Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  He showed her the crack pipe while she was still lying naked on the bed. Stood before her naked himself, tanned everywhere but on his ass and his still faintly tumescent cock, poor baby. It took a moment for her eyes to move reluctantly to the glass pipe in his hands. Naked, he sat on the bed beside her.

  “Want to see how it works?” he asked.

  “I know how it works,” she said, meaning she didn’t want a demonstration, for Christ’s sake, they were both clean. But maybe he meant the principle of the thing, a demonstration of how it would work if somebody actually put crack in it, because she didn’t think he actually had any crack here on this nice boat where he’d just fucked her brains out. What she figured was the pipe was something he’d picked up busting a crack house someplace in New-town, little war souvenir, so to speak. She never expected him to open one of the lockers and lift out a little plastic Baggie full of plastic vials that really did look like the vials perfume samples came in. But there were rock crystals in these vials. There was crack in these vials.

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  “You pick up things here and there. Let me show you.”

  “Rob…” she started to say, but he said, “Biggest high you ever had, Toots,” and suddenly her heart was pounding fiercely, and suddenly she was wet again below, as if anticipating sex, when all she anticipated was cocaine.

  Now, four months later, miles and miles from shore again, she sat handcuffed to the bulkhead of another boat and felt the first pangs of a gnawing desire she knew would devour her completely in the days and nights to come.

  I kept thinking of Annie Hall, where there’s a split screen and Woody Allen is talking to his psychiatrist while Diane Keaton is talking to hers and the psychiatrists are both asking the same question, “How often do you have sex?” and he answers “Hardly ever,” and she answers “All the time!” Or words to that effect, it was an old movie.

  Patricia wanted to know what I’d meant by my remark about God.

  “I was making a joke. We didn’t really talk about sex.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “He wanted to know how I’d like my steak done.”

  Patricia ignored this.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that raising the topic of sex in Susan’s presence was tantamount to leading a witness.”

  “I didn’t raise the topic. Andrea Lang did.”

  “You were the one who first mentioned sex.”

  “Andrea Lang was the one who asked if people in coma thought about sex.”

  “Chain of custody,” Patricia said. “Tinkers to Evers to Chance. An opening that allowed Susan to testify as an expert. And what’s with you and the Cross-Eyed Cooze?”

  “She’s a client,” I said. “You know that. Talking about her is out of bounds.”

  The professional arrangement Patricia and I have made—as opposed to our personal arrangement, such as it’s been since my recovery, but who’s griping?—is that we simply do not discuss any criminal case I’m working, this to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety between the law firm of Summerville and Hope and the State Attorney’s Office. Since Patricia is one of the brightest stars on the prosecution team headed by Skye Bannister—the unfortunate name with which our eminent state attorney was anointed—and since my office handles a great many noncriminal legal matters, we normally have plenty to talk about when it comes to sharing shoptalk.

  But this wasn’t shoptalk tonight.

  “She really should stop wearing her skirts so short, by the way.”

  “Lainie?”

  “Susan. And she should also stop using your goddamn name.”

  “It’s her goddamn name, too.”

  “Doesn’t she have a maiden name?”

  “Not anymore. She hasn’t been a maiden for many moons now.”

  “Didn’t she once have a maiden name?”

  “Yes, Susan Fitch,” I said.

  “So why doesn’t she go back to it? Why does she have to keep clinging to you?”

  “I wasn’t aware that she was clinging to me.”

  “She came to the hospital every goddamn day.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Even after you woke up. Especially after you woke up. So tonight you give her an opening she could drive a locomotive through.”

  “Andrea gave her the opening.”

  “You were the one who started it. I’m surprised she didn’t just unzip your fly.”

  “Andrea? She hardly knows me.”

  “Or maybe you’d have enjoyed that.”

  “Would’ve given me something to tell God about, anyway,” I said, and was immediately sorry.

  “What does that mean?” Patricia asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  We were in the second-story bedroom of her house on Fatback Key, where first we’d consummated our then-burgeoning romance, moonlight shining through the skylight in the cathedral ceiling as it had been on that autumn night that now seemed so very long ago. Together, we had found each other again and again and again and were surprised and delighted and grateful each and every time. Tonight Patricia was wearing a lacy white teddy, and I was wearing pajama bottoms, which bedtime attire seemed to predict a replay of that passionate night we shared under a waxing September moon too long ago. If tonight had been a movie, this scene would not have been titled “Are You Getting Enough Lately?”

  I started to explain to Patricia that ever since the day she drove me home from the hospital—

  And, oh dear God, how small and sad and forlorn I’d felt on that sunny day last May, how pitiably insufficient, how weak and dependent and utterly incapable of coping I’d felt on that bright hopeless day, no pun intended, but oh dear God it did seem a Hope-less day because the pallid figure sitting beside Patricia was definitely not Matthew Hope but an impostor who had taken his place.

  She could not have known that lying beside her in bed that night four months ago, I had wept silently and secretly, despairing that I would ever regain full strength, cursing God for having allowed me to step into the path of two speeding bullets faster than I was, knowing I would forever be an invalid, a man who’d survived a coma perhaps, but a man who would never be quite himself again, a person to be pitied instead, perhaps despised instead, a person not quite whole.

  “Ever since that day,” I started to say, and she said, “Yes?” and I said, “Ever since that day…” and she waited, and I said, “I’ve been hoping…” and she waited, and I said, “I’m very tired, Patricia, do you think we could talk about this some other time?”

  We climbed into bed, and we lay there beside each other in the silent dark, well not quite dark since moonlight was splashing through the skylight. I was naked from the waist up, and Patricia was naked and long and supple from the waist down, and I thought If I try to make love to her, she’ll back away yet another time because she’s afraid I’ll break into a million pieces.

  I wanted to tell her I would not break into a million pieces.

  I wanted to tell her I was all right again.

  Really.

  We lay still and silent under the moon.

  And at last Patricia sighed and said, “I hate that bitch,” and in a little while we both fell asleep.

  4

  Aside from Etta Toland’s,” I said, “do you recognize any of the other names on that list?”

  We were sitting in the garden behind Lainie’s house. It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning, and I had just handed her the witness list that Pete Folger had hand-delivered to my office at nine. I had not slept well the night before. Neither had Patricia. Folger was all smiles when he suggested that I ask my client to plead to Murder Two and thirty years, rather than risking the electric chair on the Murder One indictment. He wanted to move this along fast, he said. I wondered why.

  Lainie wasn’t wearing glasses this morning.

  Her hair sleep-tousled, no makeup on her face, wearing a red an
d black, floral-print, knee-length kimono sashed at the waist, she sat sipping black coffee under the shade of a pepper tree, squinting at the document I’d just handed her. She was wearing the heart-shaped ring on her pinky; I wondered if she slept with it on. Her legs were crossed. A short baby-doll nightgown in the same floral print showed where the kimono ended high on her thigh. She kept jiggling her foot.

  “I don’t know any of these people,” she said. “Who are these people?”

  “The witnesses who testified to the grand jury.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Well, we don’t know yet. Enough to get an indictment, that’s for sure.”

  “Does he have other witnesses, too?”

  “If not now, then he certainly will by the time we go to trial. But he’ll supply their names when I make demand for discovery.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Within two to three months.”

  “When will you talk to the people on this list?”

  “I’ll start making phone calls today. If I’m lucky, I can begin seeing them on Monday.”

  “To take depositions?”

  “No. Just informally. If they’re willing to talk to me. Otherwise, yes, I’ll have to subpoena them and question them under oath. You see…”

  Lainie glanced up from the typewritten list. A spot of sunlight escaped the snare of leaves above her head, shifted uncertainly in her golden hair. She looked at me expectantly. The wandering eye gave her the forlorn appearance of an abandoned child.

  “You see, Folger’s still hoping we’ll plead.”

  “Why would we?”

  “He’s hoping that after I talk to these people, whoever they are…”

  “Well, who are they, that’s what I’d like to know, too.”

  “I have no idea. But he’s hoping we’ll recognize the strength of his case and accept his offer.”

  “Second-degree murder.”

  “Yes. Second degree means without any premeditated design.”

  “I just shot Brett on the spur of the moment, right?”

  “Well, yes. For second-degree murder, that’s what it would have to be.”

  “Heat of passion, right?”

  “Well, no. That’s a term used in the section on excusable homicide. That wouldn’t apply here.”

  “Especially since I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know that.”

  “So why would I settle for thirty years in jail?”

  “Well, not to exceed thirty.”

  “For something I didn’t do.”

  “I’m not recommending it.”

  “More coffee?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  She leaned over to pour. I watched her.

  “Was your girlfriend angry?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Last night. She seemed angry.”

  “Well…no. Angry about what?”

  “You and I talking together,” she said, and shrugged. The kimono slid slightly off her shoulder, revealing the narrow strap of her nightgown. She adjusted it at once, put down the coffeepot, and looked across the table at me. “Was she?” she asked. “Angry?”

  “No.”

  “Someone told me she’s a state attorney.”

  “That’s right. A very good one.”

  “Do you talk to her about me?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I hope not. Milk?”

  “Please.”

  She poured. I kept watching her.

  “Sugar?”

  “One.”

  She slid the bowl across the table to me.

  “Why was she angry?”

  “It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Then she was angry, right?”

  “As I said…”

  “You’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Right.”

  She was jiggling her foot again. Smiling. Jiggling the foot.

  “I’d hate to go to the electric chair, you see. Just because…”

  “Well, I’ll try to make sure…”

  “Just because my attorney’s sleeping with someone,” she said, overriding my voice. “Giving away my secrets to some woman in bed,” she said. Single eyebrow raised over the crooked right eye. Faint smile still on her mouth.

  “I don’t know any of your secrets,” I said.

  “If you knew them,” she said.

  “I don’t care to know them.”

  “But you are sleeping with her.”

  “Lainie…”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Lainie, if my personal relationship with Patricia Demming intrudes in any way upon my performance as your attorney, I’ll immediately withdraw from the case.”

  “Your performance as my attorney,” she repeated.

  Still smiling.

  “Yes. In fact, if you think I’m not representing you properly…”

  “But I think you are,” she said.

  “Good. I’m happy to hear that.”

  “Besides,” she said, “anything between us is privileged, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  What secrets? I wondered.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The security guard’s name was Bartholomew Harrod.

  If a jury had been present, anything old Bart said would have been instantly and automatically believed. That’s because anyone named after one of the Twelve Apostles could not possibly be lying. Well, Judas Iscariot, maybe. Nowadays, there are women on juries, but back when you and I were young, Maggie, a jury consisted of men only. Put on that jury an Andrew, Bartholomew, James (two of them, no less), John, Thaddeus, Matthias, Philip, Peter, Simon, Thomas, or—well yes, he said modestly—even Matthew, and what you had, folks, was a jury of “twelve good men and true.” Not to mention Paul, who said he’d seen Christ after the resurrection, and was therefore elevated to Apostlehood and later to sainthood.

  There was no jury listening to what Bartholomew Harrod was saying at two o’clock on what was still a bright sunny Saturday, the sixteenth day of September. Sitting outdoors around a circular coffee table with a plastic top and wrought-iron legs painted green were Harrod, and me, and Andrew Holmes, the man in my office who would most likely be trying the Commins case if I myself declined that singular ordeal. That made three good men and true, but who was counting Apostles’ names?

  I had called Harrod immediately after leaving Lainie’s house. I’d told him I was defending Ms. Commins and had been offered his name by the state attorney, Peter Folger, whom I was sure he knew and who had suggested that I might want to talk to him as soon as possible. I told Harrod that if he agreed to come to my office, or to meet with me wherever he preferred, we could talk informally about what he’d said to the grand jury, and this might save the trouble of my having to cross-examine him later, a blatant lie, but one that sometimes swayed a reluctant witness.

  What worked best, however, was the “America the Beautiful” approach, which basically sketched in the premise that everyone in the United States was entitled to a fair trial. In the interests of justice, then—which certainly Mr. Harrod would want for himself if ever, God forbid, he found himself in a similar situation—in the interests of freedom and justice for all, then, I felt certain he would want the defense to know how the grand jury had arrived at its finding, toward which end a knowledge of his testimony would be enormously helpful, in the spirit of justice and fairness.

  I told him that he wouldn’t be under oath while we talked, it would all be very informal, although I would appreciate being able to record what he said, just for reference later on. This was another lie, though a smaller one, but neither was anyone under oath while we were talking on the phone. I needed the recording for backup in case we asked him, on the stand and under oath, to repeat anything he might say in our informal discussion. That was why I’d asked Andrew Holmes,
no relation, the new partner in the firm of Summerville and Hope, to join me when I spoke to Harrod.

  I would have preferred sending either of my two investigators, Warren Chambers or Toots Kiley, to interview and record Harrod. But calls to Warren’s office and home garnered identical messages saying he’d be out of town for the next week or so, and Toots’s machine said only that she was “away from the phone just now” and asked that a message be left at the beep. Which meant that I could not send them independently to do the donkey work and then later testify to the authenticity and genesis of the tape. Which further meant I needed a witness to the taping.

  “You may well ask why.

  Because if I myself tried Lainie’s case and called the Apostle Bartholomew to the stand and started questioning him about what he’d said on the tape, he might very well answer, “I never said that.” In which case, I would play the tape to refresh his memory. But suppose he then said, “That’s not my voice on that there tape”—who would be able to testify to the contrary? Under the Disciplinary Rules—what we refer to in the trade as DR 5-101—an advocate cannot be called as a witness. So Folger would need no prompting to ask, as the Constable of France had once asked a lowly messenger, “Who hath measured the ground?”

  Hence the presence of Andrew Holmes.

  Whichever one of us ended up actually trying the case, the other could be called as a witness to the whys, whens, hows and wherefores of the taping.

  The tape recorder sat in the center of the coffee table.

  The three of us sat around the table in uncomfortable director’s chairs with faded green canvas backs and seats. We were in the backyard, such as it was, of Harrod’s mobile home in a park thronged with similar homes just off Timucuan Point Road.

  In the state of Florida, people who own so-called mobile homes pay no state, city, county, or school taxes. All they have to do is buy a license under Article VII—titled “Finance and Taxation”—of the Constitution of the State of Florida, wherein “Motor vehicles, boats, airplanes, trailers, trailer coaches and mobile homes, as defined by law, shall be subject to a license tax for their operation in the amounts and for the purposes prescribed by law, but shall not be subject to ad valorem taxes.”