Nightlines

'How come you quit?'

Nudger could sense her shrinking into herself again, as if to envelop a sensitive, vulnerable core that had endured all it could stand. And now he had come along and touched it and brought pain.

'I didn't exactly quit,' she said. 'I was forced out.'

She didn't speak again until they were back in her apartment. She'd left the air conditioner on while they were gone, and the living room was comfortably cool. The wide window, without curtains or blinds and with a few half-dead viny plants in plastic pots suspended from the upper frame, looked out on soot-gray buildings across Spruce Street. The upper floors of the buildings were used mostly for storage, and their windows were blank. Some of the windows had faded remains of business names clinging in peeling letters to the glass. A few of them were boarded over with weathered plywood. The mercury streetlight down the block cast a sickly bluish light over it all, lending some of the grime and pigeon droppings a pale luminosity. Grim, Nudger thought. Grim. It would never make a scene in one of those crystal globes that you shook to make artificial snow fly. How would it be to live here? To look out at those buildings day after day?

Claudia walked to the kitchen door and turned to face him. 'Do you want me to put on a pot of coffee?'

He shook his head. 'Not for me. I've had enough coffee.' He went to the sofa and sat down, listening again to the tired, complaining springs. 'Are you glad I found you, Claudia?'

'I don't know.' She absently fingered one of the scars on her wrists. 'I'm sorry. I don't.' Her fingernail lightly traced the scar down to the heel of her hand.

A cold wave of apprehension passed through Nudger, a mere tremor but powerful, like the shallow, rippling raw energy of a tidal wave in mid-ocean as it made for shore and shape and size and destruction. He stood up from the sofa and walked over to her. 'Maybe I will have some coffee.'

But she didn't move to make the coffee. 'Will you stay here with me tonight, Nudger? Without sex, without any more questions, will you stay with me?'

'You're a beautiful woman who doesn't chew with her mouth open. How can I refuse?'

'I don't care if you wisecrack,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'

'I know, or I wouldn't do it.'

She leaned into him and he put his arms around her, surprised by her thinness and the prominent contours of her ribs. There was about her a faint, clean scent of shampoo and perfume and onions.

'You did say no sex?' he said.

She burrowed her face into his chest and he felt the wet warmth of her tears through his shirt. 'I don't want to be alone tonight,' she told him, with a soft, vibrant desperation.

He hugged her to him and crooned comfortingly to her, as if she were a child awake from bad dreams, gently patting her shoulder. 'You won't be alone tonight,' he assured her again and again. 'You won't be alone. And neither will I.'

In the morning, as Nudger reached the second-floor landing on his way out of the building, Coreen Davis opened her apartment door and stared out at him with unmistakable reproach and warning. You couldn't help but like C. Davis.

XVIII

Nudger stopped by his apartment for a change of clothes, then drove to Danny's for a quick breakfast. Agnes Boyington must have been to his office and seen the sign hung on his door referring business messages to the doughnut shop downstairs.

'You had a visit from a cold-hearted woman with warm hands, Nudge,' Danny said, placing a foam coffee cup and what looked like a hand-molded sugar doughnut on a napkin.

'She strikes everyone that way,' Nudger said. Maybe he had risen a few notches in Agnes Boyington's estimation, if she was dressing up for him the way she did for her lawyer. More likely, his office was a brief stopover for her on the way to things really important.

'She asked me to tell you she'd been here looking for you,' Danny said. 'She wants you to phone her.'

Nudger decided not to do that. Agnes Boyington could phone him. She could dial or punch out a number even with gloves on.

'Anything else?' Nudger asked.

'Naw. You want another doughnut?'

'I think not.'

Nudger said good-bye to Danny and carried his coffee upstairs to the office. He checked his answering machine, expecting a call from Jeanette and possibly an innovative threat from Eileen. Instead he heard a Jehovah's Witness recording urging him to seek salvation. Then came C. Davis's thick, rich voice instructing him to call her. She repeated her phone number twice, slowly, like an announcer selling record albums or wonder cutlery on television. Maybe the supply was limited. Nudger immediately picked up the receiver, rang the number, and identified himself.

C. Davis wasn't one for preparatory small talk.

She said, 'You know a giant honkie squeezes a ball?'

'What color ball?'

'Red,' she said seriously.

'I know him, but we're not friends.'

'Well, he was around here right after you left this morning. Stood outside looking over the building, then came in and was eyeballing the mailboxes.'

'Then what?'

'I asked him what he was doing and he didn't have no good answer. So I told him he had no business here and to get his ass out and away.'

'What did he say to that?'

'He didn't say nothing. He left.'

Nudger wasn't surprised. C. Davis would seem formidable to a small country's army. 'He's keeping track of my movements, Coreen, that's all. I'm sure he won't harm Claudia, but not so sure that I'm not asking you to keep an eye on things if he shows up again.'

'You don't have to ask, Nudger. Claudia's a beat-down fine lady, and a friend. I ain't gonna let anything happen to her. Not 'cause of you, neither. She told me before about how you talked to her on the phone. I know about you and how she feels about you. And I'm asking: You a one-nighter, or are you something more?'

'Something more,' Nudger said.

'Then I think you better go talk to Laura Cather. You got a pencil?'

'With lead in it.' Nudger jotted down the phone number she read off to him. She repeated it with the same slowness and careful enunciation he'd heard on the recorder. 'Who's Laura Cather?' he asked.

'You the detective, Nudger. You puzzle it out.' She hung up.

Nudger depressed the cradle button and pecked out the number C. Davis had given him.

After three rings, a sleepy-sounding woman answered. She said she was Laura Cather, and she didn't seem surprised when he told her who he was and that he wanted to talk with her about Claudia Bettencourt. C. Davis, mother- hen menace, must have paved the way for him.

He made an appointment with Laura Cather for later that morning at her apartment on Wyoming, on the city's south side. Then he sat back in his squeaking swivel chair, played out a faint but shrill rhythm by gently rocking back and forth, and thought about Hugo Rumbo watching him and Claudia. Nudger didn't like it, not at all. But he was sure that Rumbo's job was to watch him, and when ordered, apply direct pressure to intimidate. Rumbo really wasn't dangerous except in a shallow, ineffectual way. Partly because he was who he was, partly because he was an extension of Agnes Boyington, who was wont to maim souls and not mere bodies. It wouldn't be her style to have Rumbo harm Claudia to scare Nudger. Not only would that be too risky after what she'd told the police, but the weapons she'd chosen in the duel of life were more subtle and infinitely more dangerous. Still, Nudger didn't want Rumbo to frighten Claudia. Neither did C. Davis. It was good that she had called. It was reassuring that she was watching out for Claudia.