Donuts sign directly below. He wished the shop were open with doleful Danny down there behind the counter, grayish towel tucked in his belt, packing his greasy merchandise in fold-up cardboard boxes for carry-out orders for the workers in the surrounding shops and office buildings. It would be nice to talk with someone face-to-face. To read expressions.
Instead, Nudger set the empty cup on the windowsill and returned to his desk and the telephone.
He made several more contacts, had more lengthy conversations, before sitting back and considering it a night's work. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was almost 5 A.M. Nudger had wanted to acquire a feel for what went over the lines and he'd gotten it. It had sobered him.
He stretched his arms and back, exhaling loudly. Then he made one more phone call, to the Third District, and left a message for Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith, who didn't come on duty until seven o'clock. When he had hung up, he reset his alarm and lay down again on the sagging cot, this time unable to sleep.
Around him the city gradually awakened, and the nighttime lines were claimed by the daylight hours and became once more the province of telephone company employees conducting routine business.
But a piece of the night had claimed Nudger, with its accompanying very real but indecipherable apprehensions. Like a child, he was afraid of the dark. And he was trapped in it.
IV
Hammersmith sat behind his desk in his Third District office and gazed at Nudger through a greenish haze of smoke emitted by one of his incredibly foul- smelling cigars. He was a corpulent Buddha of a man now, so unlike the sleekly handsome officer who had charmed and cajoled the ladies when he and Nudger were partners a decade ago in a two-man patrol car. Time did that sort of thing to people, Nudger mused, sitting down in the hard oak chair before Hammersmith's desk. He wondered fleetingly what time was doing to him, then promptly forced such depressing speculation from his consciousness. Why stick pins in oneself?
'What are you on to now, Nudge?' Hammersmith asked.
'I need to know about the Jenine Boyington murder,' Nudger said, breathing shallowly to inhale as little secondhand smoke as possible. He understood why the Geneva Convention had outlawed chemical warfare.
Hammersmith seemed to read his mind, drew on the cigar and exhaled another green billow. 'Medium-height- and-weight female Caucasian,' he said, 'found fully clothed in her bathtub with her throat slashed. There was alcohol in her blood-what was left of it when we met her. The killing was a nice neat job. No arrests, no suspects.'
'All of that was in the newspapers,' Nudger said.
Hammersmith narrowed sharp blue eyes within pads of flesh. 'Are you on the case?'
Nudger nodded.
'We don't like that, Nudge. Anybody else I'd tell to butt out.'
'I'll stay out of your way. Really.'
'No need to promise,' Hammersmith told him. 'Who's your client?'
'Jeanette Boyington, the victim's twin sister.'
'What do you know that we should?' Hammersmith asked.
Client confidentiality or not, Nudger knew that withholding evidence in a homicide case was illegal and would at the very least get his license suspended. That was one of the reasons he had come here, to protect himself. He could divulge such information to Hammersmith and keep it reasonably confidential unless it proved to be the crux of the investigation.
'My client and I wouldn't want this information spread around,' Nudger said.
'It won't be. Do I need to promise?'
Nudger smiled. 'No.' He wondered sometimes at the bond formed between two men who spent countless hours in a cramped patrol car, depending upon each other day after day for their very lives. 'Jenine Boyington had a habit of making late-night phone calls and meeting men,' he said. And he explained to Hammersmith about the phone company service lines and their bizarre and desperate nighttime use.
'All of that might not be relevant,' Hammersmith said, when Nudger had finished. But both men knew better. Hammersmith was playing the game and would explore the new avenue of investigation as quietly as possible. He had always been nifty at stealth.
'Time now for the other end of the trade,' Nudger said. He was aware that often the police held back some pertinent piece of information from the news media. Aside from this helping them to screen the inevitable procession of cranks who confessed to every sensational homicide, it gave them a hole card to play against the murderer.
Hammersmith didn't try to be evasive. He took another pull on his cigar, exhaled a thundercloud, and said, 'There were a few strands of blond hair under one of the victim's broken fingernails.'
'The victim was a blonde,' Nudger said.
Hammersmith shook his head, his heavy jowls undulating. 'It wasn't her hair. Jenine Boyington's hair was straight. These strands of hair were about six inches long and came from the head of somebody with very curly blond hair. They almost have to be the killer's.' Another draw on the cigar. 'And something else. We got a set of smudged prints, useless except that they indicate by the wide spread of the fingers that the perpetrator has abnormally large hands. Huge hands.'
'Have any other women been murdered in their bathtubs during the last few years?' Nudger asked.
'Sure. But then bathtubs are a common enough place to find female murder victims. What could be more traditional?'
Nudger thanked Hammersmith and stood up from the hard oak chair. The chair was so uncomfortable that it was impossible to sit in for more than about ten minutes. Hammersmith knew it; he was a workaholic and didn't like to be disturbed for longer than that by visitors. Nudger wondered if he'd had the torturous chair custommade.
He was at the door when Hammersmith's voice stopped him.
'Your client, Nudge, is she an identical twin?'
'She looks exactly like her sister's newspaper photo,' Nudger said.
'Sometimes,' Hammersmith said, 'one twin takes the death of the other unnaturally hard. It's like they think death ought to be shared between them like everything else.'
'You worried about some compulsion for revenge?' Nudger asked.
'I'm telling you to worry about it. Keep an eye on your client. She might get cute.'
'She already is cute, in a reptilian sort of way.'
'And let me know if you find out anything else about those dead-of-night phone conversations.'
'Some of the talk you hear on those lines can tear your heart,' Nudger said. Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?
Hammersmith shrugged and picked up a pen from his desk. 'My heart's been torn and torn. So has yours, but your problem is your heart grows no scar tissue. Get out.'
Nudger got out.
When he returned to his office, Nudger found that Danny had let someone in to wait for him. That was the arrangement Nudger had with the doughnut-shop owner. Danny was less convenient but much cheaper than a secretary.
Even before she introduced herself, Nudger suspected the identity of the middle-aged, stiffbacked woman seated in the chair before his desk. She had to be well over fifty, but there was in her still composure, calm gray eyes, and petite curvaceousness a familiar chilly vitality.
'I'm Agnes Boyington,' she said, half standing as Nudger entered. 'Jeanette's mother.' She offered a cool hand, which Nudger shook gently, then she sat back down and waited for him to circle his desk and settle into his swivel chair. She winced when the chair yowled.
'I assume Jeanette told you she hired me to investigate Jenine's murder,' Nudger said.
'No, she didn't. But I came across your name and phone number when I was visiting Jeanette. Then I discovered that you were a private investigator.'
