Toll Call Read online

  “Nice guy.”

  “Yeah, he’s a hothead. Probably a coker, too; he’s got all the marks.”

  “What marks?”

  “Too much money from too little effort and not a ghost of an idea how to spend it on anything worthwhile. People don’t know shit these days, you know that, Marsh? Best thing most of them can think of to do with their spare time is go out and give fifty bucks to someone just because he claims to have come up with a new way to cook a chicken. Dogs got more imagination than that, for Christ’s sake.”

  I laughed at Ruthie’s truth. “You ask Hess where he was Tuesday night?”

  “Yep. He was out on the town. Alone. Bar hopping down Union Street, hoping to fill his bed.”

  “He have any luck?”

  “Nope. I gather he bunks alone more often than not, though he’d deny it if you asked him. He comes on pretty strong, but he comes on pretty rich, too, so I imagine he throws one every now and then.”

  “So we move on, is that your recommendation?”

  “Yep. For now. He’ll stay put if we want to look at him a little closer later on.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to talk to the daughter tonight. You going to sleep at Peggy’s?”

  “Nope.” Ruthie’s voice tightened around the word.

  “Why not?”

  “She told me I wasn’t welcome. And don’t get any ideas about handling the job yourself, because I’m a hell of a lot more welcome than you are.” Ruthie hesitated. “If I didn’t know better I’d guess you bedded her last night, sugar bear. And then I’d guess that neither of you could live with what you thought it meant once the sun came up and the lights turned on.”

  “We didn’t make love, but we came close.”

  “Sometimes close is worse than all the way.”

  “I guess this was one of those times. She tell you about the call?”

  “A little.”

  “She tell you I listened in?”

  “Yep.”

  “She tell you anything else?”

  “Told me you got bent out of shape about the way she talked to him.”

  “What else?”

  Ruthie ignored me. “We got to cut her some slack, Marsh, or we’re going to lose her. What we got to remember is, she can have you and me and the Chinese army around here day and night, but the guy can still get at her anytime he wants. She knows that. It scares her, and the only thing she can think of to keep him out of her tent is to do what he wants when he wants her to. Not many women brave enough to do anything but in that situation. Men, either. And I can tell you this, Marsh Tanner. It’s going to be hard to get much cooperation from our client if you keep edging up on her pussy every time you’re alone together.”

  “It’s more complicated than that, Ruthie.”

  “Maybe it is. And maybe you just hope it is so you can believe there’s some high and mighty reason for you to be doing like you’ve been doing.”

  I’d spent most of the morning wrapping my mind around just the sort of accusations that Ruthie was engaging in, and I didn’t want to deal with that part of the problem anymore. I pushed Ruthie away from my ethics and back to the case. “She tell you anything at all that’s useful?”

  “Not that I can see. She didn’t have much to say, Marsh. I’ve had an easier time with a breeched calf.”

  “So when you heading home?”

  “Soon as I finish the cheesecake.”

  “You think I should set up outside her apartment and keep watch tonight?”

  “Just a second. Someone’s at the door.”

  Ruthie left me with a dead line, then came back a minute later. “Damn neighbor woman wants to borrow some ice. Now where were we?”

  “Do you think I should stake out her apartment tonight?”

  “In this neighborhood you’re liable to get arrested you stay in one place more than an hour.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll chance it anyway. I’ll talk to you after I see the daughter. Tell Peggy I said hello. Tell her to call me at home if she wants anything. Tell her—”

  “You want her to know any more than that you got to tell her yourself. I’ll be around if you need me, Marsh.”

  “Thanks, Ruthie. I hate to say it, but I think I made all this a lot worse than it was before I got involved.”

  “Hell, that’s the PI’s stock in trade. Harry used to say he’d had a good day if he hadn’t gotten anybody killed.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I hadn’t been sure where Peggy’s daughter lived, hadn’t even known what surname she went by, but the Rolodex had given me what I needed, on the card following Peggy’s own: Allison Nettleton, 428 Delaware Street. The telephone number was listed as well. Both the number and address had been erased and amended several times, in testimony to Allison’s peripatetic lifestyle, and the card was tattered and dingy as a result. From what Peggy had told me from time to time, Allison’s life was tattered and dingy as well.

  It was almost eight. I dialed Allison’s number and got a busy signal. I dialed again five minutes later. Still busy. After downing a quick finger of Scotch, I drove out to Potrero Hill.

  Allison’s building was across from an auto parts warehouse and within earshot of the freeway. Because it was only a few feet up the hill it lacked a view and consequently hadn’t been redeveloped out of existence. Even so, there was evidence of gentrification in the neighboring lots.

  The stucco facade was stained and chipped, a window was broken and patched with black Visqueen, the garage door tilted beneath a fractured hinge, and a digit on the house number was missing. It was what passed for a low-rent district, which meant the place would be a steal at six hundred a month.

  I rang the bell. Music drifted down from the second floor, a repetitive monotone that threatened to build to significance but never did. I pressed the buzzer and waited, and pressed again and waited even longer. The next time I kept pressing until the door popped open. When I went through it I entered a carpeted staircase that was narrow, dark, and purple.

  No one appeared at the top of the stairs to ask me what I wanted, no one called out an inquiry or a greeting, no one did anything except produce a series of thudding sounds, as though someone on the second floor was using the building as a drum. Louder now, the music drilled toward the center of my brain and made me long for Mozart.

  I climbed the stairs, which were spongy and infirm. When I got to the top I took my bearings. Although no one seemed interested in the fact, I was inside the apartment and not merely in an entryway.

  The design was the reverse of the norm, with the living room at the back and bedrooms at the front. The place was unquestionably occupied, because from where I stood I could see down the hall and into a room that contained at least one pair of bare feet. They rose vertically off the floor, heels down, toes splayed, as if their owner was asleep or dead. I coughed but no one stepped forth to greet or challenge me.

  In addition to the large room at the back I could see a portion of a kitchen and the corner of a bedroom, and could smell what I guessed was herbal tea and an additional aroma that I guessed was human sweat. As I walked toward the living room an orange object hurtled across the door opening, then disappeared as completely as if it had fallen down a well. The odd apparition was followed by two more percussive thuds that caused the floor to tremble and the light fixture to rattle like coins in a can. I walked to the doorway and looked inside.

  The living room was virtually hollow, the dominant feature a polished floor shined to a golden glow. The walls were cobalt blue. The floor was barren but for a stereo tape player shoved against one wall and a futon sleeping mat rolled up and stored directly across from the stereo. Next to the mat was a pole light that sprouted several metal shades from which beamed lights that made the room seem psychedelic and me feel like twenty years had somehow disappeared.

  The feet I’d seen from the top of the stairs belonged to a young man lying on the floor. His head was propped against the rolled-up mat. Eyes closed, mouth open, brea
ths labored, he seemed exhausted by the search for meaning in the bloodless music. He was dressed only in blue Jockey shorts and a sleeveless sweatshirt with the words CHOOSE ME on the front. His body was tanned and muscular, his face handsome but dissipated, capable of cruelty.

  I was about to say something to him when I heard another thud, this time at my back. When I turned I saw the figure who had hurtled past the doorway moments earlier.

  It was Allison, a hardened version of the sprightly coed whose photograph adorned her mother’s desk. She was dressed in an orange leotard made luminescent by the mix of colors from the pole lamp. She was barefoot like her mate, but far from supine. Within the space of the next minute she crouched, sprang, kneeled, leaped, twisted, kicked, and screamed, in agony or ecstasy or something undefined. I could tell she was working hard, because her body was slick with sweat and because the music was insufficient to provoke an emotion more sophisticated than languor.

  I leaned against the doorjamb and watched the dance for several minutes more. If not blindingly original, the moves were nevertheless practiced and arresting, out of Martha Graham by way of Merce Cunningham, I guessed, the work of an earnest if not gifted artist. When the tape ran out the dancer collapsed in the center of the floor, the audience opened his eyes, and I stepped into the room.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the young man asked when he saw me, his voice thick, his lids heavy, his eyes dull, as if they were dabbed with salve. His hair was long and sculpted; his jaw jutted; his pose was reminiscent of Truman Capote’s on the jacket of his first book.

  I told him my name.

  “So what?”

  “I’d like to talk to you and Allison.” I glanced at the dancer.

  The girl was panting too heavily to speak. I looked back at her companion in time to see him extract a crystalline nugget from a plastic bag and drop it into the bowl of a tiny glass pipe and touch a match to it. “Crack,” he said after absorbing a deep puff. “Want a hit?”

  I shook my head.

  “Essence of coke, man. The highest of the highs. Al?”

  The girl swore and hopped up off the floor. She kicked at an invisible something, took one long look at the recumbent doper, and said, “What if he’s a cop?” Then she stomped angrily out of the room. I blinked and followed her.

  She led me to a bedroom in the front. The bed was a mattress on the floor, the closet a rope tied from wall to wall, the dresser a pile of clothing in a corner. The sole light was a bulb dangling from a cord in the center of the ceiling. The pull-chain had been extended with a string. A Barbie doll was tied to its end, so that Barbie was in a state of perpetual execution.

  Allison marched to the far corner of the bedroom and I lingered in the doorway. She knew I was there, knew I was watching, but that didn’t stop her from pulling off her sopping leotard and flinging it at a cardboard box. Naked, she picked a brown towel off the floor and began drying herself off. Her body was tight and stringy, rippling with a dancer’s muscles, dark and leggy. Her features bore her mother’s royal stamp, but she betrayed them with a vassal’s scowl. Still, there was an artist’s arrogance to her movements, and a lover’s ire as well.

  When she finished mopping off her body she pawed through the pile of clothing and extracted a second leotard and struggled into it. This one was black, to match her mood. When she’d arranged her breasts and buttocks within the clinging fabric she turned on me with hot hostility. “So are you?”

  “A cop?” I shook my head.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you a minute.”

  “What about?”

  “Your mother.”

  That doused her rage, but substituted suspicion. “She send you here to bad-mouth Derrick?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t even know I’m here.”

  “Right.”

  “The truth.”

  Allison frowned uncertainly. “I don’t get it. What’s the deal? She’s not sick, is she?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “I don’t know. Some jerk in a sportcoat walks in unannounced and starts talking about your mother, you wonder if there’s a problem and he’s an insurance guy or something. So? Is there?”

  “Not quite the way you think. I’m Marsh Tanner. Your mother works with me. She’s my secretary.”

  “Oh.” Allison raised a brow and cocked a hip. “You’re him, huh?”

  “I’m him.”

  “Nice to meet you, I suppose.”

  “Same here.”

  “She’s told me lots of stuff about you.”

  “Same here.”

  Her grin slid wider. “From the look of you I doubt very much of it was true.”

  “Same here,” I said, and matched her look. “Is that Derrick in the other room?”

  “That’s him. Or what’s left of him.”

  “He’s an actor, right?”

  “He’s an actor part-time. Full-time, he’s a jerk. So what are you, producing a show or something?”

  “What’s he on?”

  “The pipe? That’s crack, man. Rock cocaine. Makes every man a Rambo and every chick a Ramboette.”

  “Is Derrick an addict?”

  “Derrick would be an addict if he could afford to be an addict. Since he can’t, he sucks up whatever he can beg off the baby Bernhardts he works with. Since an amazing number of them seem to be cruising along on Daddy’s trust fund, once in a while he scores something heavy. Mostly, though, he pisses and moans about being broke and looks at me like I’m Miss Fixit.”

  “Where’s he work?”

  “By day he buses dishes at a joint on Union. By night he acts like an actor acting like he’s good.” Allison crossed her arms. “The question is, why do you care?”

  “He and your mother had some trouble a while back, didn’t they?”

  “He and my mother have had trouble ever since I made the mistake of introducing them.”

  “There was something about money recently though, wasn’t there?”

  “Money.” She said it as though it was a terminal disease. “In this house there is always something about money.”

  “What was it this time?”

  Allison held an internal debate over whether to tell me. Finally she resolved it in my favor. “Derrick, in his lucid moments, wants to open his own theater. The Anthropomorphic Space, he wants to call it. He’s got a loft down on Mission already picked out, and he’s got some energetic young thespians ready to labor night and day for nothing but the chance to trod the boards and smoke some dope with Derrick, and he’s got a review from a Boston paper saying his portrayal of Alan Strang in Equus was an inspired leap of unconscious revelation.”

  “So all he needs is money.”

  She nodded. “And since my grandfather died and left my mother some, and since Derrick is convinced that half of it is rightfully mine, he persuaded me to put the heat on dear old Mom for a loan. She refused, mirabile dictu, so Derrick made a try for it himself. She refused again, this time with some rather choice remarks that blew holes in various parts of Derrick’s ego. The relationship has since been strained, as they say.” Her smile was wry and wicked.

  “Did Derrick ever threaten her?”

  “With what?”

  “Physical harm.”

  “I don’t think so.” Allison frowned, suddenly serious. “What happened to her, anyway?”

  “Did he ever follow her around?”

  “Why would he do that? What the hell’s going on here, Tanner?” Her foot tapped nervously; her eyes leaped on and off my face.

  “Are you here late at night? At one or two in the morning?”

  “No, as it happens. I’m not.”

  “Is Derrick?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I work.”

  “Where?”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “No.”

  She hesitated. “Okay. Just so we understand each other. I dance
at a nudie joint on Broadway. Guys pay to see my interpretation of a dying swan with tits.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “You mean she hasn’t told you of her daughter’s fall from grace?”

  I shook my head.

  “How gallant of her. But why are you asking me all this crap? I’m not saying another word till you tell me.”

  “Your mother’s being harassed by someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Neither does she.”

  “Harassed how?”

  “Phone calls.”

  “Obscene, you mean?”

  “Yes. But personal.”

  “You mean she doesn’t know him but he knows her?”

  “Right.”

  “My God.” She shook her head. “And you think Derrick might be doing it?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  She shook her head again, this time in rejection, not amazement. “That’s weak, Tanner. Derrick’s focused on only one thing lately. If he can’t fit it in his pipe, he’s not interested. Sex is out. So is theater. Derrick only has eyes for his connection. So I suggest you look elsewhere.” She paused and her eyes took on a mist. “Is Mom all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “He didn’t attack her or anything, did he? Rape, I mean?”

  “No. He scared her once. Shoved her down. But she wasn’t badly hurt.”

  “Tell her to call me if she wants.”

  “It might help if you call her.”

  Allison’s eyes hardened once again. “Maybe. And maybe we should just leave well enough alone.”

  I watched her wrestle with obstreperous emotions. “Do you have any idea who’d want to go after your mother like that?” I asked after a minute.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know enough about her life to know that. I don’t want to know enough, I guess. Just like she doesn’t want to know about me.”

  “I doubt that’s the case, Allison.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”