“Yeah, yeah, you said.” Nell licked some spilled martini off the back of her hand.
The sight of her tongue gave Fin a semi-woody! He adored her broken nose! “I give blood every month, so I’m always getting tested.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she mumbled, signaling to the waitress for another round.
“You know what I hate about young actors?” Fin said. “Most of them don’t even drink.”
“Know what I hate about all male cops?” Nell said. “They do.”
“It doesn’t pay to tomcat around in singles bars, not in these times,” Fin said. “I mean, some of the cops I work with? When they sober up they have to sit in a tub full of chlorine bleach for two days. I mean, if you caught a rear view of them in the shower you’d run and call the orangutan wrangler at the San Diego Zoo.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she said, sitting up tall and crossing her legs, causing her skirt-slit to reveal her entire thigh.
“You sure are in good shape for your … you sure are in good shape,” he said. “Do you jog or something?” Of course he well remembered her back in her youthful jogging days: Foglights Salter!
“I’m in good shape for any age, bucko!” she said, truculently.
“You sure are,” he said, slumping a bit, figuring that submissive gestures are best when boozy babes get pugnacious.
When the waitress put the drinks down she looked doubtfully at the two dipsos.
Nell said to Fin, “You’re not very tall, are you?”
“None of us actors are as tall as you imagined,” he said, with a hiccup. “Excuse me,” he said, and did it again.
“I guess you’re right,” Nell said. “Bogart stood on a milk crate when he did love scenes with Ingrid Bergman.”
“James Cagney was even shorter,” Fin said earnestly. “None of us are tall.”
“If I was wearing tall heels, would you be embarrassed to dance with me?”
He thought it’d be tricky to walk, let alone dance, but he said gallantly, “Just tell me if you wanna dance. We could go somewhere. I do all the Latin steps.”
“No, I don’t wanna dance!” she said, exasperated, and this time her elbow slipped. “I just wanna know how secure you really are. I never met a secure male cop in my whole entire life!”
“My third ex-wife was six foot one,” Fin explained. “Barefoot. She taught me to tango and I was never embarrassed with my face pressed to her bosom. But being married to her was like Fatal Attraction Two. Before we split up she accused me of dating other babes, and she started putting cockroaches in the toaster. I don’t know where she got the cockroaches because she was a clean person, I have to give her that much. Life with her was a game of Dungeons and Dragons. If we’d had a kid that turned out like her, I’d’ve had it put to sleep.”
“I don’t believe all this!” Nell said, much louder than she realized.
The bartender shook his head at the cocktail waitress: No more booze!
“That’s paranoid,” she said. “Cockroaches! You’re just proving you’re a typical insecure male cop!”
“I’m not paranoid,” he said, gravely. “She turned the toaster into a cockroach condo. I checked every inch of the apartment and there were no cockroaches anywhere else. It had to be her. I think maybe she was trying to justify sleeping with half the San Francisco Giants one afternoon before a double-header with the Padres. There were a lotta tired puppies on the field that night, I can tell you.”
“Was she good-looking?”
“Actually, my conscious mind no longer remembers anything about her physical appearance. She went the way of my seventh-grade French.”
“Fin!” she cried suddenly. “I got a flash for you. We’re hammered. Smashed. Fried. Tanked. Both of us. I haven’t been like this in years!”
“That doesn’t scare me,” he said, fumbling for the money in his wallet and holding a bill up to the light, not wanting her to see that he had to wear reading glasses. “Every time I got married I was cold sober, so being drunk doesn’t scare me.”
“Take me to my car,” she said. “I can’t have dinner. I’m not feeling well.”
“We could go to my apartment,” he said. “It’s very close. Want a nightcap?”
“No! I can’t drink any more!”
“You could have a crème de menthe,” he suggested. “And pretend it’s prom night.”
Suddenly she grabbed him by the lapel and put her bent nose inches from his, saying, “Don’t … you … get it? We are blitzed! How did this happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, unable to stop hiccuping. “I’m not that much of a drinker. I think it’s probably our age. I’m forty-five, Nell. All I can see in my future is answering those TV commercials where they give a free prostate check to volunteers over forty-five. Do you know how frightening it is? Turning forty-five?”
She leaned into him and they grabbed each other’s shoulder bravely, but unsteadily. Then they stood up and that was tricky too.
The bartender whispered to the waitress: “Perfect friendship, alcohol-induced.”
“I’d like to go to your apartment, Fin,” she confessed to him. “But I can’t do that on a first date.”
“I understand,” he said, feeling queasy, doubting that he could handle this babe anyway, under the circumstances.
“And it’s none of my business,” she continued, as they lurched to the parking lot, “but I don’t think you should get involved with me or that I should get involved with you. You’re kinda cute, but very neurotic.”
“I understand,” he said, and the perfect pals were in the camaraderie mode now, standing beside his Vette, holding each other by the biceps. Foreheads pressed together in a bonding gesture. Perfect pals butting each other like rams.
“I don’t think you should ever get married again, Fin,” she said gravely.
“The whole goddamn College of Cardinals will graduate with their MBAs and drive their kids to school in a Volvo wagon before I get married again,” Fin pledged.
“Let’s go home,” she said, “before you gotta call nine-one-one.”
He managed to drive back to Old Town while Nell dozed. After he arrived, he parked and opened the door for her, noticing that she was getting green around the gills.
But she got out and gamely gave him a peck on the cheek, saying, “You give great blarney. I’ll bet you get lots ’n lots of sleepovers.”
Fin wanted to show her his stage flourish, but he was listing too far and almost toppled over. He settled for his leading-man salute; then he said, “Nell, the unvarnished truth is that my orgasms are so infrequent they oughtta be Roman-numeraled like British monarchs and Rocky movies. But I’m a very sincere person. And an above-average cuddler.”
CHAPTER 16
The first thing that Nell Salter did after arriving at work the next day was to take two aspirin with her coffee, her fifth cup of the morning and her fourth aspirin.
One of the other investigators passed her in the hallway and said, “You don’t look too good.”
“Too much caffeine,” Nell said. “I’m so amped I could jump-start Frankenstein’s monster.”
Nell kept going to the mirror to check for signs of life. Her tongue needed a shave. That goddamn little neurotic got her wasted!
Late in the morning when she felt better she phoned the office of the county medical examiner and spoke with a pathologist, a navy doctor who moonlighted at the morgue when he was not on duty with Uncle Sam.
“FedEx just arrived,” he told Nell. “The specialty lab worked at record speed. What did you tell them?”
“Only that the deceased had expired after a five-minute swim at La Jolla cove. That’s believable considering all the toxic spills around here.”