by John Lutz
Other books by John Lutz
Lazarus Man
Jericho Man
Shadow Man
The Alo Nudger Series
Buyer Beware
Nightlines
The Right to Sing the Blues
Ride the Lightning
Dancer’s Debt
Time Exposure
Diamond Eyes
Thicker Than Blood
Death By Jury
Thicker Than Blood
John Liutz
SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC
NAPLES, FLORIDA
2012
THICKER THAN BLOOD
Copyright © 1993 by John Lutz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
9781612321967
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
With thanks to Don Koch
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
—Eugene Field, Wynken, Blynken and Nod
CHAPTER 1
Nudger felt guilty.
Was guilty.
The five MunchaBunch doughnuts he’d eaten ten minutes ago still lay heavy in his stomach, but they weren’t as heavy as the single Dunker Delite his friend Danny Evers of Danny’s Donuts was trying to foist off on him for breakfast.
Danny had just finished the morning’s baking and the doughnut shop was warm. The heat, the sugar-and-grease baking smell, the very sight of the Dunker Delite, made Nudger’s delicate stomach twitch. Traitor he might be, but he wouldn’t wound Danny by letting him know he’d developed a fondness—no, to be honest an addiction—to the delicious miniature doughnuts sold by Danny’s recently opened competitor down the street, MunchaBunch Donuts.
Behind the counter, full-size doughnut in hand, Danny let gravity gain control of his basset-hound features and sad, concerned eyes. “You’ve been skipping breakfast a lot lately, Nudge. I’m worried you’re maybe sick or something.”
“I’m okay, Danny,” Nudger lied. “Been eating late-night snacks and I’m not very hungry in the mornings.”
“Late-night, huh? You been sleeping okay?”
“Sure.” He hastened to change the subject. “Anyone been in looking for me?” His office was directly above the doughnut shop, and when he was out, the sign on his door directed prospective clients to the shop, where Danny acted as his sort of polysaturated secretary.
“Oh, yeah!” Danny slapped his forehead. “There’s a woman up there waiting for you.” He let the Dunker Delite thunk back on its display tray, where it lay like an unexploded Scud missile.
“She mention what she wants?”
“Wants to hire an investigator, she said. I told her she came to the right place. Gave her a doughnut. Sent her on up. That was half an hour ago, but I never heard her come down. So she’s still up there in the outer office waiting. I switched on your air conditioner so’s she wouldn’t sweat too much.”
“Ever the gentleman,” Nudger said. “She have the look of a process server?”
“Nope. But then process servers don’t.”
Danny had a point. Lately Nudger had been hearing ominous rumblings from his former wife Eileen. Or rather from her lawyer, Henry Mercato, whom she was sleeping with these days. They wanted more of Nudger’s money.
They always wanted more of Nudger’s money. Eileen’s annual income from her barely legal, home-product pyramid-sales scam was double that of Nudger’s, but she enjoyed threatening to drag him back into court now and then to squeeze a little whatever out of the turnip. It gave her life meaning. Whatever he paid her, she’d hinted to him once, went into a legal fund that was used to ream him regularly for more money, kind of like plowing profits back into a business. “Look closely at your money,” she’d told him not long after the divorce, “and you’ll see my picture on every bill.”
It wasn’t as if they’d had children. Child support he would gladly have paid, and on time. But alimony? How many women received alimony these days? Nudger was sure someone in the legal system had been paid off by Eileen to influence the judge. And maybe the fix was still in. Nudger was afraid that if she ever got him back into court, she might be able to have him drawn and quartered. On the other hand, that might be too quick for her. The woman was vindictive.
“Said her name was Norvella,” Danny said, drawing Nudger back from dire musings. “Sounded like she was from the country.” As he spoke, he held a large Styrofoam cup beneath the spigot of a huge stainless-steel urn. There was hissing, gurgling, glugging, and then a dark, dark sludge oozed into the cup. “By ‘the country’ I meant this country, of course. What I was trying to say is she’s got this accent like she was raised way out in the country. I mean—”
“I get you,” Nudger interrupted.
“I didn’t wanna call a lady a redneck,” Danny said.
Nudger nodded. “It’s best to be politically correct.”
“At least have a cup of coffee, Nudge.” Danny turned around and set the cup in front of Nudger on the stainless-steel counter. “You ain’t too proud to accept a free cup of coffee, are you?”
Nudger said no, he wasn’t. He picked up the cup and took an obligatory sip. “Thanks, Danny,” he said, managing not to grimace.
Carrying the Styrofoam cup, he pushed out through the doughnut shop door into the morning heat, made a sharp U-turn, and went through another door that led to the narrow stairwell leading up to his office door. It was miserably hot in the stairwell. In the winter the stairwell was miserably cold. “Seasonal,” the landlord had called it, as if architects had carefully worked it out that way.
She stood up when Nudger entered. She looked country, all right. Red hair, freckles, green eyes, wearing jeans and a sleeveless blouse that showed off a trim, if angular figure. She had even, slightly protruding teeth, a receding chin, a long, long neck. Though there was a wise, haggard air about her, she somehow looked very young. She was attractive, though Nudger couldn’t figure out why. The way it all hung together, he supposed. He took into account the beginnings of crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and figured her age to be about thirty. A rough thirty.
She tried a smile on him. It made her nose crinkle in a way he liked. “I’m Norvella Beane,” she said. “With an e. Nobody calls me Norvella, though. I go by Norva.” She sounded as country as she looked.
“Nudger,” Nudger said. “I go by Nudger.”
“No first name?”
“None to speak of.”
He ushered her from the anteroo
m into his office, then excused himself for a moment while he ducked into the tiny half-bath and poured the coffee down the drain. He came back and sat down behind his desk. Considerate Danny had switched on the window unit in this room, too, and cool air evaporated perspiration at the top of Nudger’s collar, making his neck cold, though the rest of him was miserably hot. He reached back without looking and angled the vanes on the plastic vent so the stream of cold air flowed off to the side. When he straightened out to sit facing forward, the swivel chair eeeked and Norva Beane with an e swallowed hard, sending her Adam’s apple careening up and down her long neck.
She said, “I got me a problem, Mr. Nudger.” He placed her accent as southwestern Missouri, a flat Ozark drawl.
“A man or money?” Nudger asked.
She grinned at him as if dazzled by his perception. She was growing on him. “Started with a man, I guess. Now it’s money.” She raised both rough, oversized, yet oddly feminine hands palms out, like a child about to play patty-cake. “Not that I can’t pay for your services. You’ll surely get whatever I owe you. Don’t you worry a second about that.”
“You haven’t hired me yet,” Nudger pointed out. “I don’t even know what you want.”
“Want somebody followed,” she said.
Ah, it was coming clear, the old story. The heart and the groin kept Nudger in business. “Your husband causing a problem?”
“Stockbroker,” she said. Full of surprises. “You ever hear of Fred McMahon?”
Nudger said he had. McMahon had been in the news lately when McMahon Investments, his financial consulting firm, had folded after it was discovered he’d been using clients’ money for his own investments. He was out on bail and awaiting trial while his lawyers petitioned for a change of venue so he’d be treated fairly. Maybe someplace where barter was used instead of money. McMahon had influential friends, but Nudger didn’t figure he could sidestep prison on this one.
“White-collar crime,” Norva said, looking ready to spit. “Betcha he’s outa the penitentiary and swindling somebody again in less’n a year.”
“Why do you want him followed?” Nudger asked.
“I don’t. He didn’t do nothing to me. It’s that bastard Rand I want followed. Wanna see him strung up by his—”
“Who’s Rand?” Nudger asked.
“Dale Rand. He’s a stockbroker who cheated me outa my life savings, only I ain’t got proof. He talked me into buying junk bonds that defaulted on payment, companies that went belly-up a matter of months after I paid my money. I mean, it was all too quick and convenient to be legitimate.”
How do you mean?” Nudger asked, leaning forward in his chair. Eeek! He rested his elbows on the desk and studied Norva.
“I mean I figure he wasn’t investing my money at all, just holding it and telling me he’d bought bonds he knew all along was gonna turn worthless. Then, when they did go bad, I think he kept my money and told me it was my loss.”
“Don’t you have sales confirmations? Dates, numbers?”
“Not that he wouldn’t have had a chance of doctoring. Something else: I’m sure I heard him one day talking to that Fred McMahon on the phone. Now, all I want you to do is follow Rand and see if he contacts McMahon. If he does, then that’ll prove he’s crooked.”
“Not in court, it won’t.”
“I ain’t so interested in court as I am in satisfying my curiosity. In at least letting Rand know I know. Just ‘cause I’m from Possum Run—”
“Where?”
“It’s a little town down in the Ozarks, not far from the Arkansas line. I came into a bit of money by way of inheritance, and when I came here to Saint Louis last year and picked a stockbroker outa the phone book, I wound up with Rand. I know now he figured me for some dumb hick and set out at the git-go to take advantage of me. I don’t like that, Mr. Nudger. I can’t stand to let it be. You see my point?”
Nudger could. Still, he had to caution her. “If your money’s gone, and Rand technically hasn’t done anything illegal, you’ll be dropped off at the end of this exactly where you are now, at the beginning. Less my fee, of course.”
“ ’Course. But money be damned, Mr. Nudger, it’s the satisfaction I’m interested in. Country folks ain’t all rubes to be taken advantage of, but I’m afraid that’s just how that Dale Rand saw me. Sees me. But if he figures I’m a little yokel know-nothing who won’t have gumption enough to come after the money he stole, he’s wrong as piss in the wind.” Anger and determination sparked for an instant in her green eyes, flint striking flint. Then she blushed. “ ’Scuse my language. I get mad sometimes and sorta let fly. Let’s just say he’s wrong as berries in January.”
Nudger said, “You can get those in the frozen-food aisle over at Shop-n-Save.”
She fixed those unblinking green eyes on him, a tough little bird down deep where it mattered. Dale Rand had probably made a mistake if he’d actually diddled her out of her inheritance money. She said, “You siding with me or with Rand?”
Nudger thought, What is this, the Civil War?
He said, “Well, you’re the side that’s willing to pay me.”
Norva gave him her slow, toothy smile, crinkling her nose again as she fished her checkbook out of her oversized vinyl purse. “Then that settles that.” She might be a simple country girl, her look told him, but a hillbilly accent didn’t matter when money talked.
She and Eileen had nothing and everything in common.
CHAPTER 2
Nudger cleaned up old business, then started work for Norvella Beane the next morning.
Dale Rand was easy enough to find. He was in the phone book. Nudger was pleased when investigative work turned out to be that easy. It lent the illusion that all of life could be a cinch. Hah!
The Rand address turned out to belong to a luxury home in the Saint Louis suburb of Ladue, where new money lived sometimes uncomfortably among old. The Rand house looked like new money, especially with its aluminum window trim and expansive glasswork gleaming in the hot, brilliant sunlight. It was a two-story brick modern, large enough to be a terminal building at a small airport. The roof was red tile and most of the face of the upper floor was darkly tinted glass, which mirrored the tops of trees lining the base of the circular driveway. Here and there angular, rough-hewn beams were allowed to show through the brickwork, an incongruous pass at appearing rustic. Well behind the house, Nudger glimpsed a four-car garage, which seemed to have been built fairly recently. Its brickwork was paler, and the mortar looked almost white. On the garage’s roof was a small cupola, which sported a black piece of modern sculpture, a minimalist sort of bird that turned out to be a weather vane. So this was what the rooster had come to. An overhead door was open to reveal the trunk and rear bumper of a shiny black Cadillac.
Nudger backed out of the driveway, pretending to be a disoriented driver who’d nosed in only to turn around. Then he found a spot down the street where he could park in the shade and watch the house.
He knew he couldn’t stay there long. The Ladue police might regard his rusty fifteen-year-old Ford Granada as litter. Might regard Nudger himself that way. Take him in and conduct a strip search with rubber gloves. Ladue might have a law against wearing J.C. Penney underwear, might toss him in a cell, and throw the key into the manicured bushes.
He didn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes the black Caddy eased out of the Rand driveway and made its way along the tree-lined streets to Ladue Road.
It was a new Cadillac. They were building them big again, and easy to tail. Nudger followed in the land yacht’s wake as it turned south on Hanley, then east on Highway 40. They were headed toward downtown. Not once did Rand seem to glance at his rearview mirror. Nudger dropped three car lengths behind anyway. He was sure he knew Rand’s destination, so there was no reason to play in close.
Rand exited at Seventh Street and drove north into the heart of downtown. At Chestnut he made a sharp left into the underground parking garage of the Medwick Building, on
e of those pale concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, which look like stacks of ice-cube trays. It was the kind of maximum-profit architecture that bloomed like fields of tulips during Reagan’s Morning in America.
Nudger found a parking space on Chestnut, fed the meter a quarter, and jogged across the street. He entered the garage instead of the building and stood by the elevators with a couple of women dressed in business suits. Rand had parked the Caddy and was approaching. Nudger hoped the elevator wouldn’t arrive too soon for him to make it.
Rand was wearing an elegant gray suit and was taller than he’d seemed sitting behind the steering wheel, probably an inch or so over six feet. He was slim, with sandy hair combed sharply to the side to disguise the fact that it was receding. His features were what used to be called patrician, with a long jaw and aquiline nose. Blue eyes peered out from behind oversized gold-rimmed glasses. His complexion was pale and smooth, like a woman’s, though his appearance wasn’t at all feminine. He glanced at Nudger as if he owned him and was considering selling, then settled his weight to patiently wait for the elevator, his right hand wrapped around the handle of an expensive, black, leather attaché case, thin as the creases in his tailored slacks.
Norva Beane had told Nudger where Rand worked, but he wanted to verify it. Wanted, if nothing else, to be sure this was indeed Dale Rand, who fit Rand’s description and who’d emerged from Rand’s house and driven to the building containing Rand’s office. Nudger had been mixed up in a mistaken identity case before and had found himself embroiled in a stew of murder and suicide. Now he was cautious. But then, he was cautious about most everything. Even so, life often took him by surprise. That made him even more cautious.
The elevator arrived and everyone got in. Small talk ceased as elevator etiquette took hold. Nudger pushed 30, the highest numbered button, and leaned against the back wall, staring straight ahead and slightly above eye level, like everyone else, as if waiting for a film to be shown on the surface of the closed doors.