Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (17 page)

“You’d discussed offering Ms. Commins five thousand dollars if she’d drop her infringement claim.”

“Yes.”

“Did you and your husband discuss any
other
possible offer?”

“No. Well, the
price,
yes. We were trying to determine how
much
she was going for. But there was never any doubt in our mind that she’d agree to a cash settlement.”

“You didn’t, for example, discuss manufacturing Ms. Commins’s bear yourself and…”

“No.”

“…and compensating her by way of a substantial advance against generous royalties?”

“Why would we do that? She designed the bear while she was working for us. In fact, the bear was
Brett’s
idea. And we have a witness to prove it.”

“What witness?” I said at once. “You offered no witnesses at the…”

“Brett remembered only later.”

“Remembered what?”

“That Bobby Diaz was there.”

“Who’s Bobby Diaz?”

“Our design chief. He was there.”

“Where?”

“In Brett’s office. When he first told Lainie about his idea for a cross-eyed bear.”

“When was this?”

“Last September.”

“And your husband remembered it only
after
the hearing?

“Yes. In fact, that’s what prompted him to invite Lainie to the boat last Tuesday night.”

“To make an offer of a cash settlement.”

“Yes. Because now we had a witness.”

“Did you tell this is your attorney?”

“We planned to. If Lainie didn’t accept the offer.”

“So, as I understand this, at eleven-forty you were waiting at home for your husbands phone call…”

“Yes. To learn whether she’d accepted the offer or turned it down.”

“Did you think she might actually
accept
such an offer?”

“Brett and I were confident she would.”

“An offer of five thousand dollars to drop…”

“The bear was ours,” Etta said simply. “We have a witness.”

“Did your husband, in fact, call you at any time that night?” I asked.

“No,” Etta said. “My husband was being murdered by Lainie Commins that night.”

I let that go by.

“Did
you
try to reach
him
at any time that night?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“By telephone.”

“You called the boat?”

“Yes. Well, the cellular phone number. There’s a cellular phone on the boat.”

“At what time did you call the boat?”

“Eleven forty-five? Around then. I was ready for bed, in fact. When I didn’t hear from Brett, I thought something might be
wrong. So I called the boat.”

“And?”

“I got no answer.”

“What did you do then?”

“I got dressed and drove to the club.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t like Brett not to call when he said he would.”

“Did you think the meeting might still be going on?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“How long did it take you to get to the club?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes?”

“Just for clarification,” I said, “by ‘the club,’ I’m assuming you mean the Silver Creek Yacht Club.”

“Yes.”

“Where you keep your boat.”

“Yes.”

“What time did you get there, Mrs. Toland?”

“A quarter past twelve.”

“How do you know what time it was?”

“I looked at the dashboard clock just as I was nearing the club.”

“How’d you happen to do that?”

“I knew it was late, I guess I was wondering if they could still be on the boat discussing the offer. I guess I wanted to
know just how late it actually was.”

“Is the clock in your car a digital clock?”

“No. It has hands.”

“Then you can’t say
exactly
what time it was, can you?”

“It might have been a minute or so later.”

“Twelve-sixteen, would you say? Twelve-seventeen?”

“More like twelve-sixteen.”

“You said earlier that you hadn’t heard from your husband since he’d left the house…”

“That’s right.”

“What time was that?”

“Around eight.”

“Are you aware that he called Ms. Commins at nine? From the boat?”

“Yes, he said he was going to.”

“Didn’t call her from the house, is that right?”

“No. Said he wanted to call from the boat.”

“Why?”

“Lend urgency to it. Tell her he was already on the boat, ask her to meet him there, discuss a solution calmly and sensibly.”

“Didn’t ask you to come along?”

“No. He didn’t want it to seem we were ganging up on her.”

“So he left the house at eight…”

“Yes.”

“And this was now sixteen minutes past twelve as you were approaching the club…”

“Yes, the big stone pillars at the club’s entrance.”

“What did you do then?”

“I made a right turn in front of the restaurant, where the driveway swings around the oval there, and I headed for the marina
parking lot.”

“Toward the booth there at the entrance to the lot?”

“Yes.”

“Was there anyone in the booth at that hour?”

“No.”

“Were there any lights on in the booth?”

“No. Listen, let’s just
get
to it, okay?”

Frank raised his eyebrows.

I looked surprised.

“Get to what?” I asked.

“Your
client,
” she said.

“I’m sorry, what…”

“Elaine Commins,” she said. “In her little white Geo. Racing past that booth and out of the parking lot.”

My heart sank.

I was silent for a moment. Helen Hampton kept watching the tape recorder. Sidney Brackett sat with his arms folded across
his chest.

“You just said there weren’t any lights on in…”

“There were lights
outside.
”

“Where?”

“Hanging on either side of the booth.”

“Overhead lights?”

“I saw her.”

“Even though…”

“I
saw
her! It was Lainie. I looked her dead in the eye as she went flying out of that lot. Lainie Commins. Fresh from killing my
husband!”

“Did you know he was dead at the time?”

This from my partner Frank, who’d been silent until this moment.

“No, I did not know he was dead.”

“No one had yet informed you…”

“Of
course
not!”

“…that your husband was dead?”

“No.”

“Then you had no reason to assume, even if you did actually
see
Ms. Commins driving out of that lot…”

“Oh, I
saw
her, all…”

“…that she’d killed your husband, isn’t that right?”

“Until I
found
him, do you mean?”

She said this quite sweetly, nailing Frank right between the eyes. No, she was saying, I had no reason to connect a woman
racing from the scene of a crime until I’d actually
found
the scene of the crime. But we are coming to that, counselors. Just keep asking your dumb questions, and we will slowly but
inexorably get to my husband Brett Toland with two bullets in his head.

Wish to or not, we had to hear it.

“Can you tell us what happened next?” I asked.

What happened next…

And next…

And next…

And next…

…was that she’d driven her car to a parking spot facing slip number five, where
Toy Boat
was tied up, and she got out of the car and walked up the gangway to the boat, calling her husband’s name because there were
lights on in the saloon and she figured he might be down there, though she had no idea at the time that he might be down there
dead.

Far out on the water, she can hear a buoy’s foghorn moaning to the night. The wooden ladder creaks under her weight as she
takes the four steps down into the saloon with its Oriental rugs and its paisley-covered couches and glass-fronted lockers
and Currier & Ives prints, walks through the saloon and past the closed door to the head on her right, and down the passageway
into the master stateroom.

She does not see her husband at first.

What she sees at once is a gun on the bed.

Blue-black against the white bedspread.

She knows this gun, it is her husband’s. But it is odd that he would leave it here in plain sight on the bed, and besides…

Where is he?

“Brett?” she calls.

And sees him in that instant.

Lying on his back, on the carpet, on the deck, on the far side of the bed.

He is naked.

A white towel is draped open around his waist.

His face is covered with blood.

He is red with blood.

Quite calmly…

She is amazed that she does not scream.

Quite calmly, she lifts the cellular phone from where it is resting on one of the cabinets, and quite calmly dials 911 to
report that she has just discovered her husband murdered aboard their yacht.

Her watch reads twenty minutes past midnight.

The police arrive five minutes later.

If anyone in Calusa needs confirmation that the crime business here is in very good health, thanks, all he has to do is take
a quick glimpse at what was once called the Public Safety Building. The old tan brick facade of the building is still there,
but in place of the discreet lettering that had announced the police facility in the dear dead demure days, there are now
bigger, bolder, bronze letters informing the public in no uncertain terms that this is the home of:

CALUSA
POLICE
HEADQUARTERS

The day was hot and still. There seemed to be even less wind than was normal for September. It has always struck me as odd
that the school year down here starts in August, when a person can wilt just stepping out of bed. September is no picnic,
either. Sultry is perhaps the best word to describe September in Calusa, although at night cool breezes often blew in off
the Gulf. It rained a lot in September. You expected the rain to cool things off, but no, all it did was cause steam to rise
momentarily from the sidewalks. Tourists knew what Florida was like in the wintertime, but year-round residents knew the
real
Florida. Sometimes in September, when the days got steamy and sullen, an alligator waddling up Main Street wouldn’t have
surprised anyone. September in Florida was what Florida was all about.

There were no alligators coming up Main Street on that hot and sunny morning of September eighteenth. I walked past the pittosporum
bushes lining the sidewalk in front of the police facility, and glanced up, as I usually did, at the very narrow windows resembling
rifle slits in a fortress wall. But there were no snipers behind them because they were designed for protection against heat
rather than siege. Where once a person walked through a pair of dark bronze doors into an open space containing only a reception
desk with a young woman behind it, there was now a metal detector unit with an armed Calusa P.D. blue standing to the right
of it and another one sitting at a desk behind it. The one behind the desk conducted a hands-on search of my briefcase. He
also asked who I wanted to see, and called upstairs to make sure I was expected.

Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place. On the third floor, the old orange-colored letter elevator is gone, a
victim of high-tech delivery systems. The old somewhat cozy reception area has been enlarged to some four times its original
size, and transformed into a bustling space that resembles a warship’s battle room, with computer terminals beeping and blinking,
phones ringing, civil service employees mingling with P.D. blues and plain-clothes cops in a frantic boil resembling a famous
borrowed television show. A bank of four elevators is on the entrance wall. The other three walls have more doors in them
than a bedroom farce, constantly opening and closing, people coming and going in handcuffs or without.

Where earlier there had been no need for what in bigger cities is called a detention cage, there is now a rather large so-called
Conditioning Unit, which makes the cell sound like a brainwashing center, but staid, sedate Calusa has never quite admitted
to itself that crime is as rampant here as it is anyplace else in the United States. Calusa would rather believe that the
miscreants dragged into this facility day and night are not “criminals” in the strictest sense but merely misguided souls
who’ve somehow fallen afoul of the law and must be temporarily “conditioned” until the matter can be straightened out.

This morning, there were half a dozen recently arrested individuals in the C.U., as the huge cage was euphemistically called.
One of them was a black woman wearing pink satin shorts, a red bikini bra, and red high-heeled shoes. I imagined she’d been
picked up for soliciting sex on US. 41, near the airport. The other five people in the cage were men, three of them black,
two of them white. The biggest of the black men was obviously drunk and kept shouting to anyone who’d listen that he wasn’t
no
African
American, damn it! He was a plain ole
American
same as anyone else born in this country.

“Do I look like I drink goat’s milk and blood? You see flies eatin
my
eyes, man? Fuck Africa!” he shouted to me as I went by. “You hear me?
Fuck
Africa!”

One of the white men said, “Fuck
you,
man!” and then threw a finger at
me
when he realized I wasn’t the detective, lawyer, or state attorney he was waiting for. Nobody else paid any attention to
me.

I found Morris Bloom in his office at the far end of the corridor.

“Got yourself another winner, I see,” he said, and grinned and extended his hand.

I told him I thought Lainie Commins was innocent.

He said, “Sure.”

I told him Pete Folger had already offered me a deal.

“What has he got, Morrie?”

“Is this on the record?”

“He suggested I talk to his grand jury witnesses.”

“Well, I was one of them,” Bloom said, nodding.

“Can we talk?”

“No tape.”

“However.”

“Sure”

In every man’s life, there are two cowboys who once beat him up and taught him the meaning of fear. I keep expecting my particular
cowboys to show up again one day, to pay me back for what Bloom taught me to do to them. That is the kind of thing cowboys
never forget. So one day I’m sure they’ll be waiting around the next corner. In fact, when those bullets came banging out
of that parked car last April, I thought it might have been my cowboys coming to get me at last. I can tell you this. I will
never be able to repay Detective Morris Bloom for what he taught me to do. What he taught me to do was almost kill them.