Hotline to Murder (19 page)

“How long do the services last?”

“Often several hours. But you wouldn’t have
to stay for the whole thing. People come in and out. Would you like
me to pick you up?”

“No, I think I can get the car. Where is
this church?”

Tony wanted to scream. From the comments he
heard them making behind him, he knew that Nathan was writing down
the address and drawing a map for her. But Shahla was never going
to make it to the church service because Tony was going to strangle
her first.

Two calls came in simultaneously. Shahla
took one and Nathan the other. Tony sat and fumed and finished
eating his pizza. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Shahla. Then
the phone rang again, and he answered it. It was a man. When Tony
routinely asked his name, the man wouldn’t tell him.

The man said, “I used to work on the Hotline
as a listener. I know all about you people.”

Tony was instantly alert. He asked, “How
long ago was that?”

“I left about a year ago. Because I couldn’t
stand it anymore. The listeners on the Hotline are all stuck-up
jerks. Especially the girls.” He rambled on for several minutes
about how mean everybody had been to him.

“What did you say your name was?” Tony
asked.

“You people pretend that you’re performing a
great service, but you’re really ripping off the callers. You don’t
help them. You laugh at them. The kids would put the calls on the
speaker and everybody in the room would make fun of the
callers.”

“The calls are confidential. And only three
listeners at a time are allowed in the listening room.”

“Bullshit. I was there. On the weekends, at
night, it was party time. Beer and orgies.”

“Alcoholic beverages are not allowed in the
office. Listen, if you have a legitimate complaint, I’d like to
follow up on it, but I need to know your name.”

A click told Tony that he was not going to
learn the caller’s name. Shahla and Nathan were still on the phone
so he couldn’t talk to them about it. He wrote a detailed call
report, mentioning that the caller had a slight accent and sounded
older than a teenager. He painfully got up, walked into the
administration office, and placed the report on Gail’s desk. She
had been volunteer coordinator with the Hotline for years and knew
all the listeners. Maybe she could figure out who it was.

It wasn’t until an hour later that all three
of them were off the phones at the same time. Tony didn’t want to
hear any more talk about Nathan’s church, so he told them about the
call from the former listener.

“You were here a year ago,” Tony said to
Shahla. “Does my description ring any bells with you?”

“No. But of course we don’t know all the
other listeners. Gail is the best bet because she knows them
all.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“From what you said about him, I sense
hostility,” Nathan said, looking out the window rather than at
them. “He’s one of those people who never quite fit in. He’s a
little bit different, a little bit odd. He doesn’t get the girls.
Of course, he blames them for his problems. And you have to admit
that some of the girls here are stuck up.”

“Does that make him a candidate for murder?”
Tony asked.

“It might. It depends on how bad it gets and
how long it lasts. The feelings of anger and alienation build up
inside him until they reach a flash point. And then…pow.”

“Pow,” Shahla said, “meaning…?”

“Anything can happen. But he’ll feel
justified in whatever he does. Because he was wronged.”

Tony winced. “So people like this stockpile
guns and ammunition and then one fine day they walk into the place
where they experienced humiliation and shoot everybody there.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Shahla said, looking
at the outside door apprehensively. “Is the door locked? We don’t
want that guy to come busting in here.”

Tony couldn’t remember whether he had locked
it. He started to get up, but Shahla said, “No, I’ll go. I can get
there in less than half an hour.”

“That was a cruel thing to say,” Nathan said
when Shahla returned and confirmed that the door was locked. “You
sound like the girls the caller was talking about.”

“I’m sorry,” Shahla said sounding sincere.
She put a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “Tony, you know I would never
humiliate you.”

“I know,” Tony said, feeling better than he
had all evening. It was amazing the power a girl could have over a
man. “I just have one question. Nobody told me about the weekend
orgies.”

“You’ll only find them in your dreams,”
Shahla said.

CHAPTER 22

Tony was feeling a little better by Tuesday
evening. Some of the stiffness had left his body. His wounds were
beginning to heal. He felt good enough to whip himself up a mess of
spaghetti for his dinner. His Italian mother had taught him how to
do it. Of course, she made her own tomato sauce, whereas Tony got
his out of a bottle. He also used store-bought hamburger and
spaghetti, but he added basil, oregano, and garlic, just as his
mother had showed him.

As he sipped a beer and spun the spaghetti
worms (as they had seemed to him in his youth) on his fork, he
remembered that he had been going to check Josh’s drawers for
women’s underwear. Except that no opportunity had presented itself.
Until now. This morning, Josh had said he would be home late
tonight. He had some function he was going to attend, related to
his job.

Tony decided he had enough time to eat his
dinner before he conducted a search. His body still complained when
he tried to rush into anything. He ate all the spaghetti he could
manage, saved the rest, and rinsed his dishes. Then he went
upstairs to Josh’s bedroom. He opened the door and turned on the
light. He remembered that if Josh came home while the light was on,
he would see it as he drove into the carport, but Josh wouldn’t be
home for a while. Searching with a flashlight was difficult and
time consuming. Tony wanted to get this over with.

Where should he start, amid this mess that
constituted Josh’s possessions? The dresser drawers presented an
obvious location to check. He would search the easy places first;
he might get lucky. He quickly went through the drawers. He found
socks, T-shirts, handkerchiefs, boxer shorts (one difference
between him and Josh—he wore briefs), a bathing suit, a jockstrap,
baggy shorts for outerwear, but nothing that a girl would consider
wearing. Well, he remembered when girls had worn boxer shorts for a
season, but not this size.

The closet was next. Sweaters and
sweatshirts were stacked on two shelves at the top. He checked
between them and underneath them. Nothing. Dress shirts, sport
shirts, sport coats were hung on hangers. Nothing unusual here.
Josh had a lot of clothes. More than Tony did. And yet he always
looked as if he wasn’t quite put together.

A pile of dirty clothes lay on the floor.
Tony went through this pile, one piece at a time, carefully,
restacking the pile in another spot in reverse sequence. When he
was through, he flipped the pile over and reset it in the original
location—just in case Josh was more observant than he gave him
credit for.

The bending over and kneeling hurt his
knees. He wasn’t going to be able to do this much longer. What was
left? A two-drawer filing cabinet. Tony pulled open each drawer, in
turn, being sure to look in the open space in the back of the
drawers. He found nothing unusual. All that was left to search was
a bunch of brown, cardboard boxes—boxes that Josh had carted around
with him for years, containing all his other possessions.
Keepsakes, mementoes, souvenirs, books, whatever it was that Josh
saved.

Tony didn’t relish the idea of going through
the boxes in his present condition, especially since they were
heavy and stacked three high. He looked at his watch. It was after
nine. He didn’t know when Josh would be home. He’d better wrap this
up soon. He could look inside the boxes on top while standing up.
He decided to do that and then quit for the evening.

The first box contained books. Tony lifted
several out to see what was underneath. More books. He gave a pass
to that box and went on to the next. This one contained papers,
tickets, programs. It was definitely a souvenir box. He had to lift
each item individually and that took time. Near the bottom of the
box he felt something soft, something that wasn’t paper.

He pulled it out and stared in shock. A pair
of white panties. This was what he was looking for, but now that he
had found it, he couldn’t believe it. He had been trying to clear
Josh, not convict him. How long he stood there with the wispy piece
of lingerie in his hand, he didn’t know. It suddenly came to him
that he should find the bra. He searched the rest of the box,
feverishly, but there was no other piece of clothing.

There was no time to search the other boxes.
He interleaved the flaps on the top of the box together the way he
had found them, just as the sound of an engine came from the
carport area. If that was Josh, he had already seen the light on in
his room. Tony would have to bluff his way out of this. He stuffed
the panties into his pocket, turned, and headed for the door. He
never made it.

He forgot about Josh’s swivel chair; he had
moved it into the middle of the room during the search. He tripped
over one of its metal supports and felt flat on his face. And his
bad knee.

Tony let out a yell as the pain hit him like
a Freightliner truck. After a few seconds he tried to get up, but
his leg collapsed, and he was back on the floor again. He was still
there when Josh found him a minute later.

“Holy shit. Tony, what happened?” There was
real concern in Josh’s voice.

“I was trying to check your calendar.” Tony
forced the words out, between spasms of pain. “I can get tickets to
the SC football game on Saturday.”

“But what happened to you?”

“My knee. I fell on my knee.”

“Can you walk?”

Josh helped, or rather lifted, Tony to his
feet. If it hadn’t been for Josh’s continued support, he would have
fallen again. Tony put his left arm over Josh’s shoulder and leaned
against him.

“Help me get to my room.”

“I’m taking you to a room all right—the
emergency room.”

“I’ll be all right. I just need to sit down
for a few minutes.”

“Don’t argue with Uncle Josh. You can’t even
stand up, for crissake.

Josh practically had to carry Tony down the
stairs. When they reached the ground floor, Josh became his left
leg as they slowly made their way out to the carport. He bundled
Tony into his SUV and went around to the driver’s side.

On the way to the hospital, Tony tried again
to explain why he had been in Josh’s room. Josh didn’t listen. He
concentrated on his driving—accelerating and stopping slowly,
easing his way around corners, as if Tony were Humpty Dumpty. Tony
wanted to tell him to drive normally, but he didn’t. He felt
protected, just as he had when he first met Josh in college, and
Josh had taken him under his wing.

***

“I don’t think there’s any permanent
damage,” the young-looking emergency-room physician, whose name
Tony had never caught, said, surveying the X-rays mounted on the
wall. But you’ve got a helluva bruise and some lacerations to boot.
I’ll bet you didn’t get those falling down in your house.”

“No,” Tony agreed. “I got those falling down
a hill.” A paraphrase of the old nursery rhyme kept singing in his
head: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, to see two siblings playing.
Jack fell free and broke his knee….”

“I’m going to give you a pair of crutches,”
the doctor continued, “and a flexible knee brace. But I don’t want
you putting much weight on that knee for a couple of weeks.”

“Will I be able to use that leg to shift
gears in my Porsche?”

“I don’t want you even bending your knee as
much as it takes to get into a Porsche. You need to be driving
something big and roomy, with automatic transmission, that will
allow you to keep your leg straight. And you’re lucky this isn’t
your right knee or you wouldn’t be able to drive at all.”

Lucky? How was he going to work? How was he
going to do anything?

“I know what we’ll do,” Josh said. “We’ll
swap cars. You can drive my Highlander and I’ll drive the
Porsche.”

“If he hadn’t volunteered to trade you, I
would have,” the doctor said smiling. “It’s always been my dream to
own a Porsche, but with a wife and two kids….”

Tony had never let anybody drive his
Porsche, and he would have rated Josh near the bottom of his list
of possibles. But Josh had taken care of him tonight; he had not
only driven him here, but stayed with him for hours while the
paperwork ground slowly, and sicker and more seriously injured
patients gained priority over him.

“Will you promise to drive it the same way
you drove me here tonight?” Tony asked Josh.

“Scout’s honor.”

Josh had never been a boy scout, but there
was another reason Tony was willing to consider it. The pair of
panties was still in his pants pocket, which at the moment hung on
a peg on the wall of the examining room. Fortunately, his wallet
had been in another pocket, so he was able to retrieve his
insurance information without pulling them out, but he was feeling
a fair amount of guilt at violating Josh’s privacy.

CHAPTER 23

Tony remembered the way to Carol’s apartment
so well that he could have driven it blindfolded. As it was, he was
driving it with one leg. He was thankful for Josh’s SUV. At least
he didn’t have to rent a car, in addition to making hefty lease
payments on the Porsche. He forced himself not to worry about what
Josh was doing with his car.

During his few free moments at work, he had
used the time to worry about something else: what to do with the
panties. He couldn’t bring himself to turn them over to Detective
Croyden. He couldn’t rat out Josh, especially since he would have
to drive Josh’s car to the police station to do it.