reached it distorted years later. People in this city could kid themselves, sometimes, about which century they were in. Nudger and the city were not unlike each other. They were usually short of funds. They had problems. Somehow they lurched ahead, maybe toward better times.
Nudger had a key to Claudia's apartment. He decided to go there and wait for her, put his feet up on the coffee table, drink a few cold Budweisers, and listen to FM music on the radio. When Claudia arrived, he might brag a bit.
XXV
It's for you,' Claudia said again.
Nudger awoke slowly and opened his eyes to see her sitting up in bed, carefully extending the phone's white receiver toward him with both hands, as if it were alive and fragile. Her dark hair was mussed in a way he liked, but her eyes bothered him. They seemed to be puffy from more than simply too much sleep.
Accepting the receiver, he pushed himself up to brace his shoulders against the headboard. Beside him, the sheets rustled as Claudia settled back down. The room was quiet, the air heavy, hazed by the morning sunlight knifing dustily between the blinds. Nudger pressed the cool receiver to his ear, managed to separate his dry lips, croaked a hello. Could that have been his voice?
'Are you awake enough to hear about Luther Kell?' Hammersmith asked.
'Sure, it's already almost seven o'clock.' 'Folks like us have to rise before dawn to get a jump on evil,' Hammersmith said. 'Early birds of the law, foraging for the worm of crime.'
'Luther Kell,' Nudger reminded him.
'Oh, him. Mr. Anonymous. Male Caucasian, thirty-three, unmarried, no police record, no military service.'
'Prints on file?'
'No. But then they wouldn't be, without the police, military, or Civil Service in his past.'
Nudger felt weighted by disappointment. He'd hoped that Kell would have a police record with convictions hinting at or leading up to murder. He'd hoped Kell's prints would somehow match the smudged ones found in Jenine Boyington's apartment. These were the kinds of hopes that were bound to be dashed, but which Nudger seemed unable to cease embracing.
Hammersmith said, around a morning cigar, 'Kell sheems sholid and waw-abiding.' He puffed and wheezed repeatedly until the coarse tobacco was burning fiercely enough to trust not to go out in his desk ashtray. 'Sorry, Nudge, the guy is a white-hat type.'
'Not necessarily.'
'Nothing is.'
'Has the Major Case Squad come up with anything?'
Hammersmith chuckled. 'Massey's as busy trying to placate the mayor and news media as he is trying to conjure up a reasonable suspect. Besides issuing not untrue statements and doing routine legwork, very little can be accomplished at this point. The idea is to quiet the clamor while gaining time for the machinery of the law to grind slowly and exceedingly fine.'
'Makes sense,' Nudger said.
'More sense than you're gonna like. Before we grind, we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. You're chaff, Nudge.'
'There's not a grain of truth in that.'
'Truth enough,' Hammersmith said, puffing on his cigar. He exhaled loudly, maybe in an exasperated sigh. 'Springer and Massey had a long talk about you. Springer thinks you should bow out of the case. Massey agrees. I wasn't consulted. That's a bureaucracy for you, Nudge.'
'That's Springer for you.'
'Yeah, he's a brass-knuckle political infighter, cutting down on the number of people who might get credit in the game he's playing. But why should you care; you're only trying to make a living.' Hammersmith's tone left no doubt about what he thought of Leo Springer as a cop. 'The thing is you've got no choice, Nudge. Bow out.'
'I will,' Nudger said, 'as soon as I'm officially instructed.'
'Fair enough. Springer's sent a couple of blue uniforms to your apartment and office to bring you in for a chat with him. A judicious use of manpower.'
'Isn't it, though,' Nudger said in disgust. 'And just when I didn't want to be reined in.'
'Sorry about this, Nudge. Life's a Popsicle with a sharp stick.'
'And melting fast. I'll stay scarce. Thanks, Jack.'
'For what?'
Hammersmith hung up abruptly. As far as he was concerned, the conversation hadn't occurred. He had a sane cop's knack of blanking out pieces of time. That's how a sane cop stayed sane.
Nudger handed the receiver to Claudia, who untangled the cord from around her arm and reached to the night- stand. Plastic clattered on plastic as she hung up the phone.
'Business call?' she asked, turning onto her side to face Nudger.
'The police are going to tell me to back away.'
'What about Kell?'
'He doesn't have an arrest record. A solid citizen without blemish.'
'Does that eliminate him as a suspect?'
'Not in my mind,' Nudger said. 'I saw the expression on his face while he was waiting for Jeanette Boyington in the mall. It was something more than lascivious, something more subtle and harder to read, but spooky.'
'Maybe he was thinking of a lesser crime, like rape.'
'Or maybe he was hungry and thinking about onion soup.'
'That isn't spooky.'
'You can say that, not being an onion.'
'What are you going to do now?'
'Take you out for breakfast. Want to shower together?'
'Yes to breakfast, no to mutual shower.'
She rotated on the mattress and stood up, her body a golden glimpse as she crossed a bright swirl of sunlight and left the room. A faucet handle squeaked, a water pipe rattled, and the shower began to hiss. Nudger patiently waited his turn.
From where Claudia lived, it was only a short drive to the riverfront. Nudger detoured through the brick-paved streets of Laclede's Landing and bought a morning Globe, then drove down a steep grade to the riverfront McDonald's.
He and Claudia sat at a deck table on the converted barge and watched the Mississippi roll by as they worried their Egg McMuffins. Nudger studied the newspaper for a few minutes. Hammersmith was right about the media's applying pressure. The suddenly discovered series of murders dominated the front page. Wily Captain Massey was quoted at length, saying absolutely nothing concrete yet somehow giving the impression that strides were being taken along the road to ultimate justice. A police artist had even whipped up a composite drawing of a suspect based on Grace Valpone's neighbors' description of a man they thought might have visited her occasionally. The drawing vaguely resembled Leo Springer, Nudger thought, and didn't look at all like Luther Kell. Not that it mattered. This suspect, if he even existed outside of police wishful thinking, would probably turn out to be a deliveryman or an insurance adjuster. Or possibly Grace Valpone had had a fiance and a male friend who hadn't killed her. Some women did.
Setting the folded paper aside, Nudger looked up to see that Claudia hadn't eaten any of her breakfast and was gazing at the dark, half-submerged humanesque forms of driftwood carried on the muddy current. She seemed to be staring into her own depths as well as those of the river.
'Is it that hypnotic?' Nudger asked.
Her body jerked and she looked up at him, interrupted from whatever she'd been thinking, wherever she had been. 'I suppose it is,' she said, turning back to the wide, sliding river. 'Always on its way somewhere, doomed never to get there, like me.'
