by John Lutz
“I need this,” Nudger had said to Claudia, but she’d refused to regard him as a hero. She noted that he might easily have been shot last night.
“I was simply doing my job,” he replied.
“Then there’s hardly anything heroic about it.”
“I need this,” he told her again, two hours later, when the Mets were changing pitchers in the seventh inning of the Businessman’s Special. She had only morning classes today, so Nudger had visited her apartment, and after striking out there, he suggested they go to the ballpark, lunch on hot dogs and nachos, and watch the rest of the afternoon game, the Businessman’s Special. He didn’t figure he had to worry much about King Chamberlain or Aaron or being mugged again by Norva’s friend here in bright sunlight among forty thousand people.
Claudia said, “I really don’t understand it.”
“There are certain responsiblities that go with the profession,” Nudger said. “Things you owe any client. It was a matter of honor, I guess.” Honor. He was surprised by how easily the word had slid from his lips.
“I mean, I don’t understand why the Mets don’t put in a left-hander.” Claudia was knowledgeable about baseball. She and several other teachers had combined resources to buy season tickets. It was her turn to use the seats, which was another reason Nudger had suggested lunch and a ball game. He wondered if Biff Archway had ever sat where he was sitting.
Nudger said, “There are over two hundred ‘Grants’ in the phone book.”
“That has nothing to do with a right-hander being brought in to pitch to a left-handed hitter late in a tie game. The percentage is with the Cardinals.”
“Good. Nan Grant is a student, probably at the same school where Luanne Rand is enrolled. It should be easy for you to call the right people and come up with her address.” Cheering began on the other side of the stadium, and section by section, fans stood briefly and raised their arms, so that the undulating movement swept sequentially around the circular ballpark. The wave. Nudger loved baseball but not the wave. Not furry or feathered mascots, either, nor ball players who refused to slide headfirst in the last year of their contracts, or owners more interested in the bottom line than in winning games. But especially not the wave.
Instead of answering him, Claudia stood up and yelled, raising and lowering her arms. She was wearing a red Cardinals T-shirt, and Nudger liked the way her small breasts protruded when she stretched and raised her arms, but that was the best he could say for the wave.
He said, “The Mets’ manager knows that if he brings in a left-hander, the Cardinals will counter with a right-handed pinch hitter who’s a threat to hit a home run.”
Settling back into her seat, she stared at him. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
“I was asking if you’d use your connections to try to get Nan Grant’s address for me, waiting for your answer.”
The bearded giant in a tank top behind Nudger suddenly screamed, “C’mon! Let’s plaaaay baaaaaall!” Nudger jumped, spilling most of the beer from his paper cup.
Claudia made a face and said, “God, that uniform.”
Confused, Nudger said, “You’ve seen the Mets’ uniforms before.”
“I meant that outfit you had on in your newspaper photograph this morning.”
“Leisure suits were the style when the photo was taken.”
“It’s not a very flattering style, even though you were a lot thinner then.”
The giant kicked the back of Nudger’s seat in frustration. Nudger sensibly directed his anger at Claudia. “Damn it! I try to hold a conversation with you and you won’t give me an answer. You jump the rails! You—”
She grinned. “Relax, Nudger, I was only giving you the needle. Tell you what, you go buy us some more nachos, and when the game’s over I’ll try to get Nan Grant’s address.”
It sounded like a bargain to Nudger. He needed another beer anyway. He stood up and wedged his way between seat backs and knees to the aisle and descended into the shade of the tunnel beneath the stands.
He was reaching into his pocket to pay for the nachos at the concession stand when he heard the crowd roar.
It was still roaring when he got back to his section. He squinted to see better in the sunlight. Claudia and the giant were both standing, giving each other high fives. “Three run homer!” the giant was booming over and over, as Nudger edged back toward his seat, balancing the nachos and beer. Some of the beer spilled over the side of the cup and ran down his arm. “Three run homer! Terrific shot to right field. Longest I ever seen! You missed it, buddy!” The giant gave Claudia a hug as if they’d known each other for years. They slapped each other’s hands some more.
It must have been quite a home run, all right. Even the players in the Mets dugout were buzzing about it.
Gradually the crowd settled back down in their seats, but they were still excited. Nudger sat and watched Fredbird, the mascot, strut arrogantly back and forth on the roof of the Cardinals dugout. He wished the absurd maroon bird would trip and fall.
He loved baseball.
Downtown traffic was brutal after the game, so it was almost three-thirty when they got back to Claudia’s apartment. Nudger sat on the sofa, listening to blues on the radio and enjoying the air conditioning, while Claudia went into the bedroom to use the phone there for her queries about Nan Grant.
Fifteen minutes passed before he heard her call him, and turned to see her standing in the bedroom doorway wearing only panties and bra.
She smiled and said, “I’ve got the air conditioner on high in here, hero.”
He stood up and went to her, tried to grab her and kiss her, but she spun out of reach, then snatched his hand and led him to the bed. The air was cool in the bedroom. The sheets were cool. Everything other than Nudger and Claudia was cool.
He was supported on his elbows and knees, poised over her in the play of cool air, and she was breathing heavily into his ear, when the phone rang.
“Probably about Nan Grant,” she breathed.
“Maybe not. Might be your landlord. Better not answer it.”
“My landlord doesn’t phone me.”
The phone seemed to be getting louder with each ring. Nudger lowered the length of his body an inch. “Claudia . . .”
“No, no, I can’t stay in the mood if I don’t answer.” She wriggled halfway out from beneath him and snaked out an arm to lift the receiver. She pressed plastic to her ear and said hello in a way that might melt some microchips. Nudger waited.
“For you,” she said.
Supported on his knees and one elbow now, he held the receiver to his ear. Hammersmith said, “Nudge?”
“Yeah.”
“I calling at a bad time?”
“Well, yeah.”
“She’s disappeared.”
“Who?”
“Luanne.”
“She’s done it before.”
“But this time Sydney Rand went to the police and reported her missing.”
“Luanne hasn’t been gone long enough for that.”
“How would you know?”
“I know.”
“This is Ladue we’re talking about, Nudge. The rules, are different out there. The kid left the house yesterday morning and didn’t come home last night. There’s the possibility Norva Beane abducted her. Luanne’s not in school, and nobody seems to know where she is. Considering her father was shot at last night, that’s good enough for Massinger. Truth is, it might be good enough for me, too. Believe me, she’s missing.”
“Well, I don’t know where she is.”
“Just be sure you don’t, Nudge. I thought you oughta hear about this for when the Ladue police contact you. Massinger already called here. He told me he’d informed Dale Rand that Norva Beane says she’s Luanne’s natural mother. If that’s true, it’s hard to believe Norva didn’t have anything to do with the girl’s disappearance.”
“Massinger say that?”
“That, and he asked if I’d
seen you. He said he tried your office and your apartment all afternoon.”
“I was at the ball game.”
“Lucky you. Some game. Historic home run, huh? The radio said the ball went over four hundred fifty feet, hit high enough to bring rain. Musta been something to see.”
“Musta been.”
“I reminded Massinger you weren’t involved in this case anymore, now that you’ve lost your client. You’re not involved, right?”
“Only in a very limited way.”
“Okay. I’m not gonna ask how limited. I’ll let you get back to whatever it was you were doing, Nudge. I expect it was important. Hammersmith’s voice was perfectly neutral. You could never tell with him.
He hung up.
Nudger handed Claudia the receiver and she replaced it. “What was that about?” she asked.
“Luanne Rand is gone.”
She looked down at him and smiled. “So are you.”
Nudger said, “Damn!” and rolled onto his back.
“Don’t worry about it, lover. Relax.” She kissed him gently on the lips. “Relax,” she repeated.
No sooner had he relaxed when the phone rang again.
This time it was for Claudia, someone returning her call to tell her Nan Grant’s address.
Though Claudia’s Board of Education informant told her Nan Grant was indeed a classmate of Luanne, she lived nowhere near Luanne. She was attending the expensive private high school on a scholarship, and resided in a tough, gang-infested, and impoverished area of North Saint Louis.
Nudger didn’t know how to feel about that.
Certainly not relaxed.
CHAPTER 24
The slim, neatly dressed black girl who emerged from the decrepit brick apartment building the next morning didn’t look as if she belonged in such a ruinous neighborhood. She was wearing brown slacks, a yellow blouse with a white collar, white cuffs on the short sleeves, and white jogging shoes with a multicolored design on the sides, which made each shoe look like a miniature Grand Prix race car. Nudger assumed she was Nan Grant. Herbert Hoover High School summer classes began in less than an hour, so the timing was right, along with the approximate age of the girl and the fact that she had books slung under one arm.
Nudger sat in the parked Granada and watched her. Two hulking street-corner loungers watched him. He was getting uneasy. Nan Grant wasn’t walking toward the bus stop two blocks away as he’d assumed she would. Instead she was standing at the base of the apartment’s cracked concrete stoop and staring at a paper in her left hand. She seemed completely unaware of the graffiti on the boarded-up windows behind her, of the trash in the gutter, of a wino or homeless man curled sleeping, unconscious, or dead in the doorway of the next apartment building.
A rusty white Toyota pickup truck with oversized tires and little in the way of a muffler rumbled past the Granada. The young black guy driving gave him a gunfighter glance. Nudger watched as the truck pulled to the curb. The driver opened the passenger-side door and extended a hand to help Nan Grant climb up and into the cab.
Nudger started the Granada and followed as the truck made its noisy way up the street. One of the loungers, a skinny guy with a shirt that looked to be made of fish net, grinned at him and began leaping around as if trying to get out of the way of something that wasn’t there. His companion stared at Nudger in the same deadpan way as the kid who’d picked up Nan Grant. A gangly boy about twelve, walking down the opposite side of the street, scowled at Nudger, went into the moonwalk, and made an obscene gesture. Maybe it all meant something. Nudger couldn’t figure it out.
The truck didn’t lead him to Luanne Rand, as he’d hoped. It clanked and roared out to Ladue, where it was the odd fish among sleek and sharklike newer model cars, and stopped in front of Herbert Hoover High. Nan Grant climbed out of it without a word to the driver and strode along the hedge-lined walk to the school’s entrance.
Nudger watched the truck deliberately cut off a Mercedes as it pulled back out into the stream of traffic, then disappear down the street. He drove to a public phone he’d noticed near a big drugstore, where he called Nan Grant’s home and asked to speak to her. The woman who answered said Nan would be home from school at two-thirty, could he call back then. Nudger said he could, it was nothing important.
At two o‘clock he was parked outside the high school, feeling heavy and guilty about the MunchaBunch doughnuts he’d had for lunch, watching a parade of BMWs, Mercedes Benzes, and Volvo station wagons queue at the curb to pick up students. He didn’t see the beat-up Toyota truck.
Still with books slung beneath her arm, Nan Grant emerged from the school with two preppy-looking blond girls. They piled into a late-model blue BMW driven by a teenage girl with dark hair, cut almost military short on one side and arranged in a kind of rooster comb on the other. As the BMW passed Nudger, he could hear music blasting from it even though its air conditioner was on and its windows were closed. He fell in behind it, amazed at the way all its occupants seemed to be talking and gesticulating at once, all of them waving lighted cigarettes. They seemed to understand what they were saying to each other, despite the multiple-track conversations and the music roaring from the stereo, and somehow they did not set each other on fire. In some ways, God looked after kids the way He did for drunks.
The girl with the rooster hairdo drove to a vast shopping mall on Clayton Road and cruised around the airport-sized parking lot until she found a space. Nudger had to park farther away near the edge of the lot and jog to the mall entrance to catch up with the four girls.
They were having a fine time ambling around the mall, now and then entering a clothing or specialty store and trying things on. They seemed never to stop talking and finding each other vastly amusing.
They had more energy than Nudger. Within an hour his feet felt as heavy as diver’s boots. He didn’t want to wait outside one more shop, sit on one more hard bench near one more small tree near one more pool or fountain. It was past three o’clock. Apparently Nan Grant was no more predictable than Luanne about arriving home when expected.
Finally Nudger got a break. When it was nearly four o’clock, the other three girls giggled their goodbyes and left Nan standing near a shop that sold records, tapes, and compact discs. Nudger wasn’t surprised; he couldn’t imagine three preppy teenage girls in a BMW penetrating Nan’s neighborhood to drop off a friend.
What now? Nudger wondered, wriggling his toes to keep his sore feet from cramping. Would she go to a bus stop? Would the kid in the Toyota truck make an appearance?
She began walking with a sense of purpose. Breathing heavily, Nudger kept pace. All the way to the food court.
She got some kind of massive creation with a hamburger at its center, french fries, and a gallon of soda, then sat alone at one of the small, phony marble tables. Nudger bought a Busch beer at one of the food counters and sat several tables away, grateful to be motionless for an extended period of time even if the tiny chair was causing permanent spine damage.
He watched Nan sit and slowly, solemnly now that she was alone, work on her food and soda. She didn’t seem to be in any rush. Didn’t seem to be waiting for anyone. She seemed oblivious to the people streaming past on their way to and from nearby escalators, or crowded around some of the food counters. Music was being piped in, an old Rolling Stones hit that had been neutered.
After a while, Nudger walked over and sat down opposite her. “Can we talk a minute, Nan?”
She stared blankly at him, unafraid in such a public place, trying to figure out if she knew him. She looked much younger close up. Round cheeks, small features, interesting eyes with crescents of white showing beneath the dark pupils. Too much red lipstick and violet eye shadow. She would have looked cheap if she weren’t so young. What she looked like was a child who hadn’t learned how to apply makeup. About half a minute passed before she said, “You’re the guy tackled that woman who shot at Mr. Rand. I saw your picture in the paper, in that leisure suit.”
“That’s right. Can I ask you some questions about Luanne?”
Nan sipped some Coke and stared at him over the straw. Her eyes were alert now, intelligent. She straightened up and licked her lips. Lipstick rimmed the top of the straw. “I dunno. Can I trust you?”
“Can I trust you?”
“To do what?”
“To tell me the truth.”
She took him in with her eyes and her mind. Somewhere inside her was the wisdom of her pain, of what it took even to try to transcend her circumstances. It was something her girlfriends at Herbert Hoover High wouldn’t understand. He’d seldom felt so scrutinized. It only lasted a few seconds, then she was a naive teenage girl again. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, why should I lie?”
“Why should either of us? First question is, do you know where Luanne can be found?”
“First answer’s no. She missing or something?”
“Yes.” He’d carried his beer over. He took a pull of it and set the glass down next to the bottle. “I’m worried about her.”
Nan didn’t ask him why. She said, “You oughta be.”
Nudger went fishing. “You mean because of her father?”
“Uh-hm. Man’s a real dork.”
“Because of how he treats her?”
Nan looked unblinkingly at him, the older Nan again. “You know he’s balling her?”
“Yeah.” Nudger tried to keep his expression neutral but knew he hadn’t.
“Don’t look so mad and shocked. I got other friends with the same complaint. Maybe you shoulda let that crazy woman go ahead and shoot a hole in Mr. Rand. Shoot his lousy dingus right off.”
“Maybe,” Nudger said, thinking about it. “That why you figure Luanne might be missing? She ran away because of what her father was doing?”
“No, she got used to that years ago. Used to it as anybody could get, anyway. I think she’s gone because of what else he’s got her into. He set her up with some guys, and more’n once.”
“Set her up?” It took a few seconds for Nudger to grasp what this kid with the paint-splotch eye shadow was telling him. “Wait a minute, you mean he’s pimping for her?”