Nudger said nothing. He realized that he'd never had Ferris completely fooled.
"Sure, I'm right. You really are that murderous bitch's boyfriend, trying to find out if what you heard about her is true. Well, it is true, brother. But don't take my word for it; it's a matter of public record."
"So is the burning of witches."
"Meaning?"
"The people who did the burning, they were the real murderers."
The flesh around Ferris's mouth twitched involuntarily, not at all like a smile. He went pale and stood rigid with rage, eyes gleaming with a hate that needed fear to fuel such intensity. "We're done talking," he said. There was a fleck of spittle on his taut lower lip.
Nudger snapped the notebook closed. "All right."
"You've got more than your quota of nerve, coming around here spying and pretending to be what you're not. It's a good thing you outweigh me by twenty or thirty pounds." "Don't let that stop you," Nudger said.
Ferris looked remotely puzzled and backed away. The perplexed expression changed feature by feature into one of defiance. "You threatening me?"
"You're a sick bastard, Ralph."
Ferris laughed and licked the fleck of spittle from his lip with a darting tongue. "You're just saying that because I told you what you didn't want to hear. But it's the truth, and you know it and have to eat it."
Nudger was struck by a wave of revulsion for this skinny, venomous, self-righteous antagonist. Or was it possible that the revulsion really was for what Ferris had told him? Either way, the anger would follow. Nudger could feel it building to bursting inside him. He wanted to get out of there before it escaped and took control of him. He tossed the note-book in through the Volkswagen's window, onto the passenger's seat, opened the door, and got back in behind the steering wheel.
"Did you learn more than you bargained for?" Ferris asked tauntingly, as Nudger started the engine.
"Everybody always does," Nudger said. He worked the shift lever into gear. "Incidentally, Ferris, she gets the job."
"Fine," Ferris said. "They can give her a mallet and put her in charge of tenderizing the meat. She'd like that."
Nudger fought hard not to yank the wheel to the right and run over Ferris, as he pulled the Volkswagen away from the curb and accelerated down the street.
"Think about what I told you next time you're with Claudia!" Ferris yelled behind him. Probably everybody on Nightingale Drive heard. Probably they'd heard it before.
Nudger still had plenty of time before his appointment with Kelly. He stopped at a motel on Lindbergh and went into the lounge. It was a quiet, dim place with a faintly dampish odor, as if the carpet might be moldy. He got a draft beer at the bar and carried it to a booth near the entrance to the lobby, where the dampness hadn't reached. He'd decided to skip supper entirely and give his digestive system a rest. It had to need it, after his conversation with Ralph Ferris.
Unpleasant though the experience had been, Nudger was glad he'd talked with Ferris. If nothing else, it had convinced him of one thing. It wasn't because he was Claudia's former husband that Nudger disliked Ralph Ferris; it was because Ferris was damned unlikable. Nudger was pleased. Possibly that was what he had needed confirmed.
Halfway through his beer, he'd managed to shove the conversation with Ferris to the back of his cluttered mind. He thought instead of Jeanette Boyington. There sure was a lot of hate in the world.
He sat wondering about Jeanette. The woman almost vibrated with her unbending commitment to vengeance. Maybe Hammersmith was right about how the surviving twin of a murder victim might feel. Maybe Jeanette thought that when Jenine had died, a flesh-and-blood part of herself had been slain. Nudger remembered how Danny had acted while talking about his twin brother who had been dead for decades. And weren't there studies that showed how identical twins separated at birth developed remarkable similarities in their behavior even though they had never met? Who really knew what complex universal equations ruled the lives of twins? Ruled the lives of us all?
Nudger decided that he shouldn't be thinking this way after only half a mug of beer. It was unnatural and uncharacteristic. It could lead to error. Save the metaphysics for good Scotch, Dr. Shamus.
He went to the phones in the motel lobby and dialed Natalie Mallowan's number, hoping he could catch her at home and remind her of his nine hundred dollars.
When he got no answer, he called Claudia to try to arrange to see her tonight or tomorrow. No answer there, either. No one seemed to be home tonight. No one other than Ralph Ferris.
Nudger hung up the phone, feeling an unaccustomed emptiness after not being able to talk with Claudia. He was beginning to understand why he'd had to go to the Ferris house on Nightingale Drive. It was part of Claudia's past, which made it part of Nudger's future. He felt a need to acknowledge and fully reckon with her life with Ralph Ferris, to know what he could about it, place it in its proper mental slot, and so reduce it to a negligible factor in his relationship with her.
He felt an overpowering desire to talk with Claudia's daughters, to explain some things about their mother so they might understand her better. He could imagine what Ralph Ferris told them about her.
His drive to the Nightingale house on what had seemed a whim had been significant and irreversible, Nudger belatedly realized. That people had time to contemplate forks in the road of life was a lie. Usually they went one way or the other without realizing it, and could only gaze back over their shoulder as those fateful three-way intersections faded into the past.
He stood supporting himself with one hand fisted against the wall. It had been a depressing day and a demanding evening. For a moment he considered driving home, taking in the Cardinals' game on television, and forgetting about the appointment with Kelly. Forgetting about everything except hits, runs, and errors, and how nice it felt to be dozing off on the soft sofa instead of meeting another might-be murderer.
But he knew he wouldn't return to his apartment. He couldn't. He was destined to remain a while longer in the legions of those not home, doing his job. It was a job he often loathed, but it was all he had, a burden and a salvation.
He went out the lobby door to the parking lot and walked toward his car, trying to decide which was the most direct route to Twin Oaks Mall, forgetting all about going home.
XXII
Or maybe Nudger was home. The area around the Twin Oaks Mall fountain was beginning to seem as much like home as his apartment. He settled down on his customary concrete bench to wait for Kelly.
The mall was more crowded in the evenings than during the afternoons. And there were more male shoppers, more family units of husband, wife, and trailing, misbehaving offspring. The tempo of the mall was quicker. Fewer shoppers were here for idle recreation. Now the real business of buying was being conducted by many of the people hurrying past. Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, marching to the rhythms of the latest catch phrases and advertising jingles. Nudger sat back and observed the orderly lockstep madness. It was enough to make him wish he had disposable income.
A gray-haired man, easily in his seventies, sat down gingerly on the opposite end of Nudger's bench and sucked on a nasty-looking black briar pipe, all the time watching the passing parade of women with his weary but interested eyes. A couple of young boys ran up to the fountain and tossed coins in, then threaded their way at high speed back into the crowd. Two teenage girls in tight jeans walked past chattering and giggling. The old guy on the bench, probably a retiree well out of the melee, useless now to the mall except as a consumer of dentifrice and laxative, looked on with approval before fixing his wandering gaze on a buxom woman yanking a pre-schooler along behind her. Nudger had played this scene over and over during the past week. Home, all right.