The Nudger Dilemmas

by John Lutz

  "But why come see me if he already had the envelope?"

  "To put it back," Nudger said. "Dobbs was a small-time photographer who'd stumbled onto something big. He knew that if that envelope turned up missing, he'd be suspected of having stolen it, and that would put him in danger. So he took it, photographed its contents, and then put it back—not on the first visit with you, because Arnie Kyle interrupted him. But I remembered you mentioning a second Dobbs visit. Since the envelope hasn't been found in his apartment, or anywhere else, I think he managed to slip it back onto your closet shelf during the second visit. You were supposed to find it later and assume you simply missed it the first time you looked."

  "Dobbs was like you," Kyle pointed out, "just smart enough to get himself in serious trouble by playing out of his league."

  Nudger tried to ignore that unnerving comparison and continued. "When Arnie Kyle found photographs of the contents but no envelope in Dobbs's possession, he knew the original was still missing and started frantically searching for it. It never occurred to him that Dobbs would want to photograph its contents and then bring the envelope back here where he got it."

  "Until tonight," Kyle said. "When it occurred to you."

  "I had the advantage," Nudger said sportingly. "I knew about Dobbs's second visit with Adelaide. It wasn't difficult to figure out the purpose of that visit."

  "Everybody seems to have some kind of angle in this world," Kyle said. "Ain't it depressing? It causes this kind of trouble. The question now is, what are we gonna do about it?"

  Nudger shrugged. He knew there was no question in Kyle's mind, except possibly how to dispose of the bodies. "I have no idea. That's why I stopped on the way here and phoned Police Lieutenant Hammersmith, to ask him to meet me here so we can figure this thing out."

  "Don't waste my time with bluffing," Kyle said. He had a shark's under slung smile. "It doesn't become you to lie. You never talked to Hammersmith, admit it."

  "I admit it." Nudger said, as sirens began to wail in the distance. "But I left a message on his recorder."

  Doubt crossed Kyle's intense features like a subtle change of light.

  "You haven't personally killed anyone," Nudger told him. "But being in the vicinity here while Riley does would amount to the same thing."

  "He really is bluffing," Riley said. He had more nerve than Kyle and he seemed eager to kill whereas Kyle was merely willing. Nudger wondered if Riley was the one who had made Mary Lacy reveal the whereabouts of the envelope. Who had killed Mary Lacy and Virgil Hiller.

  The sirens were getting louder, getting closer.

  "If you wait around to find out for sure if I'm bluffing," Nudger said, "it will be too late for you to slip out of the building."

  "Those might be fire engine sirens, Arnie," Riley said.

  Kyle shook his head. "They ain't fire engines."

  Nudger's stomach did flip after flip as Kyle stared appraisingly at him. Riley was standing very straight and tall, breathing rapidly.

  Then Kyle gave a sort of snarl and took a few steps toward Adelaide's bedroom.

  "Knowing where that envelope is might hang you in court," Nudger pointed out. "Not to mention what might happen if it were found in your possession."

  Kyle stopped and glared at him. The sirens were quite close now. He sighed. "You really aren't as dumb as you look," he said.

  "No," Nudger agreed, "I ain't."

  With a snake-like hiss, Kyle spat on the carpet. "Come on," he said to Riley. "Let's get out by the fire stairs." He beat Riley out the door.

  Riley tucked his gun into a shoulder holster and smiled faintly at Nudger as he followed, as if he derived some satisfaction at least out of seeing his boss outsmarted.

  Adelaide let out a long breath and removed her hand from Nudger's wrist. She stared at him. "Were you bluffing?"

  Nudger stood and began to pace to help get rid of his heartburn. He reached into a shirt pocket, peeled back the silver paper on a roll of antacid tablets, popped three of them into his mouth, and chewed. "I wasn't bluffing," he said, as the sirens growled to silence in the street below. Car doors slammed. Within a minute footsteps sounded on the stairs and in the hall.

  When Hammersmith arrived, they found the envelope shoved to the back of the top shelf of Adelaide's closet.

  Inside was a blueprint of the downtown convention center that had been constructed five years ago at the time of the mayor's death. There was an X in red ink on the blueprint and a footnote, indicating where the body of Fred Carter, the missing mechanic paid by Arnie Kyle to sabotage the mayor's plane, was encased in the building's concrete piering.

  Hammersmith stared at the blueprint and shook his head sadly. "It's gonna take this city years to get over what's coming."

  "The dead legitimate mayor, the skywriter pilot, Paul Dobbs, Mary Lacy . . . they were all victims, too," Nudger said. "They'll never get over anything again."

  Hammersmith admitted Nudger had a point. After ordering a pickup bulletin for Arnie Kyle and Riley, he stormed out of Adelaide's apartment, leaving behind a greenish haze of cigar smoke.

  When they were alone, Adelaide said, "It didn't turn out at all the way I wanted when I hired you, Mr. Nudger."

  "Things seldom do," Nudger told her, "but sometimes they turn out better than they might have. I guess that has to be good enough."

  Adelaide smiled a tight, resigned smile and nodded, her eyes moist.

  Nudger took her out and bought her several double scotches. He drank warm milk.

  Typographical Error

  Nudger walked into the Kit-Kat lounge and looked around, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It was ten a.m. and the lounge was barren of customers. That was okay. The person he wanted to talk with stood behind the long, vinyl-padded bar, idly leafing through a newspaper. Lani Katlo was her name, proprietor and manager of the Kit-Kat. She was a woman sneaking up on menopause, attractive in a still youthful if shopworn fashion. When she saw Nudger approaching the bar, she smiled and nodded, waiting for him to order.

  "Coffee if you have it," Nudger told her.

  "We don't. There's a restaurant across the street." Her smile remained, taking any edge off her words.

  "Never mind," Nudger said. "What I really want is to talk, Lani." He handed her one of his cards with his Saint Louis address.

  She appeared vaguely surprised that he knew her name as she accepted the card and folded the newspaper closed. "You're in what line of work," she asked, studying the card, "that brings you to Florida?"

  "I'm a private detective," Nudger told her.

  "This says defective, with an 'f.'"

  "That's a printer's error."

  "Why don't you return the cards?"

  "I had a thousand of them made up, then the printer went out of business. What can I do but use the cards anyway?"

  "I see your point," Lani Katlo said. "These cards aren't cheap. But what would a private detective from Saint Louie want to talk to me about?"

  "Harmon Medlark. And nobody from Saint Louis says 'Saint Louie.'

  "You mean Meadowlark?"

  "Medlark." Nudger spelled the name for her.

  Lani Katlo shrugged. "I thought maybe he was somebody who'd used your printer."

  "Medlark was in business over in Clearwater six months ago, selling time shares in vacation condominium units. The deal where the customers purchase part ownership in a unit and have the right to use it one or two weeks out of each year before turning it over to the next part owner."

  "I'm familiar with the system," Lani said. "I own one fifty-second of a unit in Hawaii myself."

  Nudger settled himself onto a soft barstool. "Harmon Medlark ran into problems when he used his own peculiar calendar that divided the year into hundreds of weeks. After collecting big down payments he managed to finagle by offering ridiculously low interest rates on loans, he disappeared with the money. Some of the Saint Louis fleeced have hired me to find him and recover the wool."

  "Did he build
any of the condominiums?"

  Nudger shook his head sadly. "There is a tract of graded ground in Clearwater supporting only weeds and a sign reading 'Sun Joy Vacation Limited.' That is all. Medlark bought the ground with a small deposit and a large smile then defaulted on the loan when he disappeared."

  "With all that wool."

  Nudger nodded. He watched Lani Katlo pour herself two fingers of Scotch in a monogrammed glass and winced at the thought of hundred proof booze cascading down a throat at ten in the morning.

  Lani downed half the Scotch without visible effect and asked, "Why are you telling me all this?"

  "Because your name and address were found among the few items Medlark left behind in his hasty departure."

  Lani Katlo appeared mystified. "Honest, Nudger, I never heard of the man."

  Nudger reached into an inside pocket of his sports coat and withdrew a fuzzy snapshot of a graying man with regular features and kindly blue eyes. He showed the photograph to Lani Katlo.

  "Him I think I know," she said. "I thought his name was Herman Manners. He's a friend of Eddie Regal, who owns a florist shop over on Citrus Drive. They used to come in here together now and then, a few times they came in with Eddie's wife and a tall oversexed-acting redhead that looked like a watermelon festival queen." Lani used cupped hands before her own gaunt torso to illustrate her meaning.

  "Do you know the redhead's name?" Nudger asked. That could have been useful information even if there was no longer a connection with the evasive Medlark.

  "No," Lani said, "I only saw her maybe twice. Eddie Regal could probably tell you."

  Nudger reached into his pocket again, unfolded a slip of beige notepaper and laid it on the bar, "Does this note we found along with your name tell you anything?" he asked Lani Katlo. The neatly typed note read:

  Dear Mrs. Cupcake,

  I still can't believe you love an old greybeard like me, but I'll keep living in a dream. See you in Shangri-la.

  Mr. Moneybags

  "It doesn't mean a thing to me," Lani Katlo said, handing back the note. "Where's Shangri-la, anyway. Isn't that a place up the coast?"

  "It's a place in a book," Nudger told her. "Not real."

  "Maybe it's the name of a night spot or resort or something. Ever think of that?"

  "Thought of it and checked," Nudger said. "It's possible that was what Medlark meant when and if he typed the note."

  "Maybe Eddie Regal can tell you something about it," Lani Katlo suggested. She unfolded her newspaper again, as a signal that she was losing interest in the conversation.

  Nudger thanked her for her cooperation and left.

  On the sidewalk he stood in the heat and glare of the Florida sun and felt his stomach contract. Talking with people like Lani Katlo did that to him. Nerves. She was hiding something and Nudger knew it but couldn't pinpoint how he knew. He couldn't draw her out of concealment.

  Frustration. He wished, as he had so many times, that he knew another trade, was in some other line of work. But he didn't. He wasn't. He regretted the Spanish omelet he'd eaten for breakfast, popped an antacid tablet into his mouth and walked toward his dented Volkswagen Beetle.

  "This card says defective," Eddie Regal said from behind a display of chrysanthemums. He was a swarthy, hairy man with oversized knuckles. He did not look like a florist.

  "A typographical error," Nudger said. "I use them anyway. Have you ever heard of a man named Harmon Medlark?"

  "You mean Meadowlark?"

  Nudger explained that he didn't. "Possibly you knew him as Herman Manners." Nudger flashed the obscure photograph of Medlark.

  "Sure," Regal said, "that's Herman. I met him a few months ago at a place called the Kit-Kat. We talked a while over drinks and found we were both interested in the dog races. So we went a few times."

  "Alone?"

  "Sometimes. A couple of times we took my wife Madge and a girl Herman went out with, a redhead name of Delores."

  "Do you know where I can find Delores?"

  Regal snipped a bud and shook his head no. "I only met her a few times, when she was with Herman. I think she lives around Orlando, near Disney World."

  "Did Manners ever mention where he lived?"

  "Nope. It wasn't that kind of friendship. And Herman is a kind of tight-lipped guy anyway."

  "What's Delores' last name?"

  "That I remember because it's unusual. Bookbinder. It stuck in my mind because she isn't a bookish kind of girl at all."

  "So I hear," Nudger said. "Did Manners ever mention a timesharing deal in a condominium project in Clearwater?"

  "Nope. We talked dogs and women and that's about all."

  "Okay, Mr. Regal. You have my card with my motel phone number penned on it. Will you call me if you think of anything else about Manners?"

  "Oh, be glad to, Mr. Nudger. It interests me, how a detective works. Where you going now? Back to Saint Louie?"

  "To Orlando, to try to find Delores Bookbinder."

  "We specialize in funeral wreaths," Regal said, "but we got a special today on long-stemmed roses if you're interested."

  "Thanks," Nudger said, "but I don't think I'll need either." He walked from the aromatic shop and heard the little bell above the door tinkle cheerily behind him.

  Bookbinder, he thought. That is an unusual name.

  She was easy to find, Delores Bookbinder. She lived in Orlando proper and was listed in the phone directory. When Nudger called her she readily agreed to see him after learning only his name and hearing Regal's name mentioned. She gave directions to her apartment in a sultry telephone voice that kicked his imagination around like a bent tin can.

  Delores's directions led Nudger to a long, two-story stucco apartment building on Soltice Avenue, just off the Bee Line expressway. She lived on the top floor, and when he knocked she answered the door wearing a simple green dress that hugged her curves the way he found himself yearning to hug. Delores was a tall, lushly proportioned woman in her early thirties, with that flawless milky complexion possessed by only a minority of natural redheads.

  "Nudger?" she asked.

  He nodded, and she stepped back to usher him into a small but neatly furnished apartment that featured thick blue carpet, cool white walls and a large oil painting of a leopard luxuriously sunning itself on some far away African plain. A window air conditioner was humming a gurgly, suggestive melody. Nudger handed Delores one of his cards.

  "This says defective," she told him.

  "Don't let it fool you."

  Delores smiled and motioned for Nudger to sit on a low, cream-colored sofa. She sat across from him in a dainty chair and crossed her long legs with a calculated exaggerated modesty that brought a familiar tightness to his groin. He decided he was an idiot for what he was thinking. He reached for the foil-wrapped cylinder in his shirt pocket, thumb nailed off an antacid tablet and popped it into his mouth.

  Delores was staring at him curiously.

  "Sensitive stomach," Nudger explained. "Nerves."

  "Isn't that something of a drawback in your profession?"

  "Yes and no," he answered. "It causes me discomfort, but it sometimes acts as a warning signal." As it was doing now. Nudger decided not to lay a hand or anything else on Delores Bookbinder, if that was her name.

  "Do you know a man named Herman Manners?" he asked.

  She threw him the kind of curve he wasn't thinking about. "You mean Harmon Medlark?"

  "The same." Nudger was becoming uncomfortable on the underslung, soft sofa; it was for lying down, not sitting. "Eddie Regal and a number of other people seem to know him as Herman Manners."

  Delores waved an elegant, ring-adorned hand. "Oh, that's a name Harmon sometimes uses."

  Nudger showed her the photograph. "Is this the man we're talking about?"

  She crossed the room, leaned over Nudger with a heavy scent of perfume and squinted at the photo. "That's so fuzzy it could be anyone," she said, "but I can say with some certainty it's Harmon." Her hand r
ested very lightly on Nudger's shoulder. He wondered if she could feel his heartbeat. He chomped down hard on the antacid tablet to create a diversionary vibration.

  "Where can I get in touch with Medlark?" he asked as casually as possible.

  "I don't know exactly," Delores said. "We had an argument. I haven't seen Harmon for over a week."

  "What did you argue about?"

  Delores didn't seem offended by Nudger's nosiness. Her hand remained steady on his shoulder and he could feel the warmth of her breath on the back of his neck, as if she still needed to study the photograph that he'd now replaced in his pocket. "His drinking," she said. "Harmon drinks too much. Between the two of us, he's a sick man." She gave a mindless little laugh. "I do pick the losers. You look like a winner."

  Now that was fairly direct. Nudger turned to say something to her and they were kissing. After what seemed an enjoyable full minute, he pulled away. He stood up.

  "I don't see this as a wise move in the game," he said.

  Delores appeared mystified, her green eyes wide. "What game?"

  "I'm not sure. That's why it's not a wise move." He smiled at her. "I'm going to leave while I still can, Delores."

  She frowned and ran a long-fingered hand over her svelte curves, as if to reassure herself that they were still there. "You're nuts," she said, "or something else."

  "Nuts," Nudger assured her.

  "If you're really leaving," Delores said in a resigned and disappointed voice, "I guess I ought to tell you about a rumor I heard that Harmon is in a 'rest home' that's actually a place for alcoholics to dry out and take the cure."

  "Rest home where?" Nudger asked.

  "Over near Vero Beach. Shady Retreat, it's called, like it's a religious place for meditation or something. Well it's not; it's for problem drinkers."