'If you followed the right bus.'
'If…'
'Well, it sounds like a reasonable plan,' Claudia said, carrying the two heaping plates to the table in the small dining area. 'Get yourself another beer.'
'What about the wine I brought?'
'I forgot about that. I'll get some wineglasses.'
She produced two stemmed glasses, one with a chipped rim. Nudger got the Gallo Brothers burgundy, of a vintage not yet ripped from calendars, out of the refrigerator, uncapped it, and poured. He gave Claudia the good glass.
The meal was delicious. Claudia had fried the steaks to exactly the point where they were done but hadn't lost much of their juice, and she had somehow seasoned the corn in the pot so that it didn't require salt or butter. She was in the wrong job at Kimball's.
Nudger raised his glass in a salute. 'You're a world-class cook,' he told her, meaning it. World-class. State of the art.
She seemed embarrassed. She actually smiled shyly and ducked her head, not knowing how to reply. 'I use all cast- iron cookware,' she said seriously. 'It makes a difference.' And so it must.
They decided to postpone dessert, then Nudger helped her to clear the table. She told him they'd wash the dishes later, after they'd had cheesecake and coffee. He didn't argue. She might think he was sexist.
'What do you want to do now?' she asked. 'Watch television?'
'Too many commercials,' Nudger said. 'Watching television these days is like an evening with an aluminum- siding salesman.'
'What, then?'
'I want to do this,' Nudger said, and held her to him and kissed her mouth. He felt her arms jerk to life, coil around him, and her warm body levered forward and upward against his. He couldn't help feeling slightly surprised. It was as easy as in the movies.
She didn't want to pull away, but when she finally did, she looked up at him with dark crescent eyes and said, 'I was hungrier for that than for steak. I'm not disappointed.'
They were both in the movies. It was grand! 'It has nothing to do with iron cookware,' Nudger told her. Cary Grant.
She stared at him for a while, then nodded and smiled slightly. He knew that she saw the part of him that was detached from her and everyone else and would accept it. He could see the sweet sadness just below her surface. And her desperation, quieted at last, but patiently waiting. She led him into her bedroom.
The window was open, curtains swaying. Nudger could see the bright haze from the lights of the stadium, beyond the silhouettes of the buildings down the street. He heard the mass murmur of the night-game crowd.
As Claudia was methodically undressing, she saw the question in Nudger and said, 'I had a tubal ligation. I can have no more children. Safe. Forever.'
She made love violently and searchingly. There was a delicate sadness even in her letting go.
What they were doing must have been right. Thousands cheered.
By the time they were finished and lay quietly beside each other, the warm room held the musky scent of their perspiring bodies. A night moth found its way through the window, brushed softly against Nudger's bare leg, and then fluttered away. For an instant Nudger was with Eileen. For an instant.
'You were cautious with me,' Claudia said.
'Yes.'
'You don't have to be.'
He laced his fingers behind his head, resting back on his pillow and listening to the faint sounds of the old building's concessions to time, the muted swish of traffic below on Spruce Street, the occasional stirring of the ballpark crowd.
'I've been doing some more detective work of a personal nature,' he said.
'Oh?'
'I talked with several people who know you, your friends. Including Dr. Oliver.'
She lay silently for a long time. When she answered, her voice held a flat tone of disbelief. 'And you're still here with me?'
'I believe in you.'
'You don't have any reason to believe in me.'
'The best things in life are unreasonable.'
She was reasonable enough not to argue.
'I want you to have faith in your future,' he told her. 'Hope.'
She laughed her resigned, throaty laugh. 'I can't keep hoping, and you can't stop hoping. Yours is a bigger problem than mine.'
'When are you going to see your daughters next?' he asked. He felt the slight shift of the mattress as her body tensed.
'Next weekend. Remember? They're out of town this weekend.'
'Let me go get them for you, bring them here or wherever you want to meet them. We'll make a day of it-the Arch, the Zoo, whatever you and they like.'
'Ralph might not give them to you.'
'I already told him I was your boyfriend. Must have been a premonition. Ralph and I have talked, so it's not as if we're strangers. You can phone him and let him know I'm driving by for the girls. Or you can go with me and sit in the car where he can see you.'
'But you don't want me to see Ralph.'
'Why should you?'
She didn't have an answer for that. Or not one she liked. She lay quietly beside Nudger, breathing regularly and deeply, almost as if she were asleep. He knew she was awake.
'All right,' she said at last. He felt the light touch of her fingertips on his arm, tracing a feathery path from elbow to wrist.
'What about dessert?' he said.
XXIV
Early the next morning, Nudger began driving around the neighborhood of Kingshighway between Tholozan and Magnolia, when people were clustered at the bus stops on Kingshighway on their way to work. He stayed on Kingshighway for over an hour, bouncing along in the overheated Volkswagen, watching the number of people at the stops decrease, not seeing the ominous blond Kelly.
At eight-thirty he turned onto Magnolia and began cruising side streets lined with similar brick homes and apartment buildings, gradually working his way north to Tholozan. He noticed that the tires had begun humming on the rough pavement. The day was heating up, softening rubber and resolve. Summer in St. Louis. Wouldn't it be nice if the Volkswagen were air-conditioned?
The feeling that he was squandering his time crept into Nudger and spread debilitating tentacles. He had cause for discouragement. Not only might he be wrong about where Kelly had gotten off the bus, but Kelly might not even be the man he sought. 'Murderer' wasn't a label to be pasted on lightly; if it didn't stick, there was trouble all around. Nudger had considered telling Hammersmith about Kelly, but there really wasn't much to tell. A vague match-up of descriptions wouldn't excite the police, and Hammersmith was no longer in charge of the investigation anyway. Captain Massey of the Major Case Squad was now running the operation, a meticulous officer competent at police work but overly concerned with PR and politics. Nudger knew Massey wouldn't take the information about Kelly seriously. And if by chance he did, he'd inundate the Kingshighway area, where Nudger was searching, with enough blue uniforms and news-media people to force Kelly, all traffic offenders with unpaid tickets, and all owners of unlicensed pets to flee the neighborhood and go into deep cover. Some things were better left unsaid.
Nudger drove around the neighborhood until noon, then dug deep in his pocket, gassed up the Volkswagen,
