“I never heard of him.”
“A man wearing a black cape. And a black slouch hat.”
“No. A black cape? No. I didn’t see anyone like that.”
“Lainie, there’s a gap of about an hour and a half between the time you left the boat and the time Etta Toland found the body. If we can place someone else on that boat after you left...”
“I understand the importance. But I didn’t see anyone.”
He had allowed her to use the bathroom again, and now they stood topside, the boat drifting on a mild chop, its running lights showing its position to nothing but a starlit night, not another vessel in sight for as far as the eye could see. They were silent for a very long time.
At last she said, “I’m sorry.”
He said nothing.
“I don’t know how it happened, Warr, I really don’t. I hate myself for letting it happen again.”
He still said nothing, grateful that she was at last admitting she was hooked again, but knowing this was only the beginning, and the hard part lay ahead. Back in St. Louis, Warren had seen too many of them lose the battle, over and over again. Relapse was the technical term for it. Again and again and again. And kicking the habit seemed so very simple at first because what the dealers told you was partially true, cocaine wasn’t addictive. Hey, man, this ain’t heroin, this ain’t morphine, this ain’t no downer like Seconal or Tuinal, this ain’t no tranq like Valium or Xanax, this ain’t even a Miller Lite, man, ain’t no way you gonna get hooked on this shit, man.
True.
Cocaine wasn’t physically addicting.
The lie was in the claim that there was no way this shit could harm you, man, nothing to fear, man, quit anytime you want, man, no pain, no strain. And even this was partially true because when you quit cocaine — when you tried to quit cocaine — you didn’t experience any of the physical symptoms that accompanied withdrawal from the opoids or the tranquilizers or even alcohol. There was no shaking, no sweating, no vomiting, no muscle twitching...
“Did you know...?” he started, and then shook his head and cut himself off.
“What?” she asked.
The night black and silent around them.
“Never mind.”
“Say,” she said.
“Did you know where the expression ‘kicking the habit’ comes from?”
“No. Where?”
“When you’re quitting the opoids, you lie there in your own sweat, and your legs start twitching involuntarily, like they’re kicking out. So it became kicking the habit.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the night enveloped them again.
No muscle twitching when you quit — tried to quit cocaine — no gooseflesh either, no appearance of a plucked turkey, which is where the expression “cold turkey” came from, such a weird and wonderful vocabulary for the horrors of hell, did she know the origin of that one? He didn’t ask.
Thing the man selling poison in a vial forgot to mention was that cocaine was psychologically and emotionally addicting, concepts too lofty for anyone to comprehend, anyway, when what we are selling here is a substance that will make you feel like God.
Oh yes.
So when you quit cocaine — tried to quit cocaine — you were trying to forget that for the last little while, or the last longer while, you were God. No physical symptoms of withdrawal. Just madness.
He was here to see her through the early madness.
Keep her here on this fucking boat while her depression was keenest and the desire to kill herself was strongest. Nobody ever kicked cocaine on a boat. Nobody ever kicked it on the street, either. Later there would be choices for her to make. For now...
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
And he believed she was.
10
The scar-faced detective to whom Guthrie Lamb spoke early on Thursday morning, the twenty-first of September, was named Benjamin Hagstrom. He told Guthrie at once that the scar was a memento of a little knife duel he’d had with a burglar when he was still a uniformed police officer twelve years ago. The duel had been somewhat one-sided in that the burglar had the knife and Hagstrom had nothing but his underwear. That was because the burglary was taking place in Hagstrom’s own condo unit, which he shared with a then stripper named Sherry Lamonte, later to become his wife, subsequently his ex. All of this in the three minutes after the men had shaken hands and introduced themselves.
In the next three minutes, Hagstrom explained that on the night of the attempted burglary Sherry was downtown stripping while Hagstrom himself was doing a little stripping of his own. That was because he’d just got home from a four-to-midnight shift on a very hot Calusa summer night, and had begun undressing the minute he stepped into the apartment, peeling off clothes and dropping them on the floor behind him as he made his way toward the bathroom shower. He was down to his underwear shorts when he stepped into the bedroom and found himself face-to-face with a kid of nineteen, twenty — eighteen, as it later turned out — going through his dresser. Hagstrom had left his holstered gun on the seat of an upholstered living room chair alongside which he’d dropped his uniform pants. Now the teenybopper burglar had a surprised look on his face which matched the one on Hagstrom’s. One thing else the burglar had was a knife, which appeared magically in his right hand. Before Hagstrom could say anything like “Stop, police!” or “Put down the knife, son, before you get yourself in trouble,” or any such warning or admonition that might have detained the burglar from slashing out in panic at Hagstrom, the knife came at him. He put up his hands in self-defense and got cut across both palms, and he backed away in terror and got cut again down the right-hand side of his face...
“This scar you see here now,” he explained, “a beaut, huh?”
Backing away from the flailing knife, he banged up against the dresser, glimpsed a heavy glass ashtray on its top...
“I used to smoke back then...”
...spread his hand wide over it, picked it up, and hit the kid across the bridge of the nose with it and then again on the cheek and again on the right temple, by which time the kid had dropped the knife and there was blood all over the place, from Hagstrom’s hands and face and also from the kid’s bleeding nose and cheek.
“He drew twenty years and was out in seven. I drew twelve stitches and a lifetime souvenir. So what can I do for you, Mr. Lamb?”
“Call me Guthrie.”
“Fine, call me Benny. What can I do for you?”
“September thirteenth?” Guthrie said.
Question mark at the end of it. His little trick. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the prod was all they needed. Not this time.
“What about it?” Hagstrom asked.
“Day after the Toland murder?”
“Yeah?”
“Down at the Silver Creek Yacht Club?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Understand you talked to a night watchman named Henry Karp, who told you...”
“I talked to a lot of people the day after the murder.”
“This one told you he’d seen someone boarding the Toland yacht shortly before the shots were fired.”
“He did, huh?”
“Didn’t he?”
“What if he did?”
“Somebody dressed all in black. Like The Shadow.”
“You’re asking did the S.A.’s Office Squad follow up on it, is that what you’re asking?”