SWF Seeks Same

by John Lutz

  Still, she was more tired than thirsty. She watched a tiny insect on the ceiling make its gradual, indirect way to the corner near the window. It stopped, started, slowly detouring around cracks in the plaster, moving through life with the care necessary for survival. Finally it disappeared in deep, angled shadow. Into safety? Or danger?

  Allie sighed, stood up, and plodded barefoot from the bedroom. The floor was hard and unyielding beneath her soles. She could feel the individual cracks between strips of wood. She returned to the bedroom to get her slippers, but she couldn’t find them. Hedra had been wearing them last night; maybe they were in her room.

  But the slippers were nowhere in sight in Hedra’s bedroom. Allie peeked beneath the bed. Nothing there. Not even dust. She walked to the closet to see if compulsively neat Hedra had placed the slippers in there.

  A moment after she opened the closet door she stepped back in surprise. The clothes. Hedra’s clothes. They looked so much like … they were Allie’s own clothes.

  Allie turned and hurried to her own room. She flung open the closet doors.

  Her clothes were there, as they’d always been.

  She sat down on the edge of the mattress, gazing at the rows of dresses, blouses, and slacks on hangers. There were a few variations in color and material from Hedra’s closet, but not many.

  Wherever possible, Hedra had bought exact duplicates of Allie’s clothes.

  Allie sat very still on the edge of the bed, wondering what it meant.

  Later that day she phoned Sam and told him about it. He seemed more amused than alarmed. “What the girl wears is her business,” he said, “and you know how she idolizes you.”

  “She does idolize me,” Allie said. “More than I find comfortable.”

  Sam laughed. “You deserve it. Have I ever told you that?”

  Allie had to smile, remembering. “Yeah, you’ve told me.”

  “Meant it, too.”

  “Seeing Hedra’s clothes this morning, after losing my credit cards last night, is what’s got me rattled, I guess.”

  “You lost your credit cards? As in Master and Visa?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how.”

  “Get the cards back?”

  “No, they might have been stolen.”

  “Better phone in the numbers.”

  “I already have. I notified the police, too.”

  “Well, your liability’s limited when you lose credit cards, and maybe they’ll turn up.”

  “I can’t use them if they do; I have to wait for replacements. That’ll take a while.”

  “By the way, Allie, I’ve got some bad news.”

  Her heart took a dive. “Bad news? Dammit, Sam, that’s not what I need this morning.”

  “Christ, not that bad.” He laughed. “I only meant I have to be away for a couple of weeks. A conference in Milwaukee, then a junk-bond seminar in Los Angeles. Can you live without me?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I can’t live without you. Not for more than a few weeks. I’ll phone you.”

  “You’d better,” she said.

  “Try not to worry so much, okay, lover?”

  “Sure. That’s probably good advice.”

  Loudly, only half-jokingly, he blew a kiss into the receiver.

  When she hung up on Sam, the phone rang almost immediately. She thought it might be Sam, calling her back to say something he’d forgotten.

  But as soon as she picked up the phone she knew it wasn’t Sam.

  No voice on the other end of the connection, only heavy, uneven breathing.

  Then, “Allie, baby? Sweet Buns? I know it’s you. Soon we’re gonna—”

  She slammed the receiver into its cradle.

  Chapter 17

  DISGUSTING habit, Detective Sergeant Will Kennedy thought. And I’m disgusting for indulging.

  He snubbed out his cigar in the ashtray, knowing even then that he’d soon light another despite his doctor’s advice to stop smoking. Sitting at his desk in the squad room, he peered through the noxious haze hovering above the ashtray. A woman was standing at the wooden restraining rail that ran parallel to the booking desk. She leaned forward, her pelvis against the rail, and spoke earnestly and rapidly, as if she wanted to get her story out in a hurry.

  Kennedy watched Sergeant Morrow listen to her in his patient, speculative way, then say something and point in Kennedy’s direction. The woman smiled at Morrow, and walked purposefully toward Kennedy.

  Davis, who was working undercover in Narcotics and looked like a street punk, blatantly leered at her. It didn’t matter, Kennedy figured, she’d think he was a suspect and not a cop. The other detectives and a couple of uniforms contented themselves with sly glances in her direction. This was a busy precinct, but there was always time to appreciate beauty in the midst of police work. For the contrast.

  As she got closer, Kennedy pretended to notice her for the first time and glanced up, smiling warmly. She was in her early thirties, average height and build, short blond hair, good eyes, firm, squarish jaw, and a mouth that looked as if it had smiled plenty but which now was a grim red slash. She was wearing a lightweight raincoat, powder blue with a white collar and oversized white buttons. High heels, good ankles. Not a stunner, but an attractive woman up close as well as viewed from across the room.

  She stood in front of his gray metal desk, leaning forward as she had against the railing. “Sergeant Kennedy?”

  “Me,” he told her.

  “The desk sergeant said I should see you about my … complaint.” She was obviously nervous, not used to being in places like this. A respectable citizen in a bind.

  He nodded and motioned for her to sit in the chair alongside the desk. Kennedy was a large, shambling man of middle age who knew he presented an avuncular, soothing image to women. He was six feet tall and close to two hundred and fifty pounds, with bushy, raggedy gray hair and sleepy blue eyes. Well into his fifties. Not a handsome man or a sexual threat. A slow and amiable old bear, that was Kennedy. If he hurt anyone, it would be accidental. He fostered that impression and capitalized on it. Being underestimated could be a great advantage.

  The precinct house was warm and felt uncomfortably humid because of the rain that fell silently on thick windows reinforced with steel mesh. It even smelled damp. Fetid as a swamp. Though the ceiling didn’t quite leak, there were ancient water stains on it that always appeared wet. The air was so thick and sticky it seemed to deaden sound and coat bare flesh like oil.

  When the woman had unbuttoned her coat and settled down in the straight-backed chair, Kennedy said, “Get you a cup of coffee? Maybe a soda or glass of water?”

  She seemed surprised by his hospitality. “No. No, thank you.”

  “You mentioned a complaint, Miss… ?”

  “My name is Allison Jones, and I live at One Seventy-two West Seventy-fourth Street.”

  He smiled. “And you sound like a very nice and well-prepared twelve-year-old reciting in front of the class. Relax, Miss Jones. Like the PR ads say, your police department cares. This old cop does, anyway.”

  “Not so old,” she said, smiling back as the tension loosened its grip on her. The set of her shoulders changed beneath the blue coat, became less squared and then slumped wearily. But the rigid cast of her jaw and mouth remained grim. She was wrapped tight and ticking, this one.

  “Thank you, Allison Jones. Could be there’s some good years left in me at that.” He picked up a ball-point pen and idly rotated it between sausage-like powerful fingers, wishing he could smoke the damned thing. Despite his huge, rough hands, he had beautifully manicured nails. He wore a plain gold wedding ring, though Jeanie had been dead almost ten years. Ah, Jeanie! He said, “Now, dear, what seems to be troubling you?”

  “Well, phone calls, among other things”

  “Oh? Of an obscene nature, do you mean?”

  “Yes. Very obscene.”

  “In what way?”

  “The man—if it was the s
ame man—talked about doing things to me.”

  Kennedy cautioned himself. Gently now. “What sorts of things, Miss Jones? What I mean is, could you be more specific?”

  “Tying me up, gagging me, whipping me. Making me … do things I never would do.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Bondage, it’s called,” she said flatly.

  “Yes, I know.” He stared sadly for a moment at the ball-point pen almost lost in his big hand.

  “You get a lot of complaints like mine?”

  “Oh, yes. We see everything on this job. Soon lose the capacity to be shocked, I’m afraid.”

  “He talked as if I’d enjoy sado-masochism.”

  “He might well have believed that. The sick sort of man who’d make such a call generally has some very twisted ideas about the fair sex.”

  “Not just twisted,” Allison Jones said, “positively kinky.”

  Without a change of expression, Kennedy studied her more closely. Was she enjoying this? Getting her kicks by reporting phone calls that never occurred? It happened. All sorts of people wandered into precinct houses and reported all sorts of crimes, real or imagined. And for reasons only the psychiatrists ventured to guess, most often wrongly. This woman certainly didn’t seem that type, but Kennedy knew better than to classify by appearance and mannerism. He remembered an apparently typical young mother who’d murdered her two children as casually as one might destroy unwanted kittens.

  Allison Jones seemed suddenly aware that he was assessing her. She frowned and stirred in her chair. Crossed her legs the other way. He heard taut nylon swish.

  “This sort of thing’s been happening,” Kennedy said quickly. “Keeping us poor civil servants busy.” As if she were the twentieth woman that day to complain of obscene phone calls, and not the fifth or sixth.

  “It doesn’t usually happen to me,” she said sharply. He decided she was probably telling him straight.

  “The caller might never have laid eyes on you,” he told her. “He could’ve punched out your number at random. That’s how most of these characters operate. The odds are greatly against it being your number, so you assume he knows you personally in some way and you lose sleep over it. Just what anonymous callers want; they feed on fear.”

  “That’s so sick.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “And another thing, he called me by name.”

  “Ah!” Kennedy seemed to make a special mental note of that.

  “There’s something else,” she said, leaning forward. And she told him about stopping to eat at Goya’s, the walk with Graham Knox, and the disappearance of her expired driver’s license and credit cards.

  He tapped the pen several times on the gray metal desk, leaving tiny dark slashes, then noticed what he was doing and rubbed the desk clean with the heel of his hand. There was cigar ash on the desk; he brushed that away. “And did you notify the credit people of the loss of your cards?”

  “Of course. Soon as I realized they were gone. It’s the phone calls and the cards being stolen that I guess has me spooked.”

  “You sure the cards were stolen, not misplaced?”

  “Almost certain.”

  “Almost?”

  “I’m almost certain the sun will set tonight, Sergeant Kennedy.”

  He smiled. “Now, now, no need to get testy.”

  She nodded and tried a return smile that barely broke the surface. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “The city’s full of sick and tortured people who use the telephone for reasons not dreamed about by Alexander Graham Bell. It’s probably nothing that should cause you undue concern.”

  “But what about him calling me by name?”

  “Well, I’m assuming you’re listed in the directory.”

  “Yes. My full name, since I have such a common last name. But he didn’t say Allison, he said Allie. And that’s what I’m called, Allie.”

  “Could be he guessed that. It must be the most popular nickname for Allison.”

  “But what if he does know me?”

  Kennedy put down the pen and leaned back in his chair. The buttons on his shirt threatened to pop. “Well, that’s possible, but I’ll tell you, Miss Jones, it’s been my experience that men who talk dirty to women on the phone usually don’t carry the matter any further. The psychiatrists could tell you why. I can only tell you the psychiatrists are right. These men are often sexual and social misfits who are too afraid of women to talk to them face to face. That’s why the miserable wretches use the phone.”

  “That’s what Graham said.”

  “The Graham who was with you when you noticed your credit cards were missing?”

  “Yes, and he’s my neighbor. He’s also a playwright. And as I told you, a waiter at a restaurant near my apartment.”

  “Well, Graham’s right about obscene callers.” Kennedy sat forward slowly and placed his elbows on the desk, rested one hand on top the other. “Tell you what. If it happens again, we can have the phone company put a tap on your phone.”

  “Tap?”

  “It’s a tracer, actually. It would enable us to find out what telephone any future obscene calls came from. But again, in my experience, these men usually call from public pay phones. And they don’t often use the same phone twice.”

  “Then a tracer probably wouldn’t do much good.”

  “To be candid, no good at all, most likely.”

  “What about my stolen credit cards?”

  “You should make a complaint on that one. At least give us the account numbers. But I need to be honest with you, there isn’t much chance they’ll be recovered. People who steal credit cards, if they’re pros, either sell the cards immediately or charge everything they can on them before they might be reported stolen. On the street, stolen credit cards depreciate by the hour. Whatever’s going to be done with them is done fast, then they’re often destroyed.” He clucked his tongue. “Some sad society we live in, isn’t it?”

  Allie Jones smiled and shook her head in futility. “Have I wasted my time coming here, Sergeant Kennedy?”

  “Maybe not. You never know. I’d advise you to fill out the forms, report the credit card theft. The cards might turn up on somebody we bring in. It’s happened.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

  Kennedy ran the appropriate form into his typewriter and one-fingered out the information as she answered his questions. She was alert and efficient. From working with computers, Kennedy thought. He was uncomfortable around computers, didn’t understand them. What were microchips, miniature potato chips?

  When he was finished he read over what he’d typed. After making a few sloppy corrections with Whiteout, he ratcheted the form from the typewriter and had Allison Jones sign it.

  He said, “I promise we’ll call you right away if there’s any progress on this.”

  She thanked him and stood up. There was something about this troubled young woman that intrigued Kennedy, evoking pity and concern. Did she resemble Jeanie? Maybe. A little. And it was the cruelest of cities out there, a crouching monster that waited patiently for as long as it took and then devoured its victims.

  “Miss Jones,” he said, “is there anything else bothering you?”

  She gave him her slow and appealing smile. “It shows?”

  “Afraid it does.”

  “Not a police matter,” she said. “It’s just that my life hasn’t gone very well lately. My job, my … Well, never mind that.”

  “What about your, ah, romantic life?”

  She seemed to consider telling him something, then decide against it. “My love life’s fine, Sergeant, believe me. But that’s irrelevant.”

  “We can’t be sure about that.”

  “We’ll have to be.”

  Testy again.

  “My personal problems are more job-related. Financial.” She straightened and shrugged as if none of it mattered. “It’s how the world works sometimes,” she said.

>   “Isn’t that the truth for all of us?” He stood up halfway, leaning on his desk, and shook her hand. It was limp and cool. “Hang on,” he told her, squeezing the narrow fingers reassuringly. “Things’ll take a favorable bounce. They always do, eventually.”

  She said, “I’m sure you’re right. Thanks for reminding me.”

  He watched her walk from the squad room and out the large oak doors to the street. Then he sat back down heavily. The chair groaned beneath him. His hemorrhoids flared. God, his health was deteriorating like the South Bronx.

  “What we got there?” a voice said behind Kennedy. His partner, Hector Vasquez.

  “Obscene phone calls, stolen credit cards.”

  “Nice-looking woman,” Hector said. “The sort that’d attract that kinda call.”

  “Isn’t she, though?” Kennedy picked up the complaint form Allie Jones had signed and considered it. Stolen credit cards were seldom recovered.

  “Better file that so we can get going,” Hector urged. “Lieutenant wants us to drive over to Queens and pick up that prisoner.”

  “My hemorrhoids are on fire,” Kennedy said. “I don’t want to drive to Queens.”

  “I sure feel sorry for you,” Hector said with mock sympathy, “but that’s how the world works sometimes.”

  “Funny,” Kennedy told him, “that’s just what she said, about how the world works sometimes. Her words exactly.”

  “Whose words?”

  “Allie Jones’s. The woman who just left.”

  “Forget her and come on,” Hector said, “unless you wanna receive an obscene phone call from the lieutenant.”

  Kennedy braced with his hands on the arms of his chair and levered himself to a standing position. He tucked in his wrinkled white shirt around his ample stomach and wrestled into his tweed sportcoat. After even that brief effort, he was breathing hard. Better watch the blood pressure, he told himself. Lose some weight. Really lay off the cigars, like the doctor advised, or someday he might be waddling after a suspect and collapse and die from a heart attack.

  But he knew he wouldn’t change the way he lived. Or the way he’d probably die. Suicide by cigar.