Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12

by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

  “This scar you see here now,” he explained, “a beaut, huh?”

  Backing away from the flailing knife, he banged up against the dresser, glimpsed a heavy glass ashtray on its top…

  “I used to smoke back then…”

  …spread his hand wide over it, picked it up, and hit the kid across the bridge of the nose with it and then again on the cheek and again on the right temple, by which time the kid had dropped the knife and there was blood all over the place, from Hagstrom’s hands and face and also from the kid’s bleeding nose and cheek.

  “He drew twenty years and was out in seven. I drew twelve stitches and a lifetime souvenir. So what can I do for you, Mr. Lamb?”

  “Call me Guthrie.”

  “Fine, call me Benny. What can I do for you?”

  “September thirteenth?” Guthrie said.

  Question mark at the end of it. His little trick. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the prod was all they needed. Not this time.

  “What about it?” Hagstrom asked.

  “Day after the Toland murder?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Down at the Silver Creek Yacht Club?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Understand you talked to a night watchman named Henry Karp, who told you…”

  “I talked to a lot of people the day after the murder.”

  “This one told you he’d seen someone boarding the Toland yacht shortly before the shots were fired.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “What if he did?”

  “Somebody dressed all in black. Like The Shadow.”

  “You’re asking did the S.A.’s Office Squad follow up on it, is that what you’re asking?”

  “That would be a reasonable question,” Guthrie said.

  “The reasonable answer is that we follow all leads in an ongoing murder investigation.”

  “Yes, but did you follow this lead?”

  “I believe I said all leads.”

  “So you tried to locate this person described as ‘The Shadow,’ is that correct?”

  “First, Mr. Lamb…”

  “Call me Guthrie.”

  “First, Mr. Lamb, we tried to determine whether Karp was a man accustomed to seeing comic-book characters materializing out of the night. The Shadow tonight, maybe Batman or The Joker tomorrow night, hmm?”

  “Maybe,” Guthrie agreed.

  “We checked. All the way back to when he was a private in the Vietnam War. Bad war, that one. Left a lot of people still seeing things in the night. But we didn’t find any record of a mental problem,” Hagstrom said, “so maybe Karp really did see The Shadow on the night of the murder. Or someone who looked like The Shadow.”

  “Maybe he did,” Guthrie agreed, and waited.

  “We tried to corroborate the sighting. Questioned anyone who was still around the club at the time Karp says the person went aboard…”

  “Which was around eleven-fifteen.”

  “Give or take. Nobody saw anybody dressed all in black.”

  “How about the Bannermans? Who said they heard shots from the boat twenty-five minutes later.”

  “Went all the way to West Palm to talk to them,” Hagstrom said, and nodded. “Nothing.”

  “So that was the end of it.”

  “That was the end of it.”

  “And if he exists?”

  “You go find him,” Hagstrom said.

  Instead, Guthrie went to find Nick Alston over at the Calusa P.D. facility.

  “How you doing on my tire track?” he asked.

  “I called Gracie last night,” Alston said.

  “Oh, yeah? How’d it work out?”

  “You didn’t tell me she was still hooking,” Alston said.

  “I really didn’t know.”

  “I asked her would she like to go to a movie or something, she laughed in my face.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “I just wanted her to see me sober,” Alston said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  Both men were silent for several moments.

  At last, Guthrie asked, “Does this mean you won’t run down the tire track for me?”

  “I just haven’t got to it yet,” Alston said.

  Warren was standing outside the closed and locked door to the head, listening to Toots taking her morning pee inside there, when he heard the boat approaching. He looked up curiously, and then, as the sound of the motor got closer and closer, he realized the boat was pulling alongside, and he was starting topside when he heard a voice shouting in a Spanish accent, “Allo, anybody aboar?”

  He went up the ladder to the cockpit.

  A bearded man who looked like one of the banditos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre was already aboard. Big toothy smile in his scraggly beard. Wearing chinos, thong sandals, and a loose white fisherman’s shirt bloused over the trousers. Another man was standing at the rail of a shitty little fishing boat bobbing alongside Amberjack’s rig. He, too, was smiling. No beard on this one. Leaner and taller than the squat bearded guy. More muscular. Wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt. Both of them smiling. Which meant trouble. Smiling men meant trouble.

  “What can I do for you?” Warren asked.

  “You alone here?”

  Still smiling. Accent you could slice with a machete.

  Warren debated which way to play this, seemingly pleasant or obviously annoyed? Man came aboard without a by-your-leave, sailor had a right to be pissed, no? Siacute;. On the other hand, there were two of them.

  “Nice bo you have here,” the lean one said, and climbed onto the rail of the fishing boat and leaped down to where the bearded one was standing near the dash. Warren noticed the fishing knife in a sheath at his belt.

  “You alone?” the first one asked again, smiling.

  “Yes,” Warren said, and hoped Toots wouldn’t suddenly come out of the head and wander topside. “What do you want?”

  Sharply this time, bracing himself, letting them know they had boarded his vessel without permission and he wasn’t happy about it.

  “He wanns to know wah we wann, Luis,” the husky one said.

  “So tell him, Juan,” the lean one said.

  “We wann dee bo,” Juan said, still smiling in his beard.

  “Fat Chance Department,” Warren said.

  “Qué dices?” Luis asked.

  “I said I’m a private detective and you’re making a big mis—”

  “So arress us,” Juan said, smiling, and reached under the blousy fisherman’s shirt and yanked what looked like a nine-millimeter Glock from his belt. At the same moment, Luis pulled the fishing knife from its sheath. It was rather large.

  “Fellas…” Warren said.

  Juan hit him with the butt of the gun.

  Toots knew she shouldn’t come out of that bathroom.

  She had heard enough through the door to know that two Spanish-speaking men were aboard and that they had done something to Warren. She’d picked up a lot of Spanish because her previous fandango with cocaine had necessitated buying dope from, and selling herself to, all sorts of people, white, black, Hispanic, you name it, men, women, gays, lesbians, who gave a shit? Knew enough to ask “Cuento el kilo, amigo?” knew enough to explain “Por cinco dólares con mi mano. Con la boca, le cuesta diez. Y mas de veinte por mi concha pristina, señor,” fine little lady Tootsie Cokehead had been back then. Or was now, for that matter, though this time around she hadn’t yet run out of her life savings, hadn’t yet had to degrade herself, not yet, not quite yet.

  The engines had started half an hour ago, and she knew they were now under way, but she couldn’t tell in which direction they were moving. There was a sliding glass window in the bathroom, but all she could see through it was grayish-green water rolling away to an empty, featureless horizon far in the distance.

  She kept wondering when either of the two men would want to use the toilet.

  The door
was locked from the inside.

  She kept listening, waiting.

  And then there was the BAER, which was not a misspelling of BEAR, but was instead an acronym for Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response testing, wherein sound is applied to the ear’s eighth cranial nerve (the CNVIII, as it was known to Spinaldo and others in the trade) in order to assess how long it took for the waveform to travel from the ear stimulus to the brainstem and back again. Spinaldo assured me that my responses were fast enough, which was good.

  Everything looked good, they kept telling me.

  But…

  I still had trouble with short-term memory. I would store something for immediate recall and hours or sometimes minutes later could not remember what it was.

  This will improve, Spinaldo kept telling me.

  But…

  I still had trouble finding words. I would know the word I was searching for, but I simply could not bring it to my tongue. Spinaldo called this aphasia. I called it a pain in the ass. He said it would pass. I tried to tell him I was hopeful it would, but I couldn’t think of the word “hopeful.” He told me not to worry.

  But…

  One day they asked me to draw a clock face, and to set the hands at five o’clock. When I did this task successfully, they asked me what time it was, and I replied “Happy hour.” I was being nasty, yes. But I really didn’t know what time it was. They were targeting motor, sensory, memory and cognitive functions, you see. The goal was to identify any problems I might have with the activities of daily living. (ADLs in the jargon, go ask Spinaldo.) Things like dressing, bathing, shaving, eating, and writing legal briefs, ha! I made hourly calendars reminding me of what I was to do when. But I became easily fatigued, and I found myself distracted and edgy—”You’re like yourself, only more so,” Patricia said—and increasingly more impatient with all the tests and their goddamn initials in caps, the SSEP and the MRI and the SPECT and the VEP and the SHIT!—my chest still hurt!

  I’d been shot, you see. Twice. That was the start of all my troubles. Getting shot. And I was recovering from a pair of serious wounds that had taken me to the very brink of oblivion. While I was on the operating table, the surgeons had performed a thoracotomy, which—translated from Spinaldo’s medicalese—meant they had cracked open my chest, some fun. And whereas I hadn’t felt a thing while they were opening me up, or while they were reaching in there to massage my heart and whatnot, I was now in excruciating pain, which the good staff at Good Sam tried to alleviate by administering epidural morphine and anti-inflammatories and Tegretol. Controlling the pain helped me to cough, which Spinaldo said was one of the body’s most important protective reflexes. Controlling the pain meant increased activity and mobility. Controlling the pain meant I could tie my own shoelaces.

  But I was a lawyer.

  And I wanted to get back to work!

  I caught Bobby Diaz coming out of the Toyland offices at ten past twelve that Thursday afternoon. He told me he was on his way to a luncheon meeting and I told him this wouldn’t take a minute, and he said, “You always keep saying this won’t take a minute, but it always takes half an hour.”

  “Shows how the time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

  “What is it now?” he asked, and looked impatiently at his watch. Behind us was the low yellow-brick building with its boy-girl logo on the roof. Employees were coming out of the building now, heading toward the Cyclone-fenced parking lot. We stood in brilliant sunshine. I was wearing my seersucker suit with a white shirt and a tie the color of sand. I felt I looked like a lawyer. Bobby was wearing gray tropical slacks, a pale blue sports shirt, and a white linen jacket with the sleeves shoved up on his forearms. He looked the way the cops on Miami Vice used to look.

  “Bobby,” I said, “I sent your fingerprints to a forensics lab…”

  “My what?”

  “I’m sorry. That’s why I handed you the photograph.”

  “The what?”

  “The black-and-white glossy. I’m sorry.”

  Diaz shook his head.

  “What a cheap private-eye trick,” he said.

  “I agree. But your prints match prints on both the videocassette and its case. So now there’s a chain of custody from you to Brett Toland.”

  “So what?” he said.

  “So now maybe you’d like to tell me when you gave him that cassette.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’ll be calling you for a deposition, anyway…”

  “You’re going to introduce as evidence a cassette that shows your client…”

  “What I choose to introduce in evidence is my business. Whether the cassette is relevant to the murder of Brett Toland is another matter.”

  “How could it be?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “That’s why I want to talk. What do you say? Now, informally. Or in my office at a later date, with a tape recorder and witnesses.”

  “Let me make a call first,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  The phone was in his car, a metallic-gray BMW, with black leather upholstery. He called a restaurant named Manny’s Manor on Flamingo Key, to leave word that he would not be joining Joan Lensky Robert for lunch, and then he drove us west on Weaver Road and south on the Trail to a Chinese restaurant called Ah Fong, which several Italian-speaking friends of mine have nicknamed Ah Fong Gool. I ordered one of the six-ninety-five luncheon specials, which consisted of the egg roll, the chicken chow mein, the white rice, and a pot of tea. Bobby ordered the wonton soup, the pepper steak, the fried rice, and his own pot of tea for the same six ninety-five. We both asked for chopsticks.

  Clicking and munching away, we began discussing how Bobby’s hot little tape had landed in Brett’s hot little hands. Bobby seemed more interested in his pepper steak than in his recitation. Almost offhandedly, he told me that he had called Brett the moment he recognized Lainie on the tape…

  “This would have been on the night of September eleventh…”

  “Yes, but I didn’t get him.”

  “You called him…”

  “Yes, and kept getting his answering machine.”

  “So when did you reach him?”

  “Not until the next day.”

  The next day would have been the twelfth of September. Brett Toland had appeared in Judge Santos’s courtroom at nine that morning, in the company of his wife and his attorney. I had been there with my client and my sole witness. We had all left the courtroom at about one o’clock, when Santos adjourned.

  “What time did you finally reach him?” I asked.

  “Not until later in the afternoon.”

  “You phoned him again?”

  “No, I saw him in person. At the office.”

  “What time was that?”

  “After lunch sometime. Two, two-thirty?”

  “Did you give him the cassette at that time?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you present it to him?”

  “I said I thought it might be of interest to him.”

  “In what way?”

  “I said I knew he was involved in this lawsuit with Lainie, and I thought the tape might be of importance to him.”

  “Did you suggest how it might be of importance?”

  “Well, I told him it might be useful to him.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, as leverage. I told him to take a look at it, he’d see what I meant.”

  “Did you describe the contents of the tape?”

  “More or less.”

  “How did you describe it?”

  “I said the graphic on the cover pretty much said what the tape was about. And the title.”

  “Did you mention that Lainie was on the tape?”

  “No, I wanted him to discover that for himself. I did say the ring looked like the one Lainie wore all the time.”

  “The ring in the cover photo?”

  “Yeah. On the case.”

  “So in other words, y
ou suggested that the tape was about a woman masturbating, and that Lainie Commins was the woman depicted on the…”

  “Well, her ring, anyway.”

  “The ring was Lainie’s.”

  “I said the ring looked familiar.”

  “So Brett pretty much knew what you were talking about.”

  I guess so.

  “He pretty much knew what to expect when he looked at that tape.”

  “Well, I think he knew what I was getting at.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He seemed pleased.”

  “Did you suggest he might be able to use the tape as a means of settling the lawsuit?”

  “Well, I told him a designer of children’s toys might not want to have such a tape gain circulation in the trade.”

  “You said this to him.”

  “Yes, I said it to him.”

  “And you also said he’d know what you meant after he looked at the tape.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Chopsticks moving in a rhythmic flow from platter to mouth, grains of fried rice falling back onto the pepper steak. A gulp of tea. Food was of prime importance here, never mind the incriminating tape he had turned over to his boss. Never mind that, technically, he was an accomplice in the crime of extortion in that he had suggested how the tape might be used.

  “Did Brett look at the tape then and there?”

  “No”

  “When did he look at it, would you know?”

  “I have no idea.”

  According to Lainie, Brett had called her at nine that night, to invite her to the boat to discuss a settlement. The so-called settlement had later turned into a blackmail attempt…

  ———And warned me that unless I dropped the infringement suit, all of kiddieland would learn about that tape.