Free A Line To Murder (A Puget Sound Mystery) by Karla Stover

you want to hear about the vicar or not?”
    He answered with a scowl and tightly pursed lips.
    His anger was obvious and unnerving. I decided to wind up the conversation and get the evening over with .
    “Well, here’s the story. They’d been talking for several weeks. He called right after she ran an ad in a single’s paper. At first it was your, you know, normal, run-of-the-mill stuff.”
    “Normal?”
    “Don’t be so judgmental. We all do what we think we have to do and manage to justify it to ourselves. She didn’t break any laws and no one got hurt.”
    Andy rubbed his face under his glasses. Why did he care? The years since their divorce seemed like a long time to carry a grudge.
    “They’d been doing their thing for a while and then, somehow, he caught on to Isca’s ability to do voices. You know, like the ones she did for the cartoons. For a while she just did little routines at random, but then he started asking for voices of famous dead movie stars. She told me sometimes he’d cry and beg her understanding. I think that’s one reason why she stuck with him, because he said he had this problem and he knew it was wrong, but that he couldn’t help it. That’s when it quit being a sort of a dime-a-dance kind of thing. I mean, phone sex is no big deal, but Isca didn’t like this movie star stuff and said so. I think she’d have cut him off--”
    Andy coughed on that and a smile twitched his lips.
    “--but he started talking about being born again. She thought that by being a vicar, maybe he’d get the right kind of help.”
    “What’s to say he really was a minister?”
    “I don’t know. I just know Isca never seemed to question it.” My coffee was long gone. I twirled the Styrofoam cup between my hands.
    Andy leaned to the side and checked on Dominic. A little muscle pulsed in his cheek. It was quite a nice cheek, too. Clean shaven, with a little razor nick near a cleft in his chin.
    “She called me the Saturday before she was killed. The police took my answering machine tape, but I remember she said something about maybe knowing who the vicar was, that he was local. She was going to check it out. I called her back several times. She was never home. She just didn’t answer or her phone was out of service.”
    Andy turned his gaze from Dominic to me. “What are the odds of working a dial-a-sex phone line and then finding out the guy you’ve been doing regularly on the phone lives in the same city as you and you’ve discovered who he is?”
    Suddenly I was tired. Tired of his anger and confusion. Tired of the unnecessary death of a friend. Tired of ugly yellow and blue plastic furniture with legs that looked like enlarged colons. I wanted to go home and look at the old-fashioned streetlight outside my window and escape into a book.
    “It’s late.” I reached for my purse. “We both know Dominic will wake up early tomorrow. He’ll be cranky and hyper all day. On top of everything else, you don’t want to have to deal with that. Let’s go home. That is, let me take you home.”
    “Merc, I’m sorry.” His voice was soft, his expression compassionate. “I’m sorry. Dominic’s told me about the things the three of you used to do. I know they were your ideas because Isca didn’t think that way.” He smiled and little crow’s-feet fanned out from his eyes.
    “I can’t believe you got Isca to go to the art museum, sit on the floor and watch an Indian marionette performance or go to the Nature Center and let Dom pretend to be a caterpillar in a cocoon. Dom loved those things.”
    Andy had a nice smile. I’d never noticed it before because I’d rarely seen it. He had a nice jaw, too. Not too Arnold Schwartzenager-ish but not weak, either. Of course, none of these things made him innocent. Maybe they just made me a sucker, but he just seemed like a decent, regular guy. I looked at him and smiled. “The Armed Forces Day at Fort Lewis was more up her alley.”
    We laughed and my eyes