SWF Seeks Same

As she got closer, Kennedy pretended to notice her for the first time and glanced up, smiling warmly. She was in her early thirties, average height and build, short blond hair, good eyes, firm, squarish jaw, and a mouth that looked as if it had smiled plenty but which now was a grim red slash. She was wearing a lightweight raincoat, powder blue with a white collar and oversized white buttons. High heels, good ankles. Not a stunner, but an attractive woman up close as well as viewed from across the room.

She stood in front of his gray metal desk, leaning forward as she had against the railing. “Sergeant Kennedy?”

“Me,” he told her.

“The desk sergeant said I should see you about my … complaint.” She was obviously nervous, not used to being in places like this. A respectable citizen in a bind.

He nodded and motioned for her to sit in the chair alongside the desk. Kennedy was a large, shambling man of middle age who knew he presented an avuncular, soothing image to women. He was six feet tall and close to two hundred and fifty pounds, with bushy, raggedy gray hair and sleepy blue eyes. Well into his fifties. Not a handsome man or a sexual threat. A slow and amiable old bear, that was Kennedy. If he hurt anyone, it would be accidental. He fostered that impression and capitalized on it. Being underestimated could be a great advantage.

The precinct house was warm and felt uncomfortably humid because of the rain that fell silently on thick windows reinforced with steel mesh. It even smelled damp. Fetid as a swamp. Though the ceiling didn’t quite leak, there were ancient water stains on it that always appeared wet. The air was so thick and sticky it seemed to deaden sound and coat bare flesh like oil.

When the woman had unbuttoned her coat and settled down in the straight-backed chair, Kennedy said, “Get you a cup of coffee? Maybe a soda or glass of water?”

She seemed surprised by his hospitality. “No. No, thank you.”

“You mentioned a complaint, Miss… ?”

“My name is Allison Jones, and I live at One Seventy-two West Seventy-fourth Street.”

He smiled. “And you sound like a very nice and well-prepared twelve-year-old reciting in front of the class. Relax, Miss Jones. Like the PR ads say, your police department cares. This old cop does, anyway.”

“Not so old,” she said, smiling back as the tension loosened its grip on her. The set of her shoulders changed beneath the blue coat, became less squared and then slumped wearily. But the rigid cast of her jaw and mouth remained grim. She was wrapped tight and ticking, this one.

“Thank you, Allison Jones. Could be there’s some good years left in me at that.” He picked up a ball-point pen and idly rotated it between sausage-like powerful fingers, wishing he could smoke the damned thing. Despite his huge, rough hands, he had beautifully manicured nails. He wore a plain gold wedding ring, though Jeanie had been dead almost ten years. Ah, Jeanie! He said, “Now, dear, what seems to be troubling you?”

“Well, phone calls, among other things”

“Oh? Of an obscene nature, do you mean?”

“Yes. Very obscene.”

“In what way?”

“The man—if it was the same man—talked about doing things to me.”

Kennedy cautioned himself. Gently now. “What sorts of things, Miss Jones? What I mean is, could you be more specific?”

“Tying me up, gagging me, whipping me. Making me … do things I never would do.”

“Of course not.”

“Bondage, it’s called,” she said flatly.

“Yes, I know.” He stared sadly for a moment at the ball-point pen almost lost in his big hand.

“You get a lot of complaints like mine?”

“Oh, yes. We see everything on this job. Soon lose the capacity to be shocked, I’m afraid.”

“He talked as if I’d enjoy sado-masochism.”

“He might well have believed that. The sick sort of man who’d make such a call generally has some very twisted ideas about the fair sex.”

“Not just twisted,” Allison Jones said, “positively kinky.”

Without a change of expression, Kennedy studied her more closely. Was she enjoying this? Getting her kicks by reporting phone calls that never occurred? It happened. All sorts of people wandered into precinct houses and reported all sorts of crimes, real or imagined. And for reasons only the psychiatrists ventured to guess, most often wrongly. This woman certainly didn’t seem that type, but Kennedy knew better than to classify by appearance and mannerism. He remembered an apparently typical young mother who’d murdered her two children as casually as one might destroy unwanted kittens.

Allison Jones seemed suddenly aware that he was assessing her. She frowned and stirred in her chair. Crossed her legs the other way. He heard taut nylon swish.

“This sort of thing’s been happening,” Kennedy said quickly. “Keeping us poor civil servants busy.” As if she were the twentieth woman that day to complain of obscene phone calls, and not the fifth or sixth.

“It doesn’t usually happen to me,” she said sharply. He decided she was probably telling him straight.

“The caller might never have laid eyes on you,” he told her. “He could’ve punched out your number at random. That’s how most of these characters operate. The odds are greatly against it being your number, so you assume he knows you personally in some way and you lose sleep over it. Just what anonymous callers want; they feed on fear.”