Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

“Never.”

  “Never told him he now had a bargaining tool…”

  “Never! He didn’t need a bargaining tool. Lainie stole my design for that bear, the bear was ours!”

  “What?”

  “I said…”

  “No, no, just a minute, Mr. Diaz. The last time we…”

  “Look, this is ridiculous, Mr. Hope. Truly. I never gave that tape to Brett, I never discussed…”

  “Forget the tape! The last time we spoke, you told me Lainie delivered working drawings of the bear…”

  “No, you must have misunder—”

  “I didn’t misunderstand you, and I didn’t misunderstand Brett, and I didn’t misunderstand Etta, either. All of you said the idea for the bear was Brett’s and that he’d assigned its design to Lainie while she was still working for Toyland. Isn’t that what all of you said? You were there at the meeting, Mr. Diaz, isn’t that what you told me? You were there when Brett gave Lainie his brilliant idea and asked her to design the cross-eyed bear and its corrective eyeglasses. You were there, Mr. Diaz. You told me you were there!”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Okay. And you also told me she delivered working drawings of the bear by the end of last September…”

  “That’s where you’ve got it wrong.”

  “Oh? What have I got wrong?”

  “I told you I saw some drawings…”

  “Yes?”

  “…but I didn’t know if they were Lainie’s.”

  “Then whose drawings…?”

  “Sketches, actually.”

  “Sketches?”

  “Yes. Of a bear with glasses.”

  “Well, who did you think made these drawings, these sketches, whatever the hell they were?”

  “I thought maybe Brett did.”

  “I see, you thought maybe Brett did. So the bear was Brett’s idea, and these sketches you saw were maybe Brett’s, so Lainie’s out of the picture altogether, right? She never did design the bear while she was working for Toyland, is that what you’re saying now?”

  “I’m saying…”

  “No, no, Mr. Diaz, you’re saying now what you didn’t say earlier. You told me you saw working drawings before you…”

  “I told you I didn’t know if they were working drawings.”

  “Then what the hell were they?”

  “Sketches.”

  “When did you see working drawings?”

  “I told you I didn’t remember when I saw working drawings.”

  “Okay, Mr. Diaz, flat out. A few minutes ago you said Lainie stole your design for that bear.” I looked him dead in the eye.”What design?”

  “I said she stole our bear. The bear she designed for Toyland.”

  “No, that’s not what you said.”

  “Are you telling me what I said?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re wrong. Mr. Hope, I have a date at the Plum Garden at six-thirty. It will take me half an hour to get there, and it’s now five to six. If you’ll excuse me…”

  “Sure,” I said, and gingerly picked up the photograph and dropped it into my briefcase.

  Dr. Abner Gaines was sitting on a high stool drawn up to a counter upon which were microscopes, test tubes, pipettes, Bunsen burners and a dozen other scientific measuring tools and instruments I could not have named if you pulled me apart on a rack or burned me at the stake. As sole proprietor and principal analyst at Forensics Plus, the private lab with which I had worked on several other cases, Ab was a scientist with exacting standards and meticulous work habits, a faultless professionalism belied by his uncombed hair, his nicotine-stained fingers, his rumpled trousers and unshined shoes, and an allegedly white lab smock stained with the residue of God knew how many previous tests here at this very same counter.

  He was expecting me, and so he greeted me with his customary gruffness and the impatient air of a very busy professor who had very little time to spend with inquisitive students. Actually, he was a very busy professor at the University of South Florida.

  I tented a handkerchief over my hand, and showed him the black-and-white glossy of the dancing fingers on the white silken crotch of the Victorian-ringed lady on the Idle Hands cassette box. I showed him the actual black vinyl cassette box, with the original color photograph on its front cover, and then I opened the case to reveal the cassette within.

  “There should be one set of fingerprints on the photograph,” I told him. “I’m looking for a match with anything on the cassette or its case.”

  “When?” Ab asked me.

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  I went back to the boat again that night.

  The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were down, there was nothing to prevent me from going up the gangway and onto the boat itself, but I simply stood there on the dock, looking at her. If I’d ever known the lines that follow “I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,” I’ve forgotten them since the coma. I’ve forgotten a lot of things since the coma. I was dressed in the colors of the night. Black denims and black loafers and a black T-shirt and a black windbreaker. A mild breeze blew in off the water, riffling my hair. Sniffing the salt air that spanked in off the Gulf, I think I realized something of what John Masefield must have felt when he wrote his poem. Toy Boat’s outline was sharp against a moonlit, midnight sky. A man had been killed aboard this boat. And my client had been with him on the night he’d died.

  I wished she hadn’t posed for a pornographic tape.

  But she had.

  I wished Brett Toland hadn’t tried to use that tape in a blatant blackmail attempt.

  But according to my client, he had.

  Two bullets in the head.

  But she kept insisting she wasn’t the one who’d killed him.

  I kept staring at the boat, perhaps willing it to yield its secrets. As I listened to the high clinking sound of halyards striking metal masts, the lines came to me. “And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.” Progress.

  “Help you, sir?”

  The voice startled me. I wheeled away from the dock, my fists clenched, the hair at the back of my neck bristling. I was expecting my cowboys, the twin horrors that come in the dead of night and strike terror to the heart, my nightmare apparitions. But I was looking instead at a rotund little man wearing gray polyester slacks and a blue T-shirt bearing a logo, in white, that read SILVER CREEK YACHT CLUB. He was carrying a flashlight in his left hand, its beam casting a small circle at his feet. In the moonlight, I could make out a round face and a white mustache. Blue cap with a long bill. Nothing menacing about the face. Nothing even mildly challenging.

  “I’m the defense attorney on the Toland murder case,” I said. “I just wanted to see the boat again.”

  “We get lots of sightseers,” he said.

  “Matthew Hope,” I said, and extended my hand.

  “Henry Karp,” he said.

  We shook hands.

  A cloud scudded past the moon, darkening the dockside area. It passed in an instant. We stood looking out over the water. A Florida night. Silver wavelets dancing in the moonlight. Boat sounds all around us. Insects in the tall grass. September sounds.

  “Almost didn’t see you,” Karp said. “The black.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Quiet night, ain’t it?”

  “Very.”

  “Almost always like this. I don’t mind it. Quiet like now, you can hear the sounds. I like nighttime sounds.”

  “So do I.”

  “You think she done it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me, neither,” he said. “Did they ever find The Shadow?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The man I told them about.”

  “What man?”

  “The one I saw going aboard the boat here. I told them all about it.”

  “Told who?”

  “The detectives from the State Attorney’s Office.”
r />   There is nothing that compels a state attorney to follow a lead that will not support his version of events and take his case where he does not wish it to go. On the other hand, it is his constitutional obligation to disclose any evidence that might support the innocence of the accused. If what Henry Karp was telling me was true, I could very well argue during trial that the police had been sitting on exculpatory evidence that was not turned over to me during disclosure and that this, Your Honor, warranted immediate dismissal of the case. The judge would undoubtedly give a variation of the “Now, now, counselor” speech, advising me that he would admonish the prosecutor for his oversight, and if I needed further time to find a witness, he would give me, oh, “What would you say is fair, Mr. Hope? Two weeks? Three weeks? Would that be a sufficient amount of time?”

  I would not, of course, argue for dismissal unless I had already attempted, and failed, to find the man Henry Karp was now describing to me, in which case an additional two or three weeks would be redundant. I intended to put Guthrie Lamb on this immediately, or at least as soon as Karp finished his description, which was turning out to be sketchy at best.

  What he saw was a man who looked like the pulp magazine hero called The Shadow, wearing black trousers and a black cape and a black slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, moving out of the shadows and onto the Toland boat.

  “That’s why I call him The Shadow,” Karp said. “Cause he looked like The Shadow and he came out of the shadows.”

  “From where?”

  “The parking lot. Moved across the lot and went straight to the boat. Cape flying behind him. Hat pulled low.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “No, I was down the other end of the lot. He went up the gangway, was out of sight by the time I came abreast of the boat.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Around a quarter past eleven. I’m supposed to relieve at eleven-thirty, but I got there a little early that night.”

  A quarter past eleven. Twenty-five minutes before the Bannermans heard shots coming from the Toland boat.

  “Before you spotted him, did you happen to see a car pulling into the parking lot?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Did you hear a car door opening and closing?”

  “No.”

  “You just saw this man…”

  “The Shadow.”

  “On foot, coming across the parking lot…”

  “And going on the boat, yes.”

  “Did you see him leaving the boat at any time?”

  “No, I didn’t. I move all over the grounds, you see. I don’t cover just the marina. I have regular rounds I make all around the club.”

  “Were you still in the parking lot at eleven-forty?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was back behind the main clubhouse by then.”

  “Did you hear any shots coming from the marina?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And you say you told all this to some detectives from the State Attorney’s Office?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When was this? When they talked to you?”

  “Day after the murder. I figured I was giving them a good lead, you know? Seeing a man go aboard the boat.”

  “Did they think so?”

  “They said they’d look into it.”

  “Ever get back to you?”

  “No.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember their names, would you?”

  “No, I’m sorry. But one of them had a knife scar on his right cheek.”

  The lights were on in Lainie’s studio when I got there at ten minutes to one that morning. I had called ahead from the car phone, and I knew she was expecting me, and so I was surprised to find her in a robe and slippers. She told me she’d been getting ready for bed when I called, and apologized for looking so “casual.” We went into the main section of the house, where she turned on a living room lamp, offered me a drink, which I declined, and then poured herself a glass of white wine. I sat on a sofa upholstered in a nubby white fabric. She sat opposite me in a matching armchair. When she crossed her legs, the lacy hem of a short blue nightgown showed momentarily.

  “Lainie,” I said, “when you left the parking lot at ten-thirty that night…”

  “Or thereabouts,” she said.

  “You saw a car parked just outside the entrance pillars, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t see anyone in the car.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t see anyone walking around in the parking lot?”

  “Positive. Well, just the people coming out of the restaurant.”

  “Yes, but aside from them.”

  “No one.”

  “No one lurking in the shadows? Someone who might have been watching the boat? Waiting for you to leave?”

  “I wish I could tell you I had.”

  “Someone who looked like The Shadow?”

  “Who’s The Shadow?”

  “A magazine character. And radio. And a bad movie.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “A man wearing a black cape. And a black slouch hat.”

  “No. A black cape? No. I didn’t see anyone like that.”

  “Lainie, there’s a gap of about an hour and a half between the time you left the boat and the time Etta Toland found the body. If we can place someone else on that boat after you left…”

  “I understand the importance. But I didn’t see anyone.”

  He had allowed her to use the bathroom again, and now they stood topside, the boat drifting on a mild chop, its running lights showing its position to nothing but a starlit night, not another vessel in sight for as far as the eye could see. They were silent for a very long time.

  At last she said, “I’m sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “I don’t know how it happened, Warr, I really don’t. I hate myself for letting it happen again.”

  He still said nothing, grateful that she was at last admitting she was hooked again, but knowing this was only the beginning, and the hard part lay ahead. Back in St. Louis, Warren had seen too many of them lose the battle, over and over again. Relapse was the technical term for it. Again and again and again. And kicking the habit seemed so very simple at first because what the dealers told you was partially true, cocaine wasn’t addictive. Hey, man, this ain’t heroin, this ain’t morphine, this ain’t no downer like Seconal or Tuinal, this ain’t no tranq like Valium or Xanax, this ain’t even a Miller Lite, man, ain’t no way you gonna get hooked on this shit, man.

  True.

  Cocaine wasn’t physically addicting.

  The lie was in the claim that there was no way this shit could harm you, man, nothing to fear, man, quit anytime you want, man, no pain, no strain. And even this was partially true because when you quit cocaine—when you tried to quit cocaine—you didn’t experience any of the physical symptoms that accompanied withdrawal from the opoids or the tranquilizers or even alcohol. There was no shaking, no sweating, no vomiting, no muscle twitching…

  “Did you know…?” he started, and then shook his head and cut himself off.

  “What?” she asked.

  The night black and silent around them.

  “Never mind.”

  “Say,” she said.

  “Did you know where the expression ‘kicking the habit’ comes from?”

  “No. Where?”

  “When you’re quitting the opoids, you lie there in your own sweat, and your legs start twitching involuntarily, like they’re kicking out. So it became kicking the habit.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and the night enveloped them again.

  No muscle twitching when you quit—tried to quit cocaine—no gooseflesh either, no appearance of a plucked turkey, which is where the expression “cold turkey” came from, such a weird and wonderful vocabulary for the horrors of hell, did she know the origi
n of that one? He didn’t ask.

  Thing the man selling poison in a vial forgot to mention was that cocaine was psychologically and emotionally addicting, concepts too lofty for anyone to comprehend, anyway, when what we are selling here is a substance that will make you feel like God.

  Oh yes.

  So when you quit cocaine—tried to quit cocaine—you were trying to forget that for the last little while, or the last longer while, you were God. No physical symptoms of withdrawal. Just madness.

  He was here to see her through the early madness.

  Keep her here on this fucking boat while her depression was keenest and the desire to kill herself was strongest. Nobody ever kicked cocaine on a boat. Nobody ever kicked it on the street, either. Later there would be choices for her to make. For now…

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  And he believed she was.

  10

  The scar-faced detective to whom Guthrie Lamb spoke early on Thursday morning, the twenty-first of September, was named Benjamin Hagstrom. He told Guthrie at once that the scar was a memento of a little knife duel he’d had with a burglar when he was still a uniformed police officer twelve years ago. The duel had been somewhat one-sided in that the burglar had the knife and Hagstrom had nothing but his underwear. That was because the burglary was taking place in Hagstrom’s own condo unit, which he shared with a then stripper named Sherry Lamonte, later to become his wife, subsequently his ex. All of this in the three minutes after the men had shaken hands and introduced themselves.

  In the next three minutes, Hagstrom explained that on the night of the attempted burglary Sherry was downtown stripping while Hagstrom himself was doing a little stripping of his own. That was because he’d just got home from a four-to-midnight shift on a very hot Calusa summer night, and had begun undressing the minute he stepped into the apartment, peeling off clothes and dropping them on the floor behind him as he made his way toward the bathroom shower. He was down to his underwear shorts when he stepped into the bedroom and found himself face-to-face with a kid of nineteen, twenty—eighteen, as it later turned out—going through his dresser. Hagstrom had left his holstered gun on the seat of an upholstered living room chair alongside which he’d dropped his uniform pants. Now the teenybopper burglar had a surprised look on his face which matched the one on Hagstrom’s. One thing else the burglar had was a knife, which appeared magically in his right hand. Before Hagstrom could say anything like “Stop, police!” or “Put down the knife, son, before you get yourself in trouble,” or any such warning or admonition that might have detained the burglar from slashing out in panic at Hagstrom, the knife came at him. He put up his hands in self-defense and got cut across both palms, and he backed away in terror and got cut again down the right-hand side of his face…