C. Davis was in apartment 2C. Nudger climbed the stairs, found the door halfway down a dim, littered hall. It was a heavy wood door whose dark enamel had shrunk and cracked like eroded soil, leaving a sharply angled network of shallow crevices. The "2C" was painted on the door with what looked like pink fingernail polish.
Nudger knocked, then stood patiently. A car horn honked outside. A distant siren gave its singsong frantic wail like a faraway creature in pain.
There was a change of light in the tiny glass peephole mounted in the door. Nudger smiled, trying not to look like an overheated insurance salesman or rent collector.
"Who is it?" a female voice called.
"My name's Nudger."
"So who's Nudger?" It was a black woman's voice, lilting and rich with accent.
"I'm looking for Claudia," he said. He waited.
A chain lock rattled and the door opened. A large ebony woman with wild straightened hair peered suspiciously out at him. "What Claudia?"
"I don't know her last name. I saw the C on your mailbox."
"The C happens to be my husband," the woman said. She had large, intelligent eyes, gentle and proud eyes that were measuring Nudger dubiously. Poverty, meet poverty. "You a friend of Claudia?"
Nudger tried not to show his excitement. "Very much a friend."
"She want to see you?"
"She should see me." He met the woman's soft, skeptical stare directly, not blinking. Neither of them blinked for a long time. Then Nudger blinked.
"Claudia's a good woman," C. Davis's wife said. "She don't need no bullshit."
"I know. That's why I came."
"You look like you been wandering around out in the desert, Nudger."
"I have been, like a prophet of old whose camel has died."
"Hm, yeah. Well, Claudia lives up in 4D, top of them stairs."
"Thank you. Is she home?"
"How do I know if she's home? I ain't no spy satellite. Could be she's working today. Go knock on her door, you want to find out."
"If she's not home and you see her later, do you intend to tell her I was around asking for her?"
"You better believe it, Nudger."
Nudger smiled at her. "Good. Nice meeting you, wife of C. Davis."
He knew she was watching him as he walked toward the stairs. Without looking back, he raised a hand in a listless wave and started up toward the fourth floor.
Someone else was already knocking on Claudia's door.
He was a slim, sharp-featured man wearing a dark suit and tie and carrying one of those slender leather briefcases that look like purses because they don't have handles.
Nudger didn't know quite what to do. He could hardly knock on the door to 4C and pretend that had been his destination. It could prove embarrassing, even dangerous in this neighborhood, if the door were opened. And there could be little doubt that he was heading toward 4D's door.
The man turned and gave him a long look. He had bushy dark eyebrows and high cheekbones. He would have been craggily handsome if it weren't for a skinny kind of meanness in his features.
"She's not home," he said, jerking his head toward Claudia's door. "I've been knocking for five minutes."
"I see," Nudger said, not knowing what else to say.
The man noticed Nudger's discomfort and stared at him with new interest. "You her boyfriend?"
Nudger followed his detective's instincts. "Yes, I am."
"I'm her husband," the man said.
Ho, boy! Nudger's stomach went into a spasm and made a sound like a cat meowing.
The man narrowed one eye and took a step toward Nudger, his suit coat open and flapping as if there were a breeze in the stifling hall. Or as if he were prepared for quick-draw gunplay, his holster in easy reach.
"You tell her when she gets home that I was here," he said. "And that I'm leaving town with the kids and she can't see them this weekend." He pointed a slender forefinger as if he could shoot lightning from it. "You got that?"
"Got it," Nudger said, trying to keep calm and size up what was happening, not having much success doing either.
The man clenched overdeveloped, bunchy jaw muscles, then strode past him and down the stairs. Nudger stood listening to his echoing, receding footfalls on the wooden steps, then heard the vacuumy clatter of the vestibule door opening and closing.
Nudger looked at 4D's closed door, its layered enamel cracked like the door to C. Davis's apartment, then rapped his knuckles on it three times, hard.
He stood stiffly, waiting.
No answer. No sound from the other side of the door. No hint of movement behind the peephole. No one home.
Maybe it was just as well, he thought, looking at his watch. He was sure now that this was Claudia's apartment. Claudia Bettencourt's. He repeated her full name to himself. Say it often enough and it became musical. Like Greta Boechner's, the girl he had loved in high school.
He knocked again on the door, in case she was home and for some reason hadn't heard his first knock.
Still no reply. He backed away from the door and started walking down the narrow hall. He would return this afternoon and try again to see Claudia Bettencourt.
On the way down the stairs, he waved again to the wife of C. Davis, who was standing staunchly outside her door staring. But he didn't take time to stop and chat. He was in a hurry. It was almost eleven-thirty, and he had a noon appointment with a nightline Romeo named Jock at Twin Oaks Mall.
XV
Nudger took up his position near the Twin Oaks Mall fountain and waited. Between twelve and twelve- thirty, he saw four blond men wearing dark slacks and beige sport jackets. All of them could be ruled out for one reason or another as Jenine's murderer, and none of them appeared to be waiting for someone.
It occurred to him that the description Jeanette had given him was exceptionally vague for the basis of a rendezvous of strangers. For the first time, he wondered if Jeanette was playing their game totally within the rules he'd laid down. She was a manipulator, like her mother, and might act out of some devious scheme of her own, or only for the satisfaction of control over other people. Nudger had met other compulsive manipulators. High-level corporate executives, politicians, and tournament chess players usually had that kind of streak in them.
And it ran like a broad, deep current in the Boyington women.
Nudger craned his neck and glanced up and down the mall. Other than a young salesclerk lethargically applying a squeegee to the display window of a shoe store, there wasn't a blond man in sight. Nudger let himself relax.
He found it restful sitting in the cool indoor mall, listening to the gentle splashing of the fountain and watching the shoppers walk past. There was a controlled, protective atmosphere in a large shopping mall. It was a practical place of constant temperature, where rain never fell but where flowers and ornamental trees flourished. Inside every store's wide entrance were people paid to be polite, and almost every facet of suburban life was catered to here. There were several restaurants, a bank branch, drugstores, dime stores, department stores, and specialty stores. Bookstores, hardware stores, and software stores. Card shops, food shops, and antique shoppes. Merchandise for everyone from birth through all the stages of life. Everything but a funeral parlor. Shopping malls wanted no truck with death.
Nudger's pelvis felt as if it were grafted onto the hard concrete bench he was sitting on. It was twelve-forty, and still no blond Jock. Jeanette had been stood up again; Nudger had waited long enough.