Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 13, Mid-December 1992

Don’t Call Me by Robert Gray

For what it’s worth, Fred thinks one prospect might buy something small next week. He is supposed to “get back” to her. Any modest optimism this thread of hope might have induced has been shattered by his last call of the day, however. It was pointless and frustrating and might just cost him his job. Words were exchanged. He lost his temper.

That isn’t his style at all. He meant to hang up and take the rejection in noble silence like all the others; live to fight another day. At the last second, he made a stupid remark about the guy’s future in the business world; something about a chimpanzee being able to rent videotapes. That’s when it started. He can’t remember the exact words, but he’s sure he will hear them soon enough when they are thrown back in his face upstairs.

They clashed before, Fred and the video guy. Fred’s company backed the client last time. If the guy decides to call and complain now, it will definitely be a major problem. The magazine is not known for crossing advertisers, no matter how arrogant and insulting. And Fred hasn’t exactly been establishing sales records lately.

He was shut out again today; three straight without a bite. Only a couple of possibles in the two weeks before that. Selling advertising space in a recession is a lose-lose situation. You can exaggerate benefits and downplay charges, even plead and wheedle, but in the end only three things can happen, and only one is good. They can say no to everything. They can say yes, then stiff you after publication. Or they can say yes, pay on time, and consider running again in the next issue, maybe even signing a long term contract. That is the Holy Grail of advertising sales, but Fred has almost forgotten what selling a long term contract feels like.

He is also supposed to call an advertiser in last month’s issue and ask when payment can be expected. He hasn’t done that yet. He hates collection work, and is not supposed to be doing it. Mr. Jensen asked him on this particular one as a personal favor because “you get along so well with the client.”

It isn’t true, but Fred did not argue the point. He did, however, stare at the phone all day between infrequent sales calls, knowing he should contact the delinquent account, feeling guilty about not doing so, but physically unable to pick up the receiver. Whenever he thought about making the call, his arms were too weak to move and the telephone seemed to grow larger and more threatening. Sometime after lunch he decided to stall by telling Mr. Jensen, if he asked, that the person he has to speak with is out until Monday. That will give Fred the weekend to prepare himself for the dirty work.

Collection is the crummiest job in the place. That is why nobody ever stays on it for long, and why everyone from salesmen to secretaries to the office manager is pressured to go after stubborn accounts. Advertising is a product that has already been used by the time people are supposed to pay for it. If they decide not to advertise again, it can take forever to squeeze the money out of them.

Once they have paid up, however, you are supposed to go after them again for advertising as if nothing had happened, as if you hadn’t spent all that time calling them thieves. Ideally, collection and ad sales remain separate entities to keep the clients from associating salesmen with any more negativity than they already do. Ideals are seldom achieved.

Shut out... Fred thinks about that as he reaches for the newspaper on the floor beside his chair. He dropped it there this morning because Mr. Jensen stormed into his office as soon as he got in. The boss put the hammer down about banging the phones all day. After that, Fred thought reading the paper to get in the mood did not seem like such a good idea.

Shut out... The lady with the Styrofoam begging cup and shopping cart full of black trash bags, who stationed herself in front of his building every day, made more money today than Fred did. She didn’t work her sales pitch half as hard either, just a moan here and a pitiful look there. He would try it himself if he thought it would work on advertisers. Maybe she’d consider taking on a partner.

Reading the newspaper does not help his mood. In the first three pages alone, he finds enough bad news to confirm every prejudice he already has about this damn city. Two men argued over loud music while their cars were stopped at a traffic light. One picked up a shotgun from his seat and blew away the other. The idiot then sped off as if the dozens of cars behind him wouldn’t take down his license number. A bum was torched for kicks by some teens. A little kid disappeared from a playground in a nice neighborhood. The other kids said a man dressed in a “doctor suit” told the girl that her parents had been in an accident, and she left with him. The son of a bitch.

For the second time in a week, while women were sitting in parked cars, men opened the passenger side doors, got in, and forced the women to drive out of town. They were robbed and they were raped. It is random violence; the waning vital signs of a terminal patient. Fred thinks that if the city was in a hospital, there would be no debate about whether to continue life support systems.

Pull the plug.

The digital clock on his desk blinks five P.M. Sometimes he stays later to make a few West Coast phone calls to national accounts, but on a day like this the best thing is to just get out, go home or to a bar, forget about it, let it slide. If he stays any longer, one of the lights on his phone will start glowing a frightening red, accompanied by a demonic buzz. Mr. Jensen will be calling for an end-of-day rundown. That is the best case scenario. Fred doesn’t even want to think about the alternative. If the video guy has already called, he does not want to be around to hear about that.

Monday he can face it. The stinking brew of “No, thank you” and “Not at this time” and “He’s in a meeting” will have a couple of days to cook. He can drown it in gravy by the time he meets with Mr. Jensen; make it look more like “maybe” and “probable” and “looks good”; buy some time. There are still two weeks until deadline, so the pressure is not full force yet. If he cuts and runs today, he will be fresher for Monday, really attack those phones and break out of this slump. Maybe. He is so tired now he can hardly keep his eyes open.

In the elevator, Fred glances at the sports pages and entertainment section. More news about drug busts, gambling scandals, and lawsuits, with here and there a box score or movie review to justify the section banners. No wonder nobody wants to advertise any more. Why associate yourself with a criminal element? People are not likely to read a page filled with stories about financial misdealings, political graft, and public misery, then glance at an advertisement and decide it’s a good time to buy a car or take the family out to dinner.

That very point was emphasized repeatedly this afternoon by Al Mongeluso, the gruff little pain in the butt who runs three low-grade video rental outlets in the city. They are hole in the wall operations that only Mongeluso sees as constituting a chain. To Fred, the term chain implies more than finding desperately underpriced inner city storefront properties, stuffing a couple of hundred videos and a counter clerk inside, and calling it a “franchise operation.”

The guy bought an ad once, and Fred dutifully calls him every month to get an earful of unjustified abuse. Fred calls everybody on his hit list. That is his job. “Maintaining close personal contacts with our clients” is how Mr. Jensen describes it.

Mongeluso told him he would advertise again when the magazine started covering “good news,” but declined to say where this elusive material was hiding lately. Ad location was another big thing with Mongeluso, Fred recalls. When his half-page, vertical, black and white ad originally ran, Mongeluso demanded placement on the first right hand page available. He wanted page three, but that was already reserved for color ads. The first available black and white slot was on page twenty-three. Mongeluso got it, even though they had to bump a longtime, but understanding, advertiser to page twenty-seven.

Then Mongeluso insisted on having the ad built in-house at a special rate. He got that. When the issue finally came out, he called in a frenzy and said his phone number was all wrong. It was the same one he had written on the mockup he originally faxed to the production department. He said they should have checked the Yellow Pages.

Mongeluso called Mr. Jensen. He threatened not to pay his bill. He eventually was given a reduction in price and a second placement in the next issue free of charge. For six months after that time, he answered Fred’s calls with a tirade about their lousy service in getting his ad to print; the complete lack of business generated by it; and the high rates that were unfair to small businessmen. Each time Fred gritted his teeth and said thank you anyway. He always promised to call again next month. Mongeluso always said don’t bother. But Fred called and Mongeluso took the calls.

Until today’s debacle, Fred thought he could handle it. He didn’t think Mongeluso would ever advertise again, but the call shielded him from Mr. Jensen’s inevitable questions about the account. Rejection is better than the perception that you aren’t even trying. Until today it worked okay.

Fred starts the car, which does its usual bump and grind routine for several seconds before catching just enough to fire. He loves new Cars, but business being what it is, he still drives the Chevy he bought when he first started with the magazine more than four years ago. The car has seventy thousand miles on it, all tough, stop and go city travel that probably makes the engine wear equivalent to twice that mileage on the open road. He has paid enough repair and towing bills to back up that theory.

His car allowance from the company is minuscule. He is paid for distance traveled, not time spent waiting in traffic. He does more selling on the phone than in his car anyway. A new car is just another dream. His dreams don’t come true any more.

What will happen if the recession continues? He thinks about this as he waits for the car to warm up. It stalls out all the way home if he doesn’t let it go through its mechanical stretching routine, kind of a prelude to high impact, inner city carobics.

If business continues to decline, Fred sees himself fading and wearing out just like his car. His suits will be threadbare, his body wasted away from lack of nourishment. His weary arms will barely be able to lift the ponderous telephone and beg one more client for just a scrap of advertising, a little business card placement even, enough for a meal. Will he end up with the bag lady out front after losing his office, a filthy cardboard sign around his neck reading “I’ll trade advertising for food”?

Nobody cares. Mr. Jensen doesn’t care. Mr. Jensen hired three part-time telemarketers to “free you up for the big accounts,” he said. Fred knows they are the future, however; those adolescent telewhores. They will cold call for subscriptions as well as ads, work for a fraction of his commission and no benefits. Since so many of the clients don’t want to hear about advertising during a recession anyway, they won’t care if the people they shoot down are professional salesmen or college kids looking to earn the price of a keg of beer for the weekend.

Fred pulls out of the underground parking lot and waves to Jake, the rent-a-cop guard at the entrance. He thinks about how simple life would be if he could just sit there all day like Jake, breathing exhaust fumes and reading mystery novels for six bucks an hour.

He eases his way across the sidewalk, then noses into rush hour traffic, waving thanks to a red BMW that hasn’t so much let him into the line as backed off from the imminent possibility of collision. The BMW driver leans on his horn as his way of saying “you’re welcome.”

As he sits waiting for a light to change, Fred considers how ludicrous the word “drive” is to describe how he gets in and out of the city every day. He looks at the crowds on the sidewalks as they seem to flash by him. When the light changes and he creeps forward, he still can’t catch up to the pace of the pedestrians before he has to stop at the next light. He knows it will be like this all the way to the bridge, and over the bridge, and halfway home, like every other goddam day.

Not today. He pulls down a one-way side street that is barely wide enough for his car. It is supposed to be a two lane street, but cars and trucks are illegally parked on both sides, leaving a single narrow passage through the middle for traffic.

The street is three blocks long, with four-way stops at the intersections. Fred doesn’t care. He feels he has to keep moving, whatever the direction. That is all that matters. To stop now is to cease living. To move is to survive.

He bulls his way across three lanes and takes the next left, a one block alleyway that deposits him down by the river at a long, two lane road called The Loop, which is less congested even at this hour because it does not really take you anywhere you need to go unless you are willing to brave the mean streets of some of the worst sections of town.

Fred just keeps driving, turning down unfamiliar streets, keeping the river in sight when possible for guidance, until he finds himself in a small business district. A dozen brick buildings, none more than four stories high, flank the street. Most of the storefronts are boarded up, except for an occasional sign of life here and there. Colorful graffiti, poor man’s neon, covers the walls of the buildings and the rotting plywood nailed over shattered plate glass windows.

People are watching Fred drive by. He can feel their eyes. They loiter on the street in front of the handful of open businesses. He doesn’t want to look at their faces, to turn them into real people, but he can’t help himself. He stares back at white faces, brown faces, black faces, faces of every color and description; a rainbow of hatred and resentment directed at him as he slowly drives past. It does not meet with Fred’s image of the inner city, where everyone is supposed to cling to their own turf.

He feels like he is the common foe who has united these desperate people somehow. He wants to tell them about the rough times in the publishing industry, the diminutive size of his commission checks in recent months, the grind of a three hour daily commute. He does not see the potential for understanding or sympathy in all those wasted, angry eyes.

He stops the car, then pulls into a parking space between a delivery truck and the abandoned hulk of an Oldsmobile.

Nobody pays much attention to him once he stops moving. Like the rest of the world lately, they write him off. Autumn is in the air, and Fred starts to feel a chill a few minutes after he shuts off the car’s engine. It will be dark by six thirty, and when he glances at his watch, the hands confirm what the gathering shadows are already telling him. He should go home.

Instead, like the people hanging out on the street, his peers now, he watches passing cars and hates them, too; watches the world glide by on its way somewhere better, anywhere out of here. He sees them approach in his side mirror, many now with headlights on in the gathering dusk. They pass by and disappear. He tries to count all the cars he sees that cost more than twenty thousand dollars, and after a half hour the total is still zero.

Finally a car fitting that description, with two women inside, approaches and stops, doubleparking with its front end effectively blocking his way put. This pisses him off. The passenger gets out. Several minutes pass, and Fred seethes about being blocked in. Before he had nowhere to go. Now he can’t wait to get there.

Then he sees the man.

In his side mirror, Fred notices the door on the passenger side open suddenly and a man gets into the car. The woman seems angry and shouts something at him. Fred adjusts his mirror with the inside lever to get a better view. The man is yelling now. The woman nods stiffly, reaches for the gear shift, and begins to drive away.

Fred starts his car and hurries to catch up, trying to decide what he should do. He thinks about the newspaper stories and knows he can’t just let this go until he is sure what is happening. He checks the license plate and scribbles the number in the margin of the newspaper lying on the seat beside him. He adds a description of the car. He turns the paper around and writes down everything he notices about the people in the car: the woman’s blonde hair, her large nose, which he sees in profile when she looks to her right, the man’s shaggy brown hair, hanging over his collar and ears.

Fred stays back as far as possible without taking the chance of losing them. He doesn’t think the woman will notice, and the guy has no reason to think anybody is following. The man is doing most of the talking as far as he can tell. The woman grips the wheel with both hands. She drives at the speed limit through the city.

They follow The Loop around the outskirts of the downtown area, then enter the flow of traffic that is working its way toward the bridge. It is now dark, and only the street lights and the large, square taillights on the car in front of him permit Fred to maintain contact as they gradually become engulfed in traffic. The worst part of rush hour is over, but it is still slow going.

As Fred passes by the last mini mart before the bridge, he considers stopping to call the police, but all he would be able to tell them is that the car is leaving the city. By the time they track it down, something terrible could already have happened. He stays with the pursuit.

The car’s speed increases as it leaves the bridge behind and hits the parkway. It is not exceeding the limit, though, and Fred wonders if the man is telling her not to do anything that might attract attention. After they have gone about five miles away from the city, the car takes an exit, and Fred follows. They are the only two cars that get off the highway at that point.

The exit ramp ends at Route 22, and the car bears left, heading away from the small town for which the exit was originally constructed. Fred waits until the taillights are nearly out of sight before leaving the exit ramp to follow. He doesn’t want to attract attention. He has no weapon in the car, and he certainly doesn’t consider himself a threat to anyone, especially that guy in the other car. What could he possibly do to stop anything that might happen? He recalls a news story he read about a cab driver who apprehended a mugger by pinning him against a wall with his taxi, but doesn’t see himself doing it.

Can he intimidate this guy just by arriving at the scene and flashing his headlights? He will keep his doors locked and can drive away if the guy comes after him. What if he has a gun? Fred knows he can’t just abandon the poor woman to save himself. He will have to do something.

He is still sorting through his options when he realizes that the taillights are no longer in view.

Fred speeds up, but knows they turned off and he missed it. He panics. He finds a little country store and a pay phone. He dials 911, hoping it works this far from the city. It does. The voice at the other end listens to him but doesn’t understand, asks him to repeat things over and over. He can’t make his mouth cooperate with his brain. He hopes he has at least managed to get across the basic facts.

Fred runs back to his car. He backtracks, looking for a side road he missed the first time through. He finds it about a mile from the store, turns onto it, slows to a crawl, and switches off his headlights. He moves very slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the moonlight. The road is paved, and the yellow center line provides some guidance.

He spots the car a few hundred yards ahead as he rounds a sharp curve. It has pulled off into a parking area, and its parking lights are still on. Fred stops dead in the road and waits, engine running. He can see the two silhouettes in the other car. Their heads have moved closer together.

He watches them, waiting for a sign of danger. There seems to be an intense argument going on, but no hint of violence. If he moves in too soon, Fred is afraid the woman will be hurt or used as a shield. Maybe the best thing is to sit tight until he is sure something really bad is happening, and hope the police get here in time so he won’t have to become involved.

Then he sees the man raise his hand and the woman duck. The man hits her, and Fred knows he can’t wait for the police. He puts his car in gear, pulls up behind the other car, then twists the lever that turns on his headlights. High beam.

Two faces look through the back window of the other car, both showing fear. Then the man’s expression turns to anger, and he waves a fist at Fred, the same fist he used to hit the woman. The man is yelling. He reaches into the back seat and grabs something. He opens his door, gets out, and comes around the car, walking toward Fred. The woman stays inside.

Fred shifts his car into reverse and backs away at the same pace that the man, brandishing his weapon, advances. It is decision time. Fred’s mind is clear and focused despite the danger, clearer than it has been for days, weeks, months. He has a decision to make, weighs his options with clarity of thought, and takes action.

The man is standing his ground, still yelling at Fred, who shifts into drive, lets his foot slide off the brake pedal. He is not nervous. His hands are steady on the wheel. He jams his foot down hard on the gas pedal before the man in his headlights can react.

Fred drives straight into him, hits the large, round body square like a linebacker, and pushes him back as he was drilled to do in high school foot ball practice; drives him back and does not let up until he feels the thud as he rams the rear of the other car.

The man does not move, cannot move. One headlight has been shattered by the impact. Fred switches off the other. He doesn’t want to look. He can hear the police sirens now. They will call the rescue squad when they get here, fix this bum so he can do time.

Fred feels strange. He did what he had to do, but he is not a violent man and the aftereffects have made him a little nauseated. A woman’s face appears at his window. Her left eye is swollen, nearly closed, and tears are streaming down her cheeks. Her fists are pounding the glass.

Mr. Jensen is the only one in the place on Saturdays. He makes a pot of coffee, then goes to his office with a fresh cup and the morning paper. He unfolds it on his lap and sees the gruesome, flash-assisted photo of a body pinned between two vehicles, along with fuzzy inset photos of one of his salesmen and one of his clients. The first thought that crosses his mind is that the eighty-five line screen used to shoot halftones for the newspaper does a lousy job compared to the one hundred thirty-three line screen used by his magazine on photos for glossy stock. He knows this reaction is a safety valve, a way to deflect the shock. He sips his coffee.

The only reason he recognizes Al Mongeluso is that the guy called him yesterday to bitch about Fred. When Jensen tried to call Fred’s office, he discovered Fred had ducked out early. Jensen planned to stew about it over the weekend and nail his ass to the wall Monday. Fred’s days were numbered anyway.

The headline screamed, “Ad Man Rams Vid Man.” The article screamed as well. According to the reporter, Fred had apparently staked out Mongeluso’s main video outlet in the city. Witnesses at the scene remembered a car fitting the description and a guy sitting in it out front for a long time.

Fred followed Mongeluso to his home in the country. Mongeluso’s wife was in the car, and according to her, they were arguing in their driveway, a crescent shaped area carved out of the hill that led up to their home. Mrs. Mongeluso was upset because her husband had insisted on letting their daughter work the closing shift at the shop. She did not think it was safe and wanted to return to the city and work with her daughter. Mongeluso would not hear of it.

Fred appeared on the scene from nowhere, she said, still unaware of who he was or why he wanted to hurt them. Mongeluso reacted to Fred’s appearance by grabbing a golf club, a putter to be specific, and leaving the car for a confrontation.

One thing led to another, and soon Mongeluso was a sandwich and Fred was behind bars. Mrs. Mongeluso’s only injury was a black eye she said she received when the cars collided and her face hit the steering wheel.

Jensen winced when he read the next sentence, which mentioned the magazine and its parent corporation. They had not made the connection yet between Mongeluso and Fred as far as advertising was concerned. No mention was made of yesterday’s phone confrontation, either. It would come out soon enough. The article did say that the reporter had tried to reach Jensen at home last night but could only get an answering machine. Jensen seldom checked his machine on Saturday mornings. That was the day to catch up on last week’s work, not look for additional problems.

They were all probably looking for him now: the media, the police, the magazine’s owners or their lawyers. What a royal pain in the ass Fred had become.

He had been useless for months now. Jensen had tried to dump him, but the guys in legal said there must be a strong paper trail first. It wasn’t a simple matter to fire a guy for lagging sales performance during a recession in the publishing industry. So Jensen had been keeping a file. He planned to write up Fred soon for something just to get things started.

How about murdering a client?

They haven’t told him all the details yet, but from what Fred can gather thus far, he apparently is in protective custody. The guy he caught last night must have some bigtime connections, maybe even organized crime.

At first, Fred considered asking for a phone so he could make some sales calls and put his time to good use, but the guard he had during the night, and the one on duty this morning, were in such foul moods he left them alone.

It is now nine A.M., and he has changed his mind completely about the phone. He feels a wonderful sense of peace, a warm, pleasant glow of total surrender. He is free for awhile. He will not have to sit through a day of rejection and failure. No one will turn him down today, hang up on him, ignore him. He can’t be shut out again if he doesn’t even try to sell anything. It’s like having a game called on account of rain. Everybody gets a rain-check. Don’t bother me.

A day or two of rest until they decide how to handle his situation might be just what he needs; just the thing to get him fresh and ready for work again. He can use the rest. He wonders if he qualifies for the witness protection program. Get away from it all, a fresh start. He has earned it.

The guard is at his door, looking in. Fred smiles and waves.

“Don’t call me. I’ll call you,” he says brightly.