Nightlines (28 page)

Nudger felt a melancholy satisfaction. He had figured things right, but it was as if he’d lost something in the process. Kernel of wisdom, kernel of sadness. He was familiar with the sensation.

“Jeanette was dead,” Agnes continued. “Nothing could alter that. But why couldn’t tragedy also be opportunity? Jeanette’s death was a chance for Jenine to shake free of her sinful past. The twins had done everything together, gone to the same schools, acquired the same meager skills, so it was simple for Jenine to slip into Jeanette’s itinerant part-time office work; and Jeanette hadn’t lived long in her apartment, so it was easy for Jenine to begin living there as Jeanette without attracting suspicion.” She dropped her gaze and frowned in annoyance. “If only she’d listened to her mother! I figured out everything for her, every minuscule detail! If only she’d listened!”

“Jenine wanted something more,” Nudger said, “something you might not understand. She loved her twin sister, felt as one flesh with her. She identified with Jeanette to a greater extent than either of you had planned. The masquerade was complete; a part of her became her murdered twin, breathing and walking around. She wanted revenge.”

“Yes,” Agnes said, “revenge.” She stared at the white carpet. “But that posed problems. The double of the victim is handicapped in searching for the killer. And any radical change in Jenine’s appearance would have caused the neighbors—Jeanette’s neighbors—to look closely at her, requiring explanations and making her impersonation of Jeanette more difficult. Jenine realized this. She realized she had to hire someone like you.”

“Someone to be her bird dog,” Nudger said, “to track down and point out her twin’s killer without arousing his suspicion. When I told her about following and losing Kell the day she was to meet him, she decided it was time to act on her own. She talked to him again on the nightlines, without my knowledge, and made another appointment. She didn’t anticipate me following Kell to where she was to meet him in her disguise, meet him wearing a dark wig and makeup to obscure her resemblance to her dead twin.”

Agnes said nothing, still staring at the spotless white field of carpet.

The identity switch would have worked, Nudger realized, except for the power of Jenine’s obsession to avenge Jeanette’s death, for which she must have felt responsible. And it would have worked if Agnes Boyington had been able to buy or scare him off the case and prevent him from running Kell to ground.

And there was more. Something was bothering him, something darkly laughing and obscene.

“How much did you know,” Nudger asked, “about what Jenine had planned for tonight?”

Agnes raised her head high and her eyes glinted in the lamplight with their old brittle disdain. If she was in league with the devil, the devil had better watch out. “Everything!” she snapped.

Nudger felt his breath leave him, his stomach contract. It was true, then. He hadn’t really expected this, even from Agnes Boyington.

“You!” she said accusingly. “When you wouldn’t be reasonable and drop the case, I had no choice but to change tactics. So you might well blame yourself for what’s happened!”

For an instant Nudger felt a rush of guilt, almost buying her twisted perspective. Then, “No,” he said. And unbelievingly, “How could you let your own daughter sink into this?”

“Jenine didn’t take advantage of her opportunity after Jeanette’s death, Nudger. The opportunity I gave her. She fell into her old sinful ways, began seeing men, virtual strangers. Doing . . . things with them! I know; I had Hugo Rumbo follow her, report to me. Everything.”

“And you had Rumbo follow me. When he stopped me at the mall today, he was really trying to prevent me from following Jenine and Kell.”

“Of course he was!” Agnes Boyington said, as if Nudger were a slow study and she was becoming impatient. “And on my orders. I knew where Jenine and Kell were going, and what she was going to do—or he was. It was the kind of life Jenine lived that killed Jeanette. I gave Jenine a chance to straighten out her life, to recapture purity—”

“To become Jeanette,” Nudger interrupted. “For you.”

“Yes! Of course! And when she turned her back on decency and respectability, what choice had I left? She visited death upon her own sister with her sin and negligence. And when she failed her test with God, I planned on letting her live only long enough to avenge Jeanette’s murder!”

“You really do believe in God,” Nudger said incredulously. But he knew he shouldn’t be incredulous. The damnedest people quoted the Bible. And, if it suited them, the Constitution and Rod McKuen.

“Of course I believe in Him. Don’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” Nudger said. “I’m not sure I want to.”

He understood now. Understood more than Agnes would approve. Agnes had used Jenine as Jenine had used Nudger, to find Jeanette’s killer, the man who had dared to violate
Agnes
by invading her ordered world and murdering her pure daughter. She intended to let the soiled-beyondredemption Jenine perhaps meet the same fate as her twin, before she herself would enter the apartment and exercise her own righteous revenge on Kell. Or on Jenine. Whoever was the survivor. It was the puritanical Agnes who had prepared the bathroom for butchery. She was the woman in the hat who’d confused Hammersmith’s man watching for Jeanette. Probably she’d left the building when he was phoning Hammersmith. She had been waiting outside the apartment, but she hadn’t entered when she’d seen Nudger, then the police, arrive.

There were depths to Agnes Boyington, and depths and depths. If she was capable of planning the murder and dismemberment of her own daughter ...Nudger didn’t move. Suspicion drifted into his mind through doors suddenly sprung open; awareness bloomed from memory: the momentary whiff of the mingled, distinctive scents of cigarette tobacco and perfume that clung to a room long after Agnes had left it, the way death clung. The killer who wore gloves; the murder that never quite fit.
How likely is it that a woman engaged to be married?
. . . He didn’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t go away.

“You killed Grace Valpone,” he said, finding the revelation left him short of breath.

He’d surprised Agnes. She tilted her head back and to the side in the Boyington manner. Her wary eyes registered confusion. Then a new respect for Nudger flared in them like a fierce, cold light.

“What you did to her,” Nudger said softly. “What you did with the knife. I mean, how could you? What sort of monster lives in your skin?”

“The sort that does what is necessary. The Valpone murder, done the way it was, proved necessary. It was what a man would do.”

“You killed Grace Valpone because of her dissimilarities to your daughters,” Nudger said, “because she was older, led a different kind of life. You murdered her because she wasn’t a talker on the nightlines, and if she became a victim in the series of murders, her death would lead the police away from the lines as a factor in the bathtub slayings, away from Jenine’s nightline conversations and meetings with men. Away from closer investigation and the discovery of Jeanette’s true identity. From stigma reflected on you. But where did you know her from? What was she to you?”

“Why, nothing. A stranger.”

An icy sea engulfed Nudger, stunning him. “You murdered a complete stranger?”

“I murdered the Valpone woman precisely because she
was
a stranger,” Agnes said. “So there would be no personal connection between us and thus no apparent motive. I chose her name from the list of recent marriage licenses in the
Daily Record
. If she was going to be married, she’d hardly be talking on the nightlines as Jenine had. I eavesdropped on her life to make sure she suited my purpose, then I killed her in the manner of the nightline women’s murders. She might have been anyone. I simply wanted to alter the pattern of the murders, but not so much that they still wouldn’t be tied together in the minds of the police.

That way the investigation would be diverted away from the nightlines. It didn’t have to be Grace Valpone. It was nothing personal.”

Nudger realized he was squeezing the arms of his chair.
Nothing personal
. He was in the almost palpable presence of genuine evil; evil found out, unmasked,
real
. He was awed.

“The police will piece this together,” he said, “from what Jenine will tell them, from what I’ll tell them.”

“And from what I’ll tell them,” Agnes Boyington said. “Do you think anything really matters to me now? My daughters are shamed, one of them is dead, everything I’ve existed for is dirty, dirty, part now of your soiled and grimy world. Do you think what happens now actually makes a difference?”

“Not to you, I suppose it doesn’t,” Nudger said. But he knew better. He knew her. She would think about it. She was a fighter, and she’d pull on her white gloves and see her lawyer and make denials; she’d make whatever moves she had. Which in today’s crazy-quilt legal system might be enough to let her walk away from the game free.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

“I have always done what I must in this world,” she said firmly.

Nudger went to the white phone on the secretary desk and dialed Hammersmith’s number. He told him, briefly, the nature of the deception and the true identity of his female prisoner.

Then he hung up the phone and sat quietly with Agnes Boyington in her calm, ordered home, listening to the hoarse screaming of the locusts, and waiting for the police.

XXX
I

y the time they let Nudger leave Headquarters it was just past dawn. The wavering orange sun hadn’t yet burned off the haze of pollutants that had drifted across the river from the heavy industry on the east side, obscuring the graceful curve of the Arch above the down
town skyline. He crossed to the City Hall lot, where his car was parked, and sat behind the steering wheel for a minute before starting the engine.

Springer had prodded and goaded, and cracked the whip of the law, sending him through smaller and smaller hoops with the skill of a practiced interrogator. But Nudger had passed through them all. Finally, with the usual instruction to stay available, they had released him. The police might still be an aggravation, but they were no longer a threat.

Exhausted though he was, talked out though he was, Nudger needed to tell someone about what had happened, to share it with someone who cared. Some things not shared ate like acid.

He started the car and drove to see Claudia.

When he entered the old apartment building on Spruce
and reached the second-floor landing, Coreen stuck her head out of her doorway and called his name. Nudger picked up something disturbing in her voice, a kind of vibrant apprehension. He stood for a moment with his hand on the banister, then turned and took a few steps toward her.

“You going to see Claudia,” Coreen said, looking con
cerned, “I’ll go with you. I been trying to call her on the phone, but she don’t answer.” She stepped all the way out into the hall and closed her door behind her.

“Maybe she’s not home,” Nudger said.

“She’s home, all right. I seen her come in.”

“Come in from where?”

Coreen shrugged. “Early morning walk, I guess.” She led the way up the stairs, aggressiveness in the swing of her arms and the roll of her wide hips. “I wondered what she was doing out that time of morning. That’s why I been trying to phone her, to find out.”

“Maybe she couldn’t sleep and felt like getting out,” Nudger said.

Coreen snorted dubiously. “Anything else you feel like believing, Nudger? It ain’t like Claudia to go roaming around in the early dawn. Not unless something’s bothering her.”

When they reached Claudia’s door, Nudger rapped loudly on it with the edge of a half dollar. Slow minutes passed and Claudia didn’t answer his knock. There was no sound from inside the apartment.

“Maybe she went back to bed,” Nudger suggested hollowly, trying not to let Coreen’s foreboding infect him.

Coreen wasn’t having any of that explanation. She reached around him and rattled the knob. The door was locked. “You got a key?” she asked.

Nudger nodded. He dropped the half dollar back into his pocket, then reached deeper and drew out his key ring.

He opened the door to silence. He and Coreen stepped into Claudia’s apartment like two people entering a swamp of unpredictable sinkholes.

Maybe she wasn’t home after all, Nudger thought. The place had the unbroken quietude of rooms unoccupied. A cup and saucer sat on the table by the sofa, the cup tilted crookedly half up on the saucer rim, the brown liquid inside it level and still. For some reason it occurred to Nudger that the coffee was exactly the muddy brown color of the sliding current of the Mississippi just a few blocks away.

Coreen had moved around him and was standing in the doorway to the bedroom. Nudger saw her body stiffen and jerk backward as if she’d been struck. Her voice was the softest, saddest, he had ever heard. “Aw, Lord, no, no! . . .” She braced herself with both hands on the doorjambs.

Nudger leaped to her side, pulled her roughly out of the way and charged into the bedroom, knowing what was waiting for him.