by John Lutz
“He really ought to get a ticket for polluting,” Nudger said.
“I’m not in Traffic,” the cop explained.
He was still standing motionless with his fists on his hips, staring suspiciously as Nudger went inside.
Nudger inquired at the desk. Crime was slow. Hammersmith was in.
After the duty sergeant had alerted him by phone of Nudger’s presence, Hammersmith appeared in the hall outside his office door and waved for Nudger to enter.
Nudger perched on the uncomfortable oak chair and waited to speak until Hammersmith had situated his bulk in his deep leather executive chair. Hammersmith’s smooth, fleshy pink hand moved toward the box of cigars on his desk, hesitated, then withdrew. Only a threat.
“I was accosted in the parking lot,” Nudger told him.
“Accosted. That’s an old-fashioned word.”
“I almost went into an old-fashioned swoon. The gunsel who accosted me was almost big enough to be snow-peaked.”
“Gunsel? Really, Nudge.” Hammersmith’s blue eyes were as merry as Santa’s in his flesh-padded cheeks. “Was the subject armed? Were threats made?”
“Implied.”
Hammersmith did remove a cigar from the box now, and methodically peeled the cellophane wrapper from it. He gazed at it as if it were a woman he’d just undressed but made no move to light it. “Explain how all this came to pass,” he suggested.
Nudger explained.
“Did you get the Buick’s license number?” Hammersmith asked.
“I did, but we don’t need it. I got the man’s name.”
Hammersmith did light the cigar now. He exhaled a green death cloud and raised his eyebrows incredulously, crinkling his smooth forehead. “He followed you right into the station-house parking lot without knowing it, then was dumb enough to give you his name?”
“I forgot to mention,” Nudger said, “that before dropping the wallet when he started to come around, I looked inside and checked his identification. He’s a Hugo Rumbo.”
“Hm, sounds like a dance craze.”
“His address is over on Russell, that stretch of rundown apartment buildings.”
“He obviously isn’t a pro bone crusher,” Hammersmith said, “because he didn’t know the location of the station house. And because of the way he handled the situation when he did find out where he was.”
“I’d like you to goose the machinery,” Nudger said. “Find out who and what Hugo Rumbo is, and why he might be interested in me.”
“That might not be so easy,” Hammersmith said, “with just his description, license plate number, name and address.” He leaned back and exhaled another cumulonimbus. “Though in this, the age of the microchip, computers do work magic.”
“You’re taking this kind of light and loose,” Nudger said. “This Rumbo was about to commence pounding on me right in the police station parking lot. How would that have looked in tomorrow’s newspapers? Or on the evening local TV news? Remember, I used to be Coppy the Clown. I can ham it up for the minicameras even from a hospital bed.”
Hammersmith extended his lower lip and somberly nodded. “You make a salient point.” He placed the greenish cigar back in his mouth, clamped down on it but didn’t inhale. “Don’t you have any idea as to why this Rumbo thing was following you?”
“None.”
“Do you owe anyone money?”
“Almost everyone, but not one who’d���” Nudger sat up straighter. “Eileen, maybe.”
Hammersmith appeared disgusted. “Stay serious, Nudge.” He had always liked Eileen.
“I owe her almost a thousand dollars in back alimony.”
“Eileen wouldn’t hire an enforcer and you know it.”
Nudger nodded resignedly. Hammersmith was right. Not as right as he assumed, but right. It would be silly of Eileen to risk messing herself up in court and killing the goose that laid the brass eggs.
“Are you still working on that twins case?” Hammersmith asked.
“Sure, but I doubt if there’s a connection with Rumbo.”
“Oh? What else are you working on?”
Nudger saw what Hammersmith meant. But he couldn’t imagine Agnes Boyington hiring a professional leg breaker any more than he could really picture Eileen arranging a serious beating for him. And it didn’t seem possible that Jenine’s killer could know at this point that Nudger was on his trail.
Unless the murderer knew Jeanette, or Agnes Boyington, or anyone else who had found out what Nudger was working on. Those people included Danny, Fisher at the phone company, Hammersmith, and those on the case’s periphery whom he’d questioned indirectly about the Boyington murder. It might be absurd to suspect any of them, yet people talked. And people listened. Word spread like the proverbial ripples in a pond, signaling both prey and predator.
“I’ll run a check on Rumbo,” Hammersmith said. He said it reassuringly, reading Nudger’s mind with his cop’s honed insight. “We’ll get some answers.”
“And probably raise some questions.”
“It usually works that way. But it’s better than walking around in complete ignorance.”
“I’m not so sure,” Nudger said, “and I’ve walked around in both conditions. My problem is, I need to learn enough answers to be able to collect my fee. Sometimes that turns out to be a few answers too many.”
Not joking in the slightest, Hammersmith said, “I have a feeling you’re going to more than earn your fee this time, Nudge.”
Nudger offered no contradiction. He shared Hammersmith’s ominous premonition, and he had a personal stake in its accuracy.
He said goodbye and walked from Hammersmith’s smoke-fouled office, down the hall, past the booking desk and outside, pausing halfway out the door to stand on the top concrete step. The early evening sky was mottled by gray, illuminated clouds, blasted with light by the lowering sun to make it look like a scene from one of those dime-store religious prints that depressed rather than inspired. A southwest breeze whispered confidentially that there would surely be rain by nightfall. In the booking area, the droning metallic voice of a dispatcher directed a patrol car to a trouble spot somewhere in the darkening city. Telephones rang in remote offices, were answered with reasonable promptness. The place was humming with efficient, well-practiced activity, comforting sounds of Law and Order.
Nudger started toward his car.
When the station house’s heavy doors clicked shut behind him, he felt naked.
IX
Do you wonder what I look like?”
“I’m glad you’re curious about whether I do,” Nudger told Claudia. He was seated again at midnight in the dimness of his office, wrapped in the soft yellow illumination from his desk lamp, the telephone receiver gripped like a handle affixed to the side of his face. “It suggests that you might be interested.”
“In you?”
“No,” he told her, “in you.”
“Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”
“Oh, it does. And I do wonder, Claudia. Why don’t you describe yourself?”
She didn’t speak for a while. There was a sound in the phone that Nudger couldn’t identify, a rising and falling, a distant, rushing roar. Not interference on the line; he was sure of that.
“I’m��� average,” she said at last.
Nudger harrumphed into the phone. “Average, huh? Tall? Short? Blue eyes, or brown? Young, old, fat, lean, brunette, blonde, straight, or stooped? Nobody’s average. Only people who sell things believe that.”
He thought she might be annoyed by his persistence, but she wasn’t. “All right,” she said, with subsurface laughter in her voice, “I’m thirty-six years old, medium height, brunette with brown eyes, not too fat or thin, with reasonably good posture.”
“Sounds average,” Nudger said.
“I warned you. I never claimed I was a finalist in a beauty contest.”
“Who would want you to be? Anyway, a thing so slight as a twitch in the flank can knock you
out of the finals in those contests. And maybe I’m enamored of average. Maybe I like ranch houses, four-door sedans, two-fifty hitters, and plain vanilla ice cream-two scoops.”
“No,” she said, “you’re not average.”
“I strive not to be,” Nudger admitted. “For instance, I often wear my brown shoes with my gray suit, just to shake things up. I try to vary my schedule in all things. Maybe it would be a good idea for us to get out of this rut and talk when the sun is out.”
“I work during the day,” she said simply.
“Every day?”
“Almost. But not tomorrow.” Again Nudger heard that soft, peculiar rushing sound on the other end of the connection, a murmur at first, building to a crescendo and then tapering to silence. He considered asking Claudia what the sound was, then decided not to tip her to the one clue he had as to her whereabouts. “Maybe we can talk again tomorrow,” she said, almost grudgingly. “Will you be at your number in the afternoon?”
“I can’t promise,” Nudger told her. “Why don’t you give me a definite time?”
“No,” she said. “If you don’t answer the phone, I’ll try to get through to you again.”
“Do you promise?”
“Of course not.”
“It would be easier if we simply met somewhere,” Nudger suggested. “Are you afraid you’ll be disappointed?”
“No. And I’m not afraid you will. Isn’t that really what you were implying?”
“Don’t get all defensive on me, please,” Nudger said.
He heard her breathe out into the receiver. “All right, I’m sorry. It’s just that if we talk in person, there’ll be no way to cut short a gorilla joke.”
Actually, her defensiveness was exactly the sort of response Nudger wanted from her. She seemed to have acquired a degree of resilience. She seemed to have moved much farther away from the gun, rope, pills, or whatever means she had been considering to furnish her transportation beyond this vale of tears. But Nudger knew the unpredictability of people actually contemplating suicide, the dark cloud on the mind, unexplainable, that came and went as if by whims of capricious breezes. A distorted face flashed vividly in Nudger’s mind. It belonged to a man he and Hammersmith had found over ten years ago hanging in a garage. He was dressed in women’s clothing and had killed that side of himself he loathed. Nudger had been told it wasn’t uncommon.
“I don’t mean to push,” he told Claudia, still haunted by the macabre memory.
She must have picked up the concern in his voice. “You don’t push,” she said. “I say ouch too quickly; I admit that.” Again the rushing roar, then silence.
“Don’t say ouch, Claudia, just push back. I won’t mind. I have a thick skin.”
She laughed loudly, a little too shrilly. “No, you don’t. That’s one reason you were able to��� draw me back from where I was going. When we talked that first night, I somehow knew right away that you were as vulnerable as I.”
Nudger felt the heat of an almost adolescent blush. This was absurd, to form a close electronic relationship with a woman he’d never met. A relationship so intimate that she could make him react this way. This was self-deception raised to an art. This was the masochism of truth.
“If I’ve touched a sensitive nerve, embarrassed you���” Her voice was apologetic.
“No,” Nudger lied, “you haven’t embarrassed me. Or if you have, I deserve it.” The hell with this pain of revelation. “I still think we should get together, lie to each other like other people. It might be refreshing not to suffer.”
“Maybe someday,” she said. “I’m going to hang up now, Nudger. I’ve got to get some sleep so I’ll be able to get out of bed to go to work tomorrow.”
“You told me you were off tomorrow.”
“I’m only working in the morning. You probably have to go to work, too.”
“Not me. I’ve got nothing to do but amble to my safety deposit box and clip coupons, then phone my broker. I usually start around noon. It’s a good life even if somewhat monotonous.”
When she didn’t speak, Nudger thought she might have taken him seriously.
“Actually,” he said, “I was lying. The only coupons I clip are the kind that save a dime at the supermarket, and my broker doesn’t return my calls.”
“You weren’t lying, Nudger. You were just telling the truth in your own way. A kind of reverse English.”
“Freud is dead,” he snapped at her, but she had hung up.
He fitted the receiver in its cradle and, with his fingertips still resting on it, sat in the warm dimness trying to figure out the source of the sound he’d heard in Claudia’s phone.
Not intermittent rushes of nearby traffic, not distant trains or planes or��� ships.
The sea! That was what the sound reminded him of more than anything else. The occasional rush of a wave onto the beach, a loud sigh of surf that reached a higher decibel range when the infrequent huge breaker roared in from the sea.
He rubbed his hand over his face, as if to erase worry lines, and shook his head. The trouble with the surf theory was that the nightlines were strictly local, and the nearest ocean to St. Louis was almost a thousand miles away.
Nudger decided not to think about Claudia or the eerie sound on the phone or anything else for a while. He was tired enough to have slumped in his chair without realizing it, and gravity was getting the better of his eyelids. Forcing himself to sit up straight, he considered drinking a cup of coffee.
Then he decided that staying awake would be pointless. Whatever he might accomplish tonight-this morning-would be easier done after he’d slept. He was at the point where whatever drowsiness he endured now would simply add to his sluggishness after sunup. Rather than fight his weariness, he leaned over the desk, cradled his head in his arms, and dozed with the scent of old varnished wood inches below his nose. There was a memory jogger. Nap time in elementary school. “Heads on those desks, children.” Catching a stolen wink or two in high school or college. “Are we disturbing your slumber, young Mr. Nudger?”
He ignored the teacher. He was on the beach, his cheek pressed into a rough, warm towel that gave with the soft sand beneath it. A hot sun made his bare back tingle pleasantly. He heard the ocean nearby, sighing deeply and evenly like something gigantic in hibernation in a dark cave of the mind. A gull screamed. A gull rang. A spindly-legged sandpiper hopped delicately across the hot beach to Nudger, extended a fingertipped wing, and, raising his sunglasses so it could see his eyes, said, “It’s for you. Rates are cheaper after nine. Reach out and-”
Nudger was awake in the morning-bright office and the receiver was in his hand. He must have reached for it in his sleep. He brought it to his ear. Danny’s voice said, “Short notice, Nudge, but I thought you’d wanna know trouble’s coming your way.”
Nudger was aware of footsteps, someone climbing the narrow stairs from the street door. He thanked Danny for the warning and hung up the phone, picturing the substantial Hugo Rumbo while trying to recall if he’d locked the office door. He had, he hadn’t, he had, he hadn’t. He hadn’t!
A board on the landing creaked. A familiar sound. Whoever was out there was at the top of the stairs. Nudger would have opened a desk drawer and reached for his gun, if he’d owned a gun. His stomach and heart seemed to be fighting for the same cramped space in his throat as he stood up and leaned steeply forward, supporting himself shakily with his arms locked at the elbows and his hands palms-down on the desk. He found himself unable to look away from the prismatic glass doorknob on his office door.
The knob rotated. The door opened.
Eileen stepped in.
“Startle you?” she asked.
Nudger sat down, leaned back, and breathed out hard. “You startled me,” he confirmed.
“I meant to. It seems to be the only way I can capture your attention.”
Nudger smoothed back his hair with his fingers, straightened his collar, and gave her his attention. She was still an
attractive woman, trim and neatly groomed, with a kind of wholesomeness about her that would have carried her far as an actress playing typical homemakers in television commercials. Though a delicate woman with a certain frilliness about her, she had a robust complexion, large and perfectly aligned very white teeth, and shapely, strong-looking hands. It all suggested that good health meant good sex, and wasn’t far off the mark.
Why had they lost both love and lust for each other? Nudger thought sometimes that it was the ungodly and unpredictable hours he worked. Or was it the sterility of the suburban plot they had called home? Whatever had caused the widening gap between them was still a mystery, as it probably remained in most divorces. Nudger only knew that when she suggested the divorce he had felt not only shock but also undeniable relief. A lightning comprehension-or admission. He, too, wanted to live a life different from the one they shared. Eileen had seen that in him as soon as she’d brought up the subject of a divorce as a possible alternative, and that was that. In that instant it had been transformed from an alternative to an inevitability.
Such were the complexities of the human heart. Or maybe it was simpler and less poetic than that. Maybe he’d decided subconsciously to leave her when he heard her use the word “cute” three times in one sentence, there on the phone in that suburban frame house that was like the neighboring houses on either side. But he was being unfair. He knew that his reaction to that triple-cute was probably only symptomatic of their real problem.
“You still have it,” he told her.
She smiled. “Thank you.”
“I mean, you still have my attention.” He hadn’t meant to hurt her.
Smile gone. “And you still have a way with words, and I still don’t have my money. Almost a thousand dollars now in back alimony.”