Toll Call Read online

  When I stopped for a drink at my normal North Beach haunt, I was feeling so chipper and unburdened I knew it was time Janice and I parted company, amicably but permanently. From the look on her face when I’d left her, she’d reached the same conclusion.

  Rufus, the bartender, greeted me with a grunt. “You get lucky in the lottery or something, Tanner?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re smiling. Last time you smiled like that you’d just copped a big fee for busting up an insurance scam.”

  I shook my head. “The best things in life are free, Rufus.”

  “Bullshit. The best things in life are for sale at Gump’s and Neiman’s. You and me, we put up with the crap from K Mart. The usual?”

  “Sure.”

  Rufus gave me a double Scotch and I swiveled on my stool and surveyed my surroundings. Solitary people, mostly, single, alone but not lonely, not wealthy or attractive or desperate enough to compete in the city’s more illustrious body bars, not so dissatisfied with their lot or their lives that they aspired to anything beyond the fuzzy, funny glow that the right amount of liquor provided them four nights a week. I was a member of the group myself, and had been for years. I counted several of the patrons as friends even though I’d never seen them outside the confines of the bar.

  Rufus drifted back to my station. “I just remembered why you’re smiling.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Some lady called here for you a while back.”

  “Who?”

  I expected him to name my date. “Patty, I think. No. Peggy. That was it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she needed you to come over to her place.”

  Rufus rolled his eyes in an extravagant leer, but my grip on the highball glass tightened. “She said it just that way? That she needed me?”

  “Her words exactly. Got her begging for it, right? No wonder you been grinning like you just hit the Pick Six.”

  I pushed a bill at Rufus and slid off my stool and ignored his lusty taunts as I hurried toward the door. Two minutes later I was in my car, and five minutes after that I was winding my way out to the Marina District once again, breaking speed limits along the way. If Peggy needed me, it wasn’t for anything resembling romance.

  Parking was the usual maddening struggle, but I finally outdueled a Porsche for a slot on Fillmore a couple of blocks south of my destination. The guy in the Porsche made an obscene gesture. By the time I got to Peggy’s building I was running as fast as I could run.

  I buzzed her buzzer, panting, looking and listening for signs of violence even though the front stoop was not the likely place for such signs to be. My mouth was dry, my chest tight from exertion and concern. After a lengthy silence, Peggy’s voice crackled in the intercom. When I told her who it was she clicked me inside without another word.

  Peggy’s apartment was on the third floor. Because the elevator had been languid and infirm for years, she always used the stairs. I followed suit, and was breathing hard again by the time I reached the second flight.

  The stairwell was dark, the nearest light globe a burned-out shell, the shaft as dark and musty as a gym shoe. When I stopped for another lungful of stolid air I heard scraping sounds from below, the vestibule or the adjacent garage. I waited till they stopped. Because they seemed tame enough to leave behind, I started up the final flight.

  Halfway up, my foot kicked something lying on the step and sent it clattering to the landing below. My next step squashed something soft that gave way with a pop. I stopped and knelt to one knee and discovered a score of objects that lay scattered in my path like a volcanic spray of stones.

  Upon closer inspection, the dark lumps turned out to be cans and jars and bottles and bags, foodstuffs littering the stairway as though someone had dropped their groceries or been the victim of a flimsy bag. The soft mound I’d stepped on was a sack of flour. My shoe was flocked from the powdery explosion and so were two stair treads and a banister support.

  I looked for a moment longer, and spotted a woman’s shoe and a paper sack, torn and emptied of its booty. I tried to remember whether the shoe was one I’d previously seen on Peggy. When I couldn’t I tiptoed through the litter and made my way to apartment 32.

  The door was ajar and I went inside. The living room was as dark as the stairwell, the only light a yellow stain that spread from the streetlamp beyond the windows. A quick glance revealed no sign of a disturbance: the apartment seemed as precise and handsome as its tenant. But Peggy was nowhere in sight. I turned toward the bedroom and had taken two steps when I heard a sound that made me stop and look back toward the windows once again.

  Peggy was in the living room after all, stretched out on her couch in much the same position I’d seen her in at my office the day before. A dark shadow draped her torso in a sinister implication, and a shadow draped my heart as well.

  “Marsh?” The word was blunted to a groan by her forearm.

  I knelt beside her. “What is it, Peggy? What happened?”

  She said something slurred and indistinct. I told her I couldn’t hear her and she lifted the arm that lay across her nose and mouth. Because I was looking for it I immediately saw the damage she’d been trying to disguise.

  Her cheek and lip were puffed and bruised, the purpled growths an outrageous graffito on that sharply sculpted face. Her forearm was scraped raw; a flat patch of blood had streaked her face as she hid it with her arm. Her blouse was ripped at the shoulder, revealing the parabolic stripe of a bra strap; her skirt was soiled and wrinkled. Her breath crackled as though her lungs were crumpled cellophane.

  I swore from behind a jaw that had clenched to the point of pain, then blurted a question formed from my first fear. “Were you raped?”

  When she didn’t respond I was certain I was right. I made a fist and slammed my thigh. Breath sizzled through my teeth.

  But Peggy shook her head. “He just pushed me down,” she murmured.

  “That’s all? He just pushed you?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  “The stairs.”

  “How long ago?”

  “An hour, maybe. It took me a while to crawl up here. I might have passed out for a minute; I’m not sure. It hurt pretty bad.”

  “Where?”

  “My ankle mostly. And ribs.”

  I looked at her ankle but couldn’t see it. When I reached for the pillow that was covering it I discovered the pillow was a cat. Her name was Marilyn. I’d met her before. We didn’t like each other.

  I brushed Marilyn and her protests off the ankle and felt its contours. It was fat and warm, like Marilyn. When I pressed just slightly, Peggy groaned. When I touched her ribs she did the same.

  “I didn’t think he was that way” was what I thought she said as my fingers roamed her foot.

  My fingers stopped. “So you know who it was,” I said with quick excitement. “You know who did it.”

  She shook her head.

  “But you just said—”

  “I know who, sort of, but I don’t know his name. I—” She gasped and flinched and then fell silent.

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “My ankle. It’s starting to throb.” She laughed tightly. “You aren’t trying to fix it with a hammer, are you?”

  She’d made a joke through her pain, referring to the time I’d tried to change the toilet seat in my apartment by knocking off the rusted fastening bolts with a hammer. In the process I’d shattered the entire porcelain bowl, loosing a flood that damaged a carpet and a piano in the apartment below. The landlord was not nearly as amused as Peggy was when I told her about it.

  “I’ll call a doctor,” I said. “But I don’t understand about the guy. Who was it? Someone in the building?”

  I wasn’t sure she heard me. She began to talk in throaty, puzzled tones, as though she was the victim of a curse and not a felon. “I was so sure he wasn’t violent. That’s the thing that upsets me. I tho
ught I could handle it, you know, but he didn’t even listen. Or give me a chance to explain. He just swore at me and said what he says and pushed me down the stairs. I don’t know how I could have been so wrong about him.”

  “About who?”

  “The guy on the phone.”

  “What guy on the phone?”

  “The one who’s been calling me. I thought he was just a phone freak. Some poor little pervert who got off on talking dirty to women. A little smarter than most, maybe; a little more pathetic, maybe. But essentially harmless. I guess he’s more than that, though, isn’t he? He tried to kill me, Marsh, and all this time I thought I’d been doing exactly what he wanted me to do.”

  SIX

  I had a thousand questions, but there were things to do before I asked them. “I’m going to call a doctor,” I said, and started to stand up. “Then I’m going to call the police.”

  Peggy put out a hand to stop me, wincing in the process. “No, Marsh. Please. I’ll be all right. I just need some rest.”

  “Your ankle isn’t all right. It’s the size of a grapefruit.”

  “It’s just a sprain. I’ll put some ice on it. It’ll be fine.”

  “You might have internal injuries, Peggy. From the way you move I’d say you cracked a rib. At a minimum.”

  Her smile was forced. “If anything cracked it was the stairway. I really came down hard. Right on my … What’s the word for tailbone?”

  “Coccyx. And the stairway’s fine. I just came from there.”

  She inhaled deeply, grimaced, then looked at me. “You could do one thing for me if you would.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pick up the groceries I spilled. There’s a straw basket in the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator. Maybe you could fit them all in there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I hate to ask, but I’m afraid someone might fall over them. Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  I patted her shoulder. “I’ll pick up everything but the flour.”

  “Why not the flour?” Her puzzled glance ultimately took in my shoe. “What on earth happened?”

  “I stepped on the bag. It went up like a land mine. I deserve a Purple Heart.”

  “Is your shoe ruined?”

  “Naw. But I have an uncontrollable urge to start singing April Love. White bucks? Pat Boone? Get it?”

  Peggy giggled, but not comfortably. I told her I’d be back in a minute, then found the basket and returned to the stairway and policed the area.

  The bag of flour and a jar of Smucker’s jam were the only casualties of the fall, and I left them for the janitor. The rest of it I put in the basket and took back to the kitchen, along with Peggy’s shoe. Then I grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper from the table by the telephone and took the elevator to the lobby and taped a warning sign on the stairway door.

  Peggy didn’t stir or speak as I reentered the apartment so I assumed she had fallen asleep. I tiptoed into the living room and eased into the chair opposite the couch.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkened room, which was attractive and comfortable but not quite cozy. The couch and chairs were contemporary, upholstered in plaid and framed in oak. The carpet was a beige tweed. The wallpaper bore abstract swirls and slashes in brown and gold and white. The paintings and photographs—chiefly impressionist reproductions except for a giant daffodil painted by her daughter in what Peggy called her “Georgia O’Keeffe phase”—were grouped tangentially in a square in the center of one wall. The effect was subtly dramatic, but in contrast to Ruthie’s place there were no cute mementoes, no family heirlooms, no vacation snapshots, and for the first time I wondered if there was something in her past that Peggy was determined to conceal.

  As I was congratulating myself for not disturbing her, Peggy muttered, “I’m awake. You can turn a light on if you want.”

  “That’s okay. This is fine. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. At least I’m not nauseous anymore.”

  “Did you bump your head when you fell?”

  “I think so.”

  “Nausea sometimes indicates a concussion.”

  “Not with me it doesn’t. I get nauseous whenever I’m upside down.”

  “How’s the ankle?”

  “It still hurts a little.”

  Which meant it hurt a lot. “Can you move it?”

  “A little.”

  “I’ll get some ice.”

  I went back to the kitchen and took a tray of ice cubes out of the freezing compartment, emptied it onto a dish towel, and gathered the corners of the towel and wrapped them with a twist tie I took off the wrapper to a loaf of bread. Then I put the whole thing in a plastic freezer bag and took it into the living room and draped it over Peggy’s ankle, which seemed swollen even more than when I’d first seen it, and was turning the color of plums.

  Peggy thanked me. I asked if she needed anything else. She shook her head. I asked if she felt like talking about it yet. She shook her head again. I asked if she wanted me to call a doctor or take her to the hospital. This time she smiled wearily before telling me no. I told her to relax and try to sleep, then returned to my chair, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

  The room was cool, the air a subtle scrim of gold, the sounds from the street outside muffled and occasional. I tilted my watch toward a depleted beam of light. It was almost eleven. I was tired despite the jolt of adrenaline that was a response to my concern for Peggy and my anger at whoever had assaulted her.

  I stretched out my legs and slumped in the chair and spent several minutes trying to imagine what might have led to the attack, but finally gave up. Peggy would tell me, and then I would find the guy and have Charley Sleet arrest him and then it would be over. Simple. Nothing to be upset about. Nothing to lose sleep over.

  “Marsh? Are you there?”

  Her cry was urgent, frightened. I started, shook my head, looked around the room, then hurried to her side and took her hand. “How are you doing? Is something the matter?”

  Peggy rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Whew. I’m sorry I yelled like that. I didn’t know where I was. It felt like I was drowning, or something. I guess I must have slept for a minute. I’m just so exhausted all of a sudden.”

  “You had a shock to the system. It’s trying to recover. It’ll take some time. You should try to sleep some more.”

  “You know what I’d like first?”

  “What?”

  “A cup of hot chocolate.”

  “Okay. What do I do? I’m not much of a cook as you may remember from that time I tried to bake you a cake and your electric knife wouldn’t cut it.”

  Peggy smiled. “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Don’t keep asking that. When I mind I’ll tell you.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll sulk.”

  I shrugged. “So what’s the recipe for hot chocolate?”

  “Well, I’ve got a mix in the cupboard to the left of the stove. There’s coffee and tea in there, too; the hot chocolate’s way in the back. Just add two tablespoons, I think it is, to each cup of warm milk. If you want some, then use two cups. Or you can make yourself some coffee. Or a drink. There’s some Scotch in that hutch.”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine. What do I heat the milk in?”

  “You can use the little saucepan hanging over the stove.”

  “Okay. One hot chocolate, coming right up.”

  Peggy raised her brow. “And a marshmallow on top? They’re on the next shelf up.”

  “How about a dollop of brandy? Might help you sleep.”

  Peggy shook her head. “Just the marshmallow. Thanks, Marsh. You’re too good to me.”

  I slugged her lightly on the shoulder, then went to the kitchen and found the hot chocolate mix and put four heaping tablespoons into the saucepan, then looked in the refrigerator. “You’re out of milk,” I yelled.

  “I know. There should be some with the groceries you picked up on the stairs.”

  I look
ed through the various items I’d retrieved. “No milk here, either.”

  “Could you have missed it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “My God. It must have fallen all the way to the ground floor. Francisco will be furious.”

  I went back to the living room. “Who’s Francisco?”

  “The building superintendent. He’s a fiend for cleanliness, which normally I appreciate, but I’ll hear about messing up his precious staircase for a month.”

  I looked at my watch again. “It’s eleven o’clock. Any chance he’ll still be up?”

  She shook her head. “He’s a morning person. Up at four thirty or some ungodly hour. Why?”

  “I thought I’d go down and ask him if he saw anyone hanging around the building earlier this evening.”

  “Oh.” Peggy looked away from me, at the sparkle in the ceiling that tried to mimic private stars. “I’d almost forgotten why you were here.” She closed her eyes. “I really don’t want to go into it right now, Marsh. I’m sorry, but it’s too … I’m sorry.”

  Her voice trailed off into an uncharacteristic whine. “One more question,” I said. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “When you fell you must have made a lot of noise. Your coccyx, plus the soup cans banging down the stairs. Did anyone come see what was going on?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Not that I saw. I think that stairwell’s pretty soundproofed. I doubt that anyone noticed. Why?”

  “That person might have seen the guy who shoved you.”

  “Oh.” She swiveled on the couch and lay back down and covered her face with her arm again, blocking out memory and me.

  I surrendered. “Okay, Peggy. I’ll talk to the superintendent tomorrow. And then I’ll talk to you. In the meantime, why don’t you go back to sleep?”