“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.