by John Lutz
“I never wanted to lay eyes on Wally again and still don’t,” she said. “I went to him to get the money to pay for the abortion, the money he’d promised to give me so I’d terminate the pregnancy. But he backed down on the deal and refused to give me anything, got angry and called me names and then laughed at me. I lost my temper and struck him. It was all the excuse he needed. He beat me badly enough to put me in the hospital for two days. I never felt so much pain and fear.”
“How do you feel about Wally now?”
“I hate him, of course.”
“Have you seen him since the beating?”
“No. He left town while I was in the hospital. At least that’s what I was told by his landlady and a few of his acquaintances. They said he moved to Cincinnati to start a new salesman’s job. Wally sells religious textbooks; he’s very good at it.”
Nudger felt like reaching into his bottom desk drawer for the thermos of warm milk he kept there, but he decided that wouldn’t seem very businesslike.
He waited until Jeanette had left, then he reached instead for the telephone and called Jack Hammersmith.
When he came to the phone Hammersmith asked, “Do you have something to tell me that will break the Jenine Boyington case wide open?”
“I never saw a case break wide open,” Nudger said. “I don’t know exactly what that expression means.”
“But you do have some tidbit of information for me?”
“No. I don’t know what a tidbit is, and I called to ask for information.”
“You’re like the rest of the world.” Hammersmith sounded betrayed.
“Out here in the world away from Headquarters lives a guy named Wallace Everest. Know anything about him?”
“All I need to know, Nudge. He’s the victim’s ex-boyfriend. A bad sort. The mother told us about him. He’s got an ironclad alibi in Cincinnati for the time of the murder. And he has dark hair.”
“Thanks,” Nudger told him. “You’re on top of things.”
“It’s slippery up here, Nudge.”
“I know. Everything that slides off falls on us folks down here.”
He said good-bye to Hammersmith and quickly hung up before the lieutenant could reply. Hammersmith was accustomed to having the last word and would be irritated and chomp his poisonous cigar and literally fume about not having it this time. Good.
Nudger didn’t dwell long on Hammersmith. He was thinking about how his options had narrowed, how the twists and turns of the Boyington women had brought him smack up against one obvious course of action. It was a plan he hadn’t wanted to put into effect, because it was dangerous for him and dangerous for Jeanette Boyington.
But now it seemed to be that or nothing. In such situations, Nudger always chose that. It was the only way he could manage to stay in business.
“I want you to talk to men on the lines at night,” Nudger told Jeanette that evening. “I want you to make appointments with them, if that’s what they ask for. Tell them you’ll meet them at some busy public place, preferably a large shopping mall.”
Jeanette sat across from Nudger’s desk and nodded somberly as he spoke, as if each of his words were physically penetrating her mind to be lodged solidly forever in the gray matter of her memory. He could tell, watching her, that she’d meant it when she said she wanted to help find her twin sister’s killer, meant it perhaps more strongly than she had revealed.
“Do you want me to meet these men?” she asked. He saw that she was willing to undergo that danger. In fact, she was downright eager.
“No,” Nudger told her, “I’ll get their descriptions from you, then go to the appointed place and look them over. If one of them happens to have curly blond hair and oversized hands, I’ll follow him when he leaves disappointed and find out who he is.”
“And then?”
“Then we’ll watch him and decide whether the fish we’ve hooked is legal and should be reeled in.” Nudger studied her eyes as he spoke. They were flat gray in his dimly lighted office and made him wonder if her lifeless expression was the result of her sister’s death; Hammersmith had said some twins thought that way.
“Jenine told me she usually talked on the lines about three A.M.,” Jeanette said, “when she couldn’t sleep and was depressed. She said three A.M. was the perilous hour, a time perfectly balanced between darkness and light, joy and despair in the human soul.”
“She had a poetic turn of mind.”
“Had ...” Jeanette repeated, twisting her lips as if she loathed the taste of the word. “I’ll make my phone calls between the hours of two and four A.M. That should increase the chances of making connections with the man who killed Jenine.”
“Remember that we’re not sure someone she met through talking on the lines is her killer,” Nudger cautioned.
“I think we’re sure,” Jeanette said, decisive as always. “He killed her and he killed those other women, and probably he killed more women he met over the lines.”
“All right,” Nudger conceded, “we’re sure. Sure enough, anyway. What we’re trying to do now is determine if we’re right.”
“Agreed,” she said, obviously not meaning it. Nudger wondered if she had doubted herself even once since she had popped from the womb.
“Your phone conversations will require some convincing acting,” he said.
“Don’t worry, my heart will be in it.” She seemed to turn her attention inward, as if seeking pain, like a method actor gearing up for a role, “Do you think this plan will produce results?”
“It might, if we have enough patience.”
“Ever seen a cat poised patiently watching a mouse hole?” Jeanette asked.
“Only in a cartoon.”
“Well, that’s how patient I am. Like that cat.” There was nothing cartoonlike about the intensity in her voice. Or in her eyes.
After she’d left with a list of phone company service-line numbers, Nudger sat for a long time at his desk, chewing antacid tablets and watching the office darken as the evening sun forsook the city.
He thought that if he were a mouse he wouldn’t go outside his door.
SIX
Nudger’s stomach lay weighty and solid as cement just beneath his rib cage. He was at his desk in his dim office, watching the big hand of the clock with the intentness of a school kid eager for the bell. The telephone receiver was jammed against his ear and he could hear his own pulse pounding on the line, merged with the faint hissings and distant clickings of the phone company’s electronic monolith. It was as if the phone were draining him of something that it needed in order for its infinitely complex whole to exist and disseminate information and gossip and dispatch monthly bills.
He’d been on the line for almost an hour, discouraging hopeful romantics and listening to outpourings of desperation and sometimes madness. And waiting. It was thirty-five minutes past midnight.
At sixteen minutes to one, she was there. Nudger recognized her beaten, tenuous voice immediately as she asked if anyone was on the line.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Were you worried about me again?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t even know me.”
“I was worried about you.”
She let go of the subject. Nudger hoped she believed him. “It’s odd,” she told him, faintly amused through her despondency, “but I found myself actually looking forward to hearing your gorilla jokes.”
“Not so odd,” Nudger said. “Millions of people stay alive for nothing more intriguing than their golf games.”
“How drab.”
“Sub-par to you but important to them. It’s a subjective thing.”
“Okay, let’s have it,” she said wearily. “This gorilla walks into a bar and ...”
“Exactly!” Nudger said with enthusiasm. “But stop me if you’ve—”
“Please!”
“Okay, this gorilla walks into this bar where there’s nobody but the
bartender, polishing glasses. So the guy looks up and is astounded to see a gorilla, more astounded when the gorilla saunters over and sits on a bar stool.”
“I’m properly astounded. Get on with it.”
“The bartender goes to the owner in the back room and says, ‘A huge gorilla just walked in and sat at the bar. What do I do now?’ ‘So ask him what he’s drinking,’ the owner says.”
“So the bartender goes back ...”
“Right, the bartender goes back and says—”
“‘What’ll you have?’”
“Very good. And the gorilla growls, ‘Beer.’ The bartender checks with the owner, who says, ‘Well, give him a beer.’ When the bartender sets the mug on the bar, the gorilla hands him a ten-dollar bill. So the bartender goes back to the owner and says in a shocked voice, ‘That gorilla gave me a ten. What do I do?’ ‘Gorillas aren’t very smart,’ the owner says, ‘so give him back a dollar for change.’ The bartender does that and gets by with it, and starts polishing glasses again and is getting very nervous because the gorilla just sits there silently, sipping beer and staring straight ahead. Finally the bartender leans an elbow on the bar, to look casual, and says in a shaky voice just to make conversation and ease the tension, ‘You know, we don’t get many gorillas in here. ”’
“And the gorilla says?”
“‘I guess not, at nine dollars a beer. ”’
Nudger waited. Static on the line, no laughter. But then he hadn’t really expected any.
“Is that the end?” she asked finally.
“Uh, yeah. It’s one of those ‘all hell must have broken loose’ jokes. You know the type. Based on the listener’s imagination. Rooted in the future.”
“Very apropos, not very funny.”
“More interesting than a golf game.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“How do you feel tonight?” Nudger asked. “About the future?”
“Not much different.”
“But different?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. You didn’t save my life with that gorilla joke.”
“I know more of them.”
“Don’t threaten me.” Her voice became calmer, more serious. “I did want to talk with you again. I don’t know why, except that for some reason you seemed ...”
“To understand?”
“No, not that. You seemed to care, even though we’re strangers.”
Nudger looked at the blackness outside his window. “Sometimes two strangers can talk for a few minutes and then not be strangers. A rapport is there that springs from something deeper than they know, like the confluence of rivers underground.”
“Very eloquent. Probably nonsense.”
“If you took your life, I’d care a great deal. Do you believe that?”
“I’m not sure. I seem to believe it, despite myself.”
“What’s your name?” Nudger asked. “What’s your conventional phone number?”
“No!” she blurted, almost shouted the word.
Too fast, Nudger warned himself, too fast. “Take it easy,” he said gently. “I’ll give you my name. It’s Nudger, Alo Nudger. Short for Aloysius. Everyone just calls me Nudger.”
“I never met anyone actually named Aloysius. I’m sorry for you.”
“Will you tell me your first name?” He felt like a teenager coaxing a reluctant sophomore virgin.
“It’s Claudia,” she said. She spoke the name as if she disliked it.
“Would you like to have my phone number, Claudia? In case you want to get in touch with me during the day.”
“No.”
“Can we talk again this way, then? I’ll tell you more gorilla jokes.”
“We can talk again only if you do not tell me more gorilla jokes.”
“That seems unreasonable.”
“Most of the good things in life are unreasonable.”
Nudger had never really thought about that. It might be true. “Will you tell me more about yourself, Claudia?”
“No.”
“That leaves me as the subject of conversation. I’m quite handsome, with a large disposable income, and enough suffering in my past to be graced with wisdom and nobility.”
“Bullshit.”
“That, too.”
“Your suffering is going on right now, only you seem to have learned to live with it, almost to regard it as an unwelcome old acquaintance that’s moved in with you and won’t go away. You’ve come to an accommodation. Maybe that’s what there is about you that is more interesting than your gorilla jokes, so-called.”
Nudger smiled slightly and licked his lips, tasting the salt of his perspiration. This wasn’t suicide talk at all. “You’re a damned good psychoanalyst,” he said.
“I’ve learned from experts.”
“Why don’t you tell me—”
“Tomorrow, Nudger.”
“—at least some trivial thing about yourself?”
But she had hung up. The vacated line sighed in Nudger’s ear like the plaintive echoes of a vast lifeless ocean heard in a seashell. It was a lonely sound, a residue of pain.
He replaced the receiver in its cradle and leaned back in his swivel chair. He was pleased. Claudia was her name and for the moment she was no longer bent on suicide. That was progress. Gorilla jokes seldom failed altogether.
Nudger rested his elbows on the desk, stared at the telephone and wondered. Why did he care about her to such a large degree? Claudia was, after all, a stranger to him. Even she had referred to herself as such.
But he knew better. She actually was more than a stranger. Rapport, subterranean rivers flowing to a dark confluence, mystical oneness. He did feel that way. And so must she. Maybe that was all that was keeping her alive. Maybe. What was he to her? Who was she, really? What was she to him? Could the rights to this be sold to one of the networks for a new soap opera?
No, Nudger didn’t feel as if he were embroiled in a soap opera. This was more of a Greek tragedy, with its bizarre upstage chorus and an innate engine of fate propelling its characters to destinies they didn’t understand and couldn’t escape. Sophocles by phone.
He stood up and stretched, then exhaled with a great rush of breath. It was frustrating to sit at his desk and think about Claudia. He didn’t want to think about anything at all. He wanted to sleep.
After turning out the lights and locking the door carefully behind him, Nudger descended the dimly lit narrow stairway to the street, drove to his apartment and went immediately to bed.
The telephone shrilled beside him like a nagging wife. “Eileen ...” he muttered. But it had been years since she’d shared his bed. Nudger came awake enough to realize that the phone was ringing and lifted the receiver to quiet the damned thing.
Morning light was angling in where the drapes didn’t quite meet, lancing across the bedroom to lie in a streak of brilliance across the foot of the bed. Nudger looked at his watch. Ten forty-five. He put ear to receiver and said a sleep-thickened hello.
“Mr. Nudger, this is Jeanette. I’ve got two.”
“You’ve got to what?”
“No, no. T-w-o. Two men made dates with me over the lines last night. I’m supposed to meet them this afternoon by the fountain in the Twin Oaks Mall.”
“Good,” Nudger told her. “I’m assuming you made these dates for different times.”
“Of course.” Jeanette’s voice was icy enough to wither the last vestiges of sleep in Nudger’s mind. “I’m to meet the first one at two o’clock, the second at two-thirty. Frank and Sandy, but that’s not their real names.”
“Did you learn anything else from your conversations with them?”
“Only what they like.”
“Do they like the same things?”
“No.”
“Do either of them like what Jenine liked?”
“I don’t know,” Jeanette said. “Jenine and I never talked about things like that. Frank seems pretty conventional. Sandy suggested—”
“N
ever mind,” Nudger interrupted, “I don’t want to know. Who’s the two o’clock?”
“Frank. He’ll be wearing brown slacks and a yellow sweater. At two-thirty Sandy should show up wearing vinyl boots and a black vinyl cowboy hat.”
“Did you say vinyl?”
“That’s right. Maybe he’s too poor to be into leather.”
Nudger realized with incredulity that she seemed serious.
“I’ll be at the mall to look these two hopefuls over,” he told her.
“If one of them fits the description,” Jeanette said, “phone me as soon as you learn anything about him.”
“That’s what you’re paying me for.”
“That’s right, Mr. Nudger. Good-bye.”
Nudger hung up the phone, rolled onto his side in the fetal position and tried to go back to sleep. He seemed to get wider awake by the minute. Finally he got out of bed and showered and dressed.
The shopping mall was only half an hour from his apartment, so there was no rush. He went through the routine with Mr. Coffee, poured himself a cup of the strong brew, disdaining cream and sugar, then sat in the living room, sipping while he watched the news on cable TV. Big trouble. There was big trouble everywhere.
After a while Nudger used the remote control to switch off the TV and then simply sat in the increasing warmth of the living room. The apartment was small and cluttered, comfortable by chance. The furniture was a potpourri of styles and periods, running to overstuffed and old. Nudger figured that in a few years he and the furniture would be perfectly compatible. There was nothing in the apartment left over from his days with Eileen. He had gotten rid of all that in the first year after the divorce.
When his cup was empty, Nudger got up and went into the kitchen to prepare brunch. He poured another cup of coffee and a tall glass of chilled orange juice, then broke four eggs and got out some cheese and cooked up an omelet.
He had never acquired the knack in the kitchen. He cooked the omelet too long and it took on the thickness and texture of leather, but it tasted like vinyl.