Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “Was Lainie in the office when you got there?”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He tells Brett the good news he’s just received from his informer at Toys “” Us, and Brett immediately gets on the phone to call, first, his wife in her own large (but not as large) office down the hall, and then Toyland’s sales manager, asking him to stand by for a possible confirming call and big order from Toys, and then his production manager in the Bradenton factory (which explains why there are no elves here in the Calusa building) to tell him they may have to up their initial run order on Rush, as the game is familiarly called in-house. Idly picking up two of the tiny doll heads, he asks Bobby to sit down, and offers him a wrapped mint from the jar he keeps on his desk (he’s just quit smoking for the fifth time). As Bobby unwraps the hard candy, Brett tells him all about this idea he’s had for a teddy bear.

  Rolling the heads between his fingers the way Queeg rolled the stainless-steel marbles in The Caine Mutiny (but reforming smokers can be forgiven their little physical tics), Brett says that he suddenly remembered a hymn they used to sing in church when he was a Baptist growing up in Overall Patches, Tennessee…

  “Did he actually say that?”

  “No, no. I don’t know where he was from in Tennessee. I just made that up.”

  “But you’re not making up the rest of this, are you?”

  “Of course not. I’m telling it just the way I remember it.”

  The way Brett remembers it in that meeting last year is that one of the lines in the hymn was either “Gladly the cross I’d bear” or “Gladly the cross I’ll bear,” either one of which referred to joyously carrying the cross for Jesus. It doesn’t matter what the line actually was, he says, it’s an old hymn in public domain. The only thing that matters so far as Toyland is concerned was that all the kids thought there was actually a cross-eyed bear named Gladly.

  “What I’d like to do,” Brett says, “is come up with a cross-eyed teddy bear.”

  Sucking on the mint, Bobby looks at him.

  “A teddy bear with crossed eyes, okay?” Brett says.

  “O-kay,” Bobby says slowly and skeptically.

  “Which, when you put eyeglasses on him, the eyes get uncrossed.”

  Bobby is beginning to get it.

  “We tell the kids to kiss the bear on the nose and put the glasses on him, and all at once the bear’s eyes are straight,” Brett says.

  “How do we do that?” Bobby asks.

  “I don’t know how we do it. Am I a designer? We have this cuddly little bear who happens to have a handicap…”

  “Visually challenged,” Bobby says.

  “Strabismally challenged,” Brett says, nodding. “It’s called strabismus. When you’re cockeyed.”

  “Must be millions of kids in America who have to wear glasses,” Bobby says, sucking pensively on the mint now, beginning to recognize the possibilities inherent in Brett’s brainstorm.

  “And who hate wearing glasses,” Brett says. “This way we give them an incentive to wear glasses. Because they can see what the glasses do for the bear. The glasses fix the bear’s eyes.”

  “I think it’s terrific,” Bobby says. “We’ll get endorsements from every optometry association in the world.”

  “Who do we get to design her?”

  “Lainie,” they both say at once.

  Brett reaches for his phone.

  Lainie has worn to work, on this insufferably hot day in September, a very short green mini, a darker green T-shirt with no bra, strappy green sandals to match. The heart-shaped ring is on her right pinky. She is bare-legged, and her blond hair is massed on top of her head, held up and away from her neck with a green plastic comb. She looks sticky and sweaty and somehow desirable…

  “Well, she’s a very sexy girl, you know,” Bobby says now.

  …and vulnerable, her wandering eye giving her a slightly dazed appearance. Bobby is fearful at first that her own affliction might cause her to bridle at the notion of a bear similarly handicapped, but, no, she takes to the idea at once, expanding upon it, even making a few on-the-spot sketches of what the bear might look like with and without glasses.

  “Does Toyland’s finished bear look anything like those first sketches she made?”

  “I don’t remember what those sketches looked like.”

  “Do you recall exactly how Brett proposed the idea to her?”

  “He told her essentially what he’d told me.”

  “Do you know exactly what her response was?”

  “I told you. She was very enthusiastic.”

  “Yes, but her exact words.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  There seemed to be a lot of things Bobby Diaz didn’t remember. I wondered if he was related to Rosa Lopez, who claimed she’d seen O.J.’s Bronco parked on the street earlier than it could have been if he was out doing murder. Murders.

  “How did the meeting end?”

  “He told Lainie to get to work on it. Said he wanted drawings by the end of the month.”

  “The end of last September?”

  “Yes.”

  “Working drawings?”

  “I don’t remember if he said working drawings or not.”

  “Did you see the drawings Lainie supposedly delivered by the end of the month?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you see any drawings Lainie delivered?”

  “Well, I saw drawings. I don’t know if they were Lainie’s or not.”

  “When did you first see these drawings?”

  “Before we made up the prototype.”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “When I saw the drawings? Or when we made the bear?”

  “The drawings.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “When did you have a finished bear?”

  “The prototype?”

  “Yes.”

  “In May sometime.”

  “This past May.”

  “Yes. We had a working model by the fifteenth.”

  I remembered that Lainie claimed to have designed her bear in April.

  “Lainie Commins left Toyland in January, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s when it was.”

  “Did she discuss this with you?”

  “What? Leaving Toyland?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you’re Toyland’s design chief, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “And she was working in the design department…”

  “Yes.”

  “So didn’t she tell you she was leaving?”

  “Well, yes, I’m sure she did. I thought you meant did we discuss why she was leaving, or what she planned to do next, or…”

  “Well, did you?”

  “I told you. I don’t remember.”

  “Did you ever see her again? After she left Toyland?”

  Diaz hesitated.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  Which in Spanish was No me acuerdo.

  Which, according to O.J.’s Dream Team, meant “No” in many Spanish dialects like Rosa Lopez’s.

  Oh?

  Sí.

  The way Guthrie looked at it, women’s lib was the biggest con mankind had ever foisted on the female gender. First we—meaning Guthrie and every other conniving male in America—convinced women that they deserved the same sexual freedom men had enjoyed for centuries. This sounded good to the feminists. Why should men be the only ones to decide when sex was appropriate or indicated? Why shouldn’t women be the aggressors whenever they felt like it? Why shouldn’t women demand sex when they wanted it, initiate it when they wanted it, be the equals of men in every respect as concerned sex.

  Men like Guthrie were very sympathetic to these attitudes and ideals.

  Men like Guthrie agreed it was definitely unfair that for all these eons
women had been used and/or abused sexually but had never been granted the opportunity of calling the shots themselves. Men like Guthrie agreed that this was a despicable situation. In repentance, they were willing to do everything within their power to see to it that women enjoyed equal sexual rights. This meant that women could introduce the sex act, and encourage the sex act, and follow through on the sex act, all without stigma, humiliation or disapprobation. Women thought this was terrific. Freedom at last. Men thought it was terrific, too, because it meant they were getting laid a lot more often with a lot less hassle.

  And since there was now nothing wrong with going to bed with a man whenever the spirit moved one, so to speak, then why not take the liberation a step further and move in with a man who pleased a person spiritually and sexually besides? Why not indeed? Men encouraged this new notion. Whereas back in the Dark Ages, a man couldn’t get into a woman’s pants, so to speak, without pledging his troth to her and perhaps not even then, now it became possible for a man and a woman to live together on a sort of trial basis, which—if it worked out—might lead to marriage. But now that women had liberated themselves, there was no need for them even to be thinking about old-fashioned, restraining concepts like marriage. It was perfectly okay to share an apartment and incidentally to share the rent and the bills and everything else that went along with living together, vive la liberté! Et I’égalité, aussi.

  Guthrie was all for women’s lib.

  He also thought it was wonderful that women now felt so confident and secure that they could walk in the street practically naked or else wearing only clothes they used to wear under their clothes. Pick up a fashion magazine like Vogue or Elle or Harper’s Bazaar and you saw pictures of women wearing practically nothing at all, which only a few years ago would have got the publisher of Penthouse arrested, but which nowadays was an expression of female freedom, more power to them, and God bless them all.

  The manager of the Silver Creek Yacht Club was a redhead named Holly Hunnicutt, which name Guthrie found provocative, and she was wearing a suit that looked like the sort frails used to wear when Guthrie was plying his trade back in the Big Bad Apple, a pale pastel-blue number with huge lapels and big breast pockets, you should pardon the expression. She was wearing the jacket over a short tight skirt, no stockings, just suntanned legs. Whenever she uncrossed those legs you could see Miami on a clear day. Under the jacket, she was wearing nothing but herself so that whenever she leaned over her desk, you could see Mount St. Helens in Washington even on a rainy day. Guthrie Lamb felt as if he were back in the pulp magazines again, the days of the pulp magazines, that is.

  Holly Hunnicutt was too young to know what pulp magazines were. Guthrie guessed she was twenty-two, twenty-three years old, managing this swank yacht club here in one of Calusa’s more desirable areas, close to Manakawa County and Fatback Key. Guthrie himself lived in a rooming house not too far from Newtown, one of the city’s worst areas. He was wondering if Holly Hunnicutt—God, that name!—might be interested in one day visiting his cozy little room at the Palm Court, as it was aptly called since there were four spindly palm trees out front. Show her his newspaper clippings or something. His private-eye license. Which some people found quite impressive. Meanwhile, he was asking her whether anyone on Tuesday of last week had reported an outage of the light on top of the right-hand pillar at the entrance to the club.

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Then the light was on that night?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Is there any way you could check?”

  “Well, I guess I could call the electrician…”

  “Yes, please do,” Guthrie said, and flashed his dazzling smile which had cost him twelve thousand dollars for implants, not to mention the time and the pain. Holly found the dental work impressive, he guessed. At least she smiled back at him and bent over her desk to punch a few buttons on the phone, causing her jacket to fall somewhat open again, which Guthrie, gentleman that he was, pretended not to notice.

  Holly spent a few moments on the phone with someone named Gus, which was a good name for an electrician, as opposed to a private investigator, who should have a classy name like Guthrie, Guthrie felt. During that time, she ascertained that Gus had not in recent weeks changed any lightbulbs on either of the two pillars at the club’s entrance, and unless they had burned out last night after he’d gone home, they were still working. If she liked, he could circumvent the timer on the lights—which was set to go off at seven twenty-nine P.M. sunset in Calusa these days—and see if the lights came on now, which according to Guthrie’s watch was three-twenty P.M. Guthrie heard all of this because Gus the electrician was on the speakerphone. He heard Holly, in person, tell him “No, that won’t be necessary,” and then she hit a button on her phone, and Gus disappeared, and she crossed her long sleek legs and settled back in the big leather chair behind her desk, and smiled, and asked, “How else can I help you, Mr. Lamb?” which Guthrie felt was provocative, but did not say.

  “I’d like to talk to any of your employees who were working here last Tuesday night, the twelfth,” Guthrie said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Very good,” Guthrie said, and smiled. “I hate mysteries as much as you do. What I’m trying to learn is whether any of them might have noticed a car parked just outside the entrance pillars last Tuesday night. On the right-hand side. Facing the club, that is. As you go in. Did you, for example, happen to notice such a car?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Which narrows the field,” Guthrie said, and smiled again.

  But not considerably.

  It turned out that the yacht club employed forty people, among whom, and in addition to Holly Hunnicutt herself, were an assistant club manager, a dockmaster and two dockhands, three security guards and a night watchman, an electrician—Gus, of course—four maintenance men, a restaurant manager and assistant manager, a bartender, a hostess, ten waiters and/or waitresses, a chef, three assistant chefs, two dishwashers and four busboys. Not all of these people had been working last Tuesday night. Two had called in sick, and one had gone back to Cuba.

  Of the remaining thirty-seven, only ten had seen a car parked on the shoulder outside the club, but not at the hour Lainie Commins had specified. The time estimates varied, but they were consistent in being somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, rather than the ten-thirty Lainie had reported as the time she’d driven out of the club.

  A waiter and a waitress who’d seen the car were reluctant to say so because they’d been outside necking, when they should have been in the restaurant helping to set up for Wednesday’s lunch. In any case, neither of them was of much help in identifying the car because they were otherwise busily occupied. The waiter seemed to remember pressing the waitress against the car as he fumbled under her skirt. She seemed to remember something hard, cold and metallic against her buttocks, but she may have been understandably confused.

  The remaining eight waitresses were absolutely positive they had seen: a dark green Acura, a blue Infiniti, a black Jaguar, a bluish-black Lexus, a brown Mercedes, a blue Lincoln Continental, a black Cadillac, and/or a grayish BMW. All of them agreed there was no one in the car. All of them further agreed that the car’s lights were off. One of the assistant chefs said he’d seen the car—he was the one who claimed it was very definitely a blue GS 300 Lexus—at twenty after eleven when he’d stepped onto the road for a peaceful smoke, but that it was gone when he left for home at a little before midnight.

  Most of which added up to zilch.

  Guthrie walked to where he’d parked his own car—neither an Acura, Infiniti, Jaguar, Lexus, Mercedes, Lincoln Continental, Cadillac, nor Beamer, but instead a little red Toyota—unlocked the trunk, and took from it his Polaroid camera and his casting kit.

  Then he went out to the shoulder of the road outside the club, where eight different witnesses had seen eight different cars at eight different times on the night Brett Toland was
killed.

  There are people who maintain that if you haven’t seen Calusa by boat, you haven’t seen Calusa at all. The house I was renting was on one of the city’s many beautiful canals, and the boat tied up at the dock was a sailboat I’d bought a few months before I got shot. When I was married to Susan, we owned a sailboat she’d named Windbag, but no one ever said she wasn’t clever. I might have named the new boat Windbag II, but Patricia was very touchy about my former wife, and so the boat still wasn’t named some seven months after I’d bought her.

  Patricia, who doesn’t much care for boats, suggested the name Wet Blanket. Which is no worse than two lawyers I know who have boats respectively named Legal Ease and Legal Tender. Another of my friends owns both a discount furniture store and a boat with a big red mainsail. He calls her Fire Sail. A dentist I know has a high-powered speedboat he has named Open Wide. A gynecologist who has since been sent to prison for molesting one of his patients used to have a boat called Wading Room. Another doctor who is still around should have been sent to prison for naming his boat simply Dock.

  In Calusa, Florida, there are as many cute names for boats as there are boats on the water. In the entire United States of America, in fact, there are almost as many cute names for boats as there are cute names for beauty salons. The naming of beauty salons and boats seems to bring out the worst instincts in everyone on the planet. Show me a city that does not have a beauty salon called Shear Elegance and I will show you a city that does not have a boat named Sir N. Dippity.

  My partner Frank says I should name my new boat Wet Dream.