by John Lutz
Nudger didn’t think that was such an indictment of the police. After all, they were searching for something considerably larger than a key. Still, a phony rock, probably with a seam in it. Or maybe it was more realistic than he thought. “Were you watching to see if the police found the fake rock?” he asked.
She smiled. “I take my amusement where I can, Mr. Nudger.”
Nudger swallowed.
“If I think of anything else, I’ll call you,” she said, when he was standing out on the porch in the evening heat.
Not knowing what else to say, he thanked her again.
Driving away, he wondered if Alicia Van Moke really had been coming on to him, or if he’d been imagining it. He did that sometimes, he had to admit.
Her scent was still with him even in the car, erotic—no, exotic—spices. She’d seemed to send signals he could almost feel, yet she hadn’t actually invited him to stay.
But the woman wrote poetry, so she wouldn’t say anything directly. It wouldn’t be in her nature. He couldn’t imagine Alicia Van Moke saying, “Hey, big boy, wanna party?” Not even when she was younger.
But he knew how different reality could be from imagination. The gap between the two was one of the things that kept him working more or less steadily. The private Alicia Van Moke might be quite different from the public one.
As he turned onto Midland Avenue, he wondered if her next-door neighbor, the alleged murderer and womanizer Roger Dupont, read poetry.
Chapter Twelve
Nudger went to his office and phoned Terry Donnelly over at the Maplewood Library and asked him if he’d check under “Authors” for Alicia Van Moke.
“I don’t have to, Nudge,” Terry told him. “She’s a well-known local poet, and we have all her books.”
“All? How many is that?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe half a dozen. She’s won several national competitions, and her work’s been published mostly by university presses, collections of her poems from literary magazines. But that puts her into the major league of poets. In our society, even the best poets work cheap.”
“Like private investigators,” Nudger said.
Terry said nothing. Apparently he didn’t think Alicia Van Moke was to poetry what Nudger was to investigation.
Nudger thanked him and asked him to hold a few Alicia Van Moke collections for him, just in case the library experienced a run on her books. Terry assured him her work would be there waiting for him to pick it up, then reminded him that his library card had been expired for the past two months. Always something.
After hanging up on the library, Nudger phoned Claudia and invited her to dinner at Shoney’s on Manchester, where they often met and enjoyed the salad bar, which happened to be the most economical choice on the menu. She declined, telling him she had summer-school papers to grade, but she would meet him in an hour at Ted Drewes frozen custard stand on Chippewa, where they also often met and enjoyed Chocolate Chip Concretes while sitting in his car listening to Cardinals’ ball games.
Nudger used the extra time to pick up the Alicia Van Moke books at the library and renew his card. He placed the books in a clean area of the Granada’s trunk, then drove east on Manchester and cut over Southwest Avenue to McCausland to wind his way to Chippewa where he was to meet Claudia.
Ted Drewes was a mob scene, as it was every hot summer night when there weren’t thunderstorms and tornado warnings. The little white clapboard stand with the carved wooden icicles lining its peaked roof was surrounded by at least a hundred people. A uniformed cop was keeping an eye on things and directing traffic as Nudger steered the Granada into the lot and found a parking space facing Chippewa.
He didn’t see Claudia’s little blue Chevette anywhere, so he cranked down all the Granada’s windows to let the breeze through, then walked back and got one of Alicia Van Moke’s books out of the trunk.
Ignoring the turmoil of frozen custard eaters around him, he settled back to sample Breezes of Youth. The book was small and had a pale blue cover with an illustration of a young girl with flowing hair sitting under a shade tree. It had been published in 1987 and the dedication was to someone named Oscar Bennedict. As Nudger leafed through it, a poem titled “Fashion and Passion” caught his eye:
Thirty-four A’s and shoes size nines
Four-inch heels and daring necklines
Gaunt women with bereaved eyes
Strutting, hungry for sex and lies
A jutting hip
A tongue-wet lip
Offers passion, stay a while
A fashion always in style
Hey, Nudger thought, this was hot stuff. He couldn’t help imagining Alicia Van Moke—
“Hi, Nudge.” Claudia was leaning close to the open car window and smiling. “What are you reading? Not another of those John Grisham novels, I hope.”
“Poetry,” Nudger said, hurriedly closing the book.
“Good.” She narrowed her dark eyes at him. “Why?”
“Part of a case I’m working on. I could use your judgment on this. Let’s get our Concretes and you can have a look and see if you think this poet is any good.”
Claudia was silent as Nudger got out of the car and they stood in the nearest of half a dozen lines, waiting their turn so one of the horde of teenagers with yellow TED DREWES T-shirts could convey his order so the yellow-shirted workers in the background could speed around and fill it. Nudger wondered where Ted Drewes found such ambitious and hard-working teens. Flitting about and serving up custard concoctions inside the little white structure, they reminded him of worker bees inside a hive. Making money instead of honey. Oh-oh, already reading Alicia Van Moke had affected him.
Claudia was wearing a sleeveless white blouse, dark blue shorts, and black leather sandals. She was drawing quite a few stares from admiring males. Nudger didn’t mind. Anyway, the men soon were concentrating again on whatever they intended to order at the serving window; the more immediate need of frozen custard was becoming increasingly accessible.
He and Claudia each got their usual medium-size Chocolate Chip Concrete, then dodged a stretch limo—not an unusual sight at the perpetually trendy custard stand—and returned to the Granada.
Nudger switched on the radio and tuned to the Cardinals ball game, which turned out to be a scoreless pitchers’ duel with the Cincinnati Reds.
At the moment, Claudia wasn’t interested in baseball. She spooned in a few bites of her Concrete so it wouldn’t overflow the paper cup’s rim and drop onto her shorts or bare legs, then stuck the plastic spoon in the thick concoction like a flag and picked up Breezes of Youth.
“Oh,” she said, “this is by Alicia Van Moke.”
Nudger wondered if he was the only one who’d not previously heard of this woman.
“She any good?” he asked.
“I don’t have to read any of the poems to tell you she is. I’ve read her work before, even assigned some to my sophomore English class. She’s one of the best in the country. Certainly in the midwest. What’s her poetry have to do with the Dupont case?”
“She lives next door to the Duponts in University City.”
“No kidding?” Claudia was obviously fascinated. A glob of Concrete dropped from her tilted cup onto her leg. She absently reached for one of the paper napkins they’d brought from the serving counter and wiped her thigh clean before Nudger could gallantly offer to lick the frozen custard away.
Alicia Van Moke again, affecting his thought processes. Some poet.
But then, Nudger was at times a romantic. He thought so, anyway.
Claudia asked him to explain, and they slowly ate their Concretes while he brought her up to date on the Dupont case, ending with his visit with Alicia Van Moke. He left out the part about him thinking the famous poet was coming on to him. Why complicate the tale?
“Fascinating,” Claudia said, dabbing at her lips with the napkin she’d used on her thigh.
“She remembered exactly what Karen Dupont screamed
the night Roger says she left him of her own volition.”
“When a witness like that quotes someone verbatim, it carries weight in court,” Claudia said.
“I’m sure the prosecution will have her say it in court.” Nudger scooped the last spoonful of his Concrete with the usual regret and guilt. Regret that there was no more of the addictive stuff, and guilt that he’d surrendered to desire and ingested the calories.
But Concretes always calmed his jittery stomach. Their ingredients were kept secret, so maybe they contained an antacid.
Claudia handed him her empty cup and the wadded napkin to throw away. He fit her cup in his own, then got out of the car and dropped them in one of the orange-lidded trash receptacles placed around the parking lot. Traffic was backed up on Chippewa now, waiting to turn into the lot, and another cop was on duty. Yuppies from West County, as well as local South St. Louisans, would crowd around the custard stand until it closed in the fall and was later converted to a busy Christmas tree lot. The place must be a gold mine, Nudger thought. Why couldn’t he come up with an idea for a business like this? Something he was more suited for and was easier on his nervous stomach. Something more profitable. Why wasn’t Danny’s Donuts overrun by customers like this?
But he knew why.
When he got back in the car, the Cincinnati pitcher struck Ozzie Smith in the back with a fastball. The crowd became incensed. The announcer Mike Shannon, himself incensed, said that Smith, apparently also incensed, was charging the mound. Nudger held his breath. Smith, while a great ballplayer, was not a big man, and the Cincinnati pitcher was huge.
Fortunately, the Cincinnati catcher put a bear hug on Smith as players from both benches charged onto the field and fought in the usual baseball manner, wherein there were few injuries to valuable skilled bodies.
The crowd and the announcer loved it.
Claudia said, “Why can’t they just play baseball?”
“That is baseball,” Nudger said.
“That’s baseball and testosterone,” she corrected. “The evil hormone.”
Nudger thought of mentioning how dull women’s softball was but thought better of it. This was a time for political correctness rather than honesty. And there existed, at least in Nudger’s mind, the possibility that he’d return with Claudia to her apartment. How right she was about testosterone.
“Do you think Alicia Van Moke was having an affair with Roger Dupont?” Claudia asked.
Nudger was surprised. “Why on earth would you suggest such a thing?”
“I remember one of her poems, ‘Fashion and Passion.’ ”
“Hmm,” Nudger said. “I’ll have to read it.”
No sooner had the announcer said the field was cleared and play was resumed when the Cincinnati pitcher hit the next batter in the arm. The umpire ejected the pitcher. All hell broke loose at the ballpark. The announcer was screaming.
“Throw the Cincinnati manager out!” Nudger shouted, upset by this turn of events and gross injustice. Other men, and a few women, in other cars with radios tuned to the ball game were shouting.
“So stupid,” Claudia said. “They should be playing baseball.”
“Have you ever seen a women’s softball game?” Nudger asked.
In bed alone in his apartment that night, he watched the ten o’clock news on TV. Somber anchorman Julius Hunter mentioned that Roger Dupont was going to trial tomorrow, and there was a taped update on the case. Alicia Van Moke was shown quoting Karen Dupont the night of her alleged murder. “No! Stop! Stop! No!” Exactly as she’d described Karen’s screams to Nudger.
Nudger fell asleep wondering how Lawrence Fleck was going to dance around that one.
Chapter Thirteen
The St. Louis County Courthouse was an imposing old building that stood atop a hill in downtown Clayton. Trials were no longer held in it, though. Roger Dupont’s fate would be decided in the Courts Building, on Central Avenue behind the Old Courthouse. It was a tall, boxy structure that looked just like the office buildings around it, except for the line of police cars parked in front of it, and the prison vans waiting at the rear entrance.
The courtroom in which State of Missouri v. Dupont was being heard was deceptively bright and cheerful, with cream-colored walls and a lot of polished wood. The spectator area was crowded.
As he entered and sat down toward the back, Nudger saw several people he recognized as being from the news media. This case was interesting to the public and good for readers and ratings. One of the TV newscasts had even run a poll to see if the viewing public thought Dupont was guilty. By a wide margin, they’d convicted him. A new poll was considered to see if he should be executed. Nudger wondered if the courts could be eliminated and the whole thing done by television polls.
Roger Dupont, wearing a plain gray suit and a white shirt with a blue-and-red paisley tie, sat next to Lawrence Fleck at a table on the right of the bench. Fleck was wearing a not-so-muted brown plaid suit with a red shirt and red-and-green tie and looked more prepared to sell the jury a used car than to convince them of a defendant’s innocence. The prosecutor was Seymour Wister, a shark of a lawyer Nudger had seen in action during a previous murder trial, when he’d so persuaded the jury of the defendant’s guilt that they disobeyed the judge’s instructions and recommended two death sentences to run concurrently. The prosecutorial team were all dressed like attorneys, which made Fleck look like an underdog.
The judge was Robert MacMasters, a dignified, handsome, no-nonsense type of man, and not the sort to doze on the bench. He had sharp and intelligent blue eyes that were about all he needed to maintain order in his court.
Wister, a tall, painfully thin man with a hatchet face and bushy gray eyebrows, came out from behind the prosecutor’s table and surveyed the jury with keen gray eyes. He had thick, graying hair, razor-cut but left long in back to lend him a biblical appearance.
Jury selection had honed the group down to five men and seven women, some of whom had claimed they’d never heard of the Dupont case and so could be impartial, some of whom admitted knowing something of the case while maintaining they could achieve impartiality. They looked like a cross-section of folks you might meet at a PTA meeting where money for the school play was being discussed. Death, like life, could be a crap shoot.
“The prosecution will prove that Roger Dupont—” Wister pointed directly at Dupont, who smiled slightly—“murdered his wife Karen and disposed of her body in a place as yet unknown. The witnesses will attest to this fact, the evidence is overwhelming . . .”
Nudger tuned him out while he continued stating his case for another ten minutes, playing to the press as well as the jury, saying the same thing in different ways, drilling it into the minds of the jurors through repetition: Dupont was a killer.
When Wister finally sat down and it was Fleck’s turn, Fleck strutted out to face the jury and said, “Everything you’ve just heard about my client is untrue. Not lies, necessarily, but untrue. You know the difference? Of course not. Well, I’m here to show you the difference, and it’s going to make the difference. You understand? Well, you will understand. My client is innocent.”
He returned to the table, sat down beside Dupont, and became interested in some papers in one of his opened brown cardboard accordion folders.
Dupont stared at him. MacMasters stared at him. Wister and his team stared straight ahead and looked smug.
MacMasters shook his head slightly, then instructed the prosecution to begin presenting its case.
It didn’t go well for Dupont. The prosecution called the lead investigating officer to the stand. He was Detective Sal Vincenzo, and he was about fifty years old with a face like a topographical map of his hard years as a cop. An experienced witness, his answers to Wister’s questions were concise and delivered in a terse, clipped voice. He testified that the police had gone to see Dupont after Joleen Witt reported her sister missing. Roger’s dubious story of Karen’s disappearance, his evasiveness, and initial unwillingness t
o let them search the house for clues, made them even more suspicious. Then they’d found the muddy shovel in his car’s trunk, strands of hair on the shovel that matched a sample from Karen’s comb, the singed panties, the partially melted earring in the furnace, and the bloodstain on the defendant’s garage floor.
That bloodstain was something Nudger hadn’t known about.
On and on went the litany of evidence pointing to the extreme likelihood that Dupont had murdered his wife. By the time he was finished with Vincenzo’s testimony, Wister was absolutely gloating.
When Wister had settled back down at the prosecutors’ table, Fleck stood up and strode forward with an indignant expression on his florid pug face. Vincenzo was still on the stand, placidly waiting to be cross-examined.
“The shovel you found in the car,” Fleck said, “did it or did it not contain traces of blood?”
“It did not,” Vincenzo said.
“Was the plastic drop cloth in the car’s trunk tested for signs that it had come in contact with a body?”
“It was.”
“And were the results positive?”
“Negative.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes. Negative.”
“Yes, it was a no?”
“No, it was a yes. I mean, to your second question. The drop cloth tested—”
“Will the prosecution stipulate that the plastic drop cloth found in the defendant’s car tested negative?” Judge MacMasters interrupted impatiently.
“Inconclusive, your honor,” Wister said.
“Well, make up your mind.”
“I mean, the tests were inconclusive. The prosecution maintains that though no signs of the victim’s body remained on the plastic, it could still have been used to transport the body. The drop cloth could have been washed and then replaced in the trunk.”