Toll Call Read online

  “I’m used to keeping information confidential,” I said. “No one needs to know we’ve talked.”

  She laughed again, this time more warmly. “I’m used to keeping my mouth shut, too, Mister Investigator. And that’s just what I’m going to do right now.”

  “But I only—”

  “Look. I know what people in this building say about me. Tomkins, and little Mendosa down there. Well, whatever I may have been or done in the past, it’s not true anymore. Get it? I have friends and they come see me and we have a little fun and once in a while maybe we get a little loud. But that’s it. I know the vulnerabilities of a whore, Mister Private Eye, but I’m not one and there’s no way you can prove I am. So take your questions elsewhere. There’s no way you can lean on me. No way in the world.”

  “That’s none of my business,” I said quickly. “All I need to know is if Tomkins was with you a few minutes ago.”

  “I learned a long time ago not to answer questions about who I was with and when. So I’m going to bed. If you’ve got any sense you’ll do the same.”

  “It’s important,” I said.

  “Not to me,” she answered, and her footsteps took her away from the door.

  I was looking at my watch and wondering if there was anything more I could do when the door to the apartment across the hall opened and Karen Whittle’s face appeared in the narrow space above the chain. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  She was wearing a housecoat and her hair was in curlers but she seemed fully awake. As she brushed back a wayward curl her housecoat fell open to reveal a lacy camisole that stretched like a drumhead across her abdomen. “I was wondering if you and Lily were all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “I just saw Judson Tomkins come down from this floor. He had a look on his face that inspired my concern. I was just asking your neighbor about him. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

  She frowned and bit her lip. “I’m no more disturbed than usual,” she said with a hint of wildness that revived my suspicion of a link between her and Tomkins.

  “How’s Lily?” I asked.

  “She’s asleep, which is where I’m going when you start quieting down. What are you doing here, anyway? It’s five A.M.”

  “I was down at Peggy’s.”

  Karen Whittle raised her brows. “Is that supposed to explain what you’re doing outside my apartment?”

  “I told you. Tomkins and Miss Smith. I was checking on them.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Tomkins is a guy who needs checking on.”

  She frowned, then yawned. I wasn’t certain she was as sleepy as she pretended. “I’m not supposed to understand, am I?” she said.

  “No.” I started toward the stairway, but then turned back. “What does your ex-husband look like?”

  Apprehension iced her features. Her eyes flicked at each end of the hallway, and her hand squeezed her housecoat at the base of her throat so tightly she seemed intent on strangling herself. “Why? What about him?”

  “I saw a man hanging around. I thought it might be him.”

  “In the building?”

  “No. Outside.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Oh.” Her hand slid away from her throat and her lips stretched into an easy smile. “Well, Tom is tall, dark, and handsome, or he was when I married him. When we divorced he was short, fat, and bald. At least he looked that way to me.”

  “Red hair? Red face?”

  She shook her head. “I was the one with the red face,” she said, “when I realized what a bastard I’d married.”

  I grinned at her arid joke and told her good night and listened as she shut the door on what I’d thought was a good idea.

  A minute later I tapped on Peggy’s door. “Who’s there?” she asked for the second time that night, her voice still dry and strained, her mood still delicate.

  “Me.”

  The door opened six inches, but a chain still stretched across the gap. We looked at each other through a narrow column of air that reminded me of the times I’d talked to people through the bars of a jail cell.

  Her preparations for the trip to my apartment included changing into what looked like a cotton jumpsuit. “Let’s go,” I said. “We can have you in bed by six if we hurry.”

  “I’m not going.” Her chin jutted and her lips thinned to the diameter of wire.

  “Come on. Don’t be difficult.”

  “I’m not going, Marsh. I’m here and I’m fine and I don’t want to leave and you can’t make me because I’m not going to let you in.”

  “It’s not safe, damnit. You don’t know what that guy will do.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I looked at her. “Did he just call you? Have you talked to him since you got back here? You have, haven’t you?”

  In response to my inquisition she moved out of sight behind the door.

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No. He was very understanding. He—”

  “Crap and double crap. Come on. You’re not staying alone tonight, not where that psycho can get at you. I mean it, Peggy.”

  She didn’t answer or appear.

  “You know what he did, the son of a bitch? Huh? You know what your precious phone pal did? He bugged the office. Not my office; your office. He put a little bug in that picture behind your desk and he’s heard every single word you’ve said for months. Still think he’s harmless, Peggy? Normal? He’ll do anything to get you where he wants you. Anything. Don’t you realize that by now?”

  My outburst left me winded and defeated. Peggy didn’t respond for several hollow seconds. I was mad enough to grant her wish and leave her when she sighed a whistle that curled at me from her hidden refuge. “Where is it now?”

  “The bug?”

  “Yes.”

  “In my desk. Why?”

  “I was just wondering if it was still working.”

  “I put it in a vitamin bottle. I’m saving it, because if I ever find the bastard I’m going to feed it to him.”

  Peggy fell silent once again. I leaned against the doorjamb, closed my eyes, and ultimately surrendered. “See you tomorrow,” I said wearily. “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

  “He asked to speak to you,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “He wanted to talk to you.”

  “By name, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he want to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. I guess to tease you about tonight. About not catching him or something. He laughed about it. He asked if you hurt yourself when you fell down.”

  My face reddened around my fury. “What else did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me, goddamnit.”

  “He said I had a glorious body. He said he’d like to see it again, in more suitable surroundings. He offered to take me to Carmel sometime. To the Highlands Inn.” Her voice was light and affectless, a weatherwoman laughing at a cyclone.

  “Did you make a date with him, for Christ’s sake?”

  My bitterness brought her out from her hiding place and caused tears to fog her eyes. “Good night, Marsh,” she whispered sadly.

  “Peggy, I—”

  “Good night, Marsh. I’ll see you in the office later this afternoon. I’d appreciate it if you could be there around five. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you then. Now go home and get some sleep.”

  She closed the door on my next entreaty. I had an urge to knock again, to bang and bang until my frustration was immersed in the exchange of pain for sweet destruction, but I backed away until I calmed down. When I knocked again it was for a different reason.

  This time she opened the door only wide enough to reveal her cheek and eye. “I’m not going with you, Marsh. There’s no use trying to persuade me.”

  “T
his is something else.”

  “What?”

  “It would be more comfortable if I could come inside.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t leave, and right now that’s the only thing I want from you.”

  I put my hand against the door to keep her from closing it. “Just one more minute. You know that guy Tomkins? The one with the porn collection I told you about?”

  “What about him?”

  “I just saw him.”

  “At this hour?”

  I nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Coming down from the fourth floor. Is there any chance he was up there visiting your friend Karen?”

  The eye slid away from the opening. “No. Don’t be absurd.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. You’ve met her. You know it’s impossible. Karen despises him. Every woman in the building despises him. And that’s without seeing his girlie collection.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s something else. Tomkins was brushing sand off his pants. There was sand in the play area at the park, and probably sand scattered all over the bushes as well, by the wind and kids tossing it at each other and the like. Plus the janitor says Tomkins just got here a few minutes before we did. So there’s a chance Tomkins is our man.”

  “No.”

  “I know you want to believe the spider’s a romantic Don Juan, Peggy, but in real life these guys turn out to be repressed, perverted pipsqueaks with green teeth and runny noses and urine stains all over their pants. Tomkins fits that to a T. He’s a registered sex offender, for God’s sake. He exposes himself to kids. So get your head out of the clouds and deal with this, Peggy. Help me figure out how to stop him.”

  By the time I finished she was shaking her head with my every word. “It’s not Tomkins. It’s not.”

  “Humor me. Assume it was. Is there any possibility your friend Karen might be instigating the whole thing? Does she have any motive at all to torture you like this?”

  Peggy shook her head again. “No. That’s crazy, Marsh. Karen’s my best friend. She wouldn’t do anything like that. She’d have no reason to.”

  “You didn’t take a man away from her at one time or another, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Her ex-husband, maybe?”

  “No. They lived in Arizona when they were married. Tucson. I’ve never even been to Tucson.”

  “Could she be a lesbian? Maybe you insulted her when you didn’t pick up on her advances.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  I tried to make sense of the night or any little part of it, but all I came up with was a perfect image of Peggy’s wanton pirouette in the middle of a covetous stand of pine trees. “I’m tired of standing out here in the hall,” I said. “Think it over, Peggy. This thing better end soon or it’s going to get completely out of hand. He’s already seen you naked, and if he’s got any blood in his veins at all he’s not going to be able to get that vision out of his mind. It’ll make him even more obsessive, Peggy. His demands will become more intimate and extreme. So you’ve got to start helping. You’ve got to come to grips with a motive for what’s going on.”

  “But there isn’t any. At least not one that’s sane.”

  “Maybe. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s calculated, an attempt to drive you crazy or frighten you until you leave town or something. I suggest you give some thought to what might be behind all this.”

  I turned on my heel and left Peggy behind the door she had locked to keep me out.

  By the time I got home it was after six. I undressed and lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. But my brain pushed anxieties at me with the subtlety of a line of chorus girls with nothing on their minds but seduction and nothing on their bodies but G-strings and cheap perfume. By the time seven rolled around I was a sleepless hodgepodge of wonder and regret, and I left the bed as thankfully as I’d entered it.

  After breakfast at Zorba’s, I put in a call to the service that has access to the DMV records. I gave them the red-faced man’s license number and they told me they’d get back to me in an hour. Then I called Ruthie Spring.

  She answered right away. Like me, she’s a poor sleeper, and like me, the reasons lie deep and out of reach. “What say, sugar bear?” she asked. “You still at Peggy’s?”

  “Nope. Home.”

  “Problem?”

  “Several. We set a trap for the spider last night. Or tried to.”

  “Who’s we?” she asked, her voice arch and chilly.

  “Peggy and I.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you’d put me on the second team.”

  “You know better than that, Ruthie.”

  She paused. “I hope I do, sugar bear. So did it work?”

  “No better than the last time.”

  “Too bad. Anyone draw blood?”

  “Lucky for me, pride doesn’t show when it’s wounded.”

  Ruthie laughed a hacking rasp. “So what do you want from me?”

  “There’s one thing you can do that might help. The guy in her building, name of Tomkins, apartment twenty-three. I’d like you to clamp a tail on him, just to see where he goes and what he does. I’d particularly like to know if he does anything with a woman named Karen Whittle.”

  “That’s the friend that lives upstairs. Borrowed some ice the other day.”

  “Right. She’s hiding something, and she may be in cahoots with this Tomkins for some reason, so if you could keep an eye on him a lead might turn up. I thought about having Charley Sleet roust the guy on the theory that it wouldn’t take too much to scare him out of town. But if the Whittle woman’s involved, then that wouldn’t put an end to it. What we’re really looking for is a motive, I guess.”

  “I thought it was sex.”

  “Yeah, but I think there’s more to it, somehow. Or maybe I just want there to be.”

  “I know where you’re hailing from, Marsh. Miss Peggy turns out to be not quite the filly you thought she was when she was in the show ring instead of back in the barn. Happens all the time. Hell, my first husband was such a lizard I get a hot flash every time I think I was dumb enough to let him slither into my bed, to say nothing of my twat.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been married before Harry.”

  “Well, it’s not something I write on toilet walls.”

  “Okay, Ruthie. Pick up Tomkins when you can. He works at a porn store on Turk. But be careful. He’s warped, he’s tough, he’s facing a jail term, and he’s been out on the edge of trouble for a long time. Try not to let him catch the tail.”

  “Will do.”

  “You need to get paid, Ruthie? Looks like I’m your client now, not Peggy.”

  “When I need your money I’ll send up a smoke signal, sugar bear. Till I do, I’d as soon you not bring it up.”

  Ruthie would be faint from hunger before she’d ask me for a dime, and she knew I knew it. I thanked her and told her to call me if anything turned up. “And I don’t think it’s Peggy who looks different in the ring,” I added. “I think it’s me.”

  I hung up the phone and the DMV search service called a minute later. The red-faced man’s gray Ford was registered to a rental company that had a dozen offices in the city. They wouldn’t give out information about their customers to me but they would to Charley Sleet. I put in a call to the Central Station but Charley was out and no one knew where he was. No one ever knows where Charley is till Charley wants them to, and that only happens about twice a day. I left a message for him to call, then left the apartment and strolled down to the office and checked the mail.

  The only item of interest was hand-scrawled on a sheet of yellow legal paper: Thanks for ruining my life. One day I’ll return the favor. I wadded it up and threw it in the trash, then went to the wastebasket, got the letter, uncrumpled and smoothed it, then put it in the drawer of my desk on top of the seven other letters of its type I’ve received over the y
ears, the ones that might someday explain why I had turned up in the morgue.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I fooled my way through the morning until I thought enough people would be up and about at Peggy’s apartment building to make another visit worthwhile.

  When I got there it was just after eleven. I circled the block, lingered in yellow zones and in front of fire hydrants, and made various other essays at finding a place to park. When one finally opened up I eased my Buick into the slot and wondered how long it would be before there wasn’t a single place in the city to put a car.

  I stayed in the Buick for an hour, watching traffic come and go or loiter the way I had moments earlier. None of the cars was the gray Ford that belonged to the red-faced man. None of the drivers was anyone I knew. No one I was interested in went in or out of Peggy’s building. By the time the hour had passed I was almost asleep. Then a horn honked at me because someone thought my presence in the car meant that I was about to yield my space, and I made myself get on with it.

  The climb to the fourth floor wore me out, but the woman who answered my knock revived me quicker than CPR. She was surprisingly attractive for one in the business she allegedly plied, not beautiful, not cute, but big and handsome in a frank, unstudied way, a way that featured a thick hood of auburn hair, blue-green eyes, and lips the color of a zinfandel. When she saw me she was neither pleased nor the opposite. She studied my face, ran it through her memory, and waited for me to state my business.

  She was still dressed for bed, but instead of teasing lingerie she wore a night shirt decorated with the logo of the Oakland Raiders and the number 44. When she saw me admiring it she crossed her arms above her heavy breasts and grinned. “This is a genuine game jersey, friend, in case that’s what you were wondering. Knew a guy who played for the Silver and Black once,” she added after a moment, her voice suddenly warm with nostalgia.

  I asked who it was, not because it was important but because I was a fan.

  She smiled again, this time to herself. “Oh, he was a superstar; you’d know his name in a minute. But he’s retired now. Married. Moved back home to Mississippi. Settled down or so they claim. Hard to believe he could ever settle too far down, though,” she added fondly. “Those were good times. Good, good times. I hope Al Davis rots in hell for taking the boys down south. I get him alone some time I’ll leave him half a man and all a Christian.” She backed up a step and looked at me more closely. “I don’t know you, do I?”