'You better believe it, Nudger.'
Nudger smiled at her. 'Good. Nice meeting you, wife of C. Davis.'
He knew she was watching him as he walked toward the stairs. Without looking back, he raised a hand in a listless wave and started up toward the fourth floor.
Someone else was already knocking on Claudia's door.
He was a slim, sharp-featured man wearing a dark suit and tie and carrying one of those slender leather briefcases that look like purses because they don't have handles.
Nudger didn't know quite what to do. He could hardly knock on the door to 4C and pretend that had been his destination. It could prove embarrassing, even dangerous in this neighborhood, if the door were opened. And there could be little doubt that he was heading toward 4D's door.
The man turned and gave him a long look. He had bushy dark eyebrows and high cheekbones. He would have been craggily handsome if it weren't for a skinny kind of meanness in his features.
'She's not home,' he said, jerking his head toward Claudia's door. 'I've been knocking for five minutes.'
'I see,' Nudger said, not knowing what else to say.
The man noticed Nudger's discomfort and stared at him with new interest. 'You her boyfriend?'
Nudger followed his detective's instincts. 'Yes, I am.'
'I'm her husband,' the man said.
Ho, boy! Nudger's stomach went into a spasm and made a sound like a cat meowing.
The man narrowed one eye and took a step toward Nudger, his suit coat open and flapping as if there were a breeze in the stifling hall. Or as if he were prepared for quick-draw gunplay, his holster in easy reach.
'You tell her when she gets home that I was here,' he said. 'And that I'm leaving town with the kids and she can't see them this weekend.' He pointed a slender forefinger as if he could shoot lightning from it. 'You got that?'
'Got it,' Nudger said, trying to keep calm and size up what was happening, not having much success doing either.
The man clenched overdeveloped, bunchy jaw muscles, then strode past him and down the stairs. Nudger stood listening to his echoing, receding footfalls on the wooden steps, then heard the vacuumy clatter of the vestibule door opening and closing.
Nudger looked at 4D's closed door, its layered enamel cracked like the door to C. Davis's apartment, then rapped his knuckles on it three times, hard.
He stood stiffly, waiting.
No answer. No sound from the other side of the door. No hint of movement behind the peephole. No one home.
Maybe it was just as well, he thought, looking at his watch. He was sure now that this was Claudia's apartment. Claudia Bettencourt's. He repeated her full name to himself. Say it often enough and it became musical. Like Greta Boechner's, the girl he had loved in high school.
He knocked again on the door, in case she was home and for some reason hadn't heard his first knock.
Still no reply. He backed away from the door and started walking down the narrow hall. He would return this afternoon and try again to see Claudia Bettencourt.
On the way down the stairs, he waved again to the wife of C. Davis, who was standing staunchly outside her door staring. But he didn't take time to stop and chat. He was in a hurry. It was almost eleven-thirty, and he had a noon appointment with a nightline Romeo named Jock at Twin Oaks Mall.
XV
Nudger took up his position near the Twin Oaks Mall fountain and waited. Between twelve and twelve- thirty, he saw four blond men wearing dark slacks and beige sport jackets. All of them could be ruled out for one reason or another as Jenine's murderer, and none of them appeared to be waiting for someone.
It occurred to him that the description Jeanette had given him was exceptionally vague for the basis of a rendezvous of strangers. For the first time, he wondered if Jeanette was playing their game totally within the rules he'd laid down. She was a manipulator, like her mother, and might act out of some devious scheme of her own, or only for the satisfaction of control over other people. Nudger had met other compulsive manipulators. High-level corporate executives, politicians, and tournament chess players usually had that kind of streak in them.
And it ran like a broad, deep current in the Boyington women.
Nudger craned his neck and glanced up and down the mall. Other than a young salesclerk lethargically applying a squeegee to the display window of a shoe store, there wasn't a blond man in sight. Nudger let himself relax.
He found it restful sitting in the cool indoor mall, listening to the gentle splashing of the fountain and watching the shoppers walk past. There was a controlled, protective atmosphere in a large shopping mall. It was a practical place of constant temperature, where rain never fell but where flowers and ornamental trees flourished. Inside every store's wide entrance were people paid to be polite, and almost every facet of suburban life was catered to here. There were several restaurants, a bank branch, drugstores, dime stores, department stores, and specialty stores. Bookstores, hardware stores, and software stores. Card shops, food shops, and antique shoppes. Merchandise for everyone from birth through all the stages of life. Everything but a funeral parlor. Shopping malls wanted no truck with death.
Nudger's pelvis felt as if it were grafted onto the hard concrete bench he was sitting on. It was twelve-forty, and still no blond Jock. Jeanette had been stood up again; Nudger had waited long enough.
He got to his feet and dodged a pert young woman pushing a baby stroller, then joined the stream of shoppers walking toward the escalators. From a shop that seemed to sell only electric organs, an elaborate but repetitive beat was drifting into the vast mall. It sounded like someone playing drums that wheezed, but it was kind of catchy and Nudger noticed that most of the shoppers were unconsciously walking to its relentless jaunty rhythm.
Nudger stopped suddenly. A man walking behind him bumped him, mumbled a ' 'Scuse me' and walked on, giving a little skip to recapture the beat.
Moving over against a display window, so he would no longer be an impediment in the flow of shoppers, Nudger stared across the mall.
There was Hugo Rumbo, standing next to a bullet- shaped trash receptacle, looking at Nudger with his dreamy half-smile and squeezing his rubber ball in perfect rhythm with the wheezing organ music. As Nudger watched, Rumbo slid the ball into his jacket pocket and drew out an orange. He held the orange over the trash container and smiled more broadly at Nudger as he slowly squeezed it, compressing it to juice and pulp that oozed from between his fingers to drop into the container. Then he wiped his fingers with a handkerchief very deliberatively, never looking away from Nudger. Here was an unmistakable message not of good cheer.
Nudger's stomach was tight, but he felt safe in the mall, surrounded by hundreds of people, standing right in front of B. Dalton. He walked across the red synthetic stone floor to where Hugo Rumbo towered motionless.
Rumbo hadn't expected that. His novocaine smile disappeared and he tried to look mean. He only managed ugly, but he managed that very well.
'I could show you how to peel one of those,' Nudger offered.
Rumbo's little eyes darted around like blips on a video game, taking in the throng of shoppers. 'You better watch out I don't peel you,' he grunted.
'Did Agnes Boyington send you to follow me?' Nudger asked. He tried but couldn't imagine being peeled.
'Nobody sent me anyplace. This is a free society. I can go anywhere I want, and if it happens to be where you are, that's just too bad.'
Nudger crossed his arms and looked up at Rumbo. 'How long did it take you to memorize that?'
Rumbo crossed his own leg-sized arms and sneered. 'You're pretty brave here, Nudger, with all these people around us.'
'I'm not pretty brave anywhere,' Nudger said. This conversation was stirring playground memories. 'Tell Agnes she shouldn't have gone to the police and lied about me. And that you following me around isn't going to
