Ride the Lightning (3 page)

Randy Gantner was a construction worker for Kalas Con
struction, one of the major contractors in St. Louis, a road builder who did a lot of highway work. Nudger had seen the company name lettered across truck trailers parked at major road construction sites all over the city. Road contractors not only did this to advertise; the countless permits they needed to work were plastered all over the sides of the trailers to satisfy various inspectors and busybody local officials.

It was afternoon before Nudger located Gantner working weekend overtime on a highway access ramp job in
Northwest County. Kalas Construction was building a new cloverleaf on the stem of Interstate 70. It was hot work and a hot afternoon to do it in.

“Why should I worry about it anymore?” Gantner asked Nudger, leaning hipshot on his shovel. He didn’t mind talking to Nudger; it meant taking a break from scooping away mounds of black dirt that had been brought up by a huge drill that was boring holes to bedrock for concrete piering. “Colt’s been found guilty and he’s going to the chair, ain’t he?”

The high afternoon sun was hammering down on Nudger, warming the back of his neck and making his stom
ach uneasy. He thumbed an antacid tablet off the roll he kept in his shirt pocket and popped one of the white disks into his mouth. With his other hand he held up a photograph of Curtis Colt for Gantner to see. It was a snapshot Candy Ann had given him of the wiry, shirtless Colt leaning on a crooked fence post with a placid lake behind him and holding a beer can high in a mock toast: This one’s for Death!

Why am I doing this? Nudger asked himself. It was hopeless. He could
feel
Colt’s guilt. The jury had been right.

But he said, “This is a photograph you never saw in court. I just want you to look at it closely and tell me again if you’re sure the man you saw in the liquor store was Colt. Even if it makes no difference in whether he’s executed, it will help ease the mind of someone who loves him.”

Gantner was a ruddy, beefy man, shirtless in the sun. A rivulet of sweat zigzagged like an exploring insect down through the gingery hair on his chest. He shifted his weight against the shovel handle to lean with his other arm. “I’d be a fool to change my story about what happened now that the trial’s over,” he said logically.

“You’d be a murderer if you really weren’t sure.”

“The little punk’s gonna fry; I don’t see the point in this.”

“There’s a point,” Nudger assured him.

Gantner sighed, dragged a dirty red handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and wiped his meaty, perspiring face. He peered at the photo with pale eyes framed in seamed, tan flesh, then shrugged. “It’s him. Colt. The guy I seen shoot the man and woman when I was standing in the back aisle of the liquor store. If he’d known me and Sanders was back there, he’d have probably zapped us along with them old folks. He was having a hell of a good time playing Jesse James. Little fart richly deserves to get the chair, you ask me.”

Well, Nudger
had
asked. But he wanted to make doubly sure. “You’re positive it’s the same man?”

Gantner spat off to the side and frowned; Nudger was becoming a pest, and the foreman was staring. “I said it to the police and the jury, Nudger, and now I’m saying it to you: Colt did the old lady in.”

Persistent Nudger. “Did you actually see the shots fired?”

“Nope. Me and Sanders was in the back aisle looking for some reasonable-priced bourbon when we heard the shots, then looked around to the front of the store. There was Colt, standing over the old man, holding a gun. Then the old lady sees what happened and screams and runs out from behind the counter at Colt, at the gun. Give her top grades for guts. Colt holds the gun higher and shoots her. She goes wild and starts twitching and bouncing all over the place, knocking good whiskey all to hell, and Colt runs out the door to a car. Looked like a black or dark green old Ford. Colt fired another shot as it drove away.”

“You try to help the old lady?”

“Sure. But by the time me and Sanders got to the front of the store, she’d gone down and we could see she was dead. Round hole smack in the center of her forehead, eyes open.”

Gantner was rolling now. He knew this part of his story almost by rote from his interviews with the law and his testimony on the stand. He enjoyed telling it, polishing his delivery; show-biz was in his blood.

“Get a look at the car’s driver?” Nudger asked, thumbing another antacid tablet off the roll. God, the sun was hot!

“Sort of. Skinny dude, curly black hair and a droopy mustache. Leaning over the steering wheel and holding it tight. That’s what I told the cops. That’s all I seen. That’s all I know.”

“Where was your friend Sanders when Colt ran out the door?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Around where I was, I guess. I told you, that’s all I know. Finish.” Gantner raised a dirt-streaked hand and traced neat printing in the air. He said with perfect enunciation, “The fucking end.”

And that was the way to describe this conversation. The foreman was walking toward them, glaring. He was a big guy who swaggered like a sailor on a rolling deck. He had a hell of a glare.
Thunk!
Gantner’s shovel sliced deep into the earth, speeding the day when there’d be another place for traffic to get backed up. Nudger thanked him and advised him not to work too hard in the hot sun.

“You wanna help?” Gantner asked, grinning sweatily.

“I’m already doing some digging of my own,” Nudger said, walking away before the ominous foreman arrived.

He sat for a while in his dented Volkswagen Beetle with the windows rolled down. There was a faint breeze wafting through the car; it felt cool on the right side of Nudger’s sweat-plastered shirt. He watched the foreman motion toward the Volkswagen, talk for a few minutes with Gantner, then walk away. Gantner kept digging, not glancing over at Nudger, as if not looking at him meant he wasn’t there.

Nudger got out his spiral notebook and jotted down the pertinent parts of his conversation with Gantner. Some kind of huge machine that hammered concrete into dust rolled onto the scene then and began smashing its way noisily up the old exit ramp, like some creature from a sixties Japanese horror flick:
Crushzilla the Destroyer
. The ground trembled. Nudger wanted to stay and watch, but he had miles to go and promises to keep.

Before the state kept its promise to Curtis Colt.

The next witness Nudger talked to also stood by her identification. She was an elderly moon-faced woman with extraordinarily large watery brown eyes—Iris Langeneckert, who had been walking her dog near the liquor store and had seen Curtis Colt dash out the door and into the getaway car.

That was how she told it, simply, briefly, and with a matter-of-factness that would have swayed any jury, there in her meticulously neat south St. Louis apartment on Tennessee Avenue. Then she offered Nudger a sandwich and glass of iced tea.

Nudger declined the sandwich but accepted the tea with gratitude. It was strong, and sweet with natural sugar that still swirled gently in it from stirring and settled hazily on the bottom of the glass as pale sediment. As Nudger drank, the brown mongrel that had also witnessed the robbery-murder lay mostly concealed behind the sofa and watched him warily from half-closed eyes.

When Nudger was almost finished with the tea, Iris Langeneckert said something that Gantner had also touched on. “He was a skinny young man with curly black hair and a beard or mustache,” she said, describing the getaway-car driver. Then she added, “Like Curtis Colt’s hair and mustache.”

Nudger looked again at the lakeside snapshot Candy Ann had given him. There was Curtis Colt, about five feet nine, skinny, and handsomely mean-looking with that broad bandito mustache and mop of curly, greasy black hair. There was a don’t-give-a-damnness even in the way he stood, legs spread a little too wide, shoulders set as if to punch first if anyone even drew back a hand to threaten to strike him. A chin that proclaimed he could take it, cold eyes that said he could dish it out. Nudger had seen a lot like him. Too many. They were so alike, part of the world’s pattern of pain and desperation. He wondered if it was possible that the getaway-car driver had been Colt himself, and his accomplice had killed the old woman. Even Nudger found that one difficult to believe.

He thanked Mrs. Langeneckert, then drove to his office in the near-suburb of Maplewood and sat behind his desk in the blast of cold air from the window unit, sipping the complimentary cup of diet cola he’d brought up from Danny’s Donuts. The smell of the doughnut shop was heavier than usual in the office; maybe something to do with the heat and humidity. Nudger had never quite gotten used to the cloying sugar-grease scent and what it did to his sensitive stomach.

When he was cool enough to think clearly again, he decided he needed additional information on the holdup, and on Curtis Colt, from a more objective source than Candy Ann Adams. He phoned Police Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith at home and was told by Hammersmith’s son Jed that Hammersmith had just driven away and it would be late before he returned.

Nudger checked his answering machine again, proving that hope did indeed spring eternal in a fool’s breast.

There was another terse message from Eileen, telling him to call her but not saying what about; a solemn-voiced young man reading an address where Nudger could send a check to help pay to form a watchdog committee that would stop the utilities from continually raising their rates; and a cheerful man informing Nudger that with the labels from ten packages of a brand-name hot dog he could get a Cardinals ballgame ticket at half price. (That meant eating over eighty hot dogs. Nudger calculated that baseball season would be over by the time he did that.) Everyone seemed to want some of Nudger’s money. No one wanted to pay Nudger any money. Except for Candy Ann Adams. Nudger decided he’d better shrug off some of his pessimism and step up his efforts on the Curtis Colt case.

He tilted back his head, drained the last dribble of cola, then tried to eat what was left of the crushed ice. But the ice clung stubbornly to the bottom of the cup, taunting him. Nudger’s life was like that.

He crumpled the paper cup and lobbed it, ice and all, into the wastebasket.

I
V

he next morning Police Lieutenant Jack Hammer-smith was in his Third District office, obese, sleek, and cool-looking behind his wide metal desk. There was a comfortable grace to his corpulence, like that of a seal under water. He was pounds and years away from the hand
some cop who’d been Nudger’s partner a decade ago in a two-man patrol car. Nudger could still see traces of a dashing quality in the flesh-upholstered Hammersmith, but he wondered if that was only because he’d known him ten years ago.

“Sit down, Nudge,” Hammersmith invited, his lips smiling but his grayish-blue cop’s eyes unreadable. If eyes were the windows to the soul, his shades were always down.

Nudger sat in one of the straight-backed chairs in front of Hammersmith’s desk. The desk was neat: a phone, brown plastic “in” and “out” baskets, two stacks of papers, some file folders, a glass ashtray with a chip out of it, all of it symmetrically arranged. Hammersmith was always busy, always organized, always—well, sometimes—ready to assist his old strayed-away sidekick.

“I need some help,” Nudger said.

“Sure,” Hammersmith said, “you never come see me just to trade recipes or to sit and rock.” Hammersmith was par
tial to irony; it was a good thing in his line of work. Nudger thought it might be what kept him sane.

“I need to know more about Curtis Colt,” Nudger told him.

Hammersmith got one of his vile greenish cigars out of his shirt pocket and stared intently at it, as if its paper-ring label might reveal some secret of life and death. “Colt, eh? The guy who’s going to ride the lightning?”

“That’s the second time in the past few days I’ve heard that expression. The first time was from Colt’s fiancée. She thinks he’s innocent.”

“Fiancées think along those lines. Is she your client, this woman who’s already picked one loser?”

Nudger nodded, but didn’t volunteer Candy Ann’s name.

“Gullibility makes the world go round,” Hammersmith said. “I was in charge of that one. There’s not a chance Colt is innocent, Nudge.”

“Four eyewitness IDs are compelling evidence,” Nudger admitted.

“Damning evidence,” Hammersmith said.

“What about the getaway-car driver? His description is a lot like Colt’s. Maybe he’s the one who did the shooting and Colt was the driver.”

“Colt’s lawyer hit on that. The jury didn’t buy it. Neither do I. The man is guilty, Nudge.”

“You know how inaccurate eyewitness accounts are,” Nudger persisted.

That seemed to get Hammersmith mad. He lit the cigar. The office immediately fogged up. Even considering their hugeness, Hammersmith’s cigars generated a tremendous amount of smoke in proportion to their size. And they burned fast, like fuses; sometimes their coarse tobacco even made a faint crackling sound. Yet they never seemed to burn down to butt size so they mercifully could be extinguished.