The Nudger Dilemmas Read online

  THE NUDGER DILEMMAS

  John Lutz

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / John Lutz

  Copy-edited by: Paulo Monteiro and David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Ride the Lightning

  What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

  Only One Way to Land

  Time Exposure

  Typographical Error

  Where Is Harry Beal?

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  The Thunder of Guilt

  The Right to Sing the Blues

  Before You Leap

  The Litigants

  The Man in the Morgue

  The Romantics

  Foreword

  Somewhere in heaven, or relatively close, in the Twilight Zone maybe, but not quite in that genre, is PI Purgatory, where fictional private detectives are all enjoying themselves in (what else?) a bar. Let's call it Chez Purgatory, though you don't have to be dead, though you were never really alive to be there. If that makes sense. Or if it doesn't. And let's call it what it is, a bar, all right?

  Oh, Miss Marple and her ilk are over in the Cozy Corner where the decor runs to chintz, imbibing innocuously named alcoholic beverages with fruit in them. But it's still a bar. It's always a bar. And Nero Wolfe and Holmes are in the Art Deco Victorian Room, sipping good sherry while bent over some infernal (Oops!) board or card game.

  Archie Goodwin is chatting up the barmaid. And there at one of the tables are Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, knocking them back straight while cracking wise and trying to top one another. They're getting on Mike Hammer's nerves, so he and Lew Archer take their leave, go sit at the bar, and put on lugubrious faces while discussing Spade and Marlowe.

  The door opens, and in walks Nudger. He isn't an imposing figure like Spade or Marlowe. A bit taller than average perhaps. His hairline has begun to recede, and he's suffering the beginning of middle-age spread. Not a bad looking guy, with regular features and keen blue eyes that express puzzlement and the kind of resigned wisdom that is the loser's consolation prize.

  He gives the Cozy Corner a wide berth, fearing that wafting cat dander will trigger his allergy. It is Miz's Night, and in the Female Urban PI Room they are practicing kickboxing and doing some sort of aerobic exercise that seems to combine hugs with sudden knee lifts. He only glances in there and hurries on his way.

  Wolfe and Holmes look at him, sneer, and turn back to their mind-bending game. Hammer and Archer raise their glasses in a hard-boiled salute to him, but Nudger doesn't want to join them. They're so intense. They make him tired.

  So he sits alone at the other end of the bar, checks his pockets, and realizes he doesn't have enough money to pay for a drink. He asks for a glass of water. The bartender brings it with ice, a slice of pineapple and a paper umbrella in it. Sarcasm?

  Nudger looks around and sees that just about everyone is here. Over in a corner near where there's enough tobacco smoke to flavor ham, near the restroom ventilating system and where the kitchen's swinging door slams into the chairs of all the customers, sit a few PI's that are much like Nudger. He doesn't join them. He won't even acknowledge or identify them. His creator knows that their creators are nonviolent but can be snide. Nudger sips his water. The cold pineapple wedge bumps his nose, and he almost loses an eye to the umbrella.

  That's when the door bursts open and an incredibly attractive blonde enters and skids to a stop on her six-inch spike heels. None of the patrons seem surprised. It happens every night. It's part of the deal at Chez Purgatory. And she always has on the same dress. That's because she and the rest of the place aren't real, but that doesn't concern the patrons, who have themselves never been real.

  Nudger watches in the back bar mirror as the woman rushes over to Wolfe and Holmes and throws herself down on her knees, looking adorable and imploring. He sees her become proper and prim and sidle into the Cozy Room. Mad as all get out but with her head held high, she strides into the Female Urban PI Room. She stands hipshot at the table and trades barbs with Spade and Marlowe. Rubs up against Hammer and Archer, who are reacting quite different from each other. And she sits on a stool next to Nudger.

  "I hope this stool doesn't already belong to someone," she says.

  "It's all yours," he tells her suavely, gesturing with his right hand and spilling the drink with the pineapple and umbrella all over her.

  He stammers his apologies, offers to buy her another drink, realizes it was his that he spilled, asks her how he can possibly make it up to her.

  "There's a way," she says somberly, "but it's dangerous." His stomach seems to bite another of his internal organs. It always starts out this way, or some way like this.

  PI Purgatory.

  Or maybe it's only in the mind.

  Of course it's in the mind.

  And in these pages.

  Ride the Lightning

  A slanted sheet of rain swept like a scythe across Placid Cove Trailer Park. For an instant, an intricate web of lightning illumined the park. The rows of mobile homes loomed square and still and pale against the night, reminding Nudger of tombs with awnings and TV antennas. He held his umbrella at a sharp angle to the wind as he walked, putting a hand in his pocket to pull out a scrap of paper and double-check the address he was trying to find in the maze of trailers. Finally, at the end of Tranquility Lane, he found Number 307 and knocked on its metal door.

  "I'm Nudger," he said when the door opened.

  For several seconds the woman in the doorway stood staring out at him, rain blowing in beneath the metal awning to spot her cornflower-colored dress and ruffle her straw-blonde hair. She was tall but very thin, fragile-looking, and appeared at first glance to be about twelve years old. Second glance revealed her to be in her mid-twenties. She had slight crow's feet at the corners of her luminous blue eyes when she winced as a raindrop struck her face, a knowing cast to her oversized, girlish, full-lipped mouth, and slightly buck teeth. Her looks were hers alone. There was no one who could look much like her, no middle ground with her; men would consider her scrawny and homely, or they would see her as uniquely sensuous. Nudger liked coltish girl-women; he catalogued her as attractive.

  "Whoeee!" she said at last, as if seeing for the first time beyond Nudger. "Ain't it raining something terrible?"

  "It is," Nudger agreed. "And on me."

  Her entire thin body gave a quick, nervous kind of jerk as she smiled apologetically. "I'm Holly Ann Adams, Mr. Nudger. And you are getting wet, all right. Come on in."

  She moved aside and Nudger stepped up into the trailer. He expected it to be surprisingly spacious; he'd once lived in a trailer and remembered them as such. This one was cramped and confining. The furniture was cheap and its upholstery was threadbare; a portable black and white TV on a tiny table near the Scotch-plaid sofa was blarin
g shouts of ecstasy emitted by The Price Is Right contestants. The air was thick with the smell of something greasy that had been fried too long.

  Holly Ann cleared a stack of People magazines from a vinyl chair and motioned for Nudger to sit down. He folded his umbrella, left it by the door, and sat. Holly Ann started to say something, then jerked her body in that peculiar way of hers, almost a twitch, as if she'd just remembered something not only with her mind but with her blood and muscle, and walked over and switched off the noisy television. In the abrupt silence, the rain seemed to beat on the metal roof with added fury. "Now we can talk," Holly Ann proclaimed, sitting opposite Nudger on the undersized sofa. "You a sure-enough private investigator?"

  "I'm that," Nudger said. "Did someone recommend me to you, Miss Adams?"

  "Gotcha out of the Yellow Pages. And if you're gonna work for me, it might as well be Holly Ann without the Adams."

  "Except on the check," Nudger said.

  With a devilish twelve-year-old's grin, "Oh, sure, don't worry none about that. I wrote you out a check already, just gotta fill in the amount. That is, if you agree to take the job. You might not."

  "Why not?"

  "It has to do with my fiancé, Curtis Colt."

  Nudger listened for a few seconds to the rain crashing on the roof. "The Curtis Colt who's going to be executed next week?"

  "That's the one. Only he didn't kill that liquor store woman; I know it for a fact. It ain't right he should have to ride the lightning."

  "Ride the lightning?"

  "That's what convicts call dying in the electric chair, Mr. Nudger. They call that chair lotsa things: Old Sparky . . . The Lord's Frying Pan. But Curtis don't belong sitting in it wired up, and I can prove it."

  "It's a little late for that kind of talk," Nudger said. "Or did you testify for Curtis in court?"

  "Nope. Couldn't testify. You'll see why. All them lawyers and the judge and jury don't even know about me. Curtis didn't want them to know, so he never told them." She crossed her legs and swung her right calf jauntily. She was smiling as if trying to flirt with him into wanting to know more about the job so he could free Curtis Colt by a governor's reprieve at the last minute, as in an old movie.

  Nudger looked at her gauntly pretty, country-girl face and said, "Tell me about Curtis Colt, Holly Ann."

  "You mean you didn't read about him in the newspapers or see him on the television?"

  "I only scan the media for misinformation. Give me the details."

  "Well, they say Curtis was inside the liquor store, sticking it up—him and his partner had done three other places that night, all of 'em gas stations, though—when the old man that owned the place came out of a back room and seen his wife there behind the counter with her hands up and Curtis holding the gun on her. So the old man lost his head and ran at Curtis, and Curtis had to shoot him. Then the woman got mad when she seen that and ran at Curtis, and Curtis shot her. She's the one that died. The old man, he'll live, but he can't talk nor think nor even feed himself."

  Nudger remembered more about the case now. Curtis Colt had been found guilty of first degree murder, and because of a debate in the legislature over the merits of cyanide gas versus electricity, the state was breaking out the electric chair to make him its first killer executed by electricity in over a quarter of a century. Those of the back-to-basics school considered that progress.

  "They're gonna shoot Curtis full of electricity next Saturday, Mr. Nudger," Holly Ann said plaintively. She sounded like a little girl complaining that the grade on her report card wasn't fair.

  "I know," Nudger said. "But I don't see how I can help you. Or, more specifically, help Curtis."

  "You know what they say thoughts really are, Mr. Nudger?" Holly Ann said, ignoring his professed helplessness. Her wide blue eyes were vague as she searched for words. "Thoughts ain't really nothing but tiny electrical impulses in the brain. I read that somewheres or other. What I can't help wondering is, when they shoot all that electricity into Curtis what's it gonna be like to his thinking? How long will it seem like to him before he finally dies? Will there be a big burst of crazy thoughts along with the pain? I know it sounds loony, but I can't help laying awake nights thinking about that, and I feel I just gotta do whatever's left to try and help Curtis."

  There was a sort of check-out-tabloid logic in that, Nudger conceded; if thoughts were actually weak electrical impulses, then high-voltage electrical impulses could become exaggerated, horrible thoughts. Anyway, try to disprove it to Holly Ann.

  "They never did catch Curtis's buddy, the driver who sped away and left him in that service station, did they?" Nudger asked.

  "Nope. Curtis never told who the driver was, neither, no matter how much he was threatened. Curtis is a stubborn man."

  Nudger was getting the idea.

  "But you know who was driving the car."

  "Yep. And he told me him and Curtis was miles away from that liquor store at the time it was robbed. When he seen the police closing in on Curtis in that gas station where Curtis was buying cigarettes, he hit the accelerator and got out of the parking lot before they could catch him. The police didn't even get the car's license plate number."

  Nudger rubbed a hand across his chin, watching Holly Ann swing her leg as if it were a shapely metronome. She was barefoot and wearing no nylon hose. "The jury thought Curtis not only was at the liquor store, but that he shot the old man and woman in cold blood."

  "That ain't true, though. Not according to—" she caught herself before uttering the man's name.

  "Curtis's friend," Nudger finished

  "That's right. And he ought to know," Holly Ann said righteously, as if that piece of information were the trump card and the argument was over.

  "None of this means anything unless the driver comes forward and substantiates that he was with Curtis somewhere other than at the liquor store when it was robbed."

  Holly Ann nodded and stopped swinging her leg. "I know. But he won't. He can't. That's where you come in."

  "My profession might enjoy a reputation a notch lower than dognapper," Nudger said, "but I don't hire out to do anything illegal."

  "What I want you to do is legal," Holly Ann said in a hurt little voice. Nudger looked past her into the dollhouse kitchen and saw an empty gin bottle. He wondered if she might be slightly drunk. "It's the eyewitness accounts that got Curtis convicted," she went on. "And those people are wrong. I want you to figure out some way to convince them it wasn't Curtis they saw that night."

  "Four people, two of them customers in the store, picked Curtis out of a police lineup."

  "So what? Ain't eyewitnesses often mistaken?"

  Nudger had to admit that they were, though he didn't see how they could be in this case. There were, after all, four of them. And yet, Holly Ann was right; it was amazing how people could sometimes be so certain that the wrong man had committed a crime just five feet in front of them.

  "I want you to talk to them witnesses," Holly Ann said. "Find out why they think Curtis was the killer. Then show them how they might be wrong and get them to change what they said. We got the truth on our side, Mr. Nudger. At least one witness will change his story when he's made to think about it, because Curtis wasn't where they said he was."

  "Curtis has exhausted all his appeals," Nudger said. "Even if all the witnesses changed their stories, it wouldn't necessarily mean he'd get a new trial."

  "Maybe not, but I betcha they wouldn't kill him. They couldn't stand the publicity if enough witnesses said they was wrong, it was somebody else killed the old woman. Then, just maybe, eventually, he'd get another trial and get out of prison."

  Nudger was awed. Here was foolish optimism that transcended even his own. He had to admire Holly Ann.

  The leg started pumping again beneath the cornflower-colored dress. When Nudger lowered his gaze to stare at it, Holly Ann said, "So will you help me, Mr. Nudger?"

  "Sure. It sounds easy."

  "Why should I worry about
it anymore?" Randy Gantner asked Nudger, leaning on his shovel. He didn't mind talking to Nudger; it meant a break from his construction job on the new Interstate 170 cloverleaf. "Colt's been found guilty and he's going to the chair, ain't he?"

  The afternoon sun was hammering down on Nudger, warming the back of his neck and making his stomach queasy. He thumbed an antacid tablet off the roll he kept in his shirt pocket and popped one of the white disks into his mouth. With his other hand, he was holding up a photograph of Curtis Colt for Gantner to see. It was a snapshot Holly Ann had given him of the wiry, shirtless Colt leaning on a fence post and holding a beer can high in a mock toast: this one's for Death!

  "This is a photograph you never saw in court. I just want you to look at it closely and tell me again if you're sure the man you saw in the liquor store was Colt. Even if it makes no difference in whether he's executed, it will help ease the mind of somebody who loves him."

  "I'd be a fool to change my story about what happened now that the trial's over," Gantner said logically.

  "You'd be a murderer if you really weren't sure."

  Gantner sighed, dragged a dirty red handkerchief from his jeans pocket and wiped his beefy, perspiring face. He peered at the photo, then shrugged. "It's him, Colt, the guy I seen shoot the man and woman when I was standing in the back aisle of the liquor store. If he'd known me and Sanders was back there, he'd have probably zapped us along with them old folks."

  "You're positive it's the same man?"

  Gantner spat off to the side and frowned; Nudger was becoming a pest, and the foreman was staring. "I said it to the police and the jury, Nudger; that little twerp Colt did the old lady in. Ask me, he deserves what he's gonna get."

  "Did you actually see the shots fired?"

  "Nope. Me and Sanders was in the back aisle looking for some reasonably-priced bourbon when we heard the shots, then looked around to see Curtis Colt back away, turn, and run out to the car. Looked like a black or dark green old Ford. Colt fired another shot as it drove away."