Nightlines an-2

by John Lutz

  When they got back to Claudia’s apartment building, she asked Nudger if he was coming upstairs. She had several hours before she had to be at Kimball’s to help prepare for the lunchtime crowd. Nudger reluctantly declined. He was a workaday guy with responsibilities, he told her. She didn’t seem to believe him. He kissed her. The Volkswagen was idling roughly, vibrating hard enough to jingle the keys dangling from the ignition switch. No place for a romantic tryst.

  “Where are you going now?” she asked.

  “To my office. Then to see if I can find out more about Luther Kell.”

  He didn’t tell her what that entailed. If Kell was home, Nudger would wait for him to leave, then follow. If Kell had already left for work or wherever he went during the day, Nudger would make sure the house was unoccupied, then try to get inside and search for evidence pointing to Kell as a murderer. Illegal entry into the home of a possible killer was the sort of thing that frightened Nudger for a number of reasons; it was a game with a lot of ways to lose. But he had no choice. He hadn’t much time to learn about Kell. Springer had seen to that.

  Claudia kissed Nudger again, a slow, soft brush of her lips across his cheek, then got out of the car and closed the door without slamming it. Before walking away, she turned and leaned low to peer in at him through the open window.

  “For both of us, will you be careful?” she asked.

  “If you’ll be careful for the same two people.”

  She nodded and stood up straight. Nudger shifted to first and pulled away from the curb. At the corner, when he checked in the rearview mirror, Claudia was gone.

  XXVI

  Ten thousand dollars,” Agnes Boyington said to Nudger, sitting across from him in his office. She’d been waiting downstairs for him when he arrived, standing rigidly outside the doughnut shop, as if she’d rather endure the heat than enter.

  Nudger swiveled thoughtfully in his chair and stared across the desk at her, trying to grasp what she was saying. Ten thousand dollars. One hundred C-notes. Mucho dinero. All those dead Presidents���

  “My final offer,” she added, setting her mouth in a straight, firm line.

  “Oh, everyone says that,” Nudger told her.

  “To earn the money,” Agnes reminded him, “you have only to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. I’m sure that for you the former will be easier than the latter.”

  “You’re trying awfully hard to corrupt me, Boyington. To lead me down the primrose path.”

  “You’ve seen the primroses in all seasons.” She got one of her long brown cigarettes from her purse, manipulated the never-fail lighter, and touched flame to tobacco. Tilting back her head so that she could gaze down her nose at him, she blew a cloud of smoke that hung together in an oddly grotesque shape which drifted toward the ceiling like a medium’s ectoplasm. “What is your answer?”

  “I don’t mind if you smoke,” he told her.

  She exhaled another cloud of smoke, this one not so dense. He was getting to her. “Just what is it about my offer that bothers you, Nudger?”

  “The fact that you made it, and that you keep increasing it. And that if I accept it, you’ll have me at a permanent disadvantage. I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Those are logical reservations, though based on unfounded suspicion. Anything else? No more consideration for your professional honor?”

  “That, too. And something more. It bothers me that I don’t understand why you’re making the offer.”

  “I told you, Jeanette is under great stress. She isn’t thinking clearly, or she wouldn’t have hired you. I don’t want her hurt more than she is already.”

  Nudger shook his head slowly, not looking away from Agnes Boyington. “I’m sorry, Agnes, I can’t accept your explanation of motherly concern. It fits you about as well as a size ten hat.”

  Something crossed her face, momentarily altered the ice-gleam in her eyes. A reflection of pain. It surprised Nudger. It was like glimpsing human emotion in a reptile.

  “To be honest, Nudger, I don’t care about your assessment of me as a mother, except insomuch as it affects this matter. I love Jeanette dearly, more dearly than you can know.” The expression of deep pain again, as if she were finally leveling with him and paying the price.

  “What about Jenine?” Nudger asked. “Did you love her?”

  “No.” She smiled faintly at Nudger, from an icy distance. “I told you I was being honest. I knew Jenine, the way she lived, the things she did. She generated grief; all her life she was a burden and a stigma.”

  “Maybe you made her that way.”

  “No one made her that way. It was her inability to control her animalistic instincts that made Jenine what she was, that eventually led to her death. She was a sinner in the eyes of God and man.”

  “Her libido might have been much like yours,” Nudger said, “only channeled in a different direction, a direction that harmed no one but herself.”

  “I’m not here to talk sophomoric psychology. I’m here to talk mathematics, coin of the realm.”

  Nudger placed both hands lightly, palms down, on the desk. From God to U.S. currency in less than a minute. It was dizzying. “I’m sorry, Agnes, but there are too many unknowns in the equation. I won’t accept your offer.”

  Agnes Boyington stayed sitting very still in the chair before Nudger’s desk. Then, with a subdued, steely vibrancy, she began to tremble. She was even paler than usual as she stared at Nudger, for an instant with pleading in her eyes, then with hate.

  “You don’t understand Jeanette as well as her own mother can,” she said.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “There’s a great deal about this matter that you don’t know.”

  “I’m a willing student. No one seems willing to teach me.”

  She stood up, tucked her purse beneath her arm, and glared down at Nudger. She’d stopped the faint trembling and had regained what appeared to be total control of herself. Nudger had to admit he was impressed by her as she stood over him in pale wrath like a well-preserved ice-queen and dropped cold, clipped words on him.

  “I tried, Nudger, but you refused to listen, to be realistic. You’ve made a tragic course of events irreversible. If you forget everything else, remember that. What occurs from this point on might have been avoided if you had shelved your shabby idealism and done what was right for everyone concerned. Whatever happens now is on your head.”

  “Come off it, Agnes. I didn’t open a tomb, I turned down a bribe.”

  She backed away a few steps, toward the door, and observed him as if suddenly he were miles away. She wouldn’t attempt to buy him off anymore; he was sure of that. True to her word, she had made her final offer. She’d now accept what she couldn’t understand. Money had talked, shabby idealism hadn’t listened. That puzzled her, but in this instance that had been the undeniable outcome of her attempt to buy what she wanted. Life unaccountably worked that way sometimes. Mysterious circles.

  “You’ll be responsible,” she said softly, as if to someone in the office other than the two of them. “As heaven is my witness!”

  “Agnes, why don’t you talk to Jeanette? Be honest with her?”

  She disdainfully dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the bare office floor and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. Without looking at Nudger, she opened the door and went out, leaving it open behind her. If he wouldn’t talk sense, her brand of sense, then she wouldn’t talk to him at all. So there. He heard her measured footfalls as she descended the stairs. The draft from the street door opening and closing rolled low across the office, stirring the ashes on the floor. He didn’t like the look of those ashes, but then ashes seldom inspired.

  Nudger was more worried than he had been, but he wasn’t sure why. Possibly it was Agnes Boyington’s mention of an irreversible tragic course of events. It seemed that she had turned a corner in her mind, and he had no way of knowing what street she was on or where she was going.

  He shook
his head as if to free himself from the after-scent of her tobacco smoke and disinfectant-like perfume, then stood up from behind the desk. He knew what street he should be on: Hartford Avenue.

  After tossing the morning mail into the wastebasket and locking the office, he went downstairs and crossed Manchester to where his car was parked. The morning had been one of disturbing ambiguity. He longed for a problem he could grapple with and solve.

  Trying not to think about Agnes Boyington and her ten thousand dollars, he drove toward the conservative, orderly neighborhood, the narrow, straight street, the neat little brick house of Luther Kell.

  XXVII

  Nudger parked by a phone booth a few blocks from Kell’s house. He left the Volkswagen’s motor running as he entered the booth, fed in his twenty cents and dialed Kell’s number. If Kell answered, Nudger was ready to see how he was fixed for magazine subscriptions.

  Kell’s phone rang ten times while Nudger leaned against the phone inside the hot metal booth and watched the traffic on Kingshighway. After the tenth ring, he left the receiver dangling out of sight, yanked closed the booth’s folding doors behind him as he stepped outside, and drove to Kell’s house.

  He parked three houses down, slipped into his sport jacket, and tried to look like a pollster or Jehova’s Witness as he walked with a sureness not felt toward the curlicued wrought-iron railing marking Kell’s front steps. The antacid tablet he was chewing was dissolved except for its chalky residue on his tongue. His stomach moved and demanded another, which he promptly popped into his mouth as he unhesitatingly gripped the black railing and climbed the steps to Kell’s front porch.

  Even before he rang the doorbell, he could hear the telephone still jangling unanswered inside the house. He felt better now. He was sure Kell wasn’t home. All he had to worry about was being unexpectedly interrupted. Or one of the neighbors seeing him as a suspicious character and phoning the police.

  Nudger’s Visa card with its carefully honed edge was ready in his shirt pocket. He nonchalantly withdrew it and fitted it between door and frame. The plastic made contact with the lock bolt, but met firm resistance. It took him only a few seconds to realize that the door was equipped with a dead bolt that wouldn’t budge.

  He backed away as if puzzled that no one had answered his ring, then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, as if innocently trying to decide what to do next. In feigned sudden resolve, he left the porch and walked along the side of the house to the backyard. It was all done with such accomplished acting that he almost hoped a neighbor was watching. John Wilkes Sleuth.

  There was a chain-link fence around the yard, with a bulky padlock on the gate. Nudger saw no sign of a dog. He vaulted the fence and crossed to the back door. There was a screen door, which was locked. It took only half a minute and a minimum of trouble to slip that lock, but the main back door was like the front, equipped with a dead bolt and without windows.

  Nudger knew he wasn’t going to get inside without noise and dangerous long minutes, and in this neighborhood, where many residents were crime-conscious if not outright paranoid, he could afford little of either. He leaned to the side on the back porch and peeked through a window, through the narrow space between the frame and the drawn shade. If he could see inside the house, he might at least gain some impression of the man who lived there.

  All he saw was a small, neat kitchen with a glossy green linoleum floor. A few of the furnishings were visible: a bare Formica table with metal legs, a high wooden stool, a smooth corner of a white refrigerator. The opposite window had a drawn shade, no curtains. He could hear the unanswered phone ringing more clearly here, reassuring him that Kell hadn’t entered through the front door. But maybe Kell habitually came and went the back way.

  Nudger’s stomach growled something that sounded like “Get out!” He sensed that it was time to comply. Maybe past time.

  A sudden breeze passed like a hot breath through the yard, rustling the leaves of the shrubbery by the fence as if there were something moving among them. Nudger hurried down off the porch.

  He walked back toward the street the way he’d approached the house, with seeming casualness, noting that all of Kell’s shades were lowered and that there were iron bars over the basement windows.

  Sitting pondering in the sauna that was the Volkswagen, Nudger realized that all he’d learned was that Kell was very security-minded and kept a sanitary kitchen. But that was true of many of Kell’s scrubby, conservative South St. Louis neighbors, who believed a pound of prevention was worth an ounce of cure, in battling bacteria or crime.

  He started the car and drove farther down the street, then parked in the shade, in a spot where he could see the front of Kell’s house in the rearview mirror. He settled back in the bucket seat to wait, always the dullest part of his job but a great instiller of the virtue of patience. Since it was one of his few virtues, he took pride in it.

  After a while he moved to another spot from which he could watch the house. He didn’t want to stay parked within sight of the same houses for too long, prompting a resident to wonder, worry, and phone the police to report a lurker in a Volkswagen.

  At eleven-thirty Nudger went to lunch, ordering a carryout hamburger at the diner on Kemper and Kingshighway, where he’d seen Kell yesterday. He’d allowed himself the faint hope that Kell would be there again today, but the only other customers were the summer students from the high school. It was tough catching up on classes during summer vacation. The thrust of their adolescent conversation was that they’d rather be someplace else. Welcome to the world, Nudger thought, juggling his coffee and hamburger and pushing out through the door.

  He noticed that it had suddenly become cooler outside, and a line of dark clouds was closing in on the city from the west. Maybe rain on the way, maybe just show. Lightning flickered erratically out that way, like a celestial neon sign on the blink.

  The hamburger was a culinary surprise. Better than franchise food. Nudger ate it one-handed as he drove to the phone booth from which he’d called Kell earlier.

  The receiver was back on the hook. Someone else had used the phone, or some good citizen had noticed the dangling receiver and replaced it. Nudger hastily finished the last few bites of his hamburger and dialed Kell’s number again. Still no answer. Still nobody home.

  He folded the hamburger’s waxed wrapper into fourths, placed it on the car’s passenger seat, and brushed his hands together to rid them of salt and grease. Then he drove again to where he could watch Kell’s military-neat brick house, parked, and leisurely sipped his coffee.

  At ten minutes to three, when the coffee was only an acidic memory, a yellow station wagon pulled up in front of Kell’s house and sat angled slightly toward the curb with its motor running. Luther Kell got out, said something casually to the car’s driver, and the station wagon drove away.

  Kell walked up the steps to his porch, jangling what looked like a ring of keys that he’d pulled from his pocket. He was wearing faded jeans and a sleeveless red T-shirt that emphasized the thickness of his sinewy arms. Maybe he was coming home from work, dressed as he was in summertime factory fashion. He keyed the unbeatable lock and disappeared into the house. The shades stayed lowered in Fort Kell.

  Nudger felt better. Though another long round of waiting probably lay ahead, he at least knew Kell’s exact whereabouts.

  But this time the wait was a short one. Half an hour after Kell arrived home, he left again. He’d changed to dark dress slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves neatly turned up a few folds on his wrists. His long blond hair was carefully combed. He was walking fast, away from Nudger. It was the kind of walk that suggested a firm destination.

  Nudger let him get a block ahead, then edged the Volkswagen away from the curb and followed. He drove around the block, waited a few minutes, and caught sight of Kell again at the corner.

  Kell walked west on Arsenal toward Kingshighway. There was now an increasing eagerness in his stride; he crooked an arm a
nd shot a glance at his wristwatch. When he reached the intersection, he crossed Arsenal and stood by the bench at the bus stop on the east side of Kingshighway.

  Nudger made a right turn, drove a block past the stop, and pulled to the curb where he could still see Kell in his rearview mirror. An occasional droplet of rain softly patted the car’s metal roof, or settled in a cool fleck on the back of Nudger’s hand resting near the window.

  Kell knew his bus schedules. Within five minutes a bus veered to the curb at the stop. It disgorged a few passengers from the rear door as Kell boarded through the front. The bus rumbled past Nudger, and he slipped the Volkswagen into gear and followed two car lengths behind.

  This bus featured a cigarette advertisement below its rear window, an air-brushed photograph of a broadly smiling outdoorsy blond beauty who looked as if she could throw off lung cancer like a cold. This time Nudger memorized the company service number stenciled in neat black numerals high on the exhaust-darkened back of the bus. He didn’t look again at the blonde.

  When Kell got off the bus near where Highway 40 crossed Kingshighway, then transferred to the Cross County Express, Nudger suspected where he might be going.

  Squinting through the rain-specked windshield, he followed the lumbering bus west beneath the low gray sky bent over them, toward the suburban land of mortgaged dreams and domestic delusion. And Twin Oaks Mall.

  XXVIII

  When they were half a mile from the mall, Nudger drove ahead of the bus and found a parking space in the main lot. Then he walked to the doorway of a shop that sold nothing but athletic shoes and stood where he could see the bus stop. He wondered how a place could stay in business selling only striped sneakers expensive enough to last forever.

  The Cross County Express lumbered around the corner by Sears, intimidated a few smaller vehicles into turning into intersecting parking lanes, and belched and hissed its way tentatively to a stop. Business was thriving at the mall today; over a dozen people stepped down out of the bus. The last one off was Luther Kell.