Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (30 page)

I guess so.

“He pretty much knew what to expect when he looked at that tape.”

“Well, I think he knew what I was getting at.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He seemed pleased.”

“Did you suggest he might be able to use the tape as a means of settling the lawsuit?”

“Well, I told him a designer of children’s toys might not want to have such a tape gain circulation in the trade.”

“You said this to him.”

“Yes, I said it to him.”

“And you also said he’d know what you meant after he looked at the tape.”

“Well, yes.”

Chopsticks moving in a rhythmic flow from platter to mouth, grains of fried rice falling back onto the pepper steak. A gulp
of tea. Food was of prime importance here, never mind the incriminating tape he had turned over to his boss. Never mind that,
technically, he was an accomplice in the crime of extortion in that he had suggested how the tape might be used.

“Did Brett look at the tape then and there?”

“No”

“When
did
he look at it, would you know?”

“I have no idea.”

According to Lainie, Brett had called her at nine that night, to invite her to the boat to discuss a settlement. The so-called
settlement had later turned into a blackmail attempt…

———And warned me that unless I dropped the infringement suit, all of kiddieland would learn about that tape.

———And out the window goes your teddy bear.

———No. Out the window goes my
life.

…which was good enough reason to commit murder.

“By the way…”

Shoveling pepper steak into his mouth.

“…I didn’t see Brett again after I left his office.”

“What time was that?”

“Three o’clock. And I can tell you exactly where I was that night. In case that’s of interest to you.”

“Just as a matter of curiosity,” I said.

“Just as a matter of curiosity, I was in bed with a woman named Sheila Lockhart in her condo on Whisper Key. She’s free, white,
and twenty-one, and she has nothing to hide. We were together all night long, ask her. I left the condo at eight the next
morning.”

“What were you wearing?”

“What?”

“What were you wearing, Mr. Diaz.”

“Just what I’m wearing now, with a different shirt.”

“I suppose she’ll confirm that, too.”

“Ask her,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “Waitress,” he said, and signaled to a pretty little Chinese girl in a green silk Suzie
Wong dress slit to her thigh. “Could I get some more hot tea, please?”

The waitress scurried off.

We sat silently for a moment.

“What deal did you make, Bobby?”

“Deal?
What
deal?”

“That’s
my
question.”

“I didn’t make any deal.”

“You told me yesterday that the bear design was
yours
…”

“You keep getting that mixed up.”

“Was that the deal? You show Brett how to solve all his problems…”

“Hey, all I did was hand him a tape.”

“…and in return, he gives you credit for the bear’s design? Was that it?”

The waitress was back with his tea.

Bobby poured himself a fresh cup.

Drank.

Peered at me over the cup he was holding in both hands.

“I don’t need credit for anything anybody else designed,” he said. “I have enough credits of my own.”

“Then what were you looking for? Money?”

“I’ve been working for Toyland for almost fifteen years,” he said. “If I could help the Tolands in any way…”

“Including extortion?”

“Come on,
what
extortion? Besides, I didn’t even know what his reaction was going to be, you want the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I told him Lainie was on that tape. For all I know, he might have been offended.”

“I still don’t know what…”

“I didn’t know how he’d take it. I didn’t know whether something was still going on between them.”

I looked at him.

“Whether they still had a thing going, you know?” he said.

One of the men was talking in English now, just outside the bathroom door. She guessed Warren was sitting on the lounge diagonally
across from the bathroom. She knew it was just a matter of time before someone had to pee. She had no idea what they would
do when they discovered the bathroom door was locked.

“Where are we headed?”

Warren’s voice.

“Well,
señor,
you don nee to know that, do you?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do,
señor.
Because people will be contacting me, and I’ll have to give them my location. This isn’t my boat. The owner will be calling.
On the radio.”

“Then we will ha to
break
the radio.”

“Then the owner will call the Coast Guard. He loves this boat.”

“Then you will juss ha to lie to him.”

They argued back and forth, Warren trying to find out where they were taking the boat, the man stating over and over again
that if the owner of the boat happened to radio, Warren would just have to tell him he was sitting in the water, drifting,
the way he’d been when they boarded an hour or so ago. She gathered they had tied Warren’s hands and feet—he asked the man
once to at least untie his feet, he wasn’t about to go jumping overboard—and then dragged him down below here and tossed him
on the lounge. Well, she guessed the lounge. That was where his voice seemed to be coming from. The other man’s voice came
and went, back and forth, fading, rising, as if he were alternately pacing and then either leaning against the sink or sitting
momentarily on one of the banquettes opposite the lounge, or even leaning against the bathroom door as he had not a moment
ago, the door creaking against his weight, she’d backed away startled.

She kept wondering if she should slide open the window above the sink, remove the screen, and climb out onto the narrow deck
that ran the full length of the boat, fore and aft. The deck outside the bathroom window was what, a foot wide? Broadening
to some three feet or so up front. She could step out the window and move toward the rear of the boat, get to the steering
wheel, clobber him with her high-heeled shoe, whatever. But the second man had to be up there, didn’t he? Driving the boat?
This wasn’t the fucking
Queen Mary,
this was a little thirty-foot boat you could see from front to back of it in a single glance. The wheel was immediately aft
of the bathroom. He’d hear her sliding open the window. Hear her taking off the screen. Be watching for her the minute she
climbed through onto the deck.

But what if someone wanted to use the bathroom first?

Only in books and movies did nobody ever have to pee.

She came walking up North Apple with her head bent, studying the leaf-covered sidewalk ahead of her. She was wearing a short
white beach coat over a green tank top swimsuit and white sandals. A white tote was slung over her shoulder. It jostled her
right hip as she came steadily toward where I was waiting outside her house. I had not called ahead. I wanted to surprise
her.

Still not seeing me, she stopped on the sidewalk and dug into the tote for her keys, and then, raising her head as she started
toward the house again, spotted me standing at the curb in my seersucker suit. She hesitated only a moment, and then came
toward me.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said.

“Lainie.”

“I was at the beach.”

“Your neighbor told me.”

“Such a lovely day.”

As she unlocked the door, I noticed that she hadn’t worn the Victorian ring to the beach. We went into the house where first
she put down the tote and took off the beach coat, and then checked her answering machine for messages.

“Lainie,” I said, “we have to talk.”

“My, so serious,” she said. “I’m all sandy. May I shower first?”

“I’d rather we…”

But she was already sliding open one of the glass doors that led to the back of the house where a small patio gathered dappled
sunlight in a clearing under the dense overhead growth. An outdoor shower was set up at one end of the patio. It consisted
of a simple wooden stall with a plastic curtain hanging from a rod. The curtain was translucent, patterned with great big
white daisies, pulled back now to reveal shower head and knobs on one wall, soap dish below them. A white bath towel rested
on a painted blue stool just to the left of the stall. Lainie reached in, turned on the cold water, fiddled with the hot water
knob till the mix suited her, and then kicked off her sandals, stepped into the stall, and pulled the plastic curtain closed
behind her. I could see her feet below the bottom of the curtain. The green bathing suit dropped to the floor of the stall.
Everything behind the daisy-splashed curtain was a blur of flesh-colored movement.

“Lainie,” I said, “were you having an affair with Brett Toland?”

Not a word from behind the curtain. Blurred flesh tones moving among the big daisies. Water splashing. I waited. At last:

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s not the topic under discussion.”

The topic under discussion, or rather the topic under recitation because I merely listened and said nothing, was a two-year-long
love affair that had started shortly after Lainie moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Calusa and began working at Toyland.
The affair had ended just before Christmas of last year. According to Lainie, both she and Brett had been inordinately circumspect,
limiting their torrid romance to after-hours trysts, never publicly revealing by the slightest glance or touch that there
was anything untoward happening between employer and employee.

Which made me wonder how Bobby Diaz had known they “had a thing going,” but I said nothing.

“Did you ever notice,” she asked, “that married men tend to end affairs during the holiday season, when the tug of home and
family is strongest? On Christmas Eve, right after Brett handed out the Christmas bonuses, he told me he wanted to end it.
Merry Christmas, Lainie, it’s over. I gave my two weeks’ notice at the beginning of January.” She turned off the water. A
wet arm slithered from behind the curtain. “Could you hand me the towel, please?” I picked it up from the stool, put it in
her hand. Behind the curtain, she began drying herself.

I was silently piecing together a timetable.

Christmas Eve of last year: Brett ends the affair.

Middle of January
this
year: Lainie leaves the company.

Beginning of April: She comes up with the idea for Gladly.

Twelfth day of September: Brett is mur—

The curtain rattled back on its rod. Lainie was wearing the towel now, wrapped around her, its loose end tucked between her
breasts. She stepped out, sat on the stool, began putting on her sandals again. Long wet blond hair cascaded over her face.

“Ever see him again?” I asked.

“Around town now and then. But we didn’t travel in the same social…”

“I meant was it
really
over?”

“Yes, it was really over.”

“Never called you again…”

“Never.”

“Never asked to see you.”

“Never.”

“Until he phoned on the night of the twelfth.”

“Well, that was strictly business,” she said.

“Was it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said at once, and sat erect, tossing the wet hair in what I took to be a gesture of annoyance. Rising, she reached
into the stall for the wet bathing suit, picked it up, and started walking back to the house, the suit swinging in her right
hand. I followed her.

The living room was cool and dim.

A clock somewhere chimed three times.

The afternoon was rushing by.

“If you haven’t any other questions,” she said, “I’d like to get dressed.”

“I have other questions,” I said.

“Really, Matthew, can’t they wait?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Exasperated, she let her body go limp, her shoulders slumping on an exhalation of breath, her wandering right eye seemingly
more vexatious than usual.

“Okay, what?” she said.

“Did you go to bed with Brett Toland on the night he was killed?”

“Yes, damn it!”

S
o there we were.”

This is Lainie talking.

This is what she is now telling me about the time she spent on the Toland yacht on the night of September twelfth, a revised
version, to be sure. I sometimes think all of life is
Rashomon.
If you have not seen the Akira Kurosawa film, too bad. It is almost as good as his
High and Low,
which was based on an American mystery novel the title of which I have now forgotten.
Rashomon
is about variations of the truth. It is about reality and the different ways in which reality can be perceived. It is about
the nature of verity and falsehood. It is almost as good as the five-finger exercise Lainie Commins now performs as she sits
in a towel in a white wicker chair in the living room of her small studio-house. Her suntanned legs are stretched out in front
of her. She is relaxed in the chair. It is as if the truth—if this is, at last, the truth—has made her free.

I listen.

So there they were.

Lainie Commins and Brett Toland, lovers until December of last year, at which time Brett simultaneously handed her a Christmas
bonus and her walking papers. There they were. Sitting on a sultry September night in the cockpit of a sailboat that has been
described as “romantic” in the various magazines devoted to great yachts of the sailing world. Alternately described as “opulent”
or “luxurious.” Asking her if she’d like a drink. Why, yes, she says, that might be nice. This is now some five minutes after
she gets to the boat. She has taken off her white-laced blue Top-Siders and her blue scarf with its tiny red-anchor print…

It occurs to me that this is now the
third
version of Lainie’s story, her own personal
Rashomon
—”but I didn’t kill him,” she has told me over and over again.

…and she hands these to Brett as he goes below to mix their drinks. Perrier and lime for her, at least the
first
time around. Vodka-tonic in the second telling, bit more than one, she says, Brett freshened the drink for her, right? It
is perhaps five minutes past ten or thereabouts. In this telling—the third and final one, I hope—she has drunk two rather
strong
vodka-tonics, which may explain why she is now amenable to his invitation to revisit old times and renew old acquaintances.