Nightlines (16 page)

“Have you had dinner?” Nudger asked.

She shook her head no. There was a beaten quality about her that saddened him and evoked pity.

“I know a little bar near here called Zigzag’s,” he told her. “They serve great hamburgers. They have live music after eight o’clock. I hear it’s really something.”

She pursed her lips and he thought she was going to refuse him. But she said, “Let me change out of this dress, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back, a bit whimsically, and followed her noble nose into the bedroom.

When she returned a few minutes later she was wearing very practical Levi’s, the same brown sandals, and a white cotton blouse. The Levi’s weren’t form-fitting, but she had enough form to look good in them nonetheless.

“You’re much prettier than just average,” Nudger told her, as they walked from the apartment. He meant it. She seemed pleased, maybe amused, by the directness of the compliment.

As they descended the stairs, Nudger was becoming more at ease, more confident. Claudia in the flesh was becoming real to him in a way that Claudia on the phone could never be, exerting a pull on him that was sensuous and easy to understand. This was far from the darkness of their phone conversations. This might turn out to be a monumental rendezvous, yet at the same time an ordinary date, something he could comprehend, cope with, and enjoy. Normality.

On the second landing, she turned to him and held up her wrists to the light streaming through the cracked window.

“See the scars?” she said. “They’re from when I tried to kill myself.”

Zigzag’s actually did serve hamburgers, Nudger was relieved to discover. He and Claudia sat in a dim booth near the back of the place, beyond the bar. When a barmaid came over, Claudia asked for a whiskey sour and excused herself to go to the restroom. Nudger ordered a beer for himself and a hamburger and french fries for each of them, slyly instructing the barmaid to have the kitchen hold the onions. “The future’s not ours to see,” according to Plato. Or was it Doris Day?

The drinks were on the table when Claudia returned. Nudger watched her walk across the room, claiming the attention of a few of the male clientele. Hers was a subtle magnetism. She was the sort of woman that wasn’t striking, yet seemed more pleasing to the eye with each glance. Her features were unremarkable, but in harmony.

As she sat down, Nudger said, “I ordered burgers and fries. Now you owe me. Want to tell me about Ralph?”

Claudia didn’t go deaf this time. She sampled her whiskey sour and seemed to find it to her liking, then said, “He’s my former loving husband, is all.”

Nudger knew that wasn’t all, but that it had better be all for now. “Where do you work?” he asked. A mundane enough question. He downed half of his icy beer and waited for a mundane answer.

“I’m a waitress at Kimball’s Restaurant.”

“A four-star eatery. Gourmet food.”

“Are you a gourmet?” she asked.

“No, I’m more of a great white shark. I like most any kind of food. Only my stomach is more particular. Tell me about waitressing. Do you enjoy it?”

“It makes your feet sore and you have to take a lot of abuse from some of the customers. On weekends, when I serve more liquor, the tips are good, but the abuse quotient rises too. There are worse jobs.” She raised her glass again. She didn’t seem to be a practiced drinker, and there were no physical signs of the lush about her. “Tell me about detectiving, Nudger.”

“Oh, it’s pretty much what I’m doing now, asking questions. We detectives are a curious lot.”

“ ‘Curious’ can be an adjective used to describe an unusual object,” she said.

“I know, teacher. It’s been applied that way to me.”

She looked at him with a faintly startled expression.

“Which daughter is how old?” he asked.

“Nora’s the twelve-year-old; Joan’s ten.”

“Are they beautiful in the manner of their mother?”

“More beautiful. In their own manner.”

The hamburgers arrived, beautiful in their own beef-and-bun way. They were as tasty as they looked, and the fries were greasy and salty, the way Nudger unfortunately liked them. He ordered another beer. Claudia asked the barmaid if she could have some onions for her hamburger.

Nudger said nothing more probing than “Please pass the catsup” until they’d finished eating. He asked Claudia if she wanted another whiskey sour, and she said she’d prefer coffee. That was easy enough to get at Zigzag’s, even though the barmaid was taking a break. The same young, bald-headed bartender who had been on duty earlier today brought over two steaming white mugs on a tray.

“I see you found her,” he said to Nudger, placing the mugs before them and clearing the table of dishes and glasses.

“What did he mean?” Claudia asked, watching the bald-headed man walk away.

Nudger shrugged. “I don’t know. Bartender talk, I guess.”

They sat saying little over their coffee, oddly at ease in each other’s company, until the live music began at eight o’clock. A slightly raised stage that Nudger hadn’t noticed was abruptly bathed in red and green light, and two middle-aged men with punk haircuts and steel guitars began to twang and sing insolently of petty injustices. Nudger winced and looked across the table at Claudia. She grinned. They agreed that the hard rock at Zigzag’s wasn’t in the same class as the hamburgers.

The barmaid had disappeared for good, apparently, so Nudger walked over to the bald-headed barkeep and paid the check. Zigzag’s was becoming crowded despite the Hard Timers, as the two middle-aged punk rockers called themselves, so Nudger moved in front of Claudia, clearing a way to the door.

“I mean t’git down an’ be mean!” screamed the Hard Timers in perfect discord. One of them did a screeching slide on the guitar.

Nudger and Claudia emerged from the din, tobacco smoke, and dimness into an evening that had cooled off and conjured up stars. The door swung shut and muted the music to loud.

Claudia politely thanked Nudger for dinner. First-date patter.

“Walk a while?” he asked.

She hesitated, then nodded.

He took the curbside like a gentleman and set off in a direction away from her apartment building. He didn’t want the evening to end prematurely, still heavy with unanswered questions.

For a long time they were quiet as they walked, listening to the counterpoint rhythm of their footfalls. Nudger liked it that way but couldn’t figure out why. There was much he wanted to know about Claudia. On the other hand, maybe he was finding out something very important this way. It seemed that there could never be an awkward silence between them. Could love be mute as well as blind?

It was Claudia who finally spoke. “You said you were a private investigator. Am I part of a case you’re working on?”

“Only indirectly. The nightlines are part of the case. That’s why I was talking on the lines the night we made contact; I was trying to get a feel for what was going over the wires.”

“Then you don’t talk regularly on the lines.” She seemed pleased.

“No. Do you?”

“More often than I’d like. I can’t sleep. The early morning hours are a lonely time. Occasionally I just have to talk to someone. Regardless of their reason for listening, they provide human contact.”

Nudger smiled at her as they stepped down from a high curb. “You’re clean and attractive. Aren’t there more conventional ways to find human contact?”

“I don’t want any of the conventional ways, any of their complications.” She shifted the focus of the conversation back to Nudger. “Are you still working on the nightlines case?”

“Yes, but not at the moment.”

“What’s it about?”

“Murdered women.”

“Women who talked on the lines?”

Nudger nodded. Maybe he needed human contact too. He told her about the case. Not all about it, but almost all.

She was in an understandably somber mood when he’d finished, and he wondered if he’d regret sharing that part of himself with her.

“The wages of sin,” she said, of the murdered women. She said it ironically, not in a serious religious context.

“Maybe not,” Nudger told her. “There’s nothing solid yet to link the deaths to the same killer.”

“But you think there’s a mass murderer using the lines.”

“There’s enough evidence for me to go on that assumption. But then I’m not a bureaucracy, like the police. They can’t afford to follow hunches; I can’t afford not to, because sometimes hunches and a client are all I have.”

Claudia suggested that they return to her apartment. It was dark now, and the downtown area they were in was comprised mostly of empty office buildings and structures in various stages of renovation or construction. The city in the turmoil of rebirth. Not a safe place to walk. It occurred to Nudger that a mugger might appear unexpectedly and crack him on the head before finding out he was dealing with a tough shamus. Another tragedy born of misunderstanding. He didn’t mind when Claudia picked up the pace.

Claudia’s apartment building was in sight when Nudger said, “How long have you been a waitress?”

“Four years,” she said. “Before that, I taught.”

“Taught what?”

“Junior high school. Seventh grade. English and social studies.”

“How come you quit?”

Nudger could sense her shrinking into herself again, as if to envelop a sensitive, vulnerable core that had endured all it could stand. And now he had come along and touched it and brought pain.

“I didn’t exactly quit,” she said. “I was forced out.”

She didn’t speak again until they were back in her apartment. She’d left the air conditioner on while they were gone, and the living room was comfortably cool. The wide window, without curtains or blinds and with a few half-dead viny plants in plastic pots suspended from the upper frame, looked out on soot-gray buildings across Spruce Street. The upper floors of the buildings were used mostly for storage, and their windows were blank. Some of the windows had faded remains of business names clinging in peeling letters to the glass. A few of them were boarded over with weathered plywood. The mercury streetlight down the block cast a sickly bluish light over it all, lending some of the grime and pigeon droppings a pale luminosity. Grim, Nudger thought. Grim. It would never make a scene in one of those crystal globes that you shook to make artificial snow fly. How would it be to live here? To look out at those buildings day after day?

Claudia walked to the kitchen door and turned to face him. “Do you want me to put on a pot of coffee?”

He shook his head. “Not for me. I’ve had enough coffee.” He went to the sofa and sat down, listening again to the tired, complaining springs. “Are you glad I found you, Claudia?”

“I don’t know.” She absently fingered one of the scars on her wrists. “I’m sorry. I don’t.” Her fingernail lightly traced the scar down to the heel of her hand.

A cold wave of apprehension passed through Nudger, a mere tremor but powerful, like the shallow, rippling raw energy of a tidal wave in mid-ocean as it made for shore and shape and size and destruction. He stood up from the sofa and walked over to her. “Maybe I will have some coffee.”

But she didn’t move to make the coffee. “Will you stay here with me tonight, Nudger? Without sex, without any more questions, will you stay with me?”

“You’re a beautiful woman who doesn’t chew with her mouth open. How can I refuse?”

“I don’t care if you wisecrack,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I know, or I wouldn’t do it.”

She leaned into him and he put his arms around her, surprised by her thinness and the prominent contours of her ribs. There was about her a faint, clean scent of shampoo and perfume and onions.

“You did say no sex?” he said.

She burrowed her face into his chest and he felt the wet warmth of her tears through his shirt. “I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she told him, with a soft, vibrant desperation.

He hugged her to him and crooned comfortingly to her, as if she were a child awake from bad dreams, gently patting her shoulder. “You won’t be alone tonight,” he assured her again and again. “You won’t be alone. And neither will I.”

In the morning, as Nudger reached the second-floor landing on his way out of the building, Coreen Davis opened her apartment door and stared out at him with unmistakable reproach and warning. You couldn’t help but like C. Davis.

XVII
I

udger stopped by his apartment for a change of clothes, then drove to Danny’s for a quick breakfast. Agnes Boyington must have been to his office and seen the sign hung on his door referring business messages to the doughnut shop downstairs.

“You had a visit from a cold-hearted woman with warm hands, Nudge,” Danny said, placing a foam coffee cup and what looked like a hand-molded sugar doughnut on a napkin.

“She strikes everyone that way,” Nudger said. Maybe he had risen a few notches in Agnes Boyington’s estimation, if she was dressing up for him the way she did for her lawyer. More likely, his office was a brief stopover for her on the way to things really important.

“She asked me to tell you she’d been here looking for you,” Danny said. “She wants you to phone her.”