Nightlines (4 page)

“And let me know if you find out anything else about those dead-of-night phone conversations.”

“Some of the talk you hear on those lines can tear your heart,” Nudger said.
Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?

Hammersmith shrugged and picked up a pen from his desk. “My heart’s been torn and torn. So has yours, but your problem is your heart grows no scar tissue. Get out.”

Nudger got out.

When he returned to his office, Nudger found that Danny had let someone in to wait for him. That was the arrangement Nudger had with the doughnut-shop owner. Danny was less convenient but much cheaper than a secretary.

Even before she introduced herself, Nudger suspected the identity of the middle-aged, stiffbacked woman seated in the chair before his desk. She had to be well over fifty, but there was in her still composure, calm gray eyes, and petite curvaceousness a familiar chilly vitality.

“I’m Agnes Boyington,” she said, half standing as Nudger entered. “Jeanette’s mother.” She offered a cool hand, which Nudger shook gently, then she sat back down and waited for him to circle his desk and settle into his swivel chair. She winced when the chair yowled.

“I assume Jeanette told you she hired me to investigate Jenine’s murder,” Nudger said.

“No, she didn’t. But I came across your name and phone number when I was visiting Jeanette. Then I discovered that you were a private investigator.”

Nudger smiled thinly. “It seems you’ve been doing some investigating yourself,” he said, instinctively not liking this woman, not liking her at all.

“I bore Jeanette and Jenine late in life, Mr. Nudger,” Agnes Boyington said, as if recalling with distaste the messy process of childbirth. “Perhaps for that reason I spoiled them, meddled too much in their affairs. Yes, I admit that. But I don’t intend to confront Jeanette with what I’ve discovered and insist that she terminate her arrangement with you.”

Nudger was ahead of Agnes Boyington. He knew she realized that dealing that way with her daughter would be futile. Jeanette would simply hire another investigator, taking pains to be more secretive. “Isn’t my arrangement with her pretty much up to Jeanette, whether you confront her or not?” Nudger said. “She’s how old ...in her early twenties?”

“Twenty-eight,” Agnes Boyington snapped, as if this were distinctly none of Nudger’s business. He understood why and immediately raised his estimate of Jeanette’s mother’s age. “But she listens to her mother, usually.”

“If you don’t intend to interfere,” Nudger said flatly, “why did you come here?”

Agnes Boyington leaned forward in her chair and fixed her unblinking eyes on Nudger, summoning her powers to persuade. “I’m here to try to convince you that the police should be left to handle alone the investigation of Jenine’s murder. Jeanette was very close to her twin sister. Whatever she told you would be colored by her grief, and the emotional residue of her recent trouble. She would benefit from your benign neglect.”

“Recent trouble?” Nudger said, grabbing at the brass ring that had been so obviously proffered.

“I regret the necessity to tell you this,” Agnes Boyington lied, “and I am relying on your professional ethics to ensure your silence. Just a few months ago Jenine underwent an abortion.”

“I thought you said the recent trouble was Jeanette’s.”

Agnes Boyington removed a long, slender brown cigarette from her purse and lit it with a silver lighter that worked on the first try. She had about her the air of a woman who was used to things working on the first attempt, a woman whose daughters, especially Jenine, had been an aggravation in an otherwise perfectly controlled existence. After making sure the cigarette was burning adequately, she condescended to speak to Nudger.

“Jeanette got into an argument with the man who impregnated Jenine,” she said. “They fought over who was to pay for the abortion, and I’m sure they had other matters over which to fight. He beat her up badly, then left the city. The girls thought they were keeping it a secret from me, but of course they weren’t.” She sighed and gazed for a moment at the ceiling, as if seeking tolerance to cope with this world that didn’t measure up to her standards. “It was I who eventually paid for Jenine’s abortion, under the guise of a loan for a different purpose. I have paid for my daughters’ mistakes all their lives. It’s the cross God has given me to bear.”

“What’s the man’s name?” Nudger asked.

“It doesn’t matter. I want to maintain some discretion. I’m only here to try to impress upon you the fact that Jeanette isn’t thinking clearly right now; she’s suffered two traumatic experiences in the past eight weeks. Be advised, do not take what she says as gospel truth.” She stood up. She had the carriage and suppleness of a much younger woman. Age had somehow overlooked her. Or maybe she’d made a deal with the devil, something to ease the burden of that cross.

“So you want me to drop the case without telling Jeanette,” Nudger said, still seated.

She smiled very faintly, pointing her smoldering long cigarette at him as if it were a magic wand that could in a wink make him disappear if she so chose. “Exactly, Mr. Nudger. Though I don’t know you, since you move with at least some competence upon the less genteel and more demanding underside of life, I am assuming that you are a man of some practical wisdom and judgment. The police will find Jenine’s murderer, if he can be found.” She snuffed out the just-lighted cigarette in the ashtray on the corner of the desk, a gesture done entirely for effect, theatrical yet lowkey.

“Let me know what you decide, at your convenience. I’ll send you a check of a more than generous amount.”

Nudger was struck again by the woman’s similarity to her daughter. Was there a mold somewhere turning out these shapely, cool, and distant women? He couldn’t resist asking, “Are you a twin, Mrs. Boyington?”

“No. Twins run in families, Mr. Nudger, but usually they occur every other generation. My mother was a twin.”

“Is Jeanette’s father alive?”

“Herbert died twenty-five years ago. I never remarried. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity, Mrs. Boyington.” Nudger smiled and shrugged. “That’s why I’m a detective.” He didn’t tell her it had crossed his mind that spiders sometimes devour their mates.

“You
will
consider my proposition?” she said. It was not really a question, rather a command.

“Oh, I try to consider everything. A closed mind is the devil’s workshop.”

“That’s ‘idle hands,’ Mr. Nudger.”

“I wasn’t quoting.”

She shot a withering glance at him, nodded, and stalked from the office, leaving in her wake a scent more like disinfectant than perfume.

Nudger listened to her measured steps on the narrow wooden stairs that led to the street door, heard it open and close and felt the subtle change of temperature in a draft across his ankles. It felt warmer, now that Agnes Boyington had gone.

Nudger drummed his fingers on the desk for a few minutes. Then he stood up and went downstairs, out the street door, and made a tight turn and entered the warm and cloying atmosphere of Danny’s Donuts.

Danny was alone in the shop, as usual. Nudger often wondered how he stayed in business. But then he was sure Danny wondered the same thing about him. Neither of them was considering tax-free municipals.

Danny’s basset-hound features brightened when he saw Nudger, and he poured a cup of his acidic coffee and placed it on the counter in front of Nudger’s customary stool near the serving door.

Nudger sat and sipped. It was the polite thing to do. Danny plunked down a leadlike glazed doughnut next to the cup. Nudger knew that Danny’s freebies were leftovers from yesterday’s unsold pastry, and he was not so polite that he would eat
that
deadly morsel, despite Danny’s extreme sensitivity about the quality of his product.

“I was upstairs thinking,” Nudger said.

“That’s your line of business, Nudge.”

“Yeah. Didn’t you once tell me you were a twin?”

“That’s right. I had an identical twin brother. Sammy was his name. Samuel and Daniel.”

“Where is Samuel now?” Nudger asked.

Danny smiled, but there was a gleam of old sadness in his brown eyes. “Sammy died when we were six,” he said.

“Being twins,” Nudger said, “do you think you were closer than other brothers?”

Danny began carefully wiping down the stainless-steel counter. It didn’t need it. “I don’t know, Nudge. How could I be sure; I never had another brother, and we were so young when he died.”

“Have you ever worried about him dying young?” Nudger asked. “I mean, aren’t identical twins genetically the same, so that their organs are subject to the same weaknesses, the same diseases?”

“It never worried me, Nudge,” Danny said with that same sad smile that Nudger had never seen before today. “Sammy was hit and killed by a car.”

“I see.” Nudger sipped his coffee, burned his tongue, decided he had it coming. “I’m sorry to pry, Danny.”

Danny shrugged and tucked his gray dish towel into his belt. “Been a long time ago, Nudge.”

But not so long that it didn’t still bring pain, Nudger thought. And Jeanette Boyington had lost her twin sister only last week.

“You mixed up in a case with twins?” Danny asked.

“ ‘Mixed up’ describes what I am exactly.”

“Well, I’ll help you if I can. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know,” Nudger said. And he did know. Some things you don’t doubt.

“That all you wanted, Nudge?” Danny asked.

“That and this,” Nudger said, and girded himself and took a bite of the stale doughnut. He watched with satisfaction the slow formation of Danny’s customary amiable smile.

Outside the doughnut-shop window, a hulking man in a tan windbreaker and a bright yellow, billed cap was squinting through the glass at Nudger. His coarse features—flattened nose, shelflike eyebrows, outthrust wide jaw—registered subtle satisfaction as he impressed Nudger’s face upon his memory. He would know Nudger instantly if he saw him again, anywhere.

He turned from the doughnut-shop window and lumbered halfway down the street to where his car was parked.

It was a brown ten-year-old Buick, faded and rusty and as hulking as its owner. As the man got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door, the rearview mirror wobbled and dropped to a crooked position from the impact. He started the car and pulled away from the curb, and was only a few blocks away when he automatically reached for a small red rubber ball on the seat beside him. He began to squeeze the ball rhythmically as he drove, exercising the already powerful forearm rippling beneath the windbreaker sleeve.

As he stopped for a traffic light, he glanced down at the ball expanding and contracting between his fingers and figured that it was probably just about the size of Nudger’s Adam’s apple. He smiled, not at all with his eyes, and with only one corner of his mouth.

Then the light changed and for the time being he completely forgot about Nudger. Squeezing the ball and driving occupied his entire capacity for concentration.

V

other has always been a snoop and an interloper,” Jeanette said, later that day in Nudger’s office. Nudger made a tent with his fingers, just like Sidney Greenstreet used to do in Bogart movies, and stared candidly at Jeanette. “I’m playing this game honestly with you,” he said. “Which is why I told you about your mother’s visit. And I need complete honesty from you. What’s the name of the man who got Jenine pregnant and beat up on you?”

“Wally. Wallace Everest. But he didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

Jeanette uncrossed her shapely legs, planted her dainty silver high heels firmly on the floor, and aimed eyes like her mother’s at Nudger. “You wanted honesty, and that’s what you’re going to get.” She made it sound like a threat, and maybe it was. “Mother doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know that I was the one seeing Wally, the one he made pregnant, the one who had the abortion.”

“Prolong the honesty and explain,” Nudger said.

“I’d been seeing Wally for several months. When he found out I was expecting his baby, he was angry instead of happy. He said he was leaving me and never wanted to see me again. Then he suggested the abortion. When I cried on Jenine’s shoulder and told her what had happened, she came up with a plan.”

There were curves that you could see and curves that you couldn’t in the Boyington family, Nudger reflected. “Plan?” he said, and listened with some apprehension.

“Jenine confided in me that she’d already had three abortions,” Jeanette said. “She suggested that rather than create a black mark against me and possibly incur the rage of Mother, she’d be the one to have the abortion instead of me. Abortion number four would mean little to her, or to Mother if she found out, considering Jenine’s other activi
ties and previous abortions, which Mother’s spying might any day uncover. Mother is not a liberal or understanding person.”

Some understatement, Nudger thought. “Didn’t this plan pose somewhat of a medical problem?” he asked.

“Not one we couldn’t solve. I simply went to an abortion clinic as Jenine, with all of her identification, including driver’s license with photograph. So as far as anyone, even the doctor, knows, it was Jenine who had the abortion.”