Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  A big storm was already raging belowdecks, however, and her name was Toots, who’d come past being irritable and jumpy and quivery, all of which he’d expected in the twenty-four to thirty-six hours following her last hit on the pipe, whenever that had been. The symptoms always outlasted the initial big crash every crackhead experienced sooner or later, one time or another. So she’d come past the inconceivable craving during the first three days, and she’d also come past the insomnia and fatigue and now he could hear her below, crying hysterically again, today was going to be one fine clambake, Clyde. This was now Tuesday morning, so assuming she’d scored Thursday night sometime, it was now Crash-Plus-Four-Days and…what? Ten, twelve hours? He’d tried giving her some breakfast ten minutes ago, she’d knocked the tray out of his hands, spattered eggs and coffee all over Amberjacks spanking-clean bulkheads and deck. She’d been like this since late last night, these crazy mood swings, fine one minute, screaming and yelling the next.

  Made a man want to start smoking again.

  What worried her most was that she’d remain this way forever. Like when she was a little girl and she made a funny face and her mother warned her she’d freeze that way. She didn’t think she could bear this forever. Last time she’d kicked the habit, it hadn’t been this bad. Then again, cocaine wasn’t crack, well yes it was, well no it wasn’t! Whatever the fuck it was, she could not endure the thought that her present condition might turn out to be something permanent, she might be trapped eternally on this roller coaster that kept plunging her into hell through flames and then leveled off onto a grassy plain in a shaded valley before it started its climb again which was when she wanted to scream and scream and scream.

  The last time around, when she was on cocaine but not freebase, she’d done whatever had to be done to get the white powder. Whatever. Anything. You named it, she would do it. Yessir, whatever you say. You, too, ma’am, this is Tootsie La Cokie, didn’t you know? I will eat your pussy, suck your cock, take you in my ear, my nose, my armpit, my ass, wherever you want to put it, whenever you’d like it, I’ll do it if you just give me the candy or the money to buy it.

  She was sure he still had the stuff hidden somewhere on the boat.

  Thing to do was to get it from him.

  Convince him to give it to her.

  Any which way he wanted.

  The man’s name was Guthrie Lamb.

  He was telling me he’d been a famous private detective for more years than I’d been on earth, having started his agency back in 1952, when he used to operate out of New York City. He had moved down here twenty years ago, which accounted for his longevity and good health at the age of sixty-something.

  He did, in fact, look entirely fit.

  I had no way of knowing what he might have looked like when he first put in an appearance as a Famous Detective, to hear him tell it. But he was still a tall, youthful-looking, wide-shouldered man who, I guessed, was capable of handling himself in any situation calling for physical exertion. In fact, if ever I ran into my cowboys again, I would not have minded Guthrie Lamb at my side—particularly since he seemed to be carrying a very large gun in a highly visible shoulder holster. His eyes were a pale blue, but they appeared deeper against the pristine white of his hair and his eyebrows. He had a wide glittering smile. I wondered if his teeth were capped.

  I had called him early this morning because there was no way on earth I could raise either Warren or Toots on the telephone, and the last time I’d done my own legwork, I’d got myself shot, thanks. There were three other private detective agencies in town, none of them any good, and Benny Weiss had recommended Mr. Lamb highly. There were rumors in town that he had changed his name from Giovanni Lambino or Limbono or Lumbini or something like that, but why this should have been anyone’s business but his own was quite beyond me. It certainly wasn’t my business. My business was finding out if anyone at the Silver Creek Yacht Club had on last Tuesday night noticed a car parked just beyond the pillar on the right-hand side of the entrance gate.

  “What kind of car?” Lamb asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What color?”

  “She couldn’t tell.”

  “No light at the gate?”

  “She said it was dark.”

  “Have you ever been there at night?”

  “Yes, but I never noticed.”

  “Well, I’ll check it. Usually, if there are pillars, there are lights on top of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe one of them was burned out.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So we’ll see. What time was this supposed to be? When she saw the car.”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “Drove through the gate, you say, and was making a left turn…”

  “Yes.”

  “When she noticed the parked car and swerved away from it.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “Well, let me see who saw what out there. Did we discuss my rates?”

  “I’m assuming they’re standard.”

  “What’s standard by you?”

  “Forty-five an hour plus expenses.”

  “I usually get fifty.”

  “That’s high.”

  “Expertise,” Lamb said.

  “I pay Warren Chambers forty-five an hour and he’s the best in the business.”

  “I’m better,” Lamb said, and grinned like a shark.

  When she called to him from below, her voice was so soft he almost didn’t hear her. The boat was drifting, drifting, he hadn’t put a hook down, there was nothing to hit out here, nothing to run into, just a huge circle of water wherever you looked. Faint breeze blowing, a few white-caps out there, fishing boat far out on the horizon to the west, where Corpus Christi, Texas, was the next stop.

  “Warren?”

  Almost a whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you come down here, please?”

  He went to the ladder, took a step down, bent, and peered into the boat. She was sitting on the bunk up forward, wrist in the handcuff fastened to the grab rail on her right, legs over the side of the bunk, ankles crossed. The high-heeled pumps that matched the short black skirt were on the deck. He went down the ladder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t have knocked that tray out of your hands.”

  “Well, listen.”

  “Really, I hate being this way,” she said, and smiled. “Besides, now I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll fix you something,” he said, and went to the stove.

  “If you have some cereal, that’ll be good enough.”

  “No eggs?”

  “I’m not sure I can keep them down.”

  “That’s not supposed to be one of the symptoms.”

  “It’s the boat rocking.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you, Warren.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, sure, you know I did. You’re right, I’m hooked. Or was. I know I’ll be thanking you for this when it’s all over.”

  “No need for that.”

  He was standing at the countertop alongside the stove now, shaking cornflakes from their box into a plastic bowl. He poured milk over them, found a tablespoon in the utensil drawer, put bowl and spoon on a tray and carried it to the bunk.

  “Some coffee?” he said. “I can heat it up again.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  He went back to the stove, turned on the gas under the coffeepot. Blue flame licked at its bottom. The boat rocked gently.

  “Boy, it’s funny the way this comes in waves,” she said.

  “Bit of a chop today,” he agreed, nodding.

  “No, I mean the craving for it. You think it’s gone, and then all at once it’s back again.” She shoveled a spoonful of flakes into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Shifted her weight on the bank. “What’d you do with my stash?” she asked.
r />   “The jumbos I found in your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Deep-sixed them.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did, Toots.”

  “Terrible waste.”

  “Not the way I look at it.”

  “I’d love one of those rocks right this minute,” she said, and looked at him.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “They’re on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “I don’t believe you, Warren.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  She shifted her weight again. He realized all at once that her legs were bare. She’d taken off her panty hose. He saw them crumpled against the bulkhead now, a wad of sand-colored nylon.

  “I keep wondering where I’d be if I was a vial of crack,” she said. “Did you used to play that when you were a kid, Warren?”

  “No, I never wondered where I’d be if I was a vial of crack.”

  “I mean if you couldn’t find one of your toys or games. Didn’t you used to say Where would I be if I was a fire engine? Or a doll? Or a…?”

  “I didn’t play with dolls.”

  “Where on this boat would I be?” she asked in a cute, feigned little-girl’s voice.

  “No place,” he said. “There’s no place on this boat you’d be. Cause they ain’t no crack on dis here boat,” he said in a thick, feigned watermelon accent.

  “Wanna bet?” she asked, and smiled, and shifted her weight again, her legs parting slightly, the black skirt edging higher on her thighs. “I’ll bet if I asked you really nice, you’d tell me where you’ve hidden that crack, Warren.”

  “You’d be wasting your time, Toots.”

  “Would I?” she said, and suddenly opened her legs wide to him. “Tell me,” she said.

  “Toots…”

  “Cause, honey, right now I’d do anything for some of that shit, believe me.”

  “ Toots…”

  “Anything,” she said.

  Their eyes met.

  She nodded.

  “Not this way, Toots,” he said softly, and turned away from her, and walked swiftly to the ladder and climbed the steps and was gone.

  She stared at the empty space he’d left behind him.

  What? she thought.

  What?

  What you expected from a firm that called itself Toy-land, Toyland was a yellow-brick road leading to a gingerbread house with white-sugar icicles hanging from the roofline and jelly-drop doorknobs and mint-clear windows. You did not expect a low yellow-brick factory in a Cyclone-fenced industrial park off Weaver Road, the Toyland, Toyland boy-girl logo sitting on the rooftop in three-dimensional bliss. What you expected when you stepped into that fantasized gingerbread house was a band of bearded elves on high stools at low tables, wearing red stocking hats and whistling while they worked. What you got was a reception area with a glass-tiled wall beaming late morning sunshine, two teal-colored doors flanking a circular desk centered on the opposite wall, and huge framed glossy photographs of the company’s several hit toys and games hanging on the other two walls. Among these toys were a green frog wearing scuba-diving gear; a menacing treaded black tank whose helmeted commander was a little blond girl; and a red fire truck with a yellow water tower which, from the photographic evidence, shot a real stream of water.

  I was here to see the man Etta Toland claimed was a witness to Lainie Commins’s thievery, the man who’d been present at a meeting last September when Brett Toland first proposed his idea for a cross-eyed bear. Robert Ernesto Diaz’s office was at the end of a long corridor lined with doors painted in various pastel shades, as befitted Toyland’s image. Etta had defined him as the company’s design chief. His office at once fortified that concept.

  A rangy man with black hair, a black mustache, and dark brown eyes, Diaz stood behind a huge desk cluttered with what I assumed were models of future toys. A bank of windows behind the desk streamed sunlight onto a wall bearing a huge poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, or Bram Stoker’s, or whoever’s, flanked by a pair of Picasso prints. A Toys “” Us catalog was open on the desktop, resting beside a digital clock that read 11:27, and a pair of clay models for a very slender somewhat buxom doll…

  “Our annual bid to dethrone Barbie,” Diaz said with a rueful grin.

  …and models in five different colors for a helicopter which I assumed would fly if you put batteries in it, and four painted ceramic models of men and women in space suits, which looked very much like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to me, but I currently had one infringement suit going against the company.

  “Toyland’s already begun cutting steel on the helicopter,” he said, “but we haven’t yet decided on the color. Which one do you favor?”

  Diaz saw my puzzlement and immediately defined “cutting steel.”

  “Tooling up,” he explained. “Making the molds we’ll be using for years and years to come, I hope, I hope, I hope. The helicopter’s my design. It’s called Whurly Burly, and the pilot’s a blond girl like the one in Tinka Tank, which you may have seen on the wall in reception, and which was a big winner for us three Christmases ago. I designed her, too. Kids love blond dolls. Even black kids love blond dolls. Six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tooling on that bird, plus another four for R&D…research and development…in hope it’ll fly next Christmas. That’s a million dollars going in. But we’re betting a lot more on Gladys—which I guess is why you’re here.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said.

  “A terrible thing, terrible,” Diaz said, shaking his head. “To kill a man over a toy? Terrible.”

  I said nothing.

  “Look, she must have felt enormously threatened, I realize that. If that bear’s going to be under the tree by next Christmas, it’s got to be in the stores no later than May. By next month, all your major chains—Kmart, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘’ Us, F.A.O.’s—will be planning exactly which toy is going to be in which aisle on which shelf come spring.”

  “That early,” I said.

  “That early. October. Everything planned by then. With Tinka Tank, we had the choicest location in every goddamn store in America. There wasn’t a girl alive who didn’t want that toy. We’re hoping the same thing will happen with Gladys. Test her this Christmas, have a runaway toy next Christmas.”

  I did not mention that if Judge Santos decided in Lainie’s favor, either Mattel or Ideal would be testing Gladly and not Gladys this Christmas.

  “Say we put out twenty, twenty-five thousand bears for the test launch,” Diaz said, “which we’ve now got priced at a hundred and a quarter. If we see we’ve got a sure winner, we can drop the price to ninety-nine, keep her under that forbidding hundred-dollar price point. Mass-producing her will cost about a third of that, something like thirty-five dollars a bear, including the glasses, which are expensive to make. My guess is we’ll have sunk close to two million dollars in Gladys before we really begin marketing her. If we sell only a million bears next Christmas, you’re going to see some very long faces around here. But if she’s a big seller next year, she’ll be even bigger the year after that and the year after that and then we’re in clover. So I think you can see the urgency here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of a decision on who owns what.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we can start moving. If we’re going to get those test bears out there plugging for us, the judge not only has to decide correctly he has to decide soon. So Brett wouldn’t have died for no reason at all.”

  I missed the logic of this.

  “Why weren’t you called as a witness?” I asked.

  “At the hearing, do you mean?”

  “Yes, the hearing.”

  “From what I understand, Brett didn’t remember until it was too late.”

  “Remember what?”

  “That I’d been there at the meeting.”

  “What meeting?”

  “When he told Lainie about his idea for the bear.”

&nbs
p; “When you say ‘From what I understand…’”

  “That’s what Etta told me.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last week sometime. After what happened.”

  “After Brett’s murder, do you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Etta told you that he’d suddenly remembered…”

  “Yes.”

  “…the fact that you’d been there at this important meeting.”

  “Yes. Well, I was there, you see.”

  “Before the hearing, did you happen to mention this to either of the Tolands?”

  “Well, Brett already knew I was there, you see. So I figured if he wanted me as a witness, he’d let me know.”

  “But he didn’t, as it turned out.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Because apparently he’d forgotten all about it till the day he was murdered.”

  “Apparently.”

  “But you remembered being at the meeting.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Do you still remember being there?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  It is one of those steamy sulky September days in Florida, when everything and everyone seems wilted by the heat and the humidity and the promise of more heat and humidity. Bobby Diaz—he is familiarly called Bobby by everyone at Toyland—is working here in his office when Brett buzzes him and asks him to come down the hall a minute.

  “Do you remember the actual date of this meeting?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Or the time.”

  “I don’t remember, I’m sorry.”

  But he does remember that it was in the afternoon sometime and that he had just taken a call from an insider at Toys “” Us who’d phoned to whisper in his ear that the company thought Toyland’s new video game, Rush to Judgment, was “entirely fresh.” In fact, he would’ve hurried down the hall to report this to Brett, anyway, even if Brett hadn’t buzzed him first.

  “Down the hall” is where Brett’s huge corner-window office is. A secretary sits behind a desk in an anteroom adjoining it, but she scarcely glances up at Bobby as he raps his knuckles on her desk in passing greeting. Walking into Brett’s office is like walking into a rich kid’s playroom. There are toys and dolls and games strewn on every flat surface, including the floor. Brett himself sits behind a very large desk similarly covered with toys in various stages of development. As Bobby recalls it now, last September they were still searching for a good face for a doll they’d since abandoned, and a dozen or more models of the tiny doll’s head are scattered on Brett’s desk like the remnants of a mass decapitation. During the conversation that follows, Brett keeps rolling one of these miniature heads between his fingers. Bobby tells Brett the good…