Hotline to Murder by Alan Cook Page B

that their best bet to
help the investigation was to try to track down the writer of the
poem, especially since Croyden didn’t have any leads there.
    He looked up the information on Paul the
Poet. The page in the Green Book said that Paul still lived at
home, even though he was in his late twenties. He apparently had a
job and girlfriends, so he wasn’t completely stunted. That he lived
at home didn’t square with his claim of having been abused by his
parents. But he did admit to sleeping with a teddy bear and a
night-light.
    “It’s funny,” Shahla said as they read it.
“When you talk to him, he brings up this abuse issue, but then if
you ask him where he lives, he says he lives at home. I asked him
once who paid his phone bill. He didn’t give a straight answer. And
I think he has a job. It doesn’t all make sense.”
    “I’ve discovered that our callers don’t
always make sense. How often have you talked to this guy?”
    “Many times.” Shahla spun her chair around
to face him. “He’s one of our more intelligent callers, in spite of
the contradictions. We actually had some good conversations about
poetry. He read a few of his poems to me.”
    “And were they really good?”
    “They weren’t bad. They showed talent.”
    “So you think he could have written the
poem?”
    Shahla hesitated and then said, “He’s the
best guess I have right now.”
    “So he just happened to be in Southern
California. And he just happened to write a poem he wanted to
deliver to the Hotline. And somehow, he found out the address of
the Hotline.”
    “Sounds farfetched, doesn’t it?”
    “Especially if he’s going to be a murder
suspect. Why would he come all the way here to murder somebody? Did
he ever show animosity to you on the phone?”
    “No, he was one of the easiest repeat
callers to talk to. He was always appreciative. He often thanked me
for listening to him.” Shahla kicked the floor with her feet and
spun her chair around, a child at play. “I guess we can eliminate
him.”
    Tony furrowed his brow. “Still, it would be
nice to talk to him. Did he ever give any indication of where in
Vegas he lives? Or where he works? There’s nothing here.”
    “Not that I can remember.”
    “Wait. The book gives a last name for him.
Vicksburg.”
    Shahla shrugged. “Who knows whether that’s
correct? Our callers use a lot of aliases.”
    “But since we don’t ask for last names, he
must have volunteered it. I’m going to Google him.”
    Tony went into the office and started up
Patty’s computer. It asked him to enter a password. He looked at
Shahla, who had followed him.
    “The password is ‘m-i-g-i-b,’” Shahla
said.
    “How do you know that?”
    “Patty told me. I helped her with some
computer stuff one time.”
    “What does it mean?”
    “She wouldn’t tell me. But her boyfriend’s
name is Marty. So I remember it as, ‘Marty is great in bed.’”
    Tony didn’t comment on that. He connected to
the Internet and then the Google search engine. He typed in “Paul
Vicksburg.” On the first try he got mostly references to pages
about Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the Civil War, so he modified his
search with the word poet.
    “He’s got a website,” Tony told Shahla, who
had come in to see what he was doing. “And there’s poetry on
it.”
    They looked at the pages together. The poems
were the kind of plaintive meanderings that had always put Tony to
sleep, but he noticed that some of them did rhyme, just like the
spaghetti strap poem. They showed the egotistical nature of a
person who thought his problems were the most important problems in
the world. Still, Tony realized, many people believed that,
including some of the Hotline callers. Poets went a step further
and put the thought into words.
    “Is this the guy?” Tony asked Shahla, after
she had read several of the poems.
    She reread one of the poems and said, “He
recited that poem to me on the phone. I’m sure of it. Does it say
where