Free Hotline to Murder by Alan Cook

between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it from different angles. There was no writing on the outside. And it wasn’t sealed. The flap was just tucked in, and it would be easy to open. But should he open it? He held it up toward the overhead light. There was definitely a piece of paper inside. He set the envelope on the white table and stared at it.
    Turn all evidence over to Detective Croyden. And Tony would. But first he was going to look at it. He took a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and picked up the envelope again, this time through a layer of cloth. He wasn’t going to get any more fingerprints on it. He covered his other hand with another piece of the handkerchief and worked the flap open. Then he carefully extracted the paper from the envelope, using the handkerchief to keep his fingers from touching the paper.
    It was a regular piece of white paper, folded in thirds. Very neatly. Tony shook it to unfold it and placed it on the table.
    “What’s going on?”
    Tony jumped, startled by Shahla’s voice just behind him. He had been concentrating so hard that he had almost forgotten about her. “Do you always sneak up on people?” he asked to cover his loss of composure.
    “Next time I’ll wear a bell so you’ll know I’m coming. I saw you out here looking as though you were practicing a magic trick. What are you trying to do, make the envelope disappear?”
    “Somebody slid it under the door.”
    “Do you think it was the murderer?” She looked apprehensively toward the door.
    “I don’t know, but the door is locked. Don’t touch anything. We don’t want to leave fingerprints. Let’s see what it says on the paper.”
    Tony and Shahla bent over the table. The writing on the paper was printed in black ink, by a computer printer.
    “It’s a poem,” Shahla said.
    “Read it,” Tony said. She was the writer. He had never read poetry, other than the few poems required in English classes, and didn’t want to embarrass himself by reading it badly, even if it was a bad poem, which it probably was.
    “It’s called ‘Spaghetti Straps,’” Shahla said. She read:
    “ She wears a summer dress, spaghetti straps
    to hold it up, or is this so? Perhaps
    it's gravity, the gravity of con-
    sequences should it fall. If she should don
    her dress one day but then forget to pull
    them up, those flimsy wisps of hope so full
    of her ripe beauty, do you think the weight
    of promises within, or hand of fate,
    would slide it down, revealing priceless treasures?
    If so, would she invoke heroic measures
    to hide the truth, for fear this modest lapse
    would air the secret of spaghetti straps?”
    “What do you think?” Tony asked. He didn’t feel qualified to comment on it as a poem and he wasn’t about to be the first to comment on its contents.
    “It’s actually a pretty good poem.”
    “You’re not offended by it?”
    “Are you kidding? After some of the stuff I’ve heard, this is a nursery rhyme. If our grosser callers like the Chameleon talked like this instead of the way they do, I wouldn’t hang up on them so fast.”
    “So you don’t think the Chameleon is capable of writing this?”
    “Not from what I know about him. Unless he’s hiding his talent under the bed with his dirty magazines.”
    “Can you think of any callers who might be able to write like this?”
    Shahla contemplated the question for a period of time. Finally, she said, “When I first started on the Hotline, there was this guy who called a lot who said he wrote poetry. But he wasn’t from around here. In fact, he said he lived in Las Vegas.”
    “So he was calling long distance.”
    “For a while after 9/11 our 800 number was nationwide so that people suffering from—what’s it called?—post traumatic stress disorder could call us. But as I understand it, the number cost too much to keep so now our 800 number is just for California. Anyway, since that change, he doesn’t call as often as he did.”
    Shahla went