Ride the Lightning (Alo Nudger) Read online

  Nudger wished there were a relief corps for every occupation; there were a lot of times he could have used a relief detective. He slid his coffee cup off to the side and got back to reading.

  The papers agreed on the details of the crime. Two customers in the back of the liquor store heard shots, looked down the aisle, and saw Curtis Colt standing over the body of the old man who owned and managed the store. Colt was holding a gun. The man's wife, also shot, was staggering around the store, grabbing on to things and knocking over displays and bottles. Colt shoved her aside and ran.

  Two witnesses outside saw him, still holding the gun, race from the store and get into a parked car whose driver was waiting with the engine idling. One of the witnesses, a Mrs. Langeneckert, screamed for him to stop. Another shot was fired wildly as the car sped away.

  The liquor-store owner, sixty-eight-year-old Amos Olson, had been shot once in the head and twice in the abdomen. One of the bullets had tumbled and damaged his spine and central nervous system. He would never give his version of the crime. He would never talk or perhaps even think coherently again.

  Olson's wife Dolly, same age as her husband, had been hit only once, but with deadly accuracy in the forehead. Nudger knew that the forehead was one of the least effective places to shoot a human being; unlike the back of the skull, there was a great deal of bone there to protect the brain. Sometimes people shot in the forehead took a long time to die. Which was why Dolly Olson had thrashed about the store for a while in a blind frenzy before mercifully dropping dead.

  The Dunker Delite seemed to shift weighty position in Nudger's stomach, as if it couldn't get comfortable and wished it were someplace else. His large intestine told him he had too much imagination. He swallowed noisily and read on.

  An hour later that evening, a cruising two-man patrol car had stopped at a service station so one of the police officers could use the rest room. As they pulled up by the pumps, a black or dark green car, probably a Ford, screeched from a shadowed corner of the lot. The cruiser's engine was turned off, and as the driver tried to start the car his partner spotted someone standing by the cigarette machine inside the station. The someone looked terrified and matched the description of the liquor-store woman's killer that had recently been broadcast on the police radio. The car that had sped from the lot matched the general description of the liquor-store-holdup getaway car.

  The cop forgot all about using the rest room.

  Half an hour later, Colt was handcuffed and booked at the Third District station house. The black or dark green Ford and its driver weren't seen again.

  It was exactly the kind of case a prosecuting attorney prayed for. The jury was out less than an hour before finding Colt guilty. Colt had shot the old man first; he'd had time to think about killing the woman. He could simply have run from the liquor store, but he hadn't. He'd stayed. Premeditation of a sort. The judge recommended the death penalty. The jury went along with that one, too. Everybody was ripe for somebody else's death.

  Nudger studied the photographs of Colt, trying to get a feel for who and what the man was. On the front page of the Post-Dispatch was a shot of Colt being led into the Third District station. In the next day's paper there was a close up of him, handsome in a moody, defiant way, with lean, dark features that looked as if they'd been whittled from hard wood. He was young, with a downswept bandito mustache and wavy dark hair that fell gracefully over his ears and collar. Another shot of him, being led from police headquarters at Tucker and Clark, showed him considerably calmer than on the night of his arrest. He was wearing jail-house dungarees and his wrists were cuffed in front of him. He was somewhat on the short side, compared with the two detectives flanking him in the photo, and had a skinny middleweight's lithe and muscular build.

  “What are you supposed to be able to do for this guy?” Danny was asking.

  “Save his life,” Nudger said, folding his newspaper copies and placing the coffee cup directly before him.

  Danny was staring at the cup, whose level hadn't dropped much in the last fifteen minutes. He was almost as sensitive about his coffee as about his doughnuts, which were not quite as lethal.

  Nudger had no choice; hurting Danny's feelings was like kicking a tired old basset hound. He poured more cream into the coffee, loaded in two heaping spoonfuls of sugar to cut the bitterness, and took a sip. Not bad. Well, not fatal. He looked over at Danny and smiled.

  Danny smiled back and went to the big steel coffee urn and adjusted some valves; something toward the back of the urn hissed and emitted steam. He looked like a submariner getting ready to send his craft on a crash dive into protective depths, where it would lie on the bottom, weighted down with Dunker Delites. “Scalla ain't the sort to give reprieves,” he said over his shoulder.

  “I know. He's the type to throw the switch himself.”

  “I don't know what just reminded me,” Danny said, “but Eileen was by here this morning looking for you. She seemed eager for you and her to be in the same place at the same time.”

  Nudger's stomach kicked. Hard. Eileen was his former wife. Since the divorce, she and his stomach got along worse every year. “She say what she wanted?”

  “Not directly,” Danny said, “but she hinted it was green and you owed it to her.”

  “Not this time,” Nudger said. “I'm caught up on my alimony.”

  As he spoke, Nudger suddenly wondered if that was true. Had his last check to her been for half the amount owed? Had there been enough money in the account to cover the check? It was all misty memory.

  Danny shrugged and wiped his hands roughly on the towel, in the manner of a mechanic who'd just crawled out from under a car and was uncertain about his work. “Well, I dunno, Nudge. You want another doughnut?”

  “No, thanks. Work to do.” Nudger swiveled away from the counter and slid down off his stool. He picked up his foam coffee cup and headed for the door.

  “You really think Colt might be innocent?” Danny asked. He sounded dubious.

  “I never said that,” Nudger told him.

  He pushed out through the door into the hot day, made a tight U-turn, and went in the door to the narrow, creaking stairway that led up to his office. The sweet smell of the doughnut shop followed him.

  After switching on the window air conditioner, he sat in his squealing swivel chair behind his desk and checked his telephone answering machine. There was a click, whir, and a beep, and the first message sounded.

  A drunk, almost unintelligible, painstakingly explained that he'd called the wrong number and asked for the right one. He got angry when no one accepted his apology, and hung up in a snit.

  Beep. Eileen's voice: “Call me today, if you know what's good for you. If you don't—”

  Nudger punched the machine's off button. He didn't know what was good for him. Never had.

  He sat back in his chair. He'd heard enough messages for now, and the mail he'd brought in from the landing didn't look interesting: bills, ads, threatening letters from creditors, bills, junk mail, bills, bills. He made up his mind not to open any of the mail until he needed something to do.

  The office was getting comfortably cool. It didn't take long; the place was small. Nudger watched the electric bill on the desk flutter lazily in the breeze from the air conditioner. Finally it slid off the desk and sailed toward the far wall, out of sight. He didn't bother to retrieve it.

  He went through the Curtis Colt information again, this time more carefully, and decided Colt was guilty as original sin.

  Nudger didn't like where that left him.

  He'd have liked it even less if he'd known where it was taking him.

  3

  Nudger looked at the list of names he'd compiled and decided to start with Randy Gantner. Gantner and a friend had been in the liquor store at the time of the shooting and had testified for the prosecution in court. He was as good a place as any to begin—the logical place, really, since it occurred to Nudger that there were so many witnesses against Cu
rtis Colt that he might as well talk to them in alphabetical order.

  Randy Gantner was a construction worker for Kalas Construction, one of the major contractors in St. Louis, a road builder who did a lot of highway work. Nudger had seen the company name lettered across truck trailers parked at major road construction sites all over the city. Road contractors not only did this to advertise; the countless permits they needed to work were plastered all over the sides of the trailers to satisfy various inspectors and busybody local officials.

  It was afternoon before Nudger located Gantner working weekend overtime on a highway access ramp job in Northwest County. Kalas Construction was building a new cloverleaf on the stem of Interstate 70. It was hot work and a hot afternoon to do it in.

  “Why should I worry about it anymore?” Gantner asked Nudger, leaning hipshot on his shovel. He didn't mind talking to Nudger; it meant taking a break from scooping away mounds of black dirt that had been brought up by a huge drill that was boring holes to bedrock for concrete piering. “Colt's been found guilty and he's going to the chair, ain't he?”

  The high afternoon sun was hammering down on Nudger, warming the back of his neck and making his stomach uneasy. 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 held up a photograph of Curtis Colt for Gantner to see. It was a snapshot Candy Ann had given him of the wiry, shirtless Colt leaning on a crooked fence post with a placid lake behind him and holding a beer can high in a mock toast: This one's for Death!

  Why am I doing this? Nudger asked himself. It was hopeless. He could feel Colt's guilt. The jury had been right.

  But he said, “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 someone who loves him.”

  Gantner was a ruddy, beefy man, shirtless in the sun. A rivulet of sweat zigzagged like an exploring insect down through the gingery hair on his chest. He shifted his weight against the shovel handle to lean with his other arm. “I'd be a fool to change my story about what happened now that the trial's over,” he said logically.

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

  “The little punk's gonna fry; I don't see the point in this.”

  “There's a point,” Nudger assured him.

  Gantner sighed, dragged a dirty red handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and wiped his meaty, perspiring face. He peered at the photo with pale eyes framed in seamed, tan flesh, 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. He was having a hell of a good time playing Jesse James. Little fart richly deserves to get the chair, you ask me.”

  Well, Nudger had asked. But he wanted to make doubly sure. “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, and now I'm saying it to you: Colt did the old lady in.”

  Persistent Nudger. “Did you actually see the shots fired?”

  “Nope. Me and Sanders was in the back aisle looking for some reasonable-priced bourbon when we heard the shots, then looked around to the front of the store. There was Colt, standing over the old man, holding a gun. Then the old lady sees what happened and screams and runs out from behind the counter at Colt, at the gun. Give her top grades for guts. Colt holds the gun higher and shoots her. She goes wild and starts twitching and bouncing all over the place, knocking good whiskey all to hell, and Colt runs out the door to a car. Looked like a black or dark green old Ford. Colt fired another shot as it drove away.”

  “You try to help the old lady?”

  “Sure. But by the time me and Sanders got to the front of the store, she'd gone down and we could see she was dead. Round hole smack in the center of her forehead, eyes open.”

  Gantner was rolling now. He knew this part of his story almost by rote from his interviews with the law and his testimony on the stand. He enjoyed telling it, polishing his delivery; show-biz was in his blood.

  “Get a look at the car's driver?” Nudger asked, thumbing another antacid tablet off the roll. God, the sun was hot!

  “Sort of. Skinny dude, curly black hair and a droopy mustache. Leaning over the steering wheel and holding it tight. That's what I told the cops. That's all I seen. That's all I know.”

  “Where was your friend Sanders when Colt ran out the door?”

  “I don't know, exactly. Around where I was, I guess. I told you, that's all I know. Finish.” Gantner raised a dirt-streaked hand and traced neat printing in the air. He said with perfect enunciation, “The fucking end.”

  And that was the way to describe this conversation. The foreman was walking toward them, glaring. He was a big guy who swaggered like a sailor on a rolling deck. He had a hell of a glare. Thunk! Gantner's shovel sliced deep into the earth, speeding the day when there'd be another place for traffic to get backed up. Nudger thanked him and advised him not to work too hard in the hot sun.

  “You wanna help?” Gantner asked, grinning sweatily.

  “I'm already doing some digging of my own,” Nudger said, walking away before the ominous foreman arrived.

  He sat for a while in his dented Volkswagen Beetle with the windows rolled down. There was a faint breeze wafting through the car; it felt cool on the right side of Nudger's sweat-plastered shirt. He watched the foreman motion toward the Volkswagen, talk for a few minutes with Gantner, then walk away. Gantner kept digging, not glancing over at Nudger, as if not looking at him meant he wasn't there.

  Nudger got out his spiral notebook and jotted down the pertinent parts of his conversation with Gantner. Some kind of huge machine that hammered concrete into dust rolled onto the scene then and began smashing its way noisily up the old exit ramp, like some creature from a sixties Japanese horror flick: Crushzilla the Destroyer. The ground trembled. Nudger wanted to stay and watch, but he had miles to go and promises to keep.

  Before the state kept its promise to Curtis Colt.

  The next witness Nudger talked to also stood by her identification. She was an elderly moon-faced woman with extraordinarily large watery brown eyes—Iris Langeneckert, who had been walking her dog near the liquor store and had seen Curtis Colt dash out the door and into the getaway car.

  That was how she told it, simply, briefly, and with a matter-of-factness that would have swayed any jury, there in her meticulously neat south St. Louis apartment on Tennessee Avenue. Then she offered Nudger a sandwich and glass of iced tea.

  Nudger declined the sandwich but accepted the tea with gratitude. It was strong, and sweet with natural sugar that still swirled gently in it from stirring and settled hazily on the bottom of the glass as pale sediment. As Nudger drank, the brown mongrel that had also witnessed the robbery-murder lay mostly concealed behind the sofa and watched him warily from half-closed eyes.

  When Nudger was almost finished with the tea, Iris Langeneckert said something that Gantner had also touched on. “He was a skinny young man with curly black hair and a beard or mustache,” she said, describing the getaway-car driver. Then she added, “Like Curtis Colt's hair and mustache.”

  Nudger looked again at the lakeside snapshot Candy Ann had given him. There was Curtis Colt, about five feet nine, skinny, and handsomely mean-looking with that broad bandito mustache and mop of curly, greasy black hair. There was a don't-give-a-damn-ness even in the way he stood, legs spread a little too wide, shoulders set as if to punch first if anyone even drew back a hand to threaten to strike him. A chin that proclaimed he could take it, cold eyes that said he could dish it out. Nudger had seen a lot like him. Too many. They were so alike, part of the world's pattern of pain and desperation. He wo
ndered if it was possible that the getaway-car driver had been Colt himself, and his accomplice had killed the old woman. Even Nudger found that one difficult to believe.

  He thanked Mrs. Langeneckert, then drove to his office in the near-suburb of Maplewood and sat behind his desk in the blast of cold air from the window unit, sipping the complimentary cup of diet cola he'd brought up from Danny's Donuts. The smell of the doughnut shop was heavier than usual in the office; maybe something to do with the heat and humidity. Nudger had never quite gotten used to the cloying sugar-grease scent and what it did to his sensitive stomach.

  When he was cool enough to think clearly again, he decided he needed additional information on the holdup, and on Curtis Colt, from a more objective source than Candy Ann Adams. He phoned Police Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith at home and was told by Hammersmith's son Jed that Hammersmith had just driven away and it would be late before he returned.

  Nudger checked his answering machine again, proving that hope did indeed spring eternal in a fool's breast.

  There was another terse message from Eileen, telling him to call her but not saying what about; a solemn-voiced young man reading an address where Nudger could send a check to help pay to form a watchdog committee that would stop the utilities from continually raising their rates; and a cheerful man informing Nudger that with the labels from ten packages of a brand-name hot dog he could get a Cardinals ballgame ticket at half price. (That meant eating over eighty hot dogs. Nudger calculated that baseball season would be over by the time he did that.) Everyone seemed to want some of Nudger's money. No one wanted to pay Nudger any money. Except for Candy Ann Adams. Nudger decided he'd better shrug off some of his pessimism and step up his efforts on the Curtis Colt case.