Farewell, My Lovely, 271

She hung up, leaving me with a curious feeling of having talked to somebody that didn't exist.

The Long Goodbye, p. 359 (Penguin Crime Fiction UK)

And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time, and if you keep listening, which people don't because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds for ever, without the slightest change of inflection.