Toll Call Read online

  “About me and Mom.”

  “What about you?”

  “We’re exactly alike, that’s what. Clones. She married a jerk and I live with one. She makes unreasonable demands on me and I make unreasonable demands on her. She’s never wrong and neither am I. We each know what’s best for the other, we each think the other’s life is a wasteland, and we’re each afraid our own life is never going to get any better no matter what. Is it any wonder we hate each other’s guts?”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Well, we act like we do, so it’s the same thing, right?” Allison’s tough facade suddenly softened. “Hey. Tell her I’ve got an audition with Smuin next week. It’s a new company he’s thinking of starting. They’ve got money and everything. Tell her if I get in the corps I can keep my tutu on for a change.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, and turned to go.

  “Mr. Tanner?” Her voice was a hollow whisper at my back.

  I stopped and faced her. She seemed to have grown a decade younger.

  “My mom thinks you’re pretty special,” she said warmly.

  “Not anymore, she doesn’t.”

  “Well, she gets mad sometimes. But she doesn’t mean it.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “What I’m trying to say is, if I can help with this I’d like to.”

  “Good. I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ll try to keep an eye on Derrick, just in case I’m wrong.”

  “Good. There’s just one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Has anyone been in touch with you lately who claims to be your father?”

  My words seemed to absorb the air, to erase our previous statements, to leave us in a vacuum. Allison looked as though I’d inquired about a world that was magical and enchanting, a world she dreamed about. “My father?” she blurted eagerly, her sense made dumb and basic by my question. “What about my father?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I just thought it might be possible he was behind your mother’s problem.”

  “You mean you think he’s come back?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But has he?” Allison demanded, suddenly intense. “Has he come back?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “But you must know something. Tell me what it is. Has Mom heard from him? Is that it?”

  Her frenzy was such that I shook my head and held up a hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’ve gotten your hopes up for no reason. As far as I know, no one’s heard anything from your father, your mother included.”

  “Oh.”

  I apologized again, but within a few seconds her depression lifted and she offered me a sheepish grin. “I guess I haven’t quite resolved all that,” she said. “I think about him a lot, now that Derrick and I are … through. Not about him, exactly. Just about a man I choose to call my father. In my mind he looks kind of like Henry Fonda. I don’t know why.”

  Allison and I exchanged what I decided was some sympathy and understanding. “Don’t worry, Mr. Tanner,” she said after the moment. “She’ll be all right. Mom’s always been all right.”

  I hoped she wasn’t as blind as most kids are about their parents.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Drifting into the night, my thoughts caroming from Allison to her mother and back again, I left the apartment and drove down Delaware to Sixteenth, then cut over to South Van Ness and took it north as far as it went. It was several minutes before I realized that what I seemed to be doing was going back to Peggy’s.

  When I got to Fillmore I drove around Peggy’s block several times, unsure of what I dared to do or even wanted to. Ten minutes later I managed to find a place to park within view of the door to Peggy’s building. Suddenly tired, suddenly overwhelmed by futility, I turned off the lights, leaned back, closed my eyes, and waited for events to instruct me.

  Ten minutes later, the door to the apartment building opened and Ruthie Spring came out. She was alone and looked displeased, and she turned away without observing me engaged in the nebulous duty I’d assigned myself. She strolled down the block in what seemed to be a huff, in the opposite direction from my outpost, until she reached her red Camaro. A moment later she sped away in a rush, giving the wheels an angry spin. Peggy must have fired Ruthie as surely as she’d fired me.

  I glanced up at Peggy’s window just as the light in the front room went out. I imagined her in the bathroom undressing, preparing for bed. I imagined our foreplay of the night before, recycled the touch and smell and sight of the bed we’d shared in common, remembered the beginning and the middle and imagined a different end.

  I got out of the car. The air was cold but clear, the stars a million reminders of earthly impermanence. As I walked toward Peggy’s place I felt reborn or at least recharged.

  When I reached the end of the block a car turned onto the street in front of me, a gray Ford that cruised past me with its lights off. When I yelled for the driver to turn them on, he looked at me with what could pass for a lust for mayhem. I inspected him more closely, his face and then his car, and realized I’d seen him at least twice before since I’d begun hovering over Peggy, and one of those times was at a peculiar portion of the night, an hour when normal traffic wouldn’t have been on the streets.

  I called after him to stop. A second later his brake lights flashed. Though my view was fractured by reflections off the windshield, I thought he turned to look back at me. When I called out again he flipped his headlights on, increased his speed, raced to the next corner, and turned right, disappearing as though he’d been a figment.

  On a hunch, I slipped into the shadows of the building beside me and waited for him to reappear. It took three minutes. Two blocks north of where I stood the Ford edged around the corner, lights off once again, a blind behemoth that crept my way with the implacability of a glacier. Still in the shadows, still wondering if this was any of my business, I let him get within ten yards before I stepped into the street and cut him off.

  When he saw me his flushed face kindled. In the dark car his eyes were intense reflectors, catching the streetlight and reconstituting it as phosphorescent shrapnel. As I watched him aim the vehicle at my chest I moved onto my toes, ready to jump aside because he looked ready and able to run me down.

  From behind his glass shield he waved at me to move aside. When I didn’t he smashed a fist against the steering wheel; once, and then again. His teeth and eyes flashed once more, the metallic sheen melodramatic and mad. I held my ground with an infirm defiance. He kept coming, drove toward me until his bumper was a body-length away, then stopped abruptly. As I approached the car he seemed to seethe and scheme.

  We looked at each other through the window like prisoner and warden. I made motions for him to roll it down but he held fast to the steering wheel. His face was round and sweaty, a glossy flesh balloon. His eyes were still murderously hot but the hands on the wheel were as white as ivory, as though all his blood had been summoned to flood his face.

  “Who are you?” I asked through the glass, my voice heavy and ominous in the night.

  “Not your business,” he muttered, the words muffled and sullen.

  I could feel his resistance more than I could hear it. His lip curled and his jaw bulged. An artery in his neck swelled as thick as a thumb. I tapped on the window with my knuckle, hard enough to hurt.

  A car went past and honked at having to swerve around us. We ignored his inconvenience. The driver I was looking at looked at me, then down the street, and back at me again. This time the window drifted down, as slowly as the eyelids on a dying man. “What the hell do you want?” he demanded.

  “I want to know what you’re doing around here.”

  “It’s none of your goddamned business.”

  “It is if it’s criminal,” I said peaceably, aware that the situation was electric, potentially lethal. I wished I had my gun.

  “Oh, there’s a crime being committed,�
�� he said, his eyes still pots of heat. “Only I’m not the one committing it. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  I shook my head. “You first. What’s your business around here, friend?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with you. So get away from the car.”

  I tried to remain nonthreatening. I knew his face and I knew his car, so I could get to him when I wanted. For now I needed information. “I’m not leaving till you tell me your problem. We could go have a beer or something. You almost made a big mistake a couple of nights ago. You don’t want to press your luck.”

  “Are you nuts? I don’t even know who you are. Just leave me the hell alone.”

  “If that’s the way you want it. I’m not a cop, but if I see you around here again I’m going to call one.”

  “Do that. You just do that.”

  He was less bothered by the threat than I expected. Which could have meant he was less sane than I expected, too.

  “Did she hire you?” he went on, his lip a dismissive curl. “Are you her bodyguard or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, it won’t do her any good. I’ll do what I have to do, no matter who she hires.”

  “It’s time to put a stop to it, pal. You’ve had your fun, but enough’s enough. An assault charge is more than you bargained for, I think. And that’s what it’ll be if you fool with her again.”

  “Assault? I’ll show you an assault. You haven’t seen anything yet, mister. Just don’t get in my way.”

  He floored the accelerator and the car leaped away in a cloud of smoking tires and a cry of peeling rubber. I jumped aside, but caught my balance in time to read the license plate as he passed under the streetlight at the end of the block. I wrote the number in my notebook, then looked up at Peggy’s place again.

  It was still dark, its occupant oblivious to what had just transpired. I started back for my car, to set off after the Ford, but a glance told me it was too late. The Ford was too far away, the Marina maze too easy for it to hide in. In any event I was ambivalent: the driver was my second suspect, after all, no more or less fitting than Judson Tomkins, who seemed less fitting by the hour. Without talking to him again I couldn’t rationally bring in the police. And even if I could prove he was the spider’s alter ego, arrest presented risks. He would doubtlessly be released on bail, and at that point Peggy’s jeopardy could escalate as a result of my uninvited meddling.

  In a torpor of uncertainty, I waited two hours to see if the Ford would bring its driver back. When it didn’t, I drove to the nearest phone booth and called the cop I knew best next to Charley Sleet. I asked him to have a patrol car swing by Peggy’s place from time to time for the rest of the evening, on the bogus ground that I was working on a domestic wrangle and that the husband had been threatening my client. I gave him a description of the Ford and the license number, and my friend said he’d take care of it. Then I went home and tried to care for myself. In the process, I wondered who the red-faced man was and what Peggy could possibly have done to him to make him so livid and incorrigible.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When the phone rang I was dancing naked with Allison on the Marina Green, a sybaritic pas de deux that in real life would have been bathetic but in dreamland was arousing, elegant, and perfect. The pulsing phone destroyed all that, and by the time I had regained my senses enough to grope for the receiver I was back in my vastly imperfect bedroom, in the grip of an equally imperfect dread of what the call might mean.

  “Marsh,” she said, her voice thin and sterile. “It’s me.”

  “Peggy?”

  “Yes, I …”

  “What happened?” The question presumed calamity.

  “Nothing. I …”

  “Are you all right? You don’t sound all right.”

  “I’m fine.”

  I couldn’t believe her. “Did he attack you again?”

  “No, no, it was just a call, Marsh. Another phone call.”

  I was thankful and relieved, but as perturbed as ever by the fact of those telephonic confidences. “What did he want?”

  She hesitated. “He wants to see me.”

  I swore. “I hope you didn’t agree.”

  “Well …”

  Her silence became an elaborate and chilling answer. “When’s the meeting?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “The Alta Plaza.”

  “The park?”

  “Yes. By the swings. He wanted me to go to some place in Golden Gate Park, but it’s so big and isolated I didn’t think I ought to do that. And I certainly didn’t want him here. The plaza was the only other place we could think of.”

  The thought of the two of them negotiating a nocturnal rendezvous was infuriating. “You’re not going,” I said.

  “But I told him I’d be there.”

  “I don’t care what you told him, you’re not going.”

  She sniffed twice, then spoke halfheartedly. “But I thought this was what you wanted me to do. I thought this was a way of fighting back.”

  Charley Sleet had suggested that I lay a trap. I had vacillated, but the opportunity had presented itself without my urging. The risks remained, but now they seemed worth taking—even if the ploy was unsuccessful, a retaliatory posture might salvage Peggy’s peace of mind and even repair our torn relationship. But I had to make sure what she was thinking, how she saw our roles. “How do you mean, fight back?”

  “Well, I thought if you got there first, and hid someplace, then maybe when John came to meet me you could catch him. Or see who he was. Or call the cops. Something.”

  “Those rescue scenes hardly ever work in real life, Peggy. And when they break down they can make things worse than ever.”

  “But how else are we going to stop him, Marsh? What else can I do? Tell me, so I’ll know what I have to do to get you to stop looking at me the way you were last night. I can’t take that anymore. I just can’t.” Her final phrase slid into a convulsive groan.

  Her plea ate away my confidence as it augmented my shame. “I know this is a nightmare for you, Peggy. And that there’s no easy way out of it. I really do. I know you want it to stop, and it will, eventually. I’ll get him. I promise. But not this way. This way’s too risky.”

  “How much time, Marsh? I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep again? Please tell me, so I can have something to look forward to.”

  I said the only thing I could, which was a slippery evasion. “I don’t know, Peggy. I’m working on it, that’s all I can say. And Ruthie is too. Between us we’ll figure something out.”

  Sometime during my speech she made a decision, and it was the opposite of the one I was urging on her. When she imparted it her voice was firm and cocky. “Well, I’m going. I’ll go to the park and wait and see what happens. At least I’ll have a chance to look at him. Maybe I’ll recognize him. Maybe he’ll introduce himself and tell me his life story.” She laughed bitterly. “Hell, maybe we’ll start going steady. I don’t seem to have much luck with men I actually go out with. Maybe this is the only kind of relationship that works for me.” Her bravado drifted out of reach, and her final words were infirm again. “I don’t know what else to do, Marsh. I really don’t.”

  The only way I knew how to respond to her request for encouragement was to tell her about the guy with the red face and the gray car I’d seen outside her apartment that evening, and ask if she had any idea who it was. She said she didn’t. She said she didn’t know anyone who looked like that. She said she didn’t know anyone who drove that kind of car. She didn’t say I was wasting my time trying to identify him, but she was thinking it.

  Her disclaimer dimmed my hunch to a faint conjecture, but nevertheless I told her I was going to call the DMV in the morning, and that when I got the name of the registered owner of the Ford the whole thing might be over. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t blame her. One of the few certainties in my world at the moment was that it wasn’t going
to end that easily.

  I thought for a minute longer, then made a decision myself, one that presupposed a gamble. “What time’s he supposed to get there?”

  “Three.”

  I looked at my watch. “Okay. I can be there by two thirty. I’ll dig in someplace and wait and see what happens. If he beats me to the park and sees me coming, I assume the arrangement will be aborted and you’ll be treated to another lecture on the phone. Or worse.”

  “I’m prepared for the consequences, Marsh. At least we’re doing something.”

  “Okay. We’ll give it a try. But don’t make him mad, Peggy. Don’t give him any reason to do something that I won’t have a chance to prevent.”

  Her voice took on a bramble. “That won’t be a problem, will it? I mean, I’m used to doing what he wants. As you well know.”

  “I’m sorry for last night, Peggy. I don’t know how else to say it.”

  She hesitated, and in the echo of my apology her mood diluted. “I know you are, Marsh. I know in some ways this is as hard for you as it is for me. I know that, but it doesn’t keep me from getting mad at you sometimes. The same way you get mad at me, I guess.” Her laugh was dry and fragile, but tinged with hope.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to us, Peggy. I hope you believe that.”

  “I do. I guess.”

  “I meant it when I said I loved you. I’m not sure quite how I meant it, but I meant it.”

  “I love you, too, Marsh. I really do.”

  We paused beneath the words, without the need to evade or expand them. “We’ll get him, Peggy,” I said finally. “We’ll get him tonight. Just don’t take any chances up there. If it starts to go bad—if he has a weapon, or there’s more than one of them, or anything else that looks dangerous—just start running and leave the rest to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe I should get Ruthie in on this.”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t. Ruthie wants me to be what she is, and I can’t and I don’t want to be and I’m tired of feeling I should. You’ll take care of it, Marsh. I know you will.”