Nightlines (6 page)

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—”

“Never 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.

VI
I

udger decided to drop by his office on the way to Twin Oaks Mall and look over his mail. He was expecting a check from a Mrs. Mallowan, a West Side woman whose stolen Pekingese he’d traced and recov
ered. She’d said that Ringo was a pedigreed show dog, leading Nudger to believe that the animal was worth hundreds of dollars per pound and that Mrs. Mallowan could well afford his fee.

As he cornered the Volkswagen, he noticed that the bite marks on the back of his hand had almost faded away. Ringo hadn’t the amiable disposition of a show dog and had bitten Nudger. The dog’s owner had also put the bite on Nudger, and had owed him over nine hundred dollars for the past three months.

“No more animal cases,” he vowed again aloud, as he parked the Volkswagen in a remarkably small space that he would have trouble getting it out of unless one of the cars inches from each bumper was moved. How he had maneuvered into the space with such ease was a mystery. This was pretty much the way his life went.

He jogged across the street, deftly dodging traffic like a scared broken-field runner without blockers, and headed for his office.

There was only one item in the mail, a Grand Prize noti
fication that he’d won either a trip to Spain, a color TV, a three-thousand-dollar stereo system, or a pen that wrote in three colors. All he had to do to collect was drive a hundred miles, match his computerized number with a prize number, and tour something called Rocky Glen Estates, about which scant information was furnished. Nudger had plenty of pens. He tossed his Grand Prize notification into the wastebasket, where it landed on edge and made a hollow thunking sound.

He went back out onto the landing and locked the office door behind him, then took the steep wooden stairs down, pushed open the street door, and stepped outside.

The sun had had enough of clouds and was exercising its clout. The afternoon was brilliant with promise. On a ledge of the building across the street, pigeons were lined up like smug sentinels, feathers puffed out and colorful in the direct sunlight. Half a dozen women from the offices in the building, probably on their lunch hour, were walking along the sidewalk, also luxuriating in the fine weather, heads and shoulders thrown back, long legs kicking out in spirited strides. Nudger felt like whistling at them. Several of them glanced across the street at him and then looked away. He was glad he hadn’t whistled. He veered to enter Danny’s Donuts.

There were no customers inside, only Danny. The doughnuts sold here were too concretelike for lunch fare, and palpably dripping with grease and calories. Danny made his pittance in the mornings. Still, the place smelled good as usual, if a bit nauseatingly sweet.

Nudger smiled and nodded at Danny. “Anybody been around?”

Danny wiped his hands on his ragged gray towel. “Not in a business sense.”

“Some other sense?”

“An animal of a guy’s been watching your office from across the street.” Danny glanced out through the grease-marked window as if checking to make sure he wasn’t being overheard through the glass. “He stood over there most of the morning, but I ain’t seen him now for about an hour.”

“What do you mean by ‘animal’?” Nudger asked, settling onto a red vinyl stool at the counter. “Did he have fur, horns, hooves? An old cow hand?”

“Big,” Danny said simply.

Danny sometimes communicated like he manufactured doughnuts. Heavily, full of holes.

“What’s ‘big’?”

“Big is tall,” Danny said. “Big is wide. Big is ugly. I think the guy is maybe an ex-fighter, Nudge. Even from here I could tell he had that look about him. You know, outaplumb nose, and lumps of scar tissue over the eyes.”

An ex-fighter. Nudger rummaged through his memory but came up with no former pugilist who might be looking for him. “Did you notice what he was wearing?”

“Yeah. A light tan jacket, it looked like, and a bright yellow cap, like a baseball cap, with lettering across the front.”

“Could you make out what the lettering said?”

“Nope, he was too far away. My eyes ain’t what they used to be, Nudge.”

“How long by the clock would you say he was out there?”

“About two hours, acting like he was waiting for you.

Every now and then he’d glance up at your office window, like he wasn’t sure whether you were in or out.”

Nudger doubted that the man was an emissary of Ringo’s owner, here to pay him his nine hundred dollars. Tall, wide, ugly, and waiting for him. He didn’t need this. Neither did his stomach. It kicked and growled mightily, as if urging extreme caution.

“You say something, Nudge?”

Nudger shook his head and popped an antacid tablet.

“Stomach acting up again?”

“Never really quits.” Nudger swiveled and climbed down from the stool. “If Eileen calls or comes by here, trying to find me to talk about back alimony, tell her I’ve gone to meet Frank and Sandy.”

“Sure. She know who they are?”

“No. Tell her they’re bankers.”

Danny nodded. He held up a large foam cup. “You want a coffee to go?”

“No, thanks,” Nudger said, “I’m regular enough without it.”

Danny’s sad eyes lowered in dejection. Was he becoming as sensitive about his coffee as about his doughnuts? Damned wimp.

“On second thought,” Nudger said, “maybe about half full, with cream and sugar.”

Carrying his coffee, he pushed out the door and stepped onto the sidewalk. There was no point in not leaving before tall, wide, and ugly reappeared. Waiting around for trouble was a lot like looking for it.

Of course, there were times when someone plying Nudger’s uncertain trade earned his fee by waiting for trouble. Which was what Nudger was doing as he took up position near the fountain in Twin Oaks Mall.

He was sitting on a bench outside Woolworth’s in the vast indoor mall, with seeming casualness observing the shoppers milling around the large, gently splashing fountain that was illuminated by recessed colored spotlights. There was a circular raised concrete ledge around the fountain, serving as a bench, and several bullet-shaped trash receptacles and some plastic potted plants were scattered about. Nudger, who appeared to be simply another patient husband waiting for his wife to finish browsing, sat and watched two old women with sore feet and huge shopping bags lounge on the bench and discuss a purchase. The women finally left and several preteen boys ambled up, leaned precariously over the ledge and spat toward the fountain. An exhausted obese woman lugging an irritated infant sighed and plopped down on the bench near them. An elderly man wearing a hearing aid sat not far from her and placidly smoked a pipe. The usual shopping-mall gang.

Nudger checked his wristwatch, as if wondering how much longer he’d have to wait for his errant spouse who’d lost track of time among miles of Sears goodies. A stereo-typic but effective ruse. It was five minutes past two. Where was Frank? Was this lack of punctuality a wise way to begin a romance? Or a murder?

Then Nudger saw a short, slender man wearing brown slacks and a yellow sweater tentatively approach the fountain. The sweater either was stained or had one of the currently popular tiny animals embossed on the left breast. The man stood for a minute near the circular concrete bench as if debating whether to sit, decided to stand, and moved off about fifty feet to the side to slouch self-consciously before a window display of jogging shoes. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, and what hair he had left was in a wispy white fringe above his ears.

The man stood in the same position for about ten minutes, frequently glancing at his wristwatch. He lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, then crossed to a pedestal ashtray and ground it out as if it had all been a big mistake. Returning to his original position, he craned his neck to gaze about the sparsely occupied mall, then settled again into his slouched position, spine arched out like a cat’s and hands crammed in pockets. Frank, all right.

Frank was game. He waited until almost two-thirty, then the look of perplexity on his flushed face changed to anger, and he lit another cigarette. This one he didn’t put out immediately. Puffing furiously and trailing smoke like a locomotive, he strode with a dejected yet springy stride down the mall, keeping well to one side near the display windows as if afraid something might fall on him if he ventured too far from a wall. There was a kind of wary resilience in his bearing that Nudger found admirable.