Nightlines (9 page)

Nudger was awake in the morning-bright office and the receiver was in his hand. He must have reached for it in his sleep. He brought it to his ear. Danny’s voice said, “Short notice, Nudge, but I thought you’d wanna know trouble’s coming your way.”

Nudger was aware of footsteps, someone climbing the narrow stairs from the street door. He thanked Danny for the warning and hung up the phone, picturing the substantial Hugo Rumbo while trying to recall if he’d locked the office door. He had, he hadn’t, he had, he hadn’t. He hadn’t!

A board on the landing creaked. A familiar sound. Whoever was out there was at the top of the stairs. Nudger would have opened a desk drawer and reached for his gun, if he’d owned a gun. His stomach and heart seemed to be fighting for the same cramped space in his throat as he stood up and leaned steeply forward, supporting himself shakily with his arms locked at the elbows and his hands palms-down on the desk. He found himself unable to look away from the prismatic glass doorknob on his office door.

The knob rotated. The door opened.

Eileen stepped in.

“Startle you?” she asked.

Nudger sat down, leaned back, and breathed out hard. “You startled me,” he confirmed.

“I meant to. It seems to be the only way I can capture your attention.”

Nudger smoothed back his hair with his fingers, straightened his collar, and gave her his attention. She was still an attractive woman, trim and neatly groomed, with a kind of wholesomeness about her that would have carried her far as an actress playing typical homemakers in television commercials. Though a delicate woman with a certain frilliness about her, she had a robust complexion, large and perfectly aligned very white teeth, and shapely, strong-looking hands. It all suggested that good health meant good sex, and wasn’t far off the mark.

Why had they lost both love and lust for each other? Nudger thought sometimes that it was the ungodly and unpredictable hours he worked. Or was it the sterility of the suburban plot they had called home? Whatever had caused the widening gap between them was still a mystery, as it probably remained in most divorces. Nudger only knew that when she suggested the divorce he had felt not only shock but also undeniable relief. A lightning comprehension—or admission. He, too, wanted to live a life different from the one they shared. Eileen had seen that in him as soon as she’d brought up the subject of a divorce as a possible alternative, and that was that. In that instant it had been transformed from an alternative to an inevitability.

Such were the complexities of the human heart. Or maybe it was simpler and less poetic than that. Maybe he’d decided subconsciously to leave her when he heard her use the word “cute” three times in one sentence, there on the phone in that suburban frame house that was like the neighboring houses on either side. But he was being unfair. He knew that his reaction to that triple-cute was probably only symptomatic of their real problem.

“You still have it,” he told her.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“I mean, you still have my attention.” He hadn’t meant to hurt her.

Smile gone. “And you still have a way with words, and I still don’t have my money. Almost a thousand dollars now in back alimony.”

“Eight hundred fifty-three dollars and some odd cents,” Nudger corrected.

“Nine hundred.”

He shrugged. “Whatever.” Or did he enjoy taunting her? “I have the exact amount written down.”

“But not written where it counts—on a check made out to me.” He had made her angry. She began to stalk about the office, rotating her high heels slightly with each slow step as if grinding despicable small objects into the floor. She had on those silver shoes with the tiny black bows, like the pair Jeanette Boyington wore. Nudger felt that he might be developing a dislike for those shoes.

“You’ll get the money,” he said. “You know that.”

She stopped pacing and wheeled to glare at him. “But I want
you
to know that. If I don’t have a check in my mail by the end of next week, I’m taking you back to court.”

“Eileen, you know what they say about not being able to squeeze blood from a turnip.”

He could almost feel the heat from her eyes as she said, “I’ll settle for whatever oozes out.”

Nudger’s nervous stomach growled. It seemed to develop a language all its own when Eileen was around. It was a good thing she didn’t know what she had just been called.

“I’m giving you more than a week,” she reminded him. “That should leave you plenty of time to raise the money.”

“What I don’t have is plenty of collateral.”

She lifted her shoulders eloquently, flicked lint from her sleeve onto his floor. “That’s a problem you let develop. You should have gone back on the police force. You should have been paying me all along.”

He smiled and shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t go back, Eileen. And I can’t get a loan.”

She advanced a step and cocked her head sharply sideways. “Are you saying you’re not going to pay me?” A long-nailed forefinger was aimed like a gun at him, loaded with ammunition provided by a divorce court judge. They were bullets that stayed in the wounds and festered.

Nudger stared at that steady finger and remembered the divorce proceedings. Eileen’s lawyer was about the slickest courtroom manipulator he had ever seen. So convincing was the man that even Nudger thought the exorbitant alimony Eileen had been granted was justifiable, until several hours had passed in the real world outside the illusionary but credible world the lawyer had created for just long enough inside the courtroom. By then it was too late. His own lawyer had phoned to apologize, cutting the conversation short so he wouldn’t be late for his remedial law classes.

“Of course I plan to pay you,” Nudger said to Eileen, wondering how the two of them had come to this. And if they would have if the divorce had been over something simple, or at least definable, like an extramarital affair. They were both basically decent people.

“When and how much?” she asked.

“Soon, and all—well, half.”

She smiled as if she’d caught him breaking his diet at midnight. He remembered that beautiful, impenetrable skepticism. “I thought you had no collateral, no resources.”

“Someone owes me money from a job,” he said.

“And when will you be paid so I can be?”

“That depends. Should be any day. The Ringo case has been wrapped up for weeks.”

“Ringo? Sounds like a bookie or police character. What makes you think this Ringo pays his bills?”

“He’ll pay. He’s from a good family. Breeding tells.”

She sighed and scowled at him. Such a naughty boy he was. “All right,” she said. “I expect five hundred dollars by the end of next week, or it’s back to court. No more deals.”

“That’s reasonable enough,” Nudger said, reinforcing her spirit of compromise.

“And if this Ringo tells you he can’t pay, I want to know about it.”

“He’s not the type to tell anyone that,” Nudger assured her.

As Eileen started toward the door, she paused and looked around the office as if finally noticing her surroundings. Her upper lip curled as if she’d just discovered a hair in her salad. Nudger knew that she was making plenty of money selling one of those all-purpose home product lines while recruiting more salespeople. It was like a pyramid. She was a distributor now, with her own network of salespeople and a disproportionate cut of everyone’s take. To her, way up near the peak of the pyramid, this was poverty.

“How can you stand it here?” she asked.

Nudger felt anger dig its claws into his guts. But he knew the folly of stumbling into an argument with Eileen at this point. She was inviting him to thrash around in quicksand.

“The roof doesn’t leak,” he said, “and the rent is cheap, so I can save up and make alimony payments.”

She was smiling as she left. He didn’t get up to show her out.

To think that theirs had begun as an amicable divorce.

She certainly wasn’t the woman he’d married. But didn’t every divorced man think that about his ex? And since she’d gotten into sales, Eileen had become particularly bitchy and aggressive. Perhaps that rapacious aspect of her personality had been there all along beneath the surface, held submerged by her socially imposed self-image and the demanding but stifling roles of helpmate and homemaker, and the divorce had freed that part of her. Whatever the reason, the beast was on the loose. Nudger had married a female Dr. Jekyll; now he was contending with Ms. Hyde. These things happened in the chemistry of human relationships. Maybe people should never marry; maybe it was tinkering with the laws of nature and that’s why staying married was so tough. It was something for the marriage counselors and psychologists to consider.

Nudger returned his head to the cradle of his arms, and dreamed again of the sea.

X

udger was told at the Third District that Hammer-smith had just gone out to eat lunch. He’d left a message for Nudger, inviting him to join him at Ricardo’s in the adjoining Fourth District.

Nudger was familiar with Ricardo’s, though he hadn’t been there in the past several years. The restaurant had been in existence at the same location on Ninth and Locust for more than a decade. Nudger remembered eating there when he was a police rookie attending the Academy, and he and Hammersmith had stopped in there a few times when they were assigned to the same two-man patrol car. It had become one of Hammersmith’s favorite restaurants.

As Nudger tugged open a heavy wood door with a stained-glass insert and stepped into Ricardo’s, he was struck by the size of the place. The owner, Gino Ricardo, must have leased the space next door and eliminated a wall. The long mahogany bar was where Nudger recalled, along the north wall, to the left of the door, and the general decor seemed much the same. There were the heavy dark drapes,
plush carpet, and red tablecloths. Thick oak partitions afforded privacy and provided only occasional glimpses of the tops of heads of tall diners. Ricardo’s was a restaurant where, even when it was crowded, a conversation could be carried on with reasonable assurance that it wouldn’t be overheard. Though within walking distance of Police Head
quarters at Tucker and Clark, it was the scene of countless tense and confidential exchanges between the police and their informants.

Ricardo’s was crowded now. The long bar was two-deep with customers drinking or waiting for drinks, some of them marking time until a table became available. Waitresses and busboys scurried around among the oak partitions like industrious mice in a maze they had mastered. A maître d’ in a serious blue suit was approaching to ask Nudger if he had a reservation, when Nudger caught familiar movement from the corner of his vision. Hammersmith had sat where he could see the entrance and was standing now and motioning Nudger over to his table.

Nudger sat down across from Hammersmith, who had before him an awesomely large pizza whose embellishments ran the gamut of the garden, and a tall frosted stein of draft beer. Nudger ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a glass of milk from a waitress who looked like a young, skinny Gina Lollobrigida.

“Don’t be crazy,” Hammersmith said. “This is a great Italian restaurant. They’ve got lasagna and cannelloni and fettuccine. They’ve got pizza any size and way, spaghetti and ravioli and other olis and onis and inis. And you ask for—”

“My stomach’s been bothering me,” Nudger interrupted. He could understand how Hammersmith had reached his corpulent state. There was real passion in his voice when he spoke of food. “Besides, if I order light, you might offer to pick up the check.”

“You look glum,” Hammersmith said, changing the subject. “Something the matter?”

“I had a visit from Eileen.”

Hammersmith took a wolfish bite of pizza, used a plump finger to tuck in a string of cheese that was dangling from the corner of his mouth, and nodded in understanding. When he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “Nice woman, Eileen.”

“For somebody else, not for me.”

“The divorce was your fault. You bring out the worst in women, Nudge.”

Nudger said nothing as the waitress brought his sandwich and milk. He took a cautious bite of the sandwich. It was delicious, despite its lack of ethnicity. Hammersmith could be wrong.

Neither man said anything until Nudger had finished eating. Then Hammersmith offered him one of the three remaining oversized slices of pizza and Nudger declined. Around them were the muted sounds of flatware and china in subdued cacophony. Buzz of conversation, occasional laughter, clink of ice cubes against glass. Nudger rested the back of his head against the oak partition behind his chair and waited.

Hammersmith enjoyed a long swig of beer and set the stein down on the red tablecloth. “Hugo Rumbo is his real name,” he said, “and he hasn’t got much of an arrest record. Stole a car when he was a teenager, and an assault charge four years ago. He’s forty years old, had some amateur fights and a few matches as a pro boxer. Nobody ever compared him to Marciano. The way I heard it, his feet and hands were always fighting in two different rounds, and he got hurt bad and had to quit the fight game. Now he picks up money as a sparring partner over at the South Broadway Gym, and besides his old Buick he has a pickup truck and does yardwork and hauling. Other than the usual shady characters who hang around boxing, he has no disreputable friends and no mob connections. He’s ornery and clumsy and washed up, not a pro either in or out of the ring.”