Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (2 page)

There were no questions.

“In that case, Mr. Hope,” Santos said, “if you’re ready with your first witness, we’ll begin.”

Hurry up and come out of there, Warren thought.

He usually drove a beat-up old grayish Ford, which was a very good car for someone in his profession to drive unless he wanted
everyone in the state of Florida to know just what he was up to. Trouble was, she
knew
the Ford, had in fact been
in
the car more times than he could count, so he couldn’t very easily park it up the street from her condo without her making
it in a minute. Black man parked in a dilapidated gray Ford, who else could it be but good ole Warren Chambers?

So he’d parked here on the corner in a borrowed red Subaru with a dented left fender, and was hulking down now under the shadow
of a big banyan tree dropping leaves all over the hood the way pigeons dropped shit. From where he was parked he could see
the exit driveway from the parking lot in front of her condo. He knew her car. He’d be able to spot her the minute she left.
If she left.

A fly buzzed his head.

Trouble with sitting here all the windows open.

Hated Florida and its goddamn bugs.

Kept watching the exit drive. It was on this end of the lot, big white arrow painted on the cement, pointing in. Big white
arrow on the other end of the lot, pointing out. So come on, he thought. You got an arrow showing you the way, let’s do it.

He looked at his watch.

Nine thirty-seven.

Time to get out and get hustling, he thought.

Elaine Commins—or Lainie, as she preferred calling herself—was thirty-three years old, tall and spare with an elegantly casual
look that spelled native Floridian, but she had come here from Alabama only five years ago, and she still spoke with a marked
Southern accent. She was wearing for this morning’s hearing a long pleated silk skirt with a tunic-length cotton pullover.
No panty hose or stockings, just bare suntanned legs in a sling-back shoe with a low heel and a sort of openwork macramé toe.
On the pinky finger of her right hand was the same gold ring she’d been wearing when first she came to my office. She’d described
it then as a Victorian seal ring, its face in the shape of a heart, its band decorated with florets. The gold of the ring
and the wheat tones of her outfit complemented her long sand-colored hair, pulled back and away from her face in a ponytail
fastened with a ribbon the color of her green eyes. Those eyes seemed wary and intent and—well, not to be unkind, but merely
for the sake of accuracy—a trifle cockeyed.

In America, the word “cockeyed” means “cross-eyed,” what the British call a “squint,” although in America someone “squinting”
is not looking at you “cockeyed,” he is merely narrowing his eyes at you, looking at you with his eyes only partly open, the
way he might look while
squinting
at the sun, for example, hmm? A funny language these colonials have, wot? Lainie wasn’t truly cross-eyed. That is to say,
neither of her eyes turned inward toward her nose. But she
was
cockeyed in that her left eye looked directly at you while her right eye turned outward. The defect was vital to her claim—in
fact, I hoped it would win the day for us—but it nonetheless gave her an oddly vulnerable and exceedingly sexy look. Placing
her hand on the Bible extended by the clerk of the court, she swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, so help her God.

“Would you tell me your name, please?” I said.

“Elaine Commins.”

Her voice as soft as a hot summer wind blowing in off the Tennessee River. Cockeyed green eyes wide and expectant in a face
kissed by sunshine, left eye staring straight at me, right eye wandering to the American flag in the corner behind the judge’s
bench. Bee-stung lips, slightly parted, as though she were breathlessly anticipating my next question.

“And your address, please?”

“1312 North Apple.”

“Is this also the address of your place of business?”

“It is. I work from a small studio in my home.”

“What’s the name of your business?”

“Just Kidding.”

“What sort of business is that, Ms. Commins?”

“I design children’s toys.”

“How long have you been doing this kind of work?”

“Ever since I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design ten years ago.”

“So for ten years you’ve been designing children’s toys.”

“Yes.”

“Have you had your own business for all of those ten years?”

“No, I’ve worked for other people in the past.”

“Did you once work for Toyland, the defendant in this case?”

“I did.”

“In what capacity?”

“As a member of the design staff.”

“Designing toys?”

“Yes. Children’s toys.”

“Did you design Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear while you were in the employ of Toyland?”

“I certainly did
not
!”

“When
did
you design the bear?”

“In April of this year.”

“And you left your job at Toyland when?”

“This past January.”

I walked to the plaintiff’s table, and picked up from its top one of two seemingly identical teddy bears. The one I held in
my hand as I walked back to the witness stand was some nineteen inches tall. The one still on the table was an inch shorter.
Both were made of mohair. Each had hanging around its neck a pair of spectacles on a gold chain.

“Your Honor,” I said, “may we mark this as exhibit one for the plaintiff?”

“So marked.”

“Ms. Commins,” I said, “do you recognize this?”

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a stuffed toy called Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear, which I designed and had copyrighted and trademarked.”

“I offer the bear in evidence, Your Honor.”

“Any objections?”

“None,” Brackett said. “Subject to our argument that the bear was
not
designed by Ms. Commins.”

“Duly noted.”

“Ms. Commins, was the design of this bear original with you?”

“It was.”

“To your knowledge, before you designed and named this bear, was there any other teddy bear in the world called Gladly the
Cross-Eyed Bear?”

“To my knowledge, there
was
not and
is
not.”

“Have you registered the trademark Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear?”

“I have.”

“Your Honor, may we mark this document as plaintiff’s exhibit number two?”

“So marked.”

“Ms. Commins, I show you this document and ask if you can identify it for me.”

“It’s the original certificate of trademark registration for Gladly.”

“You mean Gladly the
bear,
of course.”

“I mean Gladly the Crow-Eyed Bear. The crossed eyes are a unique part of her design. As are the correcting eyeglasses. They
are integral parts of the trade dress.”

“Your Honor, I offer the certificate in evidence.”

“Any objections?”

“None.”

“Your Honor, may we also mark
this
document?”

“Mark it plaintiff’s exhibit number three.”

“Ms. Commins, I now show you another document. Can you tell me what it is?”

“Yes, it’s the original copyright registration certificate for Gladly.”

“Did any drawings accompany the application for copyright?”

“They did.”

“And do they accurately depict the design of your bear?”

“
And
the bear’s eyeglasses.”

“Your Honor, I offer the copyright certificate and the accompanying drawings in evidence.”

“Objections?”

“None.”

“Ms. Commins,” I said, “how would you describe Gladly?”

“She’s a cross-eyed bear with big ears, a goofy smile, and eyeglasses that she can wear.”

“Are all these design elements original with you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, aren’t there other teddy bears in the world with big ears?”

“There are. But not like Gladly’s.”

“And goofy smiles?”

“Oh
boy
are there goofy smiles!” she said, and smiled in goofy imitation, which caused Santos to smile a bit goofily himself. “But
not like Gladly’s.”

“Are there other
cross
-eyed teddy bears in the world?”

“None that I know of.”

“Then the copyrighted crossed eyes on Gladly are unique to your bear.”

“Yes.”

“As is the trademarked name.”

“Yes.”

“How about the eyeglasses? Aren’t there teddy bears who wear eyeglasses?”

“Not eyeglasses like these.”

“What’s different about these glasses?”

“They uncross her eyes.”

“No glasses like that on any other teddy bear in the world?”

“None that I know of.”

“When did the idea for this bear first come to you?”

There she was at last.

Or rather, there was her
car,
a faded green Chevy not unlike Warren’s own faded gray Ford, nondescript and unremarkable, nosing its way out of the parking
lot like a sand shark. She looked both ways and then made a right turn and drove on up the block. Warren waited till the Chevy
was out of sight. He checked his watch. Ten minutes to ten.

Give her another five minutes, he thought.

Make sure she didn’t forget something, decide to come back for it.

As Lainie Commins tells it, there are cul-de-sac streets in Calusa that make you think you’ve stepped into a time warp. Her
house with its attached studio is on one of those streets. This is Calusa—this is, in fact,
Florida
—as it must have looked in the forties and fifties.

I have never thought of Calusa as a tropical paradise. Even in the springtime, when everything is in bloom, nothing really
looks as lush or as bursting with color as it does in the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, to me, Calusa usually looks more
brown than it does green, as if the grass, and the leaves on the trees and bushes, have been overlaid with a fine dust. Even
the bougainvillea and hibiscus seem somehow limp and lacking in luster when compared to the extravagant display of these plants
in truly tropical climates.

But in April…

Which is when the idea for Gladly first came to Lainie and which, coincidentally, was when I was flat on my ass in the Intensive
Care Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in a coma as deep as—but that’s another story.

In April, then, as Lainie tells it, the street on which she lives and works resembles a jungle through which a narrow asphalt
road has been laid and left to deteriorate. The entrance to North Apple Street—there
is
no South Apple Street, by the way—is a mile and a half from the mainland side of the Whisper Key bridge. A sign at the street’s
opening reads
DEAD END
appropriate in that North Apple runs for two blocks before it becomes an oval that turns the street back upon itself in the
opposite direction.

Lining these two short blocks are twelve shingled houses with the sort of glass-louvered windows you could find all over Calusa
in the good old days before it became a tourist destination for folks from the Middle West and Canada. The houses here are
virtually hidden from view by a dense growth of dusty cabbage palm and palmetto, red bougainvillea, purple bougainvillea,
white bougainvillea growing in dense profusion, sloppy pepper trees hung with curling Spanish moss, yellow-clustered gold
trees, pink oleander, golden allamanda, trailing lavender lantana, rust-colored shrimp plants, yellow hibiscus, pink hibiscus,
red hibiscus, eponymous bottlebrush trees with long red flowers—and here and there, the one true floral splendor of Calusa,
the bird-of-paradise with its spectacular orange and bluish-purple crest.

People say about this street, “It’s still very Florida.”

Meaning it’s run-down and overgrown and wild and fetid and hidden and somehow secret and silent. “You expect to see alligators
waddling out of the bushes on this street. “You expect to see bare-breasted, bare-chested Calusa Indians. What you do see
are suntanned young sun-worshippers—some of them bare-chested or bare-breasted, true enough—living six or seven in each small
house, performing any service that will keep them outdoors most weekdays and on the beaches every weekend. There are more
gardeners, pool-cleaning people, house painters, window washers, tree trimmers, road maintenance workers, lifeguards and boatyard
personnel living on the two blocks that form Apple Street than there are in the entire state of Nebraska.

In at least three of the houses here, there are people with artistic pretensions, but that is not unusual for the state of
Florida in general and the city of Calusa in particular. Calusa calls itself the Athens of Southwest Florida, a sobriquet
that causes my partner Frank—a transplanted native New “Yorker—to snort and scoff. Four people on Apple Street call themselves
painters. Another calls himself a sculptor. A sixth calls herself a writer. Lainie Commins is the only true professional on
the street. She is, after all, a trained designer with a track record of production, though none of the toys or dolls, or
even a
game
in one instance, ever took off the way the companies for which she’d worked had anticipated.

The walls of her tiny studio are hung with actually
manufactured
toys she designed first for a company named Toy-works in Providence, where she worked for a year after her graduation from
Risdee, and then for a company named Kid Stuff in Birmingham, Alabama, not far from her birthplace, and next for Toyland,
Toyland right here in Calusa, where she worked for three years before setting out on her own in January.

The idea for Gladly comes to her at the beginning of April sometime, she can’t recall the exact date, and she tells that honestly
to the Court now. The studio in which she works is so shadowed by the plants growing outside that it is dark even in the daytime.
She works with a huge fluorescent light over her table, sketching ideas, developing them, refining them. She wears glasses
when she works. In fact, she wears them
all
the time, except here in this courtroom today, where Matthew wants Judge Santos to notice that wandering right eye and forge
a connection between Lainie’s condition and that of the bear she created. The strabismus, as her visual defect is called,
commenced when she was three years old. At least, that was when her mother first detected what was then merely a slight turning-out
of the right eye. Glasses failed to correct the condition. Two operations to shorten the muscle also proved fruitless. The
right eye continued to wander. (When Lainie was sixteen, her mother confided to a friend that her daughter had “a wandering
eye,” but she wasn’t talking about the strabismus.) Lainie explains her condition to the Court now, gratuitously contributing
the fact that the word “strabismus” comes from the Greek word
strabos,
which means “squinting”—there you are, lads. A cockeyed squint, after all!