Nightlines

he saw him again, anywhere.

He turned from the doughnut-shop window and lumbered halfway down the street to where his car was parked. It was a brown ten-year-old Buick, faded and rusty and as hulking as its owner. As the man got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door, the rearview mirror wobbled and dropped to a crooked position from the impact. He started the car and pulled away from the curb, and was only a few blocks away when he automatically reached for a small red rubber ball on the seat beside him. He began to squeeze the ball rhythmically as he drove, exercising the already powerful forearm rippling beneath the windbreaker sleeve.

As he stopped for a traffic light, he glanced down at the ball expanding and contracting between his fingers and figured that it was probably just about the size of Nudger's Adam's apple. He smiled, not at all with his eyes, and with only one corner of his mouth.

Then the light changed and for the time being he completely forgot about Nudger. Squeezing the ball and driving occupied his entire capacity for concentration.

V

M

other has always been a snoop and an interloper,' Jeanette said, later that day in Nudger's office.

Nudger made a tent with his fingers, just like Sidney Greenstreet used to do in Bogart movies, and stared candidly at Jeanette. 'I'm playing this game honestly with you,' he said. 'Which is why I told you about your mother's visit. And I need complete honesty from you. What's the name of the man who got Jenine pregnant and beat up on you?'

'Wally. Wallace Everest. But he didn't.'

'Didn't what?'

Jeanette uncrossed her shapely legs, planted her dainty silver high heels firmly on the floor, and aimed eyes like her mother's at Nudger. 'You wanted honesty, and that's what you're going to get.' She made it sound like a threat, and maybe it was. 'Mother doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that I was the one seeing Wally, the one he made pregnant, the one who had the abortion.'

'Prolong the honesty and explain,' Nudger said.

'I'd been seeing Wally for several months. When he found out I was expecting his baby, he was angry instead of happy. He said he was leaving me and never wanted to see me again. Then he suggested the abortion. When I cried on Jenine's shoulder and told her what had happened, she came up with a plan.'

There were curves that you could see and curves that you couldn't in the Boyington family, Nudger reflected. 'Plan?' he said, and listened with some apprehension.

'Jenine confided in me that she'd already had three abortions,' Jeanette said. 'She suggested that rather than create a black mark against me and possibly incur the rage of Mother, she'd be the one to have the abortion instead of me. Abortion number four would mean little to her, or to Mother if she found out, considering Jenine's other activities and previous abortions, which Mother's spying might any day uncover. Mother is not a liberal or understanding person.'

Some understatement, Nudger thought. 'Didn't this plan pose somewhat of a medical problem?' he asked.

'Not one we couldn't solve. I simply went to an abortion clinic as Jenine, with all of her identification, including driver's license with photograph. So as far as anyone, even the doctor, knows, it was Jenine who had the abortion.'

'I can guess the rest,' Nudger said. 'When you saw Wally Everest after the abortion, you tried to take up where you'd left off, but he still didn't want to see you and you fought.' Nudger was only speculating, but he wanted to give Jeanette a version that might get her angry and crack her hard exterior so that he might gauge the truth inside. He waited for the fury of a woman presumed scorned, but it never made itself evident. Her serene yet oddly predatory features remained calm. It was as if she were a member of another species.

'I never wanted to lay eyes on Wally again and still don't,' she said. 'I went to him to get the money to pay for the abortion, the money he'd promised to give me so I'd terminate the pregnancy. But he backed down on the deal and refused to give me anything, got angry and called me names and then laughed at me. I lost my temper and struck him. It was all the excuse he needed. He beat me badly enough to put me in the hospital for two days. I never felt so much pain and fear.'

'How do you feel about Wally now?'

'I hate him, of course.'

'Have you seen him since the beating?'

'No. He left town while I was in the hospital. At least that's what I was told by his landlady and a few of his acquaintances. They said he moved to Cincinnati to start a new salesman's job. Wally sells religious textbooks; he's very good at it.'

Nudger felt like reaching into his bottom desk drawer for the thermos of warm milk he kept there, but he decided that wouldn't seem very businesslike.

He waited until Jeanette had left, then he reached instead for the telephone and called Jack Hammersmith.

When he came to the phone Hammersmith asked, 'Do you have something to tell me that will break the Jenine Boyington case wide open?'

'I never saw a case break wide open,' Nudger said. 'I don't know exactly what that expression means.'

'But you do have some tidbit of information for me?'

'No. I don't know what a tidbit is, and I called to ask for information.'

'You're like the rest of the world.' Hammersmith sounded betrayed.

'Out here in the world away from Headquarters lives a guy named Wallace Everest. Know anything about him?'

'All I need to know, Nudge. He's the victim's ex- boyfriend. A bad sort. The mother told us about him. He's got an ironclad alibi in Cincinnati for the time of the murder. And he has dark hair.'

'Thanks,' Nudger told him. 'You're on top of things.'

'It's slippery up here, Nudge.'

'I know. Everything that slides off falls on us folks down here.'

He said good-bye to Hammersmith and quickly hung up before the lieutenant could reply. Hammersmith was accustomed to having the last word and would be irritated and chomp his poisonous cigar and literally fume about not having it this time. Good.

Nudger didn't dwell long on Hammersmith. He was thinking about how his options had narrowed, how the twists and turns of the Boyington women had brought him smack up against one obvious course of action. It was a plan he hadn't wanted to put into effect, because it was dangerous for him and dangerous for Jeanette Boyington.

But now it seemed to be that or nothing. In such situations, Nudger always chose that. It was the only way he could manage to stay in business.

'I want you to talk to men on the lines at night,' Nudger told Jeanette that evening. 'I want you to make appointments with them, if that's what they ask for. Tell them you'll meet them at some busy public place, preferably a large shopping mall.'

Jeanette sat across from Nudger's desk and nodded somberly as he spoke, as if each of his words were physically penetrating her mind to be lodged solidly forever in the gray matter of her memory. He could tell, watching her, that she'd meant it when she said she wanted to help find her twin sister's killer, meant it perhaps more strongly than she had revealed.

'Do you want me to meet these men?' she asked. He saw that she was willing to undergo that danger. In fact, she was downright eager.

'No,' Nudger told her, 'I'll get their descriptions from you, then go to the appointed place and look them over. If one of them happens to have curly blond hair and oversized hands, I'll follow him when he leaves disappointed and find out who he is.'

'And then?'

'Then we'll watch him and decide whether the fish we've hooked is legal and should be reeled in.' Nudger studied her eyes as he spoke. They were flat gray in his dimly lighted office and made him wonder if her lifeless expression was the result of her sister's death; Hammersmith had said some twins thought that way.