Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“My baby,” he said. “I'll tell Mrs. B. that you won't be in.” He hung up.

The moment I hung up, Jessica called. I told her nothing was doing. She sounded disappointed, but she mastered it. Youth is resilient. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so great about being resilient.

There was a time in my life when I enjoyed having nothing to do. There was also a time in my life when I smoked two packs a day and my idea of exercise was reading a digital watch. It was the only thing I did that took two hands. In those days, I'd weighed more than two hundred pounds. Eleanor had changed all that. She'd gotten my beer consumption under control, helped me to cut out the cigarettes, and gotten me running. My first quarter of a mile had been sheer agony, wheezing and limping behind her while she encouraged me in a bright and completely stress-less voice. “Positive reinforcement,” she called it. It was only the view of the back of her gym shorts that kept me going. Six months later I weighed one-eighty and was doing six or seven miles at a time. I had actual muscles. I bought new clothes. Women smiled at me on the street.

Unfortunately, with health came energy. I could no longer sit still. So here I was with a day, or four, on my hands. An hour in, and both my feet were tapping.

Jessica called again. “Maybe we could make something happen,” she said brightly.

“No way. We're on hold for four days.”

“There must be something I can do. I'm going crazy sitting here. Simeon, if we don't do something , this is going to be the longest Easter vacation of my life.”

“Can you vacuum?”

“What's that, a joke?”

“We can clean house,” I said. “They didn't say anything about cleaning house.”

“Heck,” she said before she hung up. “I'd rather do my math.”

I sort of washed the dishes. Then, probably in order to avoid sort of drying them, I realized that there was actually quite a lot I could do, without Aimee's kidnapper knowing anything about it.

I cleared a space on the living-room floor and went through Mr. Kale's files, a sheet of paper at a time, without much hope. My pessimism was rewarded. There were many good reasons why he should never be elected president of the Girls' Club of America, but there wasn't anything that linked him to Aimee. I made a note to turn the files over to Hammond and then dumped them into a box.

Okay, concentrate on Mrs. Brussels. I got the little tape recorder I'd taken with me when I broke into her office and played back the tones of the phone numbers I'd lifted off Birdie's auto-redial telephone. I listened to all of them about ten times but they went by too fast to do anything about, so I scrounged around in a closet until I came up with an old semiprofessional reel-to-reel that an aspiring rock singer had left there after she and I stopped seeing each other and she decided that being a secretary was steadier. I recorded the tones at three and three-quarters inches per second and played them back at seven and a half. They still went by too fast, but at least now there was some tape space between them.

Using a pair of rusty scissors and the roll of Scotch tape I'd bought to silence Mrs. Brussels' alarm, I cut into each of the spaces between the tones and inserted a few inches of blank recording tape. Manual dexterity is not my strong point, but eventually I had a nice long pause after each tone. I had also invented a few profane expressions that I could use later to please and impress my friends. Hauling the contraption over to the phone, I went to work.

The procedure was simple: One, crank the recorder back down to three and three-quarters, then play a tone and stop the recorder. Two, hit a number on the touch-pad of the phone. Three, when it didn't sound right, rewind, play the tone again, and hit the next number. When I found the matching tone on the telephone at last, I wrote down the number on a pad and went on to the next tone on the tape. After three or four hours of mind-numbing boredom, I'd developed perfect pitch for all the tones from one to zero, I had a blister on my index finger, and sixteen phone numbers were scribbled on my pad. Three of them were outside the 213 area code. Hot damn, I thought, I really am a detective.

By then I was on my eighth cup of coffee and more wired than a marionette. I switched to beer to calm down and dialed the first of the numbers.

“Doggies Do,” said a fey voice on the other end of the line.

I coughed a little beer onto the mouthpiece of the phone. “I beg your pardon?”

“Doggies Do,” the voice said, sounding a tad peevish. I'd have been peevish too, if I'd had to say it twice.

I took a wild conjectural leap. “I'm calling about a dog,” I said.

“I certainly hope so. If you're not, I'm wasting my time. What is it you want?”

“Well, I was hoping you'd tell me about your services.”

“Wash, dry, curl, manicure, dip,” he said automatically. “Perms require advance notice.”

“Perms.”

“Permanents, you know? Permanent waves , silly. If your dog needs a permanets, you've got to call forty-eight hours in advance. Got it?”

“Thanks,” I said. “She's a Mexican hairless, but I'll keep it in mind.” I hung up. The next number on the pad was a veterinarian's office. The one after that was a dog hotel, the Bark ’n Wag. Woofers had more appointments than a producer's wife. What I had burgled, apparently, was a Yorkshire terrier's Rolodex.

The fourth number rang forever. The fifth was a disconnect. The sixth was Birdie's colonic therapist. I was not on a hot streak. I worked on the beer for a while and then went back to the phone.

The seventh, just maybe, was something. It rang twice and then a gruff male voice said, “Cap’n’s.”

For lack of anything better, I asked, “Is the captain there?”

There was a long pause, and then the man said, “You've got the wrong number,” and hung up. When I called back, the phone was off the hook. On the whole, I thought, a very odd exchange.

One more disconnect. Then no answer. Then, on number ten, one of the ones with an out-of-state area code, I got a different man, but the same greeting.

“Cap’n’s,” he said.

“Which captain?”

I listened to the cosmic whistle of long distance. “Who is this, anyway?” the man asked.

This time I was ready. “I'm calling for the National Naval Census. We've gotten up to captains.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I told you, I'm calling-”

He disconnected. I tried another out-of-state number. “Cap’n’s,” a new man said. This time I hung up. A small revenge, but mine own.

My, my, my, I thought. I may even have said it out loud. Captains, or, rather, Cap'ns, all over the landscape. Where were all the people who answered the phones when I punched up these numbers? Hammond could have given me addresses, but I figured that calling the cops was out of bounds until Mrs. Sorrell said it was okay. However remote I thought Aimee's chances of getting home standing up might be, I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize them.

What I could do, though, was check the area codes with the operator. One of the Captains was in Arizona, one was in Idaho, and the third was in L.A. It was beginning to sound like the First Interstate Bank.

“Your phone has been busy forever ,” Jessica complained when I picked it up on the third ring. “Are you working?” She sounded aggrieved and suspicious.

“Looking for a job,” I said.

“You have a job.”

“Jessica,” I said, “this has been a memorable partnership, but for the moment it's over.”

“ Treat me like a baby,” she said bitterly. “I thought we were getting to be friends.”