Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

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...

“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, you 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.

——And out the window goes your teddy bear.

——No. Out the window goes my life.

...which was good enough reason to commit murder.

“By the way...”

Shoveling pepper steak into his mouth.

“...I didn’t see Brett again after I left his office.”

“What time was that?”

“Three o’clock. And I can tell you exactly where I was that night. In case that’s of interest to you.”

“Just as a matter of curiosity,” I said.

“Just as a matter of curiosity, I was in bed with a woman named Sheila Lockhart in her condo on Whisper Key. She’s free, white, and twenty-one, and she has nothing to hide. We were together all night long, ask her. I left the condo at eight the next morning.”

“What were you wearing?”

“What?”

“What were you wearing, Mr. Diaz.”

“Just what I’m wearing now, with a different shirt.”

“I suppose she’ll confirm that, too.”

“Ask her,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “Waitress,” he said, and signaled to a pretty little Chinese girl in a green silk Suzie Wong dress slit to her thigh. “Could I get some more hot tea, please?”

The waitress scurried off.

We sat silently for a moment.

“What deal did you make, Bobby?”

“Deal? What deal?”

“That’s my question.”

“I didn’t make any deal.”

“You told me yesterday that the bear design was yours...”

“You keep getting that mixed up.”

“Was that the deal? You show Brett how to solve all his problems...”

“Hey, all I did was hand him a tape.”

“...and in return, he gives you credit for the bear’s design? Was that it?”

The waitress was back with his tea.

Bobby poured himself a fresh cup.

Drank.

Peered at me over the cup he was holding in both hands.

“I don’t need credit for anything anybody else designed,” he said. “I have enough credits of my own.”

“Then what were you looking for? Money?”

“I’ve been working for Toyland for almost fifteen years,” he said. “If I could help the Tolands in any way...”

“Including extortion?”

“Come on, what extortion? Besides, I didn’t even know what his reaction was going to be, you want the truth.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I told him Lainie was on that tape. For all I know, he might have been offended.”

“I still don’t know what...”

“I didn’t know how he’d take it. I didn’t know whether something was still going on between them.”

I looked at him.

“Whether they still had a thing going, you know?” he said.

One of the men was talking in English now, just outside the bathroom door. She guessed Warren was sitting on the lounge diagonally across from the bathroom. She knew it was just a matter of time before someone had to pee. She had no idea what they would do when they discovered the bathroom door was locked.

“Where are we headed?”

Warren’s voice.

“Well, señor, you don nee to know that, do you?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do, señor. Because people will be contacting me, and I’ll have to give them my location. This isn’t my boat. The owner will be calling. On the radio.”

“Then we will ha to break the radio.”

“Then the owner will call the Coast Guard. He loves this boat.”

“Then you will juss ha to lie to him.”

They argued back and forth, Warren trying to find out where they were taking the boat, the man stating over and over again that if the owner of the boat happened to radio, Warren would just have to tell him he was sitting in the water, drifting, the way he’d been when they boarded an hour or so ago. She gathered they had tied Warren’s hands and feet — he asked the man once to at least untie his feet, he wasn’t about to go jumping overboard — and then dragged him down below here and tossed him on the lounge. Well, she guessed the lounge. That was where his voice seemed to be coming from. The other man’s voice came and went, back and forth, fading, rising, as if he were alternately pacing and then either leaning against the sink or sitting momentarily on one of the banquettes opposite the lounge, or even leaning against the bathroom door as he had not a moment ago, the door creaking against his weight, she’d backed away startled.

She kept wondering if she should slide open the window above the sink, remove the screen, and climb out onto the narrow deck that ran the full length of the boat, fore and aft. The deck outside the bathroom window was what, a foot wide? Broadening to some three feet or so up front. She could step out the window and move toward the rear of the boat, get to the steering wheel, clobber him with her high-heeled shoe, whatever. But the second man had to be up there, didn’t he? Driving the boat? This wasn’t the fucking Queen Mary, this was a little thirty-foot boat you could see from front to back of it in a single glance. The wheel was immediately aft of the bathroom. He’d hear her sliding open the window. Hear her taking off the screen. Be watching for her the minute she climbed through onto the deck.

But what if someone wanted to use the bathroom first?

Only in books and movies did nobody ever have to pee.

She came walking up North Apple with her head bent, studying the leaf-covered sidewalk ahead of her. She was wearing a short white beach coat over a green tank top swimsuit and white sandals. A white tote was slung over her shoulder. It jostled her right hip as she came steadily toward where I was waiting outside her house. I had not called ahead. I wanted to surprise her.

Still not seeing me, she stopped on the sidewalk and dug into the tote for her keys, and then, raising her head as she started toward the house again, spotted me standing at the curb in my seersucker suit. She hesitated only a moment, and then came toward me.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said.

“Lainie.”

“I was at the beach.”

“Your neighbor told me.”

“Such a lovely day.”

As she unlocked the door, I noticed that she hadn’t worn the Victorian ring to the beach. We went into the house where first she put down the tote and took off the beach coat, and then checked her answering machine for messages.

“Lainie,” I said, “we have to talk.”

“My, so serious,” she said. “I’m all sandy. May I shower first?”

“I’d rather we...”

But she was already sliding open one of the glass doors that led to the back of the house where a small patio gathered dappled sunlight in a clearing under the dense overhead growth. An outdoor shower was set up at one end of the patio. It consisted of a simple wooden stall with a plastic curtain hanging from a rod. The curtain was translucent, patterned with great big white daisies, pulled back now to reveal shower head and knobs on one wall, soap dish below them. A white bath towel rested on a painted blue stool just to the left of the stall. Lainie reached in, turned on the cold water, fiddled with the hot water knob till the mix suited her, and then kicked off her sandals, stepped into the stall, and pulled the plastic curtain closed behind her. I could see her feet below the bottom of the curtain. The green bathing suit dropped to the floor of the stall. Everything behind the daisy-splashed curtain was a blur of flesh-colored movement.

“Lainie,” I said, “were you having an affair with Brett Toland?”

Not a word from behind the curtain. Blurred flesh tones moving among the big daisies. Water splashing. I waited. At last:

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s not the topic under discussion.”

The topic under discussion, or rather the topic under recitation because I merely listened and said nothing, was a two-year-long love affair that had started shortly after Lainie moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Calusa and began working at Toyland. The affair had ended just before Christmas of last year. According to Lainie, both she and Brett had been inordinately circumspect, limiting their torrid romance to after-hours trysts, never publicly revealing by the slightest glance or touch that there was anything untoward happening between employer and employee.

Which made me wonder how Bobby Diaz had known they “had a thing going,” but I said nothing.

“Did you ever notice,” she asked, “that married men tend to end affairs during the holiday season, when the tug of home and family is strongest? On Christmas Eve, right after Brett handed out the Christmas bonuses, he told me he wanted to end it. Merry Christmas, Lainie, it’s over. I gave my two weeks’ notice at the beginning of January.” She turned off the water. A wet arm slithered from behind the curtain. “Could you hand me the towel, please?” I picked it up from the stool, put it in her hand. Behind the curtain, she began drying herself.

I was silently piecing together a timetable.

Christmas Eve of last year: Brett ends the affair.

Middle of January this year: Lainie leaves the company.

Beginning of April: She comes up with the idea for Gladly.

Twelfth day of September: Brett is mur—

The curtain rattled back on its rod. Lainie was wearing the towel now, wrapped around her, its loose end tucked between her breasts. She stepped out, sat on the stool, began putting on her sandals again. Long wet blond hair cascaded over her face.

“Ever see him again?” I asked.

“Around town now and then. But we didn’t travel in the same social...”

“I meant was it really over?”

“Yes, it was really over.”

“Never called you again...”

“Never.”

“Never asked to see you.”

“Never.”

“Until he phoned on the night of the twelfth.”

“Well, that was strictly business,” she said.

“Was it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said at once, and sat erect, tossing the wet hair in what I took to be a gesture of annoyance. Rising, she reached into the stall for the wet bathing suit, picked it up, and started walking back to the house, the suit swinging in her right hand. I followed her.

The living room was cool and dim.

A clock somewhere chimed three times.

The afternoon was rushing by.

“If you haven’t any other questions,” she said, “I’d like to get dressed.”

“I have other questions,” I said.

“Really, Matthew, can’t they wait?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Exasperated, she let her body go limp, her shoulders slumping on an exhalation of breath, her wandering right eye seemingly more vexatious than usual.

“Okay, what?” she said.

“Did you go to bed with Brett Toland on the night he was killed?”

“Yes, damn it!”