Duma Key(139)

I handed the phone to Hadlock and went back around the desk to Wireman.

"Christ Jesus," he said. "I knew we shouldn't have brought her, I knew... but she was so f**king insistent."

"Is she out?" I looked at her, slumped in her chair. Her eyes were open, but they looked vacantly at a point in the far corner. "Elizabeth?" There was no response.

"Was it a stroke?" Wireman asked. "I never knew they could be so violent."

"That was no stroke. Something shut her up. Go to the hospital with her-"

"Of course I'll-"

"And if she says anything else, listen."

Hadlock came back. "They're waiting for her at the hospital. An ambulance will be here any minute." He stared hard at Wireman, and then his look softened. "Oh, all right," he said.

"Oh all right?" Wireman asked. "What does that mean, oh all right?"

"It means if something like this was going to happen," Hadlock said, "where do you think she would have wanted it to happen? At home in bed, or in one of the galleries where she spent so many happy days and nights?"

Wireman took in a deep, shaky breath, let it out, nodded, then knelt beside her and began to brush at her hair. Elizabeth's face was patchy-red in places, and bloated, as if she were having an extreme allergic reaction.

Hadlock bent and tilted her head back, trying to ease her terrible rasping. Not long after, we heard the approaching warble of the ambulance.

viii

The show dragged on and I stuck it out, partly because of all the effort Dario, Jimmy, and Alice had put into the thing, but mostly for Elizabeth. I thought it was what she would have wanted. My moment in the sun, she'd called it.

I didn't go to the celebratory dinner afterwards, though. I made my excuses, then sent Pam and the girls on with Kamen, Kathi, and some others from Minneapolis. Watching them pull away, I realized I hadn't made arrangements for a ride to the hospital. While I was standing there in front of the gallery, wondering if Alice Aucoin had left yet, a beat-to-shit old Mercedes pulled up beside me, and the passenger window slid down.

"Get in," Mary Ire said. "If you're going to Sarasota Memorial, I'll drop you off." She saw me hesitate and smiled crookedly. "Mary's had very little to drink tonight, I assure you, and in any case, the Sarasota traffic goes from clogged to almost zero after ten PM the old folks take their Scotch and Prozac and then curl up to watch Bill O'Reilly on TiVo."

I got in. The door clunked when it shut, and for one alarming moment I thought my ass was going to keep descending until it was actually on Palm Avenue. Finally my downward motion stopped. "Listen, Edgar," she said, then hesitated. "Can I still call you Edgar?"

"Of course."

She nodded. "Lovely. I couldn't remember with perfect clarity what sort of terms we parted on. Sometimes when I drink too much..." She shrugged her bony shoulders.

"We're fine," I said.

"Good. As for Elizabeth... not so good. Is it?"

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. The streets were almost deserted, as promised. The sidewalks were dead empty.

"She and Jake Rosenblatt were a thing for awhile. It was pretty serious."

"What happened?"

Mary shrugged. "Can't say for sure. If you forced me to guess, I'd say that in the end she was just too used to being her own mistress to be anyone else's. Other than on a part-time basis, that is. But Jake never got over her."

I remembered him saying Fuck the rules, Miss Eastlake! and wondered what he had called her in bed. Surely not Miss Eastlake. It was a sad and useless bit of speculation.

"Maybe this is for the best," Mary said. "She was guttering. If you'd known her in her prime, Edgar, you'd know she wasn't the sort of woman who'd want to go out that way."

"I wish I had known her in her prime."

"Can I do anything for your family?"

"No," I said. "They're having dinner with Dario and Jimmy and the whole state of Minnesota. I'll join them later if I can maybe for dessert and I'm booked into the Ritz, where they're all staying. If nothing else, I'll see them in the morning."

"That's nice. They seemed nice. And understanding."

Pam actually seemed more understanding now than before the divorce. Of course now I was down here painting and not up there yelling at her. Or trying to staff her with a butter-fife.

"I'm going to praise your show to the skies, Edgar. I doubt if that means much to you tonight, but perhaps it will later on. The paintings are just extraordinary."

"Thank you."

Ahead, the lights of the hospital were twinkling in the dark. There was a Waffle House right next door. It was probably good business for the cardiac unit.

"Will you give Libby my love, if she's in any condition to take note of such things?"

"Sure."

"And I have something for you. It's in the glove compartment. Manila envelope. I was going to use it to bait the hook for a follow-up interview, but f**k it."

I had some problems with the old car's glove compartment button, but finally the little door fell open like a corpse's mouth. There was a lot more than a manila envelope in there a geologist could have taken core-samples probably going back to 1965 but the envelope was in front, and it had my name printed on it.