Two of the Deadliest: New Tales of Lust, Greed, and Murder from Outstanding Women of Mystery

Can You Hear Me Now?

By Marcia Talley

 “When you take public transportation, sit next to a serviceman. You hear me, Marjorie Ann?”

Of course I heard, and the hundred times before that, too, but I suppressed a sigh, and tried not to roll my eyes.

“Memorize his rank and insignia,” Mama added. “If he tries any funny business, Uncle Sam will know where to find him. That’s what Papa always said.”

The only thing Mama ever got from following her father’s advice was knocked up, but she married the guy, and the result was me, so I guess it’d be small of me to complain.

Actually, I hadn’t taken the kind of transportation Mama was talking about—bus or train—for quite some time. My late husband had had many faults, but dying penniless wasn’t one of them. Since Stephen, I usually fly first class, particularly after Delta sent my luggage to Chicago and me to Las Vegas, where I ended up crying on the shoulder of an oilman from Houston who...well, never mind.

I go first class by train, too, but old habits die hard, so when I boarded the Acela in D.C., bound for New York, with the specter of Mama practically perched on my shoulder, what could I do but wander down the aisle, scanning the rows, looking oh-so-casually for a serviceman to sit next to. Halfway through the car I had one of those head-smacking moments like, duh, Marjorie Ann, whose Army is going to pay per diem for a soldier to ride first class on the Acela? So I picked a seat next to a long-legged businessman with a profile chiseled out of marble and a laptop perched on the fold-down table in front of him.

“Is this seat taken?”

He glanced up with a languid, “Be my guest,” blinked twice with eyes the color of the Mediterranean flecked with gold, and grinned. I often have that affect on people. It’s my hair, Mama says, quoting Sylvia Plath: Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.

I was in a relationship, as they say, so this guy was in no danger of being eaten alive by me. I also wasn’t in the mood to encourage him, so I sat down, melted into the plush blue upholstery, and dug around in my bag for a book. I’d brought two along: a thriller that just hit number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and a copy of Agatha Christie’s Mort sur le Nil. In French, bien sûr. Another one of Mama’s tricks. If you’re stuck next to a busybody who wants to talk until your ear melts down about her grandchildren or her hysterectomy, you can look up from your roman policier, flash a sweet, slightly puzzled smile and say, Je ne parle pas l’Anglais, even if that’s the only bit of French that you know. I’d done that once, but trust me, thumbing dumbly for hours through pages of gibberish is très dull.

Thankfully, my seatmate already had his nose glued to his laptop where a Gantt chart he’d created in Excel pulsed across the screen in a rainbow of living color. He frowned, studying it—a serious, silent type—so I picked up the bestseller and began reading where I’d left off.

The guy might have been serious, but I was way wrong about the silent. From the confines of a tooled leather holster attached to his belt, a cell phone launched into Papageno’s theme from The Magic Flute. I got a gentle elbow in my arm as he dug it out. “Brad here.”

I don’t know about you, but listening to anyone rattle on for—I checked my watch—ten minutes about rearranging plane reservations had me wishing I’d sat in the quiet car. Brad was giving some travel agent a hard time about switching tickets from San Francisco to Belize, poor guy, adding an excursion to the Altun Ha Mayan ruin. Honestly, it just about broke my heart.

Eventually Brad got things sorted, and I returned to my book. Ness, Joel, and Toby had just been dumped on their aunt’s London doorstep, when Brad’s cell phone rang again. Clearly he’d taken the time to personalize his contacts with customized ring tones, because this time, instead of Mozart, the phone began buzzing like a demented insect. Psszt psszt psszt it rang, like bugs being fried by an ultraviolet zapper on a hot August night. I shuddered.

“This is Dave,” Brad answered, sweet and smooth as chocolate-cream pie.

Dave?

“The market was up yesterday,” he drawled. “Let’s sell a hundred thousand of the index fund.”

I kept my eyes on my book and my curious ears cocked while “Dave” dumped Time Warner and picked up Kraft, sold pounds and bought francs, bought December coffee at one ten, and liquidated his position in Futurepharm based on a phone call from a friend at the FDA. Why anyone’d risk being jailed for insider trading in order to save a lousy twenty-four thousand bucks was beyond me.

Make laws for the needy, not the greedy. Shades of Mama again, pontificating in my ear, misquoting Roosevelt.

Need can make men desperate, but greed, in my experience, makes men stupid. I needed twelve forms of ID to cash a check at Wal-Mart, but anyone could move millions on the telephone. Four phone calls later, I knew Dave’s bank account number and pass code, his VISA card number (and expiration date!), and his passwords to Schwab and Ameritrade. Math had never been my strong point, but give me a string of numbers—TU 9-1997 (my grandmother’s phone number); 25 left, 35 right, 21 left (the combination to my gym locker in junior high); 766-42-1057 (my first husband’s Social Security number)—and my mind was a steel trap. I could be dangerous.

Good thing for “Dave” that I’m an honest kind of girl.

As I listened, pretending to read, Brad gave his cell phone a workout, didn’t even let it cool down before calling home. “Melissa, sweetheart, it’s me. I’ll be late for dinner.”

I’m sure Melissa knew what a hero she was married to, and how grateful she should be that his long hours and almost supernatural genius kept champagne in the fridge, Escada on her back, and a Mercedes Benz in the driveway, but apparently Brad felt obliged to remind her of it anyway. In a déjà-vu haze—Harrison, my first husband, thought he was God almighty, too—I found myself rooting for Melissa. I prayed for a dead zone, a tunnel, a weak battery, anything that would shut the arrogant SOB up. I was hopeful when the train rumbled out of Baltimore and into rural Harford County, but alas, not even crappy one-bar reception discouraged the man. Brad simply twisted in his seat, pressed the phone between his ear and the window and barked, “Can you hear me now?” every few minutes before bidding his long-suffering wife a desultory goodbye.

I was sipping in silence, enjoying a glass of chilled tomato juice delivered to my seat by a uniformed attendant, anticipating the imminent arrival of a Greek salad with lamb, and appreciating the view as the train sped across the Susquehanna between Perryville and Havre de Grace, when Brad really harshed on my mellow. His blasted phone rang again, a jazzy piano tune this time, kind of classy, so I thought it might be Melissa calling him back.

“Hello. This is Phil.”

I nearly swallowed my straw. Phil? What happened to Brad? Or Dave, for that matter?

“Oh, Annie,” Phil cooed, slipping into his new identity as slickly as an undercover operative for the CIA. “Have I got a surprise for you.”

I stole a sideways glance over the rim of my glass to see him pause, smiling, thoroughly appreciating (I imagined) the oh-ing and ah-ing going on at the other end of the line. “How’d you like to spend a week in Belize, babe?”

Annie liked it, and was already packing her tankini, if the tinny shrieks of joy leaking out of the receiver were any indication. The way Phil practically drooled into the cell phone, I felt like handing him my napkin. From some hidden corner of my brain a phrase leaped out, an escapee from a poem I’d been forced to memorize in high school: And her well-tanned arms held hidden charms / For the greedy, the sinful and lewd. Something like that, anyway.

While Phil made kissy-face with Annie, I tried to remember the title of the poem. Something about Alaska. I closed my eyes and pondered, as if the answer might be written on the inside of my eyelids. I was still teasing it out—“The Yukon,” maybe?—when Phil said, “Well, hot damn!” and my eyes flew open.

After a few sentences, I deduced that he was in touch with a banker, discussing hedge funds, AAA-rated Eurobonds, and bearer shares in Panama. And I couldn’t help overhearing when “Phil”—sounding veddy veddy British—arranged a private offshore bank account, set the password to his wife’s birth date, and began redirecting his assets into it, with no more effort than applying for a rental card at Blockbuster. You had to like that in a banker. Last time I opened a bank account, they gave me a travel alarm.

When everything was arranged to his satisfaction, the guy made another call. I hoped he was going to share news of his good fortune, whatever it was, with his wife. But, no.

“Melissa, it’s me again,” my seatmate purred, wearing his Brad voice. “I’m sorry, but I won’t be home tonight after all. They’re flying me out of JFK on the red-eye. Hong Kong this time.”

Liar, liar.

Did Melissa believe one word of the bullshit Brad was shoveling? Hard to tell from my end, what with Brad listening thoughtfully and nodding agreeably—yes, dear; no, darling; whatever you say, sweetheart—all the way to Wilmington. Barf. I felt like putting a muzzle on the guy, maybe a straightjacket too. Poor Melissa!

When the train stopped for passengers in Philadelphia, I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers, praying he’d get off and leave me to my book in peace, but it simply wasn’t my lucky day. Yada yada yada for the hour it took to streak north at 120 miles per hour through the backyards of suburban New Jersey. Blah blah blah past the belching smokestacks and steaming garbage hills that spoiled my view of the Empire State Building, five miles in the distance, across the Hudson. As the train slowed to rumble through Newark Airport station without stopping, I remembered the nail file in my purse, a serious, old-fashioned metal one that TSA would have confiscated in an instant. I could put it to use! I could insert it neatly between Brad’s ribs, and thrust, and twist, hard. I didn’t know Melissa, but somehow I knew she’d be grateful.

Fortunately for Brad, I missed my chance. In no time at all, the conductor informed us we were arriving at New York’s Penn Station, and it was time to gather up our belongings and leave the train and have a nice day. By that time, Brad had apparently smoothed things over with Melissa and was fussing over Annie again as he hurried out of the train and along the platform, his cell phone mashed between his palm and his ear, his laptop case swinging wildly from a strap looped over one shoulder.

I fell several passengers behind as we merged into single file to ride the up escalator, which spit everyone out into a vast concourse among the huddled masses, flanked by their luggage and the roaming homeless. Overhead, a prehistoric departures board whirred to life, informing everyone, letter by letter and number by number—snick-snick-snick—that the Regional 171 would be departing, twenty minutes late, from gate 11.

After surviving the stampede, I caught sight of Brad again as he passed Houlihan’s pub. I was headed in the same general direction myself, but by the time I trundled past the new books display at Book Corner, Brad was some distance ahead. I watched as he finished his call, and slipped the phone into his belt.

Or so he thought.

Instead of nesting neatly in its holster, the cell phone slid down his pant leg, did a somersault on the polished marble floor, and spun away in the direction of Kabooz’s Bar and Grill. Surprisingly, Brad didn’t notice.

 A kid toting a backpack sent the instrument skidding another two feet with the toe of his Birkenstock, and a woman pushing a stroller drove right over it before I was able to scoop it up.

“Wait!” I yelled, rushing after Brad...Dave...Phil...whoever...as fast as anyone could while dragging a wheelie bag behind. I followed him up the escalator at Madison Square Garden and out to Seventh Avenue, but Brad was unencumbered and well ahead of me by the time I emerged, dazed and blinking, into the bright sunshine.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, you dropped your cell phone!”

Brad plunged on, oblivious, elbowing his way through the line of people waiting for a cab. I nearly caught up with him then, but he veered left, and crossed with the light at Thirty-third and Seventh, leaving me standing stupidly on the curb.

If I could just get his attention! But, what name should I use?

Brad, the family man?

Dave, the biz whiz?

Phil, the international playboy?

Who is this guy when he talks to his mother?

“Brad!” I shouted.

Across the busy street, Brad turned his head, puzzled, scanning the faces of the pedestrians snaking around him.

I waved the cell phone in the air. “You dropped this!”

Brad paused under the walk / don’t walk sign, cupped his ear with his hand, stared at me, and shrugged.

“Your cell phone!” I screamed over the roar of noonday traffic.

Brad patted his empty holster, waved in cheerful acknowledgement, smiled and stepped toward me from the curb. That was when it happened.

It wasn’t my fault. Honest. The cab had right of way when it sideswiped the jerk and sent him sprawling in the crosswalk, where a bus barreling down Seventh applied its brakes but...

My God, it was awful!

Tires squealed and passersby screamed as I turned away from the gruesome residue and stared at the cell phone in my hand, at the four-bar signal, at the tiny screen with its AT&T logo superimposed over a movie poster of Michael Douglas in Wall Street saying “Greed is good.”

That figured.

Naturally, I used Brad’s phone to call 911.

Then, just as naturally, I thumbed through his directory, looking for Melissa. She deserved to be the first to know.

“Home” popped up before “Melissa,” so I highlighted the entry and punched Send.

“Melissa,” I said, when she came on the line. “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Brad’s. Do you have a pencil?” I waited for her to find one, and then said, “Write down this number. It may come in handy.”

“Thanks,” she said, “I guess.”

“It’s a bank account,” I explained. “And the password is your birthday.”

“How did...” she began, but I mashed my thumb down on the red button, cutting her off.

I was booked into the Marriott on Times Square, so I waited until the cab dropped me off before turning Brad’s phone off, wiping it clean on the hem of my jacket, and dropping it into one of the green trash cans in the median at Forty-Sixth and Broadway. As Brad’s phone sank like a stone amid a sea of newspapers, fast-food wrappers and crushed soda cans, I noticed a billboard overhead, a kinetic light sculpture that proclaimed in flashing blue and yellow, “Thank you for using AT&T.”

I’d been married to a cheating worm like Brad once myself. So I saluted the billboard. “You’re very welcome,” I said.