The Nudger Dilemmas

by John Lutz

  When he called from a public phone just inside the entrance of a supermarket, she was cool to his invitation. "Is something wrong?" Nudger asked.

  "Very wrong. I don't think we should see each other for a while, Nudger."

  His stomach seemed to be devouring his other organs. This was pain. "Have you gone back to Dr. Oliver?"

  "Far from it. I've begun to realize he's the one who's caused most of my problems. His advice to see other men so I might attain self-actualization, the sedatives that dulled my senses, the long sessions that went nowhere productive . . ."

  Nudger was heartened.

  "I sought other advice and I've decided to sue Dr. Oliver," Claudia said firmly.

  Nudger was shocked. "He's an established medical professional, Claudia. He has malpractice insurance, squads of lawyers. You can't afford to sue Oliver."

  "I have help, Nudger. I've joined WOO."

  "We need to talk."

  "We shouldn't, under the circumstances. It would be legally unwise for both of us."

  "Claudia—"

  "I'm sorry, Nudger, but I have to learn who I am to be who I am. I'm confident I'll find I'm a better person, one who I know I can be."

  "What on earth does that mean? I know who you are. You're the woman who likes—"

  She hung up.

  He stood traumatized. He turned right. He turned left. He didn't know where to turn next. Finally he decided to seek solace in his work. He'd stake out the condo and follow Nora Bosca again. He would be doing his job, holding up his end of his agreement with Fleck. This was what it had come down to. This was all he had. Driven by obligation and dismay, he got his legs moving so he was lurching toward the automatic doors, dodging grocery carts and cursing his stars.

  The big Mercedes with the dented fender nosed like a prowling shark out of the underground garage this time. Nudger thought Nora Bosca was going to take the same route today and visit her attorney. Instead she turned left, on Delmar, then took the Inner Belt north. Nudger swiped at the Granada's windshield with one of his old undershirts that he used as a rag, aiding the defrosters as he stayed behind the Mercedes in heavy traffic.

  The sleek black car exited on Natural Bridge, then turned down a side street and pulled into the parking lot of a small motel near the airport. Nudger parked near the entrance and watched the Mercedes drive to the far end of the lot and stop almost out of sight next to a large dented green Dumpster. He felt like the cheap peeper. Fleck had called him, aware that his metabolism had picked up. Something was happening here, all right. And some part of him was enjoying it.

  Large snowflakes started to fall, obscuring his vision. Also Nora Bosca's. Nudger got out of his car and unobtrusively walked parallel to the front of the motel, staying away from the office. Then he moved along a row of parked cars until he was out of sight of the Mercedes. He crouched behind a red pickup truck.

  Nora Bosca had gotten out of her car. She strode into Nudger's line of sight, kicking out with her long legs and fur-topped boots, glancing around furtively. Nudger ducked low and watched over the truck's hood. The door, opened as she arrived. She didn't even have to break stride before she was inside the room and out of sight.

  But Nudger had seen enough.

  He drove to a phone and called Hammersmith, then returned to the motel through the driving snow.

  There were so many red lights blinking there it looked like the place was on fire.

  The county police wouldn't let him get close until Hammersmith arrived, sirens screaming, in the first of two Major Case Squad units. He nodded to Nudger and they walked toward the motel room Nora Bosca had entered. Its door was wide open and people were packed into the room. Thick uniform coats made everyone look bulky and immovable. When Nudger and Hammersmith were five feet from the door, they were stopped by a big man in a blue parka who flashed a badge and said he was Captain Farmington of the county police and he was in charge. The corpulent Hammersmith, bulkiest of the bulky in his tent-like camel-hair coat, puffed up even larger and said this was a Major Case Squad investigation and he was the officer in charge. Two deadpan guys in identical tan trench coats arrived and said they were FBI and they were in charge. There was a lot of arguing and shoving, and it seemed somebody from all three units took part in hustling Manny Boscanarro and his wife, Nora, to a waiting unmarked Pontiac with tinted windows and a stubby antenna on its trunk. They were the only ones without coats.

  "But Boscanarro was found dead!" Fleck said incredulously.

  They were in Nudger's office. The radiator was working okay for a change, and the winter sun was brilliant through the half-melted sheet of ice on the window. "You're listening but you're not hearing," Nudger told Fleck. "The plastic surgery on the dead man in the trash barrel wasn't actually botched. It was made to seem that way, done on some poor guy who resembled Manny Boscanarro enough that he'd pass for him with a botched face-lift. Since the victim's arms had been cut off there were no fingerprints. And Boscanarro had no dental records in this country. Six people identified the body, even his wife. And she claimed a gold necklace with their names engraved on it."

  Fleck started to pace, grinning and flailing his pudgy little arms. "Well, I'll be flamboozied!"

  "Wouldn't be the first time," Nudger said.

  "Our barter deal worked out just fine!" he said.

  "For you," Nudger told him.

  "You too, my friend!" Fleck said triumphantly. "Shirley has advised Eileen to drop the nonchild-support case."

  Nudger was astounded. "Shirley Knott did that?"

  Fleck actually looked embarrassed. "I persuaded her. Or we persuaded each other. We've uh, become close. Neither of us planned on it, but it happened."

  There truly is someone for everyone, Nudger thought. Wolf and gray wolf.

  "What about WOO?" he asked. "What about making legal history?"

  "Shirley and I are preparing to press another historic case, this time in the field of animal rights."

  "Animals?"

  "Primates, specifically."

  "Primates don't have legal rights."

  "You are a primate, Nudger."

  That gave Nudger pause.

  "The Constitution refers to men only," Fleck continued, "but obviously women are also meant to enjoy its rights and protections. Who's to say that women are the only primates excluded by the literal language? It's the kind of legal technicality that might change the world."

  "Which particular primates are your clients?"

  "The ones in the Primate House at the zoo. Shirley—and I—think three of the chimpanzees have occupied the premises long enough to claim squatter's rights by law."

  Nudger was momentarily dizzy. "You can't claim the chimpanzees own the building!"

  "Possession is nine points of the—"

  "Get out!" Nudger screamed. "Get out!" Then, calmer "No, wait."

  Fleck paused at the door and cocked his head in the opposite direction that his cheap toupee was tilted. He was looking at Nudger with an uncharacteristic injured expression on his puggy little features. "What?"

  "Thanks."

  "You too," Fleck said. "I'll send my bill." And he was out the door and gone.

  Nudger sat with his face cupped in his hands, trying to fathom it all. He heard the door open and close and knew Fleck had returned.

  But when he peeked through his fingers he saw that it wasn't Fleck.

  It was an enormous man in a neat brown suit. He was breathing through his mouth and had a long, narrow face with a bent nose and wide-set eyes that made him look like a horse.

  "You're Nudger," he said, and proffered a giant hand. Instinctively Nudger shook it and his own hand was mashed painfully before it was released.

  The horselike man sat down. Nudger wondered which breed Fleck would choose to categorize him. Clydesdale, maybe. He stared at Nudger in a way that was unnerving. Nudger unobtrusively opened his top desk drawer and slid his throbbing hand inside, toward the gun that rested there.

  "My name
's Clyde Davis, Mr. Nudger. Can you guess why I'm here?"

  Nudger's heart was hammering, his stomach writhing. "Because of Manny Boscanarro?"

  Clyde Davis looked puzzled, crossed his legs, and smiled in a way somehow more bovine than equine. "I don't know anyone by that name. I'm here because you've been harassed. We've learned that an accusation against you was recently withdrawn, but not until after you suffered monetary loss and great emotional stress in a frivolous lawsuit that made mockery and misuse of the courts. You deserve compensation, Mr. Nudger."

  Nudger stayed his hand over the gun. "We've learned? You're from a law firm?"

  "No, Mr. Nudger, but I'm here to help guide you through future litigation as you press your case. I'm from MOO."

  Nudger began to withdraw his hand from the drawer but found that he couldn't.

  He just couldn't.

  He sat staring at the man from MOO.

  His hand hovered over the gun.

  The Man in the Morgue

  It was a big house, with enough gables, dormers, and cupolas to resemble a maniac's chessboard. I smoothly braked and curbed my beige Volkswagen Beetle in the semicircular driveway, conscious of the car's faded paint and character-forming dents in contrast to the symmetrically bricked and shrubbed entranceway to the house. The engine turned over a few times after I'd killed the ignition.

  I half expected a butler to answer my ring. Instead, a large cop in a sweat-stained blue uniform opened the door and stared at me. He was about fifty with shrewd gray eyes, a shaggy gray moustache that turned down at the corners, a bulging stomach that dictated he shop in the big men's department.

  "Mr. Aloysius Nudger to see Mrs. Emily Stein," I told him.

  "If you had a hat and coat," he said, "I could take them from you and hang them up." He stepped back so I could enter. "She's expecting you, Nudger. I'm Chief Gladstone, Marlville Police."

  I followed him down a tile-floored hall into a large room furnished in dainty French provincial. The carpet was the same deep pearl color as the grips in the revolver in Gladstone's leather hip holster, and ceiling-to-floor powder-blue drapes were opened to admit soft light through white sheer curtains. The walls were papered in light gold patterned in darker gold fleurs-de-lis. It struck me as the sort of place where it might be difficult to read the menu.

  Emily Stein rose from a fragile-looking sofa and smiled a strained smile at me. She was more beautiful now than she was twenty years ago when her name was Emily Colter and she was still single and chasing a modeling career. I couldn't understand how she'd failed to catch that career. She was tall and slender but curvaceous, and she had angular, faintly oriental cheekbones and oversized, compassionate blue eyes. I'd been in love with her once, back in Plainton, Missouri. But that was over twenty years ago, and she'd considered us only good friends even then. She had phoned me at my office yesterday and said she'd found herself in trouble, would I drive out and talk with her about it. I said yes, what were friends for?

  "Thank you for coming Alo," she said, simply. There were circles of worry beneath her large eyes. "This is Chief Fred Gladstone of the Marlville Police Department."

  I nodded and we all sat down politely, Gladstone and I on silkily upholstered, breakable-looking matching chairs that were too well-bred to creak.

  "Chief Gladstone agreed it might be a good idea to call you in on this," Emily said, "when I told him we were old friends and you're a private detective in the city."

  When I glanced over at Gladstone's gone-to-fat craggy features, my impression was that he hadn't had much choice. "Larry's been kidnapped," Emily said.

  I waited while she paused for what they call in drama circles "a dramatic beat." Emily had always been stagy in an appealing way. Larry Stein was the man she married five years ago, a wealthy importer of leather goods, dark-haired, handsome, still in his thirties. I'd been at the wedding.

  "Or do you use the term 'kidnapped' for a grown man?" Emily asked.

  "You do," I told her. "When was Larry kidnapped?"

  "Yesterday at three p.m., by the statue of Admiral Farragut in the park."

  "Was there a ransom demand?"

  "Even before the kidnapping," Gladstone cut in.

  "Three days ago," Emily said, "Larry got a letter in the mail here at home. It was to the point and unsigned. If he didn't deliver five thousand dollars to the sender at three yesterday afternoon near the Farragut statue, I would be killed."

  Gladstone stood up from his chair, moved to a secretary near the window, and handed me a white envelope. "It's already been checked for prints," he said. "Nothing there. Postmarked locally, widely sold, cheap typing paper, typed on a Royal electric portable."

  The folded note inside the envelope was as Emily had described—short, direct, neat, and grammatically correct. I asked her, "Did Larry follow these instructions?"

  Emily nodded. "And he told me to call you if anything happened to him. He thinks a lot of you professionally."

  I found it odd that he'd think of me at all, since I'd only met him twice. But then I'm sure he knew, in that instinctive way husbands have, that I greatly admired Emily.

  "Larry knew something wasn't right about it, even as a straight extortion demand," Emily went on. "He said the amount of money they demanded was too small and what they really might want was an opportunity to grab him with enough money on him for them to be able to hold out while they waited for a huge ransom."

  "It turns out Larry was right," Gladstone said. "Emily got this in this morning's mail." He handed me another envelope, identical to the first—same paper, same typing—but this time with a demand for $100,000. Otherwise dead Larry. The kidnappers ended the note by assuring Emily they'd stay in touch.

  I looked at the postmark. Yesterday's date, time 11:00 a.m., local.

  "Right," Gladstone said, following my thoughts. "Mailed before Larry was snatched. So it was planned, not spontaneous."

  "How about the FBI?" I said.

  Emily shook her head no, her lips a firm, thin line.

  "She refused," Gladstone told me. "She wants you instead."

  I sat back in my chair digesting what I'd learned. It gave me a stomach ache. Extortion, kidnapping, threatened murder, a ransom demand from someone or some group that seemed to know what moves to make. I didn't have the nerves for my profession. Automatically, I reached into my shirt pocket, peeled back some tinfoil, and popped a thin white antacid tablet into my mouth.

  "Call the FBI, Emily," I said. "The odds are better that way."

  "Larry told me not to do that. He said it would be a sure way to get him killed. The FBI has a file on him. In the sixties he was what you might call a student radical—nothing serious, but his photograph was taken with the wrong people and he was in the wrong spot when a building burned down. It's all behind him, but they might not believe that."

  From student radical to Larry the capitalist.

  "What now?" Emily asked in a lost voice.

  "We wait for instructions and take it from there. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a recorder on the phone in case they decide to stop using the mail."

  "That's been taken care of," Gladstone said.

  "Can you get the hundred thousand?" I asked Emily.

  "I can." No hesitation.

  "Do you have any idea who might be doing this? Sometimes a kidnapping is a personal matter."

  "No one I can think of." Outside a jay started a shrill chatter on the patio. The strident notes seemed to set Emily more on edge. "Larry never told me much about his business; he knows people I don't know. But he was—is—the type who never made enemies."

  "Except for the FBI," I said, rising from my fragile chair. The sheer curtains were parted slightly, and beyond the brick patio I could see a tilled garden about twelve by nine feet, lined with cabbage, lettuce and staked tomato plants. Near the center of the garden were two rows of young tomato vines that would mature toward the end of summer and keep the Stems in tomatoes all season long. The garden was neglected n
ow and needed weeding. Still, it was a garden. I smiled. Plainton, Missouri. A part of Emily would always remain a country girl.

  "Maybe somebody ought to stay here with you nights," Gladstone said.

  "No," Emily said. "I'll be fine. The house is equipped with dead bolt locks and has a burglar-alarm system. And I have Bruno."

  Emily got up and walked to the door at the other end of the room. When she opened the door, a huge black and tan German Shepherd ambled in and sat, his white teeth glinting against his black lips and lolling pink tongue. Bruno was a factor.

  Before I left, I gave Emily and Gladstone each one of my printed cards with my home and office numbers. I told Emily to try to keep occupied and worry as little as possible. Hollow advice but my best under the circumstances.

  The Volkswagen's oil-starved engine beat like a busy machine shop as I drove past Marlville's exclusive shopping area of boutiques, service stations bordered by artificial green grass and shrubbery that would fool you at a thousand feet, and a red-brick and yellow-plastic McDonald's harboring half a dozen scraggly teenagers with nothing better to do on a sunny June day in swank suburbia.

  I turned onto the cloverleaf and headed east toward the city, glad to be away from all that manicured spaciousness.

  From a phone booth on Davis Avenue, I checked with my answering service. No one had called, and I didn't feel like returning to my desolate office to reread my mail.

  My apartment was also a lonely place, but the loneliness was in me, wherever I went. I phoned a colleague at police headquarters who had an FBI connection and promised to get me information on Larry Stein in a hurry and call back. Then I took a quick shower, leaving the bathroom door open so I could hear the phone.

  It rang while I was toweling myself dry.

  Larry Stein had been a member of a short-lived left-wing student organization called LIFT, Leftist Insurgents for Tomorrow. He had attended some demonstrations that turned violent and had been photographed near the R.O.T.C. building at Washington University when it burned down. He was never formally charged with arson, and someone else was eventually convicted of the crime. This was in 1966. Who cared now? Probably no one.