Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “So what’s the offer?” she asks.

  “To the point,” he says.

  “Directly to the point,” she says.

  “Good old Lainie.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  At first, the offer sounds terrific.

  What he’s proposing is that instead of Toyland coming out in competition with whoever decides to manufacture her bear—Ideal or Mattel, either one, he has ears all over the trade, and he knows there’s keen interest at each company…

  “Which I think is wonderful for you, Lainie, you’re so talented, and it’s time you were rewarded for the hard years of apprenticeship you’ve put in…”

  Which appraisal she doesn’t quite accept since she’s had half a dozen toys already produced and marketed, for Christ’s sake, and that ain’t no apprenticeship, thank you. But she says nothing, just listens for now, sipping at her Perrier, watching him across the table as he pours more Scotch over the ice in his glass.

  He tells her that he recognizes a bidding situation might very well develop between Ideal and Mattel, which is why he’s willing now to make a preemptive offer that he hopes she’ll consider satisfactory. What he’s suggesting…

  She leans forward expectantly. In periods of stress, the eye seems to wander mercilessly. She can feel the tug of the muscle shortened twice by surgery. The eye is losing the battle yet another time.

  “Here’s what we want to do, Lainie. Toyland is willing to manufacture your bear, using your copyrighted design and your trademarked name…”

  She recognizes this as a victory.

  “…and compensating you by way of a substantial advance against generous royalties…”

  “How substantial? How generous?”

  “To be mutually agreed upon, Lainie. I promise you, no one’s trying to take advantage of you here.”

  “You’ll call the bear Gladly?”

  “Just as you have it.”

  “My design? For the bear and the eyeglasses?”

  “Exactly to your specifications.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. I just don’t want to have to go through this whole damn mess, Lainie.”

  Which means he believes Santos will decide against him.

  “So if you think what I’m suggesting is something doable,” he says, “maybe you can have Matthew call my attorney…”

  She notices that he does not refer to him familiarly as “Sidney,” he is now merely “my attorney,” perhaps because he’s concluded the infringement case is already lost…

  “…so they can work out the advance and the royalties, and prepare transfers of copyright and trademark. How does that sound?”

  “Transfers?”

  “Yes. Toyland would want an outright assignment of all rights to the bear and its name.”

  “Outright?”

  “Which, I’m sure, any other company would insist on.”

  “An outright assignment of all rights?”

  “Forever,” Brett says.

  “Forever,” she repeats.

  “Yes. Well, Lainie, I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to you. If we’re to try making a success of the bear, we’d have to be certain beforehand that we have the irrevocable right to manufacture it for the life of the copyright.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of a licensing agreement.”

  “A transfer, an assignment, a license, all the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sure neither Ideal nor Mattel would sign a limited licensing agreement.”

  “It sounds to me as if they might.”

  She is lying. The feelers from both companies have been tentative pending resolution of the copyright problem.

  “Well, perhaps so, who knows, stranger things have happened. But we’re willing to go a long way on royalties, Lainie, and on subsidiary rights to…”

  “What do you mean, a long way?”

  “Escalation clauses should the bear really take off. Bonuses premised on performance. A huge share of subsidiary rights…”

  “Like what?”

  “Who knows? A television show? A movie? Whatever. The percentages would be heavily loaded in your favor.”

  “What sort of control would I have, Brett?”

  “We would guarantee the quality of the product.”

  “But what control would I have?”

  “I think you know what the Toyland logo stands for. Besides, your compensation would ensure optimum performance on our part.”

  Which sounds like double-talk to her.

  “How does it sound to you in general outline?” Brett asks.

  “I’m not sure. I’ll have to discuss it with Matthew,” she says, and puts down her glass, and is sliding her way out of the banquette when Brett puts his hand on her arm.

  “Lainie,” he says, “I wish we could shake hands on this tonight.”

  “No, I can’t. Not until I talk to him.”

  “Santos has promised a decision by the twenty-second.”

  “Well, he’s shooting for that.”

  “End of the month, for sure. “You can lose, you know.”

  “Then why are you offering a deal?”

  “I want things to be the way they were between you and the company.”

  “Maybe they will. Let me talk to Matthew.”

  “When will you do that?”

  “I’ll try him when I get home.”

  “Will you let me know?”

  “As soon as we’ve discussed it.”

  He extends his hand. She takes it. They shake hands. The forty-five is lying on the table, alongside the bowl of limes.

  “That’s the last time I saw him alive,” she tells me.

  Warren sat in the dark, waiting for her to get home. This was not going to be a kidnapping, per se. In Florida law, the term “kidnapping” was defined as “forcibly, secretly, or by threat confining, abducting, or imprisoning another person against his will and without lawful authority…”

  All of which Warren planned to do.

  “With intent to…”

  And these were the key words.

  “With intent to hold for ransom or reward or as a shield or hostage, or to commit or facilitate commission of any felony, or to inflict bodily harm or to terrorize the victim or another person, or to interfere with the performance of any government or political function.”

  None of which Warren planned to do.

  So what this would be was false imprisonment, which was defined in the statutes as “forcibly, by threat, or secretly confining, abducting, imprisoning or restraining another person without lawful authority and against his will…”

  And here’s where the difference came in.

  “With any purpose other than those referred to in Section 787.01,” which was the kidnapping section of the statutes.

  Add to that the B&E, because he had once again unlawfully forced the door to her apartment the moment he saw her driving off in her faded green Chevy at ten o’clock tonight. He sat just inside that door now, where he could hear her key the moment she inserted it in the keyway. He had dragged a chair in from the kitchen and had placed it just to the side of the door, the bottle sitting on the floor beside him, the cap on it.

  Somewhere outside, church bells began bonging the hour.

  In the stillness of the apartment, he listened.

  Eleven P.M.

  He checked his watch.

  He was two minutes fast.

  Or the church was two minutes slow.

  Or maybe it took two minutes for the bells to ring eleven times. This made him wonder if any clock in the world was precise. Because in the second it took for the sweep hand to move to the next number, wasn’t the second already gone? Or if a digital watch read 11:02:31, as his watch now read, wasn’t it already past 11:02:31 by the time the…well, there it was already 11:02:32, forget it, 11:02:33, 11:02:34, damn metaphysics could drive a person nuts.

  He heard footsteps outsid
e on the covered walkway that led past the apartments. High heels clicking. Lady must’ve got all dolled up to go do her marketing, he wondered where she was shopping these days.

  Footfalls stopped just outside the door.

  She was home.

  He picked up the bottle, gently lifted the chair out of the way.

  Set it down well clear of the door.

  Key sliding into the keyway now.

  Uncapped the bottle.

  Reached into his pocket.

  Lock turning, tumblers falling.

  He backed against the wall to the side of the door.

  Braced himself.

  The door opened. She closed it behind her. Locked it. Was reaching for the light switch…

  “Hello, Toots,” he said.

  “Warren?” she said, turning toward him, and he clamped the chloroform-soaked pad over her face.

  3

  She opened her eyes.

  The room was pitching and rolling, took her a minute to realize she was on a boat, and that her right wrist was handcuffed to something bolted to the wall or the bulkhead or whatever they called it. It was dark in the V-shaped space where she was lying on her back, she figured she was up front in the boat, the space coming to a kind of a point this way. Some sort of foam mattress under her, this had to be a sleeping compartment.

  She remembered Warren all at once, standing there in the dark inside the door to her apartment and she called his name sharply—”Warren?”—like an angry mother or older sister screaming for a rotten kid to get here right this fucking minute if he knew what was good for him, handcuffing her to the wall this way. But nobody came, and all at once she wondered if it was, in fact, Warren driving the boat and not some fisherman he’d hired to take her to Mexico and sell her into prostitution.

  The boat was moving, that was for sure, so there had to be someone up there, or out there, or wherever the steering wheel was, if that’s what you called it, she hadn’t been on too many boats in her lifetime. She brought her left wrist close to her face in the dark and looked at the luminous dial of her watch, ten minutes past two, where the hell were they?

  “Warren?” she called again, same imperious Get-Your-Ass-in-Here tone, and this time she heard a sound from what she guessed was the back of the boat, the rear, the aft, whatever, and she heard footfalls coming down what she supposed were steps, a ladder, and then through the boat toward where she was sitting up now, short skirt hiked kind of high on her legs, still wearing all her clothes, she noticed, including her high-heeled shoes.

  A light snapped on.

  She squinted her eyes against it.

  She could now see that a low wall divided the sleeping area from what appeared to be a dining area with leatherette banquettes around a Formica-topped table, and then another low wall separated this area from the food preparation area—well, a small kitchen actually, well, a galley, she guessed you called it. So what this appeared to be was a single somewhat smallish section of the boat, what you might call a cabin, she supposed, divided by these very low walls, these bulkheads, and through the cabin came Warren, waltzing on over and ducking his head because of the low ceiling, or overhead, she hated boats.

  “Okay, what is this?” she asked.

  “What is what?”

  “Why am I chained to the wall? Where’d you get the hardware?” she asked, rattling the handcuff on her wrist.

  “St. Louis P.D.”

  “You still got the key?”

  “Yes, I’ve…”

  “Then unlock it,” she said, and shook her wrist again.

  “Sorry, Toots.”

  “Well, first we’ve got the B&E,” she said, “I figure that for a good fifteen years. And then we’ve got the kidnapping…”

  “False imprisonment,” he said.

  “Thank you. Which should add another five to your tab. So how about unlocking these cuffs right this fucking minute and turning this barge around and taking me back home, and we’ll forget the whole thing, okay?”

  “No,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “I ask again, Warren. What is this?”

  “It’s cold turkey,” Warren said.

  At nine o’clock that Friday morning, the fifteenth day of September, the grand jury listened to the witnesses Pete Folger had invited to testify on behalf of the people of the state of Florida. At six minutes before noon, the jurors returned a true bill signed by the jury foreman and requesting the state attorney to file an indictment for first-degree murder.

  Folger called me in my office ten minutes later. He told me he’d got the true bill he was seeking, and said he was now going to ask that bail be denied my client, and that she be taken into custody. He also mentioned that as a matter of courtesy he would have someone in his office type up a list of the witnesses who’d testified today, in the hope that I would talk to them myself, as soon as possible, and then be willing to discuss a deal that would save his office a lot of time and the state a huge electricity bill.

  I called Lainie to tell her the bad news and to advise that I’d be requesting bail be continued as set…

  “Do you think it will be?”

  “Yes, I feel certain it will.”

  “Good, because I’ve been invited to a party,” she said. “All at once, I’m a celebrity.”

  “Don’t say a word about the case.”

  “Of course not.”

  “They’ll want to know. Just tell them your lawyer says you can’t discuss anything about it. If they persist, walk away.”

  “I will. Thank you, Matthew.”

  “The state attorney’s already mentioned a deal. I think that’s a good sign.”

  “Why do we need a deal?” she asked.

  “We don’t.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Do you know?”

  “Yes, I do. Where’s your party?”

  “On the Rosenberg yacht,” she said.

  “Small world,” I said.

  She had heard him banging around in the galley as she lay on the foam mattress that had no sheet on it, trying to keep her skirt tucked around her legs, everything feeling sticky with salt, she hated boats, her right arm extended uncomfortably behind her head, the wrist handcuffed to what she now realized was some sort of stainless-steel grab rail bolted to the bulkhead. When she sat up, she could see him standing at the small stove on the port side of the boat, to the left of the ladder leading below. Cooking smells filled the vessel.

  He finally brought in some scrambled eggs and browned sausage and whole-wheat toast and coffee, carrying everything in on a tray which he put down on the berth in front of her.

  The first thing she said was, “Who’s driving this thing?”

  “We’re drifting.”

  “Won’t we run into something?”

  “We’re thirty miles out. There’s nothing anywhere near us.”

  “Take off the cuff.”

  “No,” he said.

  “How can I eat with my hand chained to the wall?”

  “Use your left hand. Or I can feed you if you like.”

  “I don’t need your help,” she said, and picked up the fork with her left hand and began eating, sitting with her legs crossed Indian fashion on the berth. He watched her.

  “You’re making a mistake, you know,” she said.

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, Warren. I’m still clean.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said.

  “Well, I really don’t know where you’re getting your information, but I can promise you…”

  “I found some empty crack vials in your bathroom trash basket,” he said.

  “Why’d you go to my apartment in the first place?”

  “I guess I know the signs of cocaine addiction, Toots.”

  “You had no right.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  “Sure, chained to the wall.”

  “Would you stay on this boat otherwise?”

/>   “Warren, you have to let me go. Really.”

  “No.”

  “Warren, I don’t need anyone to look after me, really. I’m a big girl now.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, too, Toots.”

  “I’m not doing drugs again,” she said. “Do you think I’m crazy? Those were perfume samples. The vials look…”

  “Sure.”

  “…just like crack vials.”

  “How about the ones I found in your handbag?”

  “I don’t know what you found in my handbag. You had no right going through my handbag. You have no right doing any of this. What’d you find in my handbag that gives you the right to…?”

  “Crack vials, Toots.”

  “I told you. Perfume samples…”

  “With rocks in them.”

  “You’re mistaken.”

  “No, Toots, I’m not mistaken. I know what crack rocks look like.”

  “Someone must’ve…”

  “How about the pipe?”

  “Was there a pipe, too? Someone must’ve dropped all that stuff in my bag. People do all sorts of…”

  “Sure.”

  “…crazy things. To make a person look bad. Or just cheap. Anyway, you had no right. When did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Go through my bag.”

  “Last night. Right after I got you on the boat.”

  “You have no right doing any of this. Whose boat is it, anyway?”

  “Friend of mine’s.”

  “Keeping me prisoner this way. No right at all. He’ll be in trouble, too, you know.”

  “Nobody’s in trouble but you, Toots. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I don’t need you here, Warren. All I need you to…”

  “No.”

  “I’m not doing dope. I don’t need a guardian. I don’t need a warden. I don’t need you to look after me, Warren. All I need you to do is take off these fucking cuffs!”

  “No.”

  “Warren, I have to be left alone to do what I want to do.”