Nightlines an-2

by John Lutz

  “Four years,” she said. “Before that, I taught.”

  “Taught what?”

  “Junior high school. Seventh grade. English and social studies.”

  “How come you quit?”

  Nudger could sense her shrinking into herself again, as if to envelop a sensitive, vulnerable core that had endured all it could stand. And now he had come along and touched it and brought pain.

  “I didn’t exactly quit,” she said. “I was forced out.”

  She didn’t speak again until they were back in her apartment. She’d left the air conditioner on while they were gone, and the living room was comfortably cool. The wide window, without curtains or blinds and with a few half-dead viny plants in plastic pots suspended from the upper frame, looked out on soot-gray buildings across Spruce Street. The upper floors of the buildings were used mostly for storage, and their windows were blank. Some of the windows had faded remains of business names clinging in peeling letters to the glass. A few of them were boarded over with weathered plywood. The mercury streetlight down the block cast a sickly bluish light over it all, lending some of the grime and pigeon droppings a pale luminosity. Grim, Nudger thought. Grim. It would never make a scene in one of those crystal globes that you shook to make artificial snow fly. How would it be to live here? To look out at those buildings day after day?

  Claudia walked to the kitchen door and turned to face him. “Do you want me to put on a pot of coffee?”

  He shook his head. “Not for me. I’ve had enough coffee.” He went to the sofa and sat down, listening again to the tired, complaining springs. “Are you glad I found you, Claudia?”

  “I don’t know.” She absently fingered one of the scars on her wrists. “I’m sorry. I don’t.” Her fingernail lightly traced the scar down to the heel of her hand.

  A cold wave of apprehension passed through Nudger, a mere tremor but powerful, like the shallow, rippling raw energy of a tidal wave in mid-ocean as it made for shore and shape and size and destruction. He stood up from the sofa and walked over to her. “Maybe I will have some coffee.”

  But she didn’t move to make the coffee. “Will you stay here with me tonight, Nudger? Without sex, without any more questions, will you stay with me?”

  “You’re a beautiful woman who doesn’t chew with her mouth open. How can I refuse?”

  “I don’t care if you wisecrack,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I know, or I wouldn’t do it.”

  She leaned into him and he put his arms around her, surprised by her thinness and the prominent contours of her ribs. There was about her a faint, clean scent of shampoo and perfume and onions.

  “You did say no sex?” he said.

  She burrowed her face into his chest and he felt the wet warmth of her tears through his shirt. “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she told him, with a soft, vibrant desperation.

  He hugged her to him and crooned comfortingly to her, as if she were a child awake from bad dreams, gently patting her shoulder. “You won’t be alone tonight,” he assured her again and again. “You won’t be alone. And neither will I.”

  In the morning, as Nudger reached the second-floor landing on his way out of the building, Coreen Davis opened her apartment door and stared out at him with unmistakable reproach and warning. You couldn’t help but like C. Davis.

  XVIII

  Nudger stopped by his apartment for a change of clothes, then drove to Danny’s for a quick breakfast. Agnes Boyington must have been to his office and seen the sign hung on his door referring business messages to the doughnut shop downstairs.

  “You had a visit from a cold-hearted woman with warm hands, Nudge,” Danny said, placing a foam coffee cup and what looked like a hand-molded sugar doughnut on a napkin.

  “She strikes everyone that way,” Nudger said. Maybe he had risen a few notches in Agnes Boyington’s estimation, if she was dressing up for him the way she did for her lawyer. More likely, his office was a brief stopover for her on the way to things really important.

  “She asked me to tell you she’d been here looking for you,” Danny said. “She wants you to phone her.”

  Nudger decided not to do that. Agnes Boyington could phone him. She could dial or punch out a number even with gloves on.

  “Anything else?” Nudger asked.

  “Naw. You want another doughnut?”

  “I think not.”

  Nudger said goodbye to Danny and carried his coffee upstairs to the office. He checked his answering machine, expecting a call from Jeanette and possibly an innovative threat from Eileen. Instead he heard a Jehovah’s Witness recording urging him to seek salvation. Then came C. Davis’s thick, rich voice instructing him to call her. She repeated her phone number twice, slowly, like an announcer selling record albums or wonder cutlery on television. Maybe the supply was limited. Nudger immediately picked up the receiver, rang the number, and identified himself.

  C. Davis wasn’t one for preparatory small talk.

  She said, “You know a giant honkie squeezes a ball?”

  “What color ball?”

  “Red,” she said seriously.

  “I know him, but we’re not friends.”

  “Well, he was around here right after you left this morning. Stood outside looking over the building, then came in and was eyeballing the mailboxes.”

  “Then what?”

  “I asked him what he was doing and he didn’t have no good answer. So I told him he had no business here and to get his ass out and away.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He didn’t say nothing. He left.”

  Nudger wasn’t surprised. C. Davis would seem formidable to a small country’s army. “He’s keeping track of my movements, Coreen, that’s all. I’m sure he won’t harm Claudia, but not so sure that I’m not asking you to keep an eye on things if he shows up again.”

  “You don’t have to ask, Nudger. Claudia’s a beat-down fine lady, and a friend. I ain’t gonna let anything happen to her. Not ‘cause of you, neither. She told me before about how you talked to her on the phone. I know about you and how she feels about you. And I’m asking: You a one-nighter, or are you something more?”

  “Something more,” Nudger said.

  “Then I think you better go talk to Laura Cather. You got a pencil?”

  “With lead in it.” Nudger jotted down the phone number she read off to him. She repeated it with the same slowness and careful enunciation he’d heard on the recorder. “Who’s Laura Cather?” he asked.

  “You the detective, Nudger. You puzzle it out.” She hung up.

  Nudger depressed the cradle button and pecked out the number C. Davis had given him.

  After three rings, a sleepy-sounding woman answered. She said she was Laura Cather, and she didn’t seem surprised when he told her who he was and that he wanted to talk with her about Claudia Bettencourt. C. Davis, mother-hen menace, must have paved the way for him.

  He made an appointment with Laura Cather for later that morning at her apartment on Wyoming, on the city’s south side. Then he sat back in his squeaking swivel chair, played out a faint but shrill rhythm by gently rocking back and forth, and thought about Hugo Rumbo watching him and Claudia. Nudger didn’t like it, not at all. But he was sure that Rumbo’s job was to watch him, and when ordered, apply direct pressure to intimidate. Rumbo really wasn’t dangerous except in a shallow, ineffectual way. Partly because he was who he was, partly because he was an extension of Agnes Boyington, who was wont to maim souls and not mere bodies. It wouldn’t be her style to have Rumbo harm Claudia to scare Nudger. Not only would that be too risky after what she’d told the police, but the weapons she’d chosen in the duel of life were more subtle and infinitely more dangerous. Still, Nudger didn’t want Rumbo to frighten Claudia. Neither did C. Davis. It was good that she had called. It was reassuring that she was watching out for Claudia.

  Wyoming Avenue was in the section of South Saint Louis that was a gridwork
of streets named after states. As if that weren’t confusing enough, the streets all looked alike, all straight and narrow, all lined with similar flat-roofed brick row houses or flats, with tiny square front yards bisected by short strips of concrete leading from steps to sidewalk. It was an old section of town that hadn’t changed much in twenty years. Many of the houses had been in the same families’ possession for twice that long, and it wasn’t unusual to find people who had lived in the same shotgun flat for a quarter of a century without ever having signed a lease, paying monthly rent to the same landlord when he came around on the first to be sure the lawn was mowed or the walk cleared of snow. “Scrubby Dutch” the predominantly German Catholics of the area were sometimes called, and Nudger had often seen elderly women bent over scrubbing the curbs in front of their flats, or taping plastic flowers on the branches of dead shrubbery. There was plenty of front-yard religious statuary here, and more than a few plastic flamingos perched inelegantly on long spike legs. There were rough neighborhoods in the area, populated by rough folks, but for the most part it was one of the more stable sections of the city.

  Laura Cather lived in a typical flat-roofed building on a drab, treeless stretch of Wyoming east of Grand. Nudger rang the bell to her second-floor flat and heard someone descending the stairs to her separate entrance. Taut white sheer curtains parted on the door’s window, and a bespectacled blue eye peered fishlike out through the glass at Nudger before the door swung open.

  Laura Cather was an emaciated-looking faded blond woman still in her twenties. She was narrow of bust and hip, and her blouse and slacks hung from her frame as if from a misshapen hanger. Her bare arms were a few ounces from bone. The only substantial things about her were an old-fashioned silver brooch whose weight was pulling the material of her blouse crooked, and her wide, round tortoise-shell glasses that threatened to slide down her narrow nose and shatter at Nudger’s feet.

  “I’m Nudger,” Nudger said.

  She smiled with terrible, yellowed teeth. Despite it all, she was somehow wanly pretty, like an ethereal consumptive. “I know,” she said. “Coreen Davis described you. Won’t you come up?”

  Nudger followed her up the rubber-treaded stairs to her flat, which was larger than he’d imagined. Or maybe it seemed that way because of the bare wood floors and paucity of furniture. There was a worn modern sofa on one wall, on the opposite wall a director’s chair with red canvas next to a squarish plastic table. On the far wall was a card table that managed to support a portable electric type writer and some stacks of papers. There was a chipped white-enameled kitchen chair at the table, and a sheet of paper protruding rigidly from the typewriter’s platen. Laura Cather had been busy when Nudger arrived.

  “I’m typing resumes,” she explained, noticing his curiosity. “Have a seat, please.”

  Nudger watched her settle her frail body on the couch as he sat down in the director’s chair. He felt like yelling “Action!” to begin their conversation.

  “Coreen thinks I should tell you about Claudia Bettencourt,” she said. “If she thinks that, there must be a sound reason.”

  “There is,” Nudger said. “Coreen Davis doesn’t want Claudia to be hurt. Neither do I.”

  “Nor I, Mr. Nudger.”

  “What’s the connection between you and Claudia?”

  “I used to be a social worker for the Department of Corrections, a public employee doing pre-sentencing investigation. That was before the federal government decided policy was more important than people and cut our agency’s funds.” She waved a pale, thin hand in a casual gesture of helplessness. “I’ve been out of work for almost a year. I’m not bitching, because I’m not an isolated case.”

  Nudger was suddenly uneasy. His stomach let him know it was there. “You said pre-sentencing. Was Claudia convicted of some crime?”

  “I’ll tell you about Claudia Bettencourt,” Laura said, in the tone that people use when they’re about to begin at the beginning. “She was raised by a foster father who abused her as a child. Not sexually, but he beat her. That leaves its mark, Mr. Nudger. It stays in the mind and body like an infectious disease. Real child abuse isn’t what most people imagine. It’s not some frazzled parent losing control under stress and lashing out in a fit of temper. It’s systematic and frequent. And unbelievably violent. It’s not a bloody nose, it’s blood on the walls. And the sickening truth is that neither the victim nor the perpetrator can help what’s happening, or prevent it from happening again.”

  “Did Claudia abuse her own children?” Nudger asked, remembering his conversation with Ralph Ferris outside her door.

  “She did,” Laura Cather said, not simply looking at Nudger, but studying him. “She was one of the smart and brave ones; she tried to get help. But four years ago, while she was undergoing therapy, her three-year-old daughter, Vicki, contracted influenza. A simple case of the flu. Only the child was found in a coma one winter morning with her bedroom window open. She died two days later of pneumonia.”

  “Are you saying Claudia deliberately left the window open?”

  “I’m not. But that’s what her husband claimed when she was tried on a child-abuse charge, a second-degree murder charge.”

  “What was her defense?” Nudger asked. He felt hollow yet heavy, as if the thin canvas of the director’s chair might at any second rip to dump him onto the floor. Maybe he could have Laura Cather play that last scene a different way. Take Two, with feeling.

  “At first she denied opening the window. Vehemently denied it, as the lawyers say. Her lawyers advanced the theory that maybe the husband or one of the other kids opened the window and forgot it. Or maybe the sick child herself had climbed out of bed to open it. They do that sometimes if they have a fever, trying to cool off. But the prosecution kept pounding away at Claudia, and eventually she didn’t know herself whether she’d opened that window. Child abuse is an emotional issue, Mr. Nudger, and Claudia had a history of it. The jury knew that history and voted to convict. I was assigned to conduct the pre-sentencing investigation, learn what I could about the defendant and make recommendations to help the judge decide how severe her sentence should be.”

  “What did you find out?” Nudger asked.

  “That Claudia Bettencourt-or Ferris, as she called herself then-was an intelligent, disturbed woman who was not innately violent. Her past wouldn’t let go of here. Her younger sister had also been abused, and was a diagnosed schizophrenic who killed herself in a period of depression. Claudia was haunted by her childhood and doomed to emulate it through her daughters. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual situation, Mr. Nudger. I recommended leniency and therapy. The judge agreed. Claudia stayed out of prison. She was placed on probation and saw a court-appointed psychiatrist for several years.”

  “Did the psychiatrist help her?”

  “Dr. Oliver helped her only to an extent. She understands her past now, and she’s no longer compulsively violent. Toward anyone. She loves her children, as she always did.”

  “But she doesn’t love Claudia.”

  Laura Cather smiled her frail and gentle smile at Nudger and nodded, pleased that he understood. “Claudia can’t shake the guilt,” she said, “because Ralph Ferris won’t let her. He’s the one who needs mental therapy now, but the law doesn’t demand it.”

  “And Claudia can’t forget Ralph Ferris because he’s got custody of their daughters. He’s a part of her life whether she likes it or not.”

  “Exactly. And he sees to it that she doesn’t like it. He’s never forgiven her, or acts that way. If he’s so sure she deliberately left that window open to punish their daughter for some minor childhood transgression, maybe you can’t blame him.”

  “I can blame him,” Nudger said. “He’s perpetuating pain.”

  “I’ve told Claudia to limit her involvement with him, send someone to get the children when she has visitation rights. Her psychiatrist told her the same thing when she was seeing him. Ralph won’t cooperate. He demands to deliver
the children to her door himself. He occasionally comes to see her alone, or taunts her over the phone. There’s no way to stop him. No way, Mr. Nudger. No way even to know if he’s still a grief-sick father or simply a mean and vengeful bastard. But I know which way I’d bet.”

  Nudger sighed. The world was a swamp, and understanding was quicksand. And sometimes the log you were standing on turned and gave you a crocodile smile.

  “Two years ago Claudia tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists,” Laura Cather said. “Coreen Davis found her, slowed the bleeding, and got her medical aid in time to save her. It wasn’t one of those Russian-roulette suicide attempts where the victim gambles on help arriving before death. Claudia’s was a genuine attempt to die.”

  “And you’re afraid she might try again.”

  “It’s possible, maybe even likely. Coreen and I wanted you to find out about this the right way. We want you to know that Claudia is on a dark edge, Mr. Nudger. We want to make sure you understand that.” She frowned, staring into interior distances, as she sought words to make him grasp her compassion and meaning. “She’s fragile. So fragile. We want you to be careful with her.”

  Nudger sat looking at Laura Cather. He’d developed a sense about people like this, gentle people who couldn’t dissemble or deceive. He knew them. They were easy to read; they wanted to be read, to live in a world without deception.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” he said.

  She knew herself, too. She’d been expecting him to ask, maybe hoping for it. “I don’t think Claudia left that window open, Mr. Nudger. I think Ralph went to the sick daughter’s room that night. Maybe Vicki was feverish, complained of being too hot and wanted Ralph to open the window for just a few minutes. The child had vomited; maybe Ralph opened the window to let out the stench of sickness and forgot and left it open.

  “Child abuse brings out the vigilante in juries, Mr. Nudger. Claudia didn’t have a chance. But I read the court transcript with an objective eye, and I got to know everyone involved in the case. Ralph left that window open, Mr. Nudger. He knew it and denied it and let Claudia be convicted so he could get the children in the divorce. It eats on the bastard and he can’t let Claudia alone. Maybe he hates her because she put him into that situation. Or maybe he’s got himself talked into thinking she’s actually guilty as charged. But Ralph left that window open, Mr. Nudger. I’m sure of it.”