The morning was already heating up; a typical St. Louis July day. It would also be typical of St. Louis weather if it were sixty degrees and hailing by nightfall. The only thing that changed rapidly in this city was the weather.
Nudger quickly entered a door next-door to Danny’s Donuts and climbed a narrow wooden stairway to his office. He picked up the morning mail from where it lay on the landing, then unlocked the office door and pushed inside.
Warm, stifling, stale. The small office still seemed to contain heat from yesterday’s record-breaking temperature, as well as the sweet, cloying scent from the doughnut shop below. It was the kind of scent that permeated everything: furniture, drapes, clothes, even flesh. Wherever Nudger went, he gave off the faint scent of a Dunker Delite. It didn’t drive women wild.
He switched on the window air conditioner, then sat down in his squealing swivel chair and did nothing until the cool breeze from the humming, gurgling window unit had made the office air more breathable. Finally, he picked up the stack of mail from where he’d tossed it on the desk and leafed through it.
The usuaclass="underline" a mail-order catalog from International Investigators Supply Company, featuring an inflatable boat that would fit into a shirt pocket when deflated; a letter from his former wife Eileen, no doubt threatening stark horror unless alimony money showed up via return mail; an enticement to join a home-video club specializing in X-rated movies full of snickering adolescent sex, for adults only; an envelope from the electric company that looked disturbingly like a bill. Nudger tossed the entire mess into the wastebasket.
Then he glanced at his watch, made sure his phone-answering machine was on Record, and left the office. He had to follow a cigarette delivery-truck on its route, to discover if the driver had anything to do with why certain figures didn’t coincide.
A week later, when the cigarette pilfering case had ended (the supervisor — the man who had hired Nudger — turned out to be the thief; there was some debate over paying Nudger’s fee), Nudger was sitting at his desk wondering what next when there was a knock on the door.
Client! Nudger thought hopefully. He leaned forward, his swivel chair squealing at the same time he called for the visitor to enter.
The door opened and Danny walked in.
“You don’t seem glad to see me, Nudge,” Danny said.
“It’s not that,” Nudger said. “I was expecting someone else.”
“I think I need to talk to somebody, Nudge. You know how it is, I got no family, nobody.”
“Sit down,” Nudger said. “Talk.”
Danny sat in the chair by the window, aging ten years in the harsh morning light. “Another friend of mine died last night,” he said. “Found on the north side in a rough neighborhood, shot in the back of the head. Robbery again.”
“Who was this one?” Nudger asked.
“Mack Perry, another member of my AA chapter, another old shipmate.”
“Shipmate?”
“Yeah. Perry, Akron, and I served on the USS Kelso during the Vietnam War. This was in the midsixties, before the war heated up, when the Navy got young guys to join by promising them they’d go through training and service together. We were in a St. Louis unit. Lots of guys on the Kelso were from St. Louis, until after it was hit and recommissioned later as a minesweeper.”
“Hit?”
“By a North Vietnamese torpedo boat. The ship didn’t sink, but we limped back to port with two dead, including the captain, and fifteen wounded. They dug metal out of us and pinned medals on us and took the Kelso out of service for repairs.”
“I didn’t know you were a war hero, Danny.”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” Danny said simply. “And me and a few others were just drunk enough to be brave.”
Nudger could see he didn’t want to talk about the violent years, so he concentrated on violent yesterday. “You said Perry was another old shipmate, Danny. Was the other fellow who was killed, Artie Akron, on the Kelso, too?”
Danny nodded, “Yeah. That’s when the three of us really started drinking hard, in Honolulu after the Kelso got hit and we were in the last stages of our recuperation. Of course, lots of other guys were drinking hard then, too, and didn’t go on to let it ruin their lives.”
Nudger sat staring out the window beyond Danny, at the pigeons strutting along a stained ledge of the building across the street. He really didn’t like pigeons — messy birds. “Are any other old shipmates in your AA chapter?” he asked.
“Nope,” Danny said. “But there’s a lot more of them around town, I told you we were mostly recruited together here and formed a kind of unit throughout training and part of our service.”
“Kind of odd,” Nudger said, “two old Kelso crewmen being murdered within a week of each other.”
Danny’s furrowed forehead lowered in a frown. “You figure it could be part of a pattern, Nudge?”
“Can you think of any reason there might be a pattern?”
Danny sat silently for a moment, then shook his head. “No, there was nothing between Akron and Perry except that they served on the Kelso and were alcoholics.”
“You know anybody else fits that description, Danny?”
“No, not really.” Danny’s somber brown eyes suddenly widened. Fear gleamed in them briefly like a signal light: a call for help. “Jeez, Nudge, you don’t think somebody might try snuffing me, do you?”
“I wish I could tell you, Danny. I guess I’d better try to find out more about what’s going on.”
Danny looked embarrassed. “I can’t pay you for this right away, Nudge, but I will eventually. And you’ve got free doughnuts forever.”
Nudger tried to mask the distress on his face, but he was sure Danny caught it. The man was sensitive about his doughnuts. Nudger would have to make amends.
“And coffee?” he said, bargaining hard.
Danny smiled. “Coffee, too, Nudge.”
It was laborious but sure, the process of getting a list of the Kelso’s crew members in 1965. Naval Records even supplied a list of the crew’s hometown addresses. Thorough, was the military. We should all learn.
Fifteen of the Kelso’s crew had been from St. Louis. Nudger sat down with his crew list and the phone directory and matched five names besides Danny’s, Akron’s, and Perry’s. He began phoning, setting up appointments. When told that the subject of their conversation would be the Kelso, the four crew members he was able to contact eagerly agreed to talk with Nudger.
The first Kelso crewman Nudger met with was Edward Waite, who took time out from his job as some sort of technician at a chemical plant to sit in a corner of the employees’ lounge with Nudger over coffee. The place was empty except for them; a long, narrow room with plastic chairs, Formica tables, and a bank of vending machines displaying questionable food.
Waite was a large, muscular man with a florid face, powerful and immaculately manicured hands, and a clown like fringe of reddish unruly hair around his ears, grown long as if to compensate for his bald pate. He squinted at Nudger with his small blue eyes, as if he needed glasses, and said, “Sure, I was below deck when the Kelso took the torpedo. The concussion rolled me out of my bunk. I heard valves exploding, steam hissing, shipmates yelling. None of us near the bow were in any real danger, though; the torpedo hit amidships. But I can tell you I wanted to see the sky worse than anything when I managed to stand up. I could smell the sea and hear water rushing and figured we might be going down.”