I never play games with silent callers. I just hang up. I did so now.
Two innings later, having talked to Jan, having made myself a tuna fish sandwich on rye, found a package of potato chips I thought we’d finished off at the poker game, and gotten myself a new can of beer, I sat down to watch the last inning. The Cubs had a chance of winning. I said a silent prayer to the god of baseball.
The phone rang.
I mouthed several curses around my mouthful of tuna sandwich and went to the phone.
“Hello?” I said, trying to swallow the last of the bite.
My silent friend again.
I slammed the phone.
The Cubs got two more singles. I started on the chips, and I had polished off the beer and was thinking of getting another one when the phone rang again.
I had a suspicion of who was calling and then saying nothing — but I didn’t really want to think about it.
Then I decided there was an easy way to handle this situation. I’d just let the phone machine take it. If my anonymous friend wanted to talk to a phone machine, good for him.
Four rings. The phone machine took over, Jan’s pleasant voice saying that we weren’t home but would be happy to call you back if you’d just leave your number.
I waited to hear dead air and then a click.
Instead, a familiar female voice said, “Aaron, it’s Louise. Bob —” Louise was Bob’s wife. She was crying. I ran from the couch to the phone machine in the hall.
“Hello, Louise. It’s Aaron.”
“Oh, Aaron. It’s terrible.”
“What happened, Louise?”
“Bob —” More tears. “He electrocuted himself tonight out in the garage.” She said that a plug had accidentally fallen into a bowl of water, according to the fire captain on the scene, and Bob hadn’t noticed this and put the plug into the outlet and —
Bob had a woodcraft workshop in his garage, a large and sophisticated one. He knew what he was doing. “He’s dead, Aaron. He’s dead.”
“Oh, God, Louise. I’m sorry.”
“He was so careful with electricity, too. It’s just so hard to believe —”
Yes, I thought. Yes, it was hard to believe. I thought of last night. Of the burglars — one who’d died, one who’d gotten away.
“Why don’t I come over?”
“Oh, thank you, Aaron, but I need to be alone with the children. But if you could call Neil and Mike —”
“Of course.”
“Thanks for being such good friends, you and Jan.”
“Don’t be silly, Louise. The pleasure’s ours.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. When I’m — you know.”
“Good night, Louise.”
Mike and Neil were at my place within twenty minutes. We sat in the kitchen again, where we were last night.
I said, “Either of you get any weird phone calls tonight?”
“You mean just silence?” Neil said.
“Right.”
“I did,” Mike said. “Tracy was afraid it was that pervert who called all last winter.”
“I did, too,” Neil said. “Three of them.”
“Then a little while ago, Bob dies out in his garage,” I said. “Some coincidence.”
“Hey, Aaron,” Mike said. “Is that why you got us over here? Because you don’t think it was an accident?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Bob knew what he was doing with his tools. He didn’t notice a plug that had fallen into a bowl of water?”
“He’s coming after us,” Neil said.
“Oh, God,” Mike said. “Not you, too.”
“He calls us, gets us on edge,” I said. “And then he kills Bob. Making it look like an accident.”
“These are pretty bright people,” Mike said sarcastically.
“You notice the burglar’s eyes?” Neil said.
“I did,” I said. “He looked very bright.”
“And spooky,” Neil said. “Never saw eyes like that before.”
“I can shoot your theory right in the butt,” Mike said.
“How?” I said.
He leaned forward, sipped his beer. I’d thought about putting out some munchies, but somehow that seemed wrong given poor Bob’s death and the phone calls. The beers we had to have. The munchies were too festive.
“Here’s how. There are two burglars, right? One gets caught, the other runs. And given the nature of burglars, keeps on running. He wouldn’t even know who was in the house last night, except for Aaron, and that’s only because he’s the owner and his name would be in the phone book. But he wouldn’t know anything about Bob or Neil or me. No way he’d have been able to track down Bob.”
I shook my head. “You’re overlooking the obvious.”
“Like what?”
“Like he runs off last night, gets his car, and then parks in the alley to see what’s going to happen.”
“Right,” Neil said. “Then he sees us bringing his friend out wrapped in a blanket. He follows us to the dam and watches us throw his friend in.”
“And,” I said, “everybody had his car here last night. Very easy for him to write down all the license numbers.”
“So he kills Bob,” Neil said. “And starts making the phone calls to shake us up.”
“Why Bob?”
“Maybe he hates black people,” I said.
Mike looked first at me and then at Neil. “You know what this is?”
“Here he goes,” Neil said.
“No; no, I’m serious here. This is Catholic guilt.”
“How can it be Catholic guilt when I’m Jewish?” Neil said.
“In a culture like ours, everybody is a little bit Jewish and a little bit Catholic, anyway,” Mike said. “So you guys are in the throes of Catholic guilt. You feel bad about what we had to do last night — and we did have to do it, we really didn’t have any choice — and the guilt starts to prey on your mind. So poor Bob electrocutes himself accidentally, and you immediately think it’s the second burglar.”
“He followed him,” Neil said.
“What?” Mike said.
“That’s what he did, I bet. The burglar. Followed Bob around all day trying to figure out what was the best way to kill him. You know, the best way that would look like an accident. So then he finds out about the workshop and decides it’s perfect.”
“That presumes,” Mike said, “that one of us is going to be next.”
“Hell, yes,” Neil said. “That’s why he’s calling us. Shake us up. Sweat us out. Let us know that he’s out there somewhere, just waiting. And that we’re next.”
“I’m going to follow you to work tomorrow, Neil,” I said. “And Mike’s going to be with me.”
“You guys are having breakdowns. You really are,” Mike said.
“We’ll follow Neil tomorrow,” I said. “And then on Saturday, you and Neil can follow me. If he’s following
“And then what?” Mike said. “Suppose we do find out where he lives? Then what the hell do we do?”
Neil said, “I guess we worry about that when we get there, don’t we?”
