by John Lutz
He moved away from the phones and sat out of sight in the plush lobby, where he could watch the lounge entrance.
After about half an hour, the blonde woman left the lounge and walked to the elevators. She was the only one who got in the elevator when it arrived.
Nudger watched the floor indicator and saw that the elevator stopped on nine, then started back down.
Oh-oh, he'd almost missed Nubber coming out of the lounge. Nudger followed him outside and back to where the red Corvette was parked at the curb a block away.
Nubber lowered himself into the car, but he didn't drive away, merely sat chain-smoking cigarettes. Nudger found some shade and leaned against a building with his hands in his pockets, playing Mr. Casual, sweating profusely and keeping an eye on Nubber. After the third cigarette, Nubber started the Corvette's engine and Nudger thought he might have to sprint for where he'd parked the Granada. But Nubber only wanted the car running so he could switch on the air conditioner. Nudger stood back and watched, not liking this, thinking even his fingernails were sweating.
Two cigarettes later Abner Nubber climbed out of the Corvette, stretched languidly, then stooped to get something out of the car. Carrying a large leather overnight case and what looked like a folded black umbrella, he walked back to the Branton. Nudger followed, and wasn't surprised to see Nubber file into an elevator with half a dozen hotel guests. Nudger got in the next elevator that arrived at lobby level and pressed the "9" button.
When the elevator doors opened on nine, a family of a man, wife, and four boisterous preschool kids was waiting to pile in. They almost knocked Nudger over as he wedged out into the hall and looked both ways. Nubber was nowhere in sight. Other than a maid listlessly pushing a linen cart far down the hall, the ninth floor appeared deserted.
Some detective, Nudger thought, and rode the elevator back down to the lobby.
He sat in one of the lobby's soft armchairs, pretending to read a newspaper, like a character in late-night film noir, for almost two hours. Then he saw the blonde woman leave, not with Nubber but with a husky, crewcut man wearing a wrinkled blue business suit without a tie. Hmmm.
This was getting involved. Nudger didn't know who to follow.
He decided to wait for Nubber, who hadn't checked in and would surely be back downstairs soon.
Right. Nubber stepped out of an elevator fifteen minutes later, left the hotel, and drove back to his office.
More waiting, this time in the hot Granada, using a cleverly altered plastic water bottle to relieve himself while he watched Nubber's office. Nudger wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, looked at Nubber's parked Corvette, looked at the plastic bottle, and wondered if he might be in the wrong line of work. He could get a job selling appliances, probably make more money, meet his alimony payments easier. His former wife, Eileen, would like that. Maybe that was why he remained in his strange and sometimes ugly occupation.
Okay, here was Nubber roaring away in the Corvette at 4:30, probably heading for the apartment of the woman he'd stayed with last night. Nudger wondered what Claudia was doing tonight, and where was Biff Archway, as he gunned the old Granada and barely managed to keep the sleek red trunk of Nubber's car in sight.
That was when things began to shape up. Nubber drove back to St. Louis Hills and turned on the block where he'd visited the heavyset woman with the dark bangs. Only this time he didn't stop the car. The red Corvette slowed momentarily near the house, then its rear end dropped low and it accelerated down the street and around the corner.
A man was in the woman's front yard, cutting the lawn with a power mower. He was short, muscular, had a close haircut, and Nudger was sure he was the man who'd left the Branton Hotel with the blonde woman.
Nudger drove around the corner but didn't bother trying to keep up with Nubber. Instead he pulled the Granada to the curb and sat for a while letting his brain idle with the engine.
After about five minutes, he said, "I'll be damned," and drove away. He wanted to talk one more time with Edna Vickers, be she drunk or sober.
She was home. At first she stood motionless in the doorway squinting at Nudger, as if he were some gift of the cat and she couldn't quite place what she was looking at. Then she recognized him. "You again." She sounded disappointed. Not as if she'd been expecting someone else, though, just disappointed. She seemed sober enough this time and was wearing form-hugging red slacks and a white blouse pulled tight at the waist. Still had on her high heels, which made her seem to loom over Nudger. "Didn't know you at first," she said.
Nudger shrugged. "I've got one of those faces."
"Wouldn't have remembered you at all except for that funny cologne."
"Cologne?"
"Smells like dough and sugar baking."
"Oh. Mind if I come in? I need to ask you a few more questions. Won't take long."
"About Ernest?"
He nodded.
"Then the answer's no." She started to close the door.
"It'll be me or the police," Nudger said.
"I got nothing to fear from the police."
"Maybe not, but it's a maybe. Nothing to lose by talking to me."
"You offering me some kinda deal?"
"Why? Do you need a deal?"
"Nope. I haven't done a thing illegal. I know because I checked with my attorney."
Nudger said, "Your attorney didn't steer you wrong. So why not talk to me? I'm definitely more pleasant than the cops."
She gnawed her lip, glaring down at him. She'd probably been stunningly attractive five years and a lot of bottles ago.
"Oh, all right, but let's get it over with in a hurry. I got someplace to go."
He followed her inside and sat down on the creaking leather sofa. She remained standing, towering as a pro basketball player, ready to block his best shots.
"I've got it figured out," he said, driving toward the basket.
"What? Today's crossword puzzle?" She fancied herself cute when she was sober.
"The puzzle about how you got the evidence on your husband that enabled you to divorce him on your terms. Ernest had an affair, Abner Nubber provided you with proof—probably videotapes—and also told you about your husband's embezzlement from his employer."
"Nothing illegal there on my part. And it was photographs, not videotape."
"Except that you paid Nubber to arrange the affair so you could get the evidence. That's what Nubber does, has charismatic employees who seduce the spouses of his clients and set up the right odds in divorce cases. Very ingenious."
"And provides him a good living, I'm sure, considering the rates he charges. But I guess business is business."
"Some kinda business he's in."
"It fills a need."
"For a lotta people," Nudger had to agree.
She paced, then wheeled and stared down with open distaste at him. "The thing is, nobody forced Ernest to go to bed with that woman!"
"But he got a lot of expert coaxing. You probably even provided Nubber with information to make it easier for his female employee to seduce poor Ernest. What about the woman? Who was she?"
"Some blonde pro. What's the difference who she was? It was part of the deal that she disappear after the photos were taken. Nobody, not even Ernest's lawyers, were ever able to find her, but the photographs were proof enough Ernest had been unfaithful. Even kinky unfaithful. The fact he didn't so much as know the woman's real name or address just made it look all the worse for him. I could never catch the little weasel cheating on me any other way, so I did it this way. Fair's fair, I say."
Nudger said, "I'd call it entrapment."
"Call it what you will. I didn't intend to send the poor schmuck to prison, but there was no way to clue the law in on the affair with the blonde without revealing the embezzlement to the police—so tough cheese."
Nudger stood up. "You're a hard woman."
She smiled. "Better believe it. And a smart one. I wouldn't be telling you any of this if the law could to
uch me."
"Your lawyer must have mentioned that the law can touch Abner Nubber."
"Tough cheese there, too. Nubber can just figure that as part of the cost of doing business. He supplies male and female heartbreakers to seduce unfaithful spouses, then he provides proof and favorable conditions for divorce, he has to know he's running a risk. That's why he gets paid so much and has a swank office and drives around in a nifty car. You're a private investigator, you got an office and car like that?"
Nudger had to get out of there. He'd had enough of Edna Vickers. Ernest Gate might be better off.
He told her he didn't have an office or car like Abner Nubber's. Pointed out that he didn't have a future like Nubber's, either. Then he told her goodbye and went to the door. She didn't move except to prop her fists on her hips and stand there like a female colossus.
"You gonna tell the cops about this?" she asked.
"Sure."
"Make it a point to also tell them Ernest was a son of a bitch."
"Late son of a bitch," Nudger said, and went out the door. He could sense her edging toward the phone behind him.
Abner Nubber's redheaded receptionist said Nubber had left the city on urgent business. But when Hammersmith and a couple of uniforms arrived, she soon buckled and revealed the name of the hotel he'd fled to where he could hole up after Edna Vickers had called him. It was the Emporium, a sleazy near flophouse down by the river. Nubber was seeking his level.
Hammersmith was a homicide cop and was there only because of his previous involvement and his friendship with Nudger, so they waited for a lieutenant named Giardello from the bunko squad to arrive at the hotel before going inside.
A one-eyed desk clerk stared wildly at Hammersmith's badge and said there was no one named Nubber registered but that someone who looked like the man Nudger described had checked in a little over an hour ago and was in Room 815. Uniforms were posted in the lobby and at the base of the fire stairs, and Lieutenant Giardello led the way into the clanking and thrumming elevator that carried them to the eighth floor.
The knock on the door of 815 wasn't answered, but the faintest of sounds came from inside the room. A slight scraping of wood on wood.
Hammersmith knew what it was an instant before anyone else, and he raised a tree-trunk leg and smashed his foot into the door with all his weight behind it.
The doorjamb splintered and the door crashed and caromed off the wall so hard it nearly closed again. But Hammersmith and Giardello almost made the doorway wider rushing inside. Nudger and the uniform they'd brought with them followed.
Almost in time.
Nubber's pants leg and shoe disappeared outside as be scampered out the window he'd just forced wide open.
At first Nudger thought he was trying to get down the fire escape, but there was no outside fire escape.
Nudger was ahead of everyone else getting to the window, and when he looked outside, there was Nubber poised on the ledge exactly the way Ernest Gate had been three days ago. The same desperate backward lean against the safe solidity of the wall, and the same something dreadful and magnetic that seemed to contaminate reason and pull toward space and death.
Nubber was staring at Nudger as if now they belonged to two different worlds, and maybe they really were close to that status. The breeze was playing over Nubber, plucking at his clothes as if trying to coax him off the ledge; come out and play, flying's so much fun.
"It's over," Nudger said. "Don't make things worse for yourself. Get in here. Please!" he added. God, he didn't want to see it again, Ernest Gate making like a featherless bird too soon out of the nest. Ernest Gate plummeting like a stone to challenge the pavement with soft flesh and brittle bone. Nudger looked down. The foreshortened people that had gathered and were staring up, the downscaled cars, the tops of streetlights, all of it started to spin and he leaned forward, forward...
A hand clutched his belt and yanked him safely back into the room.
Hammersmith.
"Lemme talk to the asshole, Nudge."
He leaned his great bulk out the window and stared angrily over at Nubber. "You ain't gonna jump, 'cause you're too smart. Think this situation through. You get a good lawyer, you might walk away acquitted of a fraud charge. You get a bad lawyer, you'll probably do at most two years of a five-year stretch. Not nearly as long a time as what you're thinking about. So walk yourself back in here, Nubber, or else step off, but don't waste our time. You ain't worth it."
Hammersmith moved back away from the window and exchanged glances with Giardello.
They waited.
After about a minute a gray cuff and a black shoe appeared on the ledge, and Nubber clumsily backed himself into the room, falling onto the threadbare carpet and scrambling to his feet. The uniform had him immediately and cuffed his hands behind his back. Giardello read him his rights.
"That the truth?" Nudger asked Hammersmith. "About him only doing a few years at most?"
Hammersmith looked grim. "'Fraid so, Nudge. He's a businessman who went too far, that's all. These days, even the federal government does the kinda thing Nubber'll plead guilty to."
Where was justice? Nudger wondered, watching Abner Nubber being led away, thinking about Ernest Gate and the man mowing the lawn in St. Louis Hills. About the many other men and women who might not have dreamed of being unfaithful to their spouses, except for the amorality and entrepreneurship of Abner Nubber, and temptation too professional and potent to be resisted. Where was justice? And where would it be when Nubber was set free?
As they wrestled Nubber out the door he glanced back at Nudger.
He was smiling, his eyes fierce as a tiger's.
The Litigants
Nudger thought there was no good reason why Lawrence Fleck should be alive. The pugnacious little attorney in the cheap, chalk-stripe black suit, and the surrounding aroma of cut-rate, cloying cologne stood with his fists on his hips in front of Nudger's desk and glared down at him.
When Nudger merely stared back, Fleck picked up his coat from where he'd tossed it on a chair, brushed it off, then folded it, and laid it over the chair's arm, where it might stay cleaner. It was made of some kind of mottled, curly fur Nudger had never seen before. Fleck glanced around and scrunched up his bulldog face as if he'd just inhaled a bug. "You got an office looks like a rat hole, Nudger."
"Now that you walked in."
Fleck snorted contemptuously in his best courtroom manner—his only courtroom manner. "We got business to discuss. I'm here to hire you."
"I don't work for ambulance chasers."
"You're listening but you're not hearing, Nudger. Just like always. I said the word hire. That means the word money. Exactly what losers like you need."
Hmm. Nudger knew Fleck was right about that last part. Nudger's former wife, Eileen, had joined a militant feminist group called WOO—Women on the Offensive—whose pro bono lawyer was planning on dragging Nudger back into court to attach damages onto his alimony payments. Eileen and her attorney were claiming that Nudger was responsible for the marriage's failure, which deprived Eileen of children in her prime fertile years, for which deprivation Nudger should pay compensation. Sort of nonchild-support payments. The attorney, a truly frightening woman named Shirley Knott, was attempting to make history with this test case by establishing legal precedent. Important new ground might be broken. She'd chosen Nudger for her plow.
"Money up front?" Nudger asked.
"A little way back," Fleck said with a shrug. "There's a big settlement waiting to happen in this case, and when I get my money you'll get yours."
"I can't eat pie in the sky," Nudger said. "But maybe we can barter. Trade services."
Fleck looked suspicious, dishonest, tempted. "We wouldn't have to claim income on our tax returns . . ." he said thoughtfully.
"It'd be a wash anyway," Nudger pointed out, "but it would still be fun not to claim it. Tell me why you want to hire me, then I'll tell you about someone named Shirley Knott. I think you tw
o should meet."
"Here's the deal," Fleck said, pacing with short, lurching strides and flailing his arms for emphasis as he talked. "Client named Arty Mason comes to me, says a woman ran into his old Chevy. She's driving a Mercedes, barely gets scratched. Just about totals Arty's car, he says."
"'What do you mean?' he says. Have you seen the car, the estimates for repairs?"
"All that stuff," Fleck said with a backhanded wave of dismissal. "There are some questions from the insurance company as to how old a lot of the damages are, but that's insignificant. In fact, the whole accident might be insignificant, because Arty tells me the collider came to him and offered to pay fifteen hundred to him, leave the insurance companies and any sort of police accident report out of it."
"Collider?"
"Legal term, Nudger. She ran into him. Collider's this bit of eye candy named Nora Bosca."
"'Eye Candy' is a legal term, too, I guess. Nora Bosca was driving the other car?"
"What I said. You were listening but not hearing again, Nudger. I advised my client not to accept the collider's offer. Know why?"
"Sure. She was a wealthy woman who might have something to hide. So you and this Arty might be able to extort money from her."
Fleck backed away as if slapped and glared down at Nudger with nostrils flared. "That's an insult to me and my profession, and coming from a cheap keyhole peeper."
"Did it work?"
"Yes. She came across with five thousand. Arty said no to that, too, so she gave him ten thousand. Plenty angry about it, though. I don't think we could have gotten any more."
"Seems like the end of the case," Nudger said.
"It was, until Arty's back started acting up because of the accident. A week ago we filed against Nora Bosca for medical expenses."
"I'm not surprised. You got greedy and figured out a way to go back for seconds."
"Don't be so judgmental, Nudger. I'm sworn to get all I can for my client. And you oughta see poor Arty. He can barely get around. Wears a brace."
When someone's looking, Nudger thought.