Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

There was a Happy Holidays sign on the office door and silver tinsel draped over the entrance, but other than that the place didn’t look any more festive than you’d expect a suicide-prevention hotline to be. The office was small and cramped, its semicircular space cut into pie wedges by Styrofoam partitions. Each cubicle was crammed with flat tables, rows of phones that looked as if they’d been scavenged from a 1970s Jerry Lewis telethon. I followed a narrow hall to a desk where a cabbage-faced woman leaned back in a vinyl chair and shouted curses into a phone. I squinted at the nametag on her denim shirt, Sandy McAllister, Director, but I didn’t need a nametag to tell me she was in charge. Her desk had more phones than anyone else’s, and a narrow door behind her desk had a sign that identified it as Sandy’s Powder Room, a perk of management, I guessed. I gave her an inquisitive smile. She held up a finger for me to wait, cursed a little more, and ended the conversation by dropping the F-bomb. I figured if this was the kind of reception Lea got, there was no wonder she’d gone off the balcony.

“To hell with Memphis Light, Gas, and Water,” the woman said.

“I’ll second that.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You don’t work for them, do you?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be unless you really feel an urge to get a cussing or have a boot kicked up your ass.”

I held up my hands. “Sorry twice.”

“You’re not a volunteer.” It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t quite an accusation. “So why are you here?”

“Lea Washburn.”

“We lost her,” the woman said, her voice softening, her face sagging with exhaustion. “About a week ago, right?”

“You remember her?”

She picked up a pack of Virginia Slims from her desk and lit one despite the No Smoking sign behind her head. “I can’t forget the ones we lose,” she said, curling smoke from her lip. “I dream about them every night.” She shook her head with as much sadness as I could remember seeing. “It’s the ones we save, I forget. Those are the ones that never come back to me.”

She insisted on calling me Charlie. She apologized for it, explained that she’d talked to so many potential suicides on the phone and knew that the best way to connect with them was by using their first names that she couldn’t call anyone Mister This or That. She hoped it didn’t offend.

“Charlie’s fine,” I said. “I’ve been married twice. You call me Charlie, you’re a friend for life.”

She laughed because she was supposed to, not because I was funny. “You’re a relative or a friend of the girl?”

“Family friend,” I said.

She snubbed her cigarette, studied my face a second, and then ran her fingers through her hair. It was long and straight, the gray of fireplace ashes. There were deep furrows in her brow and the corners of her mouth. Only the liveliness of her eyes, wide and cornflower blue, kept her from looking old enough to draw Social Security.

“You’re more than a family friend.”

I showed her my ID. “I’m working for Lea’s mother.”

“Lea’s mother? Not an ambulance-chasing lawyer anxious to file a lawsuit?”

“Her mother just wants a few answers.”

She picked up a pencil, tucked it behind her ear, and sighed. “When it comes to suicide, everyone wants answers. The sad thing is, there usually aren’t any.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

She picked up her pack of cigarettes, changed her mind, and put them back down. “Ask what you want to.”

“You log incoming calls, don’t you?”

“We jot down whatever name the callers choose to give us and a few notes about them in case they hang up and then call back later. As for 911, we can’t do that at all. If word got out that suicide-prevention hotlines were turning over information to the police, no one would ever call again.”

“Do you record the conversations?”

She gave me a wary smile. “Without the caller’s permission that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”

I smiled right back at her. “But you do it anyway.”

She picked up her cigarettes again. “Just to protect ourselves in case of a lawsuit, to prove that while maybe our volunteer didn’t do any good, at least he didn’t do any harm.”

“So if I wanted to listen to the tape?”

This time her smile was playful and flirtatious and made her seem at least ten years younger. “You’d have to ask nicely.”

I waited in a narrow, mildewed cubicle in the back of the building and flipped through a coffee-stained spiral notebook that served as the Better Way Foundation’s phone log while Sandy went to search for the tape. Lea had called at nine-thirty on the evening of her death and used her real name, maybe because she’d wanted to be stopped or maybe because she was past caring. Sandy shrugged apologetically when she set the kind of full-sized portable cassette recorder in front of me that I hadn’t seen since 1985 and then bent to plug in a clunky AC adapter.