Hotline to Murder

by Alan Cook

  “No problem. I was at church.”

  “What church is that?” Tony asked, feeling that he should be helping Shahla.

  “The Church of the Risen Lord.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” And the fact that Nathan didn’t look either of them in the eye made the story sound suspect.

  “It’s northeast of the airport, about ten miles from here.”

  “Is that where you live?” Shahla asked.

  “Near there. They have Thursday evening services that sometimes go until pretty late. Eleven or so.”

  “And you have someone who can vouch for you?”

  “Of course. I have a lot of friends there.”

  “All right, you two can go,” Shahla said still without smiling.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Kevin said, with a little bow. “Come on, Nathan, let’s get out of here before they ask us more questions.”

  “Shahla is tenacious, isn’t she?” Nathan said. “I like that in a girl.”

  They went out the door together.

  Tony looked at Shahla and said, “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Didn’t you work the four-to-seven? Aren’t you leaving?”

  “If you’d look at the time sheet, you’d know that I’m working the seven-to-ten.”

  Tony hadn’t signed in on the time sheet yet. He did so now and, sure enough, Shahla was signed in for the seven-to-ten shift. She went into the listening room. He followed her, noticing that she had her dark hair in a ponytail, fastened with an elastic band he had recently learned was called a scrunchy, for reasons unknown. He liked ponytails. He said, “I wasn’t sure you were speaking to me.”

  Shahla sat down at the table by the window, the one Tony liked, and said, “I shouldn’t be, but I need your help.”

  Tony vowed to claim his seat first in the future. He sat down at one of the other tables. “Did Detective Croyden talk to you?”

  “Yes. He came to my house.”

  “How did you like him?”

  “He’s not as bad as I thought he would be. He asked some good questions and he seemed to know what he was doing.”

  “But you’re still conducting your own investigation.”

  “That’s why I need your help.”

  Tony was checking the bulletin board to see if there were any new notices. He spotted one from Gail. He read it aloud to Shahla: “When you take a call from the Chameleon, be sure to record everything he says. We particularly want information about where he lives and where he works. Don’t hang up on him unless his talk gets particularly offensive. Do not under any circumstances give him any information about Joy, the Hotline or yourselves. Do not agree to meet him anywhere. Give your call report to Nancy, Patty, or me, immediately. If none of us is here, place it on my desk.”

  “Detective Croyden has been talking to the ladies in the office,” Tony said.

  “Duh. I’m surprised you didn’t get fired.”

  “How can you get fired from a volunteer job?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “And yet you were willing to go with me. Nay, you insisted on going.”

  “But I wasn’t planning to tell Croyden about it.”

  “Okay, truce.” Tony liked this high-spirited girl too much to want to be at odds with her. “What do you plan to do now?”

  The phone rang before she could say anything. Tony answered it. “Central Hotline. This is Tony.”

  “I’ve got a problem,” a female voice said. “I need to talk to someone.”

  “You can talk to me,” Tony said. “Who’s this?”

  “Gertrude.”

  He would bet a week’s pay that her name wasn’t really Gertrude, but she could be anonymous if she wanted to be. When she didn’t immediately say anything more, he said, “What’s your problem, Gertrude?”

  “I like sex.”

  He was tempted to say, “That’s a problem?” but she sounded quite young, so he waited her out. He put the call on the speaker so that Shahla could hear it.

  After a pause she said, “I’m sixteen, but I like to have sex. What do you think I should do?”

  The Hotline rule was to not give advice because the listeners were not trained counselors. Tony asked, “What would you like to do?”

  “Should I stop having sex?”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No. I like sex. I’m always horny. But other kids are saying bad things about me.”

  “So you’re getting a bad reputation? How do you feel about that?”

  “How do you think I feel? I feel awful. So what do you think I should do? Should I go on fucking every boy I go out with or should I stop?”

  This was turning into an obscene phone call, but it was also somewhat titillating. Tony had never heard of a call like this coming from a girl. He looked at Shahla. She had a look of surprise on her face. Then she walked out of the listening room. Tony took the call off the speaker, figuring that Shahla didn’t want to listen.

  “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 w
ant 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.”