'To be honest, Nudger, I don't care about your assessment of me as a mother, except insomuch as it affects this matter. I love Jeanette dearly, more dearly than you can know.' The expression of deep pain again, as if she were finally leveling with him and paying the price.
'What about Jenine?' Nudger asked. 'Did you love her?'
'No.' She smiled faintly at Nudger, from an icy distance. 'I told you I was being honest. I knew Jenine, the way she lived, the things she did. She generated grief; all her life she was a burden and a stigma.'
'Maybe you made her that way.'
'No one made her that way. It was her inability to control her animalistic instincts that made Jenine what she was, that eventually led to her death. She was a sinner in the eyes of God and man.'
'Her libido might have been much like yours,' Nudger said, 'only channeled in a different direction, a direction that harmed no one but herself.'
'I'm not here to talk sophomoric psychology. I'm here to talk mathematics, coin of the realm.'
Nudger placed both hands lightly, palms down, on the desk. From God to U.S. currency in less than a minute. It was dizzying. 'I'm sorry, Agnes, but there are too many unknowns in the equation. I won't accept your offer.'
Agnes Boyington stayed sitting very still in the chair before Nudger's desk. Then, with a subdued, steely vibrancy, she began to tremble. She was even paler than usual as she stared at Nudger, for an instant with pleading in her eyes, then with hate.
'You don't understand Jeanette as well as her own mother can,' she said.
'I'm sure you're right.'
'There's a great deal about this matter that you don't know.'
'I'm a willing student. No one seems willing to teach me.'
She stood up, tucked her purse beneath her arm, and glared down at Nudger. She'd stopped the faint trembling and had regained what appeared to be total control of herself. Nudger had to admit he was impressed by her as she stood over him in pale wrath like a well-preserved ice-queen and dropped cold, clipped words on him.
'I tried, Nudger, but you refused to listen, to be realistic. You've made a tragic course of events irreversible. If you forget everything else, remember that. What occurs from this point on might have been avoided if you had shelved your shabby idealism and done what was right for everyone concerned. Whatever happens now is on your head.'
'Come off it, Agnes. I didn't open a tomb, I turned down a bribe.'
She backed away a few steps, toward the door, and observed him as if suddenly he were miles away. She wouldn't attempt to buy him off anymore; he was sure of that. True to her word, she had made her final offer. She'd now accept what she couldn't understand. Money had talked, shabby idealism hadn't listened. That puzzled her, but in this instance that had been the undeniable outcome of her attempt to buy what she wanted. Life unaccountably worked that way sometimes. Mysterious circles.
'You'll be responsible,' she said softly, as if to someone in the office other than the two of them. 'As heaven is my witness!'
'Agnes, why don't you talk to Jeanette? Be honest with her?'
She disdainfully dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the bare office floor and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. Without looking at Nudger, she opened the door and went out, leaving it open behind her. If he wouldn't talk sense, her brand of sense, then she wouldn't talk to him at all. So there. He heard her measured footfalls as she descended the stairs. The draft from the street door opening and closing rolled low across the office, stirring the ashes on the floor. He didn't like the look of those ashes, but then ashes seldom inspired.
Nudger was more worried than he had been, but he wasn't sure why. Possibly it was Agnes Boyington's mention of an irreversible tragic course of events. It seemed that she had turned a corner in her mind, and he had no way of knowing what street she was on or where she was going.
He shook his head as if to free himself from the after- scent of her tobacco smoke and disinfectant-like perfume, then stood up from behind the desk. He knew what street he should be on: Hartford Avenue.
After tossing the morning mail into the wastebasket and locking the office, he went downstairs and crossed Manchester to where his car was parked. The morning had been one of disturbing ambiguity. He longed for a problem he could grapple with and solve.
Trying not to think about Agnes Boyington and her ten thousand dollars, he drove toward the conservative, orderly neighborhood, the narrow, straight street, the neat little brick house of Luther Kell.
XXVII
Nudger parked by a phone booth a few blocks from Kell's house. He left the Volkswagen's motor running as he entered the booth, fed in his twenty cents and dialed Kell's number. If Kell answered, Nudger was ready to see how he was fixed for magazine subscriptions.
Kell's phone rang ten times while Nudger leaned against the phone inside the hot metal booth and watched the traffic on Kingshighway. After the tenth ring, he left the receiver dangling out of sight, yanked closed the booth's folding doors behind him as he stepped outside, and drove to Kell's house.
He parked three houses down, slipped into his sport jacket, and tried to look like a pollster or Jehova's Witness as he walked with a sureness not felt toward the curlicued wrought-iron railing marking Kell's front steps. The antacid tablet he was chewing was dissolved except for its chalky residue on his tongue. His stomach moved and demanded another, which he promptly popped into his mouth as he unhesitatingly gripped the black railing and climbed the steps to Kell's front porch.
Even before he rang the doorbell, he could hear the telephone still jangling unanswered inside the house. He felt better now. He was sure Kell wasn't home. All he had to worry about was being unexpectedly interrupted. Or one of the neighbors seeing him as a suspicious character and phoning the police.
Nudger's Visa card with its carefully honed edge was ready in his shirt pocket. He nonchalantly withdrew it and fitted it between door and frame. The plastic made contact with the lock bolt, but met firm resistance. It took him only a few seconds to realize that the door was equipped with a dead bolt that wouldn't budge.
He backed away as if puzzled that no one had answered his ring, then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, as if innocently trying to decide what to do next. In feigned sudden resolve, he left the porch and walked along the side of the house to the backyard. It was all done with such accomplished acting that he almost hoped a neighbor was watching. John Wilkes Sleuth.
There was a chain-link fence around the yard, with a bulky padlock on the gate. Nudger saw no sign of a dog. He vaulted the fence and crossed to the back door. There was a screen door, which was locked. It took only half a minute and a minimum of trouble to slip that lock, but the main back door was like the front, equipped with a dead bolt and without windows.
Nudger knew he wasn't going to get inside without noise and dangerous long minutes, and in this neighborhood, where many residents were crime-conscious if not outright paranoid, he could afford little of either. He leaned to the side on the back porch and peeked through a window, through the narrow space between the frame and the drawn shade. If he could see inside the house, he might at least gain some impression of the man who lived there.
All he saw was a small, neat kitchen with a glossy green linoleum floor. A few of the furnishings were visible: a bare Formica table with metal legs, a high wooden stool, a smooth corner of a white refrigerator. The opposite window had a drawn shade, no curtains. He could hear the unanswered phone ringing more clearly here, reassuring him that Kell hadn't entered through the front door. But maybe Kell habitually came and went the back way.
Nudger's stomach growled something that sounded like 'Get out!' He sensed that it was time to comply. Maybe past time.
A sudden breeze passed like a hot breath through the yard, rustling the leaves of the shrubbery by the fence as if there were something moving among them. Nudger hurried down off the porch.
He walked back toward the street the way he'd approached the house, with seeming casualness, noting that all of Kell's shades were lowered and that there were iron bars over the basement windows.
