Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

2

I hate the sight of women in jailhouse threads.

Even more so than with men, the clothes seem to rob them of all humanity. Lainie Commins was wearing on this Wednesday morning a shapeless blue smock with the words CALUSA COUNTY JAIL stenciled over the breast pocket. White gym socks. Laceless black shoes. No lipstick, no eye shadow. They had confiscated the heart-shaped Victorian ring for safekeeping. Only the eyeglasses were her own. Everything else she had on, right down to her underwear, belonged to the county. Even her tan seemed to have been confiscated by the authorities; under the harsh, overhead fluorescent lights, she looked pale and somehow faded. She hadn’t sent for me, but I was here, and she seemed glad to see me.

“I thought you might need help in finding a good criminal lawyer,” I said.

“I want you to represent me,” she said.

“I wouldn’t advise that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I lost the only murder case I ever tried.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I would hope not. But...”

“And I’m happy with the way you’ve been handling the copyright case.”

I looked at her.

“Lainie,” I said, “copyright infringement isn’t murder. “You’ve been charged with murder in the first degree, and in Florida...”

“I didn’t murder anyone.”

“...that’s a capital felony.”

“So they told me.”

“Who told you?”

“The detectives who arrested me.”

“When was that?”

“After they took me downtown. Before they started questioning me.”

“Had they informed you of your rights by then?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Had they informed you of your right to a lawyer?”

“Yes. I didn’t think I’d need one. It was all too ridiculous. I thought I’d be out of there in a minute. I don’t even own a gun. That wasn’t my gun. I was on the boat for no more than...”

“You were on the boat?”

“Yes.”

“Last night?”

“Yes. But only for a little while.”

“How short a while?”

“Half an hour? No more than that. I didn’t kill Brett, I didn’t even know he was dead until they came to my house and arrested me. Matthew, I want someone I know and trust to defend me, I want you, Matthew. Please help me. I didn’t murder Brett Toland.”

I looked at her again. Behind the glasses, her right eye had begun wandering yet another time. I wondered how often that wayward eye had served to enlist sympathy and compassion.

“If I represent you...” I said.

“Yes. Please. Help me, Matthew.”

“...I’d want someone else in my office to do the actual trial work.”

“However you want to do it.”

I nodded.

“Tell me again,” I said. “Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

I nodded again.

“Your first appearance hearing is at eleven this morning,” I said, and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour to talk. Tell me what you were doing on that boat.”

I have to tell you that I frankly believed she was making a mistake. I am very good at gathering facts, I will admit that, I am a total bulldog when it comes to sniffing things out and clamping my jaws on them and shaking them till they yelp. But I really don’t think I have the requisite shark mentality to try a murder case. I’m not being modest. I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. Benny Weiss, admittedly the best criminal lawyer in all Calusa — in fact, maybe in all Florida — once told me that he never asks a person charged with murder whether he committed the crime.

“I don’t care if a client did it or not,” he told me. “I’m only interested in combating the charge against him. So I tell him what the other side has, or what they think they have, and then between us we work out a plan of attack. You’ll notice I did not use the word defense, Matthew. As far as I’m concerned, this is an attack, a relentless attack against forces determined to deprive my client of his constitutional right to liberty, whether he committed the crime or not.”

Well, the way I see it, the Canons of Professional Ethics notwithstanding, which canons grant to a lawyer the right — but not the obligation — to undertake a defense regardless of his personal opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, otherwise an innocent person might God forbid be denied a proper defense and our entire judicial system would go down the drain, provided the jury system doesn’t flush it out to sea first...

But the way I see it, if someone has committed murder — or arson, or armed robbery, or rape, or aggravated assault, or any one of the hundreds of crimes we have designated as affronts to civilization — then he should be punished for that crime. It’s a bromide of the criminal justice system that you’ll never find anyone in prison who’s actually committed the crime that put him there. You won’t find any guilty people in a courtroom, either. That’s because a lawyer got there first. The day I stand in a courtroom and hear a judge ask, “How do you plead?” and hear the accused answer, “Guilty, Your Honor” is the day I will fall down dead in another coma.

Meanwhile, I bequeath to every criminal lawyer in the world anyone who has stabbed his wife or shot his mother or set fire to his girlfriend’s house or poisoned his goldfish or peed in his neighbor’s mailbox.

Me, I won’t defend anyone I think is guilty.

Warren’s friend went by the name of Amberjack James.

He had got the name not because the color of his skin sort of matched the fish’s color — what the rednecks down here used to call “high yeller” back when such shit was still tolerated — but because he’d caught the biggest jack ever fished in the waters off Calusa, a hundred-and-ten-pound beauty that now hung mounted on a plaque in the living room of the small house he shared with a girl much darker than he was but only half his age and a lot prettier. Amberjack was thirty-seven. The girl had just turned eighteen. Less than half his age, actually. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch while Warren and Amberjack sat on the back porch of the house, looking out at the river and the boat Warren hoped to borrow.

Amberjack’s real name...

Or rather the name he’d been born with, or rather the name that had been foisted upon him at birth since nobody — the way he looked at it — was ever born with a name tattooed on his forehead or his belly button, he was just born naked and squawking and helpless till some higher authority put a name on him.

In this case the higher authority happened to be his daddy, and the name he’d put on poor powerless little Amberjack was Harry James. This was in honor of a white trumpet player Amberjack’s daddy admired, he playing the cornet himself, which was a fine tribute, to be sure, if it didn’t so happen that James was also the family name, which made the baby come out Harry James James. Never did amount to much of a horn player, Amberjack’s daddy, but he left Amberjack’s mama a goodly sum of money when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-two, and he’d left Amberjack himself — in addition to the stupid fuckin name — the thirty-foot powerboat from which he’d caught his record fish two years later, thereby leaving behind forever the name of the honky bugler he’d never heard of, anyway.

It was the boat Warren was here to borrow.

“What you gonna do with it?” Amberjack asked.

Both men were drinking Coors beer and munching on fried pork rinds they were plucking out of a red and yellow cellophane bag even though Mercedes had yelled twice from the kitchen to stop snackin less they spoil they appetites. The beer was cold and tasty and the rinds were salty and crisp. It was another scorching-hot day here in Calusa. Warren kept thinking it’d be cooler out on the water, on Amberjack’s boat. The boat was tied up at a ramshackle wooden dock that thrust out into a narrow canal. The shallow water here near the shore was choked with green. The air was still.

“I just need to borrow it for a few days,” Warren said.

“For what?”

“Something I have to do.”

“Something legal?”

“Come on, Am, I’m a licensed P.I.”

“Cause, nigger, I got to tell you. You use my boat to run any kind of controlled substance up onto the beach...”

“This is nothing like that, Am.”

“Then answer my question. Is what you plan to do with my boat legal?”

“Yes, it’s legal,” Warren said, lying in that what he had in mind wasn’t strictly legal. Not that anyone would condemn him for doing it. Still, it was Am’s boat, and he had every right to ask Warren what he planned to do with it, just as Warren had every right to lie about his plans.

“You even know how to run a boat?” Amberjack asked.

“Oh, sure,” Warren said.

“Where you gonna take this boat?”

“Out on the Gulf.”

“How far out?”

“Twenty, thirty miles.”

“Better not go any further’n that,” Amberjack said. “She holds a hundred gallons of gas, burns about ten gallons an hour, so plan accordingly. I usually figure I can go a hun’ forty miles on a tank of gas.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“What’s out on the Gulf?”

“Thought I’d do some fishing.”

“Maybe I’ll go with you.”

“I feel the need for solitude, Am.”

“You takin some woman out there with you?”

Warren smiled.

“What I figured all along,” Amberjack said, and returned the smile. “Don’t get too busy you miss any hurricane coming. There’s a good radio on the boat, you keep it tuned to either channel one or channel three. You hear anything sounds like weather, you head right back in, hear?”

“I told you, I’ll be careful.”

“Never mind careful. You turn around and haul ass the minute you hear any kind of Coast Guard warnin.”

“I will.”

“I like that little boat,” Amberjack explained.

In Florida, a so-called first appearance hearing is normally held before a County Court judge on the morning following an arrest. Quite some time ago, the state’s Supreme Court had ruled that even a person accused of a capital crime was entitled to bail. Moreover, the ruling held that unless proof of the crime were “evident” or presumption of the crime “great,” bail could not be denied. It was my job to ask for bail and to argue that it should be granted. It was the state attorney’s job to argue that the evidence he possessed was so legally overwhelming that a verdict of guilty was inevitable and thus bail should be denied. The judge’s job was to decide one way or the other. The decision was exclusively his to make. Or, in this instance, hers.

The presiding judge this morning was a woman named Heather Grant, some forty years old and alarmingly attractive in black, probably because black was a good color for a redhead. Male attorneys tend to prefer homely female judges to pretty ones. I don’t know why that should be; no one in the legal profession debates whether a male judge has good legs or not. Heather had good legs and good breasts and flaming-red hair and beautiful brown eyes and she was a good dancer besides, as I’d discovered at many of Calusa’s charity balls. But she was one of the toughest judges on the County bench, especially where it concerned female defendants, go figure.

Lainie Commins appeared before the Court in her unfashionable jailhouse threads, wearing lipstick, eyeliner, and blush, which her keepers had allowed for this hearing that would merely determine her immediate freedom. Tomorrow morning at nine, a grand jury would decide whether to indict or to dismiss. It was my personal opinion that the state attorney — in this case, an assistant named Peter Folger — would get the indictment he was seeking. But that was no reason to keep Lainie in jail for the next six or seven months or however long it took for her case to come to trial on an exceptionally crowded calendar.

I told Heather that based on my investigation to date — which was bullshit, since all I’d done so far was talk to my client — I did not know of any eyewitnesses to the actual shooting, did not know of any conclusive forensic evidence, and believed that the prosecutions case was wholly circumstantial and that there was no evidence so great or proof so evident as to prevent the automatic granting of bail as provided by the statutes. Moreover, Ms. Commins had no previous record of violence, and no possible motive for the crime — she had, in fact, been seeking to resolve her differences with Mr. Toland in a court of law. In short, Lainie Commins posed no threat to society and was a responsible citizen with roots in the community, who would meet all scheduled court appearances. I then recited the “Let Freedom Ring” speech and asked that she be released on her own recognizance.

I was pretty good, if I say so myself.

Folger went the “Monstrous Beast” route, telling Heather that the victim had been shot twice in the face, that this angelic-looking woman sitting here was in fact a cold-blooded killer nursing a deep-seated anger against the victim, that exposure as an impostor and a thief was sufficient motive for the crime, that the danger of her fleeing the jurisdiction was very real in light of the airtight case the people had, and that releasing her on bail would also pose a danger to the state’s witnesses, whereby he sang the “Particularly Heinous Nature of the Crime” song and respectfully requested that bail be denied.

Heather set bail at half a million dollars, which I promptly assured her could be secured by the defendant’s home, offering to turn over to the Court the deed to her house, her current tax bill and her passport for good measure.

Whatever the grand jury decided tomorrow morning, Lainie was for the time being a free woman.

The first thing I say when I open my eyes is “Where am I?”

Hardly original, it nonetheless startles the ICU nurse into unaccustomed alacrity. Running from the room shouting “Doctor! Doctor!” she provides the first clue that I might be in some sort of medical facility. The second clue comes with the realization that I am lying flat on my back with a great many tubes running into or out of my arm or arms.

Someone leans over the bed.

“Mr. Hope?”

He has a little black mustache and little brown eyes opened wide in expectation and surprise.

“Who are you?” I ask. “Where am I?”

“I’m Dr. Spinaldo. You’re at Good Samaritan Hospital. In Calusa, Florida. Do you know where Calusa, Florida, is?”

“My head hurts,” I say.

“I’m sure it does,” he says. “Do you know your name?”

“What is this?” I ask.

“This is Good Samaritan Hospital in...”

“Yes, Calusa, Florida. What is this?” I ask, more forcefully this time. “Why are you asking me if I know my own name?”

“You’ve been very sick,” Spinaldo says.

There is now something close to unbridled joy on his face. I expect him to begin crying in ecstasy at any moment. I suddenly like him. And just as suddenly I remember. But not everything.

“Did I get shot?”

“Yes,” he says.

“My chest hurts.”

“Good.”

“My shoulder, too.”

“Very good.”

I cannot imagine why he thinks hurting so much is good and very good. I do not realize that he’s telling me I’m feeling things again. He’s telling me I’m awake again. The problem is I don’t remember having been asleep. Euphemism of the week. Asleep. It will later be explained to me that sometime while I was in surgery and they were frantically trying to repair the ruptured blood vessels in my chest, I suffered cardiac arrest and...

Well, what happened was my heart stopped for five minutes and forty seconds, and there was subsequent loss of blood to the brain...

No blood was being pumped to the brain, you see.

No blood was being circulated anywhere in my body.

In short, I was in a coma for seven days, eleven hours, and fifteen minutes, after which time — and with a mighty leap, don’t forget — I sprang out of the pit.

A different face suddenly appears above me.

This one I know.

This one I love.

“Daddy,” she whispers.

Joanna.

My daughter. Blue eyes brimming with tears. Blond hair falling loose as she leans over the bed.

“Oh Daddy”

Nothing more. And hugs me close.

And the nurse who’d earlier run to fetch the doctor cautions her not to knock over the stand holding the plastic bag of whatever the hell is dripping into my arm, I am beginning to feel crotchety already, you see, I want to put on my pants and get the hell out of here.

But now there is yet another face, and I love this one, too, and Patricia leans over the bed, and kisses my cheek, eyes as blue as my daughter’s, shining and wet, hair as blond as my daughter’s, it occurs to me that I may have a thing for blue-eyed blondes.

But, no, my former wife was a brunette, isn’t that so? And lo and behold, here she is now, right on cue, the once and future Susan Hope, leaning over me with a smile on her face and a whispered “Welcome back, Matthew,” which causes me to wonder where I’ve been because no one has yet explained to me that I’ve been in a coma, you see, although I am beginning to recall, vaguely, a bar someplace, I am waiting for someone in a bar, I leave the bar — and can remember nothing further.

I feel suddenly exhausted.

All at once, the room seems too noisy and too crowded and too active.

I want everyone to go away.

I want my pants back.

I want to go home.

I feel like crying.

I want to go to sleep again.

I have to pee.

Something is starting in this room on this bright day in April.

It is called recovery.

It is called recuperation.

Section 905.17 of the statutes plainly states that “no person shall be present at the sessions of the grand jury except the witness under examination, the state attorney, designated assistants as provided for in Section 27.18, the court reporter or stenographer, and the interpreter.”

This means that a grand jury hearing is a nonconfrontational thing. No defense lawyers there. No cross-examination of the various witnesses. Just the state attorney munching on his own sweet ham sandwich. This further means that should an accused elect to testify, his or her lawyer cannot be present in the room. Which may explain why, in most cases, any good attorney will advise his client not to accept an invitation to go in there and face the music. I explained this to Lainie now, and she nodded gravely and said it seemed unfair. I told her that perhaps the word she was seeking was “Draconian.”

I had picked her up at the County Jail after she’d changed back into civilian clothing, the jeans, T-shirt and sandals she’d thrown on last night when the police came to arrest her. I was driving her home to North Apple because we needed to talk further and also because she’d promised to show me the new stuffed animal she’d been sketching when the call from Brett Toland came last night. I was eager to see her drawings because her frame of mind was important to the events that had subsequently transpired. The important thing was that she’d been working on something new, you see. She was planning to move on, planning for the future. Contrary to her gloomy outlook at lunch, by the time she’d got back to her house, she’d come around to believing that Judge Santos would find in our favor and order the preliminary injunction we were seeking. There was no reason for her to have wanted Brett Toland dead. She hadn’t even been thinking of Brett when his call came later that night.

Her house on North Apple looked exactly as she’d described it to the Court yesterday morning. I parked my car under a huge shade tree which I could not identify, and looked up to make sure there weren’t any birds in it. The car I drive is a slate-blue Acura Legend which Patricia ran into just before our first meeting. She claims I will never forgive her for that. Maybe I won’t. Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” I don’t smoke, but I love that car. Not as much as I love Patricia, he was quick to amend. But I still didn’t want birds shitting all over its hood and its roof.

I followed Lainie up the path to the low cinder-block structure, and then into the house itself. She showed me around briefly, asked if I wanted a cold drink — it was only three-thirty, so I guessed she meant a soft drink — and we each went into the studio carrying a beaded glass of lemonade afloat with ice cubes. I felt as if I’d been in this house before, this work space before. She threw a light switch. The fluorescents came on over the long drawing table she’d described at the hearing, illuminating her sketches for Kinky Turtle. She pointed out the date she’d penciled into the lower right-hand corner of each drawing, just below her signature. Unless she’d altered the notations, the drawings had, in fact, been made yesterday.

“Tell me everything that happened last night,” I said.

“From when to when?”

“From when Brett called to the last time you saw him alive.”

It occurs to me as she speaks that she would make a compelling witness if ever we decide to put her on the stand. Her eyeglasses do nothing to correct that wandering right eye. But the visual defect gives her a somewhat startled look that attracts unwavering attention. As beautiful as she is, it is the imperfect eye that lends to her otherwise flawless features a skewed look that is totally compelling.

Sitting on a stool in jeans, T-shirt and sandals, hands in her lap, she tells me she was in the studio working on the sketches when the telephone rang...

“What time was this?”

“Around nine o’clock.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when we were later talking about my going over there...”

Brett is calling to invite her to his boat.

“What for?” she asks him.

“I want to discuss a settlement,” he says.

“Then call my lawyer,” she says.

“I don’t want to drag the lawyers in just yet, Lainie.”

“Brett,” she says, “the lawyers are already in.”

“The lawyers are why we have this problem, Lainie. All lawyers should be shot, Lainie. I want to discuss this face-to-face, just you and me. “You’re familiar with the toy business, you’ll understand the significance of what I want to suggest.”

“Okay, try me,” she says.

“Not on the phone.”

“Why not?”

“Lainie, trust me, my proposal...”

“Trust you, Brett?”

“I know we’ve had our differences...”

“Differences? You stole my fucking bear!”

“I’m willing to grant there are similarities between your design and ours. But what I’m about to propose...”

“Propose it to Matthew Hope.”

“Lainie, I promise you this won’t compromise your case at all. This isn’t a trick. I know you’ve been made aware of the fact that if money alone could repair your injuries...”

“Forget money, Brett. If you’re about to...”

“No, I’m not offering a cash settlement.”

“What are you offering?”

“Come to the boat.”

“No. Call Hope. Make your offer to him.”

“Lainie, please. For old times’ sake. Please. I promise you this is a solution. You won’t be disappointed. Come here and let me talk to you.”

She hesitates.

“Where’s here?” she asks.

“The yacht club.”

“Which one?”

“Silver Creek. You’ve been here.”

“You’re there now?”

“On the boat.”

“Is Etta with you?”

“No, but she’s aware of what I’m about to propose. We’re absolutely in agreement on it. How long will it take you to get here?”

She looks at her watch.

“An hour? Depending on traffic?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Brett...?”

“Yes, Lainie?”

“This better be good.”

She looks at me over her lemonade glass. I think she can sense my disapproval because she says nothing for a moment, and when she does speak it is only to explain what she’d started to tell me earlier, about knowing the time of Brett’s call because she’d looked at her watch in order to estimate how long it would take for her to dress and...

“Yes, I realize. How long did it take you to get there?”

“You’re thinking I shouldn’t have gone, right?”

“Why did you go?”

“Old times’ sake,” she says, and shrugs. Brett’s exact words on the phone. “We did work together for a long time, there was a history there. And I thought he might actually be ready to offer something that would simplify matters. No one likes lawsuits, Matthew.”

Graciously, she did not add “No one likes lawyers, either.”

“What time did you get to the club?”

“Around ten o’clock.”

“Silver Creek? On the river and Polk?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you get there?”

“I drove.”

“What kind of car?”

“A white Geo.”

“Anyone know the exact time you arrived?”

“Well, Brett.”

“Unreliable witness. Dead, you know.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Dead nonetheless.”

“Stop acting so pissed off.”

“You should have stuck to your guns, Lainie. You were right telling him to come to me with his offer. Why’d you change your mind?”

“I told you.”

“You weren’t so concerned about ‘old times’ when you brought the copyright suit.”

“All right, damn it, I was afraid we’d lose it, all right?”

“That’s not what you told me ten minutes ago. You told me you were feeling confident...”

“I was lying. I was scared shitless. I was sure Santos would eventually tell the Tolands to go right ahead with their bear.”

“Then what was all that business about Kinky?”

“I was working on Kinky when the phone rang. As insurance. For when Santos decided against me.”

“In other words, your frame of mind was anything but confident, isn’t that right?”

“Whose side are you on, Matthew?”

“I can’t help you if you lie to me, Lainie.”

I’m sorry.

Head bent. Little cockeyed girl in tight jeans and braless T-shirt, staring down at the hands in her lap now. Lemonade on the drawing table, alongside her “insurance” sketches for a new stuffed animal.

“All right, what happened next?”

She does not answer for a moment. She keeps staring at her hands. Then she sighs heavily, and looks up at me. Bee-stung lips slightly parted. I suddenly think it’s a long time since Patricia and I made love. I put the thought out of my mind. It occurs to me that Lainie fully understands her cockeyed appeal to men. It further occurs to me that I had better be careful here.

“Have you ever been aboard Toy Boat?” she asks.

“No.”

“Well, she’s a marvelous rig, as Brett calls her, making her sound like a little runabout, when she’s actually a ninety-four-foot gaff-rigged yawl with three beautifully outfitted double staterooms and a crew cabin forward...”

Walkway lights illuminate the dockside area, and there is a single lamppost at the far end of the parking lot, where Lainie parks the Geo. She has dressed casually but elegantly for this meeting, perhaps because she knows the boat, and doesn’t want to be intimidated by its teaked and varnished grandeur, or possibly because she truly believes Brett may be about to offer a real solution to their problem, in which case she wants to look and feel festive when they break out the celebratory champagne. So she’s wearing white-laced, blue Top-Siders — she knows the rules of boating — with flaring, bell-bottomed, blue silk slacks and a white silk boat-necked shirt over which she’s thrown a blue scarf in a tiny red-anchor print. The red frames of her eyeglasses are the color of her lipstick. The gold of the heart-shaped pinky ring echoes her blond hair, worn loose tonight. The hair catches glints of light from the lamppost as she steps out of the car and strides toward the Toland boat. She feels hopeful. She sometimes thinks her entire life, from the moment she learned her eyes weren’t like those of other little girls, has been one long battle — but now there may be a happy ending in sight.

There are lights burning in the saloon.

From the bottom of the gangway, she calls, “Hello?” Silence.

“Brett?” she calls.

“Lainie?” a voice says, and she sees Brett coming topside from the short ladder leading below. He is wearing white cotton slacks and a loose-fitting white buttonless cotton top slashed in a V over his chest. He hits a switch someplace on his right and light spills onto the cushioned cockpit area where she now sees that a bucket of ice, a pair of tumblers, and several bottles of liquor — she cannot read the labels yet — have been set out on the teak table. “Come aboard,” he calls. “I’m so glad you decided to come.”

She has been aboard this boat many times before, for cocktail parties, small dinner parties, casual lunches, an occasional sail out on the Gulf. The saloon below is furnished with comfortable couches, and glass-fronted lockers that enclose a television set, a VCR, and a CD player. The dining table seats ten comfortably, and whenever she’s been here for dinner or lunch, it has been set with Wedgwood china, Waterford crystal, and damask napkins. The boat is truly luxurious, with Oriental rugs covering the teak decks, and framed Currier & Ives sailing prints hanging on the paneled bulkheads.

In the past, she has felt more comfortable in the informal cockpit area, and she’s happy he has chosen this space for their meeting now. Brett is barefoot. She remembers that he once asked a state senator’s wife to take off her smart linen pumps for fear she might damage his precious teak decks. “Sit,” he says, “please,” and indicates with an open-hand gesture one of the cushioned banquettes. She eases in behind the teak table, seeing now that the bottles on it are Johnnie Walker Black, Canadian Club, and Stolichnaya. She also notices a small white porcelain bowl with wedges of lime in it. Brett sits on the cushioned banquette on the other side of the table.

“So,” he asks, “what to drink?”

“Do you have any Perrier?”

“Oh, come on, Lainie,” he says, smiling. “I promise you’ll want to celebrate.”

“We’ll see,” she says, and returns the smile.

He is being his most charming self, which can be charming indeed. Again, she finds herself wishing this will truly be the end of all the turmoil and strife.

“Perrier? Really?” he says.

“Really,” she says. “Perrier.”

One more time, she thinks, and they’ll send me a case every week for the rest of my life.

“Perrier it is,” he says, and slides out from behind the table, and surefootedly slips down the ladder. She hears him rummaging below — the galley is modern and spacious, with Corian work surfaces and a four-burner stove, an oven, a microwave, a trash compactor, a freezer and she forgets how many cubic feet of refrigeration, had he once said sixty? Eighty? A lot, that was for sure. He was searching now in one of the fridges for the Perrier she’d requested, and she hears him cursing when something clatters to the deck, and then there’s some muttering below, and finally he comes up the ladder again with a green bottle clutched in one hand and a blue-black automatic pistol in the other.

She looks at the gun.

“Some people tried to come aboard last week,” he says in explanation, and places the gun on the table alongside the bowl of sliced limes.

“What people?” she asks.

“Two wetbacks,” he says.

Meaning Cubans, she surmises.

“What’d they want?”

“They said they were looking for work. Wanted to know if I was taking on hands. Por favor, are you takin on some hanns, señor,” he says in bad imitation. “Have to be careful these days. Too many boats are being hijacked.”

“From a marina dock?”

“Why not?”

“Is that thing loaded?”

“Oh yes,” he says. “Sure you don’t want a little vodka in this?” he asks, pouring into one of the tumblers.

“Just ice and a lime,” she says.

Her artist’s eyes are studying the color scheme on the table. The green of the Perrier bottle and the limes, the bone white of the bowl, the amber whiskey in two of the bottles, the black label on the Scotch echoing the black cap on the other bottle, the red and black label on the Stoli, the blue-black dullness of the Colt automatic.

Brett pours himself a hefty blast of Johnnie on the rocks.

“To our future,” he says, and clinks his glass against hers. She remembers that it’s bad luck to toast with a nonalcoholic beverage. But the moment has passed, the glasses have been touched, the toast has been uttered. Still, she does not drink just yet, hoping to put some distance between the bad-luck toast and the act itself, waiting first for him to take a long swallow of Scotch, and then waiting another decent interval to take the curse off before she herself sips some of the sparkling water.

“So what’s the offer?” she asks.

“To the point,” he says.

“Directly to the point,” she says.

“Good old Lainie.”

“Let me hear it.”

At first, the offer sounds terrific.

What he’s proposing is that instead of Toyland coming out in competition with whoever decides to manufacture her bear — Ideal or Mattel, either one, he has ears all over the trade, and he knows there’s keen interest at each company...

“Which I think is wonderful for you, Lainie, you’re so talented, and it’s time you were rewarded for the hard years of apprenticeship you’ve put in...”

Which appraisal she doesn’t quite accept since she’s had half a dozen toys already produced and marketed, for Christ’s sake, and that ain’t no apprenticeship, thank you. But she says nothing, just listens for now, sipping at her Perrier, watching him across the table as he pours more Scotch over the ice in his glass.

He tells her that he recognizes a bidding situation might very well develop between Ideal and Mattel, which is why he’s willing now to make a preemptive offer that he hopes she’ll consider satisfactory. What he’s suggesting...

She leans forward expectantly. In periods of stress, the eye seems to wander mercilessly. She can feel the tug of the muscle shortened twice by surgery. The eye is losing the battle yet another time.

“Here’s what we want to do, Lainie. Toyland is willing to manufacture your bear, using your copyrighted design and your trademarked name...”

She recognizes this as a victory.

“...and compensating you by way of a substantial advance against generous royalties...”

“How substantial? How generous?”

“To be mutually agreed upon, Lainie. I promise you, no one’s trying to take advantage of you here.”

“You’ll call the bear Gladly?”

“Just as you have it.”

“My design? For the bear and the eyeglasses?”

“Exactly to your specifications.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I just don’t want to have to go through this whole damn mess, Lainie.”

Which means he believes Santos will decide against him.

“So if you think what I’m suggesting is something doable,” he says, “maybe you can have Matthew call my attorney...”

She notices that he does not refer to him familiarly as “Sidney,” he is now merely “my attorney,” perhaps because he’s concluded the infringement case is already lost...

“...so they can work out the advance and the royalties, and prepare transfers of copyright and trademark. How does that sound?”

“Transfers?”

“Yes. Toyland would want an outright assignment of all rights to the bear and its name.”

“Outright?”

“Which, I’m sure, any other company would insist on.”

“An outright assignment of all rights?”

“Forever,” Brett says.

“Forever,” she repeats.

“Yes. Well, Lainie, I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise to you. If we’re to try making a success of the bear, we’d have to be certain beforehand that we have the irrevocable right to manufacture it for the life of the copyright.”

“I was thinking more in terms of a licensing agreement.”

“A transfer, an assignment, a license, all the same thing.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m sure neither Ideal nor Mattel would sign a limited licensing agreement.”

“It sounds to me as if they might.”

She is lying. The feelers from both companies have been tentative pending resolution of the copyright problem.

“Well, perhaps so, who knows, stranger things have happened. But we’re willing to go a long way on royalties, Lainie, and on subsidiary rights to...”

“What do you mean, a long way?”

“Escalation clauses should the bear really take off. Bonuses premised on performance. A huge share of subsidiary rights...”

“Like what?”

“Who knows? A television show? A movie? Whatever. The percentages would be heavily loaded in your favor.”

“What sort of control would I have, Brett?”

“We would guarantee the quality of the product.”

“But what control would I have?”

“I think you know what the Toyland logo stands for. Besides, your compensation would ensure optimum performance on our part.”

Which sounds like double-talk to her.

“How does it sound to you in general outline?” Brett asks.

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to discuss it with Matthew,” she says, and puts down her glass, and is sliding her way out of the banquette when Brett puts his hand on her arm.

“Lainie,” he says, “I wish we could shake hands on this tonight.”

“No, I can’t. Not until I talk to him.”

“Santos has promised a decision by the twenty-second.”

“Well, he’s shooting for that.”

“End of the month, for sure. “You can lose, you know.”

“Then why are you offering a deal?”

“I want things to be the way they were between you and the company.”

“Maybe they will. Let me talk to Matthew.”

“When will you do that?”

“I’ll try him when I get home.”

“Will you let me know?”

“As soon as we’ve discussed it.”

He extends his hand. She takes it. They shake hands. The forty-five is lying on the table, alongside the bowl of limes.

“That’s the last time I saw him alive,” she tells me.

Warren sat in the dark, waiting for her to get home. This was not going to be a kidnapping, per se. In Florida law, the term “kidnapping” was defined as “forcibly, secretly, or by threat confining, abducting, or imprisoning another person against his will and without lawful authority...”

All of which Warren planned to do.

“With intent to...”

And these were the key words.

“With intent to hold for ransom or reward or as a shield or hostage, or to commit or facilitate commission of any felony, or to inflict bodily harm or to terrorize the victim or another person, or to interfere with the performance of any government or political function.”

None of which Warren planned to do.

So what this would be was false imprisonment, which was defined in the statutes as “forcibly, by threat, or secretly confining, abducting, imprisoning or restraining another person without lawful authority and against his will...”

And here’s where the difference came in.

“With any purpose other than those referred to in Section 787.01,” which was the kidnapping section of the statutes.

Add to that the B&E, because he had once again unlawfully forced the door to her apartment the moment he saw her driving off in her faded green Chevy at ten o’clock tonight. He sat just inside that door now, where he could hear her key the moment she inserted it in the keyway. He had dragged a chair in from the kitchen and had placed it just to the side of the door, the bottle sitting on the floor beside him, the cap on it.

Somewhere outside, church bells began bonging the hour.

In the stillness of the apartment, he listened.

Eleven P.M.

He checked his watch.

He was two minutes fast.

Or the church was two minutes slow.

Or maybe it took two minutes for the bells to ring eleven times. This made him wonder if any clock in the world was precise. Because in the second it took for the sweep hand to move to the next number, wasn’t the second already gone? Or if a digital watch read 11:02:31, as his watch now read, wasn’t it already past 11:02:31 by the time the... well, there it was already 11:02:32, forget it, 11:02:33, 11:02:34, damn metaphysics could drive a person nuts.

He heard footsteps outside on the covered walkway that led past the apartments. High heels clicking. Lady must’ve got all dolled up to go do her marketing, he wondered where she was shopping these days.

Footfalls stopped just outside the door.

She was home.

He picked up the bottle, gently lifted the chair out of the way.

Set it down well clear of the door.

Key sliding into the keyway now.

Uncapped the bottle.

Reached into his pocket.

Lock turning, tumblers falling.

He backed against the wall to the side of the door.

Braced himself.

The door opened. She closed it behind her. Locked it. Was reaching for the light switch...

“Hello, Toots,” he said.

“Warren?” she said, turning toward him, and he clamped the chloroform-soaked pad over her face.