Toll Call Read online

  “Sounds kind of pointy-headed to me.”

  “Maybe. But even if she wanted to stop it I’m not sure she could. At this point I’m not as interested in why Peggy’s doing what she’s doing as I am in getting hold of the guy and putting him out of commission.”

  Ruthie didn’t say anything.

  “Do you think she knows who he is but isn’t saying?”

  Ruthie shook her head.

  “Did you come up with any new candidates when you talked to her today?”

  “I worked her as much as I could, Marsh, but she wasn’t ready to chew on it. Wouldn’t tell me anything at all about the guy. About precious little else, neither. We sort of discovered we don’t like each other right at the moment, is what it comes down to. Not that it’ll affect the way I do my job.”

  I decided to let that pass until I could think of what to do about it. “How about the men in her life? Any of them look like a candidate?”

  “Not real good, but there’s a couple worth eyeballing. The son-in-law, or whatever he is. A boyfriend named Hess. Maybe some others.” Ruthie looked at her watch. “I might just pay Mr. Hess a visit tonight, if you’re here for the duration.”

  “I can stay, but there’s someone in the building that’s worth looking into. Why don’t I see if he’s in, then you can take off when I get back.”

  “Suits me,” Ruthie said. “Who is it?”

  “Name is Tomkins. Apparently he tried to hit on Peggy and she wouldn’t play. The janitor says Tomkins was pretty hot about it.”

  “Yeah, well, she gets that look on her, Marsh. That ‘you’re not as good as I am so how dare you speak to me that way’ look. Tossed it at me a few times today. Tends to get under your saddle blanket, let me tell you.”

  I grinned. “How come you’re so upset, Ruthie?”

  “Ah, shit. I just get pissed off when women like your little Peggy in there do what she’s doing. She’s a victim, goddamnit. Why the hell doesn’t she act like one?”

  FOURTEEN

  I left Ruthie in the living room and took the stairs to the lobby. The bank of tenants’ mailboxes was just inside the front door, four ranks of four doors of vented brass. A Judson Tomkins had printed his name in childish block letters on a white rectangle taped to the door to box 23. I went back to the stairwell and climbed one flight.

  The only sounds in the hallway were my sharp knocks on the door and the wooden rattle they produced. I kept at it for more than a minute, then checked my watch. It was just after five. If he worked nearby he could be returning any minute. If he worked downtown it was hard to tell. Not many people made it out of the financial district without at least one stop along the way, whether at a strip joint like Pandora’s or a singles stop like Perry’s or a hardcore drinkers’ hangout like the ones I frequent.

  I was halfway back to the stairwell when I saw him coming. When someone tells a tale you automatically imagine faces to match the deeds described. Sometimes the actual participants fulfill your expectations; other times the disparity is so dramatic you begin to doubt the story’s truth. Based on Francisco Mendosa’s account of their conversations, Judson Tomkins fell in the former category.

  His head was large and blockish, his body over larded, his eyes fleshy slits of shallow suspicion. His nose bore a drinker’s mottled glow, his lips bulged in pulpy, overripe dimensions, his cheeks were sprayed with a two-day growth of reddish beard. The cuffs of his plaid shirt hung almost to his fingertips, giving him a primate’s aspect. His black slacks were knit, so snug the side pockets flared like displaced ears. The heels on his boots were as high as ink bottles, and made him seem top-heavy.

  Tomkins looked me over warily as I approached, decided I was neither friend nor foe, and prepared to shoulder past me in the narrow passage. When I held my ground he had to stop. “What the fuck, Jack,” he grumbled. “This ain’t a one-way street.” His teeth were stained and irregularly aligned, like rotting fenceposts.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Tomkins.”

  That brought a wary scowl and a blustering pose. We were chest-to-chest. I could smell his beery breath and hear the soggy murmur of his lungs. He wanted to shove me out of his way or worse, but he was afraid I might be someone it would be a mistake to anger, which made Tomkins one of those men who live on the edge of law and ethics, whose lives and livelihoods make them vulnerable to both de jure and de facto enforcement authorities, who have frequent need to look behind them.

  While Tomkins idled in uncertainty, I stood and watched and waited. “What are you, another cop?” he asked finally. “I thought I’d seen them all by now.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you look like one and act like one and if it looks like a turd and acts like a turd then I figure it’s going to smell a lot like shit. For your information, that school beef is a crock. Hell, I was just on my way to work. I never got off the fucking sidewalk. I never touched the little—”

  Tomkins broke off his protest because what he said was more revealing than he intended. “Did you take a fall for it, Tomkins?” I asked mildly. “Or are you out on bail?”

  Instead of answering, Tomkins began to swell with confidence. “You ain’t no cop. A cop would already know that shit. A cop would be here to remind me of every last detail of that fucking trumped-up rap. So since you’re not a cop there’s no reason in the world I got to talk to you, right? Hell, I don’t got to talk to you even if you are a cop.”

  “Why don’t I take a guess, Tomkins?” I continued mildly. “Why don’t I guess that you’re on probation or parole. Why don’t I guess that you’re about to have your probation revoked because you got caught hanging around a schoolyard. Why don’t I guess that you took a fall on a sex charge. Indecent exposure, maybe? To a schoolkid? You’re a registered sex offender, right, Tomkins?”

  “You punk. You don’t know crap.”

  “Why don’t I guess that a lot of people don’t know that about you, Tomkins. Maybe the manager of this building? Your boss at work? The boys at the bar? A girlfriend? So do we talk or do I spread the word about your checkered past?”

  Tomkins seemed to be trying to disappear, to hide behind his buttons. “What the hell do you want?” he asked with half the voice that had cursed me moments earlier.

  “Let’s go to your place,” I said. “I’ll ask you some questions. If you answer them, I’ll leave.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  I looked up and down the hall. “Inside, Tomkins. Not here.”

  He cursed again, but shouldered past me and fumbled at the door to his apartment, then finally went inside. A manila envelope lay on the floor just inside the door, and he kicked it out of his way as he stomped into the room. I followed him in, and was immediately awash in a sordid confirmation of my suspicions.

  It was a smaller place than Peggy’s, a studio apartment with a small kitchenette and a smaller bath and a single room that encompassed all the rest. The bed occupied most of the floor space, the grimy bedclothes worn and faded, as though someone had lain ill in them for weeks, and finally expired. The smell of the room was sour, a fetid blend of sweaty clothing and spoiling food and mildewed furnishings. I made my breaths as shallow as I could.

  With a twist and a kick, Tomkins sent the bed up into the wall, so there was room to get to the couch beneath the window. He’d acted so quickly I wondered what there was about the bed that could possibly be more revealing than the seamy panoply that surrounded it.

  The apartment was a pervert’s paradise, all four walls a tattered collage of flesh—hundreds of nudie pictures torn from various skin magazines, from the slick, proud boasts of Penthouse and Playboy to the sad, flat hopelessness of the less prominent publications. Women alone, women with men, women with women, women with phallic substitutes both electric and not. Color, black and white, and grainy washes that fell somehow in between. A few were Polaroids, amateur poses of amateur women snapped by Tomkins himself or maybe even gifts conferred on him by the
hapless subjects.

  The raw material from which the display had been constructed littered the floor, magazines and books by the hundreds, most of them shredded and torn as though their innards had been ripped away by starving beasts. I was already revolted before I noticed the crowning touch—on the ceiling above the place where the bed had been was a giant color enlargement of the Madonna and her naked child.

  “This going to take long?” Tomkins asked as he took off his jacket and tossed it toward a metal folding chair. “I got things to do.”

  “I can guess,” I said, still looking at the pictures.

  Tomkins chuckled. “Like ’em?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say. But they all keep lookin’. Just like you.”

  As I shifted my stare, Tomkins scraped some magazines off the couch and gestured to it. “If you’re through looking you can sit down. Or maybe you want to see my videos. I got some videos you can’t believe. There’s one my navy buddy sent from Panama that’ll make you shoot your gun in five minutes, guaran-fucking-teed. I tell you, man, the thing I love about women is, they’ll do goddamned anything for bread.”

  “Sit down, Tomkins. Let’s get this over with.”

  Tomkins finished with whatever he was doing and looked at me with a smile that tried and failed to belie the room. “You want a beer?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Care if I have one?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He went to the kitchen nook and opened the tiny refrigerator and took out a can of Coors. Half of it was gone by the time he took a seat across from me. “So what’s the deal?” he asked, folksy, friendly, licking suds off his lower lip, as if to parody the slavery sadist his room suggested. I took one more look at the women who surrounded us. They made me feel as doomed as a gladiator, my gender a crime that I was guilty of, my punishment a unanimous thumbs down.

  “A woman in this building’s being harassed by someone, Tomkins,” I began. “Sexually harassed.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Never mind that now. I’m here because someone suggested you made a good suspect.”

  “What asshole said that?”

  I ignored him. “You been making phone calls, Tomkins? You like to do more than look at sexy pictures?”

  Tomkins frowned absently. “Calls? What calls? You from the fucking phone company, or what?”

  “I mean, have you been telephoning women, threatening to harm them if they don’t stay on the line, asking them about their sex life? Is that part of your thing, Tomkins? Along with your interest in erotic art?”

  His smile turned thin and cunning. “Shit. I don’t do stuff like that. But hell, maybe now I’ll start. The broads, man, they love it when you’re evil.”

  After another pull at his beer his grin became sloppy and taunting, a consequence of the beers and the lifelong disintegration of his mind and my own false step. I tried to match him with Peggy’s description of the spider who’d ensnared her, the man who so enticingly combined guile and charm with psychological terror, and I couldn’t do it. Surely Judson Tomkins was not a man to whom Peggy Nettleton would confess anything at all.

  “If it is you making the calls, I’m advising you to stop,” I said halfheartedly, then waved toward the contents of the room. “One look at this place and the cops will haul you in for questioning on every sex crime committed from Oxnard to Ukiah. I can have a police detective over here in fifteen minutes. You’ll be on a list you won’t get off of even if you become a monk.”

  Tomkins swore again. “I’m already on a lot of lists, Jack. One more won’t make no never mind.”

  “I hear you got a bad time from Miss Smith up in forty-four.”

  Tomkins sneered. “That whore? What about her?”

  “What’d you do when she turned you down, Tomkins? Threaten to knock her around?”

  “Turn me down? Hell, I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. She’s a walking, talking condom, man. I wouldn’t touch her unless she was dipped in bleach.”

  “How about Peggy Nettleton?”

  “Miss High and Mighty? What about her?”

  “You hit on her, too; right?”

  “So what if I did? I was just fooling around. So I made some crack about her tits. Hell, at her age she should be glad I noticed.”

  “You try to pay her back for telling you to get lost? You shove her down the stairs last night, Tomkins?”

  He wrinkled his lips and sniffed. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

  I gave him my roughest, toughest look. “That better be true. Because if I find out it’s not, I’m the one that’ll be doing the pushing.”

  “Yeah? You and what army?”

  I glanced at Tomkins’ gallery again, and stood up and glared down at him. “You want to try me right now? Here in front of your girlfriends?”

  He leaned away from my challenge. “You prick. So I like a little T and A. So what? That makes me like every sap in the world who watches the jigglers on TV. You probably like the little boys, right? Along with the rest of the fags in this town. Hell, you’re probably one of those Man-Boy Love Society creeps. ‘Sex before eight or by then it’s too late.’ Huh? Those guys are the perverts. Me, I’m just the boy next door.”

  I’d had my fill of Judson Tomkins, but I tried one more tack. “This apartment isn’t cheap, Tomkins. How do you afford to live here?”

  “Hey. I pay the rent. What’s it to you anyhow?”

  “You deal in porn? You sell those pictures to your buddies?”

  He started to squirm. “Naw. This is a private collection, is all.”

  “Then what do you do for a living?”

  “I got a job.”

  “Where?”

  “A bookstore. I’m a fucking intellectual. What of it?”

  “What bookstore?”

  “Place on Turk.”

  “I bet I know that place. The Pink Palace, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So you buy this stuff at discount.”

  “Yeah. Wholesale’s the only way to fly.”

  “You into the production end? You got a photo studio somewhere? Or maybe you bring them here.”

  He shook his head. “Who’d want to work with those cunts? They’re ball-busting bitches. All of them.” Tomkins looked at his wall of skin. His look was pained and despairing, as though the naked bodies were flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, offspring who had deserted the family for a life subsumed in corruption. “Will you get the fuck out of here?” he said finally, his voice suddenly a quiet and effective plea.

  I walked to the door. When I turned back I caught Tomkins eyeing the brown envelope that lay on the floor beside me, the one he’d kicked out of his way when we’d come in, the one an appropriate size to contain the latest addition to his gallery. “Leave the women in this building alone, Tomkins,” I ordered harshly. “Understand? If you don’t the only pictures you’ll be looking at are the ones in the San Quentin News.”

  FIFTEEN

  When I got back to Peggy’s, Ruthie had her coat on and was ready to leave. “I’ll mosey on out of here, Marsh,” she said, without her usual humor. “Going to stop by and have a chat with one of the boyfriends, then go home and wait for Caldwell to come over and join me in some unnatural acts.”

  “What’s the boyfriend’s name?”

  “Owen Hess. He’s the one who threatened her. Lives out on Diamond Heights. I’ll pay him a social call, see if he still has a stone in his hoof over little Peggy, then talk to you tomorrow. I can be back here by nine if you want.”

  “Good. That’ll give me a chance to hunt up the daughter in the morning.”

  “What about the guy in the building?”

  “He’s definitely a deviant, but from Peggy’s description the phone thing seems too sophisticated for him. He’s warped enough to keep an eye on, though. Pornography is like dope and Oreos—the more you get the more you want.”

  “Anythin
g else you want me to do, Marsh?”

  I shook my head. “Peggy still asleep?”

  “Yep.”

  Ruthie’s tone still had an edge to it. “Don’t be too hard on her, Ruthie,” I said. “She’s scared and she’s trying to hide it by being brassy or bossy or whatever. Not everyone’s as tough as you are, you know.”

  “Ah, hell, Marsh. I’m just a loco ole woman who’s just a tad jealous of that filly in there, you know?”

  “Jealous of what?”

  Ruthie shrugged. “Of how she looks, what she knows, who she is.” Ruthie gave me a crooked grin. “Hell, maybe I’m just jealous of who she works for.”

  We exchanged glances that condensed a lot of history, then Ruthie waved abruptly and vanished through the door. I went to the living room and awaited Sleeping Beauty.

  She emerged an hour later, shuffling through the bedroom door. She yawned, then rubbed her eyes and looked at me. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six thirty.”

  “God. I slept three hours.”

  “Good.”

  “You always seem to be watching me wake up.”

  Peggy looked around the room. “Where’s Ruthie?”

  “Home.”

  She sighed. “We had a fight, kind of.”

  “I know.”

  “It was my fault. I acted … prissy. She asked me a lot of questions and was angry when I wasn’t as responsive as she wanted me to be. But … I don’t know, Marsh; I haven’t worked all this out yet, you know? I’m not sure what I think about it all, and Ruthie couldn’t seem to accept that. She just keeps hinting she’d never let herself get caught in a situation like this.”

  “Ruthie’s hard to handle sometimes. But she doesn’t hold a grudge.”

  Peggy rubbed her eyes again, then crossed her arms and shivered. “You’re both being so good to me. I’m so guilty I can hardly stand it.”

  “If I was being good I would have brought back something for us to eat.”

  She smiled lazily. “Did you learn anything today?”

  “About the spider?”

  She frowned. “Who? Oh. The spider. It’s funny, but I don’t think of him that way. Yes.”