Nightlines (13 page)

Nudger sipped his own coffee, then took a bite of a particularly large Dunker Delite. He used a paper napkin to wipe the grease from his fingers, then, like the woman down the counter, stared into his cup and thought about his world.

It occurred to him that the crowd roar he’d heard on Claudia’s phone might have come from somewhere other than Busch Stadium. A television set or radio? Not likely. Nudger was sure he would have recognized a broadcast sound. Maybe Claudia lived near a Little League field or a park where high school or legion baseball was played.

No, Nudger decided. Not much baseball was played at one in the morning, not even major league ball. It could be that he was wrong about the source of the sound. Then he heard again the crowd’s roar last night as he was driving near the stadium.

“Did the Cards play in town night before last?” he asked Danny.

Danny nodded, a gleam of interest in his dark, basset eyes. He was a baseball fan and an ardent Cardinals rooter. “They won thirteen to ten in extra innings,” he said.

Nudger paused as he raised his foam coffee cup. “How many extra innings?”

“They played seventeen innings, their longest game of the season. They won the game with two singles and a home run when they had two outs. If they get good pitching in September—”

“Never mind that. What time was the game over?”

Danny shrugged and leaned on the glass doughnut case. “Oh, I dunno, but it had to be awful late. You could find out what time, I guess.” He stood up straight. “In fact, I know where you could find out. I still got that day’s sports page in a stack of newspapers in the back room.”

Nudger was about to ask Danny to get the sports page, but the doughnut shop entrepreneur was already shoving open the swinging door by the display case. From the back room came sounds of rummaging.

“Ain’t fair,” the old woman at the end of the counter was absently muttering again and again. “Ain’t fair, ain’t fair, ain’t fair . . .”

Age had granted her wisdom. Nudger sat feeling sorry for her, then wondered if she might actually be better off than he was. Disoriented though she might be, she didn’t have to cope with Hugo Rumbo and the Boyington women, not to mention a mass murderer. Danny emerged within a few minutes clutching a grease-spotted sheet of newspaper. It featured a photo of a leaping ballplayer and the headline
CARDS SMITE CUBS IN SEVENTEEN
. He turned the paper so Nudger could read it, spreading it out on the stainless steel counter and smoothing it flat with a swipe of his hand.

The information Nudger sought was in the second paragraph. Forty thousand people had seen the Cardinals triumph when a ten—ten tie was broken in the bottom of the seventeenth inning by a pinch-hit home run with two men on base. Forty thousand people. How far from the stadium might the exuberant roar of that many fans carry, and still be loud enough to be picked up in a phone conversation? Three blocks? Ten?

Then Nudger remembered that the area around the stadium was almost exclusively commercial; there weren’t that many apartment buildings. That would make his task possible, though not easy.

Leaving his coffee and doughnut, but no money, on the counter, he said a hasty goodbye to Danny and hurried from the doughnut shop to drive downtown.

“Hey, Nudge!” Danny called.

“Put it on my tab!”

“Ain’t fair, ain’t fair, ain’t fair,” the old woman repeated sagely, as the door swung closed behind Nudger.

Traffic was heavy downtown, the usual business crowd as well as a surprising number of summer tourists, come to see Missouri’s Big City. Nudger drove around for a while, studying the buildings in the vicinity of Busch Stadium. There were only a few apartment buildings, but there were some business structures that might contain upstairs apartments.

He divided the area around the stadium into quadrants, parked the car, and began his search on foot. He felt like the love-crossed prince searching for Cinderella. All he needed was a glass slipper.

The first building was a gloomy old converted hotel. Nudger stood in the faded vestibule and studied the bank of brass mailboxes. Some of them had only last names printed on the cards showing above the slots. Nudger cursed and wiped his forehead with his forearm. Maybe he wasn’t as close to Claudia as he thought. Or maybe closer. She might live right upstairs from where he stood, but he had no way to know from the mailboxes.

He began punching buttons above the boxes, asking if Claudia was home when he got an answer on the intercom. No Claudia lived here, he was told. No one in the building had even heard of a Claudia. At least no one who was home. Feeling better, but not completely satisfied that he could discount the building, Nudger moved on to the next challenge.

The day was getting hotter. He removed his sport jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and went through the mailbox procedure in a similar though smaller building two blocks away. No Claudia there. An apartment whose mailbox was simply labeled “Elwood” didn’t answer his ring. He made a note of it as a possible and walked back to the Volkswagen, eager to get rid of his coat and tie in the heat.

He paid the two dollars he was charged to park, then drove to another pay parking lot in the second quadrant.

More hot, tedious work, without result. He was getting dehydrated. He entered a bar beneath a sign lettered ZIGZAG’S and ordered a draft beer. It was a tiny, dim place with an overactive air conditioner that made the ice-flecked mug of beer taste even colder than it was. The bartender was a young, prematurely bald guy in a white apron. Or maybe he shaved his head; Nudger couldn’t keep up with style. There were only two other customers, a harried businessman type slouched at the bar, and a bearded man in a sleeveless shirt, cutoff jeans, and sandals. On a hunch, Nudger carried his beer to where the bartender was wrestling with some paperwork at the end of the bar.

“Help you?” the bartender asked, lifting his pencil and looking up at Nudger. His brown eyes were much too young for his bald pate.

“Does a girl named Claudia come in here?”

The bartender laughed. “The place is like a mortuary now, but girls by the hundreds flock in here before and after ball games and on Saturday nights. We got live music after eight,” he added, as if that explained such fervent female clientele.

“I mean a regular customer, a girl who lives in the area.”

The bartender shook his gleaming head. “Sorry. But she oughta be easy to find if she lives around here. The neighborhood’s nearly all commercial.” He licked the point of his pencil and went reluctantly back to his paperwork, copying numbers from a tiny calculator.

Nudger finished his beer and started to leave.

“You might try here after eight tonight,” the bartender suggested behind him. “Live music,” he reminded.

Nudger thanked him and pushed out the door into heat that struck like a hammer. It was still too early to drink alcohol. His head began to throb in reproach for his dissolute ways.

In the only likely building in the third quadrant, on Spruce Street, Nudger felt a cautious elation as he studied the mailboxes. There was a “C. Davis.” Also a “C. Bettencourt.” Single women often listed their names with only first initials in phone directories and on their mailboxes, to give potential interlopers the impression that the occupant might be a 250-pound armed male with an extra Y chromosome and a taste for combat.

This was a run-down, rent-subsidized building without intercoms. It was the only apartment building in an area of closed office buildings converted to warehouses. The vestibule reeked of cooking odors and bums’ urine. Most of the apartments had only round blank holes above their mailboxes, where push buttons for doorbells had been punched into oblivion and not replaced.

C. Davis was in apartment 2C. Nudger climbed the stairs, found the door halfway down a dim, littered hall. It was a heavy wood door whose dark enamel had shrunk and cracked like eroded soil, leaving a sharply angled network of shallow crevices. The “2C” was painted on the door with what looked like pink fingernail polish.

Nudger knocked, then stood patiently. A car horn honked outside. A distant siren gave its singsong frantic wail like a faraway creature in pain.

There was a change of light in the tiny glass peephole mounted in the door. Nudger smiled, trying not to look like an overheated insurance salesman or rent collector.

“Who is it?” a female voice called.

“My name’s Nudger.”

“So who’s Nudger?” It was a black woman’s voice, lilting and rich with accent.

“I’m looking for Claudia,” he said. He waited.

A chain lock rattled and the door opened. A large ebony

woman with wild straightened hair peered suspiciously out at him. “What Claudia?”

“I don’t know her last name. I saw the
C
on your mailbox.”

“The
C
happens to be my husband,” the woman said. She had large, intelligent eyes, gentle and proud eyes that were measuring Nudger dubiously. Poverty, meet poverty. “You a friend of Claudia?”

Nudger tried not to show his excitement. “Very much a friend.”

“She want to see you?”

“She should see me.” He met the woman’s soft, skeptical stare directly, not blinking. Neither of them blinked for a long time. Then Nudger blinked.

“Claudia’s a good woman,” C. Davis’s wife said. “She don’t need no bullshit.”

“I know. That’s why I came.”

“You look like you been wandering around out in the desert, Nudger.”

“I have been, like a prophet of old whose camel has died.”

“Hm, yeah. Well, Claudia lives up in 4D, top of them stairs.”

“Thank you. Is she home?”

“How do I know if she’s home? I ain’t no spy satellite. Could be she’s working today. Go knock on her door, you want to find out.”

“If she’s not home and you see her later, do you intend to tell her I was around asking for her?”

“You better believe it, Nudger.”

Nudger smiled at her. “Good. Nice meeting you, wife of

C. Davis.”

He knew she was watching him as he walked toward the stairs. Without looking back, he raised a hand in a listless wave and started up toward the fourth floor.

Someone else was already knocking on Claudia’s door.

He was a slim, sharp-featured man wearing a dark suit and tie and carrying one of those slender leather briefcases that look like purses because they don’t have handles.

Nudger didn’t know quite what to do. He could hardly knock on the door to 4C and pretend that had been his destination. It could prove embarrassing, even dangerous in this neighborhood, if the door were opened. And there could be little doubt that he was heading toward 4D’s door.

The man turned and gave him a long look. He had bushy dark eyebrows and high cheekbones. He would have been craggily handsome if it weren’t for a skinny kind of meanness in his features.

“She’s not home,” he said, jerking his head toward Claudia’s door. “I’ve been knocking for five minutes.”

“I see,” Nudger said, not knowing what else to say.

The man noticed Nudger’s discomfort and stared at him with new interest. “You her boyfriend?”

Nudger followed his detective’s instincts. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m her husband,” the man said.

Ho, boy!
Nudger’s stomach went into a spasm and made a sound like a cat meowing.

The man narrowed one eye and took a step toward Nudger, his suit coat open and flapping as if there were a breeze in the stifling hall. Or as if he were prepared for quick-draw gunplay, his holster in easy reach.

“You tell her when she gets home that I was here,” he said. “And that I’m leaving town with the kids and she can’t see them this weekend.” He pointed a slender forefinger as if he could shoot lightning from it. “You got that?”

“Got it,” Nudger said, trying to keep calm and size up what was happening, not having much success doing either.

The man clenched overdeveloped, bunchy jaw muscles, then strode past him and down the stairs. Nudger stood listening to his echoing, receding footfalls on the wooden steps, then heard the vacuumy clatter of the vestibule door opening and closing.

Nudger looked at 4D’s closed door, its layered enamel cracked like the door to C. Davis’s apartment, then rapped his knuckles on it three times, hard.

He stood stiffly, waiting.

No answer. No sound from the other side of the door. No hint of movement behind the peephole. No one home.

Maybe it was just as well, he thought, looking at his watch. He was sure now that this was Claudia’s apartment. Claudia Bettencourt’s. He repeated her full name to himself. Say it often enough and it became musical. Like Greta Boechner’s, the girl he had loved in high school.

He knocked again on the door, in case she was home and for some reason hadn’t heard his first knock.

Still no reply. He backed away from the door and started walking down the narrow hall. He would return this afternoon and try again to see Claudia Bettencourt.

On the way down the stairs, he waved again to the wife of C. Davis, who was standing staunchly outside her door staring. But he didn’t take time to stop and chat. He was in a hurry. It was almost eleven-thirty, and he had a noon appointment with a nightline Romeo named Jock at Twin Oaks Mall.

X
V

udger took up his position near the Twin Oaks Mall fountain and waited. Between twelve and twelve-thirty, he saw four blond men wearing dark slacks and beige sport jackets. All of them could be ruled out for one reason or another as Jenine’s murderer, and none of them appeared to be waiting for someone.