Thicker Than Blood (Alo Nudger Series) Read online

  “Claudia?” the bug man said.

  “She’s about to leave for work.”

  “You mean an exterminator?” Claudia asked.

  Nudger shook his head no. Wriggled his eyebrows again.

  “I don’t wanna talk to her,” said the bug man. “I just wanted to make sure she was the someone else you were talking to, so I could know it’d be okay for you to talk.”

  “How’d you know I was at Claudia’s?” There were certain aspects of his work Nudger didn’t want her involved in, like securities swindles and folks with guns.

  “I called you, Nudger, remember? I figured you were at Claudia’s if you weren’t at your apartment or office, so I looked up her number.”

  Claudia moved toward the door, waving good-bye to Nudger.

  “I’m barely awake,” Nudger said. “We better talk later, maybe meet someplace.”

  Claudia had paused at the door, mouthing “me?” and tapping her chest between her teacup-sized breasts with her forefinger.

  “Bug man,” Nudger said.

  “What?” asked the bug man.

  “Not you,” Nudger said.

  “Not who?” Claudia whispered.

  “Let’s meet at Danny’s in an hour,” Nudger suggested, violently shaking his head no at Claudia. Not her at Danny’s. She glared at him angrily and left.

  “If you promise I don’t have to eat any of them lead-and-lard doughnuts,” the bug man said. “That guy Danny forces them on people.”

  “It’s a promise.”

  As he hung up the phone, Nudger heard the apartment door to the hall open and shut. Claudia on her way. He lay still for a few minutes, until he picked up the muted sounds of her car starting down on Wilmington and driving away.

  His teeth felt huge and fuzzy and he had a headache. He’d drunk too much wine at dinner. Then after dinner. He’d fallen asleep on the sofa while watching the Cardinals play the Mets on television. He didn’t know who’d won the game. He vaguely remembered Ray Lankford striking out. Nudger had struck out, too, with Claudia. Dozed off, for Christsakes, like some kind of middle-aged husband in a TV sitcom. Well, he wasn’t anybody’s husband and he wasn’t in a sitcom, even if he was into his forties. He’d make it up to Claudia soon. Make it up to himself. He wished the bug man had phoned an hour earlier and she was still here getting dressed. Undressed. Ah, well.

  After a shower and the last inch of black liquid from Claudia’s Mr. Coffee, his headache was gone and the morning light no longer hurt his eyes.

  He locked the apartment behind him and drove the Granada west. The old car seemed to feel pretty good this morning, accelerating away from traffic signals without its customary wheeze and clatter, charging with spirit into its own elongated shadow.

  The bug man was already at Danny’s Donuts when Nudger arrived, sitting hunched over at the counter explaining to Danny how he’d already had breakfast and wasn’t hungry. A white Styrofoam cup full of coffee was sitting in front of him. Danny had gotten that far.

  “Ah, Nudger,” the bug man said, swiveling on his stool. “Let’s go up to your office where we can talk.” He made frantic expressions with his eyes while he chewed his lower lip.

  “You can talk private business here if you want,” Danny offered. “I got work to do in back. That office’ll be hot as Madonna, Nudge.”

  Nudger had never compared his office to Madonna. He didn’t think the analogy held up.

  “Besides,” Danny said, “talk here’n you can have breakfast on the house.”

  The bug man slid off his stool and stood tucking in his silky, perspiration-stained shirt. He was already out the door when Nudger said, “I’ll be back down later for a doughnut and coffee, Danny.”

  “Wait!” Danny said, bustling out from behind the counter. “Your friend forgot this.” He handed Nudger the cup full of the truly horrible coffee, which oozed from the giant steel urn every morning, then wiped grease from his hands onto his white apron. “He mize well take it upstairs with him.”

  Nudger thanked him and hurried to catch up with the bug man, who was waiting outside his office door at the top of the stairwell.

  When he tried to hand the bug man the coffee cup, the bug man sneered and crammed his hands deep into his pockets. He rocked his weight from leg to leg while Nudger keyed the lock and pushed the door open. Nudger hadn’t needed the key, actually; he’d forgotten to lock up again when he’d left. He did that too often. Under present circumstances, he decided to be more careful.

  Danny was right about the heat, but probably wrong about Madonna. Nudger switched on the air conditioner in the window near the desk. Like all things mechanical, it did not respond well to Nudger. It clattered, hummed, whined, then settled into a state of mechanical resignation and emitted a stream of reasonably cool air. Who knew how long it would last?

  “Hotter’n Kathleen Turner in here,” the bug man said, dropping into the chair in front of the desk and twitching around in discomfort.

  Nudger excused himself, then went into the little half-bath and poured the coffee down the drain. He didn’t run any water. Danny might hear it in the pipes and suspect.

  The office was beginning to cool down, he noticed, when he returned and settled into his squealing swivel chair behind the desk. He saw that the glowing little window on his answering machine said he had two messages. Something to cope with later.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked the bug man.

  “I didn’t let one of them doughnuts near me, but the coffee’s even worse than the last time I was here.”

  “I mean about the Rand house.”

  “Oh. Like I said, the job’s done. The place is wired for sound, every room. Voice-activated. The receiver’s stashed nearby and will record everything that goes on in there even if it’s mice making love. You got a real-time indicator so you know when what was said.”

  Nudger wiped his perspiring hand down his face, trying not to imagine what mice might say to each other if they could speak during intercourse. “Real time as opposed to unreal time?”

  “Exactly. It’ll all run together in unreal time on the tape, but you’ll also get a reading of actual time. I mean, like, if Rand says something at ten o’clock, then nothing else till noon, the two things he said’ll be one right after the other on the tape, seconds apart, but you can look at the real-time indicator to see what times he said them, how much time there was in between.”

  “So there’s nobody personally monitoring what’s being said in the house?”

  “That’d be godawful expensive, Nudger. You want that?”

  “No. How do I get the tape?”

  The bug man reached into a pocket then laid a key on the desk. “The receiver and recorder are in the trunk of a blue Chevy parked in the block behind the house. Four hours’ worth of tape, which should be enough since we’re working voice-activated. Every evening you drive by there and open the trunk, take out the old cassettes, then insert fresh ones from the box in the trunk. There’s a recorder in there for you to take with you and use. It’ll give you the times the conversations took place. I want it back when this is over.”

  Nudger swiveled a few degrees in his chair and stared out at some pigeons on a ledge across the street. He thought the setup the bug man had described would do okay. He swiveled back to face the bug man and said so.

  “I got the most sensitive listening devices on the market in that house,” the bug man told him, “and the same goes for the recording equipment in the car trunk. You’ll be able to hear a pen drop.”

  “A pin?”

  “That I doubt.” That bug man had apparently forgotten about the amorous mice. He stood up. It was impossible for him to stay in one position very long, and the office was still uncomfortably warm.

  “You’re sure the bugs are planted where they won’t be found?” Nudger asked.

  “Don’t ask such a thing, Nudger.”

  “But the family was home. You had to work fast.”

  “Fast is how
I work anyway. And I like it when somebody’s home and asleep where I’m doing a job. I know right where they are, so they ain’t gonna come traipsing through the front door and surprise me. And I can hear their breathing and monitor it while I do my work. I know how sleep-breathing sounds, Nudger. If it changes and they’re awake and listening, I’ll know right away and get outa there. I can’t be fooled.”

  “I didn’t mean to question your competence,” Nudger said. “It’s just that this is a sticky matter.”

  “Hey, I understand. Another thing you might wanna know is your girlfriend’s phone is clean. I got equipment that picks it up if the unit on the other end of the line is tapped, so our conversation this morning was private.”

  Ah, microchips! Nudger had a sudden thought. “What about my office phone?”

  “Clean, too,” the bug man said.

  “How do you know?”

  “This is where I called you from this morning, right there sitting in your chair. I only talk on clean lines. I mean, I got something at stake here, too.”

  “Now I know I need to remember to lock my door when I leave.”

  The bug man smiled. “You didn’t forget. Locks ain’t nothing to me but turnstiles.” He told Nudger the license number of the blue Chevy, to prevent him from maybe tampering with the wrong car. Then he eased out the door. Nudger heard his soft but rapid footsteps as he took the stairs down to the street door.

  For the next half hour Nudger busied himself with paper work, shifting unpaid bills to the past-due pile, past-due bills to the final-notice pile. It made him feel better, getting a kind of overview of his finances.

  He punched the Message button on his answering machine with some trepidation.

  The first message was from Eileen, who had taken time out from her busy and profitable day as sales manager for the thinly disguised pyramid scam that sold household products, to call Nudger and threaten litigation if he didn’t part with the twelve hundred dollars he owed her. He felt a surge of futile anger. It was only nine hundred. She knew that.

  The second message was also from Eileen, threatening more litigation . . .

  He fast-forwarded the machine, then erased both messages. He’d pay Eileen if he could possibly afford it; he knew she and Henry Mercato could use the money to buy more mutual funds. But he didn’t have an extra nine hundred, or even an extra hundred, after paying his creditors who would actually turn off services or show up to repossess things. So he simply wouldn’t think about Elieen. What was the use?

  He knew what he was going to do, really, though his stomach kept trying to talk him out of it. Thanks to the bug man, he could stay clear of the Rand residence, but he had to keep a watch on Rand away from home. It was the only way he could do his job. Which was the only way he could get paid. Which was . . .

  Well, the endless cycle of the common man.

  He stood up from the squealing chair and grabbed his sport jacket and tie from the closet and slung them over his arm.

  In case the uncommon Dale Rand led him somewhere upscale.

  And in case, if he got seriously injured along the way, he might be mistaken for somebody with medical insurance.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nudger didn’t go into the Medwick Building this time. Instead he sat across the street in the Granada where he could watch the entrance. Chestnut Street was crowded with pedestrians as well as vehicular traffic, so he didn’t think he had to worry about the man with the gun and earring doing a rerun of the scene out by the golf course. Besides, Nudger knew Hammersmith was probably right; the guy was trying to scare him off the case rather than kill him, or there would have been no conversation and now there would be no Nudger. The problem was, he couldn’t be sure it would be the same the next time. That left adequate room for fear.

  His stomach twitched against his belt buckle as he thumbed an antacid tablet off the roll and popped it into his mouth. He got a little aluminum foil with it and spat it out, but not before it came into contact with a silver filling and caused a galvanic reaction that gave him a tiny but painful shock. He chewed while time crawled.

  A little after one o’clock, Rand came walking out of the Medwick Building and started up the sidewalk toward Nudger but on the other side of the street. He had on a terrific blue suit today, and a great shine on his shoes, and the intrepid bearing of a door-to-door evangelist who knew he was right by divine decree. All in all, he was bright as a new dime. Even on the teeming sidewalk, he strode in a straight line. Folks got out of his way because it was obvious he knew they would.

  Nudger waited until Rand had passed, then climbed out of the Granada and walked a few steps behind him, on the opposite side of the street. He had difficulty keeping up. People kept bumping into him. A large woman juggling several shopping bags said something to him that he didn’t understand, but that was unquestionably venomous.

  Finally Rand stopped outside Miss Hullings, an upscale cafeteria, which had been in the same downtown location for decades. He glanced around, then went inside.

  Nudger debated with himself about staying outside and waiting for Rand to emerge. Then he noticed he was perspiring, and he was still getting bumped by pedestrians even though he was leaning with his back against a brick wall. Also, he was hungry.

  He crossed the street toward the cafeteria.

  The pungent, mingled scents of the hot food increased his appetite. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, though the serving line was still long. Many of the diners had already finished lunch and left to return to their offices.

  Rand was at the other end of the line, near the cash register, when Nudger picked up his tray. While waiting for his meatloaf special to be served, he kept an eye on Rand to see where he’d sit.

  As Rand walked away from the cashier, carrying his well-stocked tray, Nudger noticed for the first time that he was with the man who’d been behind him in line: a short, stocky type, bald on top but with a lot of frizzy gray hair around his ears. He was wearing a brown business suit, so Nudger didn’t recognize him at first. Then, as he watched the two men sit down at a table, he realized the gray-haired man had been one of Rand’s golf partners yesterday.

  “ . . . gravy or doncha?” a woman’s irritated voice asked.

  Nudger turned back toward his food. A tired looking server was standing with a ladleful of rich brown gravy poised over his mashed potatoes, her eyebrows raised inquisitively.

  “Just a tad,” Nudger instructed, remembering his cholesterol count from one of those free readings at Walgreen’s Drugstore.

  The woman emptied the entire greasy content of the ladle on his plate and handed it to him. He started to protest, but she was focusing all of her attention on the woman behind Nudger in line, another meatloaf special, asking the gravy question again. Nudger continued toward the cashier. On the way, he selected a large wedge of apple pie for dessert to console himself. If he was going to eat all that gravy, the additional cholesterol and calories of the pie could do scant additional harm. And it figured that Rand and his companion would be quite a while at lunch, the way their trays had been laden with food.

  He thought he might be able to get a table close enough to overhear what they were saying, but as he was moving toward the last one within earshot, an old man in a golf cap and colorful flower-pattern tropical shirt took it. Nudger sat at a table behind him, angling his chair so he could see Rand and his lunch companion.

  When the old guy in the flowered shirt had finished eating and was picking his teeth, Nudger was mechanically consuming apple pie, watching the balding gray-haired man remove a sheet of paper from his briefcase. The man brushed crumbs from the table, then laid the paper on it sideways so both he and Rand could see it. He talked to Rand about whatever was on the paper for about ten minutes, now and then tapping it with the tip of a silver pen he’d unclipped from his suit jacket’s breast pocket. People didn’t usually do that, carry pens clipped where fancy handkerchiefs sometimes rode. Nudger had carried a pen like that once and ruined a jacke
t with ink.

  Rand folded the paper and slipped it into an inside pocket, and both men finished lunch in what appeared to be thoughtful silence.

  As he followed them out of the restaurant and watched them shake hands and then part, it seemed no mystery to Nudger where Rand was walking—back to his office at Kearn-Wisdom Brokerage. The man with the halo of bushy gray hair seemed to be the most interesting to shadow.

  Safest, too.

  With an energetic, bouncy stride that made it difficult for Nudger to keep pace without breaking into a trot, Rand’s lunch companion bounded north on Eleventh Street, then west on Washington, where he entered an old and ornate office building.

  Breathing heavily, Nudger followed and watched him step into an elevator.

  The lobby featured marbled walls, tarnished brass, and a tile floor marked with smudges where cigarettes had died beneath heels. Still, it was clean and in good repair; old as it was, the building was well maintained, as if waiting for better times.

  The ancient brass arrow above the elevator door lurched to the 7 then stopped. Started. Retreated. Stopped again and remained frozen. It had made up its mind.

  Nudger was alone in the lobby, which exited both on Washington and the next block, Lucas. There had once been small shops in the lobby, but now they were closed, their windows soaped over. He walked to the directory and saw that there was only one business on the seventh floor: Compu-Data Industries. He got in the elevator and rode.

  Compu-Data Industries didn’t occupy the entire floor. All of the offices appeared to be vacant except for the ones at the far end of the hall. Nudger walked toward them, his soles making soft sucking sounds on floor tiles softened by the heat. He hoped Compu-Data’s offices were air-conditioned.

  Two doors near the end of the hall had block lettering on their frosted glass. One read, “Compu-Data Industries,” the other, “Dr. Horace Walling.” So, a business not yet on the lobby directory. Maybe the doctor was a new tenant. Maybe he was, in fact, Dale Rand’s physician. Or psychiatrist. This might prove interesting.