Ride the lightning an-4 Page 3

  “I need some help,” Nudger said.

  “Sure,” Hammersmith said, “you never come see me just to trade recipes or to sit and rock.” Hammersmith was partial to irony; it was a good thing in his line of work. Nudger thought it might be what kept him sane.

  “I need to know more about Curtis Colt,” Nudger told him.

  Hammersmith got one of his vile greenish cigars out of his shirt pocket and stared intently at it, as if its paper-ring label might reveal some secret of life and death. “Colt, eh? The guy who’s going to ride the lightning?”

  “That’s the second time in the past few days I’ve heard that expression. The first time was from Colt’s fiancee. She thinks he’s innocent.”

  “Fiancees think along those lines. Is she your client, this woman who’s already picked one loser?”

  Nudger nodded, but didn’t volunteer Candy Ann’s name.

  “Gullibility makes the world go round,” Hammersmith said. “I was in charge of that one. There’s not a chance Colt is innocent, Nudge.”

  “Four eyewitness IDs are compelling evidence,” Nudger admitted.

  “Damning evidence,” Hammersmith said.

  “What about the getaway-car driver? His description is a lot like Colt’s. Maybe he’s the one who did the shooting and Colt was the driver.”

  “Colt’s lawyer hit on that. The jury didn’t buy it. Neither do I. The man is guilty, Nudge.”

  “You know how inaccurate eyewitness accounts are,” Nudger persisted.

  That seemed to get Hammersmith mad. He lit the cigar. The office immediately fogged up. Even considering their hugeness, Hammersmith’s cigars generated a tremendous amount of smoke in proportion to their size. And they burned fast, like fuses; sometimes their coarse tobacco even made a faint crackling sound. Yet they never seemed to burn down to butt size so they mercifully could be extinguished.

  Nudger made his tone more amicable. “Mind if I look at the file on the Colt case?”

  Hammersmith gazed thoughtfully at Nudger through a dense greenish haze. He inhaled, exhaled; the haze became a cloud. “How come this fiancee didn’t turn up at the trial to testify for Colt? She could have at least lied and said he was with her locked in steamy sex that night. Hell, that’s traditional.”

  The smoke was beginning to affect Nudger’s stomach violently; he felt as if he ought to swallow, but he didn’t allow it to happen. It made talking difficult. “Colt apparently didn’t want her subjected to taking the stand,” he said in an odd, phlegmy voice.

  “How noble,” Hammersmith said. “What makes this fiancee think her Prince Charming is innocent?”

  “She knows he was somewhere else when the shopkeepers were shot.”

  “But not with her?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, that’s refreshing.”

  Maybe it was refreshing enough to make up Hammersmith’s mind. He picked up the phone and asked for the Colt file. Nudger could barely make out what he was saying around the fat cigar, but apparently everyone at the Third was used to Hammersmith and could interpret cigarese.

  Nudger finally allowed himself to swallow. Yuk. Beyond the hazy office window, the summer air looked clear and sweet and shimmering, beckoning in bright sunlight. St. Louis, the Sultry City, had its alluring moments.

  The file, which was mostly a mishmash of fan-fold computer paper, didn’t reveal much that Nudger didn’t know. Same account of the crime as was in the newspapers. Same eyewitness testimony, almost word for word. Twenty minutes after the liquorstore shooting, Colt was interrupted by officers Wayne Callister and Elvis Jefferson while buying cigarettes from a vending machine at a service station on Hanley Road. A car that had been parked near the end of the dimly lighted lot had sped away before they’d entered the station’s office. Both Callister and Jefferson had gotten only a glimpse of a black or dark green old Ford; they hadn’t made out the license-plate number, but Callister thought it started with the letter L.

  Colt had surrendered without a struggle, and that night at the Third District station the four eyeball witnesses had picked him out of a lineup. Their description of the getaway car matched that of the car the police had seen speeding from the service station. The loot from the holdup, and several gas-station holdups committed earlier that night, wasn’t on Colt, but it was probably in the car. A paraffin test on Colt’s hands turned up nitrate traces, indicating that he’d recently fired a weapon.

  “Colt’s innocence just jumps out of the file at you, doesn’t it, Nudge?” Hammersmith said. He was grinning a fat grin around the fat cigar.

  “Paraffin tests aren’t foolproof,” Nudger said. But he knew they were virtually always right; Colt had fired a gun.

  “They aren’t even admissible in court,” Hammersmith said. “The evidence against Colt was so strong, that didn’t make any difference.”

  “What about the murder weapon?”

  “Colt was unarmed when we picked him up.”

  “Seems odd.”

  “Not really,” Hammersmith said. “He was planning to pay for the cigarettes. And maybe the gun was still too hot to touch, so he left it in the car. Maybe it’s still hot; it got a lot of use for one night.”

  Closing the file folder and laying it on a corner of Hammersmith’s desk, Nudger stood up. He was relieved to find that the air was more breathable in the upper half of the room. “Thanks, Jack. I’ll keep you tapped in if I learn anything interesting.”

  Hammersmith waved the cigar gracefully, almost as if conducting a silent orchestra. “Don’t bother keeping me informed on this one, Nudge. It’s over. I don’t see how even a fiancee can doubt Colt’s guilt.”

  Nudger shrugged, trying not to breathe too deeply in the smoke-hazed office. “Maybe it’s an emotional thing. She thinks that because thought waves are tiny electrical impulses, Colt might experience time warp and all sorts of grotesque thoughts when all that voltage shoots through him. She thinks he might die a long and horrible death. She has bad dreams.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” Hammersmith said. “I’ll bet Colt has bad dreams, too. Only he deserves his.”

  “Is there any doubt the switch is going to be thrown?” Nudger asked.

  Hammersmith bit down on his cigar and shook his head. “No doubt at all. This one is Governor Scalla’s personal project. Once Colt became a convicted felon and ceased to be a voter, all hope was lost.”

  Though he believed in the necessity of capital punishment, Hammersmith was no fan of Governor Scott Scalla. Hammersmith was a good man and a good cop; he didn’t like the methods Scalla had used to put people away when the governor was attorney general.

  Early in Scalla’s career, he’d seen to it that all the juveniles he’d tried received maximum sentences when convicted; he’d often done this by plea-bargaining and letting their confederates serve lighter terms in exchange for their cooperation and a sure conviction. As long as those terms kept the juveniles in prison until they were twenty-one, it was all fine with Scalla. That way he could brag about juvenile crime statistics decreasing under his special attention, not mentioning that these juveniles were often back out on the streets adding to adult crime statistics. Crime paid for Scalla; it had helped to get him elected governor despite the often-accurate charges by his opponent that he had used his office of state attorney mainly to further his political career, and that he had been bought and was controlled by several special-interest groups.

  Scalla blithely denied all of these charges, all the while decrying the evils of crime and espousing the biblical credo of eye-for-an-eye. He belonged to a stiff-backed religion, something called Friends of God, occasionally played piano and sang gospel music, smiled boyishly and often, and had a wife who wore no lipstick. How could you not believe a guy like that?

  “Maybe the fiancee is right,” Hammersmith said.

  “About what?”

  “About all that voltage distorting thought and time. Who’s to say?”

  “Not Curtis Colt,” Nudger said. �
�Not after they throw the switch.”

  “It’s a nice theory, though,” Hammersmith said. “I’ll remember it. It might be a comforting thing to tell the murder victim’s family.”

  “Sometimes,” Nudger said, “you think just like a cop who’s seen too much.”

  “Any of it’s too much, Nudge,” Hammersmith said with surprising sadness. He let more greenish smoke drift from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth; he looked like a stone Buddha seated behind the desk, one in which incense burned.

  Nudger coughed and said good-bye. His eyes stung and watered for twenty minutes after he got outside.

  V

  After leaving Hammersmith, Nudger located and phoned Gantner’s drinking buddy, Roy Sanders, at a tire-retreading plant out in Westport where Sanders worked. Sanders was working overtime, as Gantner had been yesterday. Busy, busy. Industry was thriving. Sanders agreed to talk with Nudger during his lunch break, which was in about fifteen minutes.

  Nudger got to Westport, a business and warehouse complex in West County, in twenty minutes, and found Sanders sitting with four other men in the employee’s lounge of Roll-On Recap City.

  The lounge was a long, narrow room, painted workplace green and lined with colorful vending machines that seemed to sell everything from sandwiches to birth-control devices. There were a lot of potted plants suspended from the ceiling in front of the window at the far end, spilling lush viny greenness almost to the floor. On the windowsill sat opened boxes of plant food and a mist-sprayer.

  Sanders, a tall, Lincolnesque man with dark smudges on his bare arms, carefully placed his cheese sandwich on a white paper napkin and shook hands with Nudger. Everyone at the table was dressed in a workshirt and dark-stained jeans and was wearing a similarly soiled blue work apron. Picking up his coffee and sandwich, Sanders led Nudger to a table near the end of the long room, where they could talk privately.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” he asked Nudger, before they sat down at the gray Formica table.

  Nudger said no thanks, and they sat. Neither man said anything while a tall, redheaded woman in a business suit stalked into the lounge, deposited coins in a soup machine near the table, then cursed mightily because the machine hadn’t freed the little captive soup can from its glass cell but had kept the proffered ransom. The woman kicked the machine softly but precisely with the pointed toe of a high-heeled shoe, as if aiming for its groin, before moving down the lounge to another bank of machines that might prove more amiable.

  Nudger went through the routine he’d pursued with Gantner. The answers were the same. Sanders and Gantner had been in the rear of the store, heard shots, saw the old man on the floor, the old woman staggering around with a bullet wound in her head. Saw her fall, saw Curtis Colt run from the store, gun in hand, and get into a dark green car that screeched away. Sanders had only caught a glimpse of the car as it sped past the display window, and said he didn’t hear the shot Colt had allegedly fired from the speeding car.

  “Did you get a good look at Colt’s face?” Nudger asked, knowing Sanders had testified in court that he had.

  Sanders took a big bite of his cheese sandwich, chewing with his mouth open. His melancholy eyes were thoughtful. “Pretty good.” For a moment Nudger thought he was commenting on the sandwich, then realized Sanders was talking about the look he’d gotten at Colt. “All this takes a lot of time to tell, but it happened fast, only a couple of seconds. I got as good a look at him as I could have in that short a time.”

  Nudger shoved the lakeside photo across the table for Sanders to look at again, the one where Colt was holding a beer can high in a defiant toast. “And you’re sure this is the man?”

  Sanders gulped coffee, wiped his mouth as he stared down at the snapshot. “I don’t know that from this photo. You tell me it’s Colt, I believe you. I am sure the man I saw in the police lineup, the guy I saw in court, was the one that was in the liquor store with the gun. The one that blasted the old guy and his wife.”

  “But it’s the same man.”

  Sanders shrugged. “Hell, you know photos. You take my picture, I look handsome.”

  Nudger doubted that, but he nodded and put the snapshot back into his pocket. “Did you see the getaway-car driver?”

  “Got a glance, is all. Guy with long darkish hair, leaning over the steering wheel like he was trying to coax more speed outa the car.”

  “Colt had dark hair, wavy and almost shoulder-length.”

  Sanders grinned. “I know where you’re going with that one, Nudger. Colt’s lawyer tried it in court. Tricky little bastard; I gotta give him that. Full of more twists and turns than a double-jointed break dancer. But he couldn’t shake me. It was Colt I saw in that liquor store. No doubt whatsoever here. Curtis Colt.”

  “How do you feel about capital punishment, Mr. Sanders?”

  “I believe in it. Human life’s the most precious thing there is; you take somebody’s and you oughta die for it. And Colt took somebody’s life.”

  “But you didn’t recognize him positively in the photograph.”

  “He wasn’t in a photograph when he was in the liquor store.”

  That was a good point, Nudger conceded, looking at Sanders and thinking that with a wart on his cheek the man really would look like Lincoln.

  Sanders shot a glance at his watch. “I gotta get back and grade some tires or I get docked; we’re slaves here.”

  “I suspect someday you’ll do something about that,” Nudger said.

  Sanders looked around furtively and lowered his voice. “You mean the union?”

  “Exactly,” Nudger said, and thanked him for giving up part of his lunch break and left.

  As he drove from Roll-On Recap City’s parking lot and turned onto Dorsett Road, Nudger realized that being in the presence of all that glassed-in food had made him hungry. Claudia Bettencourt would be at a faculty meeting today until one o’clock. Nudger phoned her at Stowe High School and asked if she wanted to meet him for lunch. She said sure, at her apartment. Good girl.

  Though he was in West County, he was still closer to Claudia’s south St. Louis apartment than she was, so he got there first and let himself in with his key.

  It was an old, spacious apartment on Wilmington, high-ceilinged and with steam-radiator heat. There was no central air-conditioning. The place was stuffy, with a faint scent of cooking gas mingled with the trapped summer heat. Nudger walked to the window air conditioner in the living room and switched it on. He stood for a moment in its humming, gurgling coolness, turning so the chilled draft dried his shirt where it was stuck to his back. The draperies at the opposite window caught the gentle movement of air and began swaying in slow rhythm like dreamy dance partners.

  Claudia had lived in the apartment long enough for it to have taken on a settled appearance. The furniture, some of it new and financed through her job teaching at Stowe School, had adapted to its surroundings and seemed to have grown where it sat on the worn blue carpet. There was a clear glass ashtray with a compressed and bent cigarette butt in it on the coffee table and a stack of outdated newspapers on the floor alongside the sofa. Claudia didn’t smoke; Nudger wondered who had snubbed out a cigarette here.

  He walked into the kitchen. It was still too warm in there. He got a Budweiser out of the refrigerator, then returned to the cooler living room before popping the tab on the beer can. No need for a glass. He sat in a corner of the sofa where he could feel cool movement of air, found that morning’s Post on top of the stack of papers, and checked the front section.

  There was a photograph of Scott Scalla grinning while cutting a ribbon in front of a new factory in St. Charles. There was a piece about a county cop who had broken under strain and shot himself and his wife, and next to that a three-column article was advising people how to stay cool in the smothering grip of the present heat wave. There was nothing on Curtis Colt. He was old news and would be until a few days before his execution, when the media would get interested in whether he’d mak
e a last-minute confession or order strawberries and pickles for his final meal. Murderers sure weren’t like the rest of us; it was fun and more than a little scary to peek into their minds.

  Nudger sighed, sipped beer, and turned to the sports page to read about the Cardinals’ fourth straight victory. They’d won last night in extra innings. There was a photograph of Tommy Herr doing his muscular ballet over second base as he pivoted gracefully for the double play. Nudger thought Herr might be even smoother than Scott Scalla.

  Claudia opened the door, pivoted neatly herself, and unloaded an armload of books and folders onto the table in the hall.

  “Homework,” she said, grinning at Nudger. “It’s a little-known fact that teachers have more homework than their students. All this stuff has to be graded.” She was teaching summer school this year, a heavy schedule.

  She looked great, wearing a simple navy-blue dress that set off her long dark hair and brown eyes. Her waist appeared especially slim in the sashed dress; her lean features were perfect except for a narrow nose that some might have found too long but that Nudger thought gave her a noble look and conveyed a subtle but volatile sexiness. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and Nudger liked to behold, then to hold.

  He waited like a patient cobra until she got near enough, then pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. She was heavy for her leanness, solid and strong. She returned the kiss, using her tongue.

  “There are different kinds of homework,” Nudger pointed out. “Some on subjects more interesting than the English you teach.”

  She climbed off his lap and primly straightened her dress. “It’s the afternoon.”

  He glanced at the light streaming through the window and nodded. Afternoon, all right. A sex act might change all that, throw all the time zones out of whack.