Free Hotline to Murder by Alan Cook

gingerly 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