Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “We’ll be taking pictures in here,” Andrew said.

  “No problem,” Gergin said.

  I normally feel like strangling people who say “No problem” or, especially, “Hey, no problem.” What the phrase really means is, “Yes, there is ordinarily a problem in honoring such a request, but in this single instance, and however irritating it may be, an exception will be made, although it is truly a severe pain in the ass.”

  That is what “No problem” means.

  And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  “We’ll be looking around, too,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “No problem,” Gergin said, and shrugged, and then planted himself squarely in the door to the stateroom, where he could watch Andrew taking his pictures and me rummaging around.

  Two shots to the head, the coroner’s report had said.

  A third that had missed.

  No stench of cordite here.

  But the place reeked of murder.

  The chalked outline of Brett Toland’s body was traced on the carpet alongside the bed. Bloodstains had turned black on the carpet. Raw wood showed where the third bullet had been pried from the wall alongside the bathroom door.

  Gergin yawned while Andrew took his Polaroid pictures.

  This was where the police had found Lainie’s scarf.

  I didn’t know where to begin.

  I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

  I started in the bathroom, looking in the cabinet under the sink and finding nothing but extra rolls of toilet paper and boxes of Kleenex and a six-pack of Irish Spring soap bars. I then looked in the mirrored cabinet over the sink and found several toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste and a wide assortment of nonprescription medicines, and several prescription drugs as well, but nothing that would help me to prove my client was innocent of the crime with which she’d been charged.

  If that was what I was looking for.

  Andrew was still taking pictures.

  I went to the cabinet on the starboard side of the bed, and opened the latched door. There was a pair of pompommed slippers with low heels on the floor of the cabinet. Nothing else. I closed the door and slid open the drawer above it. A pair of reading glasses, a packet of tissues, a tube of lipstick. I figured this was Etta Toland’s side of the bed.

  I went around to Brett’s side.

  Ran the same search of the cabinet base and drawer, and found nothing of importance. But I wondered if this was where he’d stored the forty-five that had later been used to kill him.

  Walked back to the combination bookcase and entertainment center fitted with a television set, a VCR, and a CD player.

  Started looking through the books.

  Pulled out a copy of Great Expectations. Leafed through it. Placed it back on the shelf. Found The Rubaiyat. Blew dust off it. Opened it. Flipped through it. People sometimes tucked letters or scraps of paper into books. But there was nothing. The dust wrappers had been removed from all of the books. Not uncommon on a boat, where moisture caused paper to twist and curl. Took down a copy of Stephen King’s It. Big book, some two and a half inches thick. Black cover with the initials SK in red in the lower right-hand corner. Opened the book. Closed it, or It, put it back on the shelf. Started looking at some other books. Blew dust off them. Leafed through them. Put them back on the shelves again. There were a lot of books here. Hundred best books in the English language, it looked like. Some of them never read, judging by the dust on them. Began looking through the videocassettes in their black vinyl cases. The cover art on one of them showed a woman’s hands spread over the crotch of her lacy white panties. The ring on her pinky…

  “How long you guys gonna be down here?” Gergin asked.

  I put the cassette back on the shelf.

  “You can leave us if you’re bored,” I said.

  “Hey, no problem,” he said.

  “We won’t be stealing anything.”

  “Who said you would? It’s just it’s a little stuffy down here, the air-conditioning off and all.”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” I suggested. “Get yourself some air.”

  “No, that’s okay,” he said.

  I looked at some other cassettes.

  Gergin scratched his ass.

  “Did you get any pictures of the cockpit?” I asked Andrew.

  “Do we need any?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, and looked him dead in the eye.

  We’d been working together for a good long time.

  “Okay to go up alone?” he asked Gergin.

  Gergin smelled a rat.

  The wrong one.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said, and they both left the stateroom.

  I waited till I heard Gergin’s heavy footfalls on the topside deck. I took the cassette down from the shelf again. It was titled Idle Hands. The ring on the woman’s right pinky finger was identical to Lainie’s Victorian seal ring with its heart-shaped face and its floret-covered band.

  Without a second’s hesitation, I lifted my jacket and tucked the cassette into my trousers against the small of my back.

  This was embarrassing.

  Three attorneys who represented a person, watching a compromising videotape of that person. Idle Hands indeed. A tape that could easily be defined as pornography by prevailing community standards in that Lainie Commins, all by herself and looking quite cockeyed without her glasses on (or anything else but white panties and a gold Victorian ring, for that matter), was exposing her genitals, pubic area, buttocks and breasts below the top of the nipples, with less than a full opaque covering; was engaging as well in masturbation, which act constituted the commission of an abominable and detestable crime against nature, or suggested that such a crime was being or would be committed; was also exposing her genitals in a presumed state of sexual stimulation or arousal; all of this presumably done willfully (as witness the knowing albeit goofy smile on her face), which activities predominately appealed to the prurient, shameful or morbid interests, and were without serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Boy oh boy.

  “Are you telling me you slipped this tape under your jacket while the cop was topside?” Frank asked.

  “I did.”

  “Boy oh boy,” he said.

  “Do you intend to show this to the state attorney?” Andrew asked.

  I merely looked at him.

  “In which case,” he suggested, “I guess we’d better ask Miss Commins about it.”

  Lainie arrived at our offices on Heron Street at a little before two that afternoon. She explained that we’d caught her working and asked us to please excuse the jeans, sandals and T-shirt she was wearing. She was also wearing the omnipresent Victorian ring on the pinky of her right hand. I asked her to please have a seat, and then I put the Idle Hands tape in our VCR, told her we were going to step outside for fifteen, twenty minutes, and asked her to hit the PLAY button after we were gone.

  A half hour later, we rejoined her.

  “So?” I said.

  “Where’d you get this?” she asked.

  “In the master stateroom of the Toland boat.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and nodded bleakly.

  We all looked at her. Andrew seemed not to understand quite what was going on. Then again, he was but a mere callow youth. I was wondering what Lainie meant by “Yeah.” She didn’t seem ready to amplify just yet. Frank caught my eye. The prompt, he was saying. Give the lady the prompt.

  “Did you know this tape was on the boat?” I asked.

  She hesitated, trying to determine which of the three of us would be most sympathetic to her story. I was guessing she was guessing Andrew. Instead, she pitched it to Frank.

  “He was trying to blackmail me,” she said.

  “Toland?” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  “He showed you this tape, and…?”

  “No.”

  “Then…?”
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br />   “Said he had it.”

  “Said he had a video of you in the nude?”

  “Said he had this video,” she said, and nodded at the cassette vehemently, as if willing it to burst into flame—as well it might have, considering its subject matter.

  “But he didn’t show it to you?”

  “No.”

  “Just said he had it.”

  All of this from Frank in his clipped, no-nonsense New Yorker style. Sometimes I admired him.

  “Yes, just said he had it. Showed me the case, the holder, whatever the hell it’s called, with my hands on the cover. But it was empty. Told me he’d have been stupid to bring the actual cassette there to the boat with him. Told me it was safe at home. Warned me that unless I dropped the infringement suit, all of kiddieland would learn about that tape.”

  “All of…?”

  “Kiddieland. He meant everyone in the toy world. He would let it be known that the woman designing toys for children…well…was…well…doing what…what you saw me doing on the tape.”

  “And out the window goes your teddy bear,” Andrew said, nodding.

  “No,” she corrected. “Out the window goes my life”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “When was what?”

  “When did he tell you he had this tape?”

  “While we were sitting upstairs.”

  “In the cockpit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drinking…”

  “Yes.”

  “Engaged in pleasant conver—”

  “Until he tried to blackmail me.”

  “But until then…”

  “Until then, yes, he was telling me he thought he knew a way out of our problems, thought we could settle my claim without lawyers, and so on.”

  “Is that when he mentioned the tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this before or after he carried your shoes and your scarf down to the master stateroom?”

  “I didn’t know where he carried them.”

  “But before or after?”

  “After. He took my stuff with him when he went down for the drinks.”

  “Did you know which tape he was referring to?” Frank asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You knew this tape existed?”

  “Well, of course I knew,” she said, and turned to Andrew with an exasperated look on her face.

  Andrew shrugged sympathetically.

  “I mean, this wasn’t Candid Camera,” she said.

  “When was this taped?” Frank asked.

  “Earlier this year. Sometime in March.”

  “Who shot it?”

  “Man I met.”

  “Who?”

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m not on the witness stand here.”

  “Thank God you’re not,” Frank said.

  “Lainie,” I said gently, “would you like to tell us about it?”

  The way Lainie tells it—and she tells it exceptionally well, first removing her eyeglasses to heighten the Poor Little Cockeyed but Extravagantly Sexy Waif look—the bills begin mounting and the savings begin dwindling the moment she leaves her weekly-paycheck job with Toyland back in January. Her own business, Just Kidding, is not yet established and there is an unexpected dearth of the freelance assignments she was hoping for—in fact, counting on…

  “I didn’t think it would be that difficult,” she said. “I had a track record and a good reputation, and I figured the jobs would just pour in. Frankly, I even began wondering if the Tolands weren’t engaging in a little industrial sabotage. Bad-mouth me in the trade, you know, in hope I’d come back when I was on the ropes. The thing is, Toyland is the only game in town down here, so I was sending résumés to people who’d known me in New York or on the Coast, trolling, you know, networking, and it was taking a long time for people to get back to me. Meanwhile, the bucks were shrinking and…”

  Getting a bit desperate, she begins searching the want ads, first for any kind of job requiring an artistic background—a graphic designer for an ad agency, for example, or an art director for a magazine—and next for any job with the descriptive word “creative” in its newspaper listing, as for instance designing daily menus for a restaurant. The difficulty is that she’s looking for something part-time, so that she can continue designing on her own while earning enough money to pay the mounting bills. She left the job at Toyland with two thousand dollars in savings. By the end of February, she is down to six hundred dollars and is scanning the ads advertising for part-time waitresses or hostesses or cashiers or landscape assistants or…

  And her eye stops.

  The ad reads:

  LINGERIE MANNEQUINS

  TO MODEL FAMOUS IMPORTED BRANDS

  PART TIME—EXCELLENT SALARY

  CALL BUTTERCUP ENTERPRISES365–72…

  “I thought it was legitimate,” she says now. “Besides…”…ever since she moved to Florida, she’s spent a lot of time on the beach…well, her house on North Apple is merely a five-minute drive or a twenty-minute walk to the Whisper Key Beach…and surely the thong swimsuit she used to wear before the Calusa P.D. cracked down on such “indecent exposure” as they’d labeled it, was very close to parading around in lingerie, wasn’t it? In fact, rather more revealing than any lingerie she ever wore in the privacy of her own bedroom or under her clothes on the street. Besides, she truly does think the ad is legitimate, a wholesaler or retailer seeking someone to model famous imported brands like Chantelle or Lise Charmel or Hanro of Switzerland. She’s always felt she had a fairly decent figure, so why not use it to good advantage now in a part-time job paying excellent wages.

  She calls the number listed at the bottom of the ad.

  A well-spoken woman who sounds somewhat matronly and British explains that the job is modeling very expensive lingerie like Chantal Thomass or Rien or Wacoal in a retail venue—the exact word she uses, “venue”—at flexible hours, and at a starting rate of thirty dollars an hour. She asks how old Lainie is…

  “Thirty-three,” she says.

  “Mm,” the woman says.

  Lainie catches her breath.

  “It’s just that most of our mannequins are younger,” the woman says.

  “What age were you looking for?”

  “Well, most of our mannequins are in their early twenties.

  O-kay, Lainie thinks, and immediately figures she’s out of the running. Thirty-three. Ancient in the lingerie-modeling trade.

  “But I do have a very youthful figure,” she says.

  “Would you feel comfortable telling me your dimensions?” the woman asks in her pleasant voice with its mild British accent.

  “Thirty-four, twenty-five, thirty-four. B cup.”

  “You don’t have any visible scars or blemishes, do you?”

  “No,” she says, and wonders if she should mention her wandering right eye, but that’s neither a scar nor a blemish, though it’s been a pain in the ass all her life.

  “Tattoos?” the woman asks.

  Tattoos? Lainie thinks.

  “No,” she says. “No tattoos.”

  “Although some of our mannequins do have tattoos,” the woman says. “Discreet ones, of course. A tiny butterfly on the shoulder. A little rose on the hip.”

  “I don’t have any of those.”

  But I can get one, she thinks. If a tattoo is required, just let me know, I’ll run out and…

  “Well,” the woman says, and is silent for what seems an inordinately long time, no doubt studying the statistics she’s written down, no doubt trying to determine whether a thirty-three-year-old woman with a mere B cup and no tattoos is suitable for modeling higher priced lingerie like Simone Perele or Aubade or Gossard.

  “You’re not married, are you?”

  “No,” Lainie says at once.

  “Mm,” the woman says. “Is there anyone who’d be likely to object to your modeling lingerie?”

  “No,” she says.

  Why would they?
she wonders.

  “Then do you think you’d like to come in for an interview?”

  “Yes, I would,” Lainie says. “Yes.”

  She waits.

  “What would be a convenient time for you?” the woman asks.

  The offices of Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., are in a strip mall on U.S. 41, situated at street level between a pet shop and a garden supply store. Lainie parks her white Geo nose-in, facing a battery of lawn mowers and spreaders, garden hoses on reels, huge sacks of fertilizer and seed, and variously priced rakes, hoes and spades racked against the front window of the store. In the pet shop on the other side of Buttercup, white puppies frolic and a very fat fluffy kitten dozes in the glancing afternoon sun. She raps on the glass. The kitten doesn’t stir.

  The flowers painted onto the plate-glass windows flanking the entrance door to Buttercup resemble sunflowers more than any buttercups Lainie has ever seen. She wonders immediately if the company would like her to design a new logo for the window The lettering is none too elegant, either. It is the simplest form of graphic, what graffiti writers called Bubble, a sort of ballooning, overlapping face that any child could master in moments, a totally inappropriate font for a firm specializing in high-style lingerie. She would have chosen something like DESDEMONA (and here she visualizes it in her head) or HARRINGTON (again visualizing it) as more appropriate to the nature of the business.

  She does not yet know what the nature of the business actually is.

  The man who interviews her is perhaps thirty years old, a good-looking man dressed in a white linen suit and white patent-leather shoes, wearing under the suit jacket a vibrant blue cotton sports shirt, open at the throat, no tie. He looks like he just stepped out of the pages of GQ, his black hair slicked back wetly in a look too fashionable for staid Calusa. Pleasantly, cordially, he offers her a chair in front of his wide desk—ebony top, polished chrome legs and trim—and sits in a black leather chair with the same chrome appointments as the desk, a mate to the chair in which Lainie sits and crosses her legs demurely. She is wearing a straw-colored suit, lighter panty hose, a mossy-green silk blouse, low-heeled sandals of the same color. The office is modestly but nicely decorated, modern prints on the walls, a pair of Chagalls, one Calder. A triangular black plastic nameplate on his desk announces C. WILSON in white letters.