Free The Right To Sing the Blues by John Lutz Page B

she owed her supplier and couldn’t come up with payment. Maybe she met a man. Maybe she just got up one morning with an itch to change the scenery around her.” Hammersmith leaned back with his cigar and added to the considerable pollution in the tiny office. “Now, if you don’t mind, Nudge, crime of a more recent nature needs tending.”
    Nudger stood up, finding the haze denser nearer the ceiling. It made his eyes water. He thanked Hammersmith for the information and started toward the door.
    “Don’t take chances around David Collins,” Hammer-smith cautioned from behind another billowing green cloud. “You’re skating on thin ice over deep water. And your few friends who might pull you out and dry you off are here and not in New Orleans.”
    Sage advice, Nudger thought, even if offered in the wrong season. He nodded good-bye and left Hammersmith alone in air that only he could breathe.
    As he walked across the station house’s black-top parking lot, where his battered Volkswagen squatted patiently in a visitors’ slot, Nudger thought about the long-gone Jacqui James. Hammersmith was right; she wasn’t the sort of woman who would be searched for with any real effort. Not like Ineida Collins, who would be searched for with everything from bloodhounds to spy satellites. Of course, Willy Hollister didn’t know that; to him, Ineida Collins was Ineida Mann, and probably didn’t seem much different from Jacqui James, who was or had been the kind of independent, unfettered woman that Ineida only pretended to be. Jacqui James had been burned; Ineida Collins was still flitting experimentally around the alluring flame. It was a flame that might have claimed more than one victim. That still burned fiercely.
    Nudger got into the sun-heated Volkswagen and drove to Jacqui James’ last known address, wondering if he was the only person anywhere who still cared about what might have happened to her.
    I X
    acqui James had lived in a six-family brick apartment building in a bad block of Alabama in south St. Louis. The building’s wood trim was blistered and cracked, parched for paint, and chunks of the facade up near the flat roof had crumbled away to leave irregular gaps. The top of the building reminded Nudger of a jaw with teeth missing.
    Nudger checked the mailboxes in the littered, graffiti-profaned vestibule and saw that the manager lived in 2-D. He was pleased to see that the name was still Miss I. Gor man. He went up the stairs to the landing and knocked on the door.
    Irma Gorman surprised Nudger. He’d expected an older woman. She looked no more than twenty-five, and was plump, blue-eyed, and attractive. The material of her blue blouse gaped, straining at the white buttons down her breast. Her designer jeans were tight everywhere, as if encasing her were a privilege they never wanted to give up.
    “Miss Gorman?”
    She nodded.
    “Are you the Irma Gorman who was manager here four years ago, when Jacqui James was reported missing?”
    For a moment the doll-like blue eyes were blank. Then they sharpened with remembrance and maybe wariness. “I’m the one who reported Miss James missing. Has she been found?”
    “Not yet. Can I come in and ask you a few questions?”
    “You a policeman?”
    “Nope, private detective.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Irma Gorman said, brightening. She was going to tell him . . . and did: “I never met a real private detective.”
    “Disappointed?” Nudger asked.
    She shrugged and stepped back to let him enter.
    The decor of her apartment was early Sears with K-Mart accessories. Unlike the vestibule that she managed, it was clean and neatly arranged. There was a kind of homey qual ity to it that Nudger liked. Through a door he could see stacks of papers, some tagged keys, and a calculator on a Formica table. The trappings of apartment-managing biz.
    “Please sit down, Mr.—?”
    “Nudger.” He sat on a stiff, plaid early American sofa that probably unfolded into a stiff, plaid