Hammersmith smiled his jowly smile. "The tech teams are on the way here, Major Case Squad, news media, everybody. In their numbers will be Leo Springer. We need your statement, say tonight, after you've had a chance to pull yourself together, get your story straight. I'm going downstairs and make some calls. It wouldn't be a bad idea for you to leave. On your own, you understand."
Nudger nodded.
Hammersmith flicked ashes on the carpet and glided out. He left the apartment door open. Nudger could see a blue uniform sleeve outside in the hall.
He jumped as something at his feet buzzed at him like a rattlesnake.
It was the damaged phone, its shattered receiver still off the hook. He picked it up with the futile idea of answering it, knowing he probably should leave it untouched for the print man and photographer, and it gave another dying rattle and was silent and useless. He started to replace it on an end table.
Instead he stood holding it, staring at its base, before finally setting it back down on the floor.
He raked clawed fingers through his tousled hair and drew a deep breath that seared his bruised windpipe. Suddenly he wanted to get as far away as possible from Jeanette's apartment. He wanted to run, but he walked.
At the open door he paused, leaning with a palm pressed high against the doorjamb, and glanced back. His gaze again fell on the phone, and he thought about all the late-night talkers and dreamers, all the agony and loneliness transformed to electronic impulses and sent out over the nightlines, seeking connections, searching for solace of whatever fashion. He thought about blown-glass erotica and a cold, agonized twin who was driven to attempted murder.
He walked out into the hall, nodding at the blue uniform on guard, and made his way unsteadily toward the stairs, wishing the damned building would stay still. There was somewhere else he had to go this evening, and Hammersmith was right; he needed rest and time to think before talking with the police, before walking the high tightrope that Leo Springer was sure to place him on. There would be no net below.
XXX
Night hadn't fallen, but it was teetering, when Nudger turned the Volkswagen into the driveway of Agnes Boyington's fashionable white brick home in the central west end. In the dusk the house appeared even larger. The wide lawn, still damp from the afternoon rain, had been mowed recently and was rich with the sweet, pungent scent of summer. Deepening shadows softened the symmetrically manicured slope of the grounds. Lindell Boulevard didn't seem to be there at all beyond the spreading, sheltering oaks and maples. The area surrounding the Boyington house had about it the atmosphere of a groomed golf course.
When Nudger parked the Volkswagen near the columned front porch and got out, locusts in the nearby trees trilled like crickets, only deeper, more hoarsely. Katydids, children called them, mimicking their urgent rattling buzzing. The locusts existed noisily and briefly after long hibernation, then died and left behind only their dry husks. Nudger knew people who had done that.
As he stepped up onto the porch, he saw that there was a lamp burning at one of the front windows. Disdaining the brass knocker this time, he rang the doorbell, hearing chimes toll faintly inside. He waited for what seemed like five full minutes before Agnes Boyington came to the door.
She was wearing tight black slacks and a ribbed white sweater adorned with heavy gold chains. Her hair was rigidly engineered, as if she'd just returned from a beauty parlor. Earrings that matched the chains gathered and gave light as she moved her head. Nudger wondered if she'd been notified of Jeanette's arrest.
"It's time for us to talk," he said.
She studied him in the faint light, gazing at him as if he were a trespassing dandelion on the unbroken plane of green behind him. Finally she said, as if it were an order, "Come in, Nudger."
He entered, closing the door behind him, and followed Agnes Boyington through the hall and into an impeccably decorated, high-ceilinged room with pale, tiny-print wallpaper. There were soft blue chairs and a sofa with lots of light wood trim, and a dainty antique secretary desk with elegantly curved legs, just inside the door. The plush carpet was dead white and might have been laid yesterday.
"Sit down," Agnes Boyington said, pointing to a straight- backed chair with a modicum of upholstery. It seemed a device contrived by sadists.
Nudger sat. He was even more uncomfortable than he thought he'd be, but he made the most of it, scooting down and extending his legs, crossing his ankles. The chair creaked softly beneath his weight and then was quiet, as if afraid of being reprimanded for complaining. It was that kind of room.
Agnes paced to an advantageous position near the secretary and faced Nudger with the poise and presence of a stage actress. "I know about Jeanette," she said. "The police notified me this afternoon."
"How much did they tell you?"
"That she was being held for brandishing a deadly weapon."
"As soon as the prosecutor hears the facts," Nudger said, "the charge will be attempted murder."
"Oh? Murder of whom?"
"Didn't you talk to Jeanette?"
"No. I intend to do so in the morning, with my-her lawyer."
"She was going to kill someone named Luther Kell, the man who murdered your other daughter. I happened along. She was also going to kill me, as a bonus."
Agnes pursed her lips and tilted her head sideways, as if thinking over what Nudger had said, not liking it, but not disliking it all.
"I figured out some things," Nudger told her, watching her closely. He could hear the locusts screaming away their lives outside.
"That's your job, figuring out," Agnes Boyington said.
"Would you like to hear how well I've done my job?" Without waiting for an answer, he continued. "When Jeanette was out of her head with rage, about to squeeze the trigger, she said something about killing all the men she could. '… Before they kill me again,' she said."
"Not surprising, if she was as hysterical as you describe."
"No, but it caused me to recall some things about her, like her familiarity with her dead sister's apartment the day she and I went there to search it. And the expensive but uncharacteristic piece of blown-glass erotica on the curio shelf in her apartment."
"Erotica?"
"Then, when I was about to leave her apartment last night, I happened to see a nightline number scratched on the base of her phone, the number Jenine had used, scratched on the bottom of her phone in exactly the same manner."
"Nightline number?" Agnes's voice was up an octave, oddly plaintive. Something in her was bending, and must break.
"Such a lot of questions," Nudger said. "You know what I'm talking about. Obviously, I was meant to find that number in Jenine's apartment when Jeanette took me there to search. The police hadn't found it because it had been scratched on the base of Jenine's phone after they searched the apartment."
The squareness of Agnes Boyington's deceptively youthful carriage melted. Her shoulders were slumped, narrow, and bunched. Her right hand flexed spasmodically and knotted into a fist around her thumb.
"How did you get the idea?" Nudger asked. "How did it happen?"
She sat down on the uncompromising sofa across from Nudger, a middle-aged widow by lamplight. To see her age that way, almost with the rapidity of movie magic, depressed Nudger.
Her voice was a defeated monotone now, lacking entirely the cold fire and authority of only five minutes ago. "Two months ago Jenine made an appointment on the nightlines with a man-Luther Kell, as I've learned today. Kell was alone with her in her apartment, but someone interrupted them. They made another date; Jenine gave Kell a key and he was to let himself in and wait for her to arrive home the next evening. But Jeanette dropped by unexpectedly to visit her sister. Kell arrived, assumed she was Jenine, and murdered her." Agnes drew a deep breath and thrust out her chin. "My slain daughter is Jeanette."