Hotline to Murder (8 page)

“I can give you the number of a sex
hotline,” Tony said to the caller.

“Don’t brush me off,” the girl said. “Tell
me what to do.”

“Have you talked to your parents about
this?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. I’m talking
to you. So what should I do?”

“What would you like to do?” Tony repeated.
He felt trapped. He wondered whether he should tell her this was an
inappropriate call and hang up.

“You’re no help. You’re just like all the
others.”

There was a click. She had hung up before he
could. Tony stared at the receiver and said, “Whew.”

“Welcome to the club,” Shahla said. She had
returned to the listening room with more chips. “You’re not a
virgin anymore.”

“I guess not.” He wondered whether she was a
female masturbator. Or perhaps it was a crank call. He finished
filling out the call report and said, “Where were we?”

“We were talking about motives the other
day. I was trying to think of someone who might have a motive to
kill Joy.”

“And did you come up with anyone?”

“I’ve got a possibility. Her name is Martha,
and she’s a listener on the Hotline.”

“You think the killer might be a
female?”

“Detective Croyden said that was a
possibility. And Martha is big enough and strong enough to do
it.”

“Tell me about Martha.”

“She’s a senior at Bonita Beach, and she’s
on the volleyball team.”

“Joy was on the volleyball team.”

“Joy was the star of the volleyball team.
Because of her and several others, the team was expected to win the
league championship.”

“How has the team been doing without
her?”

“They’ve only played two games so far.
They’ve split.”

“Sounds like they miss Joy.”

“Definitely.”

The phone rang, and Shahla answered it. Tony
could tell from what she said that the caller was a harmless repeat
who called almost every day. She would be tied up with him for
fifteen minutes. Tony wondered why she thought that this girl
Martha might have killed Joy. Maybe Shahla didn’t like Martha. Was
she so anxious to find a killer that she was guilty of wishful
thinking? Tony had to admit that she was right about the Chameleon
being a potential suspect. But Croyden was handling him now. It
wouldn’t do any harm to listen to Shahla. But if Martha really was
a suspect, they would contact Detective Croyden, regardless of how
Shahla felt about it.

Tony wandered into the snack room and made
himself some popcorn in the microwave. It didn’t have butter on it,
so it couldn’t be fattening—could it? He carried the bag back into
the outer room. He noticed that an envelope was lying on the
carpet, partially underneath the outside door. It hadn’t been there
when he came in. Somebody must have slid it under the door. Tony
had locked the door after Kevin and Nathan left. He was going to
observe the locked-door rule, especially when Shahla was with him.
Now he was glad he had.

CHAPTER 9

The envelope was white, business-size; there was
nothing odd about it. Tony picked it up and immediately wondered
whether he should have done that. What about fingerprints? He held
it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it from
different angles. There was no writing on the outside. And it
wasn’t sealed. The flap was just tucked in, and it would be easy to
open. But should he open it? He held it up toward the overhead
light. There was definitely a piece of paper inside. He set the
envelope on the white table and stared at it.

Turn all evidence over to Detective Croyden.
And Tony would. But first he was going to look at it. He took a
handkerchief out of his pants pocket and picked up the envelope
again, this time through a layer of cloth. He wasn’t going to get
any more fingerprints on it. He covered his other hand with another
piece of the handkerchief and worked the flap open. Then he
carefully extracted the paper from the envelope, using the
handkerchief to keep his fingers from touching the paper.

It was a regular piece of white paper,
folded in thirds. Very neatly. Tony shook it to unfold it and
placed it on the table.

“What’s going on?”

Tony jumped, startled by Shahla’s voice just
behind him. He had been concentrating so hard that he had almost
forgotten about her. “Do you always sneak up on people?” he asked
to cover his loss of composure.

“Next time I’ll wear a bell so you’ll know
I’m coming. I saw you out here looking as though you were
practicing a magic trick. What are you trying to do, make the
envelope disappear?”

“Somebody slid it under the door.”

“Do you think it was the murderer?” She
looked apprehensively toward the door.

“I don’t know, but the door is locked. Don’t
touch anything. We don’t want to leave fingerprints. Let’s see what
it says on the paper.”

Tony and Shahla bent over the table. The
writing on the paper was printed in black ink, by a computer
printer.

“It’s a poem,” Shahla said.

“Read it,” Tony said. She was the writer. He
had never read poetry, other than the few poems required in English
classes, and didn’t want to embarrass himself by reading it badly,
even if it was a bad poem, which it probably was.

“It’s called ‘Spaghetti Straps,’” Shahla
said. She read:

“
She wears a summer dress,
spaghetti straps

to hold it up, or is this so?
Perhaps

it's gravity, the gravity of
con-

sequences should it fall. If she
should don

her dress one day but then forget
to pull

them up, those flimsy wisps of
hope so full

of her ripe beauty, do you think
the weight

of promises within, or hand of
fate,

would slide it down, revealing
priceless treasures?

If so, would she invoke heroic
measures

to hide the truth, for fear this
modest lapse

would air the secret of spaghetti
straps?”

“
What do you think?” Tony asked.
He didn’t feel qualified to comment on it as a poem and he wasn’t
about to be the first to comment on its contents.

“It’s actually a pretty good poem.”

“You’re not offended by it?”

“Are you kidding? After some of the stuff
I’ve heard, this is a nursery rhyme. If our grosser callers like
the Chameleon talked like this instead of the way they do, I
wouldn’t hang up on them so fast.”

“So you don’t think the Chameleon is capable
of writing this?”

“Not from what I know about him. Unless he’s
hiding his talent under the bed with his dirty magazines.”

“Can you think of any callers who might be
able to write like this?”

Shahla contemplated the question for a
period of time. Finally, she said, “When I first started on the
Hotline, there was this guy who called a lot who said he wrote
poetry. But he wasn’t from around here. In fact, he said he lived
in Las Vegas.”

“So he was calling long distance.”

“For a while after 9/11 our 800 number was
nationwide so that people suffering from—what’s it called?—post
traumatic stress disorder could call us. But as I understand it,
the number cost too much to keep so now our 800 number is just for
California. Anyway, since that change, he doesn’t call as often as
he did.”

Shahla went and got a copy of the Green Book
and pointed out a page to Tony. The Hotline handle for him was
“Paul the Poet.” His story was that he had been abused by his
parents as a child.

The telephone rang. It was Tony’s turn to
answer it. A woman with a cultured voice was on the line, with a
slight New York accent. She was definitely a cut above the usual
Hotline caller. Tony immediately pegged her as living in West Los
Angeles, perhaps Beverly Hills. He would try to get that
information before the end of the call.

The call went on and on. She was
middle-aged, married and divorced, and trying to decide what to do
about her boyfriend. He had his pluses and minuses. In fact, she
recited them so readily that Tony wondered whether she had already
taken a sheet of paper, drawn a line down the middle, and written
the pluses on one side and the minuses on the other.

While they talked, Shahla took a number of
calls. At the end of two hours Tony figured that he and his caller
had solved most of the world’s problems. Or at least the problem of
her boyfriend. She had a plan of action and thanked him for helping
her arrive at it.

After Tony hung up, Shahla said, “I thought
you were going to marry her.”

“She’s too old for me,” Tony said laughing,
“but it sounds like she has some money. Maybe it’s not a bad idea.”
He looked at the clock on the wall of the listening room. It was
almost ten. He said, “Time flies when you’re straightening out the
world. I want to make a copy of that poem before we get out of
here.”

“On the copier?”

“No. Flattening it on the copier might
destroy any fingerprints. I’ll enter it on one of the office
computers and then print it out.” Tony went to the administration
room, turned on Patty’s computer and typed in the poem, using
Microsoft Word. He had honed his typing prowess writing papers in
college and made short work of it. Then he printed it. Shahla asked
him to print a copy for her. When he was through, he deleted the
poem from the computer.

“No sense leaving evidence,” Tony said.
“Now, we’ll replace the original poem in the envelope and place
that in a larger envelope to preserve whatever there is to
preserve.” He used his handkerchief to handle the documents,
determined to keep them as clean as possible. “Then I’ll take the
evidence to the police station.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes, tonight. No time like the present. And
I need to explain to them how my fingerprints got on the
envelope.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“We’ve been through this, Shahla.”

“This is different than the other night.
First, it’s Friday night. There’s no school tomorrow. And it’s only
a few blocks to the police station. I’ll call my mother and tell
her exactly where I’m going so she won’t worry.” Tony’s look must
have been disbelieving because she said, “Yes, some teenagers do
actually communicate with their parents. Besides, I never got a
chance to tell you why I think Martha may be a suspect.”

Shahla whipped out her cell phone before
Tony could mount a solid defense and got her mother on the line.
Her side of the conversation went something like this: “Hi, Mom,
it’s me. I won’t be home for a little while…I have to go to the
police station…Just to give them some evidence…Don’t worry, I’m
going with Tony. He’s a lot older, but he’s pretty strong. He’ll
keep us safe…I’ll see you later…Bye.”

“Do I have to show her my muscles and my
AARP card?” Tony asked.

“It’s okay. I may have exaggerated a little,
but she trusts me.”

CHAPTER 10

The guard who walked out with them was a middle-aged
nonentity. Tony wondered whether he had been the one on duty the
night Joy was killed but decided not to ask him because he didn’t
want to get trapped into a long discussion about what had happened
to her.

There was one slight deviation to the plan. Tony had
Shahla drive her car home, and he followed her. It was a couple of
miles out of their way, but he didn’t want to have to return her to
the mall in the middle of the night. She ran inside her house and
told her mom she was riding to the police station in his car.

“What kind of a car is this?” Shahla asked
as she returned and settled into the passenger’s seat.

“It’s a Porsche Boxter.” Tony was proud of
his car, the one outward sign that he had accomplished something in
his life. Well, there was the townhouse, which he had shoehorned
himself into, but he still needed to have Josh live there as a
tenant to come up with the payments. He had leased the Porsche—a
manageable down payment, and reasonable monthly payments made him
look respectable. Of course, when the lease ran out, he would be
left with nothing. But he would cross that bridge…

“It’s small. And it sounds as if the engine
is behind us.”

“It’s behind our seats. Located for maximum
stability.”

Shahla looked nervously over her shoulder.
“I hope it stays there.”

Those were not the comments of a car buff.
Shahla wasn’t impressed. Maybe he should have settled for a Honda.
He made it all the way up to third gear on Pacific Coast Highway
and felt a little better as he listened to the purr of the engine.
He needed to take a trip to the desert so he could let it run for a
while, like a racehorse. It was not built for the stop-and-go
driving of a city.

They arrived at the police station within
five minutes. Bonita Beach was a compact city. Joy’s murder had
reverberated through it like a fire siren and left the residents
feeling betrayed and anxious. The full impact to the city and to
the Hotline had grown on Tony as his shock had worn off, and now he
wanted to find the murderer as much as Shahla did.

They walked into the station together and
approached the counter, behind which sat a young female officer
doing something with a computer. After a few seconds, she looked up
and said, “Can I help you?”

Tony explained that they had some possible
evidence for the murder investigation. He expected her to just take
the envelope and their names, but she said, “Detective Croyden’s
here. I’ll get him. Have a seat in there.”

She pointed to a doorway that led into a
conference room. Tony and Shahla went into the room containing a
worn wooden table and worn wooden chairs. On the wall were posters
relating to drugs, alcohol, and other temptations of the flesh. The
posters exhorted the reader against yielding to these
temptations.