John Lutz - Nightlines

He wasn't really sure why he'd driven here. Maybe he simply wanted to see the house where Claudia had lived with Ralph Ferris and their daughters, where one of those daughters had died. It was an ordinary house that might have been the setting for a TV family situation comedy, a house you wouldn't suspect could harbor such problems and potential hells. Here was where a young family should be worrying about paying the mortgage, or whether they could afford to send one of the kids to a private school and get dental braces for the others. Child abuse, death, probably didn't occur very often on Nightingale Drive. Or did they? Walls were walls, regardless of their contemporary middle- America facade. And people were people, and inside those walls they would behave like people, despite the visions of themselves instilled by current movies, sitcoms, and television commercials.

Nudger sat in the parked Volkswagen a few houses down and across the street from the Ferris house and tried to imagine Claudia living there. He couldn't. She did not belong in this stifling suburban sameness. Maybe that had exacerbated her problem.

Several young boys were playing in a front yard half a block down, crouching behind cars or shrubbery, dashing from cover to cover in some sort of game where they were trying to sneak up and surprise each other. Nudger looked around at the other houses on Nightingale, wondering what games were being played behind their walls this evening, between the boys' parents and the people like them.

He found out part of the answer.

"Can I help you with something?" Ralph Ferris was standing on the curbside of the Volkswagen, leaning down and staring in at Nudger. "A neighbor phoned and told me there was someone watching my house."

Nudger got out of the car, his mind whirling, plucking at understanding. Ferris had gone out his back door, then around the block, to approach the car from behind. Sly Ralph. As sneaky as he looked. Nudger saw the subtle lift of the man's bony features as Ferris recognized him.

"Hey, you're Claudia's boyfriend!" he said.

Nudger gave him a smile and slight shake of the head. "No, Mr. Ferris. My name is Nudger. I hope you'll forgive me for describing myself as a friend of your former wife. Actually, I've never met her. I'm doing some checking into her background for American Hosts, Incorporated. She's applied for a job at one of our hotel restaurants. We routinely check into the backgrounds of all our prospective employees. We feel we owe it to our clientele."

Ferris appeared dubious, but he was close to buying Nudger's explanation. He put his hands in the pockets of his casual khaki slacks, shifted his weight on his blue Nike jogging shoes. He was willing to listen to more, but not much more.

Nudger handed him a business card. Nothing convinced like the officialism of print. Detectives and dictators knew it.

"It says here you're a private investigator," Ferris said, staring at the card as if it might at any second leap from his hand to his throat.

Nudger smiled again. "I do all of the regional American Hosts preemployment inquiries. It's a contractual arrangement."

"But why are you watching my house? Claudia doesn't live here now, hasn't for years."

"Occasionally an inquiry takes on aspects that require deeper investigation, Mr. Ferris." Nudger made himself appear uncomfortable. It wasn't difficult. "Frankly, one of my operatives has reported some unusual circumstances in Mrs. Ferris's-"

"Ms. Bettencourt's-" Ferris interrupted.

"-Ms. Bettencourt's background. Now, I don't say that these rumors, if true, necessarily disqualify her from the job. But her application doesn't mention any such… trouble. Certainly American Hosts has a right to make inquiries before hiring someone, wouldn't you say? These days, with the unions so strong…" Nudger shrugged, as if once Claudia was hired she could do most anything she wanted at American Hosts' restaurants, including roughing up young customers who spilled the salt.

Ferris leaned back to rest his angular buttocks on the Volkswagen's fender. He removed his hands from his pockets and crossed his scrawny arms, settling down to talk. He was had.

"I'll ask directly so as not to waste your time and mine," Nudger said. "Has Claudia Bettencourt had any sort of trouble with the law?"

Ferris smiled. Very slightly, but he smiled. "Not if you don't count murder," he said.

Nudger appeared properly jolted. Then he grinned. "For a second you had me wondering. Now-"

"Oh, I wasn't joking, Mr. Nudger."

"No?" Nudger put on his gravest expression. He reached into the glove compartment of the Volkswagen and got out his spiral notebook and a pen. This was something American Hosts would have to know about in detail. "Suppose you tell me about it, Mr. Ferris."

To say Ferris was glad to cooperate was to say bears liked honey. "There's no way to really know the person you marry, not until it might be too late. I knew Claudia had a temper, that she'd hit one of the kids too hard now and then. But it got worse every year, then every month. She'd beat up on our two daughters regularly when I wasn't around- sometimes when I was around. I couldn't stop her; she was like she was crazy. Hell, she really was crazy."

"Did she seek professional help?"

"Yeah, she saw a shrink. It cost plenty and it didn't help."

"You mentioned murder," Nudger said, pen poised. He glanced down the street and saw two young, sober faces peering from the Ferris picture window. Dark hair, dark eyes. Nora and Joan. What did they think of their mother?

"Yeah, murder," Ralph Ferris was saying. "I told you Claudia had beaten our two daughters, but we had a third kid, Vicki. She was only three years old, and Claudia hadn't really gotten to her yet. At least not that I knew of. Then one winter Vicki came down with a bad case of the flu. She was puking and crying a lot, causing a fuss, making trouble like any sick kid would. Claudia went into her bedroom one night, opened the window, and left it open. The temperature outside was nearly zero. The flu became pneumonia, and Vicki died. Claudia left the window open on purpose. She murdered Vicki. A court of law said so."

Nudger pretended to take notes, glancing up occasionally at Ferris. The man was speaking in a kind of furious monotone, as if by rote, and seemed more angry than sorrowful over the death of his daughter. The righteous wrath of the guilty?

"She got probation, can you believe it?" Ferris said in disgust. "She never spent a night in jail. Nobody even mentioned the death penalty, what with the pansy-ass courts we got these days."

Nudger was surprised. "Do you think she should have been executed?"

Ferris stood up straight, his anger suddenly aimed at Nudger. "Sure, I think that! Don't you? An eye for an eye, the Bible says. She took a human life, didn't she?"

"I guess so," Nudger said, drawing another five-pointed star in his notebook without lifting the pen. He started a Terrible Swift Sword.

Ferris was grinning gauntly, like a cadaver aglow with a life not its own. "You're not here representing some hotel chain," he said. "Am I right?"

Nudger said nothing. He realized that he'd never had Ferris completely fooled.

"Sure, I'm right. You really are that murderous bitch's boyfriend, trying to find out if what you heard about her is true. Well, it is true, brother. But don't take my word for it; it's a matter of public record."

"So is the burning of witches."

"Meaning?"

"The people who did the burning, they were the real murderers."

The flesh around Ferris's mouth twitched involuntarily, not at all like a smile. He went pale and stood rigid with rage, eyes gleaming with a hate that needed fear to fuel such intensity. "We're done talking," he said. There was a fleck of spittle on his taut lower lip.