His chin kept slipping off his hand as he listened to her whine boozily about the sexual harassment she’d endured throughout her tenure in law enforcement. That was after she’d listened to him whine boozily about the injustices he’d suffered at the hands of ex-wives and talent agents.
When his dimpled chin fell out of his hand for the third time, she said, “How many martinis’ve you had, anyway?”
“As many as you.”
“We shoulda stuck to piña coladas.”
“Too sugary.”
“You gotta drive soon,” she said, slurring slightly. “Maybe we oughtta get something to eat.”
“Certainly,” he said, slurring worse.
“I don’t usually drink like this,” Nell said. “I don’t usually talk like this. So much, I mean.”
“I know,” Fin said, his eyelids drooping. “It’s because I’m so easy to talk to. Women tend to talk to me like I’m one of the girls.”
Nell blew a puff of breath upward because her hair kept falling across her eyes. “Why?” she asked. “Are you gay or something?”
“I probably am,” Fin said somberly, “except for the sex part.”
“Nobody cares what anybody is,” Nell said, spilling some booze on the table. “You get to a certain age, all you care about is, does the guy have AIDS. And does he cuddle good.”
“I know how that is,” Fin said, sympathetically. And this time his elbow slipped clear off the cocktail table. “When I used to go to singles bars, I’d wear my San Diego Blood Bank T-shirt just to show all the lonely nurses and schoolteachers that I’m a clean donor.”
“I knew you’d go for nurses and schoolteachers,” Nell said, accusingly. “The care givers, right?”
“I’m the cuddly care giver,” Fin said, defensively. “Remember my first ex-wife, the good sergeant? She wore those confrontational stockings with seams in them even before Madonna did. And call me a silly goose if you want to, but I don’t think it’s romantic when a female wears scary eye makeup and does one-arm pushups in her teddy just before she jumps in bed at night. The most tender thing she ever said to me was ‘Let’s get it on.’”
“Was she like that?” Nell was genuinely shocked.
“When we got divorced she got all the dishes she hadn’t thrown at me. Living with her was more risky than clerking in a Seven-Eleven store.”
“I really didn’t know her very well,” Nell assured him.
Fin said, “I think I married my second ex-wife because she was the opposite of the sergeant. She loved the great indoors and prescription drugs, but hated people and avoided them. The Witness Protection Program has better mixers. It was because of her that I had a test done and found out that I have a very low sperm count. I was glad ’cause any baby she gave birth to would end up being Howard Hughes. Compared to her Salman Rushdie is a party animal. Did I mention my practically nonexistent sperm count? That nobody has to worry about?”
“Yeah, yeah, you said.” Nell licked some spilled martini off the back of her hand.
The sight of her tongue gave Fin a semi-woody! He adored her broken nose! “I give blood every month, so I’m always getting tested.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she mumbled, signaling to the waitress for another round.
“You know what I hate about young actors?” Fin said. “Most of them don’t even drink.”
“Know what I hate about all male cops?” Nell said. “They do.”
“It doesn’t pay to tomcat around in singles bars, not in these times,” Fin said. “I mean, some of the cops I work with? When they sober up they have to sit in a tub full of chlorine bleach for two days. I mean, if you caught a rear view of them in the shower you’d run and call the orangutan wrangler at the San Diego Zoo.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she said, sitting up tall and crossing her legs, causing her skirt-slit to reveal her entire thigh.
“You sure are in good shape for your … you sure are in good shape,” he said. “Do you jog or something?” Of course he well remembered her back in her youthful jogging days: Foglights Salter!
“I’m in good shape for any age, bucko!” she said, truculently.
“You sure are,” he said, slumping a bit, figuring that submissive gestures are best when boozy babes get pugnacious.
When the waitress put the drinks down she looked doubtfully at the two dipsos.
Nell said to Fin, “You’re not very tall, are you?”
“None of us actors are as tall as you imagined,” he said, with a hiccup. “Excuse me,” he said, and did it again.
“I guess you’re right,” Nell said. “Bogart stood on a milk crate when he did love scenes with Ingrid Bergman.”
“James Cagney was even shorter,” Fin said earnestly. “None of us are tall.”
“If I was wearing tall heels, would you be embarrassed to dance with me?”
He thought it’d be tricky to walk, let alone dance, but he said gallantly, “Just tell me if you wanna dance. We could go somewhere. I do all the Latin steps.”
“No, I don’t wanna dance!” she said, exasperated, and this time her elbow slipped. “I just wanna know how secure you really are. I never met a secure male cop in my whole entire life!”
“My third ex-wife was six foot one,” Fin explained. “Barefoot. She taught me to tango and I was never embarrassed with my face pressed to her bosom. But being married to her was like Fatal Attraction Two. Before we split up she accused me of dating other babes, and she started putting cockroaches in the toaster. I don’t know where she got the cockroaches because she was a clean person, I have to give her that much. Life with her was a game of Dungeons and Dragons. If we’d had a kid that turned out like her, I’d’ve had it put to sleep.”
“I don’t believe all this!” Nell said, much louder than she realized.
The bartender shook his head at the cocktail waitress: No more booze!
“That’s paranoid,” she said. “Cockroaches! You’re just proving you’re a typical insecure male cop!”
“I’m not paranoid,” he said, gravely. “She turned the toaster into a cockroach condo. I checked every inch of the apartment and there were no cockroaches anywhere else. It had to be her. I think maybe she was trying to justify sleeping with half the San Francisco Giants one afternoon before a double-header with the Padres. There were a lotta tired puppies on the field that night, I can tell you.”
“Was she good-looking?”
“Actually, my conscious mind no longer remembers anything about her physical appearance. She went the way of my seventh-grade French.”
“Fin!” she cried suddenly. “I got a flash for you. We’re hammered. Smashed. Fried. Tanked. Both of us. I haven’t been like this in years!”
“That doesn’t scare me,” he said, fumbling for the money in his wallet and holding a bill up to the light, not wanting her to see that he had to wear reading glasses. “Every time I got married I was cold sober, so being drunk doesn’t scare me.”
“Take me to my car,” she said. “I can’t have dinner. I’m not feeling well.”
“We could go to my apartment,” he said. “It’s very close. Want a nightcap?”
“No! I can’t drink any more!”
“You could have a crème de menthe,” he suggested. “And pretend it’s prom night.”
Suddenly she grabbed him by the lapel and put her bent nose inches from his, saying, “Don’t … you … get it? We are blitzed! How did this happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, unable to stop hiccuping. “I’m not that much of a drinker. I think it’s probably our age. I’m forty-five, Nell. All I can see in my future is answering those TV commercials where they give a free prostate check to volunteers over forty-five. Do you know how frightening it is? Turning forty-five?”
She leaned into him and they grabbed each other’s shoulder bravely, but unsteadily. Then they stood up and that was tricky too.
The bartender whispered to the waitress: “Perfect friendship, alcohol-induced.�
��
“I’d like to go to your apartment, Fin,” she confessed to him. “But I can’t do that on a first date.”
“I understand,” he said, feeling queasy, doubting that he could handle this babe anyway, under the circumstances.
“And it’s none of my business,” she continued, as they lurched to the parking lot, “but I don’t think you should get involved with me or that I should get involved with you. You’re kinda cute, but very neurotic.”
“I understand,” he said, and the perfect pals were in the camaraderie mode now, standing beside his Vette, holding each other by the biceps. Foreheads pressed together in a bonding gesture. Perfect pals butting each other like rams.
“I don’t think you should ever get married again, Fin,” she said gravely.
“The whole goddamn College of Cardinals will graduate with their MBAs and drive their kids to school in a Volvo wagon before I get married again,” Fin pledged.
“Let’s go home,” she said, “before you gotta call nine-one-one.”
He managed to drive back to Old Town while Nell dozed. After he arrived, he parked and opened the door for her, noticing that she was getting green around the gills.
But she got out and gamely gave him a peck on the cheek, saying, “You give great blarney. I’ll bet you get lots ’n lots of sleepovers.”
Fin wanted to show her his stage flourish, but he was listing too far and almost toppled over. He settled for his leading-man salute; then he said, “Nell, the unvarnished truth is that my orgasms are so infrequent they oughtta be Roman-numeraled like British monarchs and Rocky movies. But I’m a very sincere person. And an above-average cuddler.”
CHAPTER 16
The first thing that Nell Salter did after arriving at work the next day was to take two aspirin with her coffee, her fifth cup of the morning and her fourth aspirin.
One of the other investigators passed her in the hallway and said, “You don’t look too good.”
“Too much caffeine,” Nell said. “I’m so amped I could jump-start Frankenstein’s monster.”
Nell kept going to the mirror to check for signs of life. Her tongue needed a shave. That goddamn little neurotic got her wasted!
Late in the morning when she felt better she phoned the office of the county medical examiner and spoke with a pathologist, a navy doctor who moonlighted at the morgue when he was not on duty with Uncle Sam.
“FedEx just arrived,” he told Nell. “The specialty lab worked at record speed. What did you tell them?”
“Only that the deceased had expired after a five-minute swim at La Jolla cove. That’s believable considering all the toxic spills around here.”
“Really?”
“No, I forget what I told him. Look, I got a headache today, Doctor. Can you give me the bottom line?”
“Well, it appears that you were right. Of course, we suspected you were, given the inhibiting of cholinesterase.”
“What?”
“Has to do with the nerve enzyme level. The pesticide destroys the enzyme.”
“What did the toxicology tests say? The bottom line.”
“That his death is consistent with organophosphate poisoning, specifically, azinphos methyl. I think we could give an opinion that the exposure to Guthion could’ve caused the behavior that contributed to his accident.”
“Indirectly led to his death, you mean.”
“I’m not a lawyer. You’ll have to talk to the district attorney about all that directly and indirectly stuff.”
“How long does it take that kind of insecticide to kill a person?”
“Depends on the exposure. One of the textbook cases tells about a preacher who decided to take a few gulps of malathion and read the Twenty-third Psalm to his flock. He got to ‘the shadow of death’ and fell into the collection plate. Another one concerns a woman who died in ten minutes after soaking her tampon in paraquat.”
Nell was silent for a second, then said, “Wait a minute! Why would anyone …”
“I know, I know,” the pathologist said. “They never say why anyone would.”
After talking to the body snatcher, Nell wasn’t sure whether she’d be better off trying to upchuck or work. With march-or-die grit, she opted for work and located a Spanish-speaking secretary to help with a call to the Hospital Civil in Tijuana, where any emergency case would be taken.
After three calls over a period of an hour, they were able to reach a Doctor Velásquez. He spoke excellent English and confirmed that there was not one but two patients, both young boys, who were brought into the hospital on Saturday, and who showed every symptom of pesticide poisoning.
After Nell explained the case she said, “Doctor, we know the truck was carrying Guthion. That’s an organophosphate.”
“I am familiar with it,” he said to Nell. “There are a great many insecticides still being used in our country, including some very dangerous ones that you have banned.”
“Could you send blood and tissue samples to our lab in San Diego? We could verify if it’s Guthion. And if possible, we’d like someone to talk to the boys and find out how they got contaminated.”
“As to talking with the boys it will not be possible,” Doctor Velásquez said. “One child is in a coma and the other one is very ill. Perhaps in a day or two he will be able to talk to us.”
“If you could get the samples to us as soon as possible, I’d appreciate it.”
“We are perhaps not as primitive as you might think, Ms. Salter,” the doctor said. “We do have a somewhat reliable laboratory. And now that you have identified the substance I would wager that our people might even be able to verify it.”
“Of course, Doctor,” Nell said. “I didn’t mean to …”
“That is all right,” Doctor Velàsquez said. “I am grateful for your call. And I shall personally see to it that the laboratory work is done at once. Personally.”
After she hung up, Nell said to the secretary, “I just offended him. I’ll bet he does a real job on this one so he can show a thing or two to this patronizing gringa bitch.”
Shelby Pate was even more hung over than Nell Salter that morning, but he had ingested his drugs of choice in far greater quantities. During the lunch break, the ox was at last able to hold down his food, and was munching his second bag of Fritos when Abel suggested that they go rest in the shade by a stack of waste drums.
When they were sitting alone, Abel said, “Joo throw away paperwork?”
Shelby looked puzzled for a moment, and then said, “Oh, you mean the manifest? Tell the truth, I didn’t get home till two-thirty in the morning, and my old lady was seriously bummed. I couldn’ta chilled her out with tickets on a love-boat cruise. She says to me, she says, ‘Through your nasal canal has passed more white than they see at the Pillsbury Mills.’ And me, her sugar man, I says to her, ‘I’m on’y tryin to do my part fer local lab workers.’ She’s a hardworkin bitch though. I gotta give her credit fer that much.”
“Throw away papers, Buey.”
“Yeah, sure,” the ox said. “There ain’t nothin to worry about. Don’t let that little navy cop scare ya.”
“I don’ know, Buey,” Abel Durazo said. “Remember when joo get bad feeling? Now I got bad feeling about shoes. Bad.”
If the San Diego Yacht Club had lost its America’s Cup cachet, Jules Temple might’ve resigned his membership. He never would’ve had it in the first place were it not for the fact that his father had been a longtime member. However, keeping up the membership only cost $70 a month, and Jules always hoped that he could use club connections to help in business.
When he was a teenager, Jules used to steal snatch blocks from other members’ sailboats docked at the club marina, and sell them to weekend sailors. Other members’ sailboats were also good places to steal liquor, and even binoculars, since most boat owners kept a good pair on board.
The San Diego Yacht Club was perhaps an unlikely keeper of the America’s Cup. It was a laid-back club, far more egalit
arian then the tony New York Yacht Club where the cup had resided for so long amid blazers and white ducks. In San Diego the cup lived with flipflops and Levi’s, and yachtsmen talked a lot more about prime rates than crime rates, as in New York.
The San Diego Yacht Club occupied several acres across from Shelter Island on the end of the channel. The members had a swimming pool and other amenities, but the main attraction was the large private marina where millions of dollars’ worth of pleasure craft floated, and no doubt distressed their owners during hard economic times. It was a square structure, two sides of which faced the marina. The building was functional but not unattractive, with a modified pagoda roof, and a crow’s nest on top that added a nautical touch.
San Diego Yacht Club member Dennis Conner had probably done more than anyone to put the esoteric gentleman’s sport onto America’s sports pages by the introduction of financial syndicates, corporate sponsors, television coverage, and greed. His successor, millionaire Bill Koch-the Donald Trump of yacht racing-showed promise of doing the same, proving that you could buy an America’s Cup if you were willing to scuttle more treasure than Hitler’s U-boats.
Occasionally, Jules would go out for a beer-can race on a sailboat owned by an old school friend, and once in a while he’d be invited for booze-cruises on large powerboats. Jules didn’t own a boat of his own and didn’t want one, using the club as a place to get a decent meal and some business gossip in a high-tech city that was feeling the ominous recession as much as anywhere. San Diego was overdeveloped, at least as far as hotels and office buildings were concerned, and in the California real estate-driven economy, people were nervous. What Jules often got from his visits was free legal advice from the many lawyers who were part of the yachting community.
Jules found that the club wasn’t particularly busy that weekday afternoon. There were a few visitors gawking at the old black-and-white photos of past commodores that lined one wall along the peg-and-groove corridor. And a few kids were pressing their noses to the glass case that housed the America’s Cup, at least until the next regatta, when a Japanese billionaire would probably be ready to take it.
Finnegan's week Page 14
