I glanced out the window. The neighbor’s lights were still out.
I figured she was talking to her new boyfriend, and decided to resort to Plan B. I walked over to the bar, as if to make another drink. Margot was speaking more softly now, a quick murmur or two before hanging up.
She came back into the room just as I took hold of the lemon, told myself it wouldn’t hurt as much as Travis’s burn, and nicked my finger with the knife.
“Ow!” I shouted-beyond what the little sting called for. I immediately grabbed my hand and squeezed my finger so that the bleeding looked worse.
“Oh, dear!” she said, quickly looking away.
“Oh! What a klutz! Oh no, I’m going to bleed all over your white car-pet…
That snapped her into action. “Come this way, there’s a bathroom right down this hallway.”
I followed her, and managed to get to the bathroom sink without leaving any DNA on her floor. She was frantically searching for a bandage; of course I didn’t tell her there was a whole box of the things in my purse. I was also pleased to note that she scrupulously avoided looking at my hand.
“My God, it’s deeper than I thought!” I said. Utter nonsense, but it worked on her.
“Upstairs,” she said weakly.
I followed her again.
The master bedroom was huge and featured a king-sized round bed. I didn’t get to see much of it before she hustled me into the bathroom, where there were lots of jars and an array of cosmetics out on the counter.
I held my hand over this sink, but still she avoided looking at my savage wound. I was kind of pissed about that, because I figured that if I had known what a daisy she was ahead of time, I wouldn’t have cut myself. I could have faked it.
This time, while I surveyed the contents of this larger medicine chest over her shoulder, she found an adhesive bandage. She handed it to me at arm’s length, clearly squeamish about the entire business.
“I-I don’t think that will do,” I said weakly. “Do you have any gauze?”
“Yes, yes.” She reached for it, and some tape.
“God, I think I see bone!” I screeched.
She turned white, but shoved the first-aid items at me before stepping just outside the bathroom.
I wrapped the finger rather artistically, then, in the shakiest voice I could manage, said, “I think I’m going to faint.”
It was truer of her than of me. “Oh!” Her eyes widened. “Come and lie down for a moment!”
I let her lead me over to the big dot of a bed and did my best to plop my rear down on that part of the circumference next to the fancy telephone on a nearby nightstand. I sat, then put my head between my knees.
“I’ll be okay,” I said in a muffled voice. I lifted my head a little. “This is so embarrassing. I’ll go home in just a minute.”
Now she really panicked. “Oh, no, no! Stay here a little longer. I insist.”
I groaned. “Oh, maybe you’re right. Listen, would you mind getting my drink for me? I left it downstairs.”
“Certainly, certainly,” she said, happy to get away from the wounded.
The moment she was out the door, I checked out the phone. I didn’t bother with the last-number-dialed button-that would just be Margot’s own number, entered for the pager. But to my delight, it had one of those “caller ID” features on it, the ones that record and store the numbers of incoming calls. The display showed the last call received as number seventy-five, with date and time stamped but indicating it was a “private call”-meaning her boyfriend had called from a phone that blocked caller ID. I hurriedly scrolled with the “review” button, going back to calls that started on Tuesday, the day she met Mr. Wonderful in the lobby. In the mix of calls, two showed up fairly often, and at hours when her society pals were probably getting their beauty sleep.
Margot had a little notepad next to the phone; I took the top sheet off and slipped it in my pocket, just in case I might need to use old-fashioned methods-raising a number by rubbing a pencil over the indentations. No use outsmarting yourself with technology, I thought. I used the next sheet to write down the two numbers from the caller-ID display.
By the time she had come upstairs, I had made a remarkable recovery.
“Gotta go,” I said. “Sitting here reminded me that I’m up way past my bedtime.”
She protested all the way down the stairs. At the front door, a little of my smug satisfaction at tricking her left me, and a sense of what I might have set in motion took its place.
“Margot, listen to me. And I mean listen. Your life may depend upon it. If you’ve called the man who waited for me in the lobby-”
“Called him? At this hour? Of course not!”
“Listen! If you’ve called him, get out of here. Now. Don’t wait for him to come over. He’s dangerous. You can see that, can’t you?”
“I don’t think he’s-”
“Fine!” I said. “If you want to wait around here and have Mr. Goodbar make a house call, fine. Invite him in. When they drag the canal and haul up whatever bits and pieces are left of you, I’ll tell each and every salt-soaked one of them, ”I told you so!“‘
“That’s a horrible thing to say!”
“Yeah? Whatever it takes. In fact, if you insist on staying here tonight, at least let me take your Yorkies with me. I’m not as crazy about them as you are, but I hate to see animals suffer.”
“Get out!”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Margot. Get out.”
She opened the door.
“Please, Margot.”
“Get out,” she said, but it was softer.
I tried to find some measure of hope in that as I drove off in search of a pay phone.
17
Since the nearest pay phones on Rivo Alto were on the single nonresidential street on the small island, I decided to drive a couple of miles farther, to an all-night supermarket on Pacific Coast Highway. The supermarket would be well-lighted and I could phone from indoors; better, for my purposes, than standing out in the open on a street Margot’s new boyfriend would be taking to get to her house. I was fairly certain she had invited him to come over.
The phone was near the front entrance of the market. I took a quick look around; at the checkout stand, there was an old man buying a bag of potato chips and a can of dog food, and one young couple with an infant buying baby formula. Otherwise, everyone I saw was an employee. The aisles of the store were crowded with pallets of shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes. Stocking hours.
I went back to the phone and, playing a hunch, rubbed a pencil over the paper I had taken off the notepad. The results were good enough to reveal a third and different number. I dropped a couple of coins in the phone and tried this number first. After two rings, a recorded voice said, “The subscriber on the LA Cellular System that you have called is unavailable, or has left the coverage area. Please try your call again later.”
So much for hunches. I tried one of the numbers from the caller-ID display.
It rang for a long time, no answer.
I got lucky with the third number.
“You’ve reached the voice mail of Richmond amp; Associates. We’re not in the office right now, but you can leave a message of any length, or enter your phone number and then press the pound key, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
I hung up. The name Richmond seemed familiar, but then again, it wasn’t a rare name.
I had decided to use a pay phone instead of my home phone because my initial plan was to page Margot’s friend from a number he wouldn’t recognize, and which couldn’t be traced back to me. But telling him off over the phone wouldn’t get me anywhere, and now a better plan occurred to me. I dropped another round of change into the phone and called the computer room at the News-Express.