"I phoned your office, Nudge, and talked to nothing but a machine," Hammersmith said. "I phoned your apartment, Claudia's place, Danny's Donuts, all your haunts." Hammersmith's blue eyes were twinkling; he was enjoying this. "No Nudger. All gone. Frankly I was concerned."
"Maybe you should have notified the police."
Hammersmith smiled, got a cigar out of his shirt pocket, and laid it on the desk in the way a suspicious poker player might lay a revolver on the table before the deal. There would be no nonsense here, or there would be fire and smoke.
"I was in New Orleans," Nudger said.
"Hard-earned vacation?"
"Business. Why were you trying to contact me?"
Hammersmith toyed with the cigar, rolling it back and forth a few rotations each way on the desk. He liked to tease before answering a question. "I thought you ought to know that Hugo Rumbo is out on bail."
Hammersmith was referring to a house-sized person who had made life dangerous for Nudger during his last case. Nudger nodded. "Thanks for letting me know, Jack."
"You worried?"
"I should be but I'm not. I don't think Rumbo is bright enough to hold a grudge."
"Maybe not," Hammersmith said. He stopped rolling the cigar. "So what's a Jacqui James?"
"A female of the disappeared type. She was the gir- ifriend of a jazz musician here in town about four years ago when she dropped from sight."
Hammersmith raised his sleek eyebrows. "Foul play?"
"No, he's a hell of a pianist."
Hammersmith unwrapped the cigar and placed it between even, tobacco-stained teeth. "Each year it's easier for me to understand why you had to quit the department. You're not an organization man, Nudge. There is no hole for a peg shaped like you. I assume you want me to check with Missing Persons to see if they have a file on this woman."
"Exactly."
While he pretended to consider this request, Hammersmith fired up the cigar, puffed and wheezed, and exhaled a tremendous dense cloud of greenish smoke. Then, cigar still in his mouth, he lifted the desk phone receiver and punched out the number for the main switchboard. "Get me Mishing Pershons," he said around the cigar.
Nudger smiled at him. Hammersmith smiled back and blew smoke.
"It'll take a few minutes," Hammersmith said, after hanging up the phone. "If there is an MP file on Jacqui James and it's in the computer, we can get a printout of it here for you to read."
"I appreciate this, Jack."
"And so you should."
Nudger had never doubted that Hammersmith would let him use police-department files. The two men had a mutual trust and interdependence going back over a decade to when they had been partners in a two-man patrol car. Hammersmith knew why Nudger had quit the department. It was nerves, a stomach that never got used to the everyday stress and occasional violence that was a patrol cop's lot. In a shoot-out with a burglar in the dark, Nudger had saved Hammersmith's life, though he might just as easily have killed him with one of his shaky, panicky shots.
The nerves had become worse after that, and the department had taken Nudger off patrol duty and turned him into Coppy the Clown, a local TV character who taught young children not to be afraid of policemen in our warped society. But a new police chief had decided that a clown wasn't, after all, the most desirable symbol of the department, and Nudger had resigned rather than return to the grinding stress of patrol duty. He'd become, out of necessity born of knowing no other line of work, a private investigator. It enabled him to pay the bills, more or less, in his journey along life's perilous streets. His nervous stomach traveled right along with him.
"What are you working on in New Orleans?" Hammersmith asked.
"I'm investigating an employee," Nudger said vaguely.
"I won't ask why the employer didn't hire a local," Hammersmith said. "Maybe an investigator with a Louisiana PI license."
"My client wanted only me. I came highly recommended by Jeanette Boyington."
Hammersmith emitted a foul cloud of greenish smoke and chuckled. "Unpredictable bitch, eh?"
"Agreed," Nudger said. "Actually, I'm trying to find out about a man named Hollister, a jazz musician who used to be chummy with Jacqui James."
"Why?" Hammersmith asked bluntly.
"He's involved with another woman, a fellow employee who's the daughter of a big-clout guy named Collins."
Hammersmith removed the cigar from his mouth and looked over its glowing tip at Nudger. There was cool alarm in his blue eyes. "David Collins?"
Nudger shifted his weight to his left haunch, uncomfortable in the hard chair. "How do you know Collins?" he asked. His stomach presaged the answer by arranging itself in what felt like a tight coil.
"I know of Collins," Hammersmith said, "and that's as close as I care to get. Mostly what I've heard is rumor, but none of it is good rumor. Involvement in a Gulf Coast real estate scam, a series of inflated construction bids and kickbacks when the New Orleans World's Fair was being put together, whispers of a Collins cut in a big South American drug operation that was drop-shipping in southern Florida. Collins is purported to be more of a financier of crime than an actual participant. He keeps himself at least twice- removed and free from prosecution."
"Interesting," Nudger said, "but how does a police lieutenant in St. Louis happen to know all about David Collins in New Orleans?"
"There are people who are connected in every major city," Hammersmith said. "Upper-echelon cops everywhere know who they are, or at least should know, because crime is an interstate business."
Nudger's stomach lurched into fiery contortions, almost doubling him over in his chair. " 'Connected,' you said? 'Business,' you said?"
Hammersmith nodded. "I said." He carefully angled the cigar in the glass ashtray so it wouldn't go out, then squinted through the smoke, trying to gauge the effect of his words on Nudger.
"You mean the Mafia?" Nudger asked.
Hammersmith shrugged. "Who can say for sure? But whatever or whoever runs things in a big way has an umbrella over Collins. Don't try to rain on him, Nudge."
"I'm not," Nudger said. "Well, not exactly. Maybe just a fine mist."
Hammersmith grunted dubiously, picked up his cigar, and resumed his smokestack act, leaving Nudger to his own dire thoughts.
A few minutes later there was a respectful light knock on the door and a pimply-faced young civilian clerk entered the office and placed a yellow file folder on Hammersmith's desk. He withdrew quickly, almost genuflecting, and Hammersmith opened the folder and read for several minutes before speaking again to Nudger. Nudger noticed that his old partner was leaning back from the material on his desk and wondered if Hammersmith had reached the age where he needed glasses.
Still without looking up, Hammersmith scratched a jowly, smooth-shaven cheek and said, "Jacqueline Jamison, a.k.a. Jacqui James, was reported missing January twenty- fourth, four years ago. Female Caucasian, twenty-six years old then, average height and weight, auburn hair and green eyes, no distinguishing marks, last seen wearing a white cotton blouse, blue cotton skirt, blah, blah, blah."
"Who reported her missing?" Nudger asked, trying to envision a cotton blah, blah, blah.
"Says here the apartment manager where she lived, a Miss Irma Gorman, address over on Alabama Avenue. Jacqui James hadn't paid her rent or been seen for a while, so Irma Gorman took legal steps to get her possessions out of the apartment so she could rent it to another tenant."
"What did the investigation turn up?" Nudger asked.
"Ah, here we get to Jacqui James close up and personal. A show-biz type on the fringes. She worked around town as a singer, had no close family, and drug paraphernalia was found in her apartment. Also, she had an arrest record. Two controlled-substance charges and one misdemeanor- shoplifting under a hundred dollars. Suspended sentences, never served time for anything. Minor stuff, Nudge."