Duma Key

" Catch the chair before it goes over! " Wireman roared, but I couldn't - I had only one arm, and Elizabeth was clutching it. Was docked in it.

Hadlock grabbed one of the push-handles and the chair skittered sideways instead of toppling backwards. It struck Jimmy Yoshida's desk. Now Elizabeth was in full seizure mode, jittering back and forth in her chair like a puppet. The snood came loose from her hair and flailed, sparkling, in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Her feet jerked and one of her scarlet pumps went flying off. The angels want to wear my red shoes, I thought, and as if the line had summoned it, blood burst from her nose and mouth.

"Hold her!" Hadlock shouted, and Wireman threw himself across the arms of the chair.

She did this, I thought coldly. Perse. Whoever she is.

"I've got her!" Wireman said. "Call 911, doc, for Christ's sake!"

Hadlock hurried around the desk, picked up the phone, dialed, listened. "Fuck! I just get more dial-tone!"

I snatched it from him. "You must have to dial 9 for an outside line," I said, and did it with the phone cradled between my ear and shoulder. And when the calm-voiced woman on the other end asked me the nature of my emergency, I was able to tell her. It was the address I couldn't remember. I couldn't even remember the name of the gallery.

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 fucking 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."