by John Lutz
Janet dished up the salad. Gave Nudger three broken leaves of lettuce. Then she sat down, sighing as if she were celebrating her ninetieth birthday. Nudger glanced at Belinda, who was playing with the Rice Chex that had been placed on the tray of her highchair to placate her. James sat in a regular chair, but up on two phone books. Head thrown back, he was gripping his glass with both hands and draining it of the milk that wasn’t dribbling down his chin. Janet was hungrily forking in the heap of salad she’d lavished on her bowl. Carlotta had disdained her salad and was gazing with Latin intensity at the platter of spaghetti in the center of the table. Tad was spearing a wedge of tomato over and over with his fork, as if tomatoes represented everything he hated. Bonnie smiled at Nudger. Happy family scene.
Still glaring at the tomato, Tad said, “Can’t get the damned carburetor adjusted right.”
“Must you always talk about cars?” Bonnie asked.
“Fuel mixture’s too rich.”
“Must you, Tad?”
“What else is there to talk about?”
Bonnie looked to Nudger for help. He took a generous bite of lettuce and finished most of his salad. He didn’t have a tomato to abuse. Didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t imagine Tad chatting about the weather.
Janet said, “My civilization teacher’s like out to get me. I mean, who cares where Tasmania is?”
“That would be geography, wouldn’t it?” Nudger said.
“Sure, that’s just what I mean. And who cares?”
“Tasmanians,” Tad said. “They care.”
Janet gave him a look that suggested he was other than human.
Tad said, “They got cars in Tasmania?”
“I dunno, geek.”
Bonnie said, “Of course they have cars in Tasmania,” and began dishing up the spaghetti, ladling rich red sauce over it. Nudger was glad. He’d worked up an appetite with that salad. The sauce had a pungent scent that almost brought tears to his eyes. Spicy. The way he liked it.
“Toyotas and Nissans, I bet,” Tad said. “Them Japanese cars is everywhere, with their little four-banger engines.”
The sauce was as advertised. Nudger thought the spaghetti was delicious. The accompanying bread was just as good. He helped himself to some Parmesan cheese. Bonnie could cook, all right.
“When we gonna get a new car, Mom?” Tad asked.
Carlotta spoke for the first time. “When Nora Dove says so.”
Janet snickered.
Tad said, “Maybe the company’ll give you a Corvette, hey? Goddamn, that’d be somethin’—Mom in a hot red Corvette.”
Nudger could see it. Wondered why the picture was so incongruous to Tad. “Mom” was a pretty hot number herself.
James said, “Twuck.”
“Cosmetics ladies don’t drive trucks!” Janet sneered, a shred of lettuce stuck between her front teeth.
James said, “Twuck” again.
“He’s asking for butter,” Carlotta explained patiently. “He’s talking with his mouth full—as usual.”
Bonnie said, “Janet, you can reach; give your brother the butter.”
“He can like reach it himself.”
“Give it to him!”
Janet took a bite of spaghetti.
“Like to see Mom in one of them little four-wheel-drive pickup trucks,” Tad said. “Deliver that Nora Dove shit anywhere they ordered, she had one of those. Get one with a turbocharged engine.”
“Tad, shut up about cars!” Bonnie said. “Janet, butter!”
Janet reluctantly used her knife and plopped a wedge of margarine on James’s plate. He delicately picked it up with his thumb and forefinger and tried to throw it at her, but it slipped from his grasp and dropped to the floor. Bonnie didn’t seem to have noticed. Janet was winding spaghetti around her fork and James was quiet.
The butter episode was finished.
Tad ate his spaghetti with noisy gusto, letting it trail from his mouth and sucking it in to swallow without chewing.
“Manners!” Bonnie cautioned.
Tad said, “You got a V-8 engine in that Granada of yours, Nudger?”
“Six cylinder.”
“They ain’t for shit,” Tad said, and continued to slurp spaghetti.
Belinda had managed to reach Bonnie’s salad fork and had accidentally stuck herself in the chin. She began to wail.
Janet said, “Shut up! Can’t she just like shut up?”
Bonnie hugged Belinda and made soothing sounds. Woman didn’t have things under control, but she had remarkable patience.
James began screaming and pleading for something, but no one could understand what he was saying.
So this was family life. Nudger’s stomach was quivering and his head was starting to throb. He realized he’d left his antacid tablets at the office. Should have stopped and bought some on the way over here. Tylenol, too.
“I’m gonna get me a dual manifold and exhaust for the Plymouth,” Tad proclaimed to no one in particular. “Eliminate some backup gas and add horsepower.”
“You need to get like horse sense,” Janet said.
“Up yours, slut!”
James was yelling louder. He threw a piece of hard-crusted bread at Janet. Belinda, who’d calmed down under Bonnie’s attention, started screaming again, imitating James. Carlotta smiled wistfully.
Tad said, “You just ain’t old enough to drive, so you’re pissed.”
Janet said, “Like screw you!”
Bonnie said, “Janet will clean up most of the mess, Nudger. The kids can have dessert here while we go out someplace quiet for coffee. That sound okay to you?”
Nudger said, “I guess so.”
11
Over carrot cake and coffee at a Denny’s franchise restaurant, Bonnie said, “Been kind of a whirlwind since Gary died.”
Nudger studied her in the harsh fluorescent light. Not so cute at the moment. Like a well-worn Barbie Doll down from the attic. Fine lines swooping from the wings of her turned-up nose down to the corners of her strained red lips. Mascara smeared beneath the china blue eyes. Blond hair more lank than pert. There was a faint spattering of spaghetti sauce on the shoulder of her pink dress, like stains on her life.
“He had a minor heart attack,” she said. “Survived that one, and we thought he was gonna be okay. Things had never seemed sweeter, since we’d almost lost them. Two weeks later another, massive attack took him.” Her voice was weary and objective, as if she’d hashed all this out but still had a mechanical need to reiterate. “I was pregnant with Belinda when he died.”
Nudger wasn’t sure what to say. Hadn’t dated many grieving widows. “Must have been rough,” was all he could muster. It sounded feeble and insincere. He took a bite of carrot cake. Chewed slowly. Somebody in a nearby booth must have ordered garlic bread; its sharp scent drifted to him.
“There are plenty of people have it rougher,” Bonnie said. “We had mortgage insurance, so the house is paid for. Still, kids are more expensive as they get older.” Nudger thought she might tell him the kids needed the firm hand of a father, but he supposed that went without saying. She grinned, for a moment young Doris Day without a care. Being cute was her armor, her defensive game plan for life, and there was nothing cute about maudlin. “Hey, we get by.”
“That’s what most people do,” he said, “get by.” He was seeing a new depth to Bonnie, a woman behind the facade.
She drew in a breath, took a long sip of coffee, knowing it was time to change the subject. “Making any progress on the Virgil Hiller disappearance?”
“I’m not sure. In my line of work, whether you’re making progress is something you seem to find out all at once.”
“You don’t like being a detective.”
“You can tell?”
“It’s almost lettered on your forehead. Why don’t you find another occupation?”
There was a question Nudger had often asked himself. “This one found me,” he said. “Not liking it is the only way I’m not s
uited for it. Besides, it’s more than an occupation. It’s what I do. If you know what I mean.”
“What you are,” she said.
“That’s right; seems to make little difference that I don’t like it. Somehow it’s become me. Or I’ve turned into it.”
Bonnie finished her cake and rested her fork on the plate. “I’m going to deliver some Nora Dove to Gina Hiller tomorrow,” she said. “Want me to ask her anything about her husband ? Maybe she’d tell me something she wouldn’t tell you. You know, woman to woman.”
Off on a grand adventure—Nick and Nora Charles. “I don’t want to use you that way, Bonnie.”
“You wouldn’t be; I volunteered.”
True. And that did indeed put another light on it.
The waitress came and asked if everything was okay. Nudger knew that everything was never okay, but he smiled and said that it was. Let her have her illusions, not knowing they were as perishable as the lettuce.
Bonnie extended a hand to her plate and touched a cake crumb firmly, so that it stuck to the tip of her finger, then popped it into her mouth. She said, “I’m a born volunteer. Really.”
“All right,” Nudger said. “But don’t ask Gina Hiller questions. See if you can move the conversation in the direction of the errant husband and then let her take the lead. just listen.”
Bonnie nodded. “And remember what she said, so I can tell you.” She was already a pro at this game. She thought.
“Remember that deceiving people can be damned dangerous,” Nudger told her, wondering if this was really a good idea.
But he could see that good idea or not, Bonnie was determined to play her role.
He asked if she wanted another cup of coffee, but she said no, she’d better get back home and make sure the kids hadn’t leveled the house.
He thought she was probably serious.
After driving Bonnie home, Nudger aimed the Granada west on Manchester, then north on Lindbergh. Toward the address he’d looked up in the phone book—Paul Dobbs’s apartment.
St. Louis’s schizophrenic weather was at it again. Now that darkness had fallen, the evening had turned cold. Wind chill factor of thirty degrees, said the car radio, even though the temperature was in the low forties.
The Granada’s windshield started to fog up, and Nudger switched on the defrosters. Helped some. He wished he’d brought a coat.
Dobbs lived in Chez Le Chic, an apartment project off North Lindbergh near the airport. It consisted of three L-shaped buildings, each built around a square swimming pool. The architecture was somebody’s idea of French, with fancy shutters, hip roofs, and iron balconies. The rent was probably moderately high, mainly because of convenient location if you were somebody on the go. Nudger suspected the apartments were full of people other people called yuppies.
Dobbs’s building was the Frenchest of all, constructed of white brick and trimmed in blue. Neatly pruned hedges lined the front wall on each side of the softly lighted entrance. The light was soft because it was coming from fixtures hidden in the shrubbery.
Nudger parked in a visitors’ slot on the blacktop front lot, then went into the blue-and-white tiled foyer. Saw Dobbs’s business card inserted in a plastic slot above the fancy brass mail slot for apartment 2B. Mail was jammed into the locked box. Some junk mail addressed to Dobbs was fastened together with a thick rubber band and lay on the tile floor beneath the stuffed mailbox. The top piece said Dobbs might have won a bamboo steamer; not as impressive as Mary Lacy’s new Buick, but look what the guy was missing, not being home.
Just for the hell of it, Nudger pressed the button to buzz the apartment. Maybe Dobbs was back from Fiji, or wherever it was Hammersmith had suggested the photographer had dashed off to, and simply hadn’t bothered or had time to collect his mail. Man on the run with camera and assignment. Like an old Life photojournalist in the forties. Hubba, hubba. Hammersmith was caught in a time warp.
Nudger leaned on the buzzer again. No surprise. The intercom was silent.
He took the stairs to the second floor, then used his honed Visa card to slip the pathetic lock on 2B’s door. Cheap apartment hardware. No problem. Sometimes Nudger did like being a detective.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside. Not so much fun now. Breaking and entering, this was called in courts of law. Carried a penalty of fine and imprisonment. Nudger’s stomach was fluttering like hummingbird wings.
The apartment had about it the perfect stillness of places that had been sealed and unoccupied for a long time. In the sickly orange glow from the sodium streetlight, filtering in through the sheer drapes, he could see that it was furnished modern. Lots of low tables, a two-foot-high sofa that might be even more uncomfortable than Bonnie’s. There were what looked like metal-framed modern prints or paintings on the walls, but when Nudger glanced at the one nearest him he saw that it was actually an enlarged photograph. Looked like a swirl of different colored liquids on a flat surface. There were dark spatters over the graceful swirls, like blood shed in violence, only they were different colors, too. He wondered if it was Dobbs’s work.
The wall switch near the door turned on a squat yellow lamp by the sofa. There was a clear glass ashtray next to the lamp, ashes and two filtered cigarette butts in it. The butts were stale. The smell of them contaminated the air.
Swallowing the nervous lump in his throat, Nudger began nosing around the apartment.
Dobbs’s closet and dresser contained plenty of clothes, which would indicate that if he’d gone somewhere on an assignment it wouldn’t be for long. On the other hand, what did you need by way of clothes in Fiji?
After about five minutes, Nudger found what he’d really come here to see. The place where Dobbs kept his photographic equipment.
It took up most of the walk-in closet in the second bedroom. The inside of the closet was a mess; there was undeveloped film unraveled all over the place, and three expensive Canon thirty-five-millimeter cameras lay on the hardwood floor with their backs open.
The closet was set up to be a simple but functional darkroom. An enlarger lay on its side on a narrow counter. Bottles of developing chemicals and wash were knocked over on their shelves. Shallow metal trays were stacked crookedly in a corner. Half a dozen rubber-coated tongs lay in a clutter in the top tray. Developer had been spilled somewhere; its bleachlike scent permeated the closet.
A sudden noise from the living room made Nudger suck in his breath, fear clawing at his insides. The smell of the spilled developer suddenly made him feel sick.
Someone else was in the apartment, walking slowly toward the smaller bedroom that Dobbs used for sleeping.
Nudger heard the floor creak. Close to him. His heart scurried up into his throat and expanded there.
This bedroom would be next, he was sure. And he doubted if he was hearing Dobbs light-footing it around his own apartment.
Only one direction available. He eased his way out the sliding glass doors onto the rear balcony. Two stories below, the deserted swimming pool glimmered darkly in the moonlight, water black as licorice.
A deep, amused voice crooned from the room he’d just left, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” A parody of childhood. Taunting. Sadistic. Coaxing.
Nudger moved to the side of the balcony, almost bumping into a huge fern in a ceramic planter. Pressed himself against the cool hard bricks.
Beyond the opposite building he could see the streaming lights of traffic out on Lindbergh. The rushing sound of the cars was barely audible. A lonely whisper. There was no way off the small balcony other than through the bedroom, or by a Tarzan-caliber two-story dive into the pool, and it occurred to Nudger that he didn’t know which end was the deep one. Fear jellied his knees and he tasted the metallic bitterness of bile at the base of his tongue.
“Getting a breath of night air, are you?” the voice said, playing this out, enjoying it. Nearer. Moving toward the open glass doors. “Well, you should enjoy breathing while you can. Something we all take for
granted.”
Nudger wasn’t taking it for granted at the moment. He was paralyzed with the knowledge that breathing might be a bodily function soon denied him.
Then anger tipped the balance over fear and revived him from his transfixed state. Nobody had the right to do what the man in Dobbs’s bedroom was threatening. Nobody had the right to terrorize another human being this way. Especially if that human being was Nudger. That made it intimate and infuriating.
Nudger was able to think.
To act.
He found sudden strength and lifted the ceramic planter to hurl at the man. The fern tickled his cheek, and small clods of dirt rained at his feet.
He waited, muscles strained; the rich loam in the planter brought the smell of the grave.
Then he had a better idea.
He yelled and tossed the heavy planter, fern and all, out over the pool. Then, simultaneous with the splash below, he drew back into the shadows at the very end of the balcony. Crushed himself against the bricks.
A large man wearing a black or dark blue suit ran to the balcony railing, skidded on his heels to a stop, and said, “Goddamn it!”
He gazed for a second down at the foam and ripples in the dark pool. Then he wheeled and ran back into Dobbs’s apartment. Nudger saw the dull gleam of a gun in his hand. Jesus! Meant business, all right!
Nudger waited five seconds before he followed the man’s path through the empty apartment. He could hear descending footfalls crashing on the back stairs.
He ran as silently as he could down the front stairs. His heart was banging an insane rhythm against his ribs, echoing in his ears. Urging him to hurry!
Then he was out the front entrance and racing across the parking lot to his car. Opening up his stride.
“Hey!” a voice yelled behind him.
Nudger didn’t know whose voice. Didn’t pause or look back. He had his key in his hand when he yanked open the car door. Had it in the ignition switch even before he was all the way in the seat. Twisting the key almost hard enough to break it.