Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  The license, under Chapter 320.08 of the Motor Vehicle Licenses section, costs twenty dollars flat for a mobile home not exceeding thirty-five feet in length, twenty-five dollars flat for a mobile home over thirty-five feet in length but not exceeding forty feet, and escalating on up to fifty dollars flat for a mobile home over sixty-five feet in length. Even if the tires have been removed from the vehicles, even if the vehicles are sitting on concrete pads, even if water and electricity have been connected to the vehicles, they are still considered “mobile” homes so long as they are not “permanently affixed” to the land.

  What annoys many residents of Calusa is that people who own mobile homes are permitted to vote, even though they pay no taxes. To many residents of Calusa, these frankly ugly aluminum monsters are a blight on the land, especially when the land happens to be choice river-front property purchased long before anyone knew it would one day become valuable.

  Harrod clearly appreciated his protected status as a mobile home owner. He clearly appreciated his tiny fenced backyard and the distant glimpses it afforded of the Cottonmouth River, which meandered through the metallic maze like the snake after which it had been named, sunlight glinting off its scaly waters. He seemed to appreciate as well all the attention being lavished on him this afternoon, two lawyers in suits and ties, tape recorder ready to preserve his precious words for posterity.

  He was a blue-eyed, white-haired, somewhat grizzled man in his late sixties, who—like so many other senior citizens down here on the white sand shores of the Gulf—had retired some ten years ago, only to realize that doing nothing was the equivalent of being dead. I had read somewhere that George Burns’s nephew had once told him he was thinking of retiring, and Burns had said, “What will you do with yourself?” His nephew had responded, “I’ll play golf all the time.” Burns thought about this for a moment, and then said, “Lou, playing golf is good only if you’ve got something else to do.”

  Harrod had taken a job as a security guard.

  Which is how he happened to be there this past Tuesday night when Lainie Commins drove into the parking lot of the Silver Creek Yacht Club at a little before ten P.M.

  “How did you know the time?” I asked.

  “Just let me see if we’re getting this,” Andrew said, and pressed the STOP button and then the REW button, and played back Harrod’s opening words. Andrew’s suit was the color of wheat. His tie was a green that matched the faded backs and seats of the director’s chairs upon which we were sitting. He was twenty-nine years old, and he had dark curly hair and brown eyes and an aquiline nose, which meant it was curving like an eagle’s beak, and an androgynous mouth, which meant it had both male and female characteristics, with a thin upper lip and a pouting lower one. Black-rimmed eyeglasses gave him a scholarly look, which was entirely appropriate in that he’d been editor of the Law Review at U Mich, and had graduated third in his class.

  “…little before ten,” Harrod’s voice said.

  “How did you know the time?” my voice asked.

  “Okay,” Andrew said, and simultaneously pressed the PLAY and REC buttons.

  “I looked at my watch,” Harrod said.

  “How come?”

  “Dining room quits serving at eleven-thirty. I wondered who might be coming in so late.”

  “Tell me where you were,” I said.

  “Little booth at the entrance to the club. I sit in there checking the cars as they come in. People on foot, too, some of the time.”

  “Is there a barrier?”

  “No, I just stop them and either wave them on or tell them to back on up and turn around.”

  “Is there a light in the booth?”

  “There is.”

  “Was the light on this past Tuesday night?”

  “It was.”

  “Tell me what you saw at a little before ten that night, Mr. Harrod.”

  “White Geo driving up to the booth, woman behind the wheel.”

  “Can you describe this woman?”

  “She was Lainie Commins.”

  “Did you know Lainie Commins at the time?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then how…?”

  “I asked her what her name was and she told me it was Lainie Commins and said she was there to see Mr. Toland. Brett Toland, that is. Who was killed that night.”

  “She gave you her name and also Mr. Toland’s name?”

  “Yes. That’s what they usually do. If they’re here to join somebody for dinner, or to go on one of the boats. The boats sometimes give cocktail parties, fifty, sixty people invited to them, it gets hard keeping track. I’ll tell you the truth, there’s no way I can really double-check with the person who’s the member. I just keep my eye on a guest, make sure they’re going where they said they were going, the dining room, or one of the boats.”

  “What did this woman who said she was Lainie Commins…?”

  “Oh, she was Lainie Commins, all right. I seen her since, identified her picture at the hearing, in fact. She was Lainie Commins, no question.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Blond hair, eyeglasses, wearing a white shirt with a blue scarf had some kind of anchor design on it.”

  “What color?”

  “I told you. Blue.”

  “The anchors, I mean.”

  “Oh. Red.”

  “Was she wearing slacks or a skirt?”

  “Couldn’t see. She was inside the car.”

  “Where’d she park the car?”

  “Near the lamppost at the far end of the lot.”

  “Did you see her when she got out of the car?”

  “Yes, but I don’t remember whether she had on slacks or a skirt.”

  “But you were watching her.”

  “Yes. Wanted to make sure she was going to the Toland boat, like she said.”

  “How was she wearing her hair?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Loose? Up? Tied back?”

  “Oh. Loose.”

  “But you didn’t notice whether she was wearing slacks or a skirt.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Watched her as she got out of the car…”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d she do then?”

  “Went to the walkway along the dock, started looking for the Toland boat. Toy Boat, she’s called.”

  “You were watching Ms. Commins all this time?”

  “Watching her.”

  “Did she find the boat?”

  “She found it. Stopped at the gangway, looked up at the boat, then yelled out ‘Hello?’ Like a question, you know. Hello? When she didn’t see anybody on deck.”

  “You could see all this from the booth?”

  “I could.”

  “How far away from the boat were you?”

  “Fifty, sixty feet?”

  “Light on in the booth, dark outside, but you could see…”

  “There were lights along the dockside walk. And in the saloon. I could see her plain as day.”

  “But you didn’t notice whether she was wearing slacks or a skirt.”

  “Didn’t notice that, no. Not a leg man, myself,” he said, and smiled. I smiled, too. So did Andrew.

  “What happened then?”

  “She yelled out his name. Mr. Toland’s. Like a question again. Brett? And he came up out of the saloon and she went aboard.”

  “Then what?”

  “Don’t know. Soon as I saw she was expected, I went back to my own business.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Watching television. I have a little Sony in the booth, I watch television when it’s slow.”

  “What were you watching?”

  “Dateline.”

  “This was now what time?”

  “Oh, ten after ten. A quarter past?”

  “Did you see Ms. Commins when she left the boat?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You wouldn’t know whether Dateline was still
on when she left the boat, would you?”

  “Goes off at eleven, it’s an hour-long show. Dining room closes at eleven-thirty, which is when I go home. Night watchman comes on then.”

  “Does he sit in the booth, too?”

  “No, he patrols the docks, the dining room, the whole area. There’s no traffic after the dining room closes.”

  “You didn’t happen to see Ms. Commins coming off the boat at about ten-thirty?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Didn’t happen to see her driving out of the parking lot a few minutes after that?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “How come? You were sitting right there in the booth…”

  “I didn’t see nobody come off that boat at ten-thirty,” Harrod said. “And I didn’t see the white Geo leaving the lot at that time, neither.”

  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.

  “Thank you, Mr. Harrod,” I said. “We appreciate your time.”

  “Hello, you’ve reached Warren Chambers Investigations. I’ll be out of town for the next week or so, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I return.”

  No clue as to when Warren had recorded the message.

  Same message on the machine at his home number.

  I tried Toots again.

  “Hello, I’m away from the phone just now, but if you’ll leave a message at the beep I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks. Bye.”

  Which meant that Andrew and I had to keep our four o’clock appointment with a tape recorder and a man named Charles Werner.

  When you’re a member of the police force, you see all kinds of things, people doing all kinds of things. You answer a Family Dispute call, you go in, find a man in his undershorts, woman wearing nothing but panties, man yelling she threw hot grits on his head, woman yelling he’s full of shit, you see all kinds of things. It’s like a police officer isn’t a human being anymore the minute he puts on the uniform. He becomes just the uniform, nothing inside it. Woman ain’t ashamed to be seen wearing only her panties, big fat woman with breasts hanging down to her navel, you aren’t human to her, you’re just the Man come to see to this little dispute here, you’re just an anonymous part of the system, not a human being at all, just the Man.

  You see a dead person laying in his own blood in the street, people screaming and crying all around him, you tell them to back off, go home, ain’t nothing to see here, let’s go, let’s break it up now, you’re not a human being same as the ones screaming and yelling, you’re just the Man. And you’re not supposed to be affected by the blood underfoot swarming with flies, or the brain matter spattered all over the fender of the car, or the fact that the kid laying there with his skull open is only fourteen years old, you’re the Man come to set it all straight.

  On Amberjack’s boat here in the middle of the Gulf, Warren Chambers was the Man again. The Man come to see about this little matter of Toots Kiley’s addiction, the Man come to set it all straight. So it didn’t matter he had to take the handcuffs off and lead her to the head and stand outside the door where he could hear her peeing behind it. There was no more embarrassment here than there’d been with the fat lady in her panties, he was just the Man here to settle this thing, the Man here to get her sober again. Wasn’t anybody behind that door pissing, wasn’t anybody outside here listening. The lady in there was invisible, and the Man outside here was anonymous.

  “I still don’t know how to flush this fucking thing,” Toots said from behind the door.

  “You finished in there?”

  “I’m finished.”

  “I’ll show you again. Unlock the door.”

  She unlocked the door. Stood by the sink in the small compartment, washing her hands while he demonstrated the use of the flush yet another time, not that she seemed too interested in learning about it. The thing wasn’t working properly, anyway, he’d never been on a goddamn boat that had a toilet worth a damn. He had to run the pump over and over again till he finally got water in the bowl. Toots dried her hands on a paper towel, and was about to toss it in the toilet when he gave her a look would kill a charging rhino. She wadded the towel and dropped it in the sink. He picked it up, opened the door under the sink, tossed the towel into a metal basket fastened to the inside of the door, closed the door again, and took the handcuffs from the pocket of his windbreaker.

  “Come on,” she said, “we don’t need those.”

  “I don’t want you hitting me upside the head,” he said.

  “What good would that do? I don’t know how to run a boat.”

  “Even so.”

  “Come on, Warr. I’m not a desperado.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m not hooked. You’re making a mistake. You see me clawing at the walls?”

  “Bulkheads.”

  “You see me?”

  “That’s not what happens, Toots.”

  “That crack you found, somebody was trying to make me look bad, that’s all.”

  “Sure.”

  “Come on, let me go upstairs, get some air. You keep me chained to the wall like an animal I’m liable to go crazy.”

  “I don’t want you jumping overboard.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You’ve kicked it before, Toots. You know exactly what you’re liable to do.”

  “I can’t swim. Why would I jump overboard?”

  “Gets too bad.”

  “It’s not going to get bad. How many times do I have to tell you I’m…”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Terrific. How do I look?”

  She put her hands on her hips, lifted her chin like a model, turned to him in profile, took in a deep breath. She was wearing the same short black skirt she’d had on when he’d snatched her from the condo on Thursday night, wrinkled now, that and the thin yellow blouse, also wrinkled, her legs bare, the high-heeled black shoes up forward where she was handcuffed to the wall when she wasn’t complaining about the toilet facilities.

  “You look fine,” he said.

  “So let me go upstairs, okay?”

  He looked at her closely.

  She didn’t seem any the worse for wear, considering she hadn’t had a hit since sometime Thursday. He didn’t know whether she’d beamed up at a crack house someplace before coming home with her new stash, the ten jumbo vials he’d found in her handbag, four big juicy rocks in each vial. But that would’ve made it late Thursday night, say ten, eleven o’clock, and this was now a little past three on Saturday afternoon, which made it—what? Forty hours or so since she’d been off the pipe? Eight hours to go for two full days, yet she wasn’t showing any of the signs he’d expected. Either she was a damn good actress or she was really telling the…

  No, he thought, don’t fall for that shit.

  She is Tootsie Pipehead, and I am the Man.

  “Please, Warren,” she said. “Just for a few minutes. Smell a little fresh air.”

  “Just for a few minutes,” he said.

  Two reasons she wanted to go up on deck.

  First was to keep on working him, make him believe she was sane and sound, just a dear old friend wanting a breath of fresh air, look at me, do I look like a person craving cocaine, for Christ’s sake? I am little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, and all I want is to go back to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. One thing she didn’t want was to show him what she was really feeling this very fucking minute. Because if she could convince him she was really straight, that this was all some kind of bizarre mistake, why then she could get him to turn this fucking tub around and take her back to Crack City. If she could keep him thinking she was just the Nice Little Girl Next Door, breathing in all this clean fresh healthy air ten thousand miles from shore, here in the middle of fucking nowhere, keep him from knowing how much she was m
issing the shit right now, keep him from knowing how everything inside her was screaming for a hit right now, couldn’t sleep for dreaming of crack, couldn’t stop thinking of crack every minute she was awake, if she could only keep him from knowing what she was thinking and feeling here at the railing of the boat as she looked out at a clear blue afternoon sky over inky-blue water, trying to appear calm and cool and dignified though her skirt and her blouse were wrinkled and her mind was screaming crack.

  Ten seconds was all it took.

  Two glass stems stuck in the glass bowl of the pipe. You drop the crack pellet in the larger stem and heat the frog with a butane torch till it melts down to a cooked brown ooze. “You suck on the shorter stem like you’re pulling a lover’s tongue into your mouth, kissing that sweet mother crack, fine white cloud swirling up in the bowl of the pipe, swirling, sweet suicide flying to your brain in ten seconds flat, man, you got a piece of the mountain, man, you are beaming up, man, Scottie got the rock, man, you are in explosion mode!

  And oh that first sweet flash, oh that incomparable rush, puffing at the mother lode, sucking on the source, warp speed now, oh how good, oh how fucking ec-static, oh come fuck me, crack, come be my lover, come be my man, come make me laugh out loud, come make me strong and powerful, come make me happy, happy, happy, make me come, make me giggly happy, crazy happy, I am so alive, so fucking married to this delicious fucking Rock of Gibraltar!

  God, how she wanted it.

  Now!

  Right this fucking minute.

  But no, just be Shirley Temple here at the boat’s rail, blond hair blowing in the wind, she once blew a Japanese man for the twenty dollars she needed for the rocks. He kept telling her he liked “bronze,” she thought he meant the metal, realized he was talking about girls with yellow hair, the things she’d done for crack, the twists she’d worked for crack. She’d blow a thousand fucking Japs right this minute if somebody would only return her pipe and the rocks she’d bought last Thursday night, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of the shit, he hadn’t thrown it overboard, had he? Only a crazy person would do that, he wasn’t a crazy person.