Toll Call Read online

  She looked at me hesitantly, to see whether I’d demean her confession. “Things like that are never standard, Peggy. Not to the one that suffers them.”

  Over a silent minute she seemed to relax, to finally accept my reactions as appropriate. “Well, the important thing is that I’d never, ever talked about it till John came along, and when I did I felt this tremendous sense of relief. It didn’t last long, of course, since a minute or two later I started feeling ashamed all over again, about the rest of the phone business, but still in all I owed him something. I still do. Which is why I told him what I told him this evening. When he told me why he’d done what he did to me, I sensed he was a lot like me, in a way. A victim of something he didn’t fully understand and couldn’t talk with anyone about. I thought maybe I could help him the way he helped me. Can you understand any of that, Marsh? Am I making sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “But do you believe me? I mean, do you think it’s rational for me to feel that way about it?”

  I nodded. “I know studies that compare the various kinds of therapies that litter the world today almost always conclude that the only thing any of them really do for a person is get them to talk about their problems. The rest of it’s a bunch of hooey, but talking actually helps. I think that means what you’re saying makes sense.”

  “Good.”

  “And I’m flattered that you told me.”

  “Good.”

  I grinned. “And I’ll expect you to be in the office on Monday.”

  She hesitated before she answered. “Okay.”

  “And we’ll talk about this again, whenever you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “We can even talk more about it now if you want.”

  She shook her head. “I think we’ve been through enough for one night, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “You look exhausted.”

  “I am.”

  “I’ll let you get some sleep.”

  “I think I will tonight. For the first time in a long while.”

  “Good.”

  The knock on the door was startling. We looked at each other, quickly fearful, momentarily leery that someone out of the past few days was out there to endanger us.

  “Allison,” I remembered after a second.

  Peggy slumped in relief. “I’d forgotten.”

  I stood up. “So I’ll be going. Get lots of sleep.”

  “You, too.”

  “I hope we’re okay again.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I …”

  She smiled like the Peggy I had learned I loved. “Good night, Marsh.”

  “Good night, Peggy.”

  “Thanks for listening and everything.”

  “Hey. I’m the one who should be saying thanks. About three hours ago you saved my life. Compared to that I ain’t done nothing.”

  “I think you have. I think maybe you’ve done enough.”

  “Then can I make a suggestion?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you tell Allison what you just told me?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When I got home the phone was ringing. I picked it up and said hello.

  “Tanner?”

  “Yes.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s great. Know who this is?”

  “No.”

  “A friend.”

  “You don’t sound like either of them.”

  “Funny. I—”

  “If this is business, call me at the office on Monday.”

  “This isn’t business, this is just a friendly chat. I wanted to ask if you got my note.”

  “What note?”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you read your mail?”

  “Halliburton.”

  “Give the man a door prize.”

  “Okay, Halliburton. What can I do for you?”

  “The question is, what can I do to you?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I mean I was wondering if you could suggest how I can pay you back for fucking up my life? See, since the trial started my wife left me, they repossessed my Porsche, I got a notice of foreclosure on my house, my lawyer filed suit against me for some sort of fees he claims I owe. Pretty much clears the slate, wouldn’t you say? Only thing I got left is some worthless coins some guy told me came out of a sunken treasure and a case of French wine that got ruined when they turned off the electric.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You sound real sorry about it.”

  “Maybe you should have thought a little more about the consequences when you defrauded the Arundel Corporation.”

  “Maybe. And maybe you should have left well enough alone.”

  “I was just doing a job, Halliburton. If not me it would have been someone else.”

  “But it was you is the thing. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to pay you back. I’m going to ruin you the way you ruined me.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m a sporting man, so I’m letting you know up front that I’m out to get you. That’s a better deal than you gave me. Right?”

  “Seems to me your quarrel is with the Arundel Corporation, not me. I’m just a hired hand.”

  “Yeah, well, your days as a hired hand are numbered. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but one of these days I’m going to destroy you, Tanner. I’m going to make you as miserable as you made me.”

  “I’d probably be worried if I thought you had what it takes to get the job done.”

  “You’re such a cool customer you make me sick. The jury bought your whole story, you know that? One of them told my lawyer you were the one that convinced them I was crooked. So you’ll be seeing whether I’ve got what it takes or not. In the meantime, I think I’ll give you a call from time to time, just to let you know I’m on the job. Every time the phone rings, you’ll be wondering if it’s me. You’ll be wondering if I’ve done anything yet, wondering if someone’s calling to tell you you’re deep in a pile of shit when all the time you thought it was under control. There you’ll be, wondering when I’m going to strike, thinking maybe I’ve given up, then one day, out of a clear blue sky, I’ll bring you down. I’ll find out what’s the most important thing in the world to you, and I’ll destroy it, Tanner. I’ll make you wish you were dead and buried.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Malcolm. If you pick a week like this one, that won’t be all that hard to do.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries

  1

  I’m not certain whether the affliction originates in genetic disinclination or environmentally induced aversion, but I’ve always been more a recluse than a celebrant. Most of my lies have been uttered to evade the sticky dangle of a social occasion, and most of my alcoholic intake has been consumed to ease me through those festivities I’ve been too timid or unimaginative to avoid. As a result, parties and I pretty much parted company early in the last decade, when staying home with Malamud or Mahler or Montana began to seem preferable to most of the alternatives that came my way—cocooning, I believe they call it now that the tastemakers have followed my lead. So it was distinctly out of the ordinary for me to be parading my hard-won nonchalance on the fringes of a handsomely refurbished loft on the trendiest corner south of Market, with something called the Sunday Punch sloshing over the rim of the plastic glass that had been foisted on me the moment I arrived, as I waited for my host to find time to tell me why I’d been invited to spend an evening with half a hundred guests who were far too young to have been confronted by life’s more vicious vicissitudes, at least not the sort that made my own little ledge of the world a precarious perch.

  As out of place as a parent at a prom, all I knew as I looked for something sufficiently potent to wash away the lingering sweetness of my drink was that Bryce Chatterton had been a friend for twenty years, and
all I guessed was that, given the nature of my business, he was in some kind of trouble. If that was the case, I would do anything I could to help, within reason or without. A dozen years ago, Bryce had ushered me across a nasty wrinkle in my life, when my failure to become either professionally consequential or personally connubial had spawned a depression that only Bryce’s relentless applications of common sense and good cheer had lured me out of. As a result, I had owed him a debt for a long time. As with all my debts, I would feel better once it was paid off.

  The name on the building read PERIWINKLE PRESS, broadcasting its presence to the ever-less-literate nation by a block of off-white neon featuring an appropriately leafy logo that entwined itself among the blinking letters and garlanded them with blossoms of literally electric blue. Bryce Chatterton was the founder, president, and sole surviving editor of the enterprise. Ostensibly, the purpose of the party was to announce Periwinkle’s publication of a collection of poetry by the young woman who was now backed into the far corner of the room by the press of her gushing admirers, her smile just slightly less dazzling than the head she had shaved to her scalp in honor of the occasion. All of which was further proof that I must have been present for some other reason—I haven’t read a poem since the day Walt Kelly died and took Pogo and Albert with him.

  Since in attitude, age and attire I was easily branded alien, my tour of the room was unimpeded by fellowship. I was not entirely bored, however—there’s a hot new parlor game making the rounds in San Francisco these days. It’s called Earthquake, and the object is to relate the most terrifying, heartwarming, scandalous, or apocalyptic experience that has at least a tenuous connection to the October tremor or its aftermath. The winner, of course, usually tells a tale that combines at least three of those attributes while suggesting he somehow managed to experience the event while at Candlestick Park, on the Bay Bridge, in the Marina, near the Nimitz, and under the bay in a BART tube, in an amazing feat of simultaneity. But the best this party could come up with was some suburbanites’ competitive comparison of how much water the quake had sloshed out of their in-ground pools.

  Thankfully, the evening was not without its other charms, most of which consisted of the literary snippets that wafted my way as I trailed my host around the room:

  “I hear they only printed two hundred copies; that’s barely enough to supply her ex-husbands. Of course nowadays what with computerized typesetting they can go back to press in a minute. I think Doubleday printed my book on Lapland life-styles one at a time.…”

  “He got a five-figure advance from Harper for a coffee-table book about owls. Who knew owls were going to be big, for God’s sake?”

  “I heard the film rights went for a million, then when Redford decided to do Beanfield instead they just stuck it on the shelf. But why should she care, right? I mean, she can make her own movie for that kind of money, as long as she doesn’t have to pick up the cocaine tab.…”

  “He told me Mailer read it and loved it but Random’s list is full till ninety-two and Meredith’s not taking on anyone new. I was going to send it to Pynchon, but only his agent seems to know where he is and she’s not telling. I guess I’D write a romance in the meantime, just to tide me over. I mean how hard could it be—a mansion, two rapes, and a seduction and they sail off into the setting sun.…”

  “He told me I didn’t really want to write, I only wanted to ‘be a writer.’ Can you believe it? And to think I was actually going in on a condo with the creep.…”

  “I’m almost thirty pages into it. Conduce says it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but she thinks it should be a play because my dialogue’s so today it totally overwhelms the narrative. At least that’s what Candace says. So I was wondering if you’d take a look and tell me what you think.…”

  “Her editor moved to New Zealand to herd sheep or something and the manuscript disappeared in the process, only Hortense didn’t know it for six months. In the meantime, she started seeing a channeler in Emeryville who convinced her that novels were spiritually irrelevant, so when she finally got it back she fed all nine hundred pages into the barbecue and cooked a Cornish game hen over them. She always was an Anglophile, you know.…”

  “The only intelligent thing he ever said to me about writing fiction was, ‘Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it’s good.’”

  I continued my misanthropic drift, avoiding the few people who seemed inclined to talk about something other than themselves, trying to keep the punch within the rhomboid confines of the plastic glass, keeping one weary eye on my host. Weaving his way like an eel through the gaggle of distaff groupies, Bryce Chatterton was a dervish of wit and hospitality, keeping glasses topped up, fingers filled with food, and people whose propinquity was solely geographical apprised of each other’s deliciously eclectic life-style. Whenever our eyes met, Bryce invariably signaled that he’d be with me in a minute, he had just one more thing to take care of, he hoped I understood, but somehow that minute never came. As at every party I’d ever attended, no matter where you had come from or where you wanted to go, time stopped well short of satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, Bryce’s wife occupied a companionably overstuffed chair in the corner of the room opposite the guest of honor, her eyes buried in a book she was careful to demonstrate was not the volume being feted that evening. Normally, such outré behavior would be chastised by a self-appointed social arbiter, but since Margaret Chatterton’s money had underwritten the entire decade of Periwinkle’s perilous existence, no one chose to take umbrage at such aggressive aloofness. Not out loud, at any rate.

  The next time I looked her way, I caught Margaret watching me, a furrow in her brow and a purse to her lips. But instead of acknowledging my glance, she lowered her eyes to her book and pretended neither our senses nor our sightlines had never tangled, a reaction only too indicative of the state of our mutual regard.

  I’d first met her husband back in his bachelor days, when we began to run into each other at various clubs around the city in pursuit of our mutual passion for the bebop trumpet. Periodic encounters at Basin Street West and El Matador eventually evolved into the bar-ballgame-bullshit triumvirate that was the cornerstone of male friendship in the days before estimations of present and prospective wealth became the exclusive subject of discussion in the city.

  When we met, Bryce had only recently abandoned the literary aspirations that had been fueled by his idolization of Scott Fitzgerald and his Stegner fellowship in Stanford’s famous writing program. A clerk in a Post Street used bookstore—an antiquarian bookshop, its owner dubbed it in order to justify the markup—Bryce was barely earning enough to stay afloat in the increasingly precious nectar that was post-sixties San Francisco. But because even more than jazz, books were his major passion, he was content to be a minor player in the minor minuet that passed for the city’s literary scene.

  Eventually, Bryce began to appear with less and less frequency at our haunts. Since both the quantity and quality of American jazz had already begun its steep decline, I thought that might be the reason for his absence. But what I hoped was that, in contrast to my quarter century of failure in that regard, Bryce had found a woman he liked well enough to marry.

  Most men are by nature unskilled in the things that matter. Indeed, it is often the very size of their ineptitude that makes them marriageable, in need of a complementary union to function at anything resembling their best. Because Bryce Chatterton was less able than anyone I knew at the mechanics of existence—Bryce couldn’t fry an egg, for example, or fill out a deposit slip—I was cheered when I learned his rescue had been realized.

  Margaret had seemed in the nature of a coup for Bryce, someone who both shared his love for books and possessed a net worth that could afford him a regular diet of the pricey first editions that were locked away in the long glass case at the rear of his employer’s musty establishment. Though the outward signs were thus encouraging, and I wished the two of them nothing but the best, the downside was that
our friendship failed to survive the marriage. Partly because such friendships rarely do, partly because Periwinkle was founded shortly thereafter and immediately knotted the loose ends in Bryce’s days and evenings, and partly because Margaret clearly felt that private investigators occupied a slot in the social strata somewhere below men’s room attendants, an opinion that seemed to slip a notch after she was introduced to me.

  Nonetheless, I was pleased when Bryce began to ascend through the local literary stratosphere and when his bon mots began to appear in the city’s most prominent gossip column almost as frequently as Strange de Jim’s. He would telephone me periodically to bemoan the premature demise of one of our musical idols, or rhapsodize over the discovery of his latest genius, and we would exchange heartfelt pledges to get together soon, for baseball or for lunch. But except for a handful of rather rote occasions and an all-too-recent disaster during a party at my apartment, we seldom followed through. Suddenly ten years had passed, and when I received an invitation to the publication party it was out of a blue, as blue as Periwinkle’s tiny bloom.

  When Bryce swept past me yet another time and tried to give me something resembling a mollusk pursuing a sunburn on a Ritz, I asked him how long he thought it would be before we could talk. Bryce is both thoroughly polite and relentlessly optimistic, which tends to overload his expression with a guileless mix of astonishment and glee. In answer to my question, his eyes blazed so brightly behind their steel-rimmed glasses it seemed certain he intended the next book on Periwinkle’s list to be entitled Talks with Tanner.