"With lead in it." Nudger jotted down the phone number she read off to him. She repeated it with the same slowness and careful enunciation he'd heard on the recorder. "Who's Laura Cather?" he asked.
"You the detective, Nudger. You puzzle it out." She hung up.
Nudger depressed the cradle button and pecked out the number C. Davis had given him.
After three rings, a sleepy-sounding woman answered. She said she was Laura Cather, and she didn't seem surprised when he told her who he was and that he wanted to talk with her about Claudia Bettencourt. C. Davis, mother- hen menace, must have paved the way for him.
He made an appointment with Laura Cather for later that morning at her apartment on Wyoming, on the city's south side. Then he sat back in his squeaking swivel chair, played out a faint but shrill rhythm by gently rocking back and forth, and thought about Hugo Rumbo watching him and Claudia. Nudger didn't like it, not at all. But he was sure that Rumbo's job was to watch him, and when ordered, apply direct pressure to intimidate. Rumbo really wasn't dangerous except in a shallow, ineffectual way. Partly because he was who he was, partly because he was an extension of Agnes Boyington, who was wont to maim souls and not mere bodies. It wouldn't be her style to have Rumbo harm Claudia to scare Nudger. Not only would that be too risky after what she'd told the police, but the weapons she'd chosen in the duel of life were more subtle and infinitely more dangerous. Still, Nudger didn't want Rumbo to frighten Claudia. Neither did C. Davis. It was good that she had called. It was reassuring that she was watching out for Claudia.
Wyoming Avenue was in the section of South Saint Louis that was a gridwork of streets named after states. As if that weren't confusing enough, the streets all looked alike, all straight and narrow, all lined with similar flat-roofed brick row houses or flats, with tiny square front yards bisected by short strips of concrete leading from steps to sidewalk. It was an old section of town that hadn't changed much in twenty years. Many of the houses had been in the same families' possession for twice that long, and it wasn't unusual to find people who had lived in the same shotgun flat for a quarter of a century without ever having signed a lease, paying monthly rent to the same landlord when he came around on the first to be sure the lawn was mowed or the walk cleared of snow. "Scrubby Dutch" the predominantly German Catholics of the area were sometimes called, and Nudger had often seen elderly women bent over scrubbing the curbs in front of their flats, or taping plastic flowers on the branches of dead shrubbery. There was plenty of front-yard religious statuary here, and more than a few plastic flamingos perched inelegantly on long spike legs. There were rough neighborhoods in the area, populated by rough folks, but for the most part it was one of the more stable sections of the city.
Laura Cather lived in a typical flat-roofed building on a drab, treeless stretch of Wyoming east of Grand. Nudger rang the bell to her second-floor flat and heard someone descending the stairs to her separate entrance. Taut white sheer curtains parted on the door's window, and a bespectacled blue eye peered fishlike out through the glass at Nudger before the door swung open.
Laura Cather was an emaciated-looking faded blond woman still in her twenties. She was narrow of bust and hip, and her blouse and slacks hung from her frame as if from a misshapen hanger. Her bare arms were a few ounces from bone. The only substantial things about her were an old- fashioned silver brooch whose weight was pulling the material of her blouse crooked, and her wide, round tortoise-shell glasses that threatened to slide down her narrow nose and shatter at Nudger's feet.
"I'm Nudger," Nudger said.
She smiled with terrible, yellowed teeth. Despite it all, she was somehow wanly pretty, like an ethereal consumptive. "I know," she said. "Coreen Davis described you. Won't you come up?"
Nudger followed her up the rubber-treaded stairs to her flat, which was larger than he'd imagined. Or maybe it seemed that way because of the bare wood floors and paucity of furniture. There was a worn modern sofa on one wall, on the opposite wall a director's chair with red canvas next to a squarish plastic table. On the far wall was a card table that managed to support a portable electric type writer and some stacks of papers. There was a chipped white- enameled kitchen chair at the table, and a sheet of paper protruding rigidly from the typewriter's platen. Laura Cather had been busy when Nudger arrived.
"I'm typing resumes," she explained, noticing his curiosity. "Have a seat, please."
Nudger watched her settle her frail body on the couch as he sat down in the director's chair. He felt like yelling "Action!" to begin their conversation.
"Coreen thinks I should tell you about Claudia Betten- court," she said. "If she thinks that, there must be a sound reason."
"There is," Nudger said. "Coreen Davis doesn't want Claudia to be hurt. Neither do I."
"Nor I, Mr. Nudger."
"What's the connection between you and Claudia?"
"I used to be a social worker for the Department of Corrections, a public employee doing pre-sentencing investigation. That was before the federal government decided policy was more important than people and cut our agency's funds." She waved a pale, thin hand in a casual gesture of helplessness. "I've been out of work for almost a year. I'm not bitching, because I'm not an isolated case."
Nudger was suddenly uneasy. His stomach let him know it was there. "You said pre-sentencing. Was Claudia convicted of some crime?"
"I'll tell you about Claudia Bettencourt," Laura said, in the tone that people use when they're about to begin at the beginning. "She was raised by a foster father who abused her as a child. Not sexually, but he beat her. That leaves its mark, Mr. Nudger. It stays in the mind and body like an infectious disease. Real child abuse isn't what most people imagine. It's not some frazzled parent losing control under stress and lashing out in a fit of temper. It's systematic and frequent. And unbelievably violent. It's not a bloody nose, it's blood on the walls. And the sickening truth is that neither the victim nor the perpetrator can help what's happening, or prevent it from happening again."
"Did Claudia abuse her own children?" Nudger asked, remembering his conversation with Ralph Ferris outside her door.
"She did," Laura Cather said, not simply looking at Nudger, but studying him. "She was one of the smart and brave ones; she tried to get help. But four years ago, while she was undergoing therapy, her three-year-old daughter, Vicki, contracted influenza. A simple case of the flu. Only the child was found in a coma one winter morning with her bedroom window open. She died two days later of pneumonia."
"Are you saying Claudia deliberately left the window open?"
"I'm not. But that's what her husband claimed when she was tried on a child-abuse charge, a second-degree murder charge."
"What was her defense?" Nudger asked. He felt hollow yet heavy, as if the thin canvas of the director's chair might at any second rip to dump him onto the floor. Maybe he could have Laura Cather play that last scene a different way. Take Two, with feeling.
"At first she denied opening the window. Vehemently denied it, as the lawyers say. Her lawyers advanced the theory that maybe the husband or one of the other kids opened the window and forgot it. Or maybe the sick child herself had climbed out of bed to open it. They do that sometimes if they have a fever, trying to cool off. But the prosecution kept pounding away at Claudia, and eventually she didn't know herself whether she'd opened that window. Child abuse is an emotional issue, Mr. Nudger, and Claudia had a history of it. The jury knew that history and voted to convict. I was assigned to conduct the pre-sentencing investigation, learn what I could about the defendant and make recommendations to help the judge decide how severe her sentence should be."