by John Lutz
The apartment was surprisingly large, sparsely and cheaply furnished, with threadbare oriental rugs over hardwood floors, mismatched furniture, and a very old console TV with a round bulging screen like an insect’s eye. Large prints of show-business personalities or reproductions of thirties movie posters decorated the rough plaster walls. There was Bela Lugosi hovering over a coffin, disturbingly apropos. There was Bogie, blowing a whiff of smoke from the barrel of a blue steel automatic while a young Lauren Bacall watched with disinterest. There was King Kong taking a poke at a biplane.
There was Hammersmith, in the ample flesh, motioning for Nudger to join him. Nudger nodded to an assistant ME he knew slightly and circled a knot of plainclothes detectives to get to Hammersmith.
“C’mon,” Hammersmith said. “She’s still in the bathroom.”
Nudger braced himself and followed Hammersmith down a short hall.
The bathroom was also a very large room, lined with green tile from floor to ceiling. Grace Valpone didn’t look as bad as Nudger had anticipated. She was so pale she was almost the grayish white of the claw-footed porcelain tub wherein she reclined. One slender white leg was draped over the side of the tub. Her head was resting on the porcelain slope of the tub’s back. No one had closed her eyes. She was a beautiful woman, probably more so in death than she’d been in life. Her expression was one of dignified, laconic annoyance, as if she resented the intimacy of her bath being invaded by the clods from Homicide, the fingerprint crew just now closing up shop, the police photographer still snapping shots from various angles with his instant-print Japanese camera. Horror without gore. Hitchcock couldn’t have staged it better.
Nudger stepped closer and his stomach lurched. Different movie. The bottom of the tub was caked reddish brown, and the lower portion of Grace Valpone’s body was slashed and mutilated. Her nipples were gone; there were several deep defense wounds on the palms of her hands.
Nudger stepped back. “Good Christ,” he said softly.
Hammersmith clapped him on the shoulder. “You never could take it, could you, Nudge?”
No need for a reply. Both men knew how it was. Nudger had never become accustomed to the sight of violent death. It was one of the reasons his police career had been cut short.
They left the pale lady and went into the living room. Some of the bustle was dying down as various technicians who’d finished their tasks were leaving the crime scene, casually chatting, occasionally grinning, as if drifting away from a cocktail party. All very convivial. Soon the hostess would be removed in a rubber body bag.
Nudger and Hammersmith sat on the sofa. Hammersmith stared at Nudger for a moment and suddenly seemed uneasy and solicitous, as if any second he might try to smooth things over by offering Nudger tea.
“I didn’t figure it would be such a shock to your system, Nudge. Honest.”
“The hell with that,” Nudger said. “Do you think this was done by Jenine Boyington’s killer?”
Hammersmith drew a cigar from his shirt pocket, glanced guiltily at Nudger and then returned it. “There are obvious similarities, and dissimilarities. The picture isn’t clear yet. This one’s been dead since night before last; a friend found her a few hours ago. We’ll know more when we get a lab report, and after we question her family and friends.”
“The two crimes might tie in,” Nudger said. “Fingerprints, hair, the Valpone woman’s love life��� any of them could make the link.” Nudger imagined the killer sitting where he now sat, in the corner of the sofa, watching Grace Valpone and building to the moment. “It almost has to be.”
“Fingerprints we know about,” Hammersmith said. “The apartment’s full of them, of course, but none of them are the killer’s. The fingerprint boys said right away that whoever murdered Grace Valpone wore gloves. So there’s one dissimilarity in the two crimes. And there were no correlative prints to determine the size of this killer’s hands.”
“What about similarities? Other than the fact that Grace Valpone and Jenine Boyington were stabbed to death in bathtubs.”
“There was no sign of forced entry in either case. And the crimes were tidy. Notice there’s no blood anywhere but in the tub. It was the same way with Jenine Boyington. The two women were placed in their bathtubs alive and then killed. Jenine’s throat was opened up, this woman’s wasn’t. But who knows, maybe the lab can tie it to the same knife. There was no semen in Jenine. We’ll have to wait for the report on Grace Valpone.”
“Dissimilarities?” Nudger asked.
“Grace Valpone was nude; Jenine Boyington was fully clothed. They were ten years apart in age; the Valpone woman was thirty-eight, in a stage of life different from Jenine’s. Jenine did temporary office work; Grace Valpone was a beautician. They lived and died in different sections of town. Boyington had never married; Valpone was divorced and had a ten-year-old son living with his father. Boyington’s apartment wasn’t bothered; this place was rummaged through. Boyington liked to party; neighbors say Valpone might as well have been a nun.” Hammersmith languidly waved a ruddy, manicured hand. ” ‘It goes on and on,’ as the widow said to the bishop.”
“What we need to find out,” Nudger said, “is whether Grace Valpone used the nightlines.”
“Correct,” Hammersmith said. “We’re going to turn this place all ways but loose looking for one of those six-six-six phone numbers, hoping we don’t find it.”
Nudger understood. “You don’t like the idea of a mass murderer,” he said. “You want her boyfriend or a neighbor to have done it and confess and hand over the weapon.”
“Exactly. The last thing anybody in this city needs, except for the news media, is a knife-happy series killer roaming around keeping in practice. I don’t want there to be any connection between this and the Boyington murder, Nudge.”
Nudger looked closely at Hammersmith. The sleek and handsome fat man had crescents of loose flesh beneath his eyes, and vertical frown lines above the bridge of his nose. He was deeply concerned, as well he should be. Blood was being spilled in copious amounts right here in his bailiwick. Still, Nudger could offer him no comfort.
“I think there is a connection,” he said. “So do you.”
“Of course I do,” Hammersmith said. “Or at least I think there might be. But as long as the two crimes aren’t officially related, I can move more freely in trying to solve them. The media, the Chief of Police, the mayor, the chronic confessors, all those people who make a cop’s life complicated won’t be involved. It’s pointless to operate in a pressure cooker if you can stay out on the range.”
Nudger watched two white-uniformed morgue attendants saunter through the apartment and go down the hall toward the bathroom. Conversation and laughter drifted out, then the harsh ripping sound of the rubber body bag being zipped. A few minutes later they carried out the wrapped thing that had been Grace Valpone. Residual rigor mortis kept the limbs bent in the slumped position the body had assumed in the bathtub, giving the grotesque impression that the corpse was attempting to push its way out of the black bag. She’ll suffocate in there! Nudger thought inanely.
“Always a cheering sight,” Hammersmith said. “I’ll let you know if we come up with anything that connects Grace Valpone with Jenine Boyington, Nudge. In the meantime, is there anything you’ve found out that we should know?”
“I haven’t learned anything that would be of much help,” Nudger said. He told Hammersmith about Wallace Everest’s being Jeanette’s lover, and about the abortion under a false identity.
“That totally evaporates Wally Everest’s motive to kill Jenine,” Hammersmith observed, “and still leaves him in Cincinnati at the time of the murder.”
“I told you it wouldn’t help.”
Hammersmith stood up. He did fire up a cigar now, concentrating entirely on that task for a few minutes while greenish billows fouled the room. For once Nudger didn’t mind the cigar; its pungent odor overpowered the faint but unmistakable scent of death.
“I wante
d to talk to you about this Valpone murder, Nudge,” Hammersmith said, “but there’s another reason I asked you to come down here. You haven’t been a cop for a long time, and I know the kinds of cases you’ve worked as a private investigator. Divorces, dips into the till, missing library books. Weren’t you even working on a dognapping?”
“I cracked that one,” Nudger said.
Hammersmith regarded him with calm appraisal through a greenish haze. “The police are taking the possibility of a series killer quite seriously now, Nudge. We’re very, very interested. And I wanted you to see Grace Valpone so you’d realized what you might be up against, so you’d be careful and remember not to exclude us entirely from your plans. Your police department cares.”
A pale vision of Grace Valpone in her claw-footed bathtub flashed like a Kodak slide on Nudger’s mind. “Your psychology is sound.”
“I hope it’s effective.” Hammersmith crossed his arms over his protruding stomach. Ashes from his cigar dropped onto the floor. “We won’t start to toss this place for another hour, Nudge. Want to go out for some supper? I’ll buy.”
Nudger’s stomach was doing gymnastics. Not perfect ten scores, too herky-jerky. “I think I’ll diet until tomorrow,” he said.
Hammersmith smiled. That was the answer he’d been seeking.
As he left the apartment building, Nudger passed the same dreary graffiti, the same hard-faced cop, the same striped cat staring at him smugly, as if it knew that the way out was always the same as the way in and was enjoying the joke.
When Nudger got back to his office, he checked the answering machine and heard Claudia’s voice tell him she was tired of trying to reach him and they could talk tonight in the usual way at the usual time. She sounded somewhat bemused that she would want to talk with him, maybe even slightly irritated. It was as if the recorder’s tone had sounded before she could hang up, signaling go, and she’d had little choice but to be polite and postpone the conversation rather than cancel it. One of life’s little electronic traps.
Quite an invention, the telephone. Nudger wondered if Alexander Graham Bell had ever suspected that someday the thing would speak back of its own accord, that it would bring so much heartache as well as convenience. He might have. Maybe he’d mentioned it. Nudger tried to remember the Don Ameche film but couldn’t.
He got the phone directory from the desk’s bottom left drawer and leafed through its dogeared thin pages, squinting at its headache-inducing fine print until he found a listing for A. Boyington. There was no Agnes Boyington listed. A. Boyington’s address was in the city’s fashionable central west end.
Nudger slid the phone over to him and began to punch out the number, then he hesitated and replaced the receiver. He decided not to use the phone.
The A. Boyington in the directory might not be Agnes, but the chance that it was made it worth Nudger’s time to drive to the address to try to take her by surprise, so she’d be unprepared for their conversation.
Nudger thought it might be fun to catch her in her old clothes painting the porch glider. Or cleaning up after the dog or masturbating or watching “Family Feud” on TV.
If Agnes Boyington did such things.
XII
The A. Boyington address belonged to a large, squarish two-story house on Lindell Boulevard, a wide four-lane street bordering Forest Park. Though Lindell was heavily traveled, especially during morning and evening rush hours, the houses were divorced from the traffic, set well back on meticulously tended artificial-looking green lawns, and were expensive and luxurious. This house was of white brick, with a red tile roof, black shutters, and a colonial porch that boasted tall fluted white columns supporting a peaked roof with its own tiny cupola.
Nudger looked the place over with some envy and an inevitable subtle feeling of inferiority, as if he had no business being here in his down-at-the-heels shoes and clattering little car. His very presence was an affront. Agnes Boyington was a woman of at least moderate wealth; Nudger was no stranger to the cluttered aisles of K-mart.
He drove up the hedge-bordered, smooth blacktop driveway and parked by the porch. As he climbed from the car he noticed that shade trees-oaks and fast-growing maples-had been strategically planted so that the street was barely visible despite its relative nearness. The occasional swishing of passing cars was a mere suggestion of Lindell Boulevard’s presence. From the rise on which the house sat, he could see the park across the street, a leafy expanse of green.
On the porch was a push button for a doorbell, as well as a fancy brass knocker at eye level on the door. Nudger ignored the button. He’d rattled the round brass knocker only once before Agnes Boyington opened the door.
Cool air from the house drifted out. Or was Agnes Boyington emitting that coolness?
“So, Mr. Nudger,” she said, as if not at all surprised to find him standing on her porch. She was dressed up, wearing a dark blue dress, navy-blue high heels, an expensive-looking double-looped pearl necklace. She was also wearing white gloves that extended most of the way up her forearms. Nudger didn’t think anyone wore white gloves anymore except to keep their hands warm. Yet here it was a hot summer evening and Agnes Boyington had on spotless soft white gloves. Nudger supposed that was class. He could think of no other explanation.
“We have matters to discuss,” Nudger said.
“I have an appointment in half an hour,” she told him, “but I suppose I have time to write your check.” She turned and went back inside, leaving the tall door open as an invitation to Nudger. Or maybe he was expected to wait on the porch. He walked inside.
He was standing in a hall with white walls and a ter-razzo floor of many subdued colors. There were no wall hangings and only a few pieces of furniture: a complexly constructed brass coatrack that looked like a metallic tree without leaves, an oval mahogany table on which sat a fancy fat lamp with a Tiffany glass shade. Agnes Boyington was leaning over the table, opening her purse to get out her checkbook.
“I didn’t come for a check,” Nudger told her.
She turned to face him, cocking her head back and to the side in the distinctive Boyington manner. “Oh? Then just why are you here?”
“To ask about Hugo Rumbo.”
She gazed with icy appraisal at Nudger, as if trying to see right through the front of his skull into the machinations of his mind. She was an accomplished player on the board of life. She knew how to compete in whatever game he might initiate. “I know Mr. Rumbo,” she said. “Why are you inquiring about him? Do you need the services of a handyman?”
“I sift my own swimming pool,” Nudger told her. “I’m inquiring to see if it was you who arranged an unpleasant encounter between Hugo Rumbo and me.”
“Encounter?” She was amused.
“Yes, yesterday. It seemed to me that Rumbo was in a destructive frame of mind.”
“He threatened you?” Nicely feigned disbelief.
“I think he intended to go beyond threats.” Nudger mentally gagged himself. Why should he carry on this conversation on Agnes Boyington’s genteel terms, using innuendos and euphemisms? He said, “He was determined to beat the shit out of me.”
She raised her eyebrows, not from a shocked sense of propriety, but in mock concern. “Then he implied violence.”
“He implied it strongly. There’s no room for doubt; he was going to work me over.”
“He struck you?”
“He would have hit me several times, I’m sure, only he was interrupted.”
Agnes Boyington smiled and shook her head. “You’re mistaken, I’m certain. Oh, I can understand how it might happen. Mr. Rumbo has an assertive nature.”
“So does an MX missile.”
She zipped her purse closed. No check for Nudger now, even if he changed his mind. That was what happened to bad boys who balked, who had nasty tongues. “Mr. Rumbo also has a loyal and helpful nature. He’s eager to please. It could be that he knew of my dealings with you and decided on his own to talk with you in a firm man
ner that might persuade you to see reason.”
“You hired him to rough me up,” Nudger told her, “so I’d accept your check and drop the case without telling Jeanette.”
“I hire Mr. Rumbo for odd jobs,” Agnes Boyington said, “not to commit mayhem. What he does on his own time, away from my property, is his business.” Again the cold, sweet Boyington smile. “Of course I pay him very well.”
Nudger saw that it was pointless to argue with Agnes Boyington. He’d learned what he came to find out. She’d had Hugo Rumbo follow him for the purpose of intimidation, as insurance that Nudger would accept her offer and, in effect, work for her instead of for Jeanette. He’d learned also the extent to which Agnes Boyington could deceive herself. It was probable that she habitually thought in the self-serving, convoluted fashion in which she’d just described her employment of Rumbo. Some people could rationalize anything. Nudger wouldn’t be surprised if she and Rumbo really believed Rumbo had acted entirely on his own; they were both the type that drove polygraph operators to distraction.
“I do have to leave now, Mr. Nudger,” Agnes said. She tugged at her white gloves to tighten them around her fingers. “I have an appointment that must be kept.” Stepping adroitly around him, so as not to soil herself with physical contact, she reached, stretching, and opened the door for him.
Nudger didn’t move. “I’m afraid of Hugo Rumbo,” he said. “He might trip over his ankle and fall on me. I’ve been to the police about this, and if Rumbo slips his collar again and tries to attack me, they’ll know you had something to do with it.”
“But I thought I made it clear that I’m not responsible for Mr. Rumbo. And there’s certainly no law against me talking to him as a friend and not an employer. If he finds out you’ve decided to reject my suggestion that you cease working for my daughter, it wouldn’t surprise me if he decided to visit you on his own. He’s a simple and dedicated man.”