The phone didn't give up as he closed the door behind him and walked slowly toward the persistent ringing. Few things are more irresistible than a ringing phone. Usually Nudger would have done just as well not picking up the receiver. He knew that. On the other hand, it was always possible that he'd bought a lottery ticket and forgotten. Monetary magic might strike at any time. Might. With misgivings, he lifted the receiver and held it to his ear.
'Mr. Nudger?' Jeanette Boyington said.
Nudger grunted in tired confirmation.
'You took long enough getting to the phone.'
'I was outside rotating my tires.'
She ignored him, following her own script. 'I have another appointment, for eight o'clock tonight at the Twin Oaks Mall fountain. This one calls himself Kelly. He says he's about six feet tall-but most of them say that-and he'll be wearing gray slacks and a black sport shirt with white buttons.'
'Kelly at eight,' Nudger said. 'Gray, black, and white.' He knew he was speaking with a kind of sad weariness, like a man who had just that day met a butchered woman.
'Make sure you phone me tonight if this works out,' Jeanette said.
'Are you getting impatient?'
'No, I'm getting more patient with each meeting that doesn't mean anything. They only eliminate suspects and improve the odds on encountering Jenine's murderer.'
'That's true only if our premise is correct,' Nudger told her, thinking she should have been a cop. 'If her killer did meet Jenine on the nightlines.'
'That's how he selects his victims,' Jeanette said. 'I'm sure of it. That's why he hasn't been caught, because there's no connection between him and his victims other than a late-night telephone connection.'
Nudger agreed with her, remembering the 666 number found in Susan Merriweather's flat, but he kept silent. Hammersmith might not want that information told about town.
'That Valpone woman,' Jeanette said, 'the one who was found murdered in her bathtub on the south side. I think she was one of his victims.'
'It's possible,' Nudger said, 'but so far there's nothing to link the two murders.' Jeanette would soon hear the news of Susan Merriweather's death, if she hadn't already. 'There's been another bathtub murder,' he said. 'I've just come from the scene. This one has caused the police to come around to your way of thinking, but it hasn't made my job any easier.'
'Tell me about it.'
Nudger did, giving her a fair share of the details.
Her voice was tight and cold, as if mechanically forced between her teeth. 'I don't want the police to find Jenine's killer before we do. I want to be instrumental in his capture, and I want him to know it.'
'It might work out that way,' Nudger said. 'But either way he'll be caught soon. He's gone completely insane, out of control, killing more often and maybe not even caring now if he gets caught. Maybe he hopes he'll get caught. The question is: How many more women will die before that happens?'
'Maybe not one more, if Kelly is our man.'
'Your mother left a message for me to phone her,' Nudger said. 'Do you have any idea what she wants?'
'It doesn't matter what she wants,' Jeanette said. 'You work for me, and don't forget it.'
'Apparently Agnes can't forget it. She keeps sending a leviathan named Hugo Rumbo around to try to dissuade me.'
'Why would she do that?' There was a tremor, maybe of anger, in Jeanette's voice.
'I'm not sure. You should ask her.'
'Rumbo is an idiot who has to reason out putting one foot in front of the other to walk somewhere. Someone in your profession should be able to handle him.'
'Should,' Nudger agreed.
'Don't forget to phone me about Kelly,' Jeanette said, and hung up.
Nudger replaced the receiver and stood in the quietude of his apartment, where everything was exactly the way he'd left it this morning. No one to misplace things or greet him. The refrigerator hummed a belated hello to him, that was all. A bachelor's life sure was a solitary journey. He walked into the kitchen, smiled at the refrigerator, opened its door, and reached in for one of the generic beers he'd bought on sale.
He sat at the kitchen table, sipping beer and waiting for it to be time to leave for his appointment with Kelly. There was a lot of time between now and then. It would take a lot of beer to get through it. More beer than Nudger cared to drink. Carrying his plain yellow can into the living room, he got out the phone directory and looked up Ralph Ferris.
Ferris lived on Nightingale Drive in Ferguson. Not far from Nudger in driving time, just a swift jaunt north on the Inner Belt highway. Ferris, who had gotten the house and children in the divorce. Ferris, who knew more about Claudia than Nudger did.
Nudger looked at the clock by the phone. He could skip supper, or stop for fast food if he regained faith in his digestive system. He gulped down the rest of his beer. There. That would fend off hunger.
He checked his wallet to make sure he was carrying enough cash to see him through minor emergencies, called in to the refrigerator that he was leaving, and went out the door.
A few minutes later he was in the Volkswagen, his bumpy course set for Nightingale Drive, his ear tuned to Jumbo Al Hirt's trumpet on the radio. Golden notes; a golden, temporary sanctuary from trouble and fear. From loneliness. Nudger turned up the volume. Blow, Jumbo, blow.
XXI
Nightingale Drive was a flat subdivision street of frame houses that had been built by the same contractor at the same time, about ten years ago, and were all one of three models with little variation. Ferris's address belonged to the largest model, a long ranch house with a picture window, an oversized chimney, and an attached two-car garage. Nudger bet himself that it was called the Executive Model.
He wasn't really sure why he'd driven here. Maybe he simply wanted to see the house where Claudia had lived with Ralph Ferris and their daughters, where one of those daughters had died. It was an ordinary house that might have been the setting for a TV family situation comedy, a house you wouldn't suspect could harbor such problems and potential hells. Here was where a young family should be worrying about paying the mortgage, or whether they could afford to send one of the kids to a private school and get dental braces for the others. Child abuse, death, probably didn't occur very often on Nightingale Drive. Or did they? Walls were walls, regardless of their contemporary middle- America facade. And people were people, and inside those walls they would behave like people, despite the visions of themselves instilled by current movies, sitcoms, and television commercials.
Nudger sat in the parked Volkswagen a few houses down and across the street from the Ferris house and tried to imagine Claudia living there. He couldn't. She did not belong in this stifling suburban sameness. Maybe that had exacerbated her problem.
Several young boys were playing in a front yard half a block down, crouching behind cars or shrubbery, dashing from cover to cover in some sort of game where they were trying to sneak up and surprise each other. Nudger looked around at the other houses on Nightingale, wondering what games were being played behind their walls this evening, between the boys' parents and the people like them.
He found out part of the answer.
'Can I help you with something?' Ralph Ferris was standing on the curbside of the Volkswagen, leaning down and staring in at Nudger. 'A neighbor phoned and told me there was someone watching my house.'
Nudger got out of the car, his mind whirling, plucking at understanding. Ferris had gone out his back door, then around the block, to approach the car from behind. Sly Ralph. As sneaky as he looked. Nudger saw the subtle lift of the man's bony features as Ferris recognized him.
'Hey, you're Claudia's boyfriend!' he said.
Nudger gave him a smile and slight shake of the head. 'No, Mr. Ferris. My name is Nudger. I hope you'll forgive me for describing myself as a friend of your former wife. Actually, I've never met her. I'm doing some
