So first, let him think everything’s hunky-dory sweetie, here’s Peggy Sue Got Married, sniffing in the good salt air, not a thought of any controlled substance on her mind, oh dear no, cocaine, what is that? Crack, what is that? I never heard of such things, sir, I am just a little farm girl from the heartland of America, far from the shore, adrift on a sea of little-girl happiness, sniffing in the good clean ocean air. Me a druggie? Oh dear no. Me a crackhead? What does that mean, sir, crackhead?
Let him think I’m clean and sober, let him think he’s made a mistake, it was just somebody trying to set me up, frame me, putting evil substances in my trash basket and my purse, trying to make people think I’m using again when I wouldn’t even know where to go to score.
And then find where he stashed the rocks he took from my bag Thursday night.
Stuff had to be somewhere aboard this tub, he couldn’t have thrown it overboard, could he?
You son of a bitch, she thought, tell me you didn’t throw it overboard.
She was sure he’d kept it. Because some well-meaning jackasses, you know, they didn’t realize how desperate you could get when you were forced to kick it cold turkey. So they kept some of the stuff around thinking they could give you just a little bit of it if you started acting crazy, just a teensy-weensy little bit to take the edge off if you started bugging. Just till you straightened out a bit, you know? And then let you go without anything for a slightly longer time this time, before they gave you another hit of the pipe, acting as a sort offender, loving counselor, you know, helping you through this terrible ordeal of what was known in the trade as Drug Withdrawal, never once realizing that cold turkey is cold turkey, man, and cocaine plays no fucking part in rehabilitation.
But he’d been a cop once, he knew better than to try weaning a crack addict from the pipe, he’d worked sections in St. Louis could curl the hair on a dachshund. So why would he have kept any of it? Coast Guard out here stops the boat, finds ten jumbos and a pipe, there goes Warren Chambers and the cute little blonde he’s got handcuffed to the wall. Nice story, Sambo, you’re helping the cunt kick it cold turkey, then what are you doing with this shit, can you tell us that? No way he would’ve kept it.
But just in case…
Just on the off chance he had a soft heart for someone so severely afflicted, addicted, yearning for the rock, aching for the rock, dying for the rock, then maybe there was one chance in a hundred million that he had kept some of the stuff to ease her pain when push came to shove, and maybe, if only she could convince him to give her free rein of the boat…
Shit, she wasn’t going to jump over the side.
Or hit him on the head.
Or do anything else foolish.
So if only she could sort of roam around, you know, loose, you know, instead of chained to the wall, the fucking bulkhead, then maybe she could find the stuff and…
“Let’s go,” he said.
“What?”
“Time to go back down.”
She wanted to hit him.
Instead, she smiled dazzlingly and said, “Sure, whatever you say,” and held out her right hand for the cuff.
5
Charles Nicholas Werner lived in a Spanish-style house that had been built in Calusa during the early thirties, shortly after the area was rediscovered, in effect, by a railroad man named Abner Worthington Hopper. Before then, the city’s growth was lethargic at best, the 1910 population of 840 people growing to but a mere 2,149 a full decade later. But then came Hopper, and suddenly the town became a proper city of more than 8,000 people, and all at once Calusa was on the map as a resort destination. Building his own Spanish-style mansion on choice Gulf-front property, Hopper then built a hotel to accommodate the multitude of guests he and his wife Sarah invited down each winter. The mansion was now the Ca D’Oro Museum and the hotel was a fenced derelict perilously close to U.S. 41.
The museum housed an only fair collection of Baroque art, of which Calusa was inordinately proud; when you were the self-proclaimed Athens of Southwest Florida, you had to boast about your cultural treasures, however second-rate they might be. Restoration groups were constantly promising to remodel and refurbish the hotel, which had deteriorated over the past six decades from lavish and lush to comfortable and cozy to faded and worn to shabby and decrepit. Recent talk was of tearing it down and replacing it with a shopping mall. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Werner house was the only hacienda-type structure on either side of the narrow canal running behind it. Pink stucco walls and a roof of glazed orange tiles, arched windows that smacked of Saracen influence, exotic-looking peaks and minarets greeted Andrew and me as we walked from where I’d parked my Acura to the arched mahogany front door. There was a fair amount of boat traffic on the canal. This was the beginning of the weekend—well, four o’clock on what remained of Saturday afternoon—and a popular boaters’ activity was cruising the backwaters of the city’s myriad canals, ogling the sometimes lavish homes on their banks. A wrought-iron doorbell fashioned to look like an opening black rose was situated on the jamb to the right of the door. Andrew pressed the push button positioned like a single white eye at the center of it. We heard footsteps approaching the door.
Despite the wealth down here in sunny Calusa, there are very few live-in housekeepers anymore, and seeing one of them in a proper maid’s uniform is as rare as spotting a wild panther. The maid who answered Andrew’s ring was in her early twenties, I supposed, a beautiful black woman wearing a black uniform with a little white cap and apron and collar. We told her who we were and whom we were here to see, and she said, “Pase, por favor. Le diré que está aquí.” I wondered if she had a green card.
We were standing in a hallway floored with blue tile and lined with Moorish columns. Beyond, at the center of the house, was a secluded cloister riotously blooming with flowers. Late afternoon sunlight pierced the colonnaded stillness. We could hear the maid’s footfalls padding through the house. Out on the canal, the sound of a boat’s engine spoiled the sullen stillness.
Werner, wearing shorts and sandals and nothing else, came from somewhere at the back of the house, walking briskly toward where Andrew and I were waiting. He was a short, gnomic man who looked a lot like Yoda, somewhat bandy-legged, very brown from the sun, with twinkling blue eyes and a fringe of white hair circling his head. His handshake was firm. He told us he was happy to be of assistance and then led us to the back of the house where a pool sparkled and shimmered under the sun.
I detected for the first time a faint Southern accent when he asked if we’d care for anything to drink, “Some whiskey, gen’lemen? Beer? Iced tea?” But we told him we didn’t want to take up too much of his time, and got to work at once, setting up the recorder on a low white plastic cube and sitting around it on expensive Brown Jordan lawn furniture. The boat that had earlier entered the canal was now making its way back to the Intercoastal. A sign on a stanchion across the canal warned NO WAKE ZONE. We waited until the boat was clear, and turned on the recorder.
Werner told us essentially what he had told the grand jury. At ten forty-five this past Tuesday night, he had been guiding his sloop—a twenty-five-foot centerboard, under power, and with a spotlight showing the way—toward his slip at the club’s dock. There are sixty slips in the marina. He had passed on the approach to his slip the yawl Toy Boat, with its cockpit lights on and a blond man and woman sitting at the table drinking. He had recognized the man as Brett Toland, with whom he had a passing acquaintance at the club.
“Did you recognize the woman?” I asked.
“I had never seen her before in my life,” Werner said.
I kept trying to pinpoint his accent. I guessed maybe North Carolina.
“Have you seen that same woman since?”
“Yes, suh,” Werner said. “I was shown her photograph at the grand jury hearing.”
“Just one photo?” I asked. “Or were there…?”
“They showed me at least a dozen photographs. I pic
ked hers out of the lot.”
“You identified her from a photograph.”
“I did.”
“Can you now tell me who she was?”
“She was the woman charged with killing Brett Toland. She was Lainie Commins.”
“You say you were under power as you came into the club.”
“I was.”
“How fast were you going?”
“Idle speed.”
“And you say your spotlight was on?”
“It was.”
“Pointing in the direction of the Toland boat?”
“No, suh, pointing at the water.”
“Ahead of the boat?”
“Dead ahead as I came past the club marker, and then toward the dock as I came closer in.”
“How much light was there in the cockpit of the Toland boat?”
“Enough to see who was sitting there.”
“Two blond people, you say. A man and a woman.”
“Brett Toland and Miss Commins, yes, suh.”
“You saw them clearly?”
“Clear as day. Sitting there drinking.”
“Did you say anything to them?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t greet them in any way?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t call to them?”
“No, suh. I was busy bringing my boat in. Watching the water, watching the dock.”
“Did they call anything to you?”
“No, suh.”
“Was your slip alongside the Toland slip?”
“Oh, no. Much further down the line.”
“How many boats down the line, would you say?”
“Six or seven boats.”
“Could you still see the Toland boat after you passed it?”
“Could’ve if I’d looked back, but I didn’t look back. I was bringing a boat in at night, with just a spotlight showing me the way. I kept my eyes on the water all the time.”
“You say this was around ten forty-five, is that right?”
“Just about on the dot.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s a clock on my dash.”
“Lighted?”
“Yes.”
“And it said ten forty-five?”
“Almost.”
“Is it a digital clock?”
“No, it’s what they call an analog. With hands. Black hands on a white dial.”
“Then how can you know so exactly…?”
“The hour hand was almost on the eleven, and the minute hand was almost on the nine. So it was almost ten forty-five.”
“You looked at the clock as you passed the Toland boat?”
“I did. And it said almost ten forty-five.”
“Took your eyes off the water…?”
“Just for a second.”
“…to look at the clock.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Wanted to know what time it was, I guess.”
“Why’d you want to know what time it was?”
“Wanted to see what time I was coming in.”
“Was the water dark?”
“Not where the light was shining.”
“But you took your eyes off the water…”
“Just for a second.”
“…to see what time it was.”
“Yes, I did.”
He was beginning to get annoyed, I could see that. On the phone, I had sold him “a friendly little informal interview,” but now I was coming at him like Sherman entering Atlanta. He didn’t like it one damn bit. He was a Southerner, however, and a gentleman, and I was a guest in his home, and he had agreed to talk to me, and so he went along for the rest of the ride.
“So when you say you kept your eyes on the water all the time, you didn’t actually…”
“Just for a second, I told you.”
“To look at the clock.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Could it have been earlier than ten forty-five when you looked at…?”
“No, suh.”
“Could it have been ten twenty-five, for example?”
“No, it could not have been earlier than about ten forty-five.”
“And at that time you continued under power…”
“I did.”
“…past the Toland boat…which slip was that, by the way, would you know?”
“No, I would not.”
“You looked at the clock as you were passing the Toland boat, and then turned right back to the water?”
“Yep. Bringing the boat in.”
“To which slip?”
“Number twelve. That’s my assigned slip.”
“Some six or seven boats down the line. From the Toland boat, that is.”
“Yes.”
“Did you look at the clock again as you were coming into your slip?”
“I don’t believe I did.”
“Did you look at it before you cut the engine of your boat?”
“No.”
“Before you left the wheel?”
“No.”
“Before you made her fast to the dock?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t want to know what time you were getting in?”
“Already knew that,” Werner said curtly, and rose in dismissal. “It was almost ten forty-five.”
From my home phone, I called the next two witnesses on the list Folger had given me, a man and wife named Jerry and Brenda Bannerman, who lived in West Palm Beach. They graciously agreed to see Andrew and me tomorrow, provided we didn’t mind coming to their boat. We arranged to be at their yacht club by twelve-thirty, which meant an early rising and a three-to-four-hour drive across the state.
Etta Toland wasn’t quite so gracious.
Although we’d known each other socially before the infringement matter came up, on the phone she called me “Mr. Hope,” and told me at once that she had no interest in doing a taped, informal reprise of her grand jury testimony. On the other hand, she would be delighted, Mr. Hope, to come to my office on Monday morning and testify under oath, because—as she so delicately put it—”I want to bury your fucking client.”
I asked her if ten o’clock would be convenient.
“Ten o’clock would be fine, Mr. Hope.”
I thanked her for her courtesy, and she hung up without saying goodbye.
I looked at my watch.
It was almost six o’clock and I was supposed to pick up Patricia at seven.
All during dinner that night, I kept wondering why Patricia didn’t want to make love anymore. I figured it had something to do with the fear of losing me. Fuck me and my brains would curdle again. Fuck me and I would lie in coma again for the rest of my life, a fate some people might have wished for me, but not Patricia, certainly not Patricia, who loved me. But she had also loved someone named Mark Loeb, and I think he loomed large in the equation. Mark was one of the partners in the firm she worked for at the time—Carter, Rifkin, Lieber and Loeb, he was the Loeh. She was thirty-one years old at the time, this must have been five years ago. He was forty-two. They had celebrated his birthday not a month earlier. October the fifteenth. Birth date of great men.
They’d been living together for almost two years, in a little apartment on Bleecker Street in the Village. It was his apartment, she’d moved in with him. Her own apartment had been uptown on Eighty-ninth near Lex, which was a longer subway ride to the office on Pine Street. His apartment was nicer, and closer to the office. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Everything had seemed so right at the time, they were so very much in love.
He was Jewish, and so it had always seemed so ironic that he was the one who’d wanted to go uptown to see the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. He’d never had a tree in his own home while he was growing up, never had a tree during his marriage to a Jewish girl, who’d divorced him after five years of what she called turmoil and anguish—just before Christmas, incidentally, bu
t that was a coincidence. He’d always thought of Christmas as a time to escape, get down to St. Barts or Caneel, get away from the insistent Christian barrage that made him feel excluded in his own city, made him feel somehow…un-American.
Because New York was his city, you know, he’d been born here and raised here, had only once in his life lived outside of it, and then not too distant—in Larchmont, with his ex, whose name was Monica. Patricia had met her at a party once. This was three years after the divorce, Mark hadn’t expected to see her there, he seemed flustered when he introduced them, three years after the divorce. She was a tall and gorgeous brunette who made Patricia feel like a frump. He’d apologized afterward. Never would have gone there if he’d known, and so on. In Patricia’s apartment later—they hadn’t yet started living together—it was as if seeing her again…seeing Monica…he realized he truly loved Patricia.
At the time, the firm had been litigating an important case, a mere matter of tax evasion that could have sent their client to prison for the next fifty years and cost him millions in fines. December eleventh fell on a Friday that year, which also happened to be the day the trial ended in an acquittal for their client. So they’d gone out to celebrate with the other partners and their wives, and afterward Mark suggested that they all go uptown to look at the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. None of them wanted to go except Lee Carter, who wasn’t Jewish, but his wife said she had a headache, which Mark thought was a euphemism for Let’s go home and fuck, Lee. So they all went home and Patricia and Mark got into a taxi and headed uptown.
This was pretty late. Neither of them knew what time they turned off the lights on the tree. She guessed they both had some vague idea that the tree couldn’t stay lit all night long, but they didn’t know exactly what time the plug was pulled. Neither of them was paying any attention to the time, anyway. It had been a wonderful victory today, and a great party, and they’d each had too much champagne to drink, this was now maybe eleven-thirty, maybe later, when they climbed into a taxi, and told the driver to take them uptown to Rockefeller Plaza.
Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 Page 11
