The Naked Detective(11)

Dizzy, nauseous, I wheeled out of the room.

The monitor started beeping, screaming at my back. I'd just made it to the elevator when a clot of doctors and nurses went hurrying by in the opposite direction, scrubs and lab coats rustling behind.





6


Back home, I went not for the Sancerre, not for the Vouvray, but straight, and with an unsteady hand, for a jumbo hit of grappa.

Great, I thought—one hour of playing detective and already I'm reaching for the hard stuff in the middle of the afternoon. How much longer before I sank to swilling the crappy bourbon out of paper cups?

I paced awhile, drinking, trying to forget the hospital, trying not to picture the mayhem of the docs convening over Lefty's bedside, stabbing to replace the pulled-out needles, poking to sedate his ravings, hammering his chest to get his insides back on beat. Awful and familiar images of care as violence, violence as procedure.

Desperate for distraction, I went to the music room. I scanned the wall of disks, pondered, hummed, and could find nothing that I felt like listening to, not one symphony or song I believed would succeed in carrying me away.

This happened once or twice a year, and engendered in me a subtle, simmering dread. If alcohol and music lost their power to soothe me, what the hell was left, short of really going down the tubes? What comforts would persuade me that it was worth even the small trouble I took to maintain my grip? Here's something that busy people in busy places tend to spare themselves the discomfort of noticing: It would be so easy, so ridiculously easy to let go.

This was not a wholesome line of thought, so I took my drink and fled to the porch. I love my porch. It's a haven of passivity, of presence without involvement; a place where worries seem smaller, diluted by the open air. I have a rocking chair angled behind a dense, anarchic jasmine bush. I can look out through the foliage but it's hard for others to look in. I watch the lime-green weevils chomping leaves, the lizards puffing out their ruby throats. I watch the shoeless locals going by, their cracked heels gray and hard against the pedals of their clunker bikes.

After some porch-sitting and half a glass of booze, I finally started calming down. Perspective grew generous; I began to feel, frankly, like I'd been pretty brave. I'd done the right thing. Confronted Lefty, asked the questions Kenny Lukens would have wanted me to ask. Thank God I'd gotten no answers. I had no idea who Lefty thought I was or what was so important in the goddamn pouch. Which meant there was no more I could do. Now I was really finished. Finito. Case closed. That being so, I may as well refresh the chill on my warming drink.

I was working up the initiative to fetch the grappa from the freezer, when a woman stopped her bicycle in front of my house.

She was on an old Conch cruiser that had a lot of style: hand-painted fenders, pink and green, a color scheme that continued on the chain guard, which featured a yin-and-yang motif. Wire baskets, front and back. When she stepped down from the seat, I saw that it was covered with what appeared to be a remnant of a blue shag rug.

She headed for my porch stairs and I hunkered lower behind the jasmine, shrinking from some fresh irritation, some new demand. I took a moment to pray she had a wrong address or was selling raffles. Not noticing me in the shadow of the foliage, she moved to the door and peered, a little nosily, I thought, through the screen. I waited for her to raise her hand to knock, then said, "Can I help you?"

She jumped a little as her face turned sideways, a hand went to her midriff. "You scared me."

"Lately visitors scare me too."

"Are you Pete Amsterdam?"

It sounded faintly like an accusation, and I had an impulse to deny it. Instead I only nodded.

"I'm Kenny Lukens' friend," she said. "Maybe he mentioned me."

Nothing clicked at first, and I looked at her harder. She was not your usual-looking woman, but I was pretty sure that she was female. Her hair was reddish—the kind of red that hides inside of brown then flashes forth in certain types of light. Except for feathered sideburns and a fringe at the nape of her neck, it was fitted closely to her scalp, and reminded me a little of the helmet Snoopy wears when playing pilot. Her dress was basically a long black sleeveless T-shirt, and beneath it her unfettered breasts jiggled slightly in a manner that vinyl could not emulate. Her calves were lean and smooth but she had stood firm against the bourgeois impulse to shave her armpits.

"He mentioned a friend," I stammered at last. "But I guess I thought—"

"That it would be a man," she said. "You figured he meant lover and you figured he was gay."

She had me there. Silly Pete, leaping to conclusions just because a fellow wears a frilly bra.