Claudia kissed Nudger again, a slow, soft brush of her lips across his cheek, then got out of the car and closed the door without slamming it. Before walking away, she turned and leaned low to peer in at him through the open window.
"For both of us, will you be careful?" she asked.
"If you'll be careful for the same two people."
She nodded and stood up straight. Nudger shifted to first and pulled away from the curb. At the corner, when he checked in the rearview mirror, Claudia was gone.
XXVI
Ten thousand dollars," Agnes Boyington said to Nudger, sitting across from him in his office. She'd been waiting downstairs for him when he arrived, standing rigidly outside the doughnut shop, as if she'd rather endure the heat than enter.
Nudger swiveled thoughtfully in his chair and stared across the desk at her, trying to grasp what she was saying. Ten thousand dollars. One hundred C-notes. Mucho dinero. All those dead Presidents…
"My final offer," she added, setting her mouth in a straight, firm line.
"Oh, everyone says that," Nudger told her.
"To earn the money," Agnes reminded him, "you have only to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. I'm sure that for you the former will be easier than the latter."
"You're trying awfully hard to corrupt me, Boyington. To lead me down the primrose path."
"You've seen the primroses in all seasons." She got one of her long brown cigarettes from her purse, manipulated the never-fail lighter, and touched flame to tobacco. Tilting back her head so that she could gaze down her nose at him, she blew a cloud of smoke that hung together in an oddly grotesque shape which drifted toward the ceiling like a medium's ectoplasm. "What is your answer?"
"I don't mind if you smoke," he told her.
She exhaled another cloud of smoke, this one not so dense. He was getting to her. "Just what is it about my offer that bothers you, Nudger?"
"The fact that you made it, and that you keep increasing it. And that if I accept it, you'll have me at a permanent disadvantage. I wouldn't like that."
"Those are logical reservations, though based on unfounded suspicion. Anything else? No more consideration for your professional honor?"
"That, too. And something more. It bothers me that I don't understand why you're making the offer."
"I told you, Jeanette is under great stress. She isn't thinking clearly, or she wouldn't have hired you. I don't want her hurt more than she is already."
Nudger shook his head slowly, not looking away from Agnes Boyington. "I'm sorry, Agnes, I can't accept your explanation of motherly concern. It fits you about as well as a size ten hat."
Something crossed her face, momentarily altered the ice-gleam in her eyes. A reflection of pain. It surprised Nudger. It was like glimpsing human emotion in a reptile.
"To be honest, Nudger, I don't care about your assessment of me as a mother, except insomuch as it affects this matter. I love Jeanette dearly, more dearly than you can know." The expression of deep pain again, as if she were finally leveling with him and paying the price.
"What about Jenine?" Nudger asked. "Did you love her?"
"No." She smiled faintly at Nudger, from an icy distance. "I told you I was being honest. I knew Jenine, the way she lived, the things she did. She generated grief; all her life she was a burden and a stigma."
"Maybe you made her that way."
"No one made her that way. It was her inability to control her animalistic instincts that made Jenine what she was, that eventually led to her death. She was a sinner in the eyes of God and man."
"Her libido might have been much like yours," Nudger said, "only channeled in a different direction, a direction that harmed no one but herself."
"I'm not here to talk sophomoric psychology. I'm here to talk mathematics, coin of the realm."
Nudger placed both hands lightly, palms down, on the desk. From God to U.S. currency in less than a minute. It was dizzying. "I'm sorry, Agnes, but there are too many unknowns in the equation. I won't accept your offer."
Agnes Boyington stayed sitting very still in the chair before Nudger's desk. Then, with a subdued, steely vibrancy, she began to tremble. She was even paler than usual as she stared at Nudger, for an instant with pleading in her eyes, then with hate.
"You don't understand Jeanette as well as her own mother can," she said.
"I'm sure you're right."
"There's a great deal about this matter that you don't know."
"I'm a willing student. No one seems willing to teach me."
She stood up, tucked her purse beneath her arm, and glared down at Nudger. She'd stopped the faint trembling and had regained what appeared to be total control of herself. Nudger had to admit he was impressed by her as she stood over him in pale wrath like a well-preserved ice-queen and dropped cold, clipped words on him.
"I tried, Nudger, but you refused to listen, to be realistic. You've made a tragic course of events irreversible. If you forget everything else, remember that. What occurs from this point on might have been avoided if you had shelved your shabby idealism and done what was right for everyone concerned. Whatever happens now is on your head."
"Come off it, Agnes. I didn't open a tomb, I turned down a bribe."
She backed away a few steps, toward the door, and observed him as if suddenly he were miles away. She wouldn't attempt to buy him off anymore; he was sure of that. True to her word, she had made her final offer. She'd now accept what she couldn't understand. Money had talked, shabby idealism hadn't listened. That puzzled her, but in this instance that had been the undeniable outcome of her attempt to buy what she wanted. Life unaccountably worked that way sometimes. Mysterious circles.
"You'll be responsible," she said softly, as if to someone in the office other than the two of them. "As heaven is my witness!"
"Agnes, why don't you talk to Jeanette? Be honest with her?"
She disdainfully dropped her half-smoked cigarette on the bare office floor and ground it out with the pointed toe of her shoe. Without looking at Nudger, she opened the door and went out, leaving it open behind her. If he wouldn't talk sense, her brand of sense, then she wouldn't talk to him at all. So there. He heard her measured footfalls as she descended the stairs. The draft from the street door opening and closing rolled low across the office, stirring the ashes on the floor. He didn't like the look of those ashes, but then ashes seldom inspired.
Nudger was more worried than he had been, but he wasn't sure why. Possibly it was Agnes Boyington's mention of an irreversible tragic course of events. It seemed that she had turned a corner in her mind, and he had no way of knowing what street she was on or where she was going.
He shook his head as if to free himself from the after- scent of her tobacco smoke and disinfectant-like perfume, then stood up from behind the desk. He knew what street he should be on: Hartford Avenue.
After tossing the morning mail into the wastebasket and locking the office, he went downstairs and crossed Manchester to where his car was parked. The morning had been one of disturbing ambiguity. He longed for a problem he could grapple with and solve.
Trying not to think about Agnes Boyington and her ten thousand dollars, he drove toward the conservative, orderly neighborhood, the narrow, straight street, the neat little brick house of Luther Kell.
XXVII
Nudger parked by a phone booth a few blocks from Kell's house. He left the Volkswagen's motor running as he entered the booth, fed in his twenty cents and dialed Kell's number. If Kell answered, Nudger was ready to see how he was fixed for magazine subscriptions.
Kell's phone rang ten times while Nudger leaned against the phone inside the hot metal booth and watched the traffic on Kingshighway. After the tenth ring, he left the receiver dangling out of sight, yanked closed the booth's folding doors behind him as he stepped outside, and drove to Kell's house.