Toll Call Page 2

  I trotted to the outer office and retrieved the little package and went back and presented it to Peggy.

  “What’s this for?” she asked, frowning. “My birthday’s in June. You even remembered this year.”

  “A little peace offering. So we can forget our little fight.”

  “What fight?” she asked, her words still slow and fuzzy. “Oh. That. I tried, Marsh, but about midnight my fingers broke off relations with my brain and the strangest things started to show up on the page. I just couldn’t send out those reports with typos in them; it’s so … tacky. I—”

  “It was my fault,” I interrupted. “I shouldn’t have pressed you. Thank God someone around here has standards. Another day didn’t matter anyway. I was unreasonable.”

  “No you weren’t. I was incompetent.”

  I grinned. “Let’s have another fight about whose fault it was. You take my side and I’ll take yours. Like those horse races where you ride my horse and I ride yours and the money goes to the one that comes in second.”

  Peggy smiled, yawned, and opened her present. “Obsession. I’ve always wanted to try it.” She looked up from the package at me. “You can’t afford this.”

  “Today I can.”

  She took a moment to decipher, then nodded. “The Arundel trial. How’d it go?”

  “Okay, I guess. As I left the stand, Halliburton tossed me a look that activated my acne, so I suppose I did what I was hired to do.”

  Peggy gazed back at the tiny cruet as though it had been filled from the fountain of youth. “Shall I put some on?”

  “Sure.”

  She opened the bottle, tipped the essence of something or other onto a fingertip, and dabbed it behind her wrists and ears. “Want to smell?”

  I went to the couch, leaned down, and took a sniff. My nose wriggled in self-defense, and I suppressed a sneeze as I tried and failed to identify the scent. I doubt that it existed anywhere but on the flesh of wealthy women. “You don’t have to wear it, you know,” I told her. “I didn’t know what kind you use.”

  “But I like it I think,” she said, inhaling. Then she grinned. “My usual brand’s Norell, if the question ever comes up. In Trivial Pursuit, or something.”

  We exchanged flirtatious peeks, then Peggy closed her eyes and leaned back against the couch, giving me a chance to examine her more closely.

  Tall, angular, she was darkly and archly handsome, with long brown hair that curled at her shoulders and black-brown eyes that were customarily narrowed in a dedicated skepticism. Below the eyes, her sharpened chin and nose seemed always to be accusing me of being less fervid than I ought.

  At quick glance, Peggy had aged not a whit from the moment she first entered my office eight years before, but closer inspection revealed minor flaws. Her hair seemed limp and neglected, her cheeks two shades too pale, her eyes in danger of drowning in the big black pools that spread beneath them. Her shoulders sagged; her hands lay lax; a stocking puckered at the knee. Her entire aspect was that of an extremely efficient appliance that had recently been unplugged.

  The contrast from a few short weeks before was so disturbing I asked a question. “Is anything wrong?”

  I asked it casually, gently, my eyes back on my mail, all to belie my concern. But as usual I didn’t evade her defenses.

  She opened one eye. “What?”

  “I asked if anything was wrong.”

  “What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

  “You do.”

  She closed the eye. Her smile was arid and forbidding, and succeeded a sigh. “The perfume doesn’t give you a license to be candid, Mr. John Marshall Tanner.” Her words were as stiff as steel.

  “You’re exhausted,” I persisted. “You’ve been on edge for over a month. Usually you handle my more boorish outbursts without a ripple, but lately you’ve been giving me exactly what I deserve. Which is your right, but not your style.”

  “So?” Anger barbed the word. “Maybe I’ve decided to become more assertive. They give classes in it, you know. Someone’s decided the world aches for more assertive women.”

  I ignored the snap. “Maybe I can help with whatever it is. I’d like to, if you think I could.”

  She shook her head, her eyes still closed, as though that made me insignificant. “It’s nothing. I’ve gotten myself into a situation, is all. Now I’ve got to get myself out.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I do for a living, you know.”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “This isn’t that big a deal, Marsh. Really. I’ll be fine.”

  “Great. When you are I hope you’ll let me know.”

  I was insulted and angry and she knew it from my tone. We slid into a huffy silence. Peggy seemed even more deflated than before, more churlish and reluctant. I wanted to help, but I knew her well enough to know she couldn’t be pushed effectively. Every time I’d tried it in the past I’d only solidified her obstinance to the approximate hardness of a diamond.

  I guessed the problem was a man—she’d gone through several of them in the years she’d worked for me, not surprising in a city where the vast majority of men are either gay or married or revoltingly narcissistic, and not surprising in a woman who’d told me several times that her one failed marriage was more than enough, that since she was self-sufficient financially and had already birthed a child and was past the age of safely bearing more, there seemed little reason to revisit the altar or even the justice of the peace and even less reason not to sample a wide variety of what came in the box marked MALE. But whatever the problem, there didn’t seem to be a place in it for me. Not yet. So I asked if there had been any calls while I was out.

  She shook her head, but for some reason my question prompted one of her own. “Tell me something, Marsh.”

  “What?”

  “When you go to all the trouble to change your telephone number, how does someone learn the new one so goddamned fast?”

  THREE

  I spent the rest of the day fretting over Peggy. The new telephone number she’d given me a few weeks earlier seemed suddenly an ominous incident, but she dodged all my efforts to discover why she’d changed her number and who had upset her by managing to learn the new one. She had, in fact, voided my every attempt at conversation of any sort until it was time for her to leave for home. As we bid each other a carefully perfunctory good-bye her face seemed frozen in a timorous mask, as though where she was going was even worse than where she’d been, which was with me and my awkward, aimless questioning.

  I was so concerned about her I considered tailing her after she left the office, in a blind grasp at some hint of what was gnawing at her. But Peggy usually stopped for a drink somewhere, then took the bus home. Even in the evening crunch there was no way I could keep her in sight without being spotted and running the risk that she would seal off the infected portion of her life forever.

  Soon after Peggy left I went home myself, fixed an early dinner of tomato soup and day-old pizza, and stewed some more about my secretary. It wasn’t so much that I felt she was a candidate for a serious predicament as it was my certainty that if one in fact confronted her she would wait too long before asking for help. Like many virtues, doggedness has a second side, and Peggy’s gritty self-reliance could make Pete Rose look like a shirker. During the course of the evening I debated and discarded a host of approaches to the problem, from confrontation to secret surveillance, and in the process I realized I still didn’t know all that much about the woman who had brightened my life more than anyone in the past eight years.

  She had grown up back east—New Hampshire, I thought—and had gone to Bennington for a while before dropping out to marry a “swashbuckler,” as she called him, a structural engineer who had impregnated her in their third year of marriage and abandoned her the next. Her family was so upset when she left college that they cut her off without a cent, and after the divorce Peggy had gone to work as a self-taught secretary to support herself and her baby daughter, All
ison. By the time she came to work for me, Peggy’s mother had died and her father had been put in a rest home with Alzheimer’s and Allison was in the corps de ballet in some avant-garde dance company in the SoHo section of New York. As far as I knew, Peggy had never heard from the swashbuckler again.

  Matters had stood that way until a little less than a year ago, when her father had died and left her some insurance money, which in turn had financed her daughter’s move from New York to San Francisco. Allison had brought along a rather disreputable companion, an actor who was equally into drugs and sponging off his mate, and for that reason or some other a degree of tension had developed between Peggy and her daughter, a tension whose precise source was still a mystery to me, and possibly to Peggy as well.

  The rest of my knowledge was made up of those quirky odds and ends that define us to the portion of the world that’s interested. Peggy had a cat she loved and a neighbor she was friends with. She worshipped Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, loved Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, collected copies of Matisse and Mary Cassatt. Her favorite color was red; her favorite flower the California poppy; her favorite place in the city the Palace of the Legion of Honor. She appreciated food and wine to the extent that a couple of birthday dinners she’d fixed for me at her apartment ranked among my all-time favorite meals. She liked to visit art museums in her spare time, though she bemoaned the great gulf between San Francisco’s public art and that available in New York and LA. She was a perfectionist about her work and about most other areas of her life as well, with the apparent result that sooner or later her boyfriends all fell short of her ideals and more than one of her female friends had ended up committing what Peggy had viewed as private treason.

  Peggy demanded much of the world and more of herself, and I felt fortunate to have held on to her as long as I had. I think I had succeeded for eight years because my life was so spare and simple I was relieved of making the imperfectible choices that more ambitious men are faced with, and because I could make her laugh. Still, I was afraid that sooner or later I would make what in Peggy’s eyes was a mistake so basic and unforgivable that she would vanish from my life as suddenly as she had appeared, leaving me as desolate as a jilted spouse. In the meantime, though, I intended to continue to enjoy what amounted to a first for me—an important relationship with a woman that floated on friendship rather than on lust.

  I fretted in forms that progressed from the abstract to the concrete until ten o’clock that evening, when my imagination was raging so ungovernably I decided to give Peggy a call, to make sure she was okay. I got a busy signal that relieved me, though not entirely. I tried again ten minutes later. Still busy. Twenty minutes after that her phone was busy yet again, and by then I was not relieved at all.

  I put on my shoes and tucked in my shirt and got ready to drive to Peggy’s. There were plenty of innocuous reasons for the phone being tied up for so long, of course, but there were some fearsome ones as well, and it was those that were shoving me toward the flat expanse of the Marina District, where Peggy rented an apartment.

  When my hand was on the door knob my phone rang. After a quick debate I retreated to answer it.

  “Marsh? Hi. It’s Peggy.”

  I kicked off my shoes and sagged back onto the couch. “How are you?”

  My voice must have grown an irritated burr, because Peggy hesitated before she answered. “I’m fine. Why?”

  “I’ve been trying to call you. The line was always busy. I was starting to get worried.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. About whatever’s been bothering you lately, I guess.”

  “Nothing’s bothering me, Marsh. Stop playing mother hen.”

  “I’m not playing.” The words were truthful, but more dramatic than I intended.

  Peggy started to say something, stopped, then began again in a bantering lilt that was supposed to deflect my concern. “The reason I called was, you remember I said I’d come in tomorrow first thing to make up for falling asleep on the job? Well, I just remembered I can’t make it in the morning. But I’ll be in after lunch, and Wednesday I’ll be in all day. Promise. So relax; you’ll get your money’s worth.”

  “I’d get my money’s worth if you only came in three hours a month.”

  “Why, I think that’s almost a compliment, Marsh Tanner. You’d better be careful or they’ll throw you out of the Grand Order of Confirmed Misogynists.”

  She was urging me to collaborate in the jest but I wasn’t quite ready to. “Who were you talking to?” I asked, as close to a demand as I’d ever made of her.

  “When?”

  “Just now. On the phone.”

  “Kind of nosy, aren’t you?”

  “Who?” I repeated.

  She paused again. “A friend.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone I’d want to know?”

  This time I was the one grasping at a laugh, but now it was Peggy who demurred. “No,” she snapped.

  I kept trying, this time in Peggy’s preferred pretext. “Speaking of friends, how come you never fix me up with one of them?”

  Peggy’s laugh was leaden, still hinting of bitter memory. “I’m not sure she’d appreciate the subtleties of your lifestyle.”

  “What is my lifestyle, Miss Expert?”

  “Oh, if I had to label it I suppose I’d call it a couple of degrees short of laid back.”

  “Laid out, you mean.”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “But I can change. I’ll buy a BMW. I’ll take up windsurfing. I’ll eat raw fish and drink raw milk and wear raw silk.”

  Peggy was giggling like her self of six months ago. “No, Marsh. I won’t give you a chance. If you went Yuppie I couldn’t keep your precious personality a treasure just for me.”

  “Why does the word antique come to mind when you say that?”

  We exchanged a set of matching chuckles, and I forgot the hot round slug of worry that had burned in my gut a few short minutes before, but only momentarily. “So you won’t tell me who you were talking to.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s private. Signing my paychecks doesn’t give you the right to know all my little secrets. You already know too many of them as it is.”

  I started to say good-bye, then didn’t. Several years ago, a man had been trying to kill me because he thought I’d known some things I hadn’t, and at one point it occurred to me that he might decide to lie in wait for me in my office, with Peggy under a gun, to take me out the minute I walked in the door. So Peggy and I developed a code, to use whenever I called in, that would let me know if there was any danger lurking behind the door marked TANNER INVESTIGATIONS.

  With that in mind, instead of saying good-bye I said, “Okay, Peggy. I’ll take your word for it that nothing’s wrong. There’s just one last thing.”

  “What?”

  “Did you remember to water the plants today?”

  Peggy paused long enough to dredge the code words into her consciousness. “Yes, I did remember, and yes, there really isn’t anyone here, code or no code. Now do you believe me?”

  “I guess I have to.”

  “You’ve been reading too many mystery books.”

  “Mystery books aren’t half as scary as the morning paper, Peggy. And if there’s anything at all to ESP, then there’s something wrong over there no matter what you say. I still hope you’ll tell me what it is.”

  Peggy sighed. “Will you go to bed or do I have to start humming Brahms’ Lullaby?” She hesitated, then spoke in the mildly mocking tone I knew so well. “Or maybe there’s someone over there with you. Have you watered the plants today, Mr. Tanner?”

  “Hell, if I had someone here with me I’d have left you to your troubles no matter what they were.”

  Mercifully, Peggy chose not to discuss my love life. “Don’t forget the Grantland deposition tomorrow afternoon.”

>   “Transamerica Building at two.”

  “Right. Marsh?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not real big on gratitude, you know? I mean, anything I get in life I figure I pretty much deserve and then some. But thanks for checking on me.”

  “Sure.”

  “And thanks for caring. Lately I’ve found it’s real easy to convince myself that no one does.”

  FOUR

  The phone call calmed my fears, but my sanguinity only endured till three A.M., when I woke up in a cold room with a hot sweat that emanated from my certainty that Peggy Nettleton was in serious and mounting jeopardy no matter how firm or funny her denials. I got up, fixed myself a drink, and lay awake the rest of the night formulating a plan, which at the ungainly hour of seven o’clock had me and my Buick parked a block down the street from the door to Peggy’s apartment building. I wasn’t fully certain why I was there, I was just certain that I had to do something to deflate my apprehensions, for my own peace of mind if not for Peggy’s.

  She didn’t emerge till ten. I spent the interim avoiding meter maids and reading Louis Auchincloss and watching drivers cruise the street in a desperate search for a place to park. One guy in a gray Ford went by five times before he found one. Each time he passed, his face was a darker shade of crimson, as though he had a divine right to my slot.

  Between the book and the traffic I wondered why I had become so alarmed from so little stimulus. The only thing I knew for certain was that Peggy looked tired and seemed distracted. Common enough symptoms, though not common to her. Still, the scope of my concern was surprising, so much so that I began to wonder if it was a window to a deep desire that I had denied for far too long. Perhaps Peggy had become more than a friend to me; perhaps I had fallen in love.

  Not impossible, since I’m often in love long before I know it. And not an unpleasant prospect, since being in love is usually better than being out of it, even though at my age love doesn’t sustain itself but needs a lot of work, a labor that’s increasingly easy to shy away from. And not unintriguing, since if I confessed my sentiments to Peggy I could see if they were shared.