Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  There were still people skating on the ice.

  The tree was still lighted.

  They got out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk on the almost deserted street, holding hands, looking up at the tree. Below them, on a sunken ice-skating rink, young girls in short skirts were cutting fancy figures on the ice, and old men with their hands behind their backs were plodding along like ocean liners. The giant tree with its multicolored lights dazzled the night air above them.

  And suddenly, all the lights went out.

  On the tree.

  The rink below was still illuminated, a glowing rectangle in an otherwise suddenly black landscape. Well, there were lights on the street corners, and some lights on in the windows of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, across the street, but everything suddenly felt dark in comparison to what it had been not a moment before. There was a collective disappointed ohhhhh as the lights on the tree went out, but the skaters below went about their determined circling of the rink, and the few people on the street above began dispersing, some heading into the Plaza itself, where some of the store windows were still lighted, others walking down toward Forty-ninth, Patricia and Mark walking—well, strolling really, still hand in hand—toward Fiftieth.

  The two men who attacked them seemed to materialize out of nowhere. They were both black, but they could just as easily have been white; this was the Christmas season in New York, and muggers at that time of year came in every stripe and persuasion. The mink coat was what they were after. That and Patricia’s handbag, which happened to be a Judith Leiber with a jeweled clasp that looked like money. One of them hit her on the back of the head while the other one grabbed her handbag. As she started to fall forward, the first one circled around her and yanked open the flaps of the coat, popping the buttons. He was starting to pull it down off her shoulders when Mark punched him.

  The punch rolled right off him. The man was an experienced street fighter and Mark was merely a downtown lawyer who’d taken his girl uptown to see a Christmas tree. Jewish, no less. The irony. The man hit him twice in the face, very hard, and as Mark fell to the pavement, he turned toward Patricia again, determined to get that fucking coat. The other man kicked Mark in the head. Patricia screamed and took off one of her high-heeled shoes and went at the man who was kicking Mark, wielding the shoe like a hammer, striking at his face and his shoulders with the stiletto-like heel, but the man kept kicking Mark, kicking him over and over again, his head lurching with each sharp kick. There was blood all over the sidewalk now, he was bleeding from the head, she almost slipped in the blood as she went at the man again. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” but he kept kicking Mark, kicking him, until finally the man trying to get her coat off yelled “Let it be!” and on signal they vanished into the night as suddenly as they’d appeared.

  She was still wearing the mink.

  One of the sleeves had been torn loose at the shoulder.

  They’d got the Judith Leiber bag.

  Mark Loeb was dead.

  A month later, she joined the D.A.’s Office.

  I figured she didn’t want this to happen to her again.

  Didn’t want to lose another man she loved.

  But, Patricia…

  “Something?” she asked, and smiled, and reached across the table to take my hand.

  “No, nothing,” I said.

  The top of Andrew Holmes’s Chrysler LeBaron convertible was down, and the sky above was so blue I wanted to lick it right off the page. Every so often a fat white lazy cloud drifted overhead, shading the car as it floated past. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in the state of Florida, and like college boys on spring break, we drove first toward Okeechobee along Route 70, and then through Indiantown toward West Palm Beach, the jackets to our seersucker suits lying on the backseat, our ties loose, the top buttons of our shirts unbuttoned. We were wearing suits and ties only because we were making a business call. Lawyers wear suits and ties when they’re conducting business. When we found Jerry and Brenda Bannerman on their powerboat—a forty-five-footer rigged for deep-sea fishing—they were wearing, respectively, cutoff jeans and a thong bikini.

  Jerry was a man in his mid-forties, tanned and fit, his cutoffs belted around his snug waist with a length of white line. His wife Brenda was in her late thirties, I guessed, a toothy, leggy brunette with blue eyes that matched her skimpy swimsuit. They were both swabbing the deck when we came marching up the dock of their club, a mile or so from their oceanfront West Palm condo.

  Stowing the buckets and mops at once, they offered us a light lunch, and sat with us around a cockpit table under blue canvas, all of us chatting idly like good old friends, eating the delicious shrimp salad Brenda had prepared, sipping at iced tea in tall glasses afloat with lemon wedges. Jerry told us that he, too, was a lawyer. Brenda said that she’d been a legal secretary before they married, yet another revolting development. Too much expertise here, I was thinking. Andrew later told me he was thinking the same thing.

  They told us they’d bought two apartments in their condo at a bargain price three years ago, and had broken through the walls to make one huge apartment overlooking the Atlantic. The Banner Year, as they called their boat, had been purchased after Jerry’s firm won a huge class-action suit and declared extravagant Christmas bonuses. They had been all over the state of Florida with it, had even jumped off to Bimini one fall—but that was another story.

  “We hit a hurricane,” Brenda said.

  “Wouldn’t want to experience that again,” Jerry said.

  Brenda served little cookies with chocolate sprinkles on them.

  She poured more iced tea.

  It was time to get to work.

  “As I told you on the phone,” I said, “all we want to know…”

  “Sure, let’s cut to the chase,” Jerry said. “Did the S.A. offer you a deal?”

  “He suggested we might want to make one after listening to his witnesses.”

  “Might be a good idea,” Jerry said.

  “Okay to turn this on?” Andrew asked.

  “Sure,” Jerry said.

  “I hate the way my voice sounds on tape,” Brenda said, and rolled her eyes. She had moved out into the sun. The three of us were still under the Bimini top, but she was now sitting aft of us, her face and the sloping tops of her breasts tilted up to the sun.

  Andrew hit the REC and PLAY buttons. The tape began unreeling.

  “What I figure he was trying to do,” Jerry said, “was …”

  “Who do you mean?” I asked.

  “Folger. Your state attorney. Aside from establishing that we heard shots, of course…”

  This was not heartening news.

  “…was establish a timetable. I could tell by the questions he asked me…”

  “And me, too,” Brenda said.

  “…that he had other witnesses who’d seen the accused on the boat before we came along.”

  “How could you determine that?”

  “Well, he asked if we’d seen a security guard in the booth near the gate, for example, so I figured…”

  “Me, too,” Brenda said.

  “…that the guard had some significance. So what could the significance be if the guard hadn’t seen the accused going aboard the boat where later we heard the shots?”

  Shots again.

  Witnesses to the shooting.

  “He also asked…” Brenda said.

  “Folger,” Jerry said.

  “…whether we’d seen a sailboat coming in under power and tying up in slip number twelve, I think it was…”

  “Twelve,” Jerry affirmed with a nod. “Which was another link in the time sequence, I figured.”

  “Like whoever was on that sailboat must’ve seen the accused before we came along,” Brenda said.

  “Folger was trying to establish that the accused was still on the Toland boat when we heard the shots,” Jerry said.

  I bit the bullet, so to speak.

  “What shots?�
� I asked.

  “Well, gunshots,” he said.

  “What time was this?”

  “Around twenty to twelve.”

  “Tuesday night,” Brenda said, nodding.

  “This past Tuesday night. The twelfth,” Jerry said.

  “Eleven-forty P.M.,” Brenda said, nodding again.

  “You heard these shots coming from the Toland boat?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing near the Toland boat?”

  “Walking toward where we’d parked the Banner Year.”

  “We were staying a few nights,” Brenda said.

  “Sleeping on the boat.”

  “Came over through Lake Okeechobee…”

  “Spent a night in Clewiston…”

  “Went down the Caloosahatchee to Punta Rosa…”

  “And then took the Intercoastal north to Calusa.”

  “We’ve got courtesy privileges at Silver Creek.”

  “Got there around seven that night,” Brenda said.

  “Showered ashore…”

  “Got all tarted up…”

  “Went in for dinner around nine.”

  “They stop serving at ten-thirty.”

  “Dining room closes an hour later.”

  “I had a delicious broiled lobster,” Brenda said.

  “I had the red snapper.”

  “Finished a bottle of really good Chardonnay.”

  “Headed back for the boat around eleven-thirty, I guess it was.”

  “Just ambling back to the boat,” Brenda said.

  “Just taking our good sweet time.”

  “Nowhere to go but to bed.”

  There are cars moving out of the parking lot as they enter it at the dining room end. Late diners like themselves heading home. Headlights blinding them as they move toward the waterfront planking that runs past the boats parked in their slips. The activity is short-lived. The sound of automobile engines dies on the still September night.

  Now there is only the sound of water lapping at dock pilings and boats. The occasional sound of a lanyard clanking against a mast. Marina sounds. The sounds boat people love.

  The walkway is lighted with low all-weather mushroom-shaped lamps that illuminate the path and cast some reflection onto the tethered vessels bobbing dockside. The Bannerman boat is in slip number three. As they recall it again now, Toy Boat was tied up at slip number five that night. This would make Werner’s recollection of the geography accurate. He had told us he’d tied up his boat at slip number twelve, some six or seven boats down the line from the Tolands.

  The cockpit lights are still on as the Bannermans, arm in arm, approach the luxury yawl. There is no one sitting at the cockpit table now, but there are lights burning in the saloon. It has taken them ten minutes or so, looking over all the parked boats, admiring some, dismissing others, to amble their way from the dining room to this point just abreast of the Toland boat. It is twenty minutes to twelve when…

  “We heard shots.”

  “Three gunshots.”

  I looked at them both. Not many people know what gunshots sound like. It is not like in the movies. In the movies, even the smallest caliber gun sounds like a mortar shell exploding an inch from your ear. I am not an expert on all guns, but I do know what an Iver Johnson .22-caliber Trailsman Snub revolver sounds like when it is fired three times from a car parked at the curb, the first bullet taking me in the shoulder, the second taking me in the chest, the third going Christ knew where because by then I didn’t even hear that next shot, possibly because I was suddenly gushing blood and screaming in pain and falling into a deep black hole in the sidewalk. The sound of the gun that catapulted me into an eight-day coma was nothing more than a small pop, an insignificant crack.

  “What’d these gunshots sound like?” I asked casually.

  “We know guns,” Jerry said.

  “We keep guns.”

  “We go to the range every Saturday.”

  “We know what a gun sounds like.”

  “These weren’t backfires.”

  “They were gunshots.”

  “Coming from the saloon of the Toland yawl,” Jerry said.

  “Three shots,” Brenda said.

  “What’d you do?” Andrew asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you say you heard three gunshots…”

  “We did.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “Went back to our boat. Went to bed.”

  “Didn’t report the shots to anyone?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Jerry said.

  “Why not?”

  “None of our business.”

  “When did you come forward?”

  “When we heard this man had got killed.”

  “Brett Toland.”

  “We called the S.A.’s Office right away, volunteered what we knew.”

  “Which was that you’d heard three shots coming from the Toland boat at eleven-forty last Tuesday night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the state attorney ask why you didn’t report those shots?”

  “He did.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That we weren’t eager to confront anyone who had a gun in his hand.”

  “Is there a telephone on your boat?”

  “A radio.”

  “Why didn’t you use the radio to report …?”

  “We didn’t want to get involved.”

  “But you’re involved now. You’re a witness in a…”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters to Lainie Commins. If you’d reported those shots when you heard them, someone might have apprehended whoever…”

  “We didn’t say anything that linked those shots to Ms. Commins,” Jerry said.

  “We didn’t see her on the boat, so how could we have implicated her in any way?” Brenda asked.

  “My guess is they’ve got someone who can place her there around the time we heard the shots,” Jerry said. “That’s why the careful timetable. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. But if you’d reported those shots immediately …”

  “No, we couldn’t do that,” Jerry said.

  “Why not?”

  “We just couldn’t,” Brenda said.

  “Why not?” I asked again.

  “We didn’t want anyone rummaging around.”

  “Rummaging around?”

  “Our boat.”

  I looked at them both again.

  “Why didn’t you want anyone on your boat?” I asked.

  “Turn that thing off,” Jerry said, and nodded toward the recorder.

  Andrew hit the STOP button.

  Jerry looked at his wife.

  Brenda nodded okay.

  “We had a little pot aboard,” Jerry said.

  “Marijuana,” Brenda said, explaining to the two squares in the seersucker suits.

  “Just a few ounces,” Jerry said.

  “For recreational use,” Brenda said.

  “We were on vacation.”

  “Just the two of us on the boat.”

  “Just a little for our own use.”

  “Not enough to hurt anybody.”

  Except Lainie Commins, I thought.

  6

  Etta Toland arrived at 333 Heron Street at the stroke of ten on Monday morning. She was dressed casually—disdainfully, my partner Frank later said—in jeans, a loose-fitting, tunic-style, melon-colored blouse, low-heeled very strappy sandals, and a brown leather belt with a handcrafted brass buckle in the shape of a lion’s head. Her shoulder-length black hair was pulled to the back of her head and fastened there with a brass barrette. She wore no lipstick. The lids over her dark almond-shaped eyes were subtly tinted with a tan liner. It was obvious that she expected to get the hell out of here as fast as she could and get on with the more important business in her life.

  This was for real.

&nbs
p; This was under oath.

  Her personal attorney, Sidney Brackett, was there in my office and so was a woman from the State Attorney’s Office, presumably to protect Etta’s rights, though depositions are customarily open-ended and nonleading, and no one does any cross-examination. I expected that if I asked Etta to reveal anything that constituted privileged communication—as, for example, a conversation between her and her psychiatrist, if she had one—I would at once hear from either Brackett or Mrs. Hampton, which was the ASA’s name, Helen Hampton. But I didn’t intend to tread any dangerous ground, and my partner Frank was there to nudge me in case I did.

  I should tell you that people say Frank and I look alike, though I have never been able to see the slightest resemblance. I am thirty-eight years old and Frank is forty. I am an even six feet tall and I weigh a hundred and eighty-five pounds. Frank is five-nine and a half and he weighs a hundred and sixty. My face is long and narrow, what Frank calls a “fox face.” By contrast, he calls himself a “pig face.” There are also “rhino faces” and “turtle faces” in the system of categorization he invented. I am originally from Chicago, he is from New York. We both have black hair and brown eyes, true, and we both have corner offices at Summerville and Hope, but that’s all we have in common.

  Frank has been nicer to me since I survived becoming a vegetable.

  Everybody has been nicer to me, in fact.

  In fact, that’s precisely the goddamn trouble.

  Neither Frank nor I knew anything Etta Toland had told the grand jury. Like most depositions, this was a fact-finding exploration, or, if you prefer, a fishing expedition. But we could assume, as had the pot-smoking lawyer-boater Jerry Bannerman, that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had used Etta to establish yet another time sequence in the inexorable order that linked Lainie Commins to the murder of Brett Toland. Since the Bannermans had testified to hearing shots at eleven-forty on the night of September twelfth, I figured that was a good enough place to start, so I asked Etta where she’d been at about that time.

  “Home,” she said. “Waiting for Brett’s call.”

  “You were expecting your husband to call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know where he was?”

  “Yes, he was aboard Toy Boat. With Lainie Commins.”