Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “Do we always have to pull teeth?” I asked.

  “All right, I called him.”

  “What about?”

  “I wanted to know if he’d had a chance to look at that video.”

  “And had he?”

  “Yeah, he said he’d watched it.”

  “Did you ask him what he’d thought of it?”

  “I’m sure I did.”

  “In fact, didn’t you ask him if you had a deal?”

  “No, I don’t remember asking him anything like that.”

  “And didn’t he say no, you didn’t have a deal? Didn’t he tell you the tape was of no use to him?”

  “No, we never had that conversation.”

  “Well, gee, Bobby, didn’t you tell him the tape was only his whole fucking case?”

  “I’m sure I never…”

  “And when he said he was sorry, didn’t you say, ‘Oh, you don’t know sorry, Brett! You’ll find out sorry!’ Isn’t that what you said?”

  “No.”

  “You told Sheila he’d be sorrier than he’d ever been in his whole fucking life! Those were your words, Bobby.”

  “She’s wrong.”

  “Then she’s also wrong about you leaving the condo a few minutes later.”

  “I told you she was.”

  “To go down for a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Oh, that. Sure. I thought you meant leave her. I didn’t actually leave her till eight the next…”

  “Yes, that’s what she thought, too.”

  “Good. Then…”

  “She thought leaving for the night. Not just running down to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Which is where you said you were going.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “So what took you two and a half hours, Bobby?”

  He did not answer.

  “Sheila says you didn’t get back till almost midnight. Where were you?”

  He still said nothing.

  “Where’d you go for those cigarettes, Bobby?”

  “I sure as hell didn’t go to the Silver Creek Yacht Club, if that’s what…”

  “Well, now, who said you did?”

  “If that’s what you’re sugg—”

  “But where did you go?”

  He turned back to me. Mixed himself another drink. Dropped a wedge of lime into the glass. Turned to me again.

  “What deal did you offer, Bobby?”

  “Ten percent of the bear’s gross, okay?”

  “For handing over that video to Brett?”

  “Yes. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Even though he turned you down cold?”

  “That only made him a son of a bitch. It doesn’t mean I killed him.”

  “What’d you mean when you said you’d make him sorrier than…”

  “I meant I’d get even.”

  “How?”

  “By making him sorry.”

  “By killing him? By going to the boat…”

  “I didn’t go to the fucking…”

  “…and shooting him twice in the head…”

  “No!”

  “…with his own gun? Weren’t you the man in black who parked your car outside…”

  “Man in black? What man in…?”

  “…the club and then walked to the boat…”

  “I was nowhere near the boat, nowhere near the cl—”

  “Didn’t you board the Toland boat at eleven-fifteen that night?”

  “No, I didn’t!”

  “Didn’t you shoot Brett Toland at eleven-forty?”

  “No!”

  “Then where were you at that time, Bobby?”

  “In my car! On the way back to Sheila’s condo.”

  “From where? Where the hell were you for two and a half…?”

  “I went to see Brett. But not on the boat. I didn’t know he was on the boat. He was home when I called him, I thought that was where I’d find him.”

  “You went to the Toland house?”

  “Yes. I wanted that tape back. If Brett…”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want him to use it unless he fucking well paid for it!”

  “There are other copies out there, you know. He could easily have…”

  “Good, let him go find them! Meanwhile, a judge was making his decision and Brett knew he’d stolen the bear! If he wouldn’t deal with me, then I wanted that fucking tape back!”

  He nodded angrily, took a long swallow of the drink.

  “That’s why I went there that night.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “Around ten. He wasn’t home. Etta told me…”

  Etta tells him her husband has gone to the boat.

  Bobby figures he’ll catch him there. It’s only ten, fifteen minutes from their house to the club. But then she tells him he’s gone there to meet Lainie. So he asks Etta if Brett happened to mention a videotape to her. No, he hadn’t. What videotape? Well, did he happen to be carrying a videotape when he left the house? No, she doesn’t know anything about a videotape. What videotape?

  He tells her what it is.

  Idle Hands.

  Lainie Commins’s busy little hands.

  He tells her about the deal he offered Brett, a lousy ten percent of the gross, is that a lot? As a finder’s fee? People get more than that for finder’s fees, Etta. But now Brett was going to bypass him and use the tape, anyway. That isn’t fair, is it, Etta?

  Etta tells him she’s sure he’s mistaken.

  Brett is going to offer Lainie a flat five thousand dollars in settlement.

  That’s why he’s meeting her on the boat.

  That’s what he plans to propose to her.

  She doesn’t know anything about a videotape.

  “So it suddenly occurred to me,” Diaz said, “that maybe he didn’t take the tape with him, after all, maybe it was still there in the house someplace. Maybe he really didn’t think he could use it, the shmuck, or maybe he was saving it as an ace in the hole in case Lainie turned down the flat five, who knew? So I asked her did she know where he might keep such a tape if there was such a tape?”

  Diaz drained his glass.

  “We went into the den, where their television set is, and their VCR, and all their stereo equipment. This is now maybe twenty to eleven, I’d been there forty minutes already. We searched through all their videos, but we couldn’t find Idle Hands—though there were some other porn flicks there, which Etta knew about, and which she didn’t find embarrassing, by the way. I asked her if they had a safe. I figured if Brett planned to use the tape later, then maybe he’d put it away someplace secure. I wanted to get out of there already, it was at least a forty-five-minute drive back to Sheila’s, but I didn’t want to leave if there was a possibility the tape was still there. I wanted that tape.”

  “Did they have a safe?”

  “Oh yes. Upstairs. Etta went up to check, and five minutes later…this is now a quarter to eleven, around then…she comes down with a videotape, but no case. The cassette is there, but it’s not in the little black vinyl case. She tells me this is the way she found it, at the back of their safe, and I say Well, that must be it, don’t you think? and she says There’s only one way to find out. So we played it. Just enough to confirm it was Lainie doing her thing.”

  “Then what?”

  “I told Etta I wanted the tape, please. She said she was sorry but she would first have to ask Brett if he’d already paid me anything for it. So I thought Oh yeah? Well, fuck you, lady. And I told her.”

  “Told her what?”

  Diaz nodded.

  A small satisfied smile crossed his handsome face.

  “That until last Christmas her husband was having an affair with Lainie Commins.”

  12

  Warren was telling her the guy upstairs had a gun. Toots was translating what the guy upstairs was yelling. He wanted a poncho. He was getting soaked up there, bring him a fucking poncho. She was thinking if they took
the guy out, she’d have a gun and eight kilos of coke.

  The rain was one of those hard hasty squalls that came on you suddenly and made you think you were going to drown. They seemed worse when you were on a boat because suddenly the entire world was overwhelmed by water. Thing about them was that they didn’t last long. Even so, the guy upstairs kept yelling for a poncho. Bring me a fucking poncho, Luis!

  Warren whispered the plan to her.

  Fatback Key is in Calusa County, but it is not within the city limits of Calusa itself. Instead, it falls within the boundaries of Manakawa to the south. It is the wildest and narrowest of the county’s several keys, flanked on east and west by the Gulf and the bay, two bodies of water that during the hurricane season sometimes join over Westview Road, the two-lane blacktop that skewers Fatback north to south. The bridge connecting Fatback to the mainland is a humpback that can accommodate only one car at a time. Directly over the bridge is a large wooden signpost with two dozen arrows pointing off either left or right, the names of the key’s residents carved into the wooden arrows and then painted in with white. The name DEMMING was on one of those arrows; Patricia lived on Fatback. The name TOLAND was on another arrow.

  Bobby Diaz had estimated that it was a forty-five minute drive from Sheila’s condo on Whisper to the Toland house on Fatback. Driving fast, in light off-season traffic, I made it from Diaz’s condo on Sabal in an hour and ten. I had not called ahead. I was hoping Etta Toland, a recent widow, would be home and not out dancing. There were lights on in the house, a sumptuous, architecturally pristine bayside mansion that opened westward past gulfside dunes to yet another glorious Calusa sunset. A greenish-black Infiniti was parked on the driveway’s white gravel. I parked the Acura alongside it. It was twenty minutes past seven.

  I walked through the evengloam stillness of a lush tropical garden flanking the path to the front door. Somewhere a cardinal called. The light was fading fast. I rang a doorbell over the discreet brass escutcheon with the name Toland etched upon it in black script lettering. The cardinal fell silent. The sky over the Gulf turned purple and deep blue and blue-black and black. A single star appeared.

  “Who is it?”

  Etta’s voice behind the door.

  “Matthew Hope. May I come in?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Then:

  “Is this allowed?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Silence.

  At last the door opened.

  Etta Toland was wearing a clay-spattered blue smock over jeans and sandals. Her sleek black hair was pulled to the back of her head, tied there with a short red ribbon. She had a towel in her hands, and she was still wiping the left hand clean when she opened the door. Rumor had it that she was a sculptor. Then again, in Calusa every other person you tripped over either sculpted or painted or wrote plays or…

  “What is it, Mr. Hope?”

  “I’m sorry if I’m inter—”

  “You are.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “There are some things we need to discuss.”

  “I’m sure this isn’t permitted.”

  Dark eyes angry and suspicious. Standing there in the doorway, head erect, shoulders back, barring entrance.

  “I can come back with a subpoena for a deposition,” I said.

  “Then maybe you ought to do that.”

  “I’d prefer we talked informally.”

  “All right,” she said, “come in.”

  I stepped into the foyer. She closed and locked the door behind me. I was in a tiled entry that seemed an extension of the lush garden outside, tubbed flowering plants and trees everywhere, many of them taller than I was, some of them squatting low on the earth-colored floor. I followed her past a shallow pool in which golden carp swam, moved with her through wide windowed corridors toward where a light showed in the otherwise dim interior of the house.

  Her studio—a huge room skylighted and windowed to show a star-drenched sky—faced eastward toward the bay. There were clay models of female nudes of various heights on stands and tables and platforms. The one she’d apparently been working on when I arrived was a life-size nude captured in midstride, arms swinging, left leg stepping out, right leg back. She began draping it with wet cloths. I had the sudden image of someone covering a birdcage at nightfall.

  “Mrs. Toland,” I said, “Bobby Diaz told me he was here on the night Brett was killed. Is that correct?”

  “Is it correct that he told you? Or is it correct that he was here?”

  “Etta,” I said, “let’s not play games. I think you killed your husband.”

  “Do you?”

  One eyebrow arching over a dark, almond-shaped eye. The Dragon Lady. Calm and cool and spattered with clay, her hands deftly draping rags over the clay figure that stood almost as tall as she did.

  “Diaz came here looking for a videocassette, didn’t he?”

  “Did he?”

  Same cool look. Hands working as busily as Lainie’s had on the tape in question.

  “Which you found in an upstairs safe.”

  “Did I?”

  Infuriatingly cool. Hands wrapping the clay in the wet cloths. Wrapping the arms of the nascent torso, and the legs, and the breasts, and the head. Wrapping. Studiously wrapping. Studiously ignoring me. Icily ignoring me.

  “You watched the tape together,” I said.

  No answer now. Her entire attention focused on the clay model, wrapping it like a mummy, wet cloths enveloping it, enclosing it, smothering it.

  “You confirmed that one of the women on the tape was Lainie Commins.”

  Still no answer. Still working. She dipped her hands into a basin of muddy clay water on a table beside the platform. Rinsed them. Dried them on a clay-smeared towel. Folded the towel neatly. Placed it on the table beside the platform bearing the mummy-wrapped woman in full stride. Turned away from basin and towel and mummy and me. Began walking out of the studio.

  “Etta,” I said.

  “I think we’re finished here, Mr. Hope.”

  “It was Matthew once.”

  “When we were friends.”

  “Etta, what did you do after Diaz left here that night?”

  No answer. Still walking toward the studio’s open entrance frame, a woman in full stride, like the piece she’d been sculpting.

  “Etta, he left here at about ten to eleven. What did you do then?”

  “I went to sleep.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think.”

  “It does if I can prove you were on that boat the night your husband was killed.”

  “I was on the boat that night. After he was killed. I found his body, remember, Mr. Hope?”

  “Did you go back to the boat after that night?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Then how did the cassette get there?”

  She stopped just inside the doorless frame. Thought it over for a moment or two. Turned to me.

  “Bobby took it with him,” she said.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “That’s his word against mine.”

  “Not if he wasn’t on the boat that night.”

  “Then he must have been.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Still his word against mine,” she said again, and shrugged airily, and was turning toward the open door frame again when I said, “The cassette holder was empty at eleven-thirty.”

  She hesitated again.

  Stopped in midmotion, partially turned toward me, partially turned toward the door frame and the immense house beyond.

  “So?” she said.

  “Bobby was on his way back to Whisper Key at that time. He got there shortly before midnight. I have a witness to that effect. He couldn’t have been on the boat after Lainie left it. And the cassette holder was empty at that time.”

&
nbsp; “Who says?”

  “Lainie says.”

  “Lainie killed him.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No. The cassette was here in this house at ten minutes to eleven. Lainie never had it in her possession. Eight days after the murder, I found it on the boat. You just told me you never went back to the boat. So how…?”

  “I also told you Bobby took the cassette with him when he left here that night.”

  “I don’t think so, Etta. I think you carried that cassette to the boat. I don’t know why you did that. Maybe you’d like to tell me.”

  “Please, this is absurd.”

  “No, Etta. I think you went to the boat to confront your husband. I think you…”

  “I think you should leave.”

  “I have a witness who saw you,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Going aboard at a quarter past eleven.”

  She kept looking at me.

  “Do I have to get a court order for a lineup?” I asked.

  And suddenly she was weeping.

  The first thing Juan saw was her blond hair.

  Squinting through the torrential rain, barely able to see the boat’s running lights, he clung fiercely to the wheel and yelled again for Luis to bring him a fucking poncho. White fisherman’s shirt plastered to his big barrel chest now, pistol tucked into the waistband of his soaking-wet chinos, he yelled “Luis!” again, and saw the blond head coming up from below.

  Warren was sliding open the bathroom window.

  Juan’s mouth fell open.

  Truly fell open.

  He watched her coming up from below, slow languid glide up the ladder, tight black skirt and black high-heeled shoes, wrinkled yellow blouse, where the hell had she come from?

  Warren was crawling out onto the narrow deck outside the window. Rain beating down everywhere around him. Gripping the stainless-steel grab rail as he ducked low and crawled back toward the wheel.

  “How you doin, man?” Toots said in the sultriest voice she could muster, considering that she could see the outline of the nine-millimeter gun where the guy’s shirt was plastered to his belly. Big Glock on a big bearded guy who could tear her in half even without the piece. She wanted that gun. She wanted the eight keys of cocaine. That was the only thing on her mind right now. Take the guy out, get hold of the gun, find the coke.