Nightlines

along. She was also going to kill me, as a bonus.'

Agnes pursed her lips and tilted her head sideways, as if thinking over what Nudger had said, not liking it, but not disliking it all.

'I figured out some things,' Nudger told her, watching her closely. He could hear the locusts screaming away their lives outside.

'That's your job, figuring out,' Agnes Boyington said.

'Would you like to hear how well I've done my job?' Without waiting for an answer, he continued. 'When Jeanette was out of her head with rage, about to squeeze the trigger, she said something about killing all the men she could. '… Before they kill me again,' she said.'

'Not surprising, if she was as hysterical as you describe.'

'No, but it caused me to recall some things about her, like her familiarity with her dead sister's apartment the day she and I went there to search it. And the expensive but uncharacteristic piece of blown-glass erotica on the curio shelf in her apartment.'

'Erotica?'

'Then, when I was about to leave her apartment last night, I happened to see a nightline number scratched on the base of her phone, the number Jenine had used, scratched on the bottom of her phone in exactly the same manner.'

'Nightline number?' Agnes's voice was up an octave, oddly plaintive. Something in her was bending, and must break.

'Such a lot of questions,' Nudger said. 'You know what I'm talking about. Obviously, I was meant to find that number in Jenine's apartment when Jeanette took me there to search. The police hadn't found it because it had been scratched on the base of Jenine's phone after they searched the apartment.'

The squareness of Agnes Boyington's deceptively youthful carriage melted. Her shoulders were slumped, narrow, and bunched. Her right hand flexed spasmodically and knotted into a fist around her thumb.

'How did you get the idea?' Nudger asked. 'How did it happen?'

She sat down on the uncompromising sofa across from Nudger, a middle-aged widow by lamplight. To see her age that way, almost with the rapidity of movie magic, depressed Nudger.

Her voice was a defeated monotone now, lacking entirely the cold fire and authority of only five minutes ago. 'Two months ago Jenine made an appointment on the nightlines with a man-Luther Kell, as I've learned today. Kell was alone with her in her apartment, but someone interrupted them. They made another date; Jenine gave Kell a key and he was to let himself in and wait for her to arrive home the next evening. But Jeanette dropped by unexpectedly to visit her sister. Kell arrived, assumed she was Jenine, and murdered her.' Agnes drew a deep breath and thrust out her chin. 'My slain daughter is Jeanette.'

Nudger felt a melancholy satisfaction. He had figured things right, but it was as if he'd lost something in the process. Kernel of wisdom, kernel of sadness. He was familiar with the sensation.

'Jeanette was dead,' Agnes continued. 'Nothing could alter that. But why couldn't tragedy also be opportunity? Jeanette's death was a chance for Jenine to shake free of her sinful past. The twins had done everything together, gone to the same schools, acquired the same meager skills, so it was simple for Jenine to slip into Jeanette's itinerant part-time office work; and Jeanette hadn't lived long in her apartment, so it was easy for Jenine to begin living there as Jeanette without attracting suspicion.' She dropped her gaze and frowned in annoyance. 'If only she'd listened to her mother! I figured out everything for her, every minuscule detail! If only she'd listened!'

'Jenine wanted something more,' Nudger said, 'something you might not understand. She loved her twin sister, felt as one flesh with her. She identified with Jeanette to a greater extent than either of you had planned. The masquerade was complete; a part of her became her murdered twin, breathing and walking around. She wanted revenge.'

'Yes,' Agnes said, 'revenge.' She stared at the white carpet. 'But that posed problems. The double of the victim is handicapped in searching for the killer. And any radical change in Jenine's appearance would have caused the neighbors-Jeanette's neighbors-to look closely at her, requiring explanations and making her impersonation of Jeanette more difficult. Jenine realized this. She realized she had to hire someone like you.'

'Someone to be her bird dog,' Nudger said, 'to track down and point out her twin's killer without arousing his suspicion. When I told her about following and losing Kell the day she was to meet him, she decided it was time to act on her own. She talked to him again on the nightlines, without my knowledge, and made another appointment. She didn't anticipate me following Kell to where she was to meet him in her disguise, meet him wearing a dark wig and makeup to obscure her resemblance to her dead twin.'

Agnes said nothing, still staring at the spotless white field of carpet.

The identity switch would have worked, Nudger realized, except for the power of Jenine's obsession to avenge Jeanette's death, for which she must have felt responsible. And it would have worked if Agnes Boyington had been able to buy or scare him off the case and prevent him from running Kell to ground.

And there was more. Something was bothering him, something darkly laughing and obscene.

'How much did you know,' Nudger asked, 'about what Jenine had planned for tonight?'

Agnes raised her head high and her eyes glinted in the lamplight with their old brittle disdain. If she was in league with the devil, the devil had better watch out. 'Everything!' she snapped.

Nudger felt his breath leave him, his stomach contract. It was true, then. He hadn't really expected this, even from Agnes Boyington.

'You!' she said accusingly. 'When you wouldn't be reasonable and drop the case, I had no choice but to change tactics. So you might well blame yourself for what's happened!'

For an instant Nudger felt a rush of guilt, almost buying her twisted perspective. Then, 'No,' he said. And unbelievingly, 'How could you let your own daughter sink into this?'

'Jenine didn't take advantage of her opportunity after Jeanette's death, Nudger. The opportunity I gave her. She fell into her old sinful ways, began seeing men, virtual strangers. Doing… things with them! I know; I had Hugo Rumbo follow her, report to me. Everything.'

'And you had Rumbo follow me. When he stopped me at the mall today, he was really trying to prevent me from following Jenine and Kell.'

'Of course he was!' Agnes Boyington said, as if Nudger were a slow study and she was becoming impatient. 'And on my orders. I knew where Jenine and Kell were going, and what she was going to do-or he was. It was the kind of life Jenine lived that killed Jeanette. I gave Jenine a chance to straighten out her life, to recapture purity-'

'To become Jeanette,' Nudger interrupted. 'For you.'

'Yes! Of course! And when she turned her back on decency and respectability, what choice had I left? She visited death upon her own sister with her sin and negligence. And when she failed her test with God, I planned on letting her live only long enough to avenge Jeanette's murder!'

'You really do believe in God,' Nudger said incredulously. But he knew he shouldn't be incredulous. The damnedest people quoted the Bible. And, if it suited them, the Constitution and Rod McKuen.

'Of course I believe in Him. Don't you?'

'I don't think so,' Nudger said. 'I'm not sure I want to.'

He understood now. Understood more than Agnes would approve. Agnes had used Jenine as Jenine had used Nudger, to find Jeanette's killer, the man who had dared to violate Agnes by invading her ordered world and murdering her pure daughter. She intended to let the soiled-beyond- redemption Jenine perhaps meet the same fate as her twin, before she herself would enter the apartment and exercise her own righteous revenge on Kell. Or on Jenine. Whoever was the survivor. It was the puritanical Agnes who had prepared the bathroom for butchery. She was the woman in the hat who'd confused Hammersmith's man watching for Jeanette. Probably she'd left the building when he was phoning Hammersmith. She had been waiting outside the apartment, but she hadn't entered when she'd seen Nudger, then the police, arrive.

There were depths to Agnes Boyington, and depths and depths. If she was capable of planning the murder and dismemberment of her own daughter… Nudger didn't move. Suspicion drifted into his mind through doors suddenly sprung open; awareness bloomed from memory: the momentary whiff of the mingled, distinctive scents of cigarette tobacco and perfume that clung to a room long after Agnes had left it, the way death clung. The killer who wore gloves; the murder that never quite fit. How likely is it that a woman engaged to be married?…He didn't want