Full Stop (20 page)

‘It's a stupid thing,' said Loretta, ‘but we were all so convinced
Bridget would get off we didn't actually check Brenda Perfect's story. The dentist was Anthea's idea, she's the detective, and as soon as she spoke to his nurse ... The surgery's in Bicester
and
Brenda was having a crown fitted, so she must've been out of the office for at least two hours.'

‘Was she lying? At the trial?'

‘Who knows? Anthea, that's the detective, she thinks Brenda had a crush on Sam, she certainly hasn't been very cooperative. But we've got an affidavit from the dentist, so it doesn't really matter.'

Tracey said: ‘When's the appeal?'

Loretta's pudding arrived along with Tracey's
espresso doppio
and she waited a moment before replying. ‘October. Term won't have started so I'll be able to go every day, in fact I was hoping you'd be in London.' Her brow clouded. ‘You're not really going to stay in Washington?'

‘I haven't had time to think.' He looked straight at her. ‘Why, would you miss me?'

Loretta recognised the glint in his eye and sat back in her chair. ‘Of course,' she said lightly, her mind jumping treacherously to Dale Martineau. ‘Who else would I go to concerts with? You know how ignorant I am about classical music'

‘That isn't what I meant.'

‘John–'

‘I've been thinking about yesterday, spending the whole night with you and nothing happened. I mean, we're miles from Riverside Drive, you could come back to my hotel, they've given me a double room.' Guessing what she was about to say, he added: ‘You
know,
I don't mean anything heavy. Just for old times' sake.'

Loretta looked at him coolly, thinking nostalgia was one of the worst reasons she'd ever heard for going to bed with someone. Whatever she had felt for Tracey was too far in the past to be revived now, especially when she'd just had an unexpected reminder of the electrifying effect of sudden sexual attraction. Faking a yawn, she said: ‘It's been a nice evening but I'm tired and I want an early night.'

‘What d'you mean,
nice'?
he said, and promptly changed tack. ‘At least you'd be safe with me. You seem to have spent most of your time in New York fending off sex maniacs.'

‘One obscene caller? You were just saying how many murders and rapes there are in New York, there was a woman on the news who got AIDS when she was
raped
.'

‘OK, forget it.' He grasped the edge of the table and pushed his chair back, glancing down at the floor as though he'd dropped something. Apparently he'd lost his napkin, which he retrieved and smoothed over his knees even though he'd finished eating. He looked up, saw she was still watching him and said gruffly: ‘Sorry.'

Loretta shrugged and picked up her spoon, looking down at the mélange of bananas and chocolate on her plate. It resembled an illustration from an upmarket cookery book, lightly dusted with icing sugar and with a single sliced strawberry reclining in the chocolate sauce.

‘Look, we can — er — share a taxi,' Tracey said, obviously feeling bad about his ill-judged remark. ‘I mean, I can get it on expenses, just about.'

Loretta smiled rather wanly.

‘Eat up,' she heard Tracey say, ‘they're going to want the table in ten minutes. I ought to get the bill.'

Loretta slid her spoon across the plate from the edge to the centre, scooping up sauce and bananas, releasing a rich, chocolatey perfume which made her mouth water. She lifted the first spoonful to her lips, lingering over it and allowing the pulpy sweetness to melt on her tongue. It tasted even better than its description on the menu had promised and she began to eat more quickly, hardly aware of John Tracey talking irritably to the waiter, waving his hands and querying something on the bill.

She was in the small bathroom of Toni's flat, removing her make-up, when Tracey rang. She picked up the phone as soon as she heard his voice on the answering-machine, breaking into his surprised monologue, ‘It's OK, I'm here.'

‘
Christ
, you gave me a fright. I didn't like the look of that taxi driver, you should have let me drop you off first.'

‘It's miles out of your way. Anyway, he never said a word, not even when I told him where to stop. I forgot about your change and by the time I remembered he was driving off. Are you sure you can put it on expenses? I mean, I didn't get a receipt.' Tracey had insisted on giving the driver $20 when he got out at the Gramercy Park Hotel, more than enough to cover the fare.

He said vaguely: ‘Don't worry about it. Why didn't you answer the phone?'

Loretta exhaled noisily. ‘He left another message while I was out, Donelly, Michael, whatever his name is. I thought it might be him.' She lifted her hand to her face, wiping away a smear of cleansing lotion below her left eye.

Tracey began to talk fast, exuding a febrile excitement as though he was in pursuit of a hot story. ‘I know it's late, I nearly didn't ring you but I thought you'd want to know, I mean, is this bloke
sick
or what?' Belatedly realising what Loretta had said, he stopped and added: ‘You say he's phoned again? While you were out?'

‘Yes, and there were a couple of hang-ups — you know, when someone doesn't put the phone down straight after the tone. What is it? What have you found out?'

Tracey hesitated. ‘That number,' he said, prolonging the suspense, ‘the one you gave me in the restaurant?'

‘
Yes
. What about it?' She glanced at her wrist, forgetting she'd taken her watch off in the bathroom. He had worked fast, it could only be half an hour, forty minutes at the most, since she'd dropped him off at his hotel.

‘You're not going to believe this.'

Doing her best to be patient, Loretta said: ‘Try me.'

‘Not only is there no Lieutenant Donelly, it's nothing to do with the cops.'

‘It isn't?' She sat down on the bed, unsurprised by this confirmation but not liking it. ‘John, please. Tell me.'

Tracey said triumphantly: ‘He's only picked one of
the
most popular numbers in the city, you have to hand it to him –'

‘
What?'

‘It's a helpline,' he said soberly, ‘a number for women who've been raped or sexually abused..'

She gasped.

‘Loretta? Are you all right? I told you it was sick.'

She leapt to her feet and began to pace up and down, dragging the base of the telephone across the floor behind her. Honey, who had been asleep on the floor, looked up in alarm and tried to crawl under the television.

‘Rape?' she spluttered, almost incoherent. ‘What kind of, pervert... Oh
shit.
John, don't hang up.' She knelt and fumbled with the telephone cord, which had somehow wound itself round her left ankle. ‘Hello, are you there?'

He was and she said: ‘How did you find out so quickly? I mean, I wouldn't even know where to start. God, your contacts are amazing.'

‘Oh, it was nothing. Hang on while I light a fag.' She heard the hiss of a cigarette lighter, followed by a long intake of air as he inhaled.

‘Go on,' she said eagerly, ‘how did you do it? The phone company? Or was it the police?'

‘Actually,' he said, sounding mildly embarrassed, ‘I just kept dialling the number. It took 22 attempts, I counted, and when I finally got through this woman said' — he tried, with a spectacular lack of success, to sound like an American –'Candice speaking. I must say she wasn't exactly helpful at first, I don't know why. Men get raped as well as women, not so often I know but they do. Anyway, when she finally shut up long enough for me to explain she said it's always hard to get through, they only have two numbers and they're trying to raise the cash for another one. I said I'd send her a donation — I thought you'd be proud of me.'

Loretta chewed absently at a flaky piece of skin on her index finger, not really listening to him. ‘It's the
planning,
that's what I
can't get over,' she said. ‘Choosing a number that's likely to be engaged, pretending to be a policeman —
two
policemen. All that stuff about ANEMONE, I wonder if it really exists ...'

It was Tracey's turn to sound blank. ‘What're you talking about?'

‘Oh, never mind. Thanks, John,' she added, not wanting to sound ungrateful, ‘I mean, there's not much I can do but at least I know I was right. What a — a bastard.'

‘You could report it to the cops. The real cops, I mean.'

She shuddered. ‘I'm not going through all that again. And it's not as if I know his number, his real number.'

‘You mean you're going to let him get away with it? This isn't like you, Loretta.'

She said tiredly: ‘It's midnight, I'm in a strange city, I'll be on a plane in less than 24 hours. I haven't exactly got a lot of options open to me, have I? Of course I'll tell Toni, don't worry about that.'

‘When's your flight?'

‘Nine. Well, just after. I have to be at the airport at six.'

‘Ring me when you get home.'

‘All right. Will you be in Washington?'

‘Yeah, I'm going back tomorrow.'

‘John–'

‘What?'

‘Nothing. Just — don't rush into anything, OK?'

‘I'm not going to join a cult, if that's what you're worried about.'

‘I didn't mean –'

‘I know. Listen, it's late, and you wanted an early night. You won't get much sleep on the plane.'

‘OK. Bye then.'

‘Bye.'

Loretta gazed round the room, unable to recall what she was doing when Tracey rang. The dog, sensing that the threatened crisis had been averted, crept out from her hiding place, flopped on to her side and breathed windily through her nose.

‘Make-up,' Loretta said aloud, and returned to the bathroom.

She was cleaning her teeth when the thought came back to her: what if Michael, instead of calling numbers at random, really was one of Toni's friends? Had some connection with her, at least? The red address book she had asked Loretta to consult, when she wanted her gynaecologist's office number, contained dozens of names which, judging by the variety of inks and styles in which they were written, looked as if they had been accumulated over a period of years. The only Michael Toni had admitted to knowing was a colleague at Columbia but she had been distracted when Loretta put the question and there might well be others. Rapidly overcoming her qualms about intruding into Toni's private life, she turned off the cold tap, returned her toothbrush to her toilet bag and went to get the red book. Opening it at the As, she checked the page-and-a-half of entries, finding five male names and one which could have belonged to a man or a woman, but not a single Michael. Disappointed, she moved on to the Bs and almost immediately spotted Mike Bompiani. He had two telephone numbers, home and work, but her excitement ebbed away when she saw that the three-figure code was unfamiliar, and the address below it in Aspen, Colorado. Convinced that the Michael who had planned the elaborate hoax was local, Loretta realised that she needed to be more systematic, dividing the names she found into more and less likely candidates. Seizing her notebook, she divided a clean page into two columns, the first headed by the initials ‘NY' and the second by the single word ‘other'. She wrote Mike Bompiani's name and home number in the second column and moved on to the Cs, where she drew a blank, although she couldn't help being struck by the extent of Toni's acquaintance. She seemed to know people all over the States, some of them in towns so small Loretta had never heard of them.

A few minutes later she closed the little red book. There were four possibles in New York City although one of these was the colleague Toni had mentioned, Michael Koganovitch. Loretta had an obscure notion, which she knew she would be hard put to
justify, that a man who had published a scholarly study of Derrida was unlikely to get his kicks from telephone sex. That left three. Loretta hesitated, inhibited equally by the lateness of the hour and by the fact that she had no idea what she would do if someone answered. Then, telling herself not to be a wimp, she could always hang up without speaking, she pulled the phone towards her and tried the first number. She held her breath as it connected, trying to think of something to say if Michael Day picked up the phone — or his wife, or his boyfriend, or his mother; the possibilities were endless. Listening to the ringing tone, she gradually relaxed as it became clear that, whoever he was, neither Michael Day nor any other member of his household was at home. Returning to her notebook, she read the next number aloud as she dialled, as if by doing so she could give herself confidence.

It rang twice, she heard a click, and suddenly her ears were blasted by music so loud that she automatically moved the receiver away from her ear. It faded and a recording began: ‘Hi, this is Michael Lindsay. If you're calling to offer me the lead role in an exciting new Broadway production, leave a message and I'll call you right back. Or you can try my agent, Frank Sussman, at Actors Unlimited.' Loretta gripped the receiver, her knuckles white, as the familiar, confident voice rapped out the agency's telephone number. ‘Otherwise, if your call is social, leave your name and number.' There was another burst of music, this time something lush and romantic which might have come from a film score, and a single long tone; apparently no one else had left a message that evening, which suggested that Michael Lindsay had not been out for long.

Loretta returned the receiver to its cradle, stunned by her discovery that Michael wasn't just a friend of Toni's — she had found his name a couple of lines above her own in the Ls — but an
actor.
Immediately she felt better about being taken in, he was clearly used to changing his voice and accent, and it occurred to her that he might even have acted the part of a detective in a play. Still not quite able to believe it, Loretta picked up the receiver
and dialled the number again. This time, taking the precaution of holding the phone a little way from her ear, she was able to make out the words of the song, a woman's voice complaining tonelessly, almost hypnotically, ‘I feel small when I am next to you, I feel big when I forget you, I feel small when I am next to you, I feel big when I forget you.' It seemed nastily appropriate after the lengths Michael Lindsay had gone to in tormenting her and she stabbed her finger on to the rest, cutting the connection as soon as she heard his voice.