by John Lutz
Hot night for that, Nudger thought inanely, as the man grabbed the front of his shirt. Buttons shot like popped corn into the shadows.
Nudger tried to shove his assailant away, but the man barked a short half-grunt, half-scream and hacked down with the edge of his hand at Nudger’s neck. The blow missed and glanced off his shoulder, struck the yellow hood of the car. Had to leave dents in both places.
Then the big man was up tight against him, using his weight, bending Nudger backward over the hood. He grabbed Nudger’s hair and began beating his head on the smooth metal. More dents. It was making a hell of a racket, but probably not enough to arouse the neighbors and bring help. Or maybe it only seemed loud to Nudger. Pain exploded between his ears with each impact.
When the back of Nudger’s head bounced particularly hard off the car, something must have jarred loose beneath the hood. The horn abruptly blared and kept howling.
The man straightened, glaring down like a specter through the ski mask’s eyeholes, and Nudger recognized him.
He took a final swipe, breezing a fist past Nudger’s face, then wheeled and ran into the darkness. He moved fast for his size.
Nudger heard his footsteps on the gravel road long after he lost sight of him.
Nudger stood up straight and gingerly traced the back of his head with his fingertips, then studied the fingers in the moonlight. There was no blood. Thank God the Ford didn’t have a hood ornament.
He walked around to the driver’s-side door and pulled the hood latch. Then he raised the hood, located the horn wires, and yanked them loose.
The blaring horn suddenly was silent.
“��� Fucking quiet!” a man’s voice yelled from the trailer across the street.
“It’s okay now!” Nudger called back. “All fixed!” His head felt as if it were still bouncing off the hood. Only the cardboardlike thinness and pliability of the metal had saved him from serious injury. Thank you, Detroit.
He straightened his clothes, noticing that his pants were ripped at the knee. He knew he’d been lucky. The blaring horn had alerted the neighbors and saved him; his powerful attacker hadn’t had time to inflict much damage.
“Who’s out there?” a wavering voice called. “What’s going on?”
Nudger turned and saw Candy Ann poised in the doorway of her trailer, her hand still on the knob so she could duck back inside and lock out the bogeyman if necessary.
“Me, Nudger,” Nudger said, out of breath. “I’m what’s going on.” He waited for the ground to stop tilting, then moved into the light. A dull pain caromed around inside his skull.
“Then come on in,” she said.
XXXII
Candy Ann stood watching him walk toward the door. When their eyes locked, she tried a smile, but she couldn’t quite manage her facial muscles, as if they’d become rigid and uncoordinated. In the yellow glare of reflected light streaming from the trailer, she appeared much older. The little-girl country look had deserted her; now she was an emaciated, grief-eroded woman, a country Barbie Doll whose features some evil child had lined with dark crayon. The shaded crescents beneath her eyes deprived them of their innocence. She was holding a glass that had once been a jelly jar. In it were two fingers of a clear liquid. Behind her on the table was a crumpled brown paper bag and a bottle of gin. The bottle was almost full, but it was obvious to Nudger when he caught a whiff of her breath that Candy Ann had been drinking before she arrived home.
“This is a surprise and a pleasure,” she managed to say, still not smiling, trying a mannered country charm that fell far from the mark. “What in the world happened out there?”
“Someone was hanging around your car,” Nudger said. “Maybe a hubcap thief. I scared him away.”
She stood peering down at him from the top of the three steps into the trailer, still with her hand on the doorknob. Her thin body shifted uneasily, as if a strong wind were snatching at it.
He might be the bogeyman after all.
“I figured it out,” Nudger told her.
Now she did smile, but it was fleeting, a sickly greenish shadow crossing her taut features. “You’re a man of powerful persistence, Mr. Nudger. You surely don’t know when to turn loose.”
She stepped back and he followed her into the trailer. It was warm in there; something was wrong with the air conditioner.
“Hot as hell, ain’t it,” Candy Ann commented. Nudger thought that was apropos.
He found himself sitting across from her at the tiny Formica table, just as he and Tom had sat facing each other eleven days ago. She offered him a drink. He declined. She downed the contents of the jelly-jar glass and clumsily poured herself more gin, spilling some of it on the table. It was cheap gin but hundred proof, possibly strong enough to eat through the Formica.
“Now, what’s this you’ve got figured out, Mr. Nudger?” There was something fearful and plaintive in the way she asked. She didn’t want to, but she had to hear him say it. Had to share it.
“It’s over four miles to the Right Steer Steakhouse,” Nudger told her. “The waitresses there make little more than minimum wage, and there’s no tipping, so cab fare to and from work has to take a big bite out of your salary, almost make a job there not worthwhile. But then you seem to go everywhere by cab. When I saw you leave Curtis’ funeral in one, I realized that.”
“Well, sure. My car’s been in the shop.”
“Your neighbors say it’s been gone for months.”
“I loaned it to a friend. She drove it a while, then she run it off the road into some trees and smashed it all up. I didn’t have no collison insurance, so it took me some time to get it fixed. It was up on blocks where I had it towed. That’s where it’s been all this time, in the shop.”
“I figured it might be,” Nudger said, “after I found the money and wig.”
She bowed her head slightly and took a fortifying sip of gin. “Money? Wig?”
“In the cardboard box above the ceiling panel in your bathroom.”
“You been snooping, Mr. Nudger.” There was more resignation than outrage in her voice.
“You’re sort of skinny, but not a short girl,” Nudger went on. “With a dark curly wig and a fake mustache, dressed similarly and sitting in a car, you’d resemble Curtis Colt enough to fool a dozen eyewitnesses who just caught a glimpse of you. It was a smart precaution for the two of you to take.”
Candy Ann looked astounded. “Are you saying I was driving the getaway car at that liquorstore holdup?”
“Maybe. Then maybe you hired someone to play Tom and convince me he was Colt’s accomplice and that they were far away from the murder scene when the trigger was pulled. I talked to some of your neighbors; they told me your car was a dark green Ford sedan. You were keeping the car hidden since the police had a partial description of it, then you had it painted yellow so you could begin driving it again.”
Candy Ann ran the tip of her tongue along the edges of her protruding teeth. She thought for a moment before speaking.
“You’re partway right. It’s true that Curtis and Tom used my car for their holdups. That wig, it belongs to Tom.”
“I doubt if Tom ever met Curtis. He’s somebody you paid in stolen money or drugs to sit where you’re sitting now and lie to me. And remember, he said he burned the wig after Curtis was arrested.”
“If I was driving that getaway car, Mr. Nudger, and knew for sure Curtis was guilty, why would I have hired a private investigator to try to find a hole in the eyewitnesses’ stories?”
“That bothered me for a while,” Nudger said, “until I realized you weren’t interested in clearing Curtis. What you were really worried about was Curtis Colt talking in prison. You didn’t want those witnesses’ stories changed, you wanted them substantiated-set in concrete so the witnesses wouldn’t change their statements even if Colt talked. And you wanted the police to learn about not-his-right name Tom, to avert possible suspicion from you.”
The crickets were raising a racket
again outside, their shrill ongoing scream the loudest sound in the baking trailer. Candy Ann raised her head to look directly at Nudger with eyes that begged and dreaded. She asked simply, “Why would I do that?”
“Because you were Curtis Colt’s accomplice in all of his robberies. And when you hit the liquor store, he stayed in the car to drive. You fired the shot that killed the old woman.”
Candy Ann shook her head slowly, as if stunned. “Lordy, that’s crazy.”
“Curtis was the one who fired the wild shot from the speeding car,” Nudger said. “I realized that when one of the witnesses, Edna Fine, told me she saw an arm come out of the car to fire a gun back toward the liquor store. She was looking at the car from the left side. The driver’s side. It was the driver’s-side window she’d seen the arm come out of to fire the shot. Curtis’ arm. Which was why tests indicated he’d fired a gun that night.”
“Why, that just ain’t so, Mr. Nudger. None of it.”
“It’s so. And you cozied up to Randy Gantner so you could make him stand firm if the other witnesses did change their stories. When it looked as if I might actually make progress, you would have aroused curiosity if you’d simply called me off the case, so you had Gantner hire one of his union strong-arm friends to beat me up and try to scare me off it. When that failed, Gantner made sure the other witnesses would stick to their stories; he even terrorized Edna Fine by killing her pet. While I was following you, waiting for you to get the car I was sure you must still have hidden somewhere, Gantner was following me. Just now, outside, he realized how much trouble he was in, how much you’d lured him into doing for you by playing up to his adolescent machismo, and he tried again to use force to stop me.” Nudger looked at the gin bottle. He felt like taking a drink, but he didn’t. “Did Gantner just hold you when you slept with him, Candy Ann?”
She didn’t answer. She drained her glass and poured another drink into the jelly-jar glass, striking the neck of the bottle hard on the thick rim. It made a surprisingly sharp, flinty sound, as if sparks might fly.
“Colt never talked,” Nudger said. “Not to the police, not to his lawyer, not even to a priest. Now that he’s dead you can trust him forever, but I have a feeling you could have anyway. He loved you more than you loved him, and you’ll have to live knowing he didn’t deserve to die.”
She looked down into her glass as if for answers and didn’t say anything for a long time. Nudger felt a bead of perspiration trickle in a wild zigzag course down the back of his neck, like a tiny live thing crazy from the heat.
Then she said, “I didn’t want to shoot that old man, but he didn’t leave me no choice. Then the old woman come at me.” She looked up at Nudger and smiled ever so slightly. It was a smile Nudger hadn’t seen on her before; it sent a tingling coldness through him. There was a pinpoint center of darkness, the abyss of madness, in her eyes. “God help me, Mr. Nudger, I can’t quit thinking about shooting that old woman. And about Curtis.”
“You murdered her,” Nudger said softly. “Then you murdered Curtis Colt by keeping silent and letting him die for you.”
“I was scared,” she said simply, in a flat voice.
“Everybody’s scared most of the time.”
“That’s right, I suppose. But some of us are more scared than others, and with more reason.”
Nudger kept silent, refusing to agree with her. She hadn’t confided everything to Gantner, he was sure. Nudger was the only one who knew everything about her, and he wouldn’t tell her what she longed to hear, wouldn’t soothe her and give her what she needed to justify her actions. There had to be a measure of justice in all of this, had to be some balance to the world.
“You can’t prove nothing,” Candy Ann said, still with her ancient-eyed, eerie smile that had little to do with amusement.
“You’re right,” Nudger told her, “I can’t. But I don’t think legally proving it is necessary, Candy Ann. You said it: our thoughts are actually tiny electrical impulses in the brain. Curtis Colt rode the lightning all at once. With you, it will take years, but the destination is the same. I think you’ll come to agree that his ride was easier.”
She sat very still. She didn’t answer. Wasn’t going to.
Nudger stood up and wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand. He felt sticky, dirty, confined by the low ceiling and near walls of the tiny, stifling trailer. He had to get out of there fast to escape the sensation that he was trapped.
He didn’t say good-bye to Candy Ann when he walked out. She didn’t say good-bye to him.
The last sound Nudger heard as he stepped down from the trailer was the clink of the bottle on the glass.
XXXIII
I
t was December, and frost had softly webbed the corners of Nudger’s office window, when Hammersmith phoned and told him Candy Ann Adams had committed suicide. All of Nudger’s breath left him for an instant; something icy whispered in his ear. It hadn’t taken as long as he’d thought; he could imagine Candy Ann old and guilt-ravaged, but it was difficult to imagine her dead.
“She was found in her bathtub with her radio,” Hammersmith said. “The radio was on, she was off.” Beneath his flipness lay an almost unfathomable sadness. Nudger knew Hammersmith as probably no one else did, knew how sarcasm and irony hid the real man, protected him from pain. But this time it wasn’t enough protection.
“Maybe it was an accident,” Nudger suggested, knowing better, knowing what had saddened Hammersmith.
“She left a note, Nudge. She admitted killing the old woman, and she admitted using you, and then Gantner, to try to make sure Curtis Colt burned for what she did. It was all the way you figured it last summer.”
“What about Gantner?” Nudger asked, fastening a few more buttons on his sweater. The office was cold.
“He was telling the truth,” Hammersmith said. “Candy Ann told him Colt had put her up to trying to get the witnesses to change their stories, that he’d shot the old woman and she was afraid of him and knew he’d kill her if he escaped execution and somehow got out of prison. That’s how she talked Gantner and his strong-arm buddy into trying to scare you off the case when it looked as if you might get to the truth. I think Gantner only realized Colt was innocent, and Candy Ann was the killer, when he followed you around after the funeral and guessed what you’d figured out.”
That was how Nudger had seen it. Hammersmith had questioned Gantner in July, trying to find out if Candy Ann had admitted the liquorstore killings. But Gantner was smart enough not to implicate himself as an accessory to murder and had denied knowing of Candy Ann’s guilt. He’d been telling it straight, and there hadn’t been enough evidence to bring charges against him.
Nudger could feel Hammersmith’s grief and frustration flowing through the phone connection. Hammersmith was a cop, not a killer. But he’d helped to build a case against an innocent man, helped to send him out on the lightning.
“It’s over,” Nudger said. “Don’t let it haunt you.”
“It’s over for Curtis Colt, too,” Hammersmith said.
“He was driving the car,” Nudger reminded Hammersmith. “He was involved.”
“But he didn’t pull the trigger,” Hammersmith said. “He didn’t kill anyone. The law did. And I’m the law.” He fired up a cigar; Nudger could hear him slurping and puffing furiously on it. Hammersmith was getting mad, feeling the corrosiveness of what had happened eating into him, gnawing. “I don’t buy that vigilante bullshit, Nudge. The man didn’t deserve to die.”
“He didn’t,” Nudger agreed. “But he wasn’t perfect. Neither is the law, and neither are we.”
Hammersmith was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I better get busy, Nudge. Crime never takes time out. And I’m so popular. Every damn line on my phone is blinking. Every one.”
Nudger wondered if that was true. He told Hammersmith not to be hard on himself and hung up.
He knew how Hammersmith would take this. He wouldn’t go home and beat his wife or kic
k his dog or get drunk. He’d brood a while, then plunge ahead into his work, stay hard at it until time dulled memory and he reached some sort of acceptance of the past, a perspective he could live with rather than put his gun in his mouth and follow Candy Ann. Eating the gun, going out like Billy Abraham. Hammersmith wouldn’t do that. He’d be all right, but it wouldn’t be easy.
When word of Curtis Colt’s innocence became public, Scott Scalla began to maneuver. He was no statesman, but when it came to raw politics, he could shuck and jive with the best. He was terribly upset over Colt’s execution, his press secretary said, over and over. God only knew how much the governor had agonized over this. Scalla himself, interviewed after a Friends of God Christmas assembly, implied that there had been police incompetence, then a cover-up, in the Colt case. That’s where the mistake had occurred, at a lower level, so that by the time the matter reached the governor’s office, there was little Scalla could do but follow the letter of the law and not intercede in the execution. An innocent man was dead, and the governor of a great state had been made an unwitting accomplice, helplessly bound by law. The law had been subverted, perverted. Scalla promised an investigation. This mess in the legal process would be cleaned up.
But Scalla didn’t really want an investigation. Not one that involved him. What he wanted was to leave the least damaging impression possible on voter consciousness, which he managed to do with the right succession of statements and images.
The investigation soon was shuffled from the state level down to the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners conducting an interdepartmental investigation. Media attention had been usurped by bigger news, some of it manufactured for just that purpose, and the voting public had other things on its collective mind. And as the governor had promised, there was an investigation taking place.