Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 33, No. 1, January, 1988

The Dangling Woman by William Bunce

Owen winked at Sam, the studio engineer, as the voice on his headphones droned on. “I don’t know why he would run around on me,” the voice was saying. “After twenty years, he tells me he’s been seeing another woman. I swear she’s young enough to be his daughter.”

The quiver in her voice told him she was about to burst into tears, but he headed her off. “Now, now, my dear,” he soothed. “It’s not uncommon for an older man to become involved with a woman half his age. It’s not the end of the world. Give him a little time and when he finally pulls out of his tailspin, your marriage will be stronger than ever.”

“He told me he wants to see a lawyer...” Her words dissolved into a torrent of sobs.

This woman wasn’t about to listen to reason, Owen decided. Her blubbering was starting to break up his sound quality. “Sorry,” he said brightly, “I have to give some time to the folks who pay the bills. Thanks for calling.” He punched line number three dead. “This is your personal marriage counselor, Dr. Owen Stanford, here to provide comfort and advice to those lonely voices in the night. We’ll be right back after a few words from Alpine Dog Food — your pooch would climb a mountain for it.”

After cuing in the dog food tape, he leaned back in the chair and stared at the lights blinking on his console, every one representing some small portion of human misery. Suffering sells, isn’t that what the station manager had said? Now his sponsors were fighting each other for air time, and a more lucrative contract was in the works. Owen had found his niche. As long as the faithful were willing to lap up his bland prescriptions for marital bliss, he was willing to dish them out.

Sam came into the booth with a freshly delivered pizza, still steaming in the box. “If you ask me, that last dame was the pits. With a voice like that, it’s no wonder hubby ran out on her.”

“Yeah, she was a whiner, wasn’t she?” That was the only trouble with this job, Owen thought. Rarely did a man call in to discuss a problem. He was forced to listen to a never-ending chorus of whining women. Then he had to go home to Marcia — the worst whiner of the lot. “Why don’t you set up practice like a professional? A bartender has better hours than you do. Only trash wash their dirty linen in public.” On and on it went. Unfortunately, he couldn’t silence his wife with the mere push of a button.

But there were other ways.

He threw his headset on just in time to catch the closing of the ad. “Alpine Dog Food,” he crooned. “Your pooch would climb a mountain for it.” Owen twirled his hand over the board like a magician about to produce a rabbit out of a hat and pressed the number three button. “Dr. Owen Stanford here, and what is your problem?”

There was no answer. Dead air — the worst thing that can happen in radio. Cursing under his breath, he reached for a slice of pizza. “Seems we have a teeny case of stage fright out there,” he said into the mike. “Don’t be shy, my dear. Pretend you’re talking to your oldest and dearest friend.” Nothing. Outside the booth, Sam drew a finger across his throat. Owen was just about to hit the next button when a sound came over the line. It was so low and hoarse and buried in static he couldn’t make it out at first. “You’ll have to speak up if you want to stay on the air,” he warned.

“My husband,” the voice said. It was still barely audible. For some reason, Owen was reminded of the times as a child when he had held a seashell up to his ear and listened to the throb of waves on a distant shore. He turned up the volume slightly.

“Your husband, madam? What about your husband?”

This time the voice was clearer. “What do you think of a man who does violence to his wife?”

Owen jolted upright in his seat, his face the color of the cardboard box in front of him. He yanked off the earphones and flung them down on the console. His eyes were pinned to the little red number three light.

“Something the matter, doc?” Sam raced into the booth just in time to catch him as he stumbled over some cables on the floor. Owen wiped the perspiration from his brow and tried to collect himself. “That voice. It sounded just like...”

“Just like who?”

He looked at the fat, good-natured face of his engineer. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s nothing, Sam. Look, would you mind cuing in some music while I splash some water on my face?”

“Sure, doc.” He helped him over to the door. “You go pull yourself together. Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

At three o’clock in the morning the station was deserted except for Sam and him, but he went down a darkened corridor to a pay phone and called a number he had written on a piece of paper.

He counted as the phone rang three times. On the fourth, someone picked up the receiver and a gruff voice said, “Hello?”

“This is Owen Stanford. What in blazes went wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing went wrong.” The man sounded offended. “I told you. I’m a professional at this business.”

“Marcia must’ve gotten out of it,” he hissed into the phone. “She just called me over the air.”

There was a pause at the other end. “Did she say she was your wife?”

“No, but...”

“Then how do you know it was her?” The voice was calm, analytic, and there was a certain contempt for Owen’s panicky thinking. “Look,” the man continued, “I did it just like I planned it. I went in through the bedroom window you left unlatched and let her have it while she was listening to your show. She must have sensed me in the room. Funny thing was she didn’t scream or anything. She just said, ‘Owen sent you, didn’t he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, and he paid me a bundle.’ Then I hit her. If you know the right spot, it only takes once. I checked her pulse just to make sure. Luckily, she was still dressed, so I took her car out to Indian Point and dropped her over the edge. It must be five hundred feet down to the highway. A few cars will probably run over her in the fog before they find the body. All the loose ends have been tied together neatly. Nothing to worry about, pal. Not many of my clients have a live radio show for an alibi.”

Owen leaned against the wall. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe my nerves are getting the best of me.”

“Sure, and one more thing, pal.”

“What’s that?”

“You come blabbing over the phone again and you’ll join your missus.”

“Sorry to bother you.” Owen slammed down the phone.

The hit man was right. It must be his imagination. How could a woman, bludgeoned to death, dumped over the side of a cliff, and run over by some passing cars, pick up a phone and badger him over the air? No, the whole idea was ridiculous. If he had only continued the conversation, he would have found the caller to be a total stranger, another poor slob looking for a mental massage, just like the rest.

He went into the men’s room and washed his face with cold water. It made him feel a lot better. He looked at his face in the mirror. Fifty years old and he still had his good looks. Too good to waste on some over-the-hill crone who didn’t appreciate his celebrity status. There were plenty of young women out there aching to hook up with a radio personality like himself. After an appropriate period of mourning, Dr. Owen Stanford was determined to accommodate them.

He ran through the next few hours in his mind. If he didn’t get a call from the cops first, he would go straight home from the studio and report Marcia’s disappearance. They would find her empty car at the top of Indian Point and her body hundreds of feet below on the highway. Of course he would mention her recent depression. The thought made him smile. Marcia was nothing if not depressing.

Owen returned to the booth with his confidence restored. Sam was sitting in his swivel chair, finishing the last piece of pizza. “Feeling okay? I figured you didn’t want any of this, so I saved you the trouble of throwing it out.”

“I’m all right now. For a minute I felt sick at my stomach.”

The engineer got up and brushed the crumbs from his lap. “None of your customers gave up hope.” He pointed to the bank of red lights, all blinking in happy unison. “Sure must be a lot of washed-up marriages out there. Glad I never got the urge.”

Owen sat down and hit the mike switch. “Sorry for the slight delay. This is Dr. Owen Stanford, back to speak with you about your marriage problems.” He pressed button number one. “And how might I help you, my dear?”

For the next hour everything ran smoothly. There was the usual assortment of infidelities, desertions, boring partners — typical complaints that Owen had come to expect over the last two years. For every agonized question, he reached into his bottomless box of glib answers. Sometimes he wondered why all those dimwitted housewives never caught on. Two hundred bucks to a prestigious-sounding diploma mill, a smooth way with words, and you were in business.

Just before dawn it happened again. He had finally gotten rid of a woman whose husband had gambled away their life savings when the same voice came back on number three. The question was also the same: “What do you think of a man who does violence to his wife?”

This time Owen was ready. “I don’t think there is any place in a sound marriage for that sort of thing. Have you considered, however, that it is not you he is striking, but someone or something else that has been bothering him? Perhaps your failure to recognize his difficulties has aggravated the situation.” He relished turning the tables on them with half-baked psychology. Pretty soon he would have her apologizing for having been beaten.

He also knew the collective ear of his audience was waiting for the lurid details. “You said he does violence to you. What sort of violence do you mean exactly?”

For a few seconds the static drowned out everything, and Owen was just about to cut over to another call when the voice returned. It was crisp and clear and there was no mistaking her words. “My husband had me killed.”

In a split second Owen had cut her off. Cold sweat trickled down his neck. He tried to regain control, but his voice shook like a highwire act in a stiff breeze. “Sorry, folks. Must be a full moon out tonight. Let’s see who’s on the next line.”

Amazingly, the creepy, hoarse voice crackled through his earphones again. “What do you think of a man who would have his own wife killed?”

He stabbed his finger at number five and the eerie voice came back asking the same question. In a desperate frenzy, Owen ran through the whole row of buttons, but Marcia’s voice followed him relentlessly: “What do you think of a man who would have his own wife killed?”

Finally he could stand it no longer. When the goading question whined through the last line, he screamed into the mike. “Sure, I had you killed, you useless old woman. I paid a fortune to have you dumped over Indian Point just to get rid of that voice, and I’d do it again...”

He felt Sam’s beefy arms drag him away from the console. “Doc, please!” The engineer managed to get him into the lobby and onto one of the leather couches. “You lie here,” he said. “Let me get something to help you relax.”

In a minute he was back with some pills and a glass of water. “I knew getting locked up with all those crazy phone calls would get to you sooner or later. You lie back and get some sleep. I’ll take care of everything.”

Owen closed his eyes. The pills did their work quickly. In a few moments he felt himself tumbling into a soft velvet darkness. But Marcia’s voice still echoed in his brain: “...a man who would have his wife killed.”

When Owen opened his eyes it was broad daylight. He could see the morning DJ in the booth across from where he lay. A stout man in dire need of a shave was leaning over him.

“Let me shake your hand, Dr. Stanford,” he said.

Owen sat up and took his hand limply.

“My wife and I have listened to your show for a long time. You certainly helped us over some rough going with your advice.”

“Thank you very much,” Owen mumbled, brushing the hair out of his eyes. “Nice to know there’s somebody listening out there.”

“Oh, they’re listening all right. It’s a pity I have to arrest one of the few good people on radio today.” He showed Owen his detective’s badge.

All the events of the last few hours flashed in on him. “Listen, if it’s about that little joke about my wife...”

The detective laughed. “I know you radio guys are a bunch of kooks.”

Owen joined in with his own nervous laughter. “That’s us — a bunch of kooks. You can’t take us seriously at all.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” said the detective, his expression turning somber. “I had just turned on my car radio when that little announcement about dumping your wife came over the air. I was pretty close to Indian Point, so I guess my instincts as a cop led me over there.”

“...And you looked around the highway, but you didn’t find her,” finished Owen.

“That’s right, Dr. Stanford. I couldn’t find her anywhere on the highway.”

The pieces of the puzzle were coming together in Owen’s mind. Somehow Marcia had survived, and now she was getting her revenge by making his life a living hell. Still, there was no reason this dumb flat-foot had to know all that. “As I was saying,” he said in his most convincing manner, “it was just an on-air joke.”

The detective was fumbling through his pockets for something. “No, I wouldn’t say it was a joke when we have your wife’s corpse.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t find her?”

“On the highway. I was just getting into my car when I happened to look up.”

“And?”

“Most people don’t realize the resiliency of the human body, Dr. Stanford. Apparently, she bounced quite a bit on the way down. Couldn’t believe it myself, but there she was, dangling up there among the telephone wires like a boy’s lost kite.”

“Dangling in the telephone wires?” Owen’s jaw hung slack and his eyes had a dazed expression.

“Yessir,” said the detective. “I had to get the phone people out to retrieve the body. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” He looked down at the card he had finally found. “Oh, before I forget: You have the right to remain silent...”