Ride the Lightning (2 page)

“Curtis has exhausted all his appeals,” Nudger said to this hopelessly naive girl-woman. “Even if all the witnesses changed their stories, it wouldn’t necessarily mean he’d get a new trial.”

“Maybe not, but I betcha they wouldn’t kill him. They couldn’t stand the publicity if enough witnesses said they was wrong, it was somebody else shot the old woman. Then, just maybe, eventually, Curtis would get another trial and get out of prison.”

Nudger stared at her. He was awed. Here was foolish optimism that transcended even his own. He had to admire Candy Ann.

The shapely pale leg started pumping again beneath the corn-flower-blue dress. When Nudger lowered his gaze to stare at it, Candy Ann said, “So will you help me, Mr. Nudger?”

“Sure,” Nudger said. “It sounds easy.”

I
I

udger sat on his customary red vinyl stool at the end of the stainless-steel counter in Danny’s Donuts, staring at the stack of glossy copies of newspaper pages before him. He’d spent the morning in the county library out on Lindbergh, poring over old news stories about Curtis Colt and copying the pages he thought were perti
nent. He felt slightly nauseated. Sitting and staring at one of those library microfilm viewers while blown up pictures of newspaper pages rolled past was something like sitting by a window in a moving train; it gave Nudger the same sensation as motion sickness.

He’d felt better by the time he got to his office, which was located on the second floor, directly above the doughnut shop. So he decided to come down here, talk with Danny, and have a Dunker Delite and a glass of milk for lunch. But doleful Danny was out of milk, and apologized profusely and pressed on Nudger a free bottomless cup of coffee to go with his free Dunker Delite. Nudger’s stomach was queasy again within minutes. The Dunker Delite was tolerable. The coffee, which Danny solicitously kept at rim
level in its foam cup, was at its worst. Which was like say
ing Son of Sam was in a nasty mood.

“What’s all that stuff about?” Danny asked Nudger, when the last of his few afternoon customers had left the shop.

“Curtis Colt,” Nudger said.

Danny read the papers daily and was something of a crime buff. “The guy Governor Scalla wants to fry instead of send out with gas?”

“The same,” Nudger said, gazing at his Dunker Delite. Scott Scalla was a hard-nosed former attorney general who had been elected mainly due to his pledge to implement capital punishment, and who favored the electric chair over the gas chamber. Most of the legislature in Jefferson City, the state capital, opted for using the gas chamber if Missouri had to begin executing convicted killers again. Sly politician that he was, Scalla had used the argument over
how
for the purpose of diverting attention from the argument over
if
. Curtis Colt was either going to inhale cyanide gas or he was going to ride the lightning. The
if
question had been settled just before Colt was tagged for the electric chair.

“How come you need to learn about Colt?” Danny asked, wiping down the smooth counter and tucking his grayish towel back into his belt. “After Saturday, not much of what you know about him will matter anymore. He’ll be gone.”

“Probably,” Nudger said. He pretended to sip his coffee while Danny watched with his sad brown eyes. “You think he’s guilty of killing that woman, Danny?”

“Sure. He was found guilty by twelve good men and true.”

“There were eight women on the jury,” Nudger pointed out.

“Sex aside,” Danny said, pausing for a moment to remove the towel from his belt and snap it at a bluebottle fly that had settled on the counter, “Colt is guilty. The truth comes out in court.”

“It does,” Nudger agreed, watching the fly buzz frantically away through a shaft of gold sunlight, spiraling up, up, winging for life. Beautiful. “But sometimes not all of the truth. And not in any form you might recognize.”

“It don’t matter much now,” Danny said. “What’s done’s done. The law says Colt did it, and he’s only got a week to live. So what are you doing digging around in the case, Nudge?”

“I was hired by somebody who thinks Colt’s innocent.”

“Humph,” Danny said, and bent down to rearrange the leftover cream horns in the greasy display case. One of the spread-out newspapers on which he’d placed waxed paper in the case was today’s sports page. “The Cards have won four in a row now,” he said, reading beyond the cream horns. “We get some relief pitching and we’ll take the division championship.”

Nudger wished there were a relief corps for every occupation; there were a lot of times he could have used a relief detective. He slid his coffee cup off to the side and got back to reading.

The papers agreed on the details of the crime. Two customers in the back of the liquor store heard shots, looked down the aisle, and saw Curtis Colt standing over the body of the old man who owned and managed the store. Colt was holding a gun. The man’s wife, also shot, was staggering around the store, grabbing on to things and knocking over displays and bottles. Colt shoved her aside and ran.

Two witnesses outside saw him, still holding the gun, race from the store and get into a parked car whose driver was waiting with the engine idling. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Langeneckert, screamed for him to stop. Another shot was fired wildly as the car sped away.

The liquor-store owner, sixty-eight-year-old Amos Olson, had been shot once in the head and twice in the abdomen. One of the bullets had tumbled and damaged his spine and central nervous system. He would never give his version of the crime. He would never talk or perhaps even think coherently again.

Olson’s wife Dolly, same age as her husband, had been hit only once, but with deadly accuracy in the forehead. Nudger knew that the forehead was one of the least effective places to shoot a human being; unlike the back of the skull, there was a great deal of bone there to protect the brain. Sometimes people shot in the forehead took a long time to die. Which was why Dolly Olson had thrashed about the store for a while in a blind frenzy before mercifully dropping dead.

The Dunker Delite seemed to shift weighty position in Nudger’s stomach, as if it couldn’t get comfortable and wished it were someplace else. His large intestine told him he had too much imagination. He swallowed noisily and read on.

An hour later that evening, a cruising two-man patrol car had stopped at a service station so one of the police officers could use the rest room. As they pulled up by the pumps, a black or dark green car, probably a Ford, screeched from a shadowed corner of the lot. The cruiser’s engine was turned off, and as the driver tried to start the car his partner spotted someone standing by the cigarette machine inside the station. The someone looked terrified and matched the description of the liquor-store woman’s killer that had recently been broadcast on the police radio. The car that had sped from the lot matched the general description of the liquor-store-holdup getaway car.

The cop forgot all about using the rest room.

Half an hour later, Colt was handcuffed and booked at the Third District station house. The black or dark green Ford and its driver weren’t seen again.

It was exactly the kind of case a prosecuting attorney prayed for. The jury was out less than an hour before finding Colt guilty. Colt had shot the old man first; he’d had time to think about killing the woman. He could simply have run from the liquor store, but he hadn’t. He’d stayed. Premeditation of a sort. The judge recommended the death penalty. The jury went along with that one, too. Everybody was ripe for somebody else’s death.

Nudger studied the photographs of Colt, trying to get a feel for who and what the man was. On the front page of the
Post Dispatch
was a shot of Colt being led into the Third District station. In the next day’s paper there was a close up of him, handsome in a moody, defiant way, with lean, dark features that looked as if they’d been whittled from hard wood. He was young, with a downswept bandito mustache and wavy dark hair that fell gracefully over his ears and collar. Another shot of him, being led from police headquarters at Tucker and Clark, showed him considerably calmer than on the night of his arrest. He was wearing jail-house dungarees and his wrists were cuffed in front of him. He was somewhat on the short side, compared with the two detectives flanking him in the photo, and had a skinny middleweight’s lithe and muscular build.

“What are you supposed to be able to do for this guy?” Danny was asking.

“Save his life,” Nudger said, folding his newspaper copies and placing the coffee cup directly before him.

Danny was staring at the cup, whose level hadn’t dropped much in the last fifteen minutes. He was almost as sensitive about his coffee as about his doughnuts, which were not quite as lethal.

Nudger had no choice; hurting Danny’s feelings was like kicking a tired old basset hound. He poured more cream into the coffee, loaded in two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to cut the bitterness, and took a sip. Not bad. Well, not fatal. He looked over at Danny and smiled.

Danny smiled back and went to the big steel coffee urn and adjusted some valves; something toward the back of the urn hissed and emitted steam. He looked like a submariner getting ready to send his craft on a crash dive into protective depths, where it would lie on the bottom, weighted down with Dunker Delites. “Scalla ain’t the sort to give reprieves,” he said over his shoulder.

“I know. He’s the type to throw the switch himself.”

“I don’t know what just reminded me,” Danny said, “but Eileen was by here this morning looking for you. She seemed eager for you and her to be in the same place at the same time.”

Nudger’s stomach kicked. Hard. Eileen was his former wife. Since the divorce, she and his stomach got along worse every year. “She say what she wanted?”

“Not directly,” Danny said, “but she hinted it was green and you owed it to her.”

“Not this time,” Nudger said. “I’m caught up on my alimony.”

As he spoke, Nudger suddenly wondered if that was true. Had his last check to her been for half the amount owed? Had there been enough money in the account to cover the check? It was all misty memory.

Danny shrugged and wiped his hands roughly on the towel, in the manner of a mechanic who’d just crawled out from under a car and was uncertain about his work. “Well, I dunno, Nudge. You want another doughnut?”

“No, thanks. Work to do.” Nudger swiveled away from the counter and slid down off his stool. He picked up his foam coffee cup and headed for the door.

“You really think Colt might be innocent?” Danny asked. He sounded dubious.

“I never said that,” Nudger told him.

He pushed out through the door into the hot day, made a tight U-turn, and went in the door to the narrow, creaking stairway that led up to his office. The sweet smell of the doughnut shop followed him.

After switching on the window air conditioner, he sat in his squealing swivel chair behind his desk and checked his telephone answering machine. There was a click, whir, and a beep, and the first message sounded.

A drunk, almost unintelligible, painstakingly explained that he’d called the wrong number and asked for the right one. He got angry when no one accepted his apology, and hung up in a snit.

Beep
. Eileen’s voice: “Call me today, if you know what’s good for you. If you don’t—”

Nudger punched the machine’s off button. He didn’t know what was good for him. Never had.

He sat back in his chair. He’d heard enough messages for now, and the mail he’d brought in from the landing didn’t look interesting: bills, ads, threatening letters from creditors, bills, junk mail, bills, bills. He made up his mind not to open any of the mail until he needed something to do.

The office was getting comfortably cool. It didn’t take long; the place was small. Nudger watched the electric bill on the desk flutter lazily in the breeze from the air conditioner. Finally it slid off the desk and sailed toward the far wall, out of sight. He didn’t bother to retrieve it.

He went through the Curtis Colt information again, this time more carefully, and decided Colt was guilty as original sin.

Nudger didn’t like where that left him.

He’d have liked it even less if he’d known where it was taking him.

II
I

udger looked at the list of names he’d compiled and decided to start with Randy Gantner. Gantner and a friend had been in the liquor store at the time of the shooting and had testified for the prosecution in court. He was as good a place as any to begin—the logical place, really, since it occurred to Nudger that there were so many witnesses against Curtis Colt that he might as well talk to them in alphabetical order.