The boat, still unnamed, was bobbing on the water at the end of my dock that Tuesday night while Patricia and I sipped after-dinner cognacs on my screened-in patio. All the lights were out. A week ago at about this time, Brett Toland was getting himself shot, allegedly by my client. I put down my glass. I put my arm around Patricia. I kissed her.
Once upon a time…
But that was then.
We met at a motel on the South Tamiami Trail. We sneaked into the room like burglars and fell into each other’s arms as though we’d been apart for centuries rather than days, not even days, a day and a half, not even that, twenty-eight hours since we’d kissed goodbye yesterday morning. She was dressed for work, wearing a dark blue pinstripe tropical suit with wide lapels, “My gangster suit,” she called it, an instant before she hurled the jacket onto the bed. My hands had been on her from the moment the door clicked shut behind her, “Lock it,” she whispered under my lips, but I was unbuttoning the front of the long-sleeved white blouse instead, “Oh, Jesus, lock it,” she whispered, but I was sliding the tailored skirt up over her thighs, my hands reaching everywhere, my hands remembering her, my mouth remembering her, “Jesus,” she kept murmuring under my lips, we were both crazy, kicking off the high-heeled shoes, a garter belt under the skirt, dark blue stockings, “For you,” she whispered, “for you,” lowering her panties, silken and electric, the skirt bunched up above her waist, her legs wide, entering her, “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “Oh, Jesus,” I said, clutching her to me, pulling her onto me, enclosing, enclosed, “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “I’m coming,” she said, “this is crazy,” she said, “this is crazy,” I said, we were crazy, we were crazy, we were crazy.
But, as I said, that was then.
And this was now.
And now, Patricia returned my kiss gently, afraid I would break, and then put her head on my shoulder and said, “This is nice, Matthew, sitting here.”
“Yes,” I said.
In a little while, she told me she had a busy day ahead tomorrow…
“Yes, me too,” I said.
…and really ought to be running on home.
Before I got shot, mi casa was su casa and vice versa.
But that was then.
And this was now.
8
He was trying to explain my condition to Patricia and me. What had been my condition. What my condition would be in the weeks ahead. What my condition could possibly become in the months ahead. The word “possibly” frightened me. I had just taken a mighty leap out of a very dark pit, what the hell did he mean by possibly? Patricia sat by the bed, gripping my hand.
Spinaldo explained that I had flat-lined briefly while they were attempting to remove the bullets from my chest…
“That’s not what you told us,” Patricia said.
Not for nothing was she the best prosecuting attorney in the entire state of Florida.
“When we were here at the hospital,” she explained, turning to me. “Frank and I.” She turned back to Spinaldo. “You told us there’d been a loss of blood to the brain for five minutes and forty seconds. That isn’t briefly.”
“No, it isn’t,” Spinaldo agreed. “But Mr. Hope has since reported that he recalls comments made during surgery…”
I did indeed.
Oh shit, he’s flat-lined…he’s in cardiac arrest…let’s pace him…Epinephrine…keep an eye on that clock…one cc, one to a thousand…still unobtainable…
“…and this would seem to indicate that he’d remained aware at some time during the arrest. I can only believe that the open cardiac massage we performed…”
Hands inside my chest. Massaging my naked heart.
“…did much to prevent total nonperfusion.”
“What’s nonperfusion?” Patricia asked.
I was letting her do all the talking.
I could think good, but it wasn’t coming out good.
“Total ischemia,” Spinaldo said.
Doctor talk. Worse than lawyer talk.
“And what’s that?”
Good old English. Good old Patricia. I squeezed her hand. Hard.
“Total loss of blood to the brain.”
“But you’re saying that didn’t happen.”
“It would appear so. I have to assume the brain was still getting something. You have to understand that the brain is the ultimate organ. It gets what it wants, and it gets it first, above all the other organs. It’s selfish. It has strategies for self-preservation in any crisis. The lidocaine helped, I’m sure. Turned what was most likely a ventricular tachycardia into a sinus tachycardia. But the brain was in there grabbing whatever oxygen it needed, struggling to autoregulate its blood supply. I’m guessing, of course. The point is…you were aware.”
There’d been darkness, there’d been intense light. There’d been unfathomable blackness, there’d been searing glare. There’d been no present, all was then. There’d been no past, all was now. Voices gone, concerned voices gone, lingering voices in the dark, voices swallowed in the then and the light. Whispering voices, pattering footfalls, flurries of movement, a circling of moths. Cold everywhere, hurting in the dark, shaking in the dark, sweating and hot…
Yes.
I’d been aware.
“Moreover,” Spinaldo said, “you began talking seven days after the cardiac arrest.”
“One word,” Patricia said.
She was thinking Seven days is a full week.
“Nonetheless. Any speech at all would indicate to me that his brainstem reflexes were intact, and that he was emerging out of a semicomatose state several days before he recovered full alertness.”
“Master of suspense,” Patricia said, and squeezed my hand again.
I did not feel like the master of anything at the moment.
I could not remember what had happened to me.
Everyone kept telling me I’d been shot.
Spinaldo said I would probably never remember all the details of the actual event. Spinaldo said this had to do with the way memory is moved from so-called short-term areas to long-term areas, where hardwired recollection is summoned up either consciously or unconsciously.
Here’s a loss-of-memory joke from the good doctor:
“The nice thing about recovering from a coma is that you get to meet new people every day.”
Some joke.
This was a week after I blinked up into his face.
I was already beginning to lose hope.
Guthrie Lamb could have chosen to become a cop instead of a private investigator, but the money wasn’t as good. Also, he hated all the paramilitary bullshit that was part and parcel of being a police officer. Guthrie hated any organization that evaluated a person by the uniform he was wearing. This was why he much preferred the company of naked broads.
Even so, he was forced to work with cops because there was no way he could otherwise get access to police and FBI files. This was a serious failing of the private-eye business. You had to depend on the people who were really empowered to investigate murders and such.
In fact, the last time Guthrie had ever heard of a private eye solving a murder case was never. It was one thing to gather information for an attorney who was defending a poor soul charged with murder, but it was quite another thing to be hired by some old tycoon who wanted you to find out who had murdered his beautiful blond daughter. Guthrie had never been hired by an old tycoon. Tell the truth, he had rarely come across too many beautiful blond daughters, either, dead or alive. What Guthrie did mostly was skip-tracing, or tailing wayward husbands for some woman wanted a divorce, or looking for some guy went out for a cup of coffee, didn’t come back in five years, his wife was beginning to get a little worried. Never once in his lifetime as a Famous Detective had he ever been hired to find out who’d killed somebody.
Even working for Matthew Hope this way—who seemed like a nice guy, by the way, except he’d got chintzy about Guthrie’s hourly rate, which, okay, it wasn’t the fifty an hour Guthrie had m
entioned, but Hope could at least have gone to forty-seven fifty, couldn’t he? No, he’d stuck to what he was paying Warren Chambers, whoever the hell he was, and if he was so good why wasn’t Hope using him this time? Guthrie hated hassling over money. It made a person seem mercenary.
But even on a case like this one, which was in fact a murder case, Guthrie wasn’t actually looking for a murderer, he was simply looking for an automobile that may or may not have been parked outside the yacht club while a murder was being committed. Unless, of course, the person who’d left the car there was also the person who’d done the murder, in which case it could be said that Guthrie was, after all, looking for a murderer, though to tell the truth that would be stretching it.
A private eye was a private eye, period.
In the old days, when Guthrie was first starting in this business, the police were definite enemies. There wasn’t a time back then that the police wouldn’t at one point or another accuse the private eye himself of being the murderer, can you imagine? Big bulls from Homicide would drop in on him, maybe rough him up a little, haul him downtown to the cop shop, throw a scare into him, warn him to stay out of their way and keep his nose clean. If it wasn’t for the cops back then, any self-respecting private eye could have solved the most complicated murder case in ten seconds flat. But no, the cops were always interfering, making it difficult for a hard-working, hard-drinking shamus to get his job done.
Nowadays, the cops seemed actually glad to see him.
Broke the routine, you know?
Guy coming in from left field with a plaster cast of a tire track, this was impressive. At least, that’s what Detective Nick Alston said to him at nine forty-four that Wednesday morning, when Guthrie unveiled his handiwork, first snipping the white cord he’d tied around his package, and then peeling off the layers of brown wrapping paper to reveal—ta-ra!
“That’s very impressive,” Alston said. “Where’d you get that?”
“I made it myself,” Guthrie said proudly.
“No kidding? That’s very impressive.”
Alston had never been what anyone would call handsome, but the last time Guthrie had seen him, his brown eyes were shot with red, and his craggy face looked puffy and bloated, and his straw-colored hair looked stringy, and there was a beard stubble on his face, and it was plain to see he’d already begun drinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Today, at nine forty-five now, he was clean-shaven, and he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and tie over a pristine white button-down shirt, and his hair was combed, and he looked…well…presentable.
Guthrie was impressed, too.
He basked in the glow of Alston’s approval of the cast he’d made at the scene, feeling very much like a sixth-grade pupil showing a clay ashtray to his teacher. The cast really was a very good one, if Guthrie said so himself. Sometimes they turned out lousy. But Guthrie had first sprayed shellac over the tire track in the sandy soil on the shoulder of the road, and then had used only the very finest grade of art plaster of Paris for his mixture. He had spread it over the water in the bowl, not stirring it, permitting it instead to sink eventually to the bottom of the bowl, and only then adding more plaster until the water couldn’t soak up anything further. After he’d poured the mixture onto the track, eyeballing it to a thickness of three-eighths of an inch or so, he reinforced it with snippets of twigs and twine and a few toothpicks for good luck, carefully laying on the material so that none of it touched the track itself. Pour on another layer of plaster, allow it to harden—you knew this was happening when it got warm to the touch—and voilà! The perfect specimen lying on Alston’s desk.
“So what would you like me to do with this fine work of art here?” Alston asked.
Guthrie knew he was joking.
Or hoped he was.
“Nick,” he said, “I would like you to seek a match in either your own files or the Feeb files. I have Polaroids, too,” he said, and dropped a thick manila envelope onto Alston’s desk. “I would like you to do me that favor, Nick.”
“How’s Gracie these days?” Alston asked casually.
Gracie was a hooker Guthrie had once sent around to Alston’s place as a favor when he was still a falling-down drunk.
“She’s fine. Asked about you just the other day, in fact.”
Alston said nothing for several moments. Then, still looking down at the plaster cast, he said, “I’d like her to see me sober.”
“Done,” Guthrie said. “I’ll send her over tonight.”
“No, just tell her I’ll call,” Alston said.
“Happy to,” Guthrie said, and waited.
“What’s this in reference to?” Alston asked, opening the envelope and looking at the very good Polaroids Guthrie had taken, if he said so himself.
“A homicide,” Guthrie said. “I’m working for the defense attorney.”
“Who?”
“Matthew Hope.”
“What happened to Warren Chambers?” Alston asked.
What they do is they treat you like an invalid. Which is what you are. This means that the moment I began speaking, they started a daily assessment of my functional status in addition to my neurological status. Test after test after test, tests enough to bend the mind and twist the tongue. Let us consider, for example, the Post Traumatic Amnesia Scale, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Bender-Gestalt Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, all designed to determine the extent of injury or lack thereof.
They shave your scalp with an abrasive, and with elasticized tape they attach needle electrodes to it. Ten to twenty small electrodes on the scalp in a defined spacing. You feel like Frankenstein’s monster waiting for the bolt of lightning that will make you come alive. In metabolic insults such as mine…
Spinaldo kept using the term “metabolic insult.” I felt I should challenge him to a duel.
…in metabolic insults such as mine, then, the electroencephalogram usually shows slow diffuse waves. Recovery occurs in tandem with the resolution of slow waves toward normal brain wave patterns.
Every day, Spinaldo told me I was on the way to recovery.
I kept wondering when that would be.
The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up around the slip where Toy Boat was nudging the dock, but I had called the State Attorney’s Office beforehand, and had been told by Pete Folger that the prosecution had already gathered all the evidence it needed, and that I could visit the boat anytime I wished. I was surprised, therefore, to see a uniformed police officer standing at the head of the gangway as Andrew and I approached that Wednesday morning.
I told him who we were, and handed him a card.
He told us who he was, and explained that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had asked the police department to send an officer down to “extend every courtesy to Attorney Hope.” This was code. What it meant was “Stay with him every minute and make sure he doesn’t do anything that will damage our case against Lainie Commins.”
I told the officer—whose name was Vincent Gergin, according to the black plastic nameplate over the breast pocket of his blouse—that my associate and I merely wanted to take some Polaroids of the crime scene with a view toward better orientation. I also told him we might look around the boat a bit to see if there was anything the S.A.’s Office might have overlooked. He said, “No problem.”
I hate that expression.
I said, “Fine. In that case, we’ll go aboard.”
He said, “Fine. In that case, I’ll just go with you.”
We all went down the gangway and onto the boat.
Andrew was there for the very same reason he’d accompanied me when we talked to Folger’s witnesses. Whichever one of us later tried the case, the other would be called as a witness to whatever we happened to discover on the boat this morning. Quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find a damn thing. Say what you will about the office Skye Bannister runs, his investigators and criminologists are enormously efficient in picking a crime scene
clean.
Here was the cockpit where Lainie and Brett had sat—according to her—from ten to ten-thirty. Here was where he had made a generous offer, according to her, or a merely insulting offer, according to his widow. Here was where, according to Lainie’s first story, she’d sipped Perrier that (oh-yes-I-remember-now) turned into a couple of vodka-tonics in her next version. Here was where she’d given Brett her Top-Siders and her scarf, something she’d neglected to tell me at first, which scarf was later found by the police in the boat’s master bedroom. She had not remembered the scarf until the police questioned her about it the following morning. She had not remembered either the scarf or the shoes until I later questioned her about them.
I was wondering now what else she had forgotten to tell me.
Perhaps prompted by the Tolands’ obsession with keeping their decks pristine, I now took off my own shoes and asked Andrew to remove his as well. Officer Gergin looked at us both as if we were slightly deranged and made not the slightest move to unlace his highly polished black brogans.
We all went below.
There is something about a room where a murder has been committed. This was not in actuality a “room”; there are no rooms as such aboard seagoing vessels, although “staterooms” are called rooms and “shower rooms” are called rooms, but these are truly compartments, as was this “dining saloon” we passed through which was, in fact, a dining room. Enough already. Shoeless, we padded in our socks to the master stateroom, Gergin clumping along behind us in his thick-soled regulation shoes.
If there is one area aboard a boat that truly looks like a room, it is the stateroom. Perhaps this is because it’s dominated by a bed, in this case a queen-size bed with cabinets flanking it and reading lights above it. The master bath, or the “en suite head” as it was nautically called, was on the port side of the bed, and there was a bank of dressers and several closets on the starboard side. Just opposite the foot of the bed, and flanking the entrance door to the cabin, there were glass-doored, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
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