Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (14 page)

“Even so.”

“Come on, Warr. I’m not a desperado.”

“Not yet.”

“I’m not hooked. You’re making a mistake. You see me clawing at the walls?”

“Bulkheads.”

“You see me?”

“That’s not what happens, Toots.”

“That crack you found, somebody was trying to make me look bad, that’s all.”

“Sure.”

“Come on, let me go upstairs, get some air. You keep me chained to the wall like an animal I’m liable to go crazy.”

“I don’t want you jumping overboard.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You’ve kicked it before, Toots. You know
exactly
what you’re liable to do.”

“I can’t swim. Why would I jump overboard?”

“Gets too bad.”

“It’s not
going
to get bad. How many times do I have to tell you I’m…”

“How do you feel now?”

“Terrific. How do I look?”

She put her hands on her hips, lifted her chin like a model, turned to him in profile, took in a deep breath. She was wearing
the same short black skirt she’d had on when he’d snatched her from the condo on Thursday night, wrinkled now, that and the
thin yellow blouse, also wrinkled, her legs bare, the high-heeled black shoes up forward where she was handcuffed to the wall
when she wasn’t complaining about the toilet facilities.

“You look fine,” he said.

“So let me go upstairs, okay?”

He looked at her closely.

She didn’t seem any the worse for wear, considering she hadn’t had a hit since sometime Thursday. He didn’t know whether she’d
beamed up at a crack house someplace before coming home with her new stash, the ten jumbo vials he’d found in her handbag,
four big juicy rocks in each vial. But that would’ve made it late Thursday night, say ten, eleven o’clock, and this was now
a little past three on Saturday afternoon, which made it—what? Forty hours or so since she’d been off the pipe? Eight hours
to go for two full days, yet she wasn’t showing any of the signs he’d expected. Either she was a damn good actress or she
was really telling the…

No, he thought, don’t fall for that shit.

She is Tootsie Pipehead, and I am the Man.

“Please, Warren,” she said. “Just for a few minutes. Smell a little fresh air.”

“Just for a few minutes,” he said.

Two reasons she wanted to go up on deck.

First was to keep on working him, make him believe she was sane and sound, just a dear old friend wanting a breath of fresh
air, look at me, do I look like a person craving
cocaine,
for Christ’s sake? I am little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, and all I want is to go back to the Land of the Free and the Home of
the Brave. One thing she
didn’t
want was to show him what she was
really
feeling this very fucking minute. Because if she could convince him she was really straight, that this was all some kind
of
bizarre
mistake, why then she could get him to turn this fucking tub around and take her back to Crack City. If she could keep him
thinking she was just the Nice Little Girl Next Door, breathing in all this clean fresh healthy air ten thousand miles from
shore, here in the middle of fucking nowhere, keep him from knowing how much she was missing the shit right now, keep him
from knowing how everything inside her was screaming for a hit right now, couldn’t
sleep
for dreaming of crack, couldn’t stop
thinking
of crack every minute she was awake, if she could only keep him from knowing what she was thinking and feeling here at the
railing of the boat as she looked out at a clear blue afternoon sky over inky-blue water, trying to appear calm and cool and
dignified though her skirt and her blouse were wrinkled and her mind was screaming crack.

Ten seconds was all it took.

Two glass stems stuck in the glass bowl of the pipe. You drop the crack pellet in the larger stem and heat the frog with a
butane torch till it melts down to a cooked brown ooze. “You suck on the shorter stem like you’re pulling a lover’s tongue
into your mouth, kissing that sweet mother crack, fine white cloud swirling up in the bowl of the pipe, swirling, sweet suicide
flying to your brain in ten seconds flat, man, you got a piece of the mountain, man, you are beaming up, man, Scottie got
the
rock,
man, you are in
explosion
mode!

And oh that first sweet flash, oh that incomparable rush, puffing at the mother lode, sucking on the source, warp speed now,
oh how good, oh how fucking
ec
-static, oh come fuck me, crack, come be my lover, come be my man, come make me laugh out loud, come make me strong and powerful,
come make me happy, happy, happy, make me come, make me giggly happy, crazy happy, I am so
alive,
so fucking
married
to this delicious fucking Rock of
Gibraltar
!

God, how she wanted it.

Now!

Right this fucking minute.

But no, just be Shirley Temple here at the boat’s rail, blond hair blowing in the wind, she once blew a Japanese man for the
twenty dollars she needed for the rocks. He kept telling her he liked “bronze,” she thought he meant the metal, realized he
was talking about girls with yellow hair, the things she’d done for crack, the twists she’d worked for crack. She’d blow a
thousand fucking Japs right this minute if somebody would only return her pipe and the rocks she’d bought last Thursday night,
a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of the shit, he hadn’t thrown it
overboard,
had he? Only a crazy person would do that, he wasn’t a crazy person.

So first, let him think everything’s hunky-dory sweetie, here’s Peggy Sue Got Married, sniffing in the good salt air, not
a
thought
of any controlled substance on
her
mind, oh dear no, cocaine, what is that? Crack, what is that? I never heard of such things, sir, I am just a little farm
girl from the heartland of America, far from the shore, adrift on a sea of little-girl happiness, sniffing in the good clean
ocean air. Me a druggie? Oh dear no. Me a crackhead? What does that mean, sir, crackhead?

Let him think I’m clean and sober, let him think he’s made a mistake, it was just somebody trying to set me up, frame me,
putting evil substances in my trash basket and my purse, trying to make people think I’m
using
again when I wouldn’t even know where to go to score.

And
then
find where he stashed the rocks he took from my bag Thursday night.

Stuff had to be
somewhere
aboard this tub, he
couldn’t
have thrown it overboard, could he?

You son of a bitch, she thought, tell me you didn’t throw it overboard.

She was sure he’d kept it. Because some well-meaning jackasses, you know, they didn’t realize how desperate you could get
when you were forced to kick it cold turkey. So they kept some of the stuff around thinking they could give you just a little
bit of it if you started acting crazy, just a teensy-weensy little bit to take the edge off if you started bugging. Just till
you straightened out a bit, you know? And then let you go without anything for a slightly
longer
time this time, before they gave you another hit of the pipe, acting as a sort offender, loving counselor, you know, helping
you through this terrible ordeal of what was known in the trade as Drug Withdrawal, never once realizing that cold turkey
is cold turkey, man, and cocaine plays no fucking part in rehabilitation.

But he’d been a cop once, he knew better than to try
weaning
a crack addict from the pipe, he’d worked sections in St. Louis could curl the hair on a dachshund. So why
would
he have kept any of it? Coast Guard out here stops the boat, finds ten jumbos and a pipe, there goes Warren Chambers
and
the cute little blonde he’s got handcuffed to the wall. Nice story, Sambo, you’re helping the cunt kick it cold turkey, then
what are you doing with this shit, can you tell us that? No
way
he would’ve kept it.

But just in case…

Just on the
off chance
he had a soft heart for someone so severely afflicted, addicted,
yearning
for the rock,
aching
for the rock,
dying
for the rock, then maybe there was one chance in a hundred million that he had kept some of the stuff to ease her pain when
push came to shove, and
maybe,
if only she could convince him to give her free rein of the boat…

Shit, she wasn’t going to jump over the side.

Or hit him on the head.

Or do anything else foolish.

So if only she could sort of roam around, you know, loose, you know, instead of chained to the wall, the fucking
bulkhead,
then maybe she could find the stuff and…

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What?”

“Time to go back down.”

She wanted to hit him.

Instead, she smiled dazzlingly and said, “Sure, whatever you say,” and held out her right hand for the cuff.

C
harles Nicholas Werner lived in a Spanish-style house that had been built in Calusa during the early thirties, shortly after
the area was rediscovered, in effect, by a railroad man named Abner Worthington Hopper. Before then, the city’s growth was
lethargic at best, the 1910 population of 840 people growing to but a mere 2,149 a full decade later. But then came Hopper,
and suddenly the town became a proper city of more than 8,000 people, and all at once Calusa was on the map as a resort destination.
Building his own Spanish-style mansion on choice Gulf-front property, Hopper then built a hotel to accommodate the multitude
of guests he and his wife Sarah invited down each winter. The mansion was now the Ca D’Oro Museum and the hotel was a fenced
derelict perilously close to U.S. 41.

The museum housed an only fair collection of Baroque art, of which Calusa was inordinately proud; when you were the self-proclaimed
Athens of Southwest Florida, you had to boast about your cultural treasures, however second-rate they might be. Restoration
groups were constantly promising to remodel and refurbish the hotel, which had deteriorated over the past six decades from
lavish and lush to comfortable and cozy to faded and worn to shabby and decrepit. Recent talk was of tearing it down and replacing
it with a shopping mall.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Werner house was the only hacienda-type structure on either side of the narrow canal running behind it. Pink stucco walls
and a roof of glazed orange tiles, arched windows that smacked of Saracen influence, exotic-looking peaks and minarets greeted
Andrew and me as we walked from where I’d parked my Acura to the arched mahogany front door. There was a fair amount of boat
traffic on the canal. This was the beginning of the weekend—well, four o’clock on what remained of Saturday afternoon—and
a popular boaters’ activity was cruising the backwaters of the city’s myriad canals, ogling the sometimes lavish homes on
their banks. A wrought-iron doorbell fashioned to look like an opening black rose was situated on the jamb to the right of
the door. Andrew pressed the push button positioned like a single white eye at the center of it. We heard footsteps approaching
the door.

Despite the wealth down here in sunny Calusa, there are very few live-in housekeepers anymore, and seeing one of them in a
proper maid’s uniform is as rare as spotting a wild panther. The maid who answered Andrew’s ring was in her early twenties,
I supposed, a beautiful black woman wearing a black uniform with a little white cap and apron and collar. We told her who
we were and whom we were here to see, and she said,
“Pase, por favor. Le diré que está aquí.”
I wondered if she had a green card.

We were standing in a hallway floored with blue tile and lined with Moorish columns. Beyond, at the center of the house, was
a secluded cloister riotously blooming with flowers. Late afternoon sunlight pierced the colonnaded stillness. We could hear
the maid’s footfalls padding through the house. Out on the canal, the sound of a boat’s engine spoiled the sullen stillness.

Werner, wearing shorts and sandals and nothing else, came from somewhere at the back of the house, walking briskly toward
where Andrew and I were waiting. He was a short, gnomic man who looked a lot like Yoda, somewhat bandy-legged, very brown
from the sun, with twinkling blue eyes and a fringe of white hair circling his head. His handshake was firm. He told us he
was happy to be of assistance and then led us to the back of the house where a pool sparkled and shimmered under the sun.

I detected for the first time a faint Southern accent when he asked if we’d care for anything to drink, “Some whiskey, gen’lemen?
Beer? Iced tea?” But we told him we didn’t want to take up too much of his time, and got to work at once, setting up the recorder
on a low white plastic cube and sitting around it on expensive Brown Jordan lawn furniture. The boat that had earlier entered
the canal was now making its way back to the Intercoastal. A sign on a stanchion across the canal warned NO WAKE ZONE. We
waited until the boat was clear, and turned on the recorder.

Werner told us essentially what he had told the grand jury. At ten forty-five this past Tuesday night, he had been guiding
his sloop—a twenty-five-foot centerboard, under power, and with a spotlight showing the way—toward his slip at the club’s
dock. There are sixty slips in the marina. He had passed on the approach to
his
slip the yawl
Toy Boat,
with its cockpit lights on and a blond man and woman sitting at the table drinking. He had recognized the man as Brett Toland,
with whom he had a passing acquaintance at the club.

“Did you recognize the woman?” I asked.

“I had never seen her before in my life,” Werner said.

I kept trying to pinpoint his accent. I guessed maybe North Carolina.

“Have you seen that same woman since?”

“Yes, suh,” Werner said. “I was shown her photograph at the grand jury hearing.”

“Just
one
photo?” I asked. “Or were there…?”