Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (11 page)

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.

Why
ever,
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.

Rob said he’d been watching all the good work she’d been doing since she sobered up, he was really very proud of her, working
with Warren Chambers, good man, they were the ones cracked the case got Hope shot, weren’t they?

“Well, Morrie Bloom was on it, too,” Toots said, not wanting to take all the credit. “And, anyway, it was Matthew’s legwork
led us in the right direction. It was almost as if he was supervising the case from his hospital bed.”

For some reason, Rob looked very attractive to her. Maybe it was because he’d lost ten, fifteen pounds and was down to what
he called “fighting trim” or maybe it was because he’d been putting in a lot of time on his boat most weekends and had a great
tan…

“You like boats?” he asked. “We could maybe go out on my boat one weekend, you like boats.”

“Yeah, I do,” she said, lying.

The way she felt about boats was that they looked terrific from the shore, but they weren’t particularly great to be on. Even
so, the notion of going out on a boat with Rob one weekend was somewhat appealing, although she couldn’t have said quite why
at that moment. Also, he was wearing his hair differently. Back when they were sitting that whorehouse together, he wore his
brown hair in a very short crew cut that really made him look like a redneck cop, but now it was longer in back and hanging
on his forehead in front, which gave him a sort of boyish look with those clear blue eyes of his, she had never noticed how
startlingly blue his eyes were.

It didn’t occur to her that the reason Rob might have seemed so attractive to her on this day last May when she was feeling
particularly vulnerable and alone was that in the early days of her getting to know cocaine Rob was the man who’d supplied
her with the stuff. He was her source. He was the one who introduced her with a courtly bow to the white lady, and later—when
the only thing that mattered in her life was scoring cocaine and snorting cocaine—he was the one who taught her how to go
out and get it on her own, introduced her to men who would help her earn the money to pay for the stuff she so desperately
needed, became her mentor and her guide, her savior and her salvation. It never occurred to her that in her mind Rob Higgins
would forever be equated with snow or C or blow or toot or Peruvian lady or white girl or leaf or flake or happy dust or nose
candy or freeze or any of the other darling little euphemistic pet names he’d taught her for a drug that could fry your brain
whether you sniffed it up your nose or smoked it in a pipe. It never occurred to her that proximity to Rob meant proximity
to the white powder that had dominated her life for more than two years. It never occurred to her that Rob would forever be
equated with the soaring ecstasy she’d known when she was a user.

“So do you think you’d like to see the boat sometime?” he asked.

“Yeah, maybe,” she said.

She had worn to the hospital a short khaki-colored cotton dress with panels that tied in front to create a sarong look, and
she could tell from the way he was looking at her that he liked the way it showed off her legs and her breasts. It never occurred
to her that she might be in danger. It never occurred to her that Rob Higgins
was
cocaine.

Looking up at her as if the idea has just occurred to him, he said, “How about now?”

On the way over to the marina, he started talking about how many crack users they’d been busting lately right here in little
old Calusa—”The fuckin thing’s an epidemic,” he said, “well, not only here, all over America.” That was because you didn’t
have to
snort
crack the way you did cocaine
powder,
what you did was
smoke
it, which made it appealing to people, especially teenagers, who thought smoking was sophisticated and glamorous, anyway.
But smoking it meant you got your high in ten seconds or less instead of the two minutes or so it took with the dust, because
the drug went straight from the lungs to the brain.

“Although there are people who say it isn’t addictive because of the sodium bicarbonate they use when they’re processing the
drug.”

“What’s the sodium bicarbonate got to do with it?”

“You’re asking me? It’s what makes the crackling sound when you smoke it. The sodium bicarbonate. That’s why it’s called crack.”

“Yeah, but what’s sodium bicarbonate got to do with whether or not it’s addictive.”

“They say it makes it
non
addictive,” Rob said.

“Who says?”

“Addicts,” Rob said, and laughed.

“That’s bullshit,” Toots said. “Crack is freebase cocaine, and cocaine’s addictive, period.”

“Well, not
physically
addictive.”

“No, not physically. But…”

“As well we both know,” he said.

“As well we both know,” she repeated, nodding in acknowledgment, smiling in appreciation of the fact that they’d both been
there and back.

“You hear all
kinds
of crazy stories from these jerks doing crack,” Rob said. “We picked up this guy last Tuesday in a bust we made, he told
us Sigmund Freud was a famous coke user, the shrink, you know?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And that he’d written some kind of medical paper, Freud, about how coke cured indigestion and morphine addiction, and
how it also helped cure asthma, and how it could be used to arouse sexual desire. Anyway, here we are,” he said.

He was all over her the minute they got on the boat.

His hands went up under the short cotton dress, and she felt him hard against her as he pulled her close, and she thought
Hey, I thought you were going to show me your
boat,
but she did nothing to stop him, pressed tighter into him instead, tilting her groin into him, arms going up around his neck,
lips responding when his mouth claimed hers. They half fell, half slid onto one of the berths up forward, in a narrow little
space as tight as a cave, and he slid her panties down over her thighs and her ankles, and spread her wide to him, and she
wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched her down there, sober and celibate went hand in hand. His hands on
her buttocks now, lifting her to him, inside her now, clutching her tight against him, enclosing him, rising to meet him,
Jesus.

He showed her the crack pipe while she was still lying naked on the bed. Stood before her naked himself, tanned everywhere
but on his ass and his still faintly tumescent cock, poor baby. It took a moment for her eyes to move reluctantly to the glass
pipe in his hands. Naked, he sat on the bed beside her.

“Want to see how it works?” he asked.

“I know how it works,” she said, meaning she didn’t want a
demonstration,
for Christ’s sake, they were both clean. But maybe he meant the
principle
of the thing, a demonstration of how it would work if somebody actually
put
crack in it, because she didn’t think he actually had any crack here on this nice boat where he’d just fucked her brains
out. What she figured was the pipe was something he’d picked up busting a crack house someplace in New-town, little war souvenir,
so to speak. She never expected him to open one of the lockers and lift out a little plastic Baggie full of plastic vials
that really did look like the vials perfume samples came in. But there were rock crystals in these vials. There was crack
in these vials.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked.

“You pick up things here and there. Let me show you.”

“Rob…” she started to say, but he said, “Biggest high you ever had, Toots,” and suddenly her heart was pounding fiercely,
and suddenly she was wet again below, as if anticipating sex, when all she anticipated was cocaine.

Now, four months later, miles and miles from shore again, she sat handcuffed to the bulkhead of another boat and felt the
first pangs of a gnawing desire she knew would devour her completely in the days and nights to come.

I kept thinking of
Annie Hall,
where there’s a split screen and Woody Allen is talking to
his
psychiatrist while Diane Keaton is talking to
hers
and the psychiatrists are both asking the same question, “How often do you have sex?” and he answers “Hardly
ever,
” and she answers “All the
time
!” Or words to that effect, it was an old movie.