Nightlines (24 page)

Setting the folded paper aside, Nudger looked up to see that Claudia hadn’t eaten any of her breakfast and was gazing at the dark, half-submerged humanesque forms of driftwood carried on the muddy current. She seemed to be staring into her own depths as well as those of the river.

“Is it that hypnotic?” Nudger asked.

Her body jerked and she looked up at him, interrupted from whatever she’d been thinking, wherever she had been. “I suppose it is,” she said, turning back to the wide, sliding river. “Always on its way somewhere, doomed never to get there, like me.”

“It’s a strained analogy,” Nudger told her. “I’ve never seen any barge traffic on you.”

She smiled, nothing more than a twitch of her facial muscles, without humor. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be maudlin.”

Nudger sipped his coffee and looked upriver to where the
Huck Finn
, an elaborate stern-wheeler excursion boat, was docked near the silver leap of the Arch. Beyond it, traffic was moving, distant and reflective, across Ead’s Bridge into Illinois. A faraway tugboat whistle blasted a lilting note, like a sad warning. Nudger was afraid. He didn’t understand the capricious dark wind that might at any time catch Claudia and carry her away from him.

“Are you okay?” he asked, resting his hand on her arm.

“Sure.” She smiled again, this time maybe meaning it.

Nudger sat back and watched her try to eat. She managed a few small bites, then pushed the food away and concentrated on her coffee.

“Do you ever think about going back to teaching?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t for a long time. I don’t see why I should think about it. Anyway, I’ve got a job.”

“You’ve got a profession, too.”

“You mean I used to have a profession.”

“I know a woman who’s headmistress of a private girls’ high school in the county. She owes me, or feels that she does. I could talk to her, see if there is or will be an opening to teach, ask her to interview you.”

“I’d have to tell her the truth. Would
you
hire a convicted child abuser? A murderess? Someone who let her own daughter . . .”

“You didn’t leave that window open on purpose, Claudia.”

“My baby . . .” she said, simply and sadly, with a grief so vast her words seemed to echo in it. Her expression didn’t change and her eyes remained dry; she was in a place beyond tears.

“You didn’t deliberately cause Vicki’s death,” Nudger said firmly. “You should believe that. You have to believe it!”

“Sure. Dr. Oliver agrees with you. He used hypnosis, had me relive that night in my mind. But that was only in my mind.”

“So is your guilt.”

“Maybe all guilty people convince themselves of that.”

“And maybe some who are innocent,” Nudger said. “I’d hire you.”

“Not if you wanted to keep
your
job. What would happen if the parents found out about my past?”

“Who knows? It might be rough, but maybe you could stick it out, with the proper backing. Enough of the faculty and parents might understand your situation and support you.”

“Probably not.”

“Then you’d lose your job. You’d get another job.”

She bit her lower lip and studied Nudger with her dark, dark eyes. She’d artfully applied a lot of makeup around them, but cruel daylight confirmed that she’d been crying during the night. “Do you really think it’s possible?” she asked.

“I can find out. I might be able to get you the interview, but from that point on you’d be carrying the ball on your own.” He understood how important it was for her to feel that she’d be the one landing the job. “Do you want to teach again?”

She looked into her cup, then out again at the river that he knew was drawing her as it had drawn others. “Sometimes not at all,” she said, “sometimes more than anything else.” She raised her cup and sipped.

“Think about it,” Nudger said. “Be sure before you let me know if you’re interested. And remember, no guarantees. But a chance.”

She stood up, leaned forward and kissed his forehead. Her lips were still warm from the coffee. “Thank you,” she said, and walked away from the table, away from the cold, beckoning slide of the river.

Carrying his Egg McMuffin, Nudger caught up with her at the shore end of the wooden gangplank.

When they got back to Claudia’s apartment building, she asked Nudger if he was coming upstairs. She had several hours before she had to be at Kimball’s to help prepare for the lunchtime crowd. Nudger reluctantly declined. He was a workaday guy with responsibilities, he told her. She didn’t seem to believe him. He kissed her. The Volkswagen was idling roughly, vibrating hard enough to jingle the keys dangling from the ignition switch. No place for a romantic tryst.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“To my office. Then to see if I can find out more about Luther Kell.”

He didn’t tell her what that entailed. If Kell was home, Nudger would wait for him to leave, then follow. If Kell had already left for work or wherever he went during the day, Nudger would make sure the house was unoccupied, then try to get inside and search for evidence pointing to Kell as a murderer. Illegal entry into the home of a possible killer was the sort of thing that frightened Nudger for a number of reasons; it was a game with a lot of ways to lose. But he had no choice. He hadn’t much time to learn about Kell. Springer had seen to that.

Claudia kissed Nudger again, a slow, soft brush of her lips across his cheek, then got out of the car and closed the door without slamming it. Before walking away, she turned

and leaned low to peer in at him through the open window. “For both of us, will you be careful?” she asked. “If you’ll be careful for the same two people.” She nodded and stood up straight. Nudger shifted to

first and pulled away from the curb. At the corner, when he checked in the rearview mirror, Claudia was gone.

XXV
I

en thousand dollars,” Agnes Boyington said to Nudger, sitting across from him in his office. She’d been waiting downstairs for him when he arrived, standing rigidly outside the doughnut shop, as if she’d rather endure the heat than enter.

Nudger swiveled thoughtfully in his chair and stared across the desk at her, trying to grasp what she was saying. Ten thousand dollars. One hundred C-notes.
Mucho dinero
. All those dead Presidents . . .

“My final offer,” she added, setting her mouth in a straight, firm line.

“Oh, everyone says that,” Nudger told her.

“To earn the money,” Agnes reminded him, “you have only to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. I’m sure that for you the former will be easier than the latter.”

“You’re trying awfully hard to corrupt me, Boyington. To lead me down the primrose path.”

“You’ve seen the primroses in all seasons.” She got one of her long brown cigarettes from her purse, manipulated the never-fail lighter, and touched flame to tobacco. Tilting
back her head so that she could gaze down her nose at him, she blew a cloud of smoke that hung together in an oddly grotesque shape which drifted toward the ceiling like a medium’s ectoplasm. “What is your answer?”

“I don’t mind if you smoke,” he told her.

She exhaled another cloud of smoke, this one not so dense. He was getting to her. “Just what is it about my offer that bothers you, Nudger?”

“The fact that you made it, and that you keep increasing it. And that if I accept it, you’ll have me at a permanent dis
advantage. I wouldn’t like that.”

“Those are logical reservations, though based on unfounded suspicion. Anything else? No more consideration for your professional honor?”

“That, too. And something more. It bothers me that I don’t understand why you’re making the offer.”

“I told you, Jeanette is under great stress. She isn’t thinking clearly, or she wouldn’t have hired you. I don’t want her hurt more than she is already.”

Nudger shook his head slowly, not looking away from Agnes Boyington. “I’m sorry, Agnes, I can’t accept your explanation of motherly concern. It fits you about as well as a size ten hat.”

Something crossed her face, momentarily altered the ice-gleam in her eyes. A reflection of pain. It surprised Nudger. It was like glimpsing human emotion in a reptile.

“To be honest, Nudger, I don’t care about your assessment of me as a mother, except insomuch as it affects this matter. I love Jeanette dearly, more dearly than you can know.” The expression of deep pain again, as if she were finally leveling with him and paying the price.

“What about Jenine?” Nudger asked. “Did you love her?”

“No.” She smiled faintly at Nudger, from an icy distance. “I told you I was being honest. I knew Jenine, the way she lived, the things she did. She generated grief; all her life she was a burden and a stigma.”

“Maybe you made her that way.”

“No one made her that way. It was her inability to control her animalistic instincts that made Jenine what she was, that eventually led to her death. She was a sinner in the eyes of God and man.”

“Her libido might have been much like yours,” Nudger said, “only channeled in a different direction, a direction that harmed no one but herself.”

“I’m not here to talk sophomoric psychology. I’m here to talk mathematics, coin of the realm.”

Nudger placed both hands lightly, palms down, on the desk. From God to U.S. currency in less than a minute. It was dizzying. “I’m sorry, Agnes, but there are too many unknowns in the equation. I won’t accept your offer.”

Agnes Boyington stayed sitting very still in the chair before Nudger’s desk. Then, with a subdued, steely vibrancy, she began to tremble. She was even paler than usual as she stared at Nudger, for an instant with pleading in her eyes, then with hate.

“You don’t understand Jeanette as well as her own mother can,” she said.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“There’s a great deal about this matter that you don’t know.”

“I’m a willing student. No one seems willing to teach me.”

She stood up, tucked her purse beneath her arm, and glared down at Nudger. She’d stopped the faint trembling and had regained what appeared to be total control of herself. Nudger had to admit he was impressed by her as she stood over him in pale wrath like a well-preserved ice-queen and dropped cold, clipped words on him.

“I tried, Nudger, but you refused to listen, to be realistic. You’ve made a tragic course of events irreversible. If you forget everything else, remember that. What occurs from this point on might have been avoided if you had shelved your shabby idealism and done what was right for everyone concerned. Whatever happens now is on your head.”

“Come off it, Agnes. I didn’t open a tomb, I turned down a bribe.”

She backed away a few steps, toward the door, and observed him as if suddenly he were miles away. She wouldn’t attempt to buy him off anymore; he was sure of that. True to her word, she had made her final offer. She’d now accept what she couldn’t understand. Money had talked, shabby idealism hadn’t listened. That puzzled her, but in this instance that had been the undeniable outcome of her attempt to buy what she wanted. Life unaccountably worked that way sometimes. Mysterious circles.

“You’ll be responsible,” she said softly, as if to someone in the office other than the two of them. “As heaven is my witness!”

“Agnes, why don’t you talk to Jeanette? Be honest with her?”

She disdainfully dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the bare office floor and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. Without looking at Nudger, she opened the door and went out, leaving it open behind her. If he wouldn’t talk sense, her brand of sense, then she wouldn’t talk to him at all. So there. He heard her measured footfalls as she descended the stairs. The draft from the street door opening and closing rolled low across the office, stirring the ashes on the floor. He didn’t like the look of those ashes, but then ashes seldom inspired.

Nudger was more worried than he had been, but he wasn’t sure why. Possibly it was Agnes Boyington’s mention of an irreversible tragic course of events. It seemed that she had turned a corner in her mind, and he had no way of knowing what street she was on or where she was going.

He shook his head as if to free himself from the after-scent of her tobacco smoke and disinfectant-like perfume, then stood up from behind the desk. He knew what street he should be on: Hartford Avenue.

After tossing the morning mail into the wastebasket and locking the office, he went downstairs and crossed Manchester to where his car was parked. The morning had been one of disturbing ambiguity. He longed for a problem he could grapple with and solve.

Trying not to think about Agnes Boyington and her ten thousand dollars, he drove toward the conservative, orderly neighborhood, the narrow, straight street, the neat little brick house of Luther Kell.

XXVI
I

udger parked by a phone booth a few blocks from Kell’s house. He left the Volkswagen’s motor run
ning as he entered the booth, fed in his twenty cents and dialed Kell’s number. If Kell answered, Nudger was ready to see how he was fixed for magazine subscriptions.