The trial doesn’t begin until tomorrow afternoon,” Nudger said. “Dupont isn’t convicted yet.” He formed what he hoped was a grim smile. “The more evidence the better.”