(1314)

She entered our detectives’ room at the end of my shift. I should have realized this was going to be a late one. She had that strange look on her face, the type that told me she probably shouldn’t be here. She should be at home, perhaps preparing dinner or taking care of her kids. Or, after I take a closer look at her clothing, she should have been supervising her nanny who would prepare dinner and bathe and put the kids to sleep. In my precinct, we get a lot of her type. I wondered not for the first time whether we they paid us to fight crime or to fight these women’s boredom. I guess in the end it didn’t make much of a difference. Talking with her was what kept the money in my bank and the food on my kids table. Their mother prepared their dinners and was happy to do it. And I was happy for her to do it. She wasn’t a kept woman. She was a good woman. She did her share and I did my share. It didn’t take a detective to know that the woman before me never did her share.

She walked through the wooden gate and made her way to my desk. I was the only one left. I was here to catch any calls before we called it a night. Her clickity-clackity shoes echoed off the walls. She was more plastic than natural. Good to look at but not look at too closely. “Officer?” she asked as she made her way to the front of my desk.

“Detective, Ma’am. Detective Thomson. What may I do for you this evening?”

“May I sit?” she asked as she sat on the wooden chair. I should have told her that less than an hour before an HIV-positive drug addict sat on that very chair. We caught him lurking around the mansions around Turner’s bend. We couldn’t figure out how he got there since no public transportation went anywhere near our precinct. He wouldn’t tell us, but we figured a drug deal went bad and they dropped him here as an object lesson, knowing how we treat people like him in our precinct. I guess that makes us the drug dealers’ muscles. We had a job to do and we did it. The addict won’t be heading to these parts again. For all I knew, while we processed him in that very chair, he might have bled a little into the wood. It was an old chair and there were many splinters. The office was one big splinter, when you really got down into it. The fresh coat of paint they threw on the walls each year was as bogus as she was. It was all rotten to the core. I didn’t speak about these types of things when her kind was in earshot. As I said, I was here to put food on my kid’s table, and if I had to baby the likes of her, I was a good father, and I’d do it.

“Please. What’s on your mind?” I asked her. I maintained a bemused look. It was the most serious I could manage at this time of night in front of this type of woman.

She looked me in the eye. She had blue eyes. The type of blue you only see in aquariums and advertisements for tropical beaches in far off islands where I’ll never be able to afford a vacation. I could see why swimming in her waters could be so addicting. It’s too bad that sharks infested her waters. I feel bad for her husband. He probably thought he was getting so much more than a plastic trophy. I guess we always think we’re getting so much more until we get it home and unwrap it.

“I had the strangest call tonight,” she said. “I debated whether I should come here. There are so many prank calls. But he sounded so honest, so sincere.”

I immediately thought she fell for a swindle. This happens more than you can imagine. You couldn’t tell by looking at them, but these trophy wives are the loneliest creatures. They’ll talk to anyone just for the chance to put them down. And that includes telemarketers and swindlers. I saw how this evening was going to go down: she wanted me to pry her out away from whatever they got from her. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a late night after all. We fill out the paper, and she talks to her bank and credit cards and makes everything right. It’s better when they come early on these types of things. I’ve caught a few of these cases where they waited too long and it took hours to get all the paper straight. If she spoke to him on this night, then I might be able to get this all squared away in an hour. There’s a reason their husbands thought to keep these women in trophy cases. Better there than breaking everything in sight. A bull in a china store is no better.

“Tell me about what happened, Ma’am. It’s never worse than you think it is. We’ll take care of it.”

“Protect and serve, eh, officer?” the woman asked. Her head turned to the side and she looked at me sideways. I could see each of her black lashes curled up and away from her eyes. My wife was a good cook and great with the children, but she didn’t have an eyelash to bat an eyelash at, if you see where I’m going. I’m a man, as weak as any other man is. And don’t think I didn’t think about it right there. Finish the paperwork. Maybe she’s feeling lonely. Maybe she likes men in uniform. I have a uniform in the back, in the locker room. It was all very private. Everything was always very private back there.

“That’s what I’m here for. To protect and serve, Ma’am. In all ways.” I turned my bemused look into a meaningful one. If she was going to flirt, I was going to flirt right back at her, food on the kids’ table or not. “What is your name? For the report, I mean. We need to keep good records here.”

“Sandra MacDonald,” she said. She put her left hand on the desk and the huge engagement ring almost blinded me. It was larger than her thumb’s knuckle. I pulled out my notepad and jotted down her name. “That’s with an M-A-C,” she added.

“Okay, Mrs. MacDonald. What happened on that call tonight?”

She laughed nervously. I straightened in the chair and cleaned the ink off the tip of the pen. I chewed the pen cap and waited for her to continue. In any good interrogation, you have to let the witness talk it through first, before you start putting words into their mouth. It makes it seem like those words were their own, and I’m always after honest words: as in honest-sounding words.

“He didn’t give me his name,” Sandra started in. “I have a good memory for these things, conversations. I’ll tell it like he said it and I’ll let you think if this is as crazy as it sounded.”

“However you want it. Take your time. Do you want water or coffee or something?”

“That’s okay. He sounded so desperate. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The phone rang late this evening. It was after dinner and the kids were asleep. I was straightening up after our dinner. I don’t spend much time on the phone. I never liked phones. It surprised me when it rang. My mother called in the morning, after I had seen the kids off to school. That was the only phone call I usually pick up all day. But I had a feeling about this one.”

I jot down notes as she talks. I nod and write the L.A. Raider’s schedule in my pad. I almost have the games for the season memorized. Knowing when you’re going to play who is important in planning strategy for your team. They were going places this year, I knew.

“I picked up the phone on the third ring. There was a man on the other side. As soon as I picked up he started saying, ‘hello, hello?’ He kept repeating it, as if not expecting to hear anyone on the other side. He had called me, and it was strange. I greeted him and asked who he was. He said me he didn’t know. I held the phone’s handset at arm’s distance away from and really looked at it. I don’t know what I was expecting. I thought maybe it would tell me who this strange man was. Normally I would have hung up. I think most normal people might have. There was just something in his voice that sounded desperate. It wasn’t only desperation it was also—I don’t know how to say this. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t really place it. It was like a déjà vu moment. You know the type? You are sure you’ve heard it before but you just don’t know when. He kept talking as I held the handset away from my ear. He sounded resigned, as if another person was about to hang up on him, and he kind of understood why we did that and didn’t want to hold it against us.”

I wondered what type of scam she was involved with. This didn’t sound like the typical Nigerian call. The scammers are much smarter now. Either they pretend to be a bank or something to get your information at the beginning of the call. Or the keep you on the phone for a while. They want to build up your trust before they start asking for things. This sounded like the second case. “You heard all of that when not even listening into the phone?”

“I know it sounds strange.” She laughed. “It sounds strange to me too as I describe it. But I knew that voice and I knew what it wanted. I put the phone back on my ear and I said hello again. He stopped talking for a moment. Then he started in. He spoke slowly. It wasn’t like he was choosing his words carefully, it was like he was afraid that if he said things too quickly I would run away, like a dog approaching a bone to see if it’s safe to grab. He said, ‘Do you mind if I go on? There’s just so much I want to tell you. Not many people want to listen once I get into it. I know it’s me and all my talking, and I completely understand if you want to go before I even start in.’ I assured him that I did want to hear what he had to say. At the time it was just curiosity. He reminded me of someone that I couldn’t place I figured if he spoke more I’d be able to put a name on it.”

“Have you placed him now that you’ve had some time to think about it?” I asked, looking for a way to cut this story shorter. Wherever Sandra was trying to get, she certainly was taking her sweet time.

She ignored me, lost in her memories of the strange phone call. “I asked him what his name was.

I know how I must sound. It’s fantastical. Unbelievably so. You’ll be entertained either way: a crazy person’s detailed delusions, or an fantastical and sad story.

“That is kind of you.

“Before I called you? I was studying the phone. When I’m not talking on it, I spend a lot of my time studying the phone. I stare at it for hours at a time, some days. The phone is red and heavy. It is much larger than the phones I remember. Of course, it’s been so long time since I’ve seen other phones, it’s hard to know for sure. My memory is no longer my friend. It tricks me sometimes. Makes me think I remember something that I don’t, or creates a memory that I know couldn’t be real. What do phones look like today?

“Oh, that is interesting. That small, really? I’m not doubting you. It’s just this phone is not small. I know things have changed. My little window into the world gives me at least that much information.

It’s a bit of a cliché that I have a big red phone but I enjoy the color. The walls and floor in the room are white, as is the table. The table has a few blue and red speckles as well. The chair at the table is a worn white leather chair. And the toilet and sink are both porcelain white. If it wasn’t for the red phone, I think I would lose the ability to discern colors.

The phone has a rotary, with the ten numbers working their way around the dial counterclockwise. I sometimes sit at the phone and turn the rotary. It doesn’t do anything, mind you. When I lift the headset, it automatically connects somewhere. I don’t know who does connection or who decides on what number. If they listen in on my conversation, they never say anything. When someone hangs up on the other end, another call is placed, and another, until I hang up the phone on the receiver.