thug.'
'She's the sort that will do what's necessary to get what she wants. You're fooling yourself with that coincidence talk.'
'I'm not fooling myself,' Hammersmith said. 'I just wanted to see what you thought of the idea.'
'What I think is that I need to have a talk with Agnes Boyington.'
The waitress appeared again, and placed Nudger's glass of milk on the table along with the check. She smiled and commanded them to have a nice day and discreetly withdrew.
Hammersmith transferred his wadded red napkin from his lap to the table and stood up, brushing crumbs from his paunch. 'I've got to get back to the station house,' he said. 'Crime doesn't stop for lunch, you know.' He scrutinized the check and placed some folding money on the table. 'This'll take care of half,' he said.
'Sometimes crime goes to lunch at Ricardo's,' Nudger told him.
Hammersmith smiled, said good-bye, and walked away. Nudger saw him nod to the maitre d' and light up a cigar as he pushed through the door to the street.
Nudger took his time finishing his second glass of milk, enjoying the restaurant's warm and garlicky ambience. Then he summoned the waitress and paid the check, leaving most of Hammersmith's 'half' for the tip.
He drove from Ricardo's back to his office. When he checked his telephone recorder he found that Claudia hadn't called but Jeanette Boyington had.
When Nudger returned Jeanette's call she told him angrily that she'd phoned him four times and had gotten only the recorder. She'd made another appointment, for two o'clock, at the fountain again in the Twin Oaks Mall. She was to meet a lonely man named Rudy.
'This one has blond hair,' she said. 'I got him to tell me that on the phone. It's easy to get them to trade general descriptions, and if they have dark hair I don't make an appointment with them.' She told Nudger what Rudy would be wearing. He was the white-belt, polyester type. A step up from Sandy.
'You sound as if you're enjoying yourself,' Nudger said, catching a smug sense of power in her tone that gave him a chill.
'I am. I feel that we're doing something that will result in the apprehension of my sister's murderer, without him even suspecting. That's the only part of this I'm enjoying, but I'm enjoying it immensely, to the very depths of my soul.' Her voice crackled with cold fury.
Some family, Nudger thought, hanging up the phone. There were flaws, aberrations, genetic and otherwise, that were passed down from generation to generation in certain families, affecting differently each person contracting them. He reflected that it would be an exercise of morbid fascination to trace the Boyington family tree back to its diseased and twisted roots.
Rudy must have had second thoughts. Or maybe since 3 A.M. he'd met someone more his type. For whatever reason, he didn't show up for his appointment with Jeanette at the fountain in Twin Oaks Mall. Nudger watched for him until half past two before giving up and going back to the office.
The morning mail had arrived during the afternoon. Hidden among the advertisements and incredible offers was a note from Mrs. Natalie Mallowan, Ringo's owner, explaining that she would be somewhat later than she'd anticipated with the nine hundred dollars she owed Nudger. She assured him that Ringo was well and seemed to be suffering no ill effects from his time away from her.
Nudger was glad about Ringo, but he hoped Natalie Mallowan could come up with his fee before the end of next week.
If only he could introduce Eileen to Natalie and explain that there was no need to transfer the money twice and they might as well leave him out of it. Natalie could owe Eileen, okay?
But that sort of thing hadn't worked since his schoolyard days. It was a character-builder to make paying one's debts as difficult as possible. Even banks wouldn't let you assume loans anymore.
The desk phone rang. Hammersmith calling. Nudger recognized the special edge in his voice; it went back years.
'I'm at an apartment over on Spring,' Hammersmith said. 'It's leased to a woman named Grace Valpone. I think you should come right over here, Nudge.'
Nudger felt the old hollow coldness in the pit of his stomach, the heady shortness of breath. 'Who's Grace Valpone?' he asked.
'We don't know. She can't tell us. She's in her bathtub, not taking a bath. She's dead.'
XI
Grace Valpone's apartment was in an old U-shaped brick building with ornate gray stone cornices. There was a circular area that had once been a garden in the center of the network of walkways to the entrances. Now it was bare earth with a few withered azaleas in the middle and a futile sprinkling of grass seed, bisected by what looked like tricycle tracks. A few dozen neighbors were milling around the many police cars blocking the quiet residential street and parked at crazy angles to the curb. Uniformed cops kept the gawkers out of harm's way. Some of the patrol cars' roof lights were still on and rotating, casting pale hues against the slanted late afternoon sunlight. One of the cars' radios, tuned to top volume, sputtered and crackled occasionally with code numbers, car designations, and addresses. Official stuff. The neighbors were impressed. They shifted about uneasily, exchanging comments and I-told-you-so's, excited and a little scared.
A calm, striped cat disdainfully observed Nudger from a perch on a windowsill as he gave the hard-faced cop at the building's west entrance his ID and explained that Hammersmith was expecting him. The cop nodded, stepping aside to give him room to pass.
Nudger's stomach was becoming light and queasy. 'Is it a messy one?' he asked.
'She's been dead a couple of days,' the cop said.
Nudger swallowed the acidic, coppery taste along the edges of his tongue. The cop smiled. The cat didn't blink.
'First floor, at the end of the hall,' the cop said, as Nudger pushed open the door and entered a vestibule profaned with graffiti.
There had been no need for directions. From halfway up the stairs Nudger could see plenty of activity in the hall, and, through the wide-open door, in the apartment's living room.
As he entered, a familiar, faintly medicinal scent wafted to him, then was gone. He tried to identify it but couldn't.
The apartment was surprisingly large, sparsely and cheaply furnished, with threadbare oriental rugs over hardwood floors, mismatched furniture, and a very old console TV with a round bulging screen like an insect's eye. Large prints of show-business personalities or reproductions of thirties movie posters decorated the rough plaster walls. There was Bela Lugosi hovering over a coffin, disturbingly apropos. There was Bogie, blowing a whiff of smoke from the barrel of a blue steel automatic while a young Lauren Bacall watched with disinterest. There was King Kong taking a poke at a biplane.
There was Hammersmith, in the ample flesh, motioning for Nudger to join him. Nudger nodded to an assistant ME he knew slightly and circled a knot of plainclothes detectives to get to Hammersmith.
'C'mon,' Hammersmith said. 'She's still in the bathroom.'
Nudger braced himself and followed Hammersmith down a short hall.
The bathroom was also a very large room, lined with green tile from floor to ceiling. Grace Valpone didn't look as bad as Nudger had anticipated. She was so pale she was almost the grayish white of the claw-footed porcelain tub wherein she reclined. One slender white leg was draped over the side of the tub. Her head was resting on the porcelain slope of the tub's back. No one had closed her eyes. She was a beautiful woman, probably more so in death than she'd been in life. Her expression was one of dignified, laconic annoyance, as if she resented the intimacy of her bath being invaded by the clods from Homicide, the fingerprint crew just now closing up shop, the police photographer still snapping shots from various angles with his instant-print Japanese camera. Horror without gore. Hitchcock couldn't have staged it better.
Nudger stepped closer and his stomach lurched. Different movie. The bottom of the tub was caked reddish
