Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  ———And out the window goes your teddy bear.

  ———No. Out the window goes my life.

  …which was good enough reason to commit murder.

  “By the way…”

  Shoveling pepper steak into his mouth.

  “…I didn’t see Brett again after I left his office.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Three o’clock. And I can tell you exactly where I was that night. In case that’s of interest to you.”

  “Just as a matter of curiosity,” I said.

  “Just as a matter of curiosity, I was in bed with a woman named Sheila Lockhart in her condo on Whisper Key. She’s free, white, and twenty-one, and she has nothing to hide. We were together all night long, ask her. I left the condo at eight the next morning.”

  “What were you wearing?”

  “What?”

  “What were you wearing, Mr. Diaz.”

  “Just what I’m wearing now, with a different shirt.”

  “I suppose she’ll confirm that, too.”

  “Ask her,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “Waitress,” he said, and signaled to a pretty little Chinese girl in a green silk Suzie Wong dress slit to her thigh. “Could I get some more hot tea, please?”

  The waitress scurried off.

  We sat silently for a moment.

  “What deal did you make, Bobby?”

  “Deal? What deal?”

  “That’s my question.”

  “I didn’t make any deal.”

  “You told me yesterday that the bear design was yours…”

  “You keep getting that mixed up.”

  “Was that the deal? You show Brett how to solve all his problems…”

  “Hey, all I did was hand him a tape.”

  “…and in return, he gives you credit for the bear’s design? Was that it?”

  The waitress was back with his tea.

  Bobby poured himself a fresh cup.

  Drank.

  Peered at me over the cup he was holding in both hands.

  “I don’t need credit for anything anybody else designed,” he said. “I have enough credits of my own.”

  “Then what were you looking for? Money?”

  “I’ve been working for Toyland for almost fifteen years,” he said. “If I could help the Tolands in any way…”

  “Including extortion?”

  “Come on, what extortion? Besides, I didn’t even know what his reaction was going to be, you want the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I told him Lainie was on that tape. For all I know, he might have been offended.”

  “I still don’t know what…”

  “I didn’t know how he’d take it. I didn’t know whether something was still going on between them.”

  I looked at him.

  “Whether they still had a thing going, you know?” he said.

  One of the men was talking in English now, just outside the bathroom door. She guessed Warren was sitting on the lounge diagonally across from the bathroom. She knew it was just a matter of time before someone had to pee. She had no idea what they would do when they discovered the bathroom door was locked.

  “Where are we headed?”

  Warren’s voice.

  “Well, señor, you don nee to know that, do you?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do, señor. Because people will be contacting me, and I’ll have to give them my location. This isn’t my boat. The owner will be calling. On the radio.”

  “Then we will ha to break the radio.”

  “Then the owner will call the Coast Guard. He loves this boat.”

  “Then you will juss ha to lie to him.”

  They argued back and forth, Warren trying to find out where they were taking the boat, the man stating over and over again that if the owner of the boat happened to radio, Warren would just have to tell him he was sitting in the water, drifting, the way he’d been when they boarded an hour or so ago. She gathered they had tied Warren’s hands and feet—he asked the man once to at least untie his feet, he wasn’t about to go jumping overboard—and then dragged him down below here and tossed him on the lounge. Well, she guessed the lounge. That was where his voice seemed to be coming from. The other man’s voice came and went, back and forth, fading, rising, as if he were alternately pacing and then either leaning against the sink or sitting momentarily on one of the banquettes opposite the lounge, or even leaning against the bathroom door as he had not a moment ago, the door creaking against his weight, she’d backed away startled.

  She kept wondering if she should slide open the window above the sink, remove the screen, and climb out onto the narrow deck that ran the full length of the boat, fore and aft. The deck outside the bathroom window was what, a foot wide? Broadening to some three feet or so up front. She could step out the window and move toward the rear of the boat, get to the steering wheel, clobber him with her high-heeled shoe, whatever. But the second man had to be up there, didn’t he? Driving the boat? This wasn’t the fucking Queen Mary, this was a little thirty-foot boat you could see from front to back of it in a single glance. The wheel was immediately aft of the bathroom. He’d hear her sliding open the window. Hear her taking off the screen. Be watching for her the minute she climbed through onto the deck.

  But what if someone wanted to use the bathroom first?

  Only in books and movies did nobody ever have to pee.

  She came walking up North Apple with her head bent, studying the leaf-covered sidewalk ahead of her. She was wearing a short white beach coat over a green tank top swimsuit and white sandals. A white tote was slung over her shoulder. It jostled her right hip as she came steadily toward where I was waiting outside her house. I had not called ahead. I wanted to surprise her.

  Still not seeing me, she stopped on the sidewalk and dug into the tote for her keys, and then, raising her head as she started toward the house again, spotted me standing at the curb in my seersucker suit. She hesitated only a moment, and then came toward me.

  “Hello, Matthew,” she said.

  “Lainie.”

  “I was at the beach.”

  “Your neighbor told me.”

  “Such a lovely day.”

  As she unlocked the door, I noticed that she hadn’t worn the Victorian ring to the beach. We went into the house where first she put down the tote and took off the beach coat, and then checked her answering machine for messages.

  “Lainie,” I said, “we have to talk.”

  “My, so serious,” she said. “I’m all sandy. May I shower first?”

  “I’d rather we…”

  But she was already sliding open one of the glass doors that led to the back of the house where a small patio gathered dappled sunlight in a clearing under the dense overhead growth. An outdoor shower was set up at one end of the patio. It consisted of a simple wooden stall with a plastic curtain hanging from a rod. The curtain was translucent, patterned with great big white daisies, pulled back now to reveal shower head and knobs on one wall, soap dish below them. A white bath towel rested on a painted blue stool just to the left of the stall. Lainie reached in, turned on the cold water, fiddled with the hot water knob till the mix suited her, and then kicked off her sandals, stepped into the stall, and pulled the plastic curtain closed behind her. I could see her feet below the bottom of the curtain. The green bathing suit dropped to the floor of the stall. Everything behind the daisy-splashed curtain was a blur of flesh-colored movement.

  “Lainie,” I said, “were you having an affair with Brett Toland?”

  Not a word from behind the curtain. Blurred flesh tones moving among the big daisies. Water splashing. I waited. At last:

  “Yes.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “That’s not the topic under discussion.”

  The topic under discussion, or rather the topic under recitation because I merely listened and said nothing,
was a two-year-long love affair that had started shortly after Lainie moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Calusa and began working at Toyland. The affair had ended just before Christmas of last year. According to Lainie, both she and Brett had been inordinately circumspect, limiting their torrid romance to after-hours trysts, never publicly revealing by the slightest glance or touch that there was anything untoward happening between employer and employee.

  Which made me wonder how Bobby Diaz had known they “had a thing going,” but I said nothing.

  “Did you ever notice,” she asked, “that married men tend to end affairs during the holiday season, when the tug of home and family is strongest? On Christmas Eve, right after Brett handed out the Christmas bonuses, he told me he wanted to end it. Merry Christmas, Lainie, it’s over. I gave my two weeks’ notice at the beginning of January.” She turned off the water. A wet arm slithered from behind the curtain. “Could you hand me the towel, please?” I picked it up from the stool, put it in her hand. Behind the curtain, she began drying herself.

  I was silently piecing together a timetable.

  Christmas Eve of last year: Brett ends the affair.

  Middle of January this year: Lainie leaves the company.

  Beginning of April: She comes up with the idea for Gladly.

  Twelfth day of September: Brett is mur—

  The curtain rattled back on its rod. Lainie was wearing the towel now, wrapped around her, its loose end tucked between her breasts. She stepped out, sat on the stool, began putting on her sandals again. Long wet blond hair cascaded over her face.

  “Ever see him again?” I asked.

  “Around town now and then. But we didn’t travel in the same social…”

  “I meant was it really over?”

  “Yes, it was really over.”

  “Never called you again…”

  “Never.”

  “Never asked to see you.”

  “Never.”

  “Until he phoned on the night of the twelfth.”

  “Well, that was strictly business,” she said.

  “Was it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said at once, and sat erect, tossing the wet hair in what I took to be a gesture of annoyance. Rising, she reached into the stall for the wet bathing suit, picked it up, and started walking back to the house, the suit swinging in her right hand. I followed her.

  The living room was cool and dim.

  A clock somewhere chimed three times.

  The afternoon was rushing by.

  “If you haven’t any other questions,” she said, “I’d like to get dressed.”

  “I have other questions,” I said.

  “Really, Matthew, can’t they wait?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Exasperated, she let her body go limp, her shoulders slumping on an exhalation of breath, her wandering right eye seemingly more vexatious than usual.

  “Okay, what?” she said.

  “Did you go to bed with Brett Toland on the night he was killed?”

  “Yes, damn it!”

  11

  So there we were.”

  This is Lainie talking.

  This is what she is now telling me about the time she spent on the Toland yacht on the night of September twelfth, a revised version, to be sure. I sometimes think all of life is Rashomon. If you have not seen the Akira Kurosawa film, too bad. It is almost as good as his High and Low, which was based on an American mystery novel the title of which I have now forgotten. Rashomon is about variations of the truth. It is about reality and the different ways in which reality can be perceived. It is about the nature of verity and falsehood. It is almost as good as the five-finger exercise Lainie Commins now performs as she sits in a towel in a white wicker chair in the living room of her small studio-house. Her suntanned legs are stretched out in front of her. She is relaxed in the chair. It is as if the truth—if this is, at last, the truth—has made her free.

  I listen.

  So there they were.

  Lainie Commins and Brett Toland, lovers until December of last year, at which time Brett simultaneously handed her a Christmas bonus and her walking papers. There they were. Sitting on a sultry September night in the cockpit of a sailboat that has been described as “romantic” in the various magazines devoted to great yachts of the sailing world. Alternately described as “opulent” or “luxurious.” Asking her if she’d like a drink. Why, yes, she says, that might be nice. This is now some five minutes after she gets to the boat. She has taken off her white-laced blue Top-Siders and her blue scarf with its tiny red-anchor print…

  It occurs to me that this is now the third version of Lainie’s story, her own personal Rashomon—”but I didn’t kill him,” she has told me over and over again.

  …and she hands these to Brett as he goes below to mix their drinks. Perrier and lime for her, at least the first time around. Vodka-tonic in the second telling, bit more than one, she says, Brett freshened the drink for her, right? It is perhaps five minutes past ten or thereabouts. In this telling—the third and final one, I hope—she has drunk two rather strong vodka-tonics, which may explain why she is now amenable to his invitation to revisit old times and renew old acquaintances.

  In her first version, Brett offered her a licensing agreement. In a second version of the tale (though admittedly not hers) Brett offered her a flat settlement of five thousand dollars to drop the infringement suit—thus spaketh Etta Toland. In Lainie’s own second version, Brett tried to blackmail her by threatening to disclose the nature of Idle Hands to the kiddie world at large. But now…

  Enfin…

  The truth.

  I hoped.

  In this version, Lainie does not, in fact, leave the boat at ten-thirty. Instead, she is drinking her second vodka-tonic in the cockpit when a sloop comes in under power, its spotlight guiding the way to a slip further down the marina dock. This is Charles Nicholas Werner, though she does not know the man’s name at the time, or that he will later testify to having seen her and Brett sitting there tête-à-tête, drinking, at ten forty-five. Understandably, and considering the fact that someone later thoughtlessly pumped two bullets into Brett’s head, Lainie afterward felt it expedient not to mention that Brett at that very moment was inviting her belowdecks to see his etchings. Or rather, to show her the videocassette case with its cover photo insert of two busy hands, one of which is wearing a heart-shaped Victorian ring Brett himself gave her one Valentine’s Day, back when their affair was running as swift and as torrid as the waters of Babylon.

  A ring she still wears, by the way.

  The very ring that captured my attention when first I discovered the cassette.

  Which he shows her now in the master bedroom of the yawl called Toy Boat.

  Shows her Idle Hands.

  Her hands.

  On the cover of the cassette case.

  Undeniably her hands wearing his ring.

  The case is empty.

  ———I’d have been stupid to bring it here to the boat, wouldn’t I? It’s safe at home.

  He makes no mention of blackmail just yet, merely shows her the cover photo of her hands working her crotch, and mentions that he watched the tape that afternoon and that it aroused old memories and isn’t it foolish of them to be battling in court over something as nonsensical as a fucking teddy bear, you should pardon the expression, when not too very long ago they’d meant everything in the world to each other?

  At which point he kisses her.

  So there they were.

  In what was unmistakably a bedroom (albeit on a boat it is called a stateroom) standing beside a bed, which is what a bed is called even on a boat (although on naval vessels it is frequently called a sack or a bunk), their lips together again for the first time (at least since December), his fingers spread on what is called an ass, hers, even on a boat, his cock growing what is called tumescent in certain novels or tumid in others, a palpably steamy urgency rising between them as they stand clinging to each
other, hoo boy!

  So what was a fun-loving couple to do under such circumstances, even if in court they were adversaries? Well, it could reasonably be assumed that they might fall together onto the bed, locked in each other’s arms, and it could further be assumed that his hands might slide down into the back of the blue silk slacks she’s wearing to find the cheeks of her aforementioned ass, and then inadvertently to find, from behind, the lips of her swollen pudendum although only grazingly. They are expert at this. For two years they were doing this before Brett called a halt to it on Christmas Eve, some present, sweetie. Doing it in motels hither and yon, in and around the environs of Calusa, Bradenton and Sarasota, the so-called Calbrasa Triangle, even doing it two or three times in this very stateroom on Toy Boat when the unsuspecting Etta Toland was in Atlanta, Georgia, visiting her mother in a nursing home there.

  They know just what they’re doing, these two.

  They’ve done it again and again until they are rather knowledgeable about the heres and theres, the goings and comings, so to speak, practice makes perfect. In fact, they are sooo good at what they’re doing that the time just flies by, honeylamb, and it is close to eleven-thirty when Brett withdraws physically and emotionally, and mentions casually that unless Lainie drops the infringement suit…

  ———all of kiddieland will learn about that tape. I’ll send copies to every company in the field…

  …although he did very much enjoy fucking her again, for which his heartfelt thanks.

  Lainie tells him he’s a no-good son of a bitch and leaves the boat in high dudgeon, putting on her Top-Siders first, but forgetting the blue scarf in her haste to get away.

  It’s eleven-thirty, not ten-thirty as she’d claimed in her initial telling of the tale now retitled Babes in Toyland Redux.

  A car is parked on the road outside the pillars at the club’s entrance.

  This has not changed from her second telling.

  Ten minutes later, Jerry and Brenda Bannerman hear shots coming from the Toland boat.

  I was thinking about time.

  I was thinking about ten crucial minutes.

  Because if Lainie had previously lied about an hour, why not now lie about a critical ten-minute period when she could still have been on that boat, shooting and killing the man who’d fucked her and later tried to blackmail her?