Nightlines (3 page)

After switching on his yellow-shaded desk lamp, Nudger reached for the phone and dragged it to him. He tried the number from the base of Jenine’s phone and got a busy sig
nal. Then he tried all the numbers Fisher had given him and was surprised to keep getting busy signals. He decided to try only the number from Jenine’s apartment and sat punching it out every half minute until he got a dial tone.

Within seconds there was a loud click in the receiver. A male voice said, “Are you there, sweet thing?”

“I’m here,” Nudger said. “How sweet I am is debatable.”

“What’s not debatable,” the man said, “is that you’re not my kind of sweet. That is, unless you’ve got an awfully deep voice to match perfect thirty-six C-cup lung power.”

“I wear a forty-four-long suitcoat,” Nudger said, “sometimes triple-knit, usually a bit frayed at the cuffs and elbows. Still interested?”

The man laughed. “Sure, but not in you, pal. I got a feeling we’re looking for the same thing.” He hung up.

Very possible, Nudger thought, staying on the line.

Another click.

“I’m a Nordic-type music lover in my early thirties, and I prefer the muscular Mediterranean macho type,” a man said, sounding like one of those classified ads in the personal column of the
National Enquirer
. “I can be sheep or wolf, if anyone is listening. Also I’m into rubber. Hello, hello, are you there, lover? Are you assimilating my red-hot vibes?”

“I’m assimilating them,” Nudger said, “but I’m not quite on the same wave length. I’m into chocolate frosting.”

“Sounds divine.”

“That’s what Betty Crocker says.”

“You jest?”

“I jest.”

“Ciao, then.”
Click
.

There was something more than a little sad in all of this, Nudger thought, as he shifted position in his chair. It reminded him of forced gaiety on New Year’s Eve, when everybody realized that time was slipping away from them, but wore funny hats and tooted horns and then riotously sang “Auld Lang Syne,” essentially a sad song.

As if from a great distance, a woman’s gentle voice inquired, “Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?”

“I’m here,” Nudger told her, pressing the receiver tighter to his ear.

“I’m lonely and I’m going to kill myself,” the woman said. She said it as if she meant it.

Nudger sat up straight. What the French call a
frisson
raised the hair on the nape of his neck. “Don’t do that, please.”

“It’s closing in on me,” the woman said. “Everything’s closing in on me. I don’t think there’s any other way to stop it.”

“I understand how you feel,” Nudger told her, “really I do.”

“You don’t. You can’t. It’s asinine of you to say you understand.”

“Maybe I can’t know for sure whether I understand,” Nudger conceded, “but I’ve had the feeling you just described, where it seems that every available move will lose the game.”

“What do you do?”

“I move, I lose, I start over.”

She laughed. It was a sad laugh, a manifestation of hopelessness.

“I’ve had some experience with suicides,” Nudger said. “None of the people you leave behind will feel sorry for you. Oh, maybe they will at first, but within a short time they’ll be angry about what you did. They’ll stay angry for a long while, maybe the rest of their lives.”

“What possible difference will that make to me when I’m dead?”

There was sound logic in that, all right, Nudger admitted to himself.

“When life become unbearable,” the woman said, “why should we continue to suffer?” More logic. Damn!

“Because we only
think
life is unbearable. If we hang on a while, the situation usually eases up, or maybe it gets worse in a way that might be a little more interesting.”

The woman laughed again, not quite so hopelessly this time.

“Maybe you ought to try seeing a doctor,” Nudger suggested, “a professional who can help you in some way you can’t imagine.”

“I’ve been to a psychiatrist. He listened to me, just like you, only he took notes. Are you taking notes?”

“No, but I would if I thought it would stop you from taking your life. Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you. It might help you if you share your misery.”

“Do you believe in hell?”

“No.”

“I do. I’m in it.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Nudger said. “You’ve got nothing to compare it with.”

“Do you really think there is something to compare?”

“I think death is nothingness,” Nudger told her. “It scares me.”

“I take it back; you’re not like the psychiatrist.”

“Do you like gorilla jokes?” Nudger asked.

Again the laugh, briefer but brighter. “What a mundane thing to ask a potential suicide.”

“Death is mundane. There is nothing more mundane. Talk to me tomorrow and I’ll tell you some gorilla jokes.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Nudger thought she might not still be on the line. Then she said, “I don’t want to hear the one about where they sleep.”

“My gorilla jokes are much more sophisticated than that. Talk to me tomorrow night. Promise me.” He sensed that he almost had her.

Another pause. “Are gorilla jokes worth staying alive for?”

“Mine are. Anything is worth staying alive for. Talk to me tomorrow on this line. You’ll see. Everyone likes good gorilla jokes. They’re a positive force in this world.”

“All right,” she said. “But I don’t promise. I can’t.”

“Sure,” Nudger told her. “Same time?”

“Same time,” she said, and abruptly hung up.

Nudger replaced his own receiver. He realized that the woman had somehow become more than just a disembodied voice in the night, more than a stranger; their conversation had been piercingly intimate, and he felt as if he knew her, cared about her. Was that what Sam Fisher would describe as weird? Was it so bad? She had been reaching out for human contact, talking and not killing herself.

The office was quiet, the air motionless and thick, almost like liquid. Nudger’s right hand still rested on the flesh-warm receiver. He was clenching his free fist hard enough for his fingernails to indent his palm, and he was perspiring heavily. There was more electricity on the nighttime service lines than was supplied by the phone company.

Nudger usually spared his intestines the rigors of coping with alcohol, but now he got up and walked to the file cabinet where he kept a bottle of Johnny Walker red label for special occasions and his very best clients. He poured himself a generous slug of the amber stuff in a rinsed-out coffee cup, drank it down and felt its warm bite. He went to the window and stood looking down at the street, at the faint greenish neon glow from the Danny’s Donuts sign directly below. He wished the shop were open with doleful Danny down there behind the counter, grayish towel tucked in his belt, packing his greasy merchandise in fold-up cardboard boxes for carry-out orders for the workers in the surrounding shops and office buildings. It would be nice to talk with someone face-to-face. To read expressions.

Instead, Nudger set the empty cup on the windowsill and returned to his desk and the telephone.

He made several more contacts, had more lengthy conversations, before sitting back and considering it a night’s work. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was almost 5
A
.
M
. Nudger had wanted to acquire a feel for what went over the lines and he’d gotten it. It had sobered him.

He stretched his arms and back, exhaling loudly. Then he made one more phone call, to the Third District, and left a message for Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith, who didn’t come on duty until seven o’clock. When he had hung up, he reset his alarm and lay down again on the sagging cot, this time unable to sleep.

Around him the city gradually awakened, and the nighttime lines were claimed by the daylight hours and became once more the province of telephone company employees conducting routine business.

But a piece of the night had claimed Nudger, with its accompanying very real but indecipherable apprehensions. Like a child, he was afraid of the dark. And he was trapped in it.

I
V

ammersmith sat behind his desk in his Third District office and gazed at Nudger through a greenish haze of smoke emitted by one of his incredibly foul-smelling cigars. He was a corpulent Buddha of a man now, so unlike the sleekly handsome officer who had charmed and cajoled the ladies when he and Nudger were partners a decade ago in a two-man patrol car. Time did that sort of thing to people, Nudger mused, sitting down in the hard oak chair before Hammersmith’s desk. He wondered fleetingly what time was doing to him, then promptly forced such depressing speculation from his consciousness. Why stick pins in oneself?

“What are you on to now, Nudge?” Hammersmith asked.

“I need to know about the Jenine Boyington murder,” Nudger said, breathing shallowly to inhale as little second
hand smoke as possible. He understood why the Geneva Convention had outlawed chemical warfare.

Hammersmith seemed to read his mind, drew on the cigar and exhaled another green billow. “Medium-height
and-weight female Caucasian,” he said, “found fully clothed in her bathtub with her throat slashed. There was alcohol in her blood—what was left of it when we met her. The killing was a nice neat job. No arrests, no suspects.”

“All of that was in the newspapers,” Nudger said.

Hammersmith narrowed sharp blue eyes within pads of flesh. “Are you on the case?”

Nudger nodded.

“We don’t like that, Nudge. Anybody else I’d tell to butt out.”

“I’ll stay out of your way. Really.”

“No need to promise,” Hammersmith told him. “Who’s your client?”

“Jeanette Boyington, the victim’s twin sister.”

“What do you know that we should?” Hammersmith asked.

Client confidentiality or not, Nudger knew that with
holding evidence in a homicide case was illegal and would at the very least get his license suspended. That was one of the reasons he had come here, to protect himself. He could divulge such information to Hammersmith and keep it reasonably confidential unless it proved to be the crux of the investigation.

“My client and I wouldn’t want this information spread around,” Nudger said.

“It won’t be. Do I need to promise?”

Nudger smiled. “No.” He wondered sometimes at the bond formed between two men who spent countless hours in a cramped patrol car, depending upon each other day after day for their very lives. “Jenine Boyington had a habit of making late-night phone calls and meeting men,” he said. And he explained to Hammersmith about the phone company service lines and their bizarre and desperate nighttime use.

“All of that might not be relevant,” Hammersmith said, when Nudger had finished. But both men knew better. Hammersmith was playing the game and would explore the new avenue of investigation as quietly as possible. He had always been nifty at stealth.

“Time now for the other end of the trade,” Nudger said. He was aware that often the police held back some pertinent piece of information from the news media. Aside from this helping them to screen the inevitable procession of cranks who confessed to every sensational homicide, it gave them a hole card to play against the murderer.

Hammersmith didn’t try to be evasive. He took another pull on his cigar, exhaled a thundercloud, and said, “There were a few strands of blond hair under one of the victim’s broken fingernails.”

“The victim was a blonde,” Nudger said.

Hammersmith shook his head, his heavy jowls undulating. “It wasn’t her hair. Jenine Boyington’s hair was straight. These strands of hair were about six inches long and came from the head of somebody with very curly blond hair. They almost have to be the killer’s.” Another draw on the cigar. “And something else. We got a set of smudged prints, useless except that they indicate by the wide spread of the fingers that the perpetrator has abnormally large hands. Huge hands.”

“Have any other women been murdered in their bathtubs during the last few years?” Nudger asked.

“Sure. But then bathtubs are a common enough place to find female murder victims. What could be more traditional?”

Nudger thanked Hammersmith and stood up from the hard oak chair. The chair was so uncomfortable that it was impossible to sit in for more than about ten minutes. Hammersmith knew it; he was a workaholic and didn’t like to be disturbed for longer than that by visitors. Nudger wondered if he’d had the torturous chair custommade.

He was at the door when Hammersmith’s voice stopped him.

“Your client, Nudge, is she an identical twin?”

“She looks exactly like her sister’s newspaper photo,” Nudger said.

“Sometimes,” Hammersmith said, “one twin takes the death of the other unnaturally hard. It’s like they think death ought to be shared between them like everything else.”

“You worried about some compulsion for revenge?” Nudger asked.

“I’m telling you to worry about it. Keep an eye on your client. She might get cute.”

“She already is cute, in a reptilian sort of way.”