Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “What he’ll be considering in the next week or so…”

  “He said the end of the month.”

  “Well, he’s shooting for the twenty-ninth at the very latest. What he’ll be considering is whether we’d be likely to prevail on the merits should this thing ever come to trial.”

  “Is that a possibility?”

  “Oh, sure. He may, in fact, order a trial.”

  “There goes Christmas,” Lainie said.

  “No, no. If he goes that route, he’d probably ask for an immediate trial. He knows the importance of Christmas, he’s stated that several…”

  “How immediate? Any delay would put me out of the running for Christmas. Matthew, you don’t understand how important this is to me.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” she insisted, and put down her fork, and looked across the table, her right eye focusing for a moment before it wandered away again. I imagined her as a four-year-old girl enduring her first strabotomy. And then another one a year after that. The failure of both operations. At their first meeting, she’d told me she had cried night after night after night, wanting to be like all the other little girls, and knowing she never would. She seemed ready to begin crying again now. “I know Gladly is a winner,” she said. “And I know her time is now.” Talking about the bear as if it were a real person. “Not next year or the year after that, but now. Why do you think Mattell and Ideal are so interested? Because of my good looks?” She was, in fact, quite beautiful. “They know Gladly’ll sell in the millions. That bear is my future, Matthew. That bear is my life.”

  And did begin crying.

  I told her that I wasn’t at all convinced Santos had already made his decision. Told her the judge would be considering other things besides the copying. For example, as I’d started to tell her a moment ago, Santos would be considering whether we were likely to succeed on the merits should the case eventually go to trial. Considering, too, whether deciding for the Tolands would cause irreparable harm to Lainie…

  “It would only ruin my entire life,” she said, sobbing.

  “…or whether money alone could repair your injuries.”

  “I wouldn’t take a million dollars…”

  “Good, because if you were willing to accept a cash settlement…”

  “For Gladly? Never.”

  “…there’d be no grounds for enjoining them.”

  “I told you no. She’s mine.”

  Again sounding as if she were talking about a living human being and not a stuffed animal.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Yeah, good. What’s so good about it?”

  She dried her eyes with a paper napkin. She looked across the table at me. Green eyes shining. Trying to focus. Losing the battle. Right eye wandering. Oddly, I felt like taking her in my arms, comforting her as I would a child.

  “Everything’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. Please.”

  She nodded.

  On Wednesday morning, the first thing I heard on Channel 8, the local television station, was that Brett Toland had been shot to death aboard his yacht late last night, and that a former employee named Elaine Commins had been charged with his murder and taken into custody early this morning.

  2

  I hate the sight of women in jailhouse threads.

  Even more so than with men, the clothes seem to rob them of all humanity. Lainie Commins was wearing on this Wednesday morning a shapeless blue smock with the words calusa county jail stenciled over the breast pocket. White gym socks. Laceless black shoes. No lipstick, no eye shadow. They had confiscated the heart-shaped Victorian ring for safekeeping. Only the eyeglasses were her own. Everything else she had on, right down to her underwear, belonged to the county. Even her tan seemed to have been confiscated by the authorities; under the harsh, overhead fluorescent lights, she looked pale and somehow faded. She hadn’t sent for me, but I was here, and she seemed glad to see me.

  “I thought you might need help in finding a good criminal lawyer,” I said.

  “I want you to represent me,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t advise that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I lost the only murder case I ever tried.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I would hope not. But…”

  “And I’m happy with the way you’ve been handling the copyright case.”

  I looked at her.

  “Lainie,” I said, “copyright infringement isn’t murder. “You’ve been charged with murder in the first degree, and in Florida…”

  “I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “…that’s a capital felony.”

  “So they told me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The detectives who arrested me.”

  “When was that?”

  “After they took me downtown. Before they started questioning me.”

  “Had they informed you of your rights by then?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Had they informed you of your right to a lawyer?”

  “Yes. I didn’t think I’d need one. It was all too ridiculous. I thought I’d be out of there in a minute. I don’t even own a gun. That wasn’t my gun. I was on the boat for no more than…”

  “You were on the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes. But only for a little while.”

  “How short a while?”

  “Half an hour? No more than that. I didn’t kill Brett, I didn’t even know he was dead until they came to my house and arrested me. Matthew, I want someone I know and trust to defend me, I want you, Matthew. Please help me. I didn’t murder Brett Toland.”

  I looked at her again. Behind the glasses, her right eye had begun wandering yet another time. I wondered how often that wayward eye had served to enlist sympathy and compassion.

  “If I represent you…” I said.

  “Yes. Please. Help me, Matthew.”

  “…I’d want someone else in my office to do the actual trial work.”

  “However you want to do it.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me again,” I said. “Did you kill him?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  I nodded again.

  “Your first appearance hearing is at eleven this morning,” I said, and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour to talk. Tell me what you were doing on that boat.”

  I have to tell you that I frankly believed she was making a mistake. I am very good at gathering facts, I will admit that, I am a total bulldog when it comes to sniffing things out and clamping my jaws on them and shaking them till they yelp. But I really don’t think I have the requisite shark mentality to try a murder case. I’m not being modest. I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. Benny Weiss, admittedly the best criminal lawyer in all Calusa—in fact, maybe in all Florida—once told me that he never asks a person charged with murder whether he committed the crime.

  “I don’t care if a client did it or not,” he told me. “I’m only interested in combating the charge against him. So I tell him what the other side has, or what they think they have, and then between us we work out a plan of attack. You’ll notice I did not use the word defense, Matthew. As far as I’m concerned, this is an attack, a relentless attack against forces determined to deprive my client of his constitutional right to liberty, whether he committed the crime or not.”

  Well, the way I see it, the Canons of Professional Ethics notwithstanding, which canons grant to a lawyer the right—but not the obligation—to undertake a defense regardless of his personal opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, otherwise an innocent person might God forbid be denied a proper defense and our entire judicial system would go down the drain, provided the jury system doesn’t flush it out to sea first…

  But the way I see it, if someone has committed murder—or arson, or armed robbery, or rape, or aggravated assault, or any one of the
hundreds of crimes we have designated as affronts to civilization—then he should be punished for that crime. It’s a bromide of the criminal justice system that you’ll never find anyone in prison who’s actually committed the crime that put him there. You won’t find any guilty people in a courtroom, either. That’s because a lawyer got there first. The day I stand in a courtroom and hear a judge ask, “How do you plead?” and hear the accused answer, “Guilty, Your Honor” is the day I will fall down dead in another coma.

  Meanwhile, I bequeath to every criminal lawyer in the world anyone who has stabbed his wife or shot his mother or set fire to his girlfriend’s house or poisoned his goldfish or peed in his neighbor’s mailbox.

  Me, I won’t defend anyone I think is guilty.

  Warren’s friend went by the name of Amberjack James.

  He had got the name not because the color of his skin sort of matched the fish’s color—what the rednecks down here used to call “high yeller” back when such shit was still tolerated—but because he’d caught the biggest jack ever fished in the waters off Calusa, a hundred-and-ten-pound beauty that now hung mounted on a plaque in the living room of the small house he shared with a girl much darker than he was but only half his age and a lot prettier. Amberjack was thirty-seven. The girl had just turned eighteen. Less than half his age, actually. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch while Warren and Amberjack sat on the back porch of the house, looking out at the river and the boat Warren hoped to borrow.

  Amberjack’s real name…

  Or rather the name he’d been born with, or rather the name that had been foisted upon him at birth since nobody—the way he looked at it—was ever born with a name tattooed on his forehead or his belly button, he was just born naked and squawking and helpless till some higher authority put a name on him.

  In this case the higher authority happened to be his daddy, and the name he’d put on poor powerless little Amberjack was Harry James. This was in honor of a white trumpet player Amberjack’s daddy admired, he playing the cornet himself, which was a fine tribute, to be sure, if it didn’t so happen that James was also the family name, which made the baby come out Harry James James. Never did amount to much of a horn player, Amberjack’s daddy, but he left Amberjack’s mama a goodly sum of money when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-two, and he’d left Amberjack himself—in addition to the stupid fuckin name—the thirty-foot powerboat from which he’d caught his record fish two years later, thereby leaving behind forever the name of the honky bugler he’d never heard of, anyway.

  It was the boat Warren was here to borrow.

  “What you gonna do with it?” Amberjack asked.

  Both men were drinking Coors beer and munching on fried pork rinds they were plucking out of a red and yellow cellophane bag even though Mercedes had yelled twice from the kitchen to stop snackin less they spoil they appetites. The beer was cold and tasty and the rinds were salty and crisp. It was another scorching-hot day here in Calusa. Warren kept thinking it’d be cooler out on the water, on Amberjack’s boat. The boat was tied up at a ramshackle wooden dock that thrust out into a narrow canal. The shallow water here near the shore was choked with green. The air was still.

  “I just need to borrow it for a few days,” Warren said.

  “For what?”

  “Something I have to do.”

  “Something legal?”

  “Come on, Am, I’m a licensed P.I.”

  “Cause, nigger, I got to tell you. You use my boat to run any kind of controlled substance up onto the beach…”

  “This is nothing like that, Am.”

  “Then answer my question. Is what you plan to do with my boat legal?”

  “Yes, it’s legal,” Warren said, lying in that what he had in mind wasn’t strictly legal. Not that anyone would condemn him for doing it. Still, it was Am’s boat, and he had every right to ask Warren what he planned to do with it, just as Warren had every right to lie about his plans.

  “You even know how to run a boat?” Amberjack asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Warren said.

  “Where you gonna take this boat?”

  “Out on the Gulf.”

  “How far out?”

  “Twenty, thirty miles.”

  “Better not go any further’n that,” Amberjack said. “She holds a hundred gallons of gas, burns about ten gallons an hour, so plan accordingly. I usually figure I can go a hun’ forty miles on a tank of gas.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “What’s out on the Gulf?”

  “Thought I’d do some fishing.”

  “Maybe I’ll go with you.”

  “I feel the need for solitude, Am.”

  “You takin some woman out there with you?”

  Warren smiled.

  “What I figured all along,” Amberjack said, and returned the smile. “Don’t get too busy you miss any hurricane coming. There’s a good radio on the boat, you keep it tuned to either channel one or channel three. You hear anything sounds like weather, you head right back in, hear?”

  “I told you, I’ll be careful.”

  “Never mind careful. You turn around and haul ass the minute you hear any kind of Coast Guard warnin.”

  “I will.”

  “I like that little boat,” Amberjack explained.

  In Florida, a so-called first appearance hearing is normally held before a County Court judge on the morning following an arrest. Quite some time ago, the state’s Supreme Court had ruled that even a person accused of a capital crime was entitled to bail. Moreover, the ruling held that unless proof of the crime were “evident” or presumption of the crime “great,” bail could not be denied. It was my job to ask for bail and to argue that it should be granted. It was the state attorney’s job to argue that the evidence he possessed was so legally overwhelming that a verdict of guilty was inevitable and thus bail should be denied. The judge’s job was to decide one way or the other. The decision was exclusively his to make. Or, in this instance, hers.

  The presiding judge this morning was a woman named Heather Grant, some forty years old and alarmingly attractive in black, probably because black was a good color for a redhead. Male attorneys tend to prefer homely female judges to pretty ones. I don’t know why that should be; no one in the legal profession debates whether a male judge has good legs or not. Heather had good legs and good breasts and flaming-red hair and beautiful brown eyes and she was a good dancer besides, as I’d discovered at many of Calusa’s charity balls. But she was one of the toughest judges on the County bench, especially where it concerned female defendants, go figure.

  Lainie Commins appeared before the Court in her unfashionable jailhouse threads, wearing lipstick, eyeliner, and blush, which her keepers had allowed for this hearing that would merely determine her immediate freedom. Tomorrow morning at nine, a grand jury would decide whether to indict or to dismiss. It was my personal opinion that the state attorney—in this case, an assistant named Peter Folger—would get the indictment he was seeking. But that was no reason to keep Lainie in jail for the next six or seven months or however long it took for her case to come to trial on an exceptionally crowded calendar.

  I told Heather that based on my investigation to date—which was bullshit, since all I’d done so far was talk to my client—I did not know of any eyewitnesses to the actual shooting, did not know of any conclusive forensic evidence, and believed that the prosecutions case was wholly circumstantial and that there was no evidence so great or proof so evident as to prevent the automatic granting of bail as provided by the statutes. Moreover, Ms. Commins had no previous record of violence, and no possible motive for the crime—she had, in fact, been seeking to resolve her differences with Mr. Toland in a court of law. In short, Lainie Commins posed no threat to society and was a responsible citizen with roots in the community, who would meet all scheduled court appearances. I then recited the “Let Freedom Ring” speech and asked that she be released on her own recognizance.

  I was pretty g
ood, if I say so myself.

  Folger went the “Monstrous Beast” route, telling Heather that the victim had been shot twice in the face, that this angelic-looking woman sitting here was in fact a cold-blooded killer nursing a deep-seated anger against the victim, that exposure as an impostor and a thief was sufficient motive for the crime, that the danger of her fleeing the jurisdiction was very real in light of the airtight case the people had, and that releasing her on bail would also pose a danger to the state’s witnesses, whereby he sang the “Particularly Heinous Nature of the Crime” song and respectfully requested that bail be denied.

  Heather set bail at half a million dollars, which I promptly assured her could be secured by the defendant’s home, offering to turn over to the Court the deed to her house, her current tax bill and her passport for good measure.

  Whatever the grand jury decided tomorrow morning, Lainie was for the time being a free woman.

  The first thing I say when I open my eyes is “Where am I?”

  Hardly original, it nonetheless startles the ICU nurse into unaccustomed alacrity. Running from the room shouting “Doctor! Doctor!” she provides the first clue that I might be in some sort of medical facility. The second clue comes with the realization that I am lying flat on my back with a great many tubes running into or out of my arm or arms.

  Someone leans over the bed.

  “Mr. Hope?”

  He has a little black mustache and little brown eyes opened wide in expectation and surprise.

  “Who are you?” I ask. “Where am I?”

  “I’m Dr. Spinaldo. You’re at Good Samaritan Hospital. In Calusa, Florida. Do you know where Calusa, Florida, is?”

  “My head hurts,” I say.

  “I’m sure it does,” he says. “Do you know your name?”

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “This is Good Samaritan Hospital in…”