'Now,' she said, lowering her head and fixing him with an upcast, direct stare, still smiling.
'Now what?' Nudger asked, wondering if a lot of people had been wrong about Ineida.
But the thought of tit for tat, sex for that, hadn't entered her naive young mind. Or if it had; it had fled through the pure driven snow. 'Now are you going to tell me who hired you if Daddy didn't?'
'Nope,' Nudger said, wondering if he was disappointed.
There was a polite knock on the door. Ineida looked in that direction, then back at Nudger, and he nodded, motioning for her to answer the knock. 'That would be Room Service.'
Ineida went to the door, opened it, and stood back.
A scrawny young bellhop Nudger hadn't seen before pushed a cart with Nudger's breakfast on it into the room. When he saw Ineida in her Hustler magazine outfit, his Adam's apple jumped but his expression remained professionally bland. The cart's wheels squeaked as he ran it through a kind of loose figure eight.
'For him,' Ineida said, pointing toward Nudger.
The kid gulped noisily and pushed the cart over to the blue chair. Nudger nodded thanks to him and tried to reach into his hip pocket for his wallet without standing up. He found that the pocket was empty, and he saw his wallet on the dresser where Sandra Reckoner had put it after it had fallen onto the floor while she was helping him to undress last night.
'Here,' Ineida said, holding out a five-dollar bill for the scrawny kid. He accepted the money and grinned at her; he liked her, all right. Nudger wished he'd take her out for a PG movie and a hamburger and a Coke and make her forget all about Willy Hollister.
When the bellhop had gone, she turned again to Nudger, who was meticulously placing a napkin in his lap and lifting the silver cover off his plate. Eggs, toast, and coffee had never smelled so good.
'Your last chance,' she said, tilting her halfopen purse so he could see a corner of the white envelope. With the sight seemed to come the faint perfumed scent of money to mingle with his breakfast aromas.
Nudger ignored her, tried not to look at the envelope.
'Aren't you even tempted?'
'Of course I am.'
'Then why don't you accept my offer?'
'You said it earlier: scruples.'
'I said ethics.'
'Same thing.'
'Same price, too. I don't think you're not for sale, Nudger; I think it's simply that someone is paying you more than my offer. How much more?'
'Don't be ridiculous. No one has more money than you do.'
Nudger's refusal was puzzling and infuriated her. This visit wasn't going as she'd anticipated. She hadn't planned on a smitten bellhop and a private investigator dumb enough to have more of an appetite for food than for money. Life was too damned tricky and unpredictable. Unfair, unfair. Something inside her began to cave in. She suddenly looked even more ridiculous in the MTV clothes she'd worn to impress him with her authority. Different dress and mannerisms hadn't taken her where she wanted to go.
'I want you to leave me alone,' she said, almost crying because she couldn't buy what she wanted. 'I want you to stop sneaking around and badgering me and Willy and threatening our happiness.'
'You have a few things backward,' Nudger told her.
'No, I don't. And I get what I want, Nudger.' Her eyes were brimming; she looked so young and unknowing, standing there on the edge of tears and rage, ready to topple forward on those high heels and fall in. So very, very determined. 'I'll get you to leave Willy and me alone, no matter what it takes.'
'A threat?'
'A threat,' she confirmed. She was trembling, about to lose any semblance of control over her emotions.
'Do you want half of my omelet?' Nudger asked her.
'No! Do me a favor and choke on your goddamned omelet!'
Unwilling to break down in front of him, she stalked from the room quickly so he couldn't see the sobbing that he heard. She slammed the door so hard that the omelet quivered on its plate like something alive and neurotic.
Nudger sat in the reverberating silence for a few minutes, then pushed his plate away and poured himself a cup of coffee. Ineida and her tears and her twenty thousand dollars had ruined his appetite.
After coffee and half a piece of buttered toast, Nudger went to the bed and sat down with the phone. He dialed direct to the Third District station house in St. Louis and got Hammersmith.
'This is Nudger, Jack.'
'I know,' Hammersmith said, 'I was warned.'
Nudger made a mental note not to leave his name next time with Ellis the desk sergeant. 'I need some information.'
'I assume you're still in New Orleans, or you'd be here in the flesh to bring to bear the full force of your personality behind your request. What specifically do you want to know?'
'Nothing specifically,' Nudger said. 'I want your feeling on the Billy Weep murder.'
'You mean Benjamin Harrison Jefferson?'
'You know who I mean,' Nudger said.
'My feeling, huh?' Hammersmith understood what Nudger was requesting.
Nudger heard the labored wheezing sounds of Hammersmith lighting a cigar and was glad that over six hundred miles separated them. Even at that he considered glancing out the window to check wind direction.
'We found a gram of heroin hidden in Weep's apartment, Nudge,' Hammersmith said.
'I thought you searched his apartment and came up with nothing.'
'This was wrapped in a cut-off prophylactic and tucked down into a light socket with a bulb screwed in on top of it. Would you have found it?'
'No,' Nudger said, letting Hammersmith extract his price for whatever information he was going to divulge, making a resolution not to take burned-out light bulbs for granted. They and burned-out people could surprise.
'The most likely theory is that someone knew Weep had the junk hidden in the apartment and killed him for it but didn't find it.' Hammersmith couldn't quite make himself sound as if he believed that theory.
'How would they know he had it or how much it was?'
'Could be they saw him get it from his supplier and followed him home.'
Nudger remembered the wasted Billy Weep slouched in his chair in the shadows. It was hard to imagine him having the strength even to go out and score for a fix. And it wasn't easy to find a supplier who delivered heroin like pizza to go. Something softer, maybe, but not heroin. 'Was there evidence of heroin in his blood?' Nudger asked.
'No. There was a two-point-five alcohol reading and there were traces of THC in him. Marijuana. He was on two kinds of high when he was killed.'
'Maybe not,' Nudger said. 'THC stays around in the body for a long time, and when I talked to him just before his death, Billy told me he wasn't drinking.'
'That may or may not be true about the drinking, Nudge. The ME says his liver was about gone and he'd have probably died within six months on his own if somebody hadn't helped him across.'
'How about needle tracks?' Nudger asked. 'Did the ME find any on Billy's body?'
Hammersmith smacked his lips and puffed on his cigar; over the phone he sounded like a locomotive in heat. 'How astute of you to ask, Nudge. No needle-entry signs, not under the tongue or between the toes or anywhere else.'
'Do you know what was used to beat him to death?'
'No. It could have been a number of things. He actually died of asphyxiation.'
'Asphyxiation?' Nudger repeated. 'Somebody choked him?'
'Whatever was used on him hit him in the throat, crushed his larynx and windpipe cartilage, made it impossible for him to get air.'
Nudger couldn't help it; he imagined for a moment how it would be, the final, horrible panic: thrashing around wildly on the floor, struggling futilely to suck in oxygen, feeling your heart sledgehammer against your ribs, your entire body about to crumple inward around its internal airless ruins. The rage. The terror.
