brown, and the lower portion of Grace Valpone's body was slashed and mutilated. Her nipples were gone; there were several deep defense wounds on the palms of her hands.
Nudger stepped back. 'Good Christ,' he said softly.
Hammersmith clapped him on the shoulder. 'You never could take it, could you, Nudge?'
No need for a reply. Both men knew how it was. Nudger had never become accustomed to the sight of violent death. It was one of the reasons his police career had been cut short.
They left the pale lady and went into the living room. Some of the bustle was dying down as various technicians who'd finished their tasks were leaving the crime scene, casually chatting, occasionally grinning, as if drifting away from a cocktail party. All very convivial. Soon the hostess would be removed in a rubber body bag.
Nudger and Hammersmith sat on the sofa. Hammersmith stared at Nudger for a moment and suddenly seemed uneasy and solicitous, as if any second he might try to smooth things over by offering Nudger tea.
'I didn't figure it would be such a shock to your system, Nudge. Honest.'
'The hell with that,' Nudger said. 'Do you think this was done by Jenine Boyington's killer?'
Hammersmith drew a cigar from his shirt pocket, glanced guiltily at Nudger and then returned it. 'There are obvious similarities, and dissimilarities. The picture isn't clear yet. This one's been dead since night before last; a friend found her a few hours ago. We'll know more when we get a lab report, and after we question her family and friends.'
'The two crimes might tie in,' Nudger said. 'Fingerprints, hair, the Valpone woman's love life… any of them could make the link.' Nudger imagined the killer sitting where he now sat, in the corner of the sofa, watching Grace Valpone and building to the moment. 'It almost has to be.'
'Fingerprints we know about,' Hammersmith said. 'The apartment's full of them, of course, but none of them are the killer's. The fingerprint boys said right away that whoever murdered Grace Valpone wore gloves. So there's one dissimilarity in the two crimes. And there were no correlative prints to determine the size of this killer's hands.'
'What about similarities? Other than the fact that Grace Valpone and Jenine Boyington were stabbed to death in bathtubs.'
'There was no sign of forced entry in either case. And the crimes were tidy. Notice there's no blood anywhere but in the tub. It was the same way with Jenine Boyington. The two women were placed in their bathtubs alive and then killed. Jenine's throat was opened up, this woman's wasn't. But who knows, maybe the lab can tie it to the same knife. There was no semen in Jenine. We'll have to wait for the report on Grace Valpone.'
'Dissimilarities?' Nudger asked.
'Grace Valpone was nude; Jenine Boyington was fully clothed. They were ten years apart in age; the Valpone woman was thirty-eight, in a stage of life different from Jenine's. Jenine did temporary office work; Grace Valpone was a beautician. They lived and died in different sections of town. Boyington had never married; Valpone was divorced and had a ten-year-old son living with his father. Boyington's apartment wasn't bothered; this place was rummaged through. Boyington liked to party; neighbors say Valpone might as well have been a nun.' Hammersmith languidly waved a ruddy, manicured hand. ' 'It goes on and on,' as the widow said to the bishop.'
'What we need to find out,' Nudger said, 'is whether Grace Valpone used the nightlines.'
'Correct,' Hammersmith said. 'We're going to turn this place all ways but loose looking for one of those six- six-six phone numbers, hoping we don't find it.'
Nudger understood. 'You don't like the idea of a mass murderer,' he said. 'You want her boyfriend or a neighbor to have done it and confess and hand over the weapon.'
'Exactly. The last thing anybody in this city needs, except for the news media, is a knife-happy series killer roaming around keeping in practice. I don't want there to be any connection between this and the Boyington murder, Nudge.'
Nudger looked closely at Hammersmith. The sleek and handsome fat man had crescents of loose flesh beneath his eyes, and vertical frown lines above the bridge of his nose. He was deeply concerned, as well he should be. Blood was being spilled in copious amounts right here in his bailiwick. Still, Nudger could offer him no comfort.
'I think there is a connection,' he said. 'So do you.'
'Of course I do,' Hammersmith said. 'Or at least I think there might be. But as long as the two crimes aren't officially related, I can move more freely in trying to solve them. The media, the Chief of Police, the mayor, the chronic confessors, all those people who make a cop's life complicated won't be involved. It's pointless to operate in a pressure cooker if you can stay out on the range.'
Nudger watched two white-uniformed morgue attendants saunter through the apartment and go down the hall toward the bathroom. Conversation and laughter drifted out, then the harsh ripping sound of the rubber body bag being zipped. A few minutes later they carried out the wrapped thing that had been Grace Valpone. Residual rigor mortis kept the limbs bent in the slumped position the body had assumed in the bathtub, giving the grotesque impression that the corpse was attempting to push its way out of the black bag. She'll suffocate in there! Nudger thought inanely.
'Always a cheering sight,' Hammersmith said. 'I'll let you know if we come up with anything that connects Grace Valpone with Jenine Boyington, Nudge. In the meantime, is there anything you've found out that we should know?'
'I haven't learned anything that would be of much help,' Nudger said. He told Hammersmith about Wallace Everest's being Jeanette's lover, and about the abortion under a false identity.
'That totally evaporates Wally Everest's motive to kill Jenine,' Hammersmith observed, 'and still leaves him in Cincinnati at the time of the murder.'
'I told you it wouldn't help.'
Hammersmith stood up. He did fire up a cigar now, concentrating entirely on that task for a few minutes while greenish billows fouled the room. For once Nudger didn't mind the cigar; its pungent odor overpowered the faint but unmistakable scent of death.
'I wanted to talk to you about this Valpone murder, Nudge,' Hammersmith said, 'but there's another reason I asked you to come down here. You haven't been a cop for a long time, and I know the kinds of cases you've worked as a private investigator. Divorces, dips into the till, missing library books. Weren't you even working on a dognapping?'
'I cracked that one,' Nudger said.
Hammersmith regarded him with calm appraisal through a greenish haze. 'The police are taking the possibility of a series killer quite seriously now, Nudge. We're very, very interested. And I wanted you to see Grace Valpone so you'd realized what you might be up against, so you'd be careful and remember not to exclude us entirely from your plans. Your police department cares.'
A pale vision of Grace Valpone in her claw-footed bathtub flashed like a Kodak slide on Nudger's mind. 'Your psychology is sound.'
'I hope it's effective.' Hammersmith crossed his arms over his protruding stomach. Ashes from his cigar dropped onto the floor. 'We won't start to toss this place for another hour, Nudge. Want to go out for some supper? I'll buy.'
Nudger's stomach was doing gymnastics. Not perfect ten scores, too herky-jerky. 'I think I'll diet until tomorrow,' he said.
Hammersmith smiled. That was the answer he'd been seeking.
As he left the apartment building, Nudger passed the same dreary graffiti, the same hard-faced cop, the same striped cat staring at him smugly, as if it knew that the way out was always the same as the way in and was enjoying the joke.
When Nudger got back to his office, he checked the answering machine and heard Claudia's voice tell him she was tired of trying to reach him and they could talk tonight in the usual way at the usual time. She sounded somewhat bemused that she would want to talk with him, maybe even slightly irritated. It was as if the recorder's tone had sounded before she could hang up, signaling go, and she'd had little choice but to be polite and postpone the conversation rather than cancel it. One of life's little electronic traps.
Quite an invention, the telephone. Nudger wondered if Alexander Graham Bell had ever suspected that someday the thing would speak back of its own accord, that it would bring so much heartache as well as
