shoulder.
Nudger said nothing as they scaled the four flights of stairs to her apartment. He decided that the dress might be a cocktail-waitress uniform. She was wearing brown sandals that didn't go with the dress but were easy on the feet, and he had a hunch she was carrying highheeled shoes in her purse.
Without looking at him, she unlocked the door, pushed it open, and with a kind of shrug motioned for him to enter.
It was a small apartment, clean but in hectic disorder. Nudger could see into the kitchen. There were dishes, apparently washed and dried, stacked haphazardly on the sink counter. The living room, where he stood, was cluttered with paperback books, magazines, and newspapers. There was a threadbare green recliner in a corner, a sagging sofa, a coffee table marked with interlocking pale rings from damp glasses. On one end of the table sat an old Sylvania black-and-white portable TV, angled so it could be watched from the sofa. A print of water lilies, a Monet, hung on one of the pale-gray walls, and that was the only wall decoration. There were patches of gouged plaster and even a few nails protruding here and there, probably left by previous tenants. At the far end of the room was a closed door, no doubt leading to the bedroom. The telephone must be in the bedroom.
Claudia crossed the bare wood floor and switched on the window air conditioner. It rattled fiercely in protest, then settled into a steady hum and seemed resigned to doing the job.
'The place cools off fast,' she said.
'Good,' Nudger replied. He was still hot. His face felt greasy with perspiration. He wished he knew what to say to Claudia.
'Sit down, please,' she invited.
He did, on the sofa. Its springs gave a metallic gurgle and it threatened to collapse. He watched Claudia. She watched him.
Crossing her arms tightly so that she was clutching her elbows, she said, 'Now what? Gorilla jokes?'
'If you want to hear some.'
'I don't.'
'Downstairs on the sidewalk,' Nudger said, 'how did you know who I was?'
'Coreen phoned me at work and told me you'd been here.'
'C. Davis's wife?'
'There is no C. Davis living downstairs other than Coreen. Single woman's subterfuge. It's necessary in this neighborhood.'
Nudger stood up, paced to the window with his fingertips inserted in his back pockets, then turned to face Claudia. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have tracked you down against your wishes, but I couldn't resist. It's part of my line of work. I'm a private detective.'
'Christ, is there still such a thing?'
'Only the best of us survive at the trade. We're primitives. Like iguanas and cockroaches, only not so ugly.'
'As which?'
'Ah, I detect a healthy nastiness here.'
She smiled. 'Good old Nudger talk. It comforts.'
'I'm glad it does. Genuinely glad.'
'I suspect that genuineness is your talent and weakness. How did you locate me?'
Nudger explained it to her. She seemed not at all impressed by his cleverness.
'Can I get you something to drink?' she asked, as if suddenly not wanting to be remiss as a hostess. But she didn't apologize for the apartment's messiness. 'I think there's beer.'
'Water will do fine,' Nudger said. He didn't like it that she'd immediately thought of him as the beer type. Which he was.
While she walked into the kitchen and he heard tap water running, Nudger glanced at the titles of the reading material scattered around the room. There was fiction, non- fiction, mystery, mainstream, everything.
'You read a lot,' Nudger told her, when she returned and handed him a drinking glass full of water. There were three square ice cubes suspended in it, very clear ones, imprisoning muted reflected images.
'It's escape,' she said. 'I escape as often as I can.'
'From what?'
Instead of answering, she turned, went back into the kitchen, and ran a glass of water for herself. When she returned she said, 'Now what again?'
'When I was here earlier today there was a man knocking on your door. A skinny, annoyed little guy with dark hair. Looked like an ugly young Frank Sinatra. He wanted me to deliver a message to you. He and the kids will be out of town this weekend, so you can't see the kids. Who is he? Who are the kids?' That should give her plenty to chew on, Nudger thought.
Claudia raised her ice water to her lips and sipped, gazing calmly over the glass rim at Nudger, not answering.
'Another painful subject?'
She seemed to deliberate for a moment, then she said, 'The man is Ralph Ferris, my former husband. The kids are Nora and Joan, our daughters.'
And that gave Nudger plenty to chew on. 'How old are Nora and Joan?'
'Twelve and ten.'
Nudger glanced around the apartment; no sign of children. 'Do the girls live with Ralph?'
Something seemed to draw Claudia into herself and cause discomfort. 'Yes.'
'I instinctively disliked Ralph,' Nudger said. 'Was I right?'
'Ralph's okay. The marriage would have worked out, only…'
Obviously she didn't want to finish such a revealing sentence. Not yet, anyway.
'Bettencourt's my maiden name,' she said, changing the subject just enough. All of a sudden she seemed embarrassed. She placed her glass on the coffee table. 'Nudger, I never met anyone else after talking to them on the lines. I mean, I don't use the lines for what you might be thinking.'
'I know why you use them. I'm glad we talked to each other. It's okay.' He was trying to soothe her; she seemed seconds away from an emotional explosion. Nudger glimpsed something dark in her that had a hold on her, a voracious thing that fed on her insides and waited for opportune moments to inflict pain.
She picked up her glass and sipped more cold water. That seemed to calm the thing.
'Have you had dinner?' Nudger asked.
She shook her head no. There was a beaten quality about her that saddened him and evoked pity.
'I know a little bar near here called Zigzag's,' he told her. 'They serve great hamburgers. They have live music after eight o'clock. I hear it's really something.'
She pursed her lips and he thought she was going to refuse him. But she said, 'Let me change out of this dress, okay?'
'Okay,' he said, smiling.
She smiled back, a bit whimsically, and followed her noble nose into the bedroom.
When she returned a few minutes later she was wearing very practical Levi's, the same brown sandals, and a white cotton blouse. The Levi's weren't form-fitting, but she had enough form to look good in them nonetheless.
'You're much prettier than just average,' Nudger told her, as they walked from the apartment. He meant it. She seemed pleased, maybe amused, by the directness of the compliment.
As they descended the stairs, Nudger was becoming more at ease, more confident. Claudia in the flesh was becoming real to him in a way that Claudia on the phone could never be, exerting a pull on him that was sensuous and easy to understand. This was far from the darkness of their phone conversations. This might turn out to be a monumental rendezvous, yet at the same time an ordinary date, something he could comprehend, cope with, and enjoy. Normality.
On the second landing, she turned to him and held up her wrists to the light streaming through the cracked window.
'See the scars?' she said. 'They're from when I tried to kill myself.'
Zigzag's actually did serve hamburgers, Nudger was relieved to discover. He and Claudia sat in a dim booth
