Nightlines (25 page)

Kell’s phone rang ten times while Nudger leaned against the phone inside the hot metal booth and watched the traffic on Kingshighway. After the tenth ring, he left the receiver dangling out of sight, yanked closed the booth’s folding doors behind him as he stepped outside, and drove to Kell’s house.

He parked three houses down, slipped into his sport jacket, and tried to look like a pollster or Jehova’s Witness as he walked with a sureness not felt toward the curlicued wrought-iron railing marking Kell’s front steps. The antacid tablet he was chewing was dissolved except for its chalky residue on his tongue. His stomach moved and demanded another, which he promptly popped into his mouth as he unhesitatingly gripped the black railing and climbed the steps to Kell’s front porch.

Even before he rang the doorbell, he could hear the tele
phone still jangling unanswered inside the house. He felt better now. He was sure Kell wasn’t home. All he had to worry about was being unexpectedly interrupted. Or one of the neighbors seeing him as a suspicious character and phoning the police.

Nudger’s Visa card with its carefully honed edge was ready in his shirt pocket. He nonchalantly withdrew it and fitted it between door and frame. The plastic made contact with the lock bolt, but met firm resistance. It took him only a few seconds to realize that the door was equipped with a dead bolt that wouldn’t budge.

He backed away as if puzzled that no one had answered his ring, then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, as if innocently trying to decide what to do next. In feigned sudden resolve, he left the porch and walked along the side of the house to the backyard. It was all done with such accomplished acting that he almost hoped a neighbor was watching. John Wilkes Sleuth.

There was a chain-link fence around the yard, with a bulky padlock on the gate. Nudger saw no sign of a dog. He vaulted the fence and crossed to the back door. There was a screen door, which was locked. It took only half a minute and a minimum of trouble to slip that lock, but the main back door was like the front, equipped with a dead bolt and without windows.

Nudger knew he wasn’t going to get inside without noise and dangerous long minutes, and in this neighborhood, where many residents were crime-conscious if not outright paranoid, he could afford little of either. He leaned to the side on the back porch and peeked through a window, through the narrow space between the frame and the drawn shade. If he could see inside the house, he might at least gain some impression of the man who lived there.

All he saw was a small, neat kitchen with a glossy green linoleum floor. A few of the furnishings were visible: a bare Formica table with metal legs, a high wooden stool, a smooth corner of a white refrigerator. The opposite window had a drawn shade, no curtains. He could hear the unanswered phone ringing more clearly here, reassuring him that Kell hadn’t entered through the front door. But maybe Kell habitually came and went the back way.

Nudger’s stomach growled something that sounded like “Get out!” He sensed that it was time to comply. Maybe past time.

A sudden breeze passed like a hot breath through the yard, rustling the leaves of the shrubbery by the fence as if there were something moving among them. Nudger hurried down off the porch.

He walked back toward the street the way he’d approached the house, with seeming casualness, noting that all of Kell’s shades were lowered and that there were iron bars over the basement windows.

Sitting pondering in the sauna that was the Volkswagen, Nudger realized that all he’d learned was that Kell was very security-minded and kept a sanitary kitchen. But that was true of many of Kell’s scrubby, conservative South St. Louis neighbors, who believed a pound of prevention was worth an ounce of cure, in battling bacteria or crime.

He started the car and drove farther down the street, then parked in the shade, in a spot where he could see the front of Kell’s house in the rearview mirror. He settled back in the bucket seat to wait, always the dullest part of his job but a great instiller of the virtue of patience. Since it was one of his few virtues, he took pride in it.

After a while he moved to another spot from which he could watch the house. He didn’t want to stay parked within sight of the same houses for too long, prompting a resident to wonder, worry, and phone the police to report a lurker in a Volkswagen.

At eleven-thirty Nudger went to lunch, ordering a carry-out hamburger at the diner on Kemper and Kingshighway, where he’d seen Kell yesterday. He’d allowed himself the faint hope that Kell would be there again today, but the only other customers were the summer students from the high school. It was tough catching up on classes during summer vacation. The thrust of their adolescent conversation was that they’d rather be someplace else. Welcome to the world, Nudger thought, juggling his coffee and hamburger and pushing out through the door.

He noticed that it had suddenly become cooler outside, and a line of dark clouds was closing in on the city from the west. Maybe rain on the way, maybe just show. Lightning flickered erratically out that way, like a celestial neon sign on the blink.

The hamburger was a culinary surprise. Better than franchise food. Nudger ate it one-handed as he drove to the phone booth from which he’d called Kell earlier.

The receiver was back on the hook. Someone else had used the phone, or some good citizen had noticed the dangling receiver and replaced it. Nudger hastily finished the last few bites of his hamburger and dialed Kell’s number again. Still no answer. Still nobody home.

He folded the hamburger’s waxed wrapper into fourths, placed it on the car’s passenger seat, and brushed his hands together to rid them of salt and grease. Then he drove again to where he could watch Kell’s military-neat brick house, parked, and leisurely sipped his coffee.

At ten minutes to three, when the coffee was only an acidic memory, a yellow station wagon pulled up in front of Kell’s house and sat angled slightly toward the curb with its motor running. Luther Kell got out, said something casually to the car’s driver, and the station wagon drove away.

Kell walked up the steps to his porch, jangling what looked like a ring of keys that he’d pulled from his pocket. He was wearing faded jeans and a sleeveless red T-shirt that emphasized the thickness of his sinewy arms. Maybe he was coming home from work, dressed as he was in summertime factory fashion. He keyed the unbeatable lock and disappeared into the house. The shades stayed lowered in Fort Kell.

Nudger felt better. Though another long round of waiting probably lay ahead, he at least knew Kell’s exact whereabouts.

But this time the wait was a short one. Half an hour after Kell arrived home, he left again. He’d changed to dark dress slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves neatly turned up a few folds on his wrists. His long blond hair was carefully combed. He was walking fast, away from Nudger. It was the kind of walk that suggested a firm destination.

Nudger let him get a block ahead, then edged the Volkswagen away from the curb and followed. He drove around the block, waited a few minutes, and caught sight of Kell again at the corner.

Kell walked west on Arsenal toward Kingshighway.

There was now an increasing eagerness in his stride; he crooked an arm and shot a glance at his wristwatch. When he reached the intersection, he crossed Arsenal and stood by the bench at the bus stop on the east side of Kingshighway.

Nudger made a right turn, drove a block past the stop, and pulled to the curb where he could still see Kell in his rearview mirror. An occasional droplet of rain softly patted the car’s metal roof, or settled in a cool fleck on the back of Nudger’s hand resting near the window.

Kell knew his bus schedules. Within five minutes a bus veered to the curb at the stop. It disgorged a few passengers from the rear door as Kell boarded through the front. The bus rumbled past Nudger, and he slipped the Volkswagen into gear and followed two car lengths behind.

This bus featured a cigarette advertisement below its rear window, an air-brushed photograph of a broadly smiling outdoorsy blond beauty who looked as if she could throw off lung cancer like a cold. This time Nudger memorized the company service number stenciled in neat black numerals high on the exhaust-darkened back of the bus. He didn’t look again at the blonde.

When Kell got off the bus near where Highway 40 crossed Kingshighway, then transferred to the Cross County Express, Nudger suspected where he might be going.

Squinting through the rain-specked windshield, he followed the lumbering bus west beneath the low gray sky bent over them, toward the suburban land of mortgaged dreams and domestic delusion. And Twin Oaks Mall.

XXVII
I

hen they were half a mile from the mall, Nudger drove ahead of the bus and found a parking space in the main lot. Then he walked to the doorway of a shop that sold nothing but athletic shoes and stood where he could see the bus stop. He wondered how a place could stay in business selling only striped sneakers expensive enough to last forever.

The Cross County Express lumbered around the corner by Sears, intimidated a few smaller vehicles into turning into intersecting parking lanes, and belched and hissed its way tentatively to a stop. Business was thriving at the mall today; over a dozen people stepped down out of the bus. The last one off was Luther Kell.

Kell stood still for a moment and looked around, as the bus emitted a noxious black cloud near him and eased away from the stop. Then he turned and went in through the mall’s tinted-glass main entrance. Nudger noticed that Kell was wearing soft, black, crinkly leather moccasins. They were probably part of the reason the muscular blond man
moved with such litheness and oddly ominous calm. Like the stillness before the storm.

Nudger followed, taking his time, sure of where Kell was going. Apparently the mall fountain was a favorite meeting place for people on the nightlines. Kell had probably talked on the lines last night and made a date with another woman. Unless Nudger was making false assumptions. He’d be disappointed if Kell simply shopped around for a while and then returned home with some new socks and shirts. For that matter, what was Nudger supposed to do if Kell did meet a woman here? She might be his regular girlfriend. Surely the man didn’t murder every woman he dated. Possi
bly he had murdered no one, ever.

Kell slowed his pace as he approached the fountain, moving toward the center of the wide promenade, into the calm area between the thick streams of shoppers making their way to one end of the mall or the other. He ambled over to the raised concrete ledge that circled the gently splashing fountain, propped one foot up on the ledge, and began slowly rotating a toothpick between his front teeth. Sandy the vinyl-clad cowboy had picked his teeth in the same manner while waiting here. Déjà vu, Nudger thought.

Kell rotated the toothpick, absently rolling it between thumb and forefinger, for quite a while, then began diligently probing molars with it. Mr. Tooth Decay was no friend of his.

This time Kell wasn’t stood up. Within ten minutes a long-haired brunette wearing a navy-blue skirt and red blazer walked up to him and they chatted briefly. Then she snaked her arm around his and walked away with him.

Nudger watched them stroll toward the mass of shoppers moving toward the east end of the mall.

Now what? Should he follow? Were Kell and the woman leaving the mall, or were they going to have a sandwich at the Woolworth snack counter and take in the mall theater movie? Or browse through merchandise at one of the department stores? Might they be shopping for her wedding gown? Possible. Shouldn’t a model citizen like Kell, with a neat little house, have a neat little wife to go in it? Was all of this any of Nudger’s business?

Of course not.

Unless . . .

He began walking in the direction Kell and the woman had taken. He could still see Kell’s blond head, catch an occasional glimpse of the woman’s flowing auburn hair and her red blazer.

Just as he reached the fountain, Nudger realized that, though he’d only glimpsed her from the back, there was something faintly familiar about the woman. About the compact, controlled way she swung her arms when she walked, and the way she carried herself, so smoothly and erectly.

An after-image flashed in Nudger’s mind.

Her shoes! The dark-haired woman had been wearing high-heeled silver shoes with black bows! Like the shoes Nudger’s former wife Eileen had worn. Like . . .

Like Jeanette Boyington’s shoes!

Nudger sucked in his breath and plunged forward, skirting the fountain at a run to gain ground on Kell and the woman.

His leather soles scraped wildly on the synthetic stone floor and he did a mad little dance, almost losing his balance, as a weighty hand fell on his shoulder and stopped him as if his knees had suddenly locked tight.

“I been watching you, Nudger,” a deep, thick voice said.

“Mrs. Boyington says it’s time me ’n’ you had a little talk ’n’ settled some things ’n’ . . .”