Brazen Virtue

Roxanne. Three times a week. I could talk to her and come back and face Schedule Cs.”
    “Last night, Mr. Markowitz,” Ed prompted.
    “Yes, last night. Well, we hadn’t been talking very long. I was just getting into it. You know, relaxing.” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “All of a sudden, she was talking to someone else. Like there was someone in the room. She said something like ‘Who are you?’ or ‘What are you doing here?’ At first I thought she was still talking to me, so I said something back, a joke or something. Then she screamed. I almost dropped the phone. She said, ‘Lawrence, Lawrence, help me. Call the police, call somebody.’ ” He began to cough as if repeating the words irritated his throat. “I was talking back to her. It was so unexpected. I think I told her to calm down. Then I heard another voice.”
    “A man’s voice?” Ed continued to write in his notebook.

    “Yes, I think. Another voice anyway. He said, I think he said, ‘You’re going to like this.’ He called her by name.”
    “Roxanne?” Ben asked.
    “Yes, that’s right. I heard him say Roxanne, and I heard—” Now he covered his face with the cloth and waited a moment. “You have to understand, I’m really a very ordinary man. I keep the excitement and complications in my life to a minimum. I have low blood sugar.”
    Ed gave him a sympathetic nod. “Just tell us what you heard.”
    “I heard such terrible noises. Breathing and banging. She wasn’t screaming anymore, just making some gasping, gurgling sounds. I hung up. I didn’t know what to do, so I hung up.”
    He lowered the cloth again, and his face was gray. “I thought maybe it was a put-on. I tried to tell myself it was, but I kept hearing noises. I kept hearing Roxanne crying and begging him not to hurt her. And I heard the other voice say that she wanted him to hurt her, that she was never going to experience anything like this again. I think, I think he said that he’d heard her say she wanted to be hurt. I’m not sure about that. It was all so garbled. Excuse me.”

    He got up to go to the watercooler. He filled a paper cup as air bubbled up to the top. After he’d gulped it down, he filled the cup again. “I didn’t know what to do, I just sat there thinking. I tried to go back to work, to forget about it. Like I said before, I kept thinking it was probably just a joke. But it didn’t sound like a joke.” He drained the second cup of water. “The longer I sat there, the harder it was to believe it was just a joke. So I ended up calling Fantasy. I told the girl there that Roxanne was in trouble. I thought maybe someone was killing her. I hung up again, and I—I went back to work. What else could I do?” His gaze darted back and forth between Ed and Ben, never landing on either of them. “I kept thinking Roxanne would call back and tell me everything was okay. That she’d just been kidding. But she didn’t call back.”
    “Was there anything about the voice—the other voice you heard—that made it distinctive?” As he wrote, Ed glanced up and watched Markowitz sweat. “An accent, a tone, a way of phrasing?”
    “No, it was just a voice. I could hardly hear it over Roxanne’s. Look, I don’t even know what she looked like. I don’t want to know. Let’s be honest about this, she was nothing more to me than, well, a clerk at the supermarket. She was just somebody I called a few times a week so I could forget about work.” Distancing himself that far eased his mind. He was an ordinary man, he reminded himself, even honest. To a point. Nobody wanted their accountants to treat honesty like a religion. “I think she probably had a boyfriend who was jealous. That’s what I think.”
    “Did she use a name?” Ben asked.
    “No. Just mine. She just called out my name. Please, there’s nothing more I can tell you. I did everything I could. I didn’t have to call in, you know,” he added, his tone altering with the beginnings of self-righteousness. “I didn’t have to get involved.”
    “We appreciate your cooperation.” Ben pulled himself out of the chair. “You’re going to have to come in and sign a statement.”
    “Detective, if I so much as move out of this chair until midnight tomorrow, I could be responsible for a dozen fines.”
    “File early,” the parakeet advised. “Cover your ass.”
    “Come down the morning of the sixteenth. Ask for me or Detective Paris. We’ll do our best to