“That’s right. That’s the only phone I’ve had in a couple of years, ever since I realized it didn’t make any sense to go on paying for a landline.”
“So your phone rang and you answered it.”
She shook her head. “I recognized his number when it showed up on the screen. I let it go to voice mail.”
“He leave a message?”
“Not that time. An hour later he did. ‘Can’t get you out of my head, Ell.’ ”
“But you didn’t take that call either.”
“No, I’ve never taken a single one of his calls. In fact I never answer the phone, because how do I know it isn’t him using a different phone with a number I don’t recognize? I check my voice mail, and when it’s somebody I want to talk to I call them back, and if they don’t leave a message it’s probably a robocall anyway. My big chance to save on a time-share in Puerto Vallarta.”
I asked if his messages had changed.
“At first they got graphic. This was what we would do when we got together, di dah di dah di dah. And then there was a threat, but only the one time.”
“What kind of threat?”
“ ‘You’re a very pretty girl but that could change.’ ”
“But that was the only threat.”
She nodded. “But from the look on your face that’s bad news. I thought it was good, that the threats stopped. It’s not?”
“Maybe it is,” I allowed. “But maybe it means he doesn’t want to leave evidence.”
“Evidence,” she said.
“On your phone. Did you keep the messages?”
“God, I’m so stupid! I deleted every one as soon as I’d listened to it. I wanted to delete them without listening, to keep myself from having to listen to him, but I decided I had to know if he was, you know—”
“Getting close,” Elaine said. She leaned forward. “Honey,” she said, “you don’t want to let this go any further than it already has. I think the first thing you have to do is get an order of protection against him.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. It’s a simple procedure, you don’t even need a lawyer, though you can have one with you if you want. All you do is — look, if you’re afraid it’ll piss him off—”
“She doesn’t know his name,” I said. They both looked at me, and I said, “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I know him as Paul,” Ellen said. “He never gave me a last name, and as far as that goes I don’t think his first name is really Paul. He was telling me some story, and I referred to him in the third person. ‘And what did Paul think about that?’ Something along those lines. And it took him a beat to get it, as if the name Paul didn’t register.”
I asked if she had any idea what his name might be. She said she didn’t. Elaine said it was probably Rumpelstiltskin, and was a name an absolute requirement for an order of protection? I said I thought it must be, that I’d never heard of one aimed at John Doe, or To Whom It May Concern.
Elaine said, “You know, do those things do any good anyway? On Dateline, it seems as though the next thing that happens after somebody gets an order of protection is she disappears, and the whole town is walking through the woods, looking for her and calling her name. Oh, God, honey, nothing like that’s gonna happen to you. I watch too much TV, I was just running off at the mouth.”
Ellen had gone white, and looked as though she might lose it. But she was hanging in there.
I said, “The fact of the matter is that an order of protection allows you to press charges against anybody who violates it. It’s not of much use if there’s any actual danger.”
She asked if I thought there was.
“I think you have to act as though there is. At this point it’s just a matter of phone calls, so it’s not as though he’s actually stalking you, but—”
“Yes it is.”
“Oh?”
“The last call, just this morning. That’s why I panicked and called here. ‘You moved away, Ell. Why’d you go and do that?’ And then he said something about how could I move out and leave the dishes on the table? And didn’t I want to come back for my alligator purse?”
“And did you leave dishes on the table?”
“That’s what a hurry I was in. And the alligator bag was on a shelf in the bedroom closet. He had to be in the apartment, he had to go into the bedroom and open the closet door, in order to say that.”
I asked if the message was still on her phone.
“God, I’m so fucking stupid...”
Elaine told her she wasn’t stupid, she was scared, and she had every reason to be scared. When I’d left the room earlier, I’d stuck a notebook in my back pocket. I took it out now and uncapped a ballpoint.
I said, “Let’s figure out what you know about him.”
“But I don’t know anything! All I know is his first name and it’s probably not even his.”
I told her she knew more than she realized.
For one thing, she knew his phone number. Knew it by heart, in fact, but to make sure she checked her phone contacts and confirmed it. The area code was 917, which meant that it was a local mobile phone.
“I never thought of that,” she said. “Can you track a person if you know his phone number?”
You can if you’re a cop, or know a cop who owes you a favor. I’d been the first and had known plenty who stayed on the job after I left, but every day my contacts faded further into the past. Everybody I ever worked with had retired long ago, and if their names came up at all it was apt to be on the obituary page. When I was working as a private investigator, I’d cultivated younger cops I met in the course of my work, and made a point of staying in touch with them. But most of them had retired by now, and I’d lost touch with the others.
All I said was the technology existed, but that it only worked on a registered phone.
“It might be a burner,” Elaine explained, and defined that as a phone purchased anonymously, with prepaid minutes. You could use it for one specific purpose, and discard it when you were done, and there was no record to connect it to its actual user.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. “Let’s see what else you know about him. How old is he?”
“I’d say early forties. But I’m not that good at telling a person’s age.”
“But no less than thirty-five and no more than fifty?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Height?”
“Six-one, six-two.”
“Weight?”
“I don’t know what men weigh. I mean, I don’t know how to guess.”
“Was he fat? Thin? What kind of body did he have.”
She brightened; here was something she could answer. “He was carrying a few extra pounds,” she said, “but he was muscular, you could tell he worked out.”
“Tattoos?”
“No.”
“Scars?”
“None that I noticed.”
“Facial hair?”
“No.”
“Full head of hair? Or was he balding?”
“He was getting the beginning of a bald spot.” She touched the crown of her own head. “Just the beginning. I don’t know if he was aware of it.”
“Hair color?”
“Brown. A dark brown.”
“Any gray in it?”
“Not that I saw. Of course I wouldn’t know if Just For Men had something to do with that.”
“Guys really use that?”
“Oh, God,” Elaine said. “No, nobody uses the stuff. That’s why every drugstore in America makes a point of carrying it.”
“I guess what I mean is that nobody I know, no man I know, dyes his hair.”
Elaine said I was wrong, and named the cashier at the Flame. I asked which one, and she said he worked weekday afternoons, wore horn-rimmed glasses. I said, “Marvin? He dyes his hair? How can you tell?”