by John Lutz
He started to move toward Nudger, but Nudger kept his shopping cart between them, raising it in front and swiveling it on its rear wheels. Palp moved sideways to get around the cart, and Nudger shoved it hard into his stomach.
Palp said, “Oof!” and angrily shoved the cart back. It struck Nudger in the hip and pinned him against a freezer case. He felt cold air creep up his back. Something wet on his hip and thigh. The Max Hawk bottle had broken in his pocket.
Palp stopped, sniffed. Said, “Something stinks.”
“Wild Brawn.”
“Huh?”
Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Nudger wedged out from behind the cart and ran to the end of the aisle, lifting his knees high. He skidded around the corner.
Palp had moved like a jungle cat going for the kill and was right behind him. Nudger felt a hand clutch at his shoulder and put on another burst of speed.
Broke free.
Then he was in the cereal aisle. There were at least a dozen shoppers here, including the three who’d just left Frozen Foods. One of the shoppers, a huge man with a ponytail and a walrus mustache, stared at Nudger and Palp. A display of blue and yellow cereal boxes, upset by the action in the adjacent Frozen Foods aisle, had collapsed and partially blocked the aisle.
Nudger bounded away from Palp, over and through the scattered boxes. The cereal was one of those sugary candied brands and contained a free squeeze-toy replica of a cuddly cartoon character pictured on the front of the box. As Nudger tromped over the boxes, some of them squealed as if in pain.
“I’m gonna fetch the manager,” the large black woman said. “Put us an end to this shit.”
Nudger said, “That’s him back there. Tall man in a black suit.”
The woman kicked aside a box of the squealing cereal and swaggered menacingly toward Palp. He started to move away, but several other shoppers had rounded the corner and their carts blocked his path. Palp shoved the woman aside and began barging through the spilled boxes. The woman almost fell, then scrambled and regained her balance and shouted, “You gonna pay for that, you bastard! I’ll have your job!”
The big guy with the walrus mustache said, “Easy, bub,” and grabbed Palp’s arm. “Better calm down and apologize to the lady.”
Palp put some kind of martial arts move on him and the guy went flailing into the shelves and knocked down more cereal. The big woman had caught up with Palp again. Several other shoppers had joined her. The woman with the child in the cart stayed back and contributed by screaming. The kid puckered up and began a duet with Mom. Had stronger lungs.
Nudger bolted toward the front of the store, saw the doors, and made for them. The cashiers, the people in the checkout lines all had stopped what they were doing and were staring at him, not quite believing what was happening. Nudger knew the feeling.
Someone clutched his sleeve. A squat little muscular man with bristly black hair and a forest of pens and pencils protruding from a plastic liner in his shirt pocket. The man said, “I’m the manager. What’s going on back there?”
“Fella causing trouble. Big guy in a black suit. Says he’s the manager.”
“Oh, he does, does he?”
Somebody said, “What’s that smell?”
Nudger pulled his sleeve free. “You better call the police. Take care of the matter. I’m getting outta here. Won’t shop here again.”
He ran, not breaking stride as he neared the exit. The pneumatic door barely opened in time and he was out in the parking lot, beating feet for the Granada.
He knocked over an empty cart, bounced off another and sent it careening into a blue Oldsmobile, chipping paint. Sorry.
Then he was in the Granada. Bumped his head getting in but barely felt it. He didn’t remember digging into his pocket for his keys, but they were in his hand. He fumbled with them and somehow got the engine started.
Thought he saw Palp jogging across the lot, as he yanked the steering wheel left and screeched into the street. A brown delivery van braked so hard the driver laid a palm flat against the windshield to keep from flying through it. Opened his eyes wide in fear, his mouth wider as he screamed curses. Nudger got the Granada straightened out and kept his foot to the floor, wondering what the van driver had said to him. Better not to know, he decided.
He made a fast right turn off of Manchester, slowed down, and wound through side streets lined with similar brick and frame ranch houses. Peaceful residential avenues, not unlike Bonnie’s street. Peaceful if you only drove through and didn’t go inside any of the houses.
He picked the pieces of the broken Max Hawk bottle and what was left of the sodden bag from his pocket without cutting his fingers, then he zigzagged east until he found himself on Big Bend, finally satisfied that he’d shaken Palp.
Still trembling from his encounter with Kyle’s eerie enforcer, he thought, Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong.
A lot of dead presidents . . .
After another ten minutes of aimless driving, he decided to go to Mary Lacy’s apartment.
30
Nudger was unlocking Mary’s apartment, using the key Adelaide had given him, when the door of 1W, across the hall, eased open like the heavy entrance to a vault.
A tall, gray-haired woman in slacks and a threadbare red sweater with reindeer on the front stepped halfway out and said, “You a relative?”
“Almost everybody’s somebody’s relative.”
“I mean, of Mary Lacy.”
“Nope. Friend.”
“Sorry. I thought, since you had a key . . .” She moved all the way out into the hall. Shut the door all but a crack. She was about fifty, with a sallow face that might once have been breathtakingly beautiful, but now wore frown lines and crow’s feet and an I’ve-been-hurt expression that probably endured even in sleep. “I’m Grace Knowland, the building manager. The owner read about Mary disappearing and all, and he’s wondering about the apartment. I mean, whether somebody’s gonna pay the month’s rent.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Nudger said. He flashed her a smile to soften the words. “I’m not that close a friend.” So full of bullshit he was. “In fact, I’m acting more in my professional capacity than as a family friend.”
Grace raised a penciled, arched eyebrow almost to her hairline. “What is your profession?”
“I’m a private investigator, looking into Mary’s disappearance.”
“You mean trying to find her and that politician?”
“If they’re together.”
“Wouldn’t they be? The papers and TV news seem to think so.”
“What do you think?”
Grace crossed her lean arms. She had long, tapered fingers with red-painted nails, wore a total of five rings, all of them cheap, some of them gaudy. A bulky silver bracelet on each bony wrist. She was the kind of big woman who could drape herself with jewelry and get by with it. She took a long time thinking about Nudger’s question. Finally she said, “I can’t see Mary running away with her boss.”
“You’re not the only one who can’t. She and you friends?”
“Oh, no. Mary’s the type that keeps to herself. Tell you the truth, so’m I. Around here, anyway. That’s the way I have to be ‘cause I’m the one that collects the rent, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure. Mary usually on time with her rent?”
“Always.”
“She on a lease?”
“Yeah. Signed her fourth one-year lease just before she disappeared.”
“So she lived here three years.”
“Three years and a week.”
“Good tenant?”
“One of my all-time best.”
“What kinda social life she lead?”
“Now you sound like a cop.”
“Well, I am a cop. Sort of.”
Grace seemed skeptical even of that. Nudger thought she might ask to see his identification, but he was wrong. Didn’t really matter to her who he was. The shrill cries of neighb
orhood kids playing sifted in from outside. Too far away to understand what they were shouting. Other than that, it was quiet in the hall.
She said, “Mary was almost reclusive, I’d say. Now and then somebody’d come by to see her, but she hardly ever went out. Never caused a bit of trouble. Like I said, she was a dandy tenant and I wish she’d come back. God knows what’ll rent the place if she doesn’t.”
Nudger told her he hoped Mary came back soon, too. Then he stepped inside the apartment and closed the door.
He was met by dusty silence and stale air. A reminder of death.
Oh, God, cancer!
Then he noticed that the refrigerator was humming a tenor monotone in the kitchen. But that only made the silence, the emptiness, seem all the more forlorn.
Everything was still neatly in place. The low green sofa squarely faced the console TV, the remote control lying on the coffee table and waiting patiently for a finger to punch the power button. The museum prints were still precisely aligned on the walls; they had the patience of ages. The venetian blind slats were still slanted upward, casting light off the ceiling and lending the apartment a soft, unreal illumination. Discernible under the scent of the Max Hawk soaked into his pants was a faint, unpleasant smell, like that of brackish water.
Nudger said, “Hello, Mary!” just to hear his own voice. Then he walked down the hall to the bedroom with its black-lacquered furniture. Its mood of desolation.
He knew what he was looking for, and went directly to Mary’s dresser. After making neat piles of lingerie, sweaters, pantyhose on the bed, he carefully removed the newspaper lining the bottoms of the drawers. It was the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for March 31, 1981, covering Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Reagan, more than eight years ago.
But Mary Lacy had lived in the apartment only three years.
The newspaper sections were separated but hardly crinkled. They hadn’t been read before being placed in the drawers three years ago. Or more recently. Of course, there was always the possibility that Mary had the newspaper lining in the drawers at her previous address, and moved the dresser here papers and all. Not likely, though, knowing Mary’s compulsive neatness. In fact, it was unlikely she’d use newspapers rather than shelf paper to line her dresser drawers. Newsprint rubbed off and stained.
But she might have used the newspaper this way as a means of hiding it, and also of leaving a message that wouldn’t be removed, in case harm came to her. Left this edition, containing sensational news, as a signal to someone close enough to her to realize she’d only been in the apartment three years. Someone who knew it was out of character for her to use newspaper for drawer lining.
But what was there about this newspaper? The attempt on Reagan’s life? Was that why she’d saved this edition, and had it to use in the drawers?
Nudger arranged the paper’s sections more or less in order, the front page on top. There was Reagan ducking into the limo, there in the foreground Hinckley’s arm and hand holding the gun, in midrange the Secret Service men still looking around, startled and angry. The bodies on the pavement. Paul Dobbs would probably have killed for a photo like that.
Nudger sat down on the floor cross-legged and read the front page. Then he turned pages, scanning each slowly before going on to the next.
Hinckley’s try for Reagan’s life had pushed what Nudger was looking for all the way back to page six.
On the same day as the presidential assassination attempt, the city comptroller, Marvin Nolander, who was planning to run for reelection, died with his wife and son in the crash of his small private plane.
Nolander had been succeeded in office by the present comptroller, Dan Gray, who had as his assistant comptroller Virgil Hiller.
Who disappeared with Mary Lacy.
None of it meant much to Nudger now, but he knew it would soon. The thread had become a string had become a rope, and would form a tenuous bridge to the truth. But the crossing would be dangerous.
He painstakingly replaced the newspapers and the rest of the drawers’ contents the way he’d found them. Then he left the apartment, careful not to draw Grace Knowland’s attention on his way out.
He was climbing into his car when he thought he caught a glimpse of Tad’s old Plymouth turning the corner off of Hoover two blocks down. A flash of primered gray metal and dark exhaust fumes. The sun was in his eyes. He might have been mistaken.
But probably not.
Teenagers, he thought. They shouldn’t be allowed to own a car until they were much older and their glands were less of a factor in their driving. It would make for safer streets. Fewer jackrabbit starts, screaming rubber, and heart-stopping near collisions.
Excited by what he’d found in Mary’s apartment, he pulled away from the curb faster than he should have, tires squealing, almost rammed a parked car, and drove toward the county library on Lindbergh.
31
As he pushed through the library turnstile, Nudger saw Adelaide standing behind the long counter, using the electronic scanner to record the card number of an elderly woman checking out a tall stack of books.
Adelaide was wearing a gray skirt, a high-collared blouse, and a nubby white cardigan sweater. Her hair was pulled back more severely than before, and a pen dangled from a thin silver chain around her neck. Today her fire was banked; she was everyone’s idea of a librarian.
He waited until the elderly woman had left, lugging her books with the top one tucked beneath her pointed chin, before approaching the desk. It was especially quiet in the library; the only people there other than Nudger and Adelaide were a fidgety, birdlike employee and two browsers over in the periodical section. It felt cool and spacious.
Adelaide folded her hands on top of the checkout counter, smiled at Nudger, and said, “You look tired.”
“Didn’t get much sleep.”
“You look excited, too. Kind of odd. As if you just had a nifty dream.”
“My dreams haven’t been nifty lately.”
She raised her head, sniffed. “That your cologne I smell?”
“Not exactly. Some was spilled on me.”
“It’s a little much, but actually not bad.”
“You have copies of the St. Louis newspapers from nineteen eighty-one?” He realized he was speaking with unnecessary softness. In his library mode.
Adelaide didn’t answer. She moved to the side to receive books being returned by an obese blond man in a blue windbreaker. Nudger sidled over to stand near her, and when the man had paid a small overdue fine and wandered off toward the mystery section, she said, “We’d have the papers on microfilm. Any particular month or day?”
“Around when Hinckley shot Reagan.”
She looked at him. Blinked. “Hinckley? Reagan? This have something to do with my sister and Virgil Hiller?”
“Not the Reagan thing—something else. You recall seeing Mary’s dresser drawers lined with newspaper?”
“Sure. Like Mary to cover shelves and drawers. She wouldn’t put her clothes on bare wood. Might pick up a splinter. Snag something.”
“The paper she used was from nineteen eighty-one, all about when Hinckley shot Reagan.”
“Mary wouldn’t have left newspaper in the bottom of her drawers that long without putting in fresh. She was a compulsive neatnik; she equated dirt with sin and disease. My God, she used to clean around her kitchen baseboard with a rag stretched over a knife point.”
“Which means that the newspaper might have some significance. That she wanted somebody to notice it and look at the date. Realize what it meant.”
Adelaide cocked her head to the side, puzzled.
“She’d only lived in the apartment three years,” Nudger pointed out, “which makes the date wrong. And the newspaper looked fresh enough to have been bought yesterday.”
“Maybe she’d saved it as a souvenir. Or bought it at one of those specialty shops that re-create old and memorable newspaper editions. You know, stories on Pearl Harbor or the John Kenne
dy assassination.”
“Either way, she wouldn’t have used it to line drawers. Unless she had a reason.”
Adelaide placed her elbows on the counter and leaned forward, so close he could see his twin reflections in her blue eyes. For an instant it took him outside himself. Two Nudgers looking out from another’s skull, reassessing the world from a different point of view.
She said, “You have some idea as to the reason?”
Nudger nodded. “On page six, taking a backseat to all the ink about the Reagan shooting, is a news item about the accidental death of the city comptroller, a man named Nolander.”
Adelaide sighed and stood up straight, gazing off across the library at Biography, poking her tongue against the inside of her cheek. Considering. “And you think that’s more than coincidence?”
“I think we need to find out. I want to look at the newspapers for the rest of that time period. I think Mary saved or obtained that paper because of the Nolander piece. In case something happened to her, she wanted to leave it in her apartment in such a way that it might be overlooked and not removed. People searching apartments, rummaging through drawers, don’t generally pay much attention to what’s used to line the drawers. Especially when they’re in a hurry. She hoped that eventually somebody else, somebody who knew her or was suspicious and worried about her, would pick up on what she’d done. Have their attention drawn to the date.”
Adelaide smiled. Beautiful. “And now somebody has.”
“If I’m right,” Nudger said.
She was already moving out from behind the desk. “C’mon.” She waved an arm for Nudger to follow, like a cavalry officer summoning troops for a charge. He spurred his mount.
There was no one else in the microfilm room. Adelaide stooped gracefully in front of a bank of small wooden file drawers marked with dates and the names of newspapers, pressing her knees together and swinging them wide to one side. She pulled out one of the drawers and removed several small boxes containing plastic reels of microfilm.
“These cover the weeks just before and after the Reagan assassination attempt,” she told him, handing him the boxes. “Know how to work the machines?”