Toll Call Read online

  I shrugged. “I wouldn’t overestimate their concern if I were you.”

  Peggy stayed silent. As she shifted position again her housecoat fell open, exposing portions of her breast and belly. Her underclothes were blue, the color of an empty sky. “How old do you think he is?” I asked.

  She frowned. “I’ve tried to figure that out, but it’s hard. In between, I’d say. Not a teenager; not an octogenarian. The problem is, I can’t learn much about him because he gets furious if I ask a question. I have to answer all of his, but he doesn’t have to answer any of mine.”

  Peggy began to cry in sniffles and snorts, a child whose best friend had just cheated at jacks. “You make it sound like a game,” I said.

  She nodded and dislodged a tear. “It’s like when you’re a kid, and one of you gets to be master and the other has to be slave. And then you switch roles, and then you switch back. Only with John it’s never time to switch. It’s always the same, night after night. I think it’s going to drive me crazy, Marsh. I really do.”

  She broke down momentarily, her voice raw with the beginnings of hysteria. I went to her side and knelt until I could put my arm around her. She inclined her head against my shoulder. “I’m sorry this is so difficult,” I said as her convulsions subsided. “But you’ve got to go through it so I can try to help. Okay? I’ll make it as short as possible.”

  She sniffed and nodded. “But don’t you have things to do? Isn’t there somewhere you have to be today?”

  “Later,” I said. “Now, what about the voice? Does he have an accent?”

  “No.”

  “Any kind of background noise?”

  “No. Never. I’ve listened, but nothing.”

  “Is the phone hum always the same? As though he calls from the same place every time?”

  She thought about it. “No. Sometimes it’s different. Sometimes it even seems like long distance. That hiss, you know?”

  “Does his voice remind you of anyone at all?”

  Peggy managed an incongruous grin. “It reminds me of the minister at the church we went to when I was little. He made me feel like the basest sinner who ever lived. John makes me feel the same way.” She looked at me. “No, Marsh. It’s not Reverend Sowers. He’s dead. A suicide. Preachers do that quite often, I’ve since discovered.”

  It wasn’t a subject she should dwell on. “Do you think he’s disguising his voice?”

  “It’s possible. He’s very dramatic at times, very mesmerizing. Evangelical, almost. He could be acting, I suppose. Playing a role. He’s a little bit like Burt Lancaster in that—what was it?—Elmer Gantry.”

  “Do you think he’s religious? A lot of fundamentalists are pretty warped on sex.”

  She shook her head. “He never says anything that’s specifically religious.”

  “Nothing about sin or salvation?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “How about your daughter? Isn’t her boyfriend an actor?”

  She hesitated. “Derrick? Yes, but I’m sure it’s not him.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, what would he want to terrorize me for?”

  “I don’t know, but there was some trouble there, wasn’t there? Something about money?”

  She shook her head several times. “I’m sure it’s not Derrick. He’s a conceited rake, unfeeling, possibly even brutal, but he’s not sick like this. And he’s aces with women. Allison knows of several affairs he’s had since they’ve been together. No. Definitely not Derrick.”

  She didn’t sound nearly as certain as she wanted me to believe, so I scrawled Derrick’s name on my invisible list of things to do and hurried ahead with my questions before Peggy made me stop. Interrogation is like gambling—when you’re on a roll you go with it. Also like gambling, often you go too far.

  “Does he ever refer to anyone else? Other women he calls, or friends, or me, even?”

  She shook her head. “No one. It’s as if I’m the only person in the world.”

  “So you don’t know if he’s married.”

  “No, but I’d guess he’s not. From the kinds of questions he asks I’d say he’s not married and has never had a serious relationship with a woman.”

  “How much does he know about you?”

  “Too much,” Peggy blurted quickly.

  “Does he know where you live?”

  “Yes.”

  “Work?”

  “Yes. At least he knows I go downtown, and he knows the bus I take.”

  “Do you think he follows you around?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think so at first, but lately I’ve had the feeling someone’s been following me. It’s probably paranoia, but …” She shrugged. “You know what they say—just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. Yesterday I was certain someone was watching me, but I couldn’t pick him out.”

  I didn’t tell her that she was right, and that the person who was watching her was me. “Until he shoved you down the stairs did he make any other approach to you? Other than the calls?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Not even a pinch on the bus?”

  She shook her head and breathed deeply. “Can we stop now, Marsh? Please?”

  “Let’s go back to the phone number. Who did you give the new one to?”

  “Well, there was you.”

  “Who else?”

  “Allison, of course. And Karen upstairs. And my boyfriend.”

  “Which one?”

  “Stan.”

  “Still going with him?”

  “No. He dumped me.”

  I hadn’t known that. The information was oddly cheering. “Was he angry with you? Did you have a fight?”

  “No, what he was was in love with some girl he met on a rock-climbing trip. Apparently what they experienced on top of some stony promontory reeked with a symbolism that could not be denied.”

  Peggy’s jealous slur momentarily erased her discomfiture. “So he wouldn’t come under the definition of a jilted suitor,” I said.

  “Not even slightly.”

  “Who else got the number?”

  “I don’t know. I think that’s about it. I just changed it three weeks ago.”

  “No other girlfriends?”

  “Just Karen. Girlfriends are hard to come by these days. Most of the women I know seem to want a fellow-feminist more than a friend; a documented outrage more than a good laugh. Either that or they’re determined to tell me something personal about themselves that I’d just as soon not know. At one point I knew of four different men—men I’d never met before—who were premature ejaculators, all because their lovers felt their lives would be enhanced if they told me that. Ah, well, I’ve been quite a turkey myself of late. To have a friend you have to be one, and I haven’t been able to manage that since … this.” She gestured absently toward the telephone, which in that instant gave off the vibrations of a weapon as ominous as the one on Karen Whittle’s wall.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess that brings us to the last item.”

  “Which is?”

  “What does this guy talk about when he calls?”

  She sent me a twisted smirk. “You know damned well what he talks about,” she said. “He talks about sex.”

  TEN

  “I think we have to go into it, Peggy,” I began carefully.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know you don’t, but what he’s said might tell us who he is.”

  Her eyes glistened once again, as though my words had burnished them. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? Don’t you think I’ve gone over it and over it until I’m so full of self-loathing I almost gag?” She choked back a sob, and the effort made her bruised ribs protest.

  “You’re not a man, Peggy. Something he said might mean something to me that it wouldn’t to you.”

  She scowled at me, intense and intent. If I was going to be of help I was going to have to hurt her and she was going to have to le
t me do it. The mutual knowledge made us adversaries. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you, Marsh?” she said softly.

  I nodded.

  “Why? Why bother with it?”

  I tried to make it light because the truth seemed at that moment distracting and unhelpful. “Because you’re the only secretary I’ve ever had who’s been able to keep my ficus alive.”

  Peggy’s smile was dry, as incongruous as a cactus flower. “There’s one thing you ought to know, Marsh.”

  “What?”

  “If we go into this, if I tell you everything that’s gone on between me and this … this creep, it’s going to change the way you think about me.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  Her expression was soaked in melancholy. “Oh, but it will. If I tell you what you want to know, you may never want to see me again.”

  “Not possible,” I said, because I believed it, or because I wanted to believe it, or because I hoped it was true.

  “No, Marsh. We’re going to disappoint each other before this is over. Believe me. I’ve done things with John that nice girls don’t do, and you’re going to find that hard to fit into the picture you have of what you think I am.”

  “I thought you’d never seen him.”

  “I haven’t. But he ordered me to talk about certain things and I did. Eventually. After I was convinced he would hurt me if I didn’t, and after he convinced me that he had an uncanny ability to know when I was lying and when I wasn’t, and after I realized …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. The point is, I gave in to him, Marsh. Don’t you see? I let him rape me, in a way.”

  “No, you didn’t. You—”

  “Whatever he wanted to know, I told him,” she interrupted, her words heated and precise. “And I told the truth, because in the end there didn’t seem to be all that much reason not to.” She paused for breath. “And you know something?” She flung the question like a gauntlet.

  “What?”

  “What I just started to tell you was that it got to the point, once in a while, where I liked it. I enjoyed some of our talks. Can you believe that? And accept it?”

  What she saw on my face made her doubt it.

  “I was a very proper girl, Marsh,” she went on, in a hurry to make me understand. “And for the most part I’ve been a very proper woman. I mean, they’re not going to canonize me or anything, but I’ve pretty much lived by the old rules, and when I’ve broken them I’ve lived with a lot of guilt. But basically I’ve believed there are things you don’t do, and things you don’t say, even though every fiber of your being might cry out for you to do or say them. With the result that I sit here alone most nights, just me and my nineteenth-century morality and my twentieth-century guilt. Then this guy comes along, and throws out all the rules, turns me inside out, makes it not only okay but obligatory that I think and talk about forbidden things, and in the process he provided some kind of crazy therapy for me. As the weeks went by I moved from this horrible fear and loathing to the point where I found myself trying my best to be truthful to him, and in the effort to do so I found myself thinking about things that had troubled me since adolescence. He’s told me a lot about myself, Marsh. Or rather I’ve told myself a lot about myself since he started asking all his questions. Even though I know it has to stop, even though I know it’s ruining my life, still there’s one sense in which I’m grateful for—”

  I forced myself to break her faulty idyll. “He tried to kill you, Peggy.”

  She blinked. “I know, and I don’t understand it. The only thing I can think of is, I must have made him angry somehow. Maybe he thought I was lying about something I said, or maybe he thought I was trying to trap him.” Her eyes widened and her breath quickened. “I know what it was. I did something yesterday, and this is his way of telling me he knows all about it, and that I’d better not do it again.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I … after I fell asleep at the office I realized that this thing has worn me out. I’m exhausted, and it’s doing things to my body and my mind, and it’s not fair to you or to the other people in my life. I decided I had to try to put a stop to it, so I saw someone I thought could help.”

  “Who?”

  She brushed away my question. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, he must have been following me yesterday morning. He must have felt threatened by what I’d done, and pushing me down the stairs was a warning. A warning not to ask for help. God. I’ll bet he knows you’re here. I’ll bet he’s even more upset with me. What if he—”

  I put my hand on Peggy’s shoulder to brake her surging panic. She trembled beneath my fingers, the engines within her taxed to the point of breakdown. For the first time I fully appreciated the degree of pressure she’d been under, and I began to consider how to convince her to check into a hospital, for rest at a minimum, for psychiatric help at best.

  “Don’t worry about this guy,” I told her, trying to be soothing, to be more reassuring than I felt. “I’ll be around for a while longer, and I’ll arrange for a substitute if I have to go out, so there’ll be someone with you all day. He won’t be able to get at you again, Peggy. No chance.”

  Peggy’s motors unwound a bit, but still were far from idle. She frowned and shook her head. “You can’t stay here any longer, Marsh; you’ve got a meeting in an hour. Anyway, I’ll be okay, now that I know what he’s trying to do. I just wasn’t prepared last night. He took me by surprise.”

  I’d forgotten about the meeting, but the appointment sparked an idea. “I’m going to call Ruthie Spring,” I said. “You remember her, don’t you?”

  Peggy cocked her head. “I remember,” she said warily.

  “Ruthie and I owe each other so many favors we’ve stopped keeping track. If she’s free, I’m sure she’ll be glad to come over and stay till I get back.”

  “No. I can’t ask her to do that.”

  “You’re not asking her to do anything.”

  I reached for the phone and called Ruthie. Luckily, she was in. Even more luckily, she was a quick study. After I asked if she could come stay with Peggy, she asked me if Peggy was on an extension. When I said she wasn’t, Ruthie asked if Peggy knew that I knew about her visit to Ruthie’s office the day before. I told her no, and that we’d talk about it later, then told her I’d wait till she arrived, then be back to relieve her at six at the latest. I also told her to bring her gun.

  Peggy was watching me intently as I replaced the receiver. I thought she was going to accuse me of tailing her to Ruthie’s, but that’s not what was on her mind. “Do you ever look around and ask yourself how on earth you could let life toy with you like this? How you could let yourself get trapped in something that turns out to be so completely and totally disastrous?”

  “Frequently,” I admitted. “But you didn’t let anything happen, Peggy. You didn’t have any choice. The guy picked you out and set out to ensnare you, like the spider and the fly. He convinced you he was capable of violence if you didn’t go along, and what happened last night shows you were right to be convinced. You shouldn’t feel guilty about the situation, Peggy. You’re the victim, not the perpetrator.”

  As I paused for breath I wondered how much of my statement I actually believed, and whether I would believe more or less of it as events progressed.

  “But I do feel guilty,” Peggy said.

  “So do I,” I admitted.

  “Why on earth do you feel guilty?”

  “Because I’m supposed to be an expert on trouble, on putting a stop to it or keeping it from happening in the first place. And here a whole big batch of it has hatched right under my nose while I’ve been stumbling around like a big dumb ox, overlooking all the signs.”

  Peggy patted my knee. “Don’t, Marsh. It’s not your fault. I tried my best to keep it from you.”

  “Why?”

  “I was embarrassed to ask for help. And I was afraid I couldn’t pay your fee.”

  “What the hell
made you think there would be a fucking fee?”

  As I regretted my outburst, Peggy recoiled from my verbal slap, then closed her eyes and bit her lip. “The last time I felt this dumb was when I was in high school,” she murmured finally. “And I was real dumb in high school, believe me.”

  We exchanged apologetic smiles. Time wandered through the room, oblivious to our woes. The shadows fleeing from the rising sun were passing through as well, dark strangers on eerie business of their own. I was more enervated than I should have been, more reluctant than my task demanded. “What does the spider say when he calls you up?” I asked when I thought Peggy was ready to confront both me and her dilemma once again.

  “Who?”

  “The spider. The guy on the phone.”

  “Sex. I told you.”

  “I mean specifically.”

  “Specifically, he asks questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Oh, about what I think, what I like and don’t like, what I do and don’t do.”

  “And all these questions are about sex?”

  “Just about. But then from one point of view everything in the world is about sex, isn’t it?” Peggy gave me another empty laugh. She had slipped back into a spell, the one she assumed whenever we talked about the calls.

  “Does he ever talk about what he does or likes or wants to do?”

  “Not often. It’s as though he wants to learn about women, Marsh. About what makes them tick. He’s always asking if ‘most women’ do this or ‘all women’ do that. I think he’s been very unsuccessful with relationships in the past and he thinks I can tell him how to change his luck. It’s like I’m a teacher and he’s my pupil. Sexology 101.” Peggy lowered her eyes. “And I’m such a dedicated teacher I’ve told him things I’ve never told another soul in my whole entire life.”

  For the second time that morning I was angry with Peggy—angry at her flip remark, angry that she was not as incensed as she should have been at what the spider was doing to her, angry, deep down, that in a short time the spider had reached a degree of intimacy with Peggy that I had not achieved in all the years I’d known her.