“I won’t let you do crack, Toots.”
“I will do exactly what I…”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to scream.”
“Go ahead, scream.”
“The Coast Guard will come.”
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss,” he said.
She began screaming.
The boat was a seventy-five-foot Burger worth about four million dollars, large enough to accommodate, without crowding, the two dozen guests who stood talking and sipping cocktails on the aft deck as the sun began its slow descent into the Gulf of Mexico.
The boat was named Sea Sybil, after one of its owners, Sybil Rosenberg, whose husband was the attorney David Rosenberg, who was senior partner in the firm of Rosenberg, Katlowitz and Frank, all of whom made a lot more money than I did. In Calusa, Florida, everybody knew how much money everybody else made. There were a lot of moneyed people down here in this Paradise by the Sea, this Athens of Southwest Florida. Most of the money came from Canada or the Middle West; that was because if you drew a zigzagging line south from Toronto, it would pass through Cleveland and Pittsburgh and then hit Calusa before heading for Havana.
Coincidence, or perhaps fate, had thrown Lainie and me together on the same boat for the same sunset bash. Being out on bail could turn into a pleasant pastime in a small town, even if you’d been charged with slaying your mama, your papa, and your pet parakeet. As Calusa’s latest Accused Murderess celebrity, I supposed she would be much in demand in the weeks and months to come, and I knew I couldn’t confine her to her home or be with her at every function she attended, monitoring every word she muttered. Clearly the center of attention in a circle of sunset watchers on the starboard side of the boat, all of whom seemed eager to know what it felt like to be accused of murdering someone, for God’s sake, she successfully fended off any attempt to learn what had happened or not happened on Brett Toland’s yawl.
As for me, everyone kept asking how I was feeling.
Everyone kept asking what it had felt like.
This evening, I was lying.
It was a way of creating my own fun. I used to do that even before I’d got shot one dark and stormless night. I hated cocktail parties, especially sunset cocktail parties, especially sunset cocktail parties on boats. I sometimes felt that the moneyed people who moved down here from unspeakable climes like those in Minneapolis or Milwaukee or South Bend did so only because they liked to look at sunsets.
“I found myself staring into the face of God,” I said.
“What did she look like?” Aggie Pratt asked.
A long time ago, I had enjoyed—if that was the appropriate word—an extramarital love affair with Aggie. In fact, Aggie was the reason Susan and I had ended our marriage. I don’t think I liked myself very much back then, but that was all in the past, merely yet another sun dropping into yet another vast body of water.
Aggie had eventually divorced her then husband Gerald, and was now married to a man named Louis Pratt who published the Calusa Herald-Tribune; I still had difficulty remembering that she was now Mrs. Pratt. She looked very good to me tonight, causing me to wonder what was happening to me. Gray eyes glowing in the fading light of the sinking sun, faint smile on her generous mouth as she made her little God-Is-a-Woman joke, long black hair (Aggie’s, not God’s) combed straight and sleek as Cleopatra’s, short black, scoop-necked cocktail dress exposing treasures I recalled fondly but only vaguely.
Patricia Demming stood beside me in the ring of people wanting to know what God had looked like, for God’s sake! I couldn’t tell from the expression on her face whether or not she knew I was putting them on. Maybe she thought a vision of the Almighty actually had appeared to me one night while I was adrift in limbo. Her red dress—her favorite color, by the way—was also extravagantly low cut, considering the fact that she was supposed to be a staid and serious assistant state attorney, albeit beautiful and buxom and not in any courtroom at the moment, its daring bodice revealing yet more treasures I could scarcely remember, where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
“Actually he was a man,” I said, “and he looked like Joe DiMaggio,” winging it.
My former wife Susan was also here aboard the Sea Sybil—large boat, small town. As the sun plunked into the Gulf, she and all the assembled guests ooohed and ahhhed the obligatory squeals of delight. She was wearing tonight an extremely short, moss-green cocktail dress that showcased spectacular legs I remembered quite well, thank you, though I wouldn’t have wished her to notice me noticing them. The sky suddenly turned a sexy velvety violet—what the hell was happening to me?
“What did you and God talk about?” Aggie asked.
“Sex,” I said, and my eyes met Patricia’s, who was the only one who didn’t laugh at the remark.
“Do people even think about sex when they’re in coma?” a woman named Andrea Lang asked, and Susan responded—with all the authority of someone who’d been married to the apparent subject in question for, lo, those many years—”Matthew always thinks about sex,” which comment did not sit at all well with Patricia, who turned away and joined the cluster of satellites around Lainie. Thinking better of it an instant later—she was, after all, an S.A. even though one of her colleagues would be trying the case—she sauntered over to the bar and extended her glass to the man behind it. A few moments later, Lainie walked over to where I was now standing alone, I sure know how to clear a room.
She was wearing a short, peach-colored, rayon dress cut fore and aft in plunging Vs, with flaring pleats created by a knotted tie at the back. Drop earrings with red tourmaline stones. Victorian seal ring once again on her right pinky. High-heeled open-toed sandals with red straps. Long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail fastened with a barrette fashioned from tiny seashells. Rimless eyeglasses that lent a touch of the schoolmarm to an otherwise sophisticated look. Right eye askew behind them.
“When do you expect that witness list?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“What then?”
“We’ll see.”
“Will you call me?”
“I’ll call you,” I promised.
We sounded like spies.
She couldn’t believe she was hooked again.
Toots Kiley.
That’s m’name, folks, she thought. Daughter of James Kiley, who’d heroically named her after Toots Thielemans, best harmonica player in the world, take it or leave it. Nor is Toots a nickname, folks, remember that, it is a proud and proper given name. Toots. To rhyme with “puts” and not “boots,” as if you didn’t know. But enough already, she thought. You’re a fucking crackhead, Toots.
A cop had got her started the first time, that had been the irony of it.
Same cop got her started all over again this time, that was the same irony all over again.
Good old Rob Higgins, pride of the Calusa P.D.
First time around, it was cocaine. Sitting in a car with him in Newtown, working a case where she was tailing a woman whose husband suspected her of cheating on him, but who was instead—or so Rob claimed—working in a whorehouse he’d been investigating. “Your lady ain’t fuckin around,” he’d told Toots, “she’s just plain fuckin.” So there they were, sitting in a car outside the place at a little after midnight on a September morning more years ago than she chose to remember, with an hour or so to kill before the next wave of Johns arrived before closing time, and all at once Higgins asked, “You feel like doin’ a few lines?”
Well now, Toots knew what this meant, of course, she didn’t think he was speaking Martian or anything, she knew the significance of the words “doin’ a few lines.” The only surprise was that a cop was the one asking her if she’d care to snort a little coke. “What do you say?” he asked. This was a time when a well-meaning but ill-informed First Lady was advising ghetto kids to Just Say No. Toots wasn’t a ghetto kid. “Why the hell not?” she said.
An hour later, higher than a fucking kite, she�
��d floated up the whorehouse stairs with Rob and got some very nice pictures of the married lady she was tailing, who was wearing at close to two in the morning nothing but black open-crotch panties from Frederick’s of Hollywood and black boots with four-inch-high spike heels, and who was incidentally blowing a black man who was at least six feet four inches tall all over.
It took Toots two years to sober up.
It took her two minutes to fall off the wagon.
She ran into Rob Higgins again the day Matthew Hope was released from the hospital. She was there at Good Samaritan on that bright sunny day at the end of May when a nurse wheeled him out to the curb in a wheelchair, Patricia waiting in her car to pick him up and drive him home. Warren, and Detective Bloom, and Matthew’s partner Frank, and even Matthew’s former wife Susan were all there to wish him well and to let him know they’d be there for him if ever he needed them, though Patricia looked as if she wished Susan would wade into the Gulf of Mexico and never be heard from since.
Warren had a lunch date with a friend of his from St. Louis, who was in town for a few days—he never said whether the person was male or female, white or black—and Bloom had to get back to the Public Safety Building, and Frank and his wife Leona had no interest in having lunch with a private eye who was now wearing her formerly frizzed blond hair long and straight and hanging over one eye like Veronica Lake, whoever the hell she might have been. So Toots stood on the sidewalk outside the hospital with her finger up her ass, watching everybody driving off, and then she walked to where she’d parked her tired green Chevy and climbed in behind the wheel and drove over to the Calusa Square Mall, figuring she’d grab a bite to eat in one of the food courts there.
It so happened…
Things happen, you know.
It so happened that Detective Rob Higgins—on his day off, she learned later—was walking into a bar called Frisky’s, situated at one corner of the big mall building, just as Toots got out of her car. He spotted her, sauntered over with that detective strut a lot of the plainclothes cops down here affected, asked how she was doing, and asked would she like to have lunch and a beer with him. She told him she’d join him for lunch, but she’d have to skip the beer. She was clean now, you start with a beer, next thing you know…
He said, “I’ve been straight since last January, when I burned two keys of the shit in my fireplace. But a glass of beer can’t hurt anybody.”
“It can hurt me,” she said.
“Then drink milk,” he said, and smiled. “Come on in, we’ll catch up.”
She still didn’t know why she agreed to have lunch with him. In retrospect, she guessed it was because Warren hadn’t asked her to join him and his friend from St. Louis, who—also in retrospect—she supposed had been a woman, and maybe a white woman at that. Not that there was anything but a professional relationship between her and Warren.
Or maybe it was because she was feeling sort of left out as Matthew drove off from the hospital in Patricia’s car, looking small and pale and somehow lost sitting there in the passenger seat beside her, all his friends drifting off in opposite directions, leaving Toots standing alone on the sidewalk, worst thing an addict can feel is alone and lonely.
Whyever, she said, “Sure, why not?” and if this triggered any echoes of previous famous last lines, they were entirely lost on her. She had been taught to understand that an addict was always an addict, so watch it, sister. But somehow she temporarily forgot the admonition when she accepted Rob’s invitation to lunch in a place called Frisky’s, which looked like a barroom and smelled like a barroom and was populated at twelve-thirty that afternoon with a lot of people doing what looked to Toots like some very serious drinking.
They took a booth at the back, and they both ordered burgers and fries, Rob’s with a beer, Toots’s with a Coke. Rob started talking about Matthew Hope, what a bum break it was he’d got shot and had to lay there in coma for a week, ten days, whatever it was. Toots told him it had only been eight days or so, and that he was fine now, although it had taken a while for the gunshot wounds to heal and for him to get back his strength—well, a coma, you know. Oh, sure, Rob said. Matter of fact, Toots said, they’d picked him up at Good Sam today, and he’d looked terrific, which was a lie because he hadn’t looked like his old self at all, she could still see him sitting there beside Patricia looking somehow withered and…well…old.
Rob said he’d been watching all the good work she’d been doing since she sobered up, he was really very proud of her, working with Warren Chambers, good man, they were the ones cracked the case got Hope shot, weren’t they?
“Well, Morrie Bloom was on it, too,” Toots said, not wanting to take all the credit. “And, anyway, it was Matthew’s legwork led us in the right direction. It was almost as if he was supervising the case from his hospital bed.”
For some reason, Rob looked very attractive to her. Maybe it was because he’d lost ten, fifteen pounds and was down to what he called “fighting trim” or maybe it was because he’d been putting in a lot of time on his boat most weekends and had a great tan…
“You like boats?” he asked. “We could maybe go out on my boat one weekend, you like boats.”
“Yeah, I do,” she said, lying.
The way she felt about boats was that they looked terrific from the shore, but they weren’t particularly great to be on. Even so, the notion of going out on a boat with Rob one weekend was somewhat appealing, although she couldn’t have said quite why at that moment. Also, he was wearing his hair differently. Back when they were sitting that whorehouse together, he wore his brown hair in a very short crew cut that really made him look like a redneck cop, but now it was longer in back and hanging on his forehead in front, which gave him a sort of boyish look with those clear blue eyes of his, she had never noticed how startlingly blue his eyes were.
It didn’t occur to her that the reason Rob might have seemed so attractive to her on this day last May when she was feeling particularly vulnerable and alone was that in the early days of her getting to know cocaine Rob was the man who’d supplied her with the stuff. He was her source. He was the one who introduced her with a courtly bow to the white lady, and later—when the only thing that mattered in her life was scoring cocaine and snorting cocaine—he was the one who taught her how to go out and get it on her own, introduced her to men who would help her earn the money to pay for the stuff she so desperately needed, became her mentor and her guide, her savior and her salvation. It never occurred to her that in her mind Rob Higgins would forever be equated with snow or C or blow or toot or Peruvian lady or white girl or leaf or flake or happy dust or nose candy or freeze or any of the other darling little euphemistic pet names he’d taught her for a drug that could fry your brain whether you sniffed it up your nose or smoked it in a pipe. It never occurred to her that proximity to Rob meant proximity to the white powder that had dominated her life for more than two years. It never occurred to her that Rob would forever be equated with the soaring ecstasy she’d known when she was a user.
“So do you think you’d like to see the boat sometime?” he asked.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said.
She had worn to the hospital a short khaki-colored cotton dress with panels that tied in front to create a sarong look, and she could tell from the way he was looking at her that he liked the way it showed off her legs and her breasts. It never occurred to her that she might be in danger. It never occurred to her that Rob Higgins was cocaine.
Looking up at her as if the idea has just occurred to him, he said, “How about now?”
On the way over to the marina, he started talking about how many crack users they’d been busting lately right here in little old Calusa—”The fuckin thing’s an epidemic,” he said, “well, not only here, all over America.” That was because you didn’t have to snort crack the way you did cocaine powder, what you did was smoke it, which made it appealing to people, especially teenagers, who thought smoking was sophisticated and glamorous, anyw
ay. But smoking it meant you got your high in ten seconds or less instead of the two minutes or so it took with the dust, because the drug went straight from the lungs to the brain.
“Although there are people who say it isn’t addictive because of the sodium bicarbonate they use when they’re processing the drug.”
“What’s the sodium bicarbonate got to do with it?”
“You’re asking me? It’s what makes the crackling sound when you smoke it. The sodium bicarbonate. That’s why it’s called crack.”
“Yeah, but what’s sodium bicarbonate got to do with whether or not it’s addictive.”
“They say it makes it nonaddictive,” Rob said.
“Who says?”
“Addicts,” Rob said, and laughed.
“That’s bullshit,” Toots said. “Crack is freebase cocaine, and cocaine’s addictive, period.”
“Well, not physically addictive.”
“No, not physically. But…”
“As well we both know,” he said.
“As well we both know,” she repeated, nodding in acknowledgment, smiling in appreciation of the fact that they’d both been there and back.
“You hear all kinds of crazy stories from these jerks doing crack,” Rob said. “We picked up this guy last Tuesday in a bust we made, he told us Sigmund Freud was a famous coke user, the shrink, you know?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And that he’d written some kind of medical paper, Freud, about how coke cured indigestion and morphine addiction, and how it also helped cure asthma, and how it could be used to arouse sexual desire. Anyway, here we are,” he said.
He was all over her the minute they got on the boat.
His hands went up under the short cotton dress, and she felt him hard against her as he pulled her close, and she thought Hey, I thought you were going to show me your boat, but she did nothing to stop him, pressed tighter into him instead, tilting her groin into him, arms going up around his neck, lips responding when his mouth claimed hers. They half fell, half slid onto one of the berths up forward, in a narrow little space as tight as a cave, and he slid her panties down over her thighs and her ankles, and spread her wide to him, and she wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched her down there, sober and celibate went hand in hand. His hands on her buttocks now, lifting her to him, inside her now, clutching her tight against him, enclosing him, rising to meet him, Jesus.
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