by John Lutz
Joleen lowered the spade to her side and her expression softened. “Why don’t you sit down,” she suggested.
She wasn’t inviting him inside out of the heat, but Nudger considered her invitation progress. He sat down on the hard, meshed-steel step of the trailer, still in the shade of the awning. Joleen seemed to prefer standing in the sun. She was well tanned and hardy looking.
“You don’t think there’s any chance your sister is alive?” he said.
Her lips compressed. She shook her head once. “I have no hope. Even before the police found—the things in the furnace, I knew Karen was dead. If she were alive she would have contacted me.”
“I understand it was you who brought the police into the case.”
“I was suspicious from the beginning,” she said.
“Why?”
She gave him a surprised look. “Does Roger’s story sound plausible? That Karen just suddenly upped and went off to Chicago and never contacted anyone?”
“Doesn’t seem plausible to me,” Nudger said.
Joleen squatted down, chunked the spade into the ground and rested her elbows on her knees. She rotated on the balls of her feet until the crotch of the stretched Levi’s was exactly in Nudger’s line of sight.
Nudger wondered.
“How did you feel about Roger before this happened?” he asked.
“Hated him,” Joleen said flatly. She reached down and plucked a blade of grass, then looked it over and stuck one end of it in her mouth, rested her elbow back on her knee. Nudger got the impression she gardened a lot and could stay squatted down like that for a long time.
“Why?” Nudger asked.
“I had a bad feeling about him from the start. I told Karen not to marry him. But she did. And right away it became clear to me she’d made a big mistake. The week after they returned from their honeymoon, he made a pass at me.”
“You’re sure?”
She rotated around on the balls of her feet again. “We’d just finished a set of tennis at Effie’s place in Ladue, and Effie and Karen had gone in to make some drinks. Roger put his hand on me where it didn’t belong. His exact words were ‘Do you want to play?’ He didn’t mean more tennis.”
The meshed steel step was beginning to dig painfully into Nudger’s buttocks. He couldn’t sit there much longer, but he didn’t want to change the setting or flow of conversation, so he stayed put. “What was your reaction?” he asked.
“I hit him in the knee with my racket. Neither of us spoke of the incident again, but he knew how I felt about him.”
“If he didn’t love Karen, why do you think he married her?” he asked.
“Roger wanted someone to make a home for him. We’re simple, unpretentious people, Mr. Nudger. Not like the Duponts of Ladue. Karen cared about keeping house and cooking. That’s what Roger wanted in a wife. He said one MBA in the family was enough.”
“But did he love her?”
“Roger’s too shallow to love anyone. Everything’s a game to him. He’d won Karen—married her—so he lost interest. He looked around for other women to win.”
“He had affairs.”
“I’m sure, but I can’t prove it.”
“Had Karen ever behaved rashly before? Some people have described her as impulsive. They’ve said it’s in character for her to have suddenly run off to Chicago.”
Joleen spat out the blade of grass. “I can guess at least one of the people who’d say such a thing. That sister of Roger’s, Effie Prang.”
“You don’t like Mrs. Prang?”
“She’s a snob and a drone,” replied Joleen succinctly. “She thinks she’s better than people like me, who work for a living. And all because she married a rich man and then drove him off to Abu Dhabi. And then hired a good lawyer.”
How do you mean, a good lawyer?”
“The divorce settlement left her fixed for life.”
“You don’t think a woman ought to take money off her ex-husband?” Nudger asked.
“Not money she had nothing to do with earning. Not if there aren’t any children involved. Let her get a job. Earn her own money like I do.”
Nudger nodded, deeply impressed. Joleen was a wise woman, with a strong sense of justice.
“But you still didn’t answer my question,” he said. “Did Karen have a history of behaving rashly? Would you describe her as impulsive?”
Inside the trailer, a phone began to ring. Joleen stood up and moved toward the door, and Nudger got up from the step so she could pass. He could feel his underwear sticking to his buttocks from sitting on the mesh steel step. His rear end must look like a waffle.
Joleen brushed past him swiftly, not at all stiff from squatting so long in the same position.
“The answer is no,” she said, before slamming the door. “No, no, no!”
Nudger wasn’t convinced. There was a lot of sisterly loyalty operating here.
He waited a few minutes for Joleen, staring at the red-handled spade she’d left sticking in the ground, but she didn’t come back outside.
Taking one of his business cards from his wallet, he scrawled a note on the back, asking Joleen to contact him if she thought of anything else she wanted to tell him. He tucked the card between door and frame, near the knob.
Then he crossed the street to the Granada and drove away.
Chapter Ten
Nudger had a Three-eighths Pounder, fries, and another vanilla milk shake at Shag’s, then sat sipping a glass of water while he waited for the lunchtime crowd to drift back out into the afternoon heat. As people left and collective body heat diminished, it became comfortably cool in Shag’s. Were it not for the thick and nauseating smell of fried grease and onions, the atmosphere would have been quite pleasant.
By one-thirty the place was empty except for Nudger, the teenage girl he’d seen behind the serving counter yesterday, and Heidran. The girl, whose name tag said she was Dorothy, bustled around for a while wiping down the brown plastic tables, then went outside.
She appeared outside the window a few minutes later dragging a hose and a bucket full of plastic bottles, then squirted the greasy pane where Nudger was seated, smiled in at him, and began making irritating sounds on the glass with a squeegee.
Nudger smiled back, then got up and walked over to where Heidran was counting those little plastic jugs of—he looked closely at the lettering on one of the peel-off lids—coffee whitener.
“Mizz Kreb,” he said, “my name is Nudger.”
She glanced up at him. “You made me lose count.” Her brown Shag’s uniform with the yellow collar fit her large, squarish body with military crispness. Her submarine commander’s blue eyes were cold; she might have been telling him he’d made her miss an Allied ship with a torpedo.
“Sorry,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Ray.”
Now she seemed to give him total attention. Her eye’s narrowed. For the first time, Nudger felt the full force of her personality and will. He had an inkling of what was scaring Ray. Eeeeep! screamed the squeegee.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you a friend of Ray’s?”
“Yes,” Nudger said. But the single word turned his stomach, so he amended, “More a friend of his cousin, really. Danny Evers. He owns the doughnut shop down the street.”
Heidran Kreb gave one bob of her formidable chin, granting him permission to speak.
“I understand you want to hire Ray to work here at Shag’s.”
“That’s right.” Almost absently, she began counting coffee-whitener containers again, sliding those she’d tallied into neat rows on the countertop as if working an abacus. “He put in an application, and Shag’s has decided he’s qualified.”
“You mean you’ve decided.”
“Same thing. I do the hiring at this unit.”
“The problem is,” Nudger said, “you wouldn’t be doing Ray a favor by hiring him.”
Heidran interrupted her counting to aim her cold gaze at him again. “You shoul
d know I’ve already heard the story about the injured back.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Not entirely. I phoned Ray’s previous employer at the trucking company. He doesn’t believe it at all, but he said that contesting Ray’s unemployment claim would be futile. In a roundabout way, so he couldn’t get into any legal trouble, he strongly advised me not to hire Ray.”
“Then why hire him?” Nudger knew the answer; he wanted to see how Heidran reacted to the question.
Her eyes softened. Slightly, but they softened. “I know Ray’s a slacker, Mr. Nudger, but I see something else in him. I think that if he were given some motivation, made to do work and be proud of it, he’d soon straighten up and become a man.”
Nudger swallowed. He was amazed to find himself genuinely touched.
Eeeeeep! Dorothy smiled in at him again through glass so clean as to be invisible. She was a perky kid with an infectious smile. And obviously a hard worker. Nudger wondered if she’d been a shiftless teen drifting toward a troubled, slothful adulthood until being dramatically rescued by Heidran and Shag’s.
Heidran said, “Bad back or not, there’s nothing around here heavier than a hamburger.”
“Those Three-eighths Pounders add up over the course of a day,” Nudger said. Heidran didn’t smile. He wondered if she would when Ray made the same observation with deadly seriousness. She really was underestimating Ray’s dedication to worthlessness. “Ray’s idea of a hard day,” he told her, “is watching a Cubs game from his recliner without beer.”
“That’s your Ray,” she said. “That’s not the Ray I see.”
“You’re threatening to interrupt his unemployment benefits,” Nudger said. “To Ray, that’s like denouncing his religion and persecuting him. He’ll hate you for it.”
“At first, maybe. But time will pass, then he’ll thank me for providing him with useful and profitable work. For giving him back his dignity.”
“Ray perceives a certain dignity in avoiding toil,” Nudger said. “I know him. I know the pride he takes in sidestepping responsibility.”
“He’s better than that,” Heidran said simply.
“No, he’s just Ray. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I think you see him in a different and more flattering light because of a fondness you feel for him. But if you’d switch off that light, you’d know the truth. What you see is what you get, and it’s just Ray.”
Heidran blushed and tucked her chin in. A few seconds passed before she could look Nudger in the eye.
“Do yourself, and Ray, a favor,” Nudger said. “See him as simply another customer hooked on Shagburgers.”
Heidran turned slightly and looked outside where Dorothy was laboring with the squeegee. Oh, no! Nudger thought. It was true!
“See that girl?” Heidran said, beginning to justify his fears. “When she came to work here three months ago her grammar was so mangled the drive-through customers couldn’t understand her. Every other word she said was ‘like’ and she chewed gum with her mouth open. Look at her now.”
Eeeeep!
“She appears to be a good soldier,” Nudger admitted.
“And in three months that’s what Ray will be. I promise you.”
“I wish I could convince you,” Nudger said, “that you won’t be able to keep that promise. It’s a silk purse and sow’s ear situation. Ray will always be Ray.”
“He cannot like himself the way he is,” Heidran said.
“You’re wrong. He’s quite happy with himself. It’s true that few other people like him, but he wouldn’t care even if he were sensitive enough to notice.”
Heidran leaned back and stared at Nudger as if she might hurl a lightning bolt at him. “You’re being cruel, Mr. Nudger.”
“It’s Ray’s position that you’re the one being cruel.”
“The difference is, I’m being cruel to be kind. To help him.”
“You’re threatening him with a job and dignity, when what he really wants is beer and potato chips.”
Heidran gazed out a crystalline window and seemed to think that over. Then in a controlled, chilling voice, she said, “Tell Ray that when he is called, he should be ready to report for work immediately.”
“I’m only trying to save you heartache,” Nudger said, still pressing. After all, he’d promised Danny.
“The world would profit from fewer do-gooders like you and more men like Ray.”
“It’s men like Ray who make work for the do-gooders,” Nudger pointed out. “Your misguided notion that you can reform him is a case in point.”
An unnatural calm and stillness gripped Heidran’s body. Nudger knew he had gone too far.
“Mr. Nudger, don’t make me come around from behind this counter.”
He took that as a suggestion that he should leave. She was determined and sincere. It amazed him to have met someone who saw even Ray as a person of basic decency and worth, and it made him think about Effie’s faith in her brother Roger. Probably he could never be a murderer in her eyes. Even after his almost inevitable conviction, she would cling to her faith in him.
He shook his head and backed away, making it clear to Heidran that he was heading for the door. “I tried my best,” he said.
“And a puny attempt it was. But don’t feel bad. Any attempt would have fallen far short of the mark.”
“Ray doesn’t deserve you,” Nudger said, letting her put whatever interpretation she wanted on the remark. What did it matter? There was a sense of unreality pervading this place anyway. Heidran would reform Ray when Shag’s sold more hamburgers than McDonald’s.
He crossed the brown tile floor, pushed open the door, and went outside.
Squirting soap onto a window, Dorothy, the former offensive elocutionist and gum-chewer, smiled dazzlingly at him.
“Great day, isn’t it?” she remarked in the hundred-degree heat.
Had the world gone mad? Everyone was as naively optimistic as Roger Dupont.
But Nudger agreed with her, then got into the broiler that was the Granada and drove down Manchester to his office.
Chewing an antacid tablet, he sat at his desk and checked his messages, absently looking around at the uncharacteristic neatness of the office since he’d cleaned up the mess made by the intruder.
Beep: “This is Wilma Berkshire, Mr. Nudger. No one has yet contacted us about paying ransom for the recovery of Alan—”
Nudger fast-forwarded. Alan was a cat that was missing from the wealthy Wilma Berkshire, who had convinced herself he’d been abducted. Now she was debating on hiring Nudger, since she couldn’t get the police interested. She was waiting for a call from the kid(cat?)napers, but Nudger thought it would never come. Alan had probably run away and been run over by a car or was shacked-up happily with a female cat from the wrong side of the tracks.
Beep: “You miserable bastard, Nudger—”
Eileen. Fast-forward.
Beep: “Lawrence Fleck here, Nudger. Hey, remember me? I expect people to be in when I call. They usually are, if they know it’s going to be me. Why haven’t you called and given me a progress report? The trial starts tomorrow, and if any other attorney had the popgun ammunition Dupont’s given me he’d be certain dead meat. His client too, by the way. Let me know what the hell’s going on. You should know my number. If you don’t, ask anyone in the legal profession. Don’t make me call you again. I—”
Nudger pressed the erase button. Then he chomped another antacid tablet and used the end of the half-roll that was left to peck out Fleck’s office number.
“Nudger!” Fleck barked when the call had been put through. “Where have you been? What have you been doing for my money?”
“I—”
“I hired you to keep me informed, not in the dark.”
“What I’ve—”
“I thought you and I had the understanding that—”
Nudger hung up.
He waited.
Ten minutes later the phone rang. He lifted the r
eceiver on the fourth ring.
“Dammit, Nudger! Once the president hung up on me and lived to regret being rash!”
Nudger was thrown. “The President of the United States?”
“I didn’t say that. Now what have you found out?”
“I talked to Effie Prang and Joleen Witt. Effie’s your friend, Joleen isn’t.”
“Any new evidence?”
“No, it doesn’t work that way. I’ll keep asking around and eventually a picture will form.”
“Eventually there’ll be another ice age. The picture I’m getting is your fee—my money—flying out the window.”
“Your money or Roger Dupont’s?”
“At this point that doesn’t matter. What counts is getting the best deal for my client. Which is why I employed you, my friend. Another attorney would have told you to get lost a long time ago. Know why?”
“No.”
“Another attorney would have decided the hell with that poor naive innocent Roger Dupont and let him go to his death. I see injustice and I fight it. You believe that?”
“Sure. ”
“Then you’re a poor dumb innocent like Dupont. What I’m talking about here is odds. Know why I hired you?”
“To make the odds better.” Even as he answered Nudger realized he’d been pulled into another rapid-fire question-and-answer riff by the annoying little lawyer.
“Yes! Bingo! You score! I hired you to improve the odds in favor of my client. Have you done that?”
“I don’t know. I’m—”
“So what are you gonna do about it? God’s sake, Nudger, what have you got to tell me I can use?”
“You hired me because something other than your client and your toupee is crooked here, and you can’t figure out what it is. I can’t make the case fall open like your cheap briefcase; I haven’t been on it long enough. You want to hire someone else?”
“Hey! Calm yourself. Don’t get your back up for no reason like you been insulted. It’s hypersensitive jerks like you who make justice hard to come by. Another attorney would fire your ass in a Philadelphia second, but not me. Know why? I see something in you makes me think you’re the kinda loony’s gotta keep digging till he finds the bone. Like a psycho bloodhound or something. Now don’t get overconfident ‘cause I complimented you. Just tell me what strikes you so far. Not facts, necessarily, but impressions. Can you at least do that much?”