Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (23 page)

“That’s very impressive,” Alston said. “Where’d you get that?”

“I made it myself,” Guthrie said proudly.

“No kidding? That’s very impressive.”

Alston had never been what anyone would call handsome, but the last time Guthrie had seen him, his brown eyes were shot with
red, and his craggy face looked puffy and bloated, and his straw-colored hair looked stringy, and there was a beard stubble
on his face, and it was plain to see he’d already begun drinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Today, at nine forty-five
now, he was clean-shaven, and he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and tie over a pristine white button-down shirt, and his
hair was combed, and he looked…well…presentable.

Guthrie was impressed, too.

He basked in the glow of Alston’s approval of the cast he’d made at the scene, feeling very much like a sixth-grade pupil
showing a clay ashtray to his teacher. The cast really was a very good one, if Guthrie said so himself. Sometimes they turned
out lousy. But Guthrie had first sprayed shellac over the tire track in the sandy soil on the shoulder of the road, and then
had used only the very finest grade of art plaster of Paris for his mixture. He had spread it over the water in the bowl,
not stirring it, permitting it instead to sink eventually to the bottom of the bowl, and only then adding more plaster until
the water couldn’t soak up anything further. After he’d poured the mixture onto the track, eyeballing it to a thickness of
three-eighths of an inch or so, he reinforced it with snippets of twigs and twine and a few toothpicks for good luck, carefully
laying on the material so that none of it touched the track itself. Pour on another layer of plaster, allow it to harden—you
knew this was happening when it got warm to the touch—and
voilà!
The perfect specimen lying on Alston’s desk.

“So what would you like me to do with this fine work of art here?” Alston asked.

Guthrie knew he was joking.

Or hoped he was.

“Nick,” he said, “I would like you to seek a match in either your own files or the Feeb files. I have Polaroids, too,” he
said, and dropped a thick manila envelope onto Alston’s desk. “I would like you to do me that favor, Nick.”

“How’s Gracie these days?” Alston asked casually.

Gracie was a hooker Guthrie had once sent around to Alston’s place as a favor when he was still a falling-down drunk.

“She’s fine. Asked about you just the other day, in fact.”

Alston said nothing for several moments. Then, still looking down at the plaster cast, he said, “I’d like her to see me sober.”

“Done,” Guthrie said. “I’ll send her over tonight.”

“No, just tell her I’ll call,” Alston said.

“Happy to,” Guthrie said, and waited.

“What’s this in reference to?” Alston asked, opening the envelope and looking at the very good Polaroids Guthrie had taken,
if he said so himself.

“A homicide,” Guthrie said. “I’m working for the defense attorney.”

“Who?”

“Matthew Hope.”

“What happened to Warren Chambers?” Alston asked.

What they do is they treat you like an invalid. Which is what you are. This means that the moment I began speaking, they started
a daily assessment of my
functional
status in addition to my
neurological
status. Test after test after test, tests enough to bend the mind and twist the tongue. Let us consider, for example, the
Post Traumatic Amnesia Scale, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Bender-Gestalt Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Index, all designed to determine the extent of injury or lack thereof.

They shave your scalp with an abrasive, and with elasticized tape they attach needle electrodes to it. Ten to twenty small
electrodes on the scalp in a defined spacing. You feel like Frankenstein’s monster waiting for the bolt of lightning that
will make you come alive. In metabolic insults such as mine…

Spinaldo kept using the term “metabolic insult.” I felt I should challenge him to a duel.

…in metabolic insults such as mine, then, the electroencephalogram usually shows slow diffuse waves. Recovery occurs in tandem
with the resolution of slow waves toward normal brain wave patterns.

Every day, Spinaldo told me I was on the way to recovery.

I kept wondering when that would be.

The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up around the slip where
Toy Boat
was nudging the dock, but I had called the State Attorney’s Office beforehand, and had been told by Pete Folger that the
prosecution had already gathered all the evidence it needed, and that I could visit the boat anytime I wished. I was surprised,
therefore, to see a uniformed police officer standing at the head of the gangway as Andrew and I approached that Wednesday
morning.

I told him who we were, and handed him a card.

He told us who he was, and explained that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had asked the police department to send an
officer down to “extend every courtesy to Attorney Hope.” This was code. What it meant was “Stay with him every minute and
make sure he doesn’t do anything that will damage our case against Lainie Commins.”

I told the officer—whose name was Vincent Gergin, according to the black plastic nameplate over the breast pocket of his blouse—that
my associate and I merely wanted to take some Polaroids of the crime scene with a view toward better orientation. I also told
him we might look around the boat a bit to see if there was anything the S.A.’s Office might have overlooked. He said, “No
problem.”

I hate that expression.

I said, “Fine. In that case, we’ll go aboard.”

He said, “Fine. In that case, I’ll just go with you.”

We all went down the gangway and onto the boat.

Andrew was there for the very same reason he’d accompanied me when we talked to Folger’s witnesses. Whichever one of us later
tried the case, the other would be called as a witness to whatever we happened to discover on the boat this morning. Quite
frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find a damn thing. Say what you will about the office Skye Bannister runs, his investigators
and criminologists are enormously efficient in picking a crime scene clean.

Here was the cockpit where Lainie and Brett had sat—according to her—from ten to ten-thirty. Here was where he had made a
generous offer, according to her, or a merely insulting offer, according to his widow. Here was where, according to Lainie’s
first story, she’d sipped Perrier that (oh-yes-I-remember-now) turned into a couple of vodka-tonics in her next version. Here
was where she’d given Brett her Top-Siders and her scarf, something she’d neglected to tell me at first, which scarf was later
found by the police in the boat’s master bedroom. She had not remembered the scarf until the police questioned her about it
the following morning. She had not remembered either the scarf
or
the shoes until I later questioned her about them.

I was wondering now what else she had forgotten to tell me.

Perhaps prompted by the Tolands’ obsession with keeping their decks pristine, I now took off my own shoes and asked Andrew
to remove his as well. Officer Gergin looked at us both as if we were slightly deranged and made not the slightest move to
unlace his highly polished black brogans.

We all went below.

There is something about a room where a murder has been committed. This was not in actuality a “room”; there are no
rooms
as such aboard seagoing vessels, although “staterooms” are called rooms and “shower rooms” are called rooms, but these are
truly compartments, as was this “dining
saloon
” we passed through which was, in fact, a dining
room.
Enough already. Shoeless, we padded in our socks to the master stateroom, Gergin clumping along behind us in his thick-soled
regulation shoes.

If there is one area aboard a boat that truly
looks
like a room, it is the stateroom. Perhaps this is because it’s dominated by a bed, in this case a queen-size bed with cabinets
flanking it and reading lights above it. The master bath, or the “en suite head” as it was nautically called, was on the port
side of the bed, and there was a bank of dressers and several closets on the starboard side. Just opposite the foot of the
bed, and flanking the entrance door to the cabin, there were glass-doored, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

“We’ll be taking pictures in here,” Andrew said.

“No problem,” Gergin said.

I normally feel like strangling people who say “No problem” or, especially, “
Hey,
no problem.” What the phrase
really
means is, “Yes, there is
ordinarily
a problem in honoring such a request, but in this single instance, and however irritating it may be, an exception will be
made, although it is truly a severe pain in the ass.”

That is what “No problem” means.

And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

“We’ll be looking around, too,” I said.

“For what?”

“Don’t know.”

“No problem,” Gergin said, and shrugged, and then planted himself squarely in the door to the stateroom, where he could watch
Andrew taking his pictures and me rummaging around.

Two shots to the head, the coroner’s report had said.

A third that had missed.

No stench of cordite here.

But the place reeked of murder.

The chalked outline of Brett Toland’s body was traced on the carpet alongside the bed. Bloodstains had turned black on the
carpet. Raw wood showed where the third bullet had been pried from the wall alongside the bathroom door.

Gergin yawned while Andrew took his Polaroid pictures.

This was where the police had found Lainie’s scarf.

I didn’t know where to begin.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

I started in the bathroom, looking in the cabinet under the sink and finding nothing but extra rolls of toilet paper and boxes
of Kleenex and a six-pack of Irish Spring soap bars. I then looked in the mirrored cabinet over the sink and found several
toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste and a wide assortment of nonprescription medicines, and several prescription drugs as
well, but nothing that would help me to prove my client was innocent of the crime with which she’d been charged.

If that was what I was looking for.

Andrew was still taking pictures.

I went to the cabinet on the starboard side of the bed, and opened the latched door. There was a pair of pompommed slippers
with low heels on the floor of the cabinet. Nothing else. I closed the door and slid open the drawer above it. A pair of reading
glasses, a packet of tissues, a tube of lipstick. I figured this was Etta Toland’s side of the bed.

I went around to Brett’s side.

Ran the same search of the cabinet base and drawer, and found nothing of importance. But I wondered if this was where he’d
stored the forty-five that had later been used to kill him.

Walked back to the combination bookcase and entertainment center fitted with a television set, a VCR, and a CD player.

Started looking through the books.

Pulled out a copy of
Great Expectations.
Leafed through it. Placed it back on the shelf. Found
The Rubaiyat.
Blew dust off it. Opened it. Flipped through it. People sometimes tucked letters or scraps of paper into books. But there
was nothing. The dust wrappers had been removed from all of the books. Not uncommon on a boat, where moisture caused paper
to twist and curl. Took down a copy of Stephen King’s
It.
Big book, some two and a half inches thick. Black cover with the initials SK in red in the lower right-hand corner. Opened
the book. Closed it, or
It,
put it back on the shelf. Started looking at some other books. Blew dust off them. Leafed through them. Put them back on
the shelves again. There were a lot of books here. Hundred best books in the English language, it looked like. Some of them
never read, judging by the dust on them. Began looking through the videocassettes in their black vinyl cases. The cover art
on one of them showed a woman’s hands spread over the crotch of her lacy white panties. The ring on her pinky…

“How long you guys gonna be down here?” Gergin asked.

I put the cassette back on the shelf.

“You can leave us if you’re bored,” I said.

“Hey, no problem,” he said.

“We won’t be stealing anything.”

“Who said you would? It’s just it’s a little stuffy down here, the air-conditioning off and all.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs?” I suggested. “Get yourself some air.”

“No, that’s okay,” he said.

I looked at some other cassettes.

Gergin scratched his ass.

“Did you get any pictures of the cockpit?” I asked Andrew.

“Do we need any?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and looked him dead in the eye.

We’d been working together for a good long time.

“Okay to go up alone?” he asked Gergin.

Gergin smelled a rat.

The wrong one.

“I’ll go with you,” he said, and they both left the stateroom.