Hotline to Murder

by

Alan Cook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

“This is a very entertaining mystery that
builds up speed and takes the reader along to its surprising
conclusion.”

—Cynthia Chow, Librarian, Kaneohe, Hawaii

“This story is well crafted and the
California setting terrific. I highly recommend this book.”

—Dawn Dowdle for Mystery Lovers Corner

PUBLISHED BY:

Alan Cook on Smashwords

Hotline to Murder

Copyright ©
2005 by Alan L. Cook.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the
rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the
prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author
acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various
products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used
without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not
authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark
owners.

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BOOKS BY ALAN COOK

Run into Trouble

Gary Blanchard Mysteries:

Honeymoon for Three

The Hayloft: a 1950s mystery

California Mystery:

Hotline to Murder

Lillian Morgan mysteries:

Catch a Falling Knife

Thirteen Diamonds

Other fiction:

Walking to Denver

Nonfiction:

Walking the World: Memories and
Adventures

History:

Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s
Champions of Freedom

Poetry:

The Saga of Bill the Hermit

DEDICATION

To all the Hotline listeners, young and old,
who put their own psyches on the telephone line, in order to help
others.

CHAPTER 1

The three-story building looked like any of
a thousand small office buildings in a hundred cities, with its
gray stucco exterior and its glass doors. It blended in so well
with the retail shops that most of the customers of the strip mall
in Bonita Beach didn’t even realize it was there. And that made it
a perfect location.

Tony had never been inside this building.
All of the training sessions had been held in a local church. The
students hadn’t been told the location of the Hotline office until
they graduated. It was confidential.

He rode the elevator to the third floor and
found room 327. There was no name on the door. He took a deep
breath and put a half smile on his face. He hesitated. This was
much harder than going on a routine sales call. Finally, he tried
the door handle. The door was unlocked.

He opened the door and walked into the
office. Nobody was in sight. Minor relief. It gave him a moment to
get his bearings. The best word for the place was utilitarian.
About what you’d expect for the office of a struggling nonprofit
organization. Tony assumed it was struggling. Didn’t all nonprofits
struggle?

A girl emerged from one of three doorways
and immediately smiled.

“Hi, I bet you’re Tony.”

“Hi.” Tony remembered to put a smile on his
own face. She must be his mentor for this shift.

“I’m Shahla. Glad you’re on time. The guys
on the four to seven shift just left, and it’s a little creepy here
alone at night.”

“Tony.” She already knew that. Why was he so
flustered? “Uh, how do you spell your name?” he asked, trying to
hide it.

“S-h-a-h-l-a. Excuse the food. I haven’t
eaten dinner. Are you hungry? There’re snacks in there.”

She pointed her head back over her shoulder.
She carried a paper plate full of chips and a coke. That was
dinner? Maybe for a teenager. Tony tried to remember his eating
habits when he was younger. He shook his head to signify that he
wasn’t hungry.

Shahla walked into a room with a sign that
said “Listening Room” over the door, and set the food on one of the
three tables. Tony followed her.

She turned back to him and said, “I
understand that you let the class use your condo for one of the
Saturday sessions and that you have a really neat pool. That was a
nice thing to do.” She gave him a thumbs-up sign.

“How did you hear about that?” Tony asked,
caught off guard.

“Joy is my friend. She was one of the
facilitators for the class. She swam in your pool.”

“I remember Joy.” That was an
understatement. He was not likely to forget the blonde Joy,
especially how she looked in a bikini.

“I’m supposed to show you around,” Shahla
said, after a sip of coke. “This is the listening room. We write
the names of repeat callers on the board each day so that if they
call a second time, we can tell them they’ve already called.”

“Repeat callers get only fifteen minutes a
day,” Tony said, quoting from the class, where facilitators had
done comical imitations of some of the chronic Hotline haunters.
There were several names on the white board from earlier shifts,
including Prince Pervert, Lovelorn Lucy, and Masturbating Fool.
“Don’t you hang up on the bad calls?”

“Yeah, if they start talking about sex in an
explicit way or if we think they’re masturbating, we tell them it’s
an inappropriate call and hang up.”

She spoke in a casual voice, but Tony felt
uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to talking about masturbation with a
teenage girl. He said, “And the books are for referrals?”

“Right. We have a couple of different
telephone directories, including a local one, and these other books
contain numbers we can give to callers, depending on their problem.
They have names of counselors, drug and alcohol programs, shelters,
that sort of thing.” She pointed out the books on one of the
tables. “And this is the Green Book which tells about the repeat
callers.”

Tony made a mental note to look through the
books.

“I’ll show you how to sign in and also the
rest of the office.” Shahla led the way out of the listening
room.

She had long, dark hair and dark eyes—eyes
that he knew he had no business gazing into. She wore jeans cut low
across her hips and a midriff-baring top with spaghetti straps. Two
other straps peeked out from beneath the outside ones. No navel
ring, however. In fact, the only piercings he saw on her were one
in each ear containing a stud. He couldn’t guess her nationality,
offhand, but assumed her parents were from somewhere in the
war-torn Middle East. He wasn’t surprised. The class had been
composed of predominantly teenagers, belonging to a rainbow of
races. But she spoke better English than he did.

“I guess most of the listeners are young,”
Tony said as he signed in twice: on the daily time sheet and also
the permanent record of hours worked by each listener.

“Yeah, we have to get our community service
hours to graduate from high school.”

“A lot of the kids in the class were
sixteen.”

“I’m seventeen.”

She said it with enough emphasis so he knew
the difference was important. “Are you a senior at Bonita Beach
High?”

“Yes. I’ve been on the Hotline for a year
and a half.”

Shahla took him into what must be a supply
room. Except that in additional to metal cabinets, it also
contained a sink and some bags of chips and pretzels.

“Food,” she said, pointing. “There’s drinks
and stuff in the refrigerator. And there’s water.”

A five-gallon Sparkletts bottle sat upside
down on its metal stand. She led him out of that room and through
the one remaining doorway. The room they entered was the largest
one yet. It contained three desks, with all the appropriate office
paraphernalia on top of them.

“These desks belong to Gail and Patty.”

Tony had met them at the class sessions.
Patty was the Administrative Assistant and Gail was the Volunteer
Coordinator.

“What about the third desk?”

“Several people have left. Patty’s only been
here for three months. Here’s Nancy’s office.”

Shahla went through a doorway to an interior
office containing just one desk. Nancy was the Executive Director.
Tony had met her, too. She appeared to him to be very competent. He
glanced at a couple of framed certificates and some photographs of
the local beach on the walls of her office, and then they walked
back to the listening room.

“Can you help me with something until the
phone rings?” Shahla asked. She pulled a sheet of paper out of a
folder she had brought with her. “I’m trying to put together a
resume so I can get a part-time job. Can you take a look at it for
me?”

“Do you really need a resume to work at
McDonald’s?” Tony asked. “Or do you aspire to something
grander?”

“I’m not really qualified for anything
grander yet. I figured a resume would give me an advantage over the
competition.”

Tony was impressed, not only by the resume,
but by Shahla’s thinking. With a shock, it occurred to him that
perhaps she
was
qualified to do more than work at
McDonald’s. She had done two things when she met him that would do
credit to a top salesperson. She had complimented him and asked for
his advice, which had immediately endeared her to him. This was no
airheaded teenager.

The telephone rang. Shahla said, “Okay,
you’re on the air.”

Tony’s nervousness returned. He took a
breath to calm himself and picked up the phone. “Central Hotline.
This is Tony.”

There was an audible click at the other end
of the line and then silence.

Shahla, who had pushed the speaker button,
smiled. “You’ve just had your first hang up.” She walked over to a
sheet of paper pinned to one of the bulletin boards and put a mark
beside August 16.

“Do you think it was one of the obscene
callers?”

Shahla shrugged. “Who knows? We all get hang
ups.”

For some reason Tony felt marginally better
about taking the calls. There were some people who didn’t want to
talk to him even more than he didn’t want to talk to them.

Five minutes later the phone rang again. He
answered it with slightly more confidence.

“Tony?” a female voice said in response to
his greeting. “Have I talked to you before?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Julie.”

“Hi, Julie.”

Shahla placed the call on the speaker. There was no
echo so callers didn’t know they were on a speaker. She reached for
the Green Book and riffled through its pages. She set the book in
front of Tony so he could read about Julie. Meanwhile, Julie, who
had apparently figured out that Tony didn’t know her story, had
taken off like a windup toy, talking about her ex-husband who had
run away with his secretary, and a number of other men with whom
she had apparently had affairs, but who had screwed her in one way
or another. This wasn’t just a bad joke; she was crying on the
line.

Tony barely had an opportunity to get in an
occasional verbal nod, consisting of “Uh huh,” and no opportunity
to practice other skills he had learned in the class. He belatedly
wrote the time down on a call-report form and scanned the written
information about Julie. She had been calling for several years.
She complained about men and almost everything else, and her
nickname was Motormouth. About all the listener could do was to
give an occasional verbal nod and hang on for fifteen minutes.

After a while, Tony realized that some of the
incidents Julie was talking about had happened years earlier. He
felt like telling her to get over it and get a life. Perhaps it was
a good thing he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

At the end of fifteen minutes, Shahla swept her hand
across her throat in the classic “cut” gesture. However, that was
easier said than done. Tony tried to interrupt Julie several times;
she talked right over him. Finally, she stopped for a moment to
take a breath, the first time Tony remembered her doing so, and he
told her he had to answer other calls.

“Oh,” Julie said, and then, “If you hang up just
like that, I’ll be depressed for the rest of the day. Can I just
tell you one more thing?”

“Okay,” Tony said, feeling helpless. He avoided
Shahla’s eyes.