Nightlines an-2

by John Lutz

  Jeanette was smiling. She leaned slightly toward Nudger. He thought she was going to say something, but she only licked her lips.

  She hadn’t the faintest idea Hammersmith was there until his wide pink hand closed on her fist clenching the gun and shoved it toward the carpet. She gave a low whine as Hammersmith squeezed hard.

  Then her body sagged, drained by abrupt realization. What she had planned hadn’t worked, couldn’t work. It was over. Hammersmith calmly removed the gun with his free hand and slipped it into his pocket.

  The blue uniforms streamed in then. Kell was jerked to his feet and frisked, revealing a long-bladed pocketknife with a yellowed bone handle. Jeanette stood quietly, her eyes wide and vacant, staring into cold distances beyond the apartment walls. Pain was already becoming resignation.

  A Homicide plainclothesman hauled out a dogeared card and read Kell and Jeanette their rights. They both stood unmoving, deaf to the carefully worded legalese. Neither of them looked back as they were steered from the apartment.

  Nudger caught a glimpse of silver highheeled shoes with black bows, of smooth trim ankles, during the momentary shuffling at the door. Then he heard policemen and prisoners move away down the hall.

  Everything had become very controlled and efficient when Hammersmith arrived. Order had been wrought from chaos, in a routine, choreographed manner. Nudger was as impressed as he was grateful and bewildered.

  “I could have sworn I didn’t complete my call for help to you,” he said, struggling up from where he sat on the carpet. The words came out as if they’d been strained through ground glass. His throat and the side of his neck were on fire. He felt a stiffness around his Adam’s apple, as if he needed to swallow but couldn’t.

  “It wasn’t you we charged in here to rescue,” Hammersmith said. He fired up one of his abominable cigars with a connoisseur’s quiet relish. “After our earlier conversation, I assigned a man to watch Jeanette Boyington. He didn’t recognize her when she slipped out wearing her dark wig; had her confused with another woman who’d worn a hat going in. But when he finally realized what had happened, he phoned in and we rushed over here for the same reason you no doubt did. There was only one man Jeanette Boyington would want to disguise herself to meet, and this apartment figured to be their eventual destination. Our man stayed in place and saw you, and later the man and the Boyington woman, enter the building. We got here shortly after that. I guess you noticed we were almost too late.”

  “It hadn’t escaped me,” Nudger said in his new, hoarse voice.

  Hammersmith puffed on the cigar and exhaled a cloud of noxious fumes, smiling through the greenish haze. The apartment would never be the same: Hammersmith was like a dog that had to mark its territory with a foul scent.

  “You were right about twins,” Nudger said, “about Jeanette’s craving for revenge. Look in the bathroom closet. She was going to convert Luther Kell to pre-packaged meat.”

  Hammersmith looked. When he came back he was gazing musingly at his cigar. “It’s a nice change in this job, to prevent a murder instead of investigating one,” he said. He puffed, exhaled. “Two murders, actually. And colorful ones at that.”

  Nudger’s mind flashed a slide of the black plastic trash bags and shining hacksaw and cleaver. The thing that had been fluttering in his stomach suddenly sprang claws and dug them in. Automatically he reached for his roll of antacid tablets, nimbly peeling back the foil with his thumbnail.

  “Alive though you are,” Hammersmith said, “you’ll have a tough time collecting your fee.”

  “That doesn’t seem important at the moment,” Nudger said.

  “It will, though.” Hammersmith squinted at him, then motioned with the cigar. “You better have that neck looked at. Guy try to choke you?”

  “Tried hard.”

  “Never know about those things. Lots of tender cartilage in the neck, little bones. Promise me you’ll have it looked at?”

  “Sure.”

  Hammersmith smiled his jowly smile. “The tech teams are on the way here, Major Case Squad, news media, everybody. In their numbers will be Leo Springer. We need your statement, say tonight, after you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, get your story straight. I’m going downstairs and make some calls. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to leave. On your own, you understand.”

  Nudger nodded.

  Hammersmith flicked ashes on the carpet and glided out. He left the apartment door open. Nudger could see a blue uniform sleeve outside in the hall.

  He jumped as something at his feet buzzed at him like a rattlesnake.

  It was the damaged phone, its shattered receiver still off the hook. He picked it up with the futile idea of answering it, knowing he probably should leave it untouched for the print man and photographer, and it gave another dying rattle and was silent and useless. He started to replace it on an end table.

  Instead he stood holding it, staring at its base, before finally setting it back down on the floor.

  He raked clawed fingers through his tousled hair and drew a deep breath that seared his bruised windpipe. Suddenly he wanted to get as far away as possible from Jeanette’s apartment. He wanted to run, but he walked.

  At the open door he paused, leaning with a palm pressed high against the doorjamb, and glanced back. His gaze again fell on the phone, and he thought about all the late-night talkers and dreamers, all the agony and loneliness transformed to electronic impulses and sent out over the nightlines, seeking connections, searching for solace of whatever fashion. He thought about blown-glass erotica and a cold, agonized twin who was driven to attempted murder.

  He walked out into the hall, nodding at the blue uniform on guard, and made his way unsteadily toward the stairs, wishing the damned building would stay still. There was somewhere else he had to go this evening, and Hammersmith was right; he needed rest and time to think before talking with the police, before walking the high tightrope that Leo Springer was sure to place him on. There would be no net below.

  XXX

  Night hadn’t fallen, but it was teetering, when Nudger turned the Volkswagen into the driveway of Agnes Boyington’s fashionable white brick home in the central west end. In the dusk the house appeared even larger. The wide lawn, still damp from the afternoon rain, had been mowed recently and was rich with the sweet, pungent scent of summer. Deepening shadows softened the symmetrically manicured slope of the grounds. Lindell Boulevard didn’t seem to be there at all beyond the spreading, sheltering oaks and maples. The area surrounding the Boyington house had about it the atmosphere of a groomed golf course.

  When Nudger parked the Volkswagen near the columned front porch and got out, locusts in the nearby trees trilled like crickets, only deeper, more hoarsely. Katydids, children called them, mimicking their urgent rattling buzzing. The locusts existed noisily and briefly after long hibernation, then died and left behind only their dry husks. Nudger knew people who had done that.

  As he stepped up onto the porch, he saw that there was a lamp burning at one of the front windows. Disdaining the brass knocker this time, he rang the doorbell, hearing chimes toll faintly inside. He waited for what seemed like five full minutes before Agnes Boyington came to the door.

  She was wearing tight black slacks and a ribbed white sweater adorned with heavy gold chains. Her hair was rigidly engineered, as if she’d just returned from a beauty parlor. Earrings that matched the chains gathered and gave light as she moved her head. Nudger wondered if she’d been notified of Jeanette’s arrest.

  “It’s time for us to talk,” he said.

  She studied him in the faint light, gazing at him as if he were a trespassing dandelion on the unbroken plane of green behind him. Finally she said, as if it were an order, “Come in, Nudger.”

  He entered, closing the door behind him, and followed Agnes Boyington through the hall and into an impeccably decorated, high-ceilinged room with pale, tiny-print wallpaper. There were soft blue chairs and a sofa with lots of light wood tr
im, and a dainty antique secretary desk with elegantly curved legs, just inside the door. The plush carpet was dead white and might have been laid yesterday.

  “Sit down,” Agnes Boyington said, pointing to a straight-backed chair with a modicum of upholstery. It seemed a device contrived by sadists.

  Nudger sat. He was even more uncomfortable than he thought he’d be, but he made the most of it, scooting down and extending his legs, crossing his ankles. The chair creaked softly beneath his weight and then was quiet, as if afraid of being reprimanded for complaining. It was that kind of room.

  Agnes paced to an advantageous position near the secretary and faced Nudger with the poise and presence of a stage actress. “I know about Jeanette,” she said. “The police notified me this afternoon.”

  “How much did they tell you?”

  “That she was being held for brandishing a deadly weapon.”

  “As soon as the prosecutor hears the facts,” Nudger said, “the charge will be attempted murder.”

  “Oh? Murder of whom?”

  “Didn’t you talk to Jeanette?”

  “No. I intend to do so in the morning, with my-her lawyer.”

  “She was going to kill someone named Luther Kell, the man who murdered your other daughter. I happened along. She was also going to kill me, as a bonus.”

  Agnes pursed her lips and tilted her head sideways, as if thinking over what Nudger had said, not liking it, but not disliking it all.

  “I figured out some things,” Nudger told her, watching her closely. He could hear the locusts screaming away their lives outside.

  “That’s your job, figuring out,” Agnes Boyington said.

  “Would you like to hear how well I’ve done my job?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “When Jeanette was out of her head with rage, about to squeeze the trigger, she said something about killing all the men she could. ‘��� Before they kill me again,’ she said.”

  “Not surprising, if she was as hysterical as you describe.”

  “No, but it caused me to recall some things about her, like her familiarity with her dead sister’s apartment the day she and I went there to search it. And the expensive but uncharacteristic piece of blown-glass erotica on the curio shelf in her apartment.”

  “Erotica?”

  “Then, when I was about to leave her apartment last night, I happened to see a nightline number scratched on the base of her phone, the number Jenine had used, scratched on the bottom of her phone in exactly the same manner.”

  “Nightline number?” Agnes’s voice was up an octave, oddly plaintive. Something in her was bending, and must break.

  “Such a lot of questions,” Nudger said. “You know what I’m talking about. Obviously, I was meant to find that number in Jenine’s apartment when Jeanette took me there to search. The police hadn’t found it because it had been scratched on the base of Jenine’s phone after they searched the apartment.”

  The squareness of Agnes Boyington’s deceptively youthful carriage melted. Her shoulders were slumped, narrow, and bunched. Her right hand flexed spasmodically and knotted into a fist around her thumb.

  “How did you get the idea?” Nudger asked. “How did it happen?”

  She sat down on the uncompromising sofa across from Nudger, a middle-aged widow by lamplight. To see her age that way, almost with the rapidity of movie magic, depressed Nudger.

  Her voice was a defeated monotone now, lacking entirely the cold fire and authority of only five minutes ago. “Two months ago Jenine made an appointment on the nightlines with a man-Luther Kell, as I’ve learned today. Kell was alone with her in her apartment, but someone interrupted them. They made another date; Jenine gave Kell a key and he was to let himself in and wait for her to arrive home the next evening. But Jeanette dropped by unexpectedly to visit her sister. Kell arrived, assumed she was Jenine, and murdered her.” Agnes drew a deep breath and thrust out her chin. “My slain daughter is Jeanette.”

  Nudger felt a melancholy satisfaction. He had figured things right, but it was as if he’d lost something in the process. Kernel of wisdom, kernel of sadness. He was familiar with the sensation.

  “Jeanette was dead,” Agnes continued. “Nothing could alter that. But why couldn’t tragedy also be opportunity? Jeanette’s death was a chance for Jenine to shake free of her sinful past. The twins had done everything together, gone to the same schools, acquired the same meager skills, so it was simple for Jenine to slip into Jeanette’s itinerant part-time office work; and Jeanette hadn’t lived long in her apartment, so it was easy for Jenine to begin living there as Jeanette without attracting suspicion.” She dropped her gaze and frowned in annoyance. “If only she’d listened to her mother! I figured out everything for her, every minuscule detail! If only she’d listened!”

  “Jenine wanted something more,” Nudger said, “something you might not understand. She loved her twin sister, felt as one flesh with her. She identified with Jeanette to a greater extent than either of you had planned. The masquerade was complete; a part of her became her murdered twin, breathing and walking around. She wanted revenge.”

  “Yes,” Agnes said, “revenge.” She stared at the white carpet. “But that posed problems. The double of the victim is handicapped in searching for the killer. And any radical change in Jenine’s appearance would have caused the neighbors-Jeanette’s neighbors-to look closely at her, requiring explanations and making her impersonation of Jeanette more difficult. Jenine realized this. She realized she had to hire someone like you.”

  “Someone to be her bird dog,” Nudger said, “to track down and point out her twin’s killer without arousing his suspicion. When I told her about following and losing Kell the day she was to meet him, she decided it was time to act on her own. She talked to him again on the nightlines, without my knowledge, and made another appointment. She didn’t anticipate me following Kell to where she was to meet him in her disguise, meet him wearing a dark wig and makeup to obscure her resemblance to her dead twin.”

  Agnes said nothing, still staring at the spotless white field of carpet.

  The identity switch would have worked, Nudger realized, except for the power of Jenine’s obsession to avenge Jeanette’s death, for which she must have felt responsible. And it would have worked if Agnes Boyington had been able to buy or scare him off the case and prevent him from running Kell to ground.

  And there was more. Something was bothering him, something darkly laughing and obscene.

  “How much did you know,” Nudger asked, “about what Jenine had planned for tonight?”

  Agnes raised her head high and her eyes glinted in the lamplight with their old brittle disdain. If she was in league with the devil, the devil had better watch out. “Everything!” she snapped.

  Nudger felt his breath leave him, his stomach contract. It was true, then. He hadn’t really expected this, even from Agnes Boyington.

  “You!” she said accusingly. “When you wouldn’t be reasonable and drop the case, I had no choice but to change tactics. So you might well blame yourself for what’s happened!”

  For an instant Nudger felt a rush of guilt, almost buying her twisted perspective. Then, “No,” he said. And unbelievingly, “How could you let your own daughter sink into this?”

  “Jenine didn’t take advantage of her opportunity after Jeanette’s death, Nudger. The opportunity I gave her. She fell into her old sinful ways, began seeing men, virtual strangers. Doing��� things with them! I know; I had Hugo Rumbo follow her, report to me. Everything.”

  “And you had Rumbo follow me. When he stopped me at the mall today, he was really trying to prevent me from following Jenine and Kell.”

  “Of course he was!” Agnes Boyington said, as if Nudger were a slow study and she was becoming impatient. “And on my orders. I knew where Jenine and Kell were going, and what she was going to do-or he was. It was the kind of life Jenine lived that killed Jeanette. I gave Jenine a chance to straighten out her life, to recaptu
re purity-”

  “To become Jeanette,” Nudger interrupted. “For you.”

  “Yes! Of course! And when she turned her back on decency and respectability, what choice had I left? She visited death upon her own sister with her sin and negligence. And when she failed her test with God, I planned on letting her live only long enough to avenge Jeanette’s murder!”

  “You really do believe in God,” Nudger said incredulously. But he knew he shouldn’t be incredulous. The damnedest people quoted the Bible. And, if it suited them, the Constitution and Rod McKuen.

  “Of course I believe in Him. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nudger said. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  He understood now. Understood more than Agnes would approve. Agnes had used Jenine as Jenine had used Nudger, to find Jeanette’s killer, the man who had dared to violate Agnes by invading her ordered world and murdering her pure daughter. She intended to let the soiled-beyond- redemption Jenine perhaps meet the same fate as her twin, before she herself would enter the apartment and exercise her own righteous revenge on Kell. Or on Jenine. Whoever was the survivor. It was the puritanical Agnes who had prepared the bathroom for butchery. She was the woman in the hat who’d confused Hammersmith’s man watching for Jeanette. Probably she’d left the building when he was phoning Hammersmith. She had been waiting outside the apartment, but she hadn’t entered when she’d seen Nudger, then the police, arrive.

  There were depths to Agnes Boyington, and depths and depths. If she was capable of planning the murder and dismemberment of her own daughter��� Nudger didn’t move. Suspicion drifted into his mind through doors suddenly sprung open; awareness bloomed from memory: the momentary whiff of the mingled, distinctive scents of cigarette tobacco and perfume that clung to a room long after Agnes had left it, the way death clung. The killer who wore gloves; the murder that never quite fit. How likely is it that a woman engaged to be married?���He didn’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t go away.