Alan Cook - Hotline to Murder

“How do you think I feel? I feel awful. So what do you think I should do? Should I go on fucking every boy I go out with or should I stop?”

This was turning into an obscene phone call, but it was also somewhat titillating. Tony had never heard of a call like this coming from a girl. He looked at Shahla. She had a look of surprise on her face. Then she walked out of the listening room. Tony took the call off the speaker, figuring that Shahla didn’t want to listen.

“I can give you the number of a sex hotline,” Tony said to the caller.

“Don’t brush me off,” the girl said. “Tell me what to do.”

“Have you talked to your parents about this?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not. I’m talking to you. So what should I do?”

“What would you like to do?” Tony repeated. He felt trapped. He wondered whether he should tell her this was an inappropriate call and hang up.

“You’re no help. You’re just like all the others.”

There was a click. She had hung up before he could. Tony stared at the receiver and said, “Whew.”

“Welcome to the club,” Shahla said. She had returned to the listening room with more chips. “You’re not a virgin anymore.”

“I guess not.” He wondered whether she was a female masturbator. Or perhaps it was a crank call. He finished filling out the call report and said, “Where were we?”

“We were talking about motives the other day. I was trying to think of someone who might have a motive to kill Joy.”

“And did you come up with anyone?”

“I’ve got a possibility. Her name is Martha, and she’s a listener on the Hotline.”

“You think the killer might be a female?”

“Detective Croyden said that was a possibility. And Martha is big enough and strong enough to do it.”

“Tell me about Martha.”

“She’s a senior at Bonita Beach, and she’s on the volleyball team.”

“Joy was on the volleyball team.”

“Joy was the star of the volleyball team. Because of her and several others, the team was expected to win the league championship.”

“How has the team been doing without her?”

“They’ve only played two games so far. They’ve split.”

“Sounds like they miss Joy.”

“Definitely.”

The phone rang, and Shahla answered it. Tony could tell from what she said that the caller was a harmless repeat who called almost every day. She would be tied up with him for fifteen minutes. Tony wondered why she thought that this girl Martha might have killed Joy. Maybe Shahla didn’t like Martha. Was she so anxious to find a killer that she was guilty of wishful thinking? Tony had to admit that she was right about the Chameleon being a potential suspect. But Croyden was handling him now. It wouldn’t do any harm to listen to Shahla. But if Martha really was a suspect, they would contact Detective Croyden, regardless of how Shahla felt about it.

Tony wandered into the snack room and made himself some popcorn in the microwave. It didn’t have butter on it, so it couldn’t be fattening-could it? He carried the bag back into the outer room. He noticed that an envelope was lying on the carpet, partially underneath the outside door. It hadn’t been there when he came in. Somebody must have slid it under the door. Tony had locked the door after Kevin and Nathan left. He was going to observe the locked-door rule, especially when Shahla was with him. Now he was glad he had.

The envelope was white, business-size; there was nothing odd about it. Tony picked it up and immediately wondered whether he should have done that. What about fingerprints? He held it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it from different angles. There was no writing on the outside. And it wasn’t sealed. The flap was just tucked in, and it would be easy to open. But should he open it? He held it up toward the overhead light. There was definitely a piece of paper inside. He set the envelope on the white table and stared at it.

Turn all evidence over to Detective Croyden. And Tony would. But first he was going to look at it. He took a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and picked up the envelope again, this time through a layer of cloth. He wasn’t going to get any more fingerprints on it. He covered his other hand with another piece of the handkerchief and worked the flap open. Then he carefully extracted the paper from the envelope, using the handkerchief to keep his fingers from touching the paper.

It was a regular piece of white paper, folded in thirds. Very neatly. Tony shook it to unfold it and placed it on the table.

“What’s going on?”

Tony jumped, startled by Shahla’s voice just behind him. He had been concentrating so hard that he had almost forgotten about her. “Do you always sneak up on people?” he asked to cover his loss of composure.

“Next time I’ll wear a bell so you’ll know I’m coming. I saw you out here looking as though you were practicing a magic trick. What are you trying to do, make the envelope disappear?”

“Somebody slid it under the door.”

“Do you think it was the murderer?” She looked apprehensively toward the door.

“I don’t know, but the door is locked. Don’t touch anything. We don’t want to leave fingerprints. Let’s see what it says on the paper.”

Tony and Shahla bent over the table. The writing on the paper was printed in black ink, by a computer printer.

“It’s a poem,” Shahla said.

“Read it,” Tony said. She was the writer. He had never read poetry, other than the few poems required in English classes, and didn’t want to embarrass himself by reading it badly, even if it was a bad poem, which it probably was.

“It’s called ‘Spaghetti Straps,’” Shahla said. She read:

“ She wears a summer dress, spaghetti straps to hold it up, or is this so? Perhaps it's gravity, the gravity of con- sequences should it fall. If she should don her dress one day but then forget to pull them up, those flimsy wisps of hope so full of her ripe beauty, do you think the weight of promises within, or hand of fate, would slide it down, revealing priceless treasures?

If so, would she invoke heroic measures to hide the truth, for fear this modest lapse would air the secret of spaghetti straps?”

“What do you think?” Tony asked. He didn’t feel qualified to comment on it as a poem and he wasn’t about to be the first to comment on its contents.

“It’s actually a pretty good poem.”

“You’re not offended by it?”

“Are you kidding? After some of the stuff I’ve heard, this is a nursery rhyme. If our grosser callers like the Chameleon talked like this instead of the way they do, I wouldn’t hang up on them so fast.”

“So you don’t think the Chameleon is capable of writing this?”

“Not from what I know about him. Unless he’s hiding his talent under the bed with his dirty magazines.”

“Can you think of any callers who might be able to write like this?”

Shahla contemplated the question for a period of time. Finally, she said, “When I first started on the Hotline, there was this guy who called a lot who said he wrote poetry. But he wasn’t from around here. In fact, he said he lived in Las Vegas.”

“So he was calling long distance.”

“For a while after 9/11 our 800 number was nationwide so that people suffering from-what’s it called?-post traumatic stress disorder could call us. But as I understand it, the number cost too much to keep so now our 800 number is just for California. Anyway, since that change, he doesn’t call as often as he did.”

Shahla went and got a copy of the Green Book and pointed out a page to Tony. The Hotline handle for him was “Paul the Poet.” His story was that he had been abused by his parents as a child.