Hotline to Murder (23 page)

“Always a pleasure, Tony. By the way, what’s
with the crutches?”

“I fell and hurt my knee.”

“Well, try to keep your balance.”

“I always do.”

***

Tony went to the Hotline after leaving the
police station. On the way there, he bought a gyro to go at the
drive-through window of the Beach House. He was eating on the run
more and more lately. He knew that wasn’t good for his attempt to
control his weight. Too much fat and too many empty calories. Or
was it too many carbs? He had to get back to his days and nights of
relative leisure, before he had started working at the Hotline.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

Shahla was already there when he arrived.
She almost ran to meet him as he came through the doorway. The
first words out of her mouth were, “Did you bring the panties?”

Tony quickly looked around the office to see
if anyone else was there.

“Tony, don’t be so squeamish. We’re alone.
Did you bring them?”

“I…er, they’re in the car.”

“Give me the keys, and I’ll get them. It
will take you all night to hobble down to your car and back. At
least I’m not a cripple.”

“But you are showing your usual sensitivity.
My knee is actually feeling better, thank you for asking. I should
be able to get rid of the crutches soon.”

“Sorry, but we’re running out of clues.” She
held out her hand for the keys. “I want to make sure we follow up
on the ones we have.”

“Bring the whole attaché case so that we’ll
have something to keep them in, just in case somebody else shows
up.”

Tony was on a phone call when Shahla
returned, having eaten no more than two bites of his gyro. He
watched Shahla take the panties out of the case, while at the same
time trying to concentrate on his caller. She looked at them from
all angles and then another call came in, tying her up. She placed
the garment on the table. Tony spent the next twenty minutes
listening with one ear for the sound of somebody unlocking the
outside door of the office, in which case he was prepared to put
his caller on hold, even though she was talking nonstop, rush over
to Shahla’s table, grab the panties and stuff them into the attaché
case. Until he remembered that he couldn’t rush anywhere in his
current condition.

Fortunately, that eventuality didn’t occur
and when Shahla ended her call thirty minutes later, Tony was
examining the panties, himself, while attempting to fathom the
vicissitudes of life that found him looking at a woman’s underwear
from the point of view of a detective rather than a horny man. He
didn’t see anything unusual about them. They didn’t contain any
obvious tears or stains. As to their age, how did one tell? Could
they use carbon dating on panties?

Shahla finished writing her call report and
said, “Tony, we’ve got to turn these in.”

“To the police?”

“No, to the Goodwill. Of course to the
police.”

“I was hoping that you would be able to
prove they didn’t belong to Joy.”

“So was I, for your sake, but I can’t.
They’re too generic. Both the size and the style.”

“You said they were conservative.”

“So? It proves nothing. Maybe Joy’s mother
bought them for her.”

The shit was really going to hit the fan. If
his relationship with Josh had been stumbling a little, now it was
going over the cliff. Tony had a strong impulse to destroy the
panties, perhaps to burn them. But that would be tampering with
evidence. And what if Josh had actually killed Joy? No matter how
many times he thought about it, he couldn’t rule out that
possibility.

The phone rang. Tony answered it. He thought
he heard somebody breathing before he heard the click. Hang up. He
and Shahla chatted about their adventure of the night before while
he finally finished his sandwich. They concluded that Nathan was a
harmless dupe, as were the other members of the congregation.

Tony said he was going to spend part of his
Saturday telling the story to the Los Angeles Police Department, if
for no other reason than to clear his conscience. Shahla said she
would go with him. Tony said it was unnecessary, and he didn’t want
to waste the time of both of them. He thought she looked a little
disappointed, but that may have been wishful thinking on his
part.

The phone rang again. Shahla answered it.
After a few seconds, she signaled to Tony and put the call on the
speaker. The voice wasn’t immediately recognizable to him, but then
he hadn’t had as much experience with the Chameleon as Shahla had.
And the Chameleon was a master of voice disguise, sometimes even
using some sort of mechanical means to change it.

The voice was saying, “If you’re too busy
I’ll call back another time.”

Tony looked a question at Shahla. This
couldn’t be the Chameleon.

Shahla saw his face and pressed the Mute
button. “This is part of his act,” she said. “It puts us off
guard.” Into the receiver she said, “I’m not busy. You can talk to
me.”

“Well, this problem is kind of embarrassing.
There’s a girl who lives next door. She’s in high school. She has
tattoos.”

The caller paused and Shahla prompted, “She
has tattoos?”

“Yes.”

Another pause. Shahla pressed the Mute again
and said, “Sometimes you even have to drag it out of the
masturbators.” And to the caller, “Have you seen them?”

“I was talking to her one day. She mentioned
that she had tattoos.”

Another pause. This time Shahla waited him
out, while making circles in the air with her hand, a gesture
meaning, let’s get on with it. Tony stifled a laugh.

“I asked her where her tattoos were. She
said she’d show me one.”

Pause. The Chameleon—Tony was certain by now
that it was the Chameleon—was really milking this.

Shahla said, “And did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Show you her tattoo.”

Shahla cradled the phone on her shoulder and
put out her hands, palms up, in a gesture of supplication. Tony
almost laughed again.

“She told me to look out my window at ten
o’clock that evening. My window faces her bedroom window. When I
did, she had her drapes open. I saw her undress. When she took off
her bra I saw the tattoo. It’s on her breast.”

“So what happened then?”

“I watched until she closed the drapes. Now
I look out my window every evening, but her drapes are always
closed. I can’t get anything done. I’m obsessed with her
tattoo.”

“But you haven’t been able to see it
again.”

“No. What do you think I should do?”

“Would you like to see another tattoo?”

Tony frowned. Shahla put her finger to her
lips. He wanted to end the call, but something in her demeanor
prevented him from disconnecting it.

Shahla broke the silence saying, “I’m a high
school girl, and I’ve got a tattoo. Would you like to see it?”

Tony was almost positive that Shahla did not
have a tattoo. More silence followed while he hoped that the
Chameleon would hang up, as he had done before.

“Where is it?”

The Chameleon was hanging in there and not
hanging up. Tony was pulled in two directions, wanting to protect
Shahla on the one hand and wanting to see if she could hook him on
the other.

“It’s on my butt. I would have to take down
my jeans to show it to you.”

Now who was making the obscene call? Tony
started to say something. Shahla put up a hand and stopped him.

The Chameleon said, “When you said before
that you’d meet me, a man came instead.”

He remembered her name, or at least her
Hotline name—Sally. Now he would surely hang up.

Shahla said, “I’ll come alone. I really want
to see you.”

“The man drove a Porsche. What kind of car
do you have?”

Shahla pressed the mute button and looked at
Tony. “What should I tell him?”

“Uh…tell him you have a black Toyota
Highlander.”

Shahla got back on the phone and repeated
the information.

“Can you come to El Segundo tonight?”

“Yes.”

Silence. They scarcely breathed. Had she
hooked him? Or would the next sound they heard be the click of a
disconnect?

Shahla pressed the Mute again and said,
“Should I ask him where to meet him?”

Tony shook his head and put a finger to his
lips. He knew that their only chance was to say nothing. Seconds
passed. A whole minute. It was the longest minute of their lives.
Tony gave a couple of head-fakes. Shahla fiddled with her hair.

The caller said, “Meet me at Zook Sheeting
at 11:30.” He gave an address. Then he said, “Ring the bell at the
front door. I’ll know if you’re alone because there are
surveillance cameras trained on the outside of the building.”

“Will you be the only one there?” Shahla
asked.

“Yes.”

The caller hung up before she could say
anything else. Tony and Shahla looked at each other. Then Shahla
jumped up from her chair and threw her arms around his neck, almost
knocking his chair over.

“We know where he works,” she cried. “We
know where he works.”

“Good job,” Tony said, grimacing as her leg
hit his bad knee. “We can give that information to Detective
Croyden, along with the panties.”

Shahla leaned over him with her hands on his
shoulders, her face close to his. She said, “He’d better not screw
it up.”

CHAPTER 27

The meeting with Detective Croyden proceeded
badly, as far as Tony was concerned. Croyden met Tony and Shahla in
the conference room just off the waiting room of the police
station. Tony reluctantly gave him the panties and told him how he
had found them. In answer to Croyden’s questions, he tried to
explain why Josh might be a suspect. His arguments sounded weak to
himself, and he wondered whether he was accusing his roommate for
no reason.

Croyden took notes with his Mont Blanc pen
and said that he would investigate Josh. In answer to Tony’s sudden
plea, he promised that he wouldn’t use Tony’s name unless he had
to.

Next, Tony and Shahla told about the call
from the Chameleon. When they got to the part where he agreed to
meet Shahla at 11:30, Croyden asked Shahla how she had elicited
this information. She told him about the discussion of tattoos.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to give
personal information,” Croyden said.

“I did it to try to get his address,” Shahla
said. “I don’t have a tattoo.”

“It worked,” Tony pointed out.

“That remains to be seen,” Croyden said.
“He’s a pretty tricky guy.”

“It’s still worth a try,” Tony said. “Zook
is only a couple of blocks from where I saw him before. He must
live nearby. You are going to follow up, aren’t you?”

“That address is in the jurisdiction of the
El Segundo Police Department,” Croyden said. “We’ll have to
coordinate with them.”

There was no sense of urgency in his
voice.

“You’re not going to do anything tonight?”
Shahla asked.

“Don’t worry; we’ll check it out. If he is
the night guard there, we’ll find him. That w ll be easy
enough.”

“But not
tonight
,” Tony said.

“There’s no hurry. If he’s working there
tonight, he’ll be working there tomorrow night. We’ll check with
the management at Zook and get all the information on him.” Croyden
looked at his notes. “His story doesn’t ring true. If he’s working
nights as a security guard, how could he be looking out his window
at the tattoos of the girl who lives next door?”

“That’s a fantasy,” Shahla said. “A real
girl probably won’t even talk to him, let alone show him her
tattoo. Our callers fantasize a lot.”

“You shouldn’t be talking to weirdoes like
that,” Croyden said.

“It’s part of the job.”

“That’s what I mean. This whole concept of
the Hotline is a bad one. Putting teenage girls on the phone with
these guys who are the scum of society. I don’t like it at
all.”

“Not all the callers are like that,” Shahla
said hotly. “We help a lot of people.”

“If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let her
work in a place like that. If this…Chameleon calls again, I want
you to hang up on him. I’m going to talk to your boss, Nancy, about
this. I want all the girls to hang up on him.”

***

“I feel so frustrated. I wanted to take one
of those old hatpins and stick it up Croyden’s ass to get him to do
something.”

Shahla
must
feel frustrated. This was
one of the few times Tony could remember her using language that
was even slightly off-color. He had followed her home to make sure
she got there safely. He had even pulled into the driveway behind
her to make sure she went into the house and didn’t take off for El
Segundo. It was too late, anyway. His watch said 11:30.

She stuck her head through the window of his
SUV and said, “Croyden doesn’t appreciate that I got evidence for
him. He doesn’t want girls working on the Hotline. I read a book
that talks about men who want their women barefoot and pregnant.
I’ll bet he’s one of them. And I don’t think he’s going to find
Joy’s murderer, whoever he is. Croyden is incompetent, and I
suspect the rest of the Bonita Beach police are the same way.”

“They’ll get him,” Tony said with more
confidence than he felt. “They know what they’re doing.” He lifted
his hand to give her a reassuring pat, but she turned quickly away
and walked toward the front door of the house. He watched until she
went inside and shut the door. An upstairs light told him that Rasa
was awake.

Tony backed out of the driveway, intending
to drive home. But instead of going directly home, he went to
Pacific Coast Highway and turned north. North toward El Segundo. He
didn’t know what he was going to do there, but he did remember the
Chameleon saying previously that he got off work at midnight.
Traffic was light. Tony would get there by midnight with no
problem.