Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (20 page)

“No, I never wondered where I’d be if I was a vial of crack.”

“I mean if you couldn’t find one of your toys or games. Didn’t you used to say Where would I be if I was a fire engine? Or
a doll? Or a…?”

“I didn’t play with dolls.”

“Where on this boat would I be?” she asked in a cute, feigned little-girl’s voice.

“No place,” he said. “There’s no place on this boat you’d be. Cause they ain’t no crack on dis here boat,” he said in a thick,
feigned watermelon accent.

“Wanna bet?” she asked, and smiled, and shifted her weight again, her legs parting slightly, the black skirt edging higher
on her thighs. “I’ll bet if I asked you really nice, you’d tell me where you’ve hidden that crack, Warren.”

“You’d be wasting your time, Toots.”

“Would I?” she said, and suddenly opened her legs wide to him. “Tell me,” she said.

“Toots…”

“Cause, honey, right now I’d do anything for some of that shit, believe me.”

“ Toots…”

“Anything,” she said.

Their eyes met.

She nodded.

“Not this way, Toots,” he said softly, and turned away from her, and walked swiftly to the ladder and climbed the steps and
was gone.

She stared at the empty space he’d left behind him.

What? she thought.

What?

What you expected from a firm that called itself Toy-land, Toyland was a yellow-brick road leading to a gingerbread house
with white-sugar icicles hanging from the roofline and jelly-drop doorknobs and mint-clear windows. You did not expect a low
yellow-brick factory in a Cyclone-fenced industrial park off Weaver Road, the Toyland, Toyland boy-girl logo sitting on the
rooftop in three-dimensional bliss. What you expected when you stepped into that fantasized gingerbread house was a band of
bearded elves on high stools at low tables, wearing red stocking hats and whistling while they worked. What you got was a
reception area with a glass-tiled wall beaming late morning sunshine, two teal-colored doors flanking a circular desk centered
on the opposite wall, and huge framed glossy photographs of the company’s several hit toys and games hanging on the other
two walls. Among these toys were a green frog wearing scuba-diving gear; a menacing treaded black tank whose helmeted commander
was a little blond girl; and a red fire truck with a yellow water tower which, from the photographic evidence, shot a real
stream of water.

I was here to see the man Etta Toland claimed was a witness to Lainie Commins’s thievery, the man who’d been present at a
meeting last September when Brett Toland first proposed his idea for a cross-eyed bear. Robert Ernesto Diaz’s office was at
the end of a long corridor lined with doors painted in various pastel shades, as befitted Toyland’s image. Etta had defined
him as the company’s design chief. His office at once fortified that concept.

A rangy man with black hair, a black mustache, and dark brown eyes, Diaz stood behind a huge desk cluttered with what I assumed
were models of future toys. A bank of windows behind the desk streamed sunlight onto a wall bearing a huge poster for Francis
Ford Coppola’s
Dracula,
or Bram Stoker’s, or whoever’s, flanked by a pair of Picasso prints. A Toys “
” Us catalog was open on the desktop, resting beside a digital clock that read 11:27, and a pair of clay models for a very
slender somewhat buxom doll…

“Our annual bid to dethrone Barbie,” Diaz said with a rueful grin.

…and models in five different colors for a helicopter which I assumed would fly if you put batteries in it, and four painted
ceramic models of men and women in space suits, which looked very much like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to me, but I currently
had
one
infringement suit going against the company.

“Toyland’s already begun cutting steel on the helicopter,” he said, “but we haven’t yet decided on the color. Which one do
you favor?”

Diaz saw my puzzlement and immediately defined “cutting steel.”

“Tooling up,” he explained. “Making the molds we’ll be using for years and years to come, I hope, I hope, I hope. The helicopter’s
my design. It’s called Whurly Burly, and the pilot’s a blond girl like the one in Tinka Tank, which you may have seen on the
wall in reception, and which was a big winner for us three Christmases ago. I designed
her,
too. Kids love blond dolls. Even black kids love blond dolls. Six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tooling on that bird,
plus another four for R&D…research and development…in hope it’ll fly
next
Christmas. That’s a million dollars going in. But we’re betting a lot more on Gladys—which I guess is why you’re here.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

“A terrible thing, terrible,” Diaz said, shaking his head. “To kill a man over a
toy
? Terrible.”

I said nothing.

“Look, she must have felt enormously threatened, I realize that. If that bear’s going to be under the tree by next Christmas,
it’s got to be in the stores no later than May. By next month, all your major chains—Kmart, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘
’ Us, F.A.O.’s—will be planning exactly which toy is going to be in which aisle on which shelf come spring.”

“That early,” I said.

“That early. October. Everything planned by then. With Tinka Tank, we had the choicest location in every goddamn store in
America. There wasn’t a girl alive who didn’t want that toy. We’re hoping the same thing will happen with Gladys. Test her
this
Christmas, have a runaway toy
next
Christmas.”

I did not mention that if Judge Santos decided in Lainie’s favor, either Mattel or Ideal would be testing
Gladly
and not
Gladys
this Christmas.

“Say we put out twenty, twenty-five thousand bears for the test launch,” Diaz said, “which we’ve now got priced at a hundred
and a quarter. If we see we’ve got a sure winner, we can drop the price to ninety-nine, keep her under that forbidding hundred-dollar
price point. Mass-producing her will cost about a third of that, something like thirty-five dollars a bear, including the
glasses, which are expensive to make. My guess is we’ll have sunk close to two million dollars in Gladys before we
really
begin marketing her. If we sell only a million bears next Christmas, you’re going to see some very long faces around here.
But if she’s a
big
seller next year, she’ll be even bigger the year after that and the year after that and then we’re in clover. So I think
you can see the urgency here.”

“Yes.”

“Of a decision on who owns what.”

“Yes.”

“So we can start moving. If we’re going to get those test bears out there plugging for us, the judge not only has to decide
correctly
he has to decide
soon.
So Brett wouldn’t have died for no reason at all.”

I missed the logic of this.

“Why weren’t you called as a witness?” I asked.

“At the hearing, do you mean?”

“Yes, the hearing.”

“From what I understand, Brett didn’t remember until it was too late.”

“Remember what?”

“That I’d been there at the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“When he told Lainie about his idea for the bear.”

“When you say ‘From what I understand…’”

“That’s what Etta told me.”

“When was that?”

“Last week sometime. After what happened.”

“After Brett’s murder, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Etta told you that he’d suddenly remembered…”

“Yes.”

“…the fact that you’d been there at this important meeting.”

“Yes. Well, I
was
there, you see.”

“Before the hearing, did you happen to mention this to either of the Tolands?”

“Well, Brett already
knew
I was there, you see. So I figured if he wanted me as a witness, he’d let me know.”

“But he didn’t, as it turned out.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Because apparently he’d forgotten all about it till the day he was murdered.”

“Apparently.”

“But you remembered being at the meeting.”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you still remember being there?”

“Well, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

It is one of those steamy sulky September days in Florida, when everything and everyone seems wilted by the heat and the humidity
and the promise of more heat and humidity. Bobby Diaz—he is familiarly called Bobby by everyone at Toyland—is working here
in his office when Brett buzzes him and asks him to come down the hall a minute.

“Do you remember the actual date of this meeting?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Or the time.”

“I don’t remember, I’m sorry.”

But he does remember that it was in the afternoon sometime and that he had just taken a call from an insider at Toys “
” Us who’d phoned to whisper in his ear that the company thought Toyland’s new video game,
Rush to Judgment,
was “entirely fresh.” In fact, he would’ve hurried down the hall to report this to Brett, anyway, even if Brett hadn’t buzzed
him first.

“Down the hall” is where Brett’s huge corner-window office is. A secretary sits behind a desk in an anteroom adjoining it,
but she scarcely glances up at Bobby as he raps his knuckles on her desk in passing greeting. Walking into Brett’s office
is like walking into a rich kid’s playroom. There are toys and dolls and games strewn on every flat surface, including the
floor. Brett himself sits behind a very large desk similarly covered with toys in various stages of development. As Bobby
recalls it now, last September they were still searching for a good face for a doll they’d since abandoned, and a dozen or
more models of the tiny doll’s head are scattered on Brett’s desk like the remnants of a mass decapitation. During the conversation
that follows, Brett keeps rolling one of these miniature heads between his fingers. Bobby tells Brett the good…

“Was Lainie in the office when you got there?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Go ahead.”

He tells Brett the good news he’s just received from his informer at Toys “
” Us, and Brett immediately gets on the phone to call, first, his wife in her own large (but not
as
large) office down the hall, and then Toyland’s sales manager, asking him to stand by for a possible confirming call and
big order from Toys, and then his production manager in the Bradenton factory (which explains why there are no elves here
in the Calusa building) to tell him they may have to up their initial run order on
Rush,
as the game is familiarly called in-house. Idly picking up two of the tiny doll heads, he asks Bobby to sit down, and offers
him a wrapped mint from the jar he keeps on his desk (he’s just quit smoking for the fifth time). As Bobby unwraps the hard
candy, Brett tells him all about this idea he’s had for a teddy bear.