Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (22 page)

The remaining eight waitresses were absolutely positive they had seen: a dark green Acura, a blue Infiniti, a black Jaguar,
a bluish-black Lexus, a brown Mercedes, a blue Lincoln Continental, a black Cadillac, and/or a grayish BMW. All of them agreed
there was no one in the car. All of them further agreed that the car’s lights were off. One of the assistant chefs said he’d
seen the car—he was the one who claimed it was very definitely a blue GS 300 Lexus—at twenty after eleven when he’d stepped
onto the road for a peaceful smoke, but that it was gone when he left for home at a little before midnight.

Most of which added up to zilch.

Guthrie walked to where he’d parked his own car—neither an Acura, Infiniti, Jaguar, Lexus, Mercedes, Lincoln Continental,
Cadillac,
nor
Beamer, but instead a little red Toyota—unlocked the trunk, and took from it his Polaroid camera and his casting kit.

Then he went out to the shoulder of the road outside the club, where eight different witnesses had seen eight different cars
at eight different times on the night Brett Toland was killed.

There are people who maintain that if you haven’t seen Calusa by boat, you haven’t seen Calusa at all. The house I was renting
was on one of the city’s many beautiful canals, and the boat tied up at the dock was a sailboat I’d bought a few months before
I got shot. When I was married to Susan, we owned a sailboat she’d named
Windbag,
but no one ever said she wasn’t clever. I might have named the new boat
Windbag II,
but Patricia was very touchy about my former wife, and so the boat still wasn’t named some seven months after I’d bought
her.

Patricia, who doesn’t much care for boats, suggested the name
Wet Blanket.
Which is no worse than two lawyers I know who have boats respectively named
Legal Ease
and
Legal Tender.
Another of my friends owns both a discount furniture store and a boat with a big red mainsail. He calls her
Fire Sail.
A dentist I know has a high-powered speedboat he has named
Open Wide.
A gynecologist who has since been sent to prison for molesting one of his patients used to have a boat called
Wading Room.
Another doctor who is still around
should
have been sent to prison for naming his boat simply
Dock.

In Calusa, Florida, there are as many cute names for boats as there are boats on the water. In the entire United States of
America, in fact, there are almost as many cute names for boats as there are cute names for beauty salons. The naming of beauty
salons and boats seems to bring out the worst instincts in everyone on the planet. Show me a city that does not have a beauty
salon called
Shear Elegance
and I will show you a city that does not have a boat named Sir
N. Dippity.

My partner Frank says I should name my new boat
Wet Dream.

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.

H
e 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 mentioned, 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
!