Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (31 page)

In her first version, Brett offered her a licensing agreement. In a second version of the tale (though admittedly not hers)
Brett offered her a flat settlement of five thousand dollars to drop the infringement suit—thus spaketh Etta Toland. In Lainie’s
own
second version, Brett tried to blackmail her by threatening to disclose the nature of
Idle Hands
to the kiddie world at large. But now…

Enfin
…

The truth.

I hoped.

In this version, Lainie does
not,
in fact, leave the boat at ten-thirty. Instead, she is drinking her
second
vodka-tonic in the cockpit when a sloop comes in under power, its spotlight guiding the way to a slip further down the marina
dock. This is Charles Nicholas Werner, though she does not know the man’s name at the time, or that he will later testify
to having seen her and Brett sitting there
tête-à-tête,
drinking, at ten forty-five. Understandably, and considering the fact that someone later thoughtlessly pumped two bullets
into Brett’s head, Lainie afterward felt it expedient not to mention that Brett at that very moment was inviting her belowdecks
to see his etchings. Or rather, to show her the videocassette case with its cover photo insert of two busy hands, one of which
is wearing a heart-shaped Victorian ring Brett himself gave her one Valentine’s Day, back when their affair was running as
swift and as torrid as the waters of Babylon.

A ring she still wears, by the way.

The very ring that captured my attention when first I discovered the cassette.

Which he shows her now in the master bedroom of the yawl called
Toy Boat.

Shows her
Idle Hands.

Her
hands.

On the cover of the cassette case.

Undeniably
her
hands wearing
his
ring.

The case is empty.

———I’d have been stupid to bring it here to the boat, wouldn’t I? It’s safe at home.

He makes no mention of blackmail just yet, merely shows her the cover photo of her hands working her crotch, and mentions
that he watched the tape that afternoon and that it aroused old memories and isn’t it foolish of them to be battling in court
over something as nonsensical as a fucking
teddy
bear, you should pardon the expression, when not too very long ago they’d meant everything in the world to each other?

At which point he kisses her.

So there they were.

In what was unmistakably a bedroom (albeit on a boat it is called a stateroom) standing beside a bed, which is what a bed
is called even on a boat (although on naval vessels it is frequently called a sack or a bunk), their lips together again for
the first time (at least since December), his fingers spread on what is called an ass, hers, even on a boat, his cock growing
what is called tumescent in certain novels or tumid in others, a palpably steamy urgency rising between them as they stand
clinging to each other, hoo boy!

So what was a fun-loving couple to do under such circumstances, even if in court they were adversaries? Well, it could reasonably
be assumed that they might fall together onto the bed, locked in each other’s arms, and it could further be assumed that his
hands might slide down into the back of the blue silk slacks she’s wearing to find the cheeks of her aforementioned ass, and
then inadvertently to find, from behind, the lips of her swollen pudendum although only grazingly. They are expert at this.
For two years they were doing this before Brett called a halt to it on Christmas Eve, some present, sweetie. Doing it in motels
hither and yon, in and around the environs of Calusa, Bradenton and Sarasota, the so-called Calbrasa Triangle, even doing
it two or three times in this very stateroom on
Toy Boat
when the unsuspecting Etta Toland was in Atlanta, Georgia, visiting her mother in a nursing home there.

They know just what they’re doing, these two.

They’ve done it again and again until they are rather knowledgeable about the heres and theres, the goings and comings, so
to speak, practice makes perfect. In fact, they are
sooo
good at what they’re doing that the time just
flies
by, honeylamb, and it is close to eleven-thirty when Brett withdraws physically
and
emotionally, and mentions casually that unless Lainie drops the infringement suit…

———all of kiddieland will learn about that tape. I’ll send copies to every company in the field…

…although he did very much enjoy fucking her again, for which his heartfelt thanks.

Lainie tells him he’s a no-good son of a bitch and leaves the boat in high dudgeon, putting on her Top-Siders first, but forgetting
the blue scarf in her haste to get away.

It’s
eleven
-thirty, not
ten
-thirty as she’d claimed in her initial telling of the tale now retitled
Babes in Toyland Redux.

A car is parked on the road outside the pillars at the club’s entrance.

This has not changed from her second telling.

Ten minutes later, Jerry and Brenda Bannerman hear shots coming from the Toland boat.

I was thinking about time.

I was thinking about ten crucial minutes.

Because if Lainie had previously lied about an hour, why not now lie about a critical ten-minute period when she could
still
have been on that boat, shooting and killing the man who’d fucked her and later tried to blackmail her?

If she told me one more time that she didn’t kill him, I would scream.

“Believe me, Matthew,” she said.

Toots had slid open the bathroom window just a crack. She could hear the two of them topside, talking in Spanish. One of them
driving the boat, the other one standing alongside him, both of them yelling over the sound of the boat’s motor. She guessed
Warren was still trussed on the lounge down here, but she didn’t hear a word from him. All she heard was the sound of the
motor and the two men yelling. What they were yelling about was cocaine. Getting the cocaine down to Miami on the east coast.

They could yell as loud as they wanted out here in the middle of the Gulf, nobody was going to hear them. Except Toots, who
was all ears, Spanish coming back to her in a welcome rush, courtesy of all those Hispanic dealers past and present, near
and far. Mother is the necessity of invention, dears, and when you are hooked, the dealer
is
Mother, and don’t you ever forget it. Enough cocaine on this boat to keep her high for a year and a half, from what she could
gather. Problem was their people in Miami were expecting some
other
boat, their
own
boat, the one they’d had to ditch because of something wrong with the carburetor, whatever, she couldn’t make out all the
technical language, fumes in the engine compartment, a flash fire, burned wiring—the Spanish she heard was
“carburador defectuoso”
and
“gases dentro del motor”
and
“auto combustionón”
and
“cables quemados.”
Transferred the shit to Warren’s boat when they realized they weren’t going to make it to Miami in their
own
vessel. But now they were afraid their people wouldn’t recognize
this
boat coming in, so they were trying to figure how they could make contact so they could get the stuff ashore. Eight kilos,
she was hearing.
Ochos kilos.
Worth a hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars, she was hearing.
Ciento treinta y dos mil dólares.

Tengo que orinar,
she was hearing.

Which in English meant “I have to take a piss.”

At lunch earlier today, Bobby Diaz told me that on the night of the murder he was in bed with a woman 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.

It was now precisely four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, some eight days, sixteen hours and twenty minutes after the Bannermans
heard someone firing three shots aboard the Toland boat. I was driving over the Whisper Key bridge on my way to see a woman
named Sheila Lockhart because a long-ago law professor once told me, “Matthew, an alibi isn’t an alibi till a second party
swears to it.”

Whisper is a bad marriage between Florida as it used to be and Florida as the big real estate interests would wish it to be.
It is less developed than Sabal Key, for example, which has been thoroughly exploited to its legal and environmental limits—albeit
tastefully, to be sure. Taste is the middle name of SunShore Development, which bought up most of this northernmost barrier
island when it was worth less than two cents and a collar button and turned it into a vast overlapping retirement theme park
of high-rise condos, golf courses, swimming pools, cluster homes, tennis courts, white sand beaches, and private homes in
gated enclaves. Flamingo Key is fully developed as well, but only with private homes, some of them quite luxurious, most of
them looking pink and Floridian on the outside and brown and Middle Western on the inside, meaning that all that heavy dark
furniture inherited from Grandma Hattie in Lansing or Indianapolis or Grand Rapids has been bodily transported down here where
it wages staid and stuffy battle with clear blue skies and bright green water.

There’s a lot of old Florida still extant on Whisper Key, but it’s inexorably losing the battle against the developers. You’ll
drive past a long stretch of impenetrable vegetation behind which you know is a low, rambling house on shallow brackish water
leading nowhere, a ramshackle dock jutting out to where a flaking rowboat sits in mottled sunshine, and suddenly the wall
of green is gone and there is a white tower jutting up into the sky, a fountain splashing water in the center of a landscaped
oasis, parking sheds over shaded spaces, the sound of children shouting and giggling in a cool blue swimming pool hidden somewhere
behind the building’s steep facade, voices rising and falling on the sullen hot September air. And several hundred yards beyond
that, the road will amble past half a mile of lopsided overgrown wooden fence, and you know that behind this fence there is
yet another residential relic of what this area used to be. And your heart breaks.

Sheila Lockhart lived in a new sixteen-story condo called Sandalwind, at the southern end of Whisper Key, adjacent to the
public beach. The day was humid and hot, the Gulf surging in restlessly against the shore, whitecaps cresting on the dark
waters beyond. I would not have liked to be on a boat in a chop like today’s.

I parked the Acura in a row of spaces reserved for
VISITORS
and then found my way to a building called the Sundowner, and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Sheila lived
in apartment 14C. I had called ahead, and she was expecting me. I rang the doorbell and waited. I rang again. Waited. The
door opened at last.

She was not twenty-one, as Diaz had claimed, nor was she even any longer close to that age, but perhaps he’d merely meant
she was
over
twenty-one. But he’d also said she was free and white, and whereas I had no quarrel with her apparent liberty, she could
not have been considered white under any circumstances. Then again, Diaz merely may have been using a figure of speech. Nonetheless,
Sheila Lockhart appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties, a very good-looking barefooted black woman wearing white
cutoff shorts and a white halter top, her long black dreadlocks strung with tiny bright-colored beads. A rush of cold air
swept out of the apartment.

“Come in,” she said, “before the heat does.”

White she wasn’t, but neither was black a proper classification. Her skin was the color of dark amber, her eyes the sort of
grayish-green one finds a lot in the Caribbean, the end result of centuries-old admixtures of black, white and
Indian
Indian. I followed her into a longish living room that ran from the entrance door to a screened terrace overlooking the Gulf.
Sliding glass doors closed now because the air-conditioning was on. Kitchen off to one side of the room. Closed door adjacent
to it. The bedroom, I supposed. A choice apartment in that it was on an upper floor and facing the water.

“So what kind of trouble is Bobby in now?” she asked.

“None that I know of,” I said.

“Then why’s he looking for an alibi?”

She had gone briefly into the kitchen as she spoke, and now she returned with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea and two
tall glasses brimming with ice cubes. Our eyes met. I hadn’t mentioned anything on the phone about wanting to verify Bobby’s
story of where he’d been on the night of the twelfth. I could only assume that she’d called him to say I’d be visiting her,
and that he’d asked her to confirm his whereabouts that night.

“Tea?” she asked.

“Please,” I said.

She broke eye contact.

Poured over the ice in each glass. Cubes crackled and popped. She put down the pitcher. Sat opposite me in a white leather
sling chair. I was sitting on a platform sofa with a foam rubber cushion covered in pale blue linen. We lifted our glasses.
Drank.