Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

5

Charles Nicholas Werner lived in a Spanish-style house that had been built in Calusa during the early thirties, shortly after the area was rediscovered, in effect, by a railroad man named Abner Worthington Hopper. Before then, the city’s growth was lethargic at best, the 1910 population of 840 people growing to but a mere 2,149 a full decade later. But then came Hopper, and suddenly the town became a proper city of more than 8,000 people, and all at once Calusa was on the map as a resort destination. Building his own Spanish-style mansion on choice Gulf-front property, Hopper then built a hotel to accommodate the multitude of guests he and his wife Sarah invited down each winter. The mansion was now the Ca D’Oro Museum and the hotel was a fenced derelict perilously close to U.S. 41.

The museum housed an only fair collection of Baroque art, of which Calusa was inordinately proud; when you were the self-proclaimed Athens of Southwest Florida, you had to boast about your cultural treasures, however second-rate they might be. Restoration groups were constantly promising to remodel and refurbish the hotel, which had deteriorated over the past six decades from lavish and lush to comfortable and cozy to faded and worn to shabby and decrepit. Recent talk was of tearing it down and replacing it with a shopping mall. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The Werner house was the only hacienda-type structure on either side of the narrow canal running behind it. Pink stucco walls and a roof of glazed orange tiles, arched windows that smacked of Saracen influence, exotic-looking peaks and minarets greeted Andrew and me as we walked from where I’d parked my Acura to the arched mahogany front door. There was a fair amount of boat traffic on the canal. This was the beginning of the weekend — well, four o’clock on what remained of Saturday afternoon — and a popular boaters’ activity was cruising the backwaters of the city’s myriad canals, ogling the sometimes lavish homes on their banks. A wrought-iron doorbell fashioned to look like an opening black rose was situated on the jamb to the right of the door. Andrew pressed the push button positioned like a single white eye at the center of it. We heard footsteps approaching the door.

Despite the wealth down here in sunny Calusa, there are very few live-in housekeepers anymore, and seeing one of them in a proper maid’s uniform is as rare as spotting a wild panther. The maid who answered Andrew’s ring was in her early twenties, I supposed, a beautiful black woman wearing a black uniform with a little white cap and apron and collar. We told her who we were and whom we were here to see, and she said, “Pase, por favor. Le diré que está aquí.” I wondered if she had a green card.

We were standing in a hallway floored with blue tile and lined with Moorish columns. Beyond, at the center of the house, was a secluded cloister riotously blooming with flowers. Late afternoon sunlight pierced the colonnaded stillness. We could hear the maid’s footfalls padding through the house. Out on the canal, the sound of a boat’s engine spoiled the sullen stillness.

Werner, wearing shorts and sandals and nothing else, came from somewhere at the back of the house, walking briskly toward where Andrew and I were waiting. He was a short, gnomic man who looked a lot like Yoda, somewhat bandy-legged, very brown from the sun, with twinkling blue eyes and a fringe of white hair circling his head. His handshake was firm. He told us he was happy to be of assistance and then led us to the back of the house where a pool sparkled and shimmered under the sun.

I detected for the first time a faint Southern accent when he asked if we’d care for anything to drink, “Some whiskey, gen’lemen? Beer? Iced tea?” But we told him we didn’t want to take up too much of his time, and got to work at once, setting up the recorder on a low white plastic cube and sitting around it on expensive Brown Jordan lawn furniture. The boat that had earlier entered the canal was now making its way back to the Intercoastal. A sign on a stanchion across the canal warned NO WAKE ZONE. We waited until the boat was clear, and turned on the recorder.

Werner told us essentially what he had told the grand jury. At ten forty-five this past Tuesday night, he had been guiding his sloop — a twenty-five-foot centerboard, under power, and with a spotlight showing the way — toward his slip at the club’s dock. There are sixty slips in the marina. He had passed on the approach to his slip the yawl Toy Boat, with its cockpit lights on and a blond man and woman sitting at the table drinking. He had recognized the man as Brett Toland, with whom he had a passing acquaintance at the club.

“Did you recognize the woman?” I asked.

“I had never seen her before in my life,” Werner said.

I kept trying to pinpoint his accent. I guessed maybe North Carolina.

“Have you seen that same woman since?”

“Yes, suh,” Werner said. “I was shown her photograph at the grand jury hearing.”

“Just one photo?” I asked. “Or were there...?”

“They showed me at least a dozen photographs. I picked hers out of the lot.”

“You identified her from a photograph.”

“I did.”

“Can you now tell me who she was?”

“She was the woman charged with killing Brett Toland. She was Lainie Commins.”

“You say you were under power as you came into the club.”

“I was.”

“How fast were you going?”

“Idle speed.”

“And you say your spotlight was on?”

“It was.”

“Pointing in the direction of the Toland boat?”

“No, suh, pointing at the water.”

“Ahead of the boat?”

“Dead ahead as I came past the club marker, and then toward the dock as I came closer in.”

“How much light was there in the cockpit of the Toland boat?”

“Enough to see who was sitting there.”

“Two blond people, you say. A man and a woman.”

“Brett Toland and Miss Commins, yes, suh.”

“You saw them clearly?”

“Clear as day. Sitting there drinking.”

“Did you say anything to them?”

“No, suh.”

“Didn’t greet them in any way?”

“No, suh.”

“Didn’t call to them?”

“No, suh. I was busy bringing my boat in. Watching the water, watching the dock.”

“Did they call anything to you?”

“No, suh.”

“Was your slip alongside the Toland slip?”

“Oh, no. Much further down the line.”

“How many boats down the line, would you say?”

“Six or seven boats.”

“Could you still see the Toland boat after you passed it?”

“Could’ve if I’d looked back, but I didn’t look back. I was bringing a boat in at night, with just a spotlight showing me the way. I kept my eyes on the water all the time.”

“You say this was around ten forty-five, is that right?”

“Just about on the dot.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a clock on my dash.”

“Lighted?”

“Yes.”

“And it said ten forty-five?”

“Almost.”

“Is it a digital clock?”

“No, it’s what they call an analog. With hands. Black hands on a white dial.”

“Then how can you know so exactly...?”

“The hour hand was almost on the eleven, and the minute hand was almost on the nine. So it was almost ten forty-five.”

“You looked at the clock as you passed the Toland boat?”

“I did. And it said almost ten forty-five.”

“Took your eyes off the water...?”

“Just for a second.”

“...to look at the clock.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Wanted to know what time it was, I guess.”

“Why’d you want to know what time it was?”

“Wanted to see what time I was coming in.”

“Was the water dark?”

“Not where the light was shining.”

“But you took your eyes off the water...”

“Just for a second.”

“...to see what time it was.”

“Yes, I did.”

He was beginning to get annoyed, I could see that. On the phone, I had sold him “a friendly little informal interview,” but now I was coming at him like Sherman entering Atlanta. He didn’t like it one damn bit. He was a Southerner, however, and a gentleman, and I was a guest in his home, and he had agreed to talk to me, and so he went along for the rest of the ride.

“So when you say you kept your eyes on the water all the time, you didn’t actually...”

“Just for a second, I told you.”

“To look at the clock.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Could it have been earlier than ten forty-five when you looked at...?”

“No, suh.”

“Could it have been ten twenty-five, for example?”

“No, it could not have been earlier than about ten forty-five.”

“And at that time you continued under power...”

“I did.”

“...past the Toland boat... which slip was that, by the way, would you know?”

“No, I would not.”

“You looked at the clock as you were passing the Toland boat, and then turned right back to the water?”

“Yep. Bringing the boat in.”

“To which slip?”

“Number twelve. That’s my assigned slip.”

“Some six or seven boats down the line. From the Toland boat, that is.”

“Yes.”

“Did you look at the clock again as you were coming into your slip?”

“I don’t believe I did.”

“Did you look at it before you cut the engine of your boat?”

“No.”

“Before you left the wheel?”

“No.”

“Before you made her fast to the dock?”

“No, suh.”

“Didn’t want to know what time you were getting in?”

“Already knew that,” Werner said curtly, and rose in dismissal. “It was almost ten forty-five.”

From my home phone, I called the next two witnesses on the list Folger had given me, a man and wife named Jerry and Brenda Bannerman, who lived in West Palm Beach. They graciously agreed to see Andrew and me tomorrow, provided we didn’t mind coming to their boat. We arranged to be at their yacht club by twelve-thirty, which meant an early rising and a three-to-four-hour drive across the state.

Etta Toland wasn’t quite so gracious.

Although we’d known each other socially before the infringement matter came up, on the phone she called me “Mr. Hope,” and told me at once that she had no interest in doing a taped, informal reprise of her grand jury testimony. On the other hand, she would be delighted, Mr. Hope, to come to my office on Monday morning and testify under oath, because — as she so delicately put it — “I want to bury your fucking client.”

I asked her if ten o’clock would be convenient.

“Ten o’clock would be fine, Mr. Hope.”

I thanked her for her courtesy, and she hung up without saying goodbye.

I looked at my watch.

It was almost six o’clock and I was supposed to pick up Patricia at seven.

All during dinner that night, I kept wondering why Patricia didn’t want to make love anymore. I figured it had something to do with the fear of losing me. Fuck me and my brains would curdle again. Fuck me and I would lie in coma again for the rest of my life, a fate some people might have wished for me, but not Patricia, certainly not Patricia, who loved me. But she had also loved someone named Mark Loeb, and I think he loomed large in the equation. Mark was one of the partners in the firm she worked for at the time — Carter, Rifkin, Lieber and Loeb, he was the Loeh. She was thirty-one years old at the time, this must have been five years ago. He was forty-two. They had celebrated his birthday not a month earlier. October the fifteenth. Birth date of great men.

They’d been living together for almost two years, in a little apartment on Bleecker Street in the Village. It was his apartment, she’d moved in with him. Her own apartment had been uptown on Eighty-ninth near Lex, which was a longer subway ride to the office on Pine Street. His apartment was nicer, and closer to the office. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Everything had seemed so right at the time, they were so very much in love.

He was Jewish, and so it had always seemed so ironic that he was the one who’d wanted to go uptown to see the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. He’d never had a tree in his own home while he was growing up, never had a tree during his marriage to a Jewish girl, who’d divorced him after five years of what she called turmoil and anguish — just before Christmas, incidentally, but that was a coincidence. He’d always thought of Christmas as a time to escape, get down to St. Barts or Caneel, get away from the insistent Christian barrage that made him feel excluded in his own city, made him feel somehow... un-American.

Because New York was his city, you know, he’d been born here and raised here, had only once in his life lived outside of it, and then not too distant — in Larchmont, with his ex, whose name was Monica. Patricia had met her at a party once. This was three years after the divorce, Mark hadn’t expected to see her there, he seemed flustered when he introduced them, three years after the divorce. She was a tall and gorgeous brunette who made Patricia feel like a frump. He’d apologized afterward. Never would have gone there if he’d known, and so on. In Patricia’s apartment later — they hadn’t yet started living together — it was as if seeing her again... seeing Monica... he realized he truly loved Patricia.

At the time, the firm had been litigating an important case, a mere matter of tax evasion that could have sent their client to prison for the next fifty years and cost him millions in fines. December eleventh fell on a Friday that year, which also happened to be the day the trial ended in an acquittal for their client. So they’d gone out to celebrate with the other partners and their wives, and afterward Mark suggested that they all go uptown to look at the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. None of them wanted to go except Lee Carter, who wasn’t Jewish, but his wife said she had a headache, which Mark thought was a euphemism for Let’s go home and fuck, Lee. So they all went home and Patricia and Mark got into a taxi and headed uptown.

This was pretty late. Neither of them knew what time they turned off the lights on the tree. She guessed they both had some vague idea that the tree couldn’t stay lit all night long, but they didn’t know exactly what time the plug was pulled. Neither of them was paying any attention to the time, anyway. It had been a wonderful victory today, and a great party, and they’d each had too much champagne to drink, this was now maybe eleven-thirty, maybe later, when they climbed into a taxi, and told the driver to take them uptown to Rockefeller Plaza.

There were still people skating on the ice.

The tree was still lighted.

They got out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk on the almost deserted street, holding hands, looking up at the tree. Below them, on a sunken ice-skating rink, young girls in short skirts were cutting fancy figures on the ice, and old men with their hands behind their backs were plodding along like ocean liners. The giant tree with its multicolored lights dazzled the night air above them.

And suddenly, all the lights went out.

On the tree.

The rink below was still illuminated, a glowing rectangle in an otherwise suddenly black landscape. Well, there were lights on the street corners, and some lights on in the windows of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, across the street, but everything suddenly felt dark in comparison to what it had been not a moment before. There was a collective disappointed ohhhhh as the lights on the tree went out, but the skaters below went about their determined circling of the rink, and the few people on the street above began dispersing, some heading into the Plaza itself, where some of the store windows were still lighted, others walking down toward Forty-ninth, Patricia and Mark walking — well, strolling really, still hand in hand — toward Fiftieth.

The two men who attacked them seemed to materialize out of nowhere. They were both black, but they could just as easily have been white; this was the Christmas season in New York, and muggers at that time of year came in every stripe and persuasion. The mink coat was what they were after. That and Patricia’s handbag, which happened to be a Judith Leiber with a jeweled clasp that looked like money. One of them hit her on the back of the head while the other one grabbed her handbag. As she started to fall forward, the first one circled around her and yanked open the flaps of the coat, popping the buttons. He was starting to pull it down off her shoulders when Mark punched him.

The punch rolled right off him. The man was an experienced street fighter and Mark was merely a downtown lawyer who’d taken his girl uptown to see a Christmas tree. Jewish, no less. The irony. The man hit him twice in the face, very hard, and as Mark fell to the pavement, he turned toward Patricia again, determined to get that fucking coat. The other man kicked Mark in the head. Patricia screamed and took off one of her high-heeled shoes and went at the man who was kicking Mark, wielding the shoe like a hammer, striking at his face and his shoulders with the stiletto-like heel, but the man kept kicking Mark, kicking him over and over again, his head lurching with each sharp kick. There was blood all over the sidewalk now, he was bleeding from the head, she almost slipped in the blood as she went at the man again. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” but he kept kicking Mark, kicking him, until finally the man trying to get her coat off yelled “Let it be!” and on signal they vanished into the night as suddenly as they’d appeared.

She was still wearing the mink.

One of the sleeves had been torn loose at the shoulder.

They’d got the Judith Leiber bag.

Mark Loeb was dead.

A month later, she joined the D.A.’s Office.

I figured she didn’t want this to happen to her again.

Didn’t want to lose another man she loved.

But, Patricia...

“Something?” she asked, and smiled, and reached across the table to take my hand.

“No, nothing,” I said.

The top of Andrew Holmes’s Chrysler LeBaron convertible was down, and the sky above was so blue I wanted to lick it right off the page. Every so often a fat white lazy cloud drifted overhead, shading the car as it floated past. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in the state of Florida, and like college boys on spring break, we drove first toward Okeechobee along Route 70, and then through Indiantown toward West Palm Beach, the jackets to our seersucker suits lying on the backseat, our ties loose, the top buttons of our shirts unbuttoned. We were wearing suits and ties only because we were making a business call. Lawyers wear suits and ties when they’re conducting business. When we found Jerry and Brenda Bannerman on their powerboat — a forty-five-footer rigged for deep-sea fishing — they were wearing, respectively, cutoff jeans and a thong bikini.

Jerry was a man in his mid-forties, tanned and fit, his cutoffs belted around his snug waist with a length of white line. His wife Brenda was in her late thirties, I guessed, a toothy, leggy brunette with blue eyes that matched her skimpy swimsuit. They were both swabbing the deck when we came marching up the dock of their club, a mile or so from their oceanfront West Palm condo.

Stowing the buckets and mops at once, they offered us a light lunch, and sat with us around a cockpit table under blue canvas, all of us chatting idly like good old friends, eating the delicious shrimp salad Brenda had prepared, sipping at iced tea in tall glasses afloat with lemon wedges. Jerry told us that he, too, was a lawyer. Brenda said that she’d been a legal secretary before they married, yet another revolting development. Too much expertise here, I was thinking. Andrew later told me he was thinking the same thing.

They told us they’d bought two apartments in their condo at a bargain price three years ago, and had broken through the walls to make one huge apartment overlooking the Atlantic. The Banner Year, as they called their boat, had been purchased after Jerry’s firm won a huge class-action suit and declared extravagant Christmas bonuses. They had been all over the state of Florida with it, had even jumped off to Bimini one fall — but that was another story.

“We hit a hurricane,” Brenda said.

“Wouldn’t want to experience that again,” Jerry said.

Brenda served little cookies with chocolate sprinkles on them.

She poured more iced tea.

It was time to get to work.

“As I told you on the phone,” I said, “all we want to know...”

“Sure, let’s cut to the chase,” Jerry said. “Did the S.A. offer you a deal?”

“He suggested we might want to make one after listening to his witnesses.”

“Might be a good idea,” Jerry said.

“Okay to turn this on?” Andrew asked.

“Sure,” Jerry said.

“I hate the way my voice sounds on tape,” Brenda said, and rolled her eyes. She had moved out into the sun. The three of us were still under the Bimini top, but she was now sitting aft of us, her face and the sloping tops of her breasts tilted up to the sun.

Andrew hit the REC and PLAY buttons. The tape began unreeling.

“What I figure he was trying to do,” Jerry said, “was...”

“Who do you mean?” I asked.

“Folger. Your state attorney. Aside from establishing that we heard shots, of course...”

This was not heartening news.

“...was establish a timetable. I could tell by the questions he asked me...”

“And me, too,” Brenda said.

“...that he had other witnesses who’d seen the accused on the boat before we came along.”

“How could you determine that?”

“Well, he asked if we’d seen a security guard in the booth near the gate, for example, so I figured...”

“Me, too,” Brenda said.

“...that the guard had some significance. So what could the significance be if the guard hadn’t seen the accused going aboard the boat where later we heard the shots?”

Shots again.

Witnesses to the shooting.

“He also asked...” Brenda said.

“Folger,” Jerry said.

“...whether we’d seen a sailboat coming in under power and tying up in slip number twelve, I think it was...”

“Twelve,” Jerry affirmed with a nod. “Which was another link in the time sequence, I figured.”

“Like whoever was on that sailboat must’ve seen the accused before we came along,” Brenda said.

“Folger was trying to establish that the accused was still on the Toland boat when we heard the shots,” Jerry said.

I bit the bullet, so to speak.

“What shots?” I asked.

“Well, gunshots,” he said.

“What time was this?”

“Around twenty to twelve.”

“Tuesday night,” Brenda said, nodding.

“This past Tuesday night. The twelfth,” Jerry said.

“Eleven-forty P.M.,” Brenda said, nodding again.

“You heard these shots coming from the Toland boat?”

“Oh yes.”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing near the Toland boat?”

“Walking toward where we’d parked the Banner Year.”

“We were staying a few nights,” Brenda said.

“Sleeping on the boat.”

“Came over through Lake Okeechobee...”

“Spent a night in Clewiston...”

“Went down the Caloosahatchee to Punta Rosa...”

“And then took the Intercoastal north to Calusa.”

“We’ve got courtesy privileges at Silver Creek.”

“Got there around seven that night,” Brenda said.

“Showered ashore...”

“Got all tarted up...”

“Went in for dinner around nine.”

“They stop serving at ten-thirty.”

“Dining room closes an hour later.”

“I had a delicious broiled lobster,” Brenda said.

“I had the red snapper.”

“Finished a bottle of really good Chardonnay.”

“Headed back for the boat around eleven-thirty, I guess it was.”

“Just ambling back to the boat,” Brenda said.

“Just taking our good sweet time.”

“Nowhere to go but to bed.”

There are cars moving out of the parking lot as they enter it at the dining room end. Late diners like themselves heading home. Headlights blinding them as they move toward the waterfront planking that runs past the boats parked in their slips. The activity is short-lived. The sound of automobile engines dies on the still September night.

Now there is only the sound of water lapping at dock pilings and boats. The occasional sound of a lanyard clanking against a mast. Marina sounds. The sounds boat people love.

The walkway is lighted with low all-weather mushroom-shaped lamps that illuminate the path and cast some reflection onto the tethered vessels bobbing dockside. The Bannerman boat is in slip number three. As they recall it again now, Toy Boat was tied up at slip number five that night. This would make Werner’s recollection of the geography accurate. He had told us he’d tied up his boat at slip number twelve, some six or seven boats down the line from the Tolands.

The cockpit lights are still on as the Bannermans, arm in arm, approach the luxury yawl. There is no one sitting at the cockpit table now, but there are lights burning in the saloon. It has taken them ten minutes or so, looking over all the parked boats, admiring some, dismissing others, to amble their way from the dining room to this point just abreast of the Toland boat. It is twenty minutes to twelve when...

“We heard shots.”

“Three gunshots.”

I looked at them both. Not many people know what gunshots sound like. It is not like in the movies. In the movies, even the smallest caliber gun sounds like a mortar shell exploding an inch from your ear. I am not an expert on all guns, but I do know what an Iver Johnson .22-caliber Trailsman Snub revolver sounds like when it is fired three times from a car parked at the curb, the first bullet taking me in the shoulder, the second taking me in the chest, the third going Christ knew where because by then I didn’t even hear that next shot, possibly because I was suddenly gushing blood and screaming in pain and falling into a deep black hole in the sidewalk. The sound of the gun that catapulted me into an eight-day coma was nothing more than a small pop, an insignificant crack.

“What’d these gunshots sound like?” I asked casually.

“We know guns,” Jerry said.

“We keep guns.”

“We go to the range every Saturday.”

“We know what a gun sounds like.”

“These weren’t backfires.”

“They were gunshots.”

“Coming from the saloon of the Toland yawl,” Jerry said.

“Three shots,” Brenda said.

“What’d you do?” Andrew asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you say you heard three gunshots...”

“We did.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Went back to our boat. Went to bed.”

“Didn’t report the shots to anyone?” I asked.

“Nope,” Jerry said.

“Why not?”

“None of our business.”

“When did you come forward?”

“When we heard this man had got killed.”

“Brett Toland.”

“We called the S.A.’s Office right away, volunteered what we knew.”

“Which was that you’d heard three shots coming from the Toland boat at eleven-forty last Tuesday night.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Did the state attorney ask why you didn’t report those shots?”

“He did.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That we weren’t eager to confront anyone who had a gun in his hand.”

“Is there a telephone on your boat?”

“A radio.”

“Why didn’t you use the radio to report...?”

“We didn’t want to get involved.”

“But you’re involved now. You’re a witness in a...”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“It matters to Lainie Commins. If you’d reported those shots when you heard them, someone might have apprehended whoever...”

“We didn’t say anything that linked those shots to Ms. Commins,” Jerry said.

“We didn’t see her on the boat, so how could we have implicated her in any way?” Brenda asked.

“My guess is they’ve got someone who can place her there around the time we heard the shots,” Jerry said. “That’s why the careful timetable. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes. But if you’d reported those shots immediately...”

“No, we couldn’t do that,” Jerry said.

“Why not?”

“We just couldn’t,” Brenda said.

“Why not?” I asked again.

“We didn’t want anyone rummaging around.”

“Rummaging around?”

“Our boat.”

I looked at them both again.

“Why didn’t you want anyone on your boat?” I asked.

“Turn that thing off,” Jerry said, and nodded toward the recorder.

Andrew hit the STOP button.

Jerry looked at his wife.

Brenda nodded okay.

“We had a little pot aboard,” Jerry said.

“Marijuana,” Brenda said, explaining to the two squares in the seersucker suits.

“Just a few ounces,” Jerry said.

“For recreational use,” Brenda said.

“We were on vacation.”

“Just the two of us on the boat.”

“Just a little for our own use.”

“Not enough to hurt anybody.”

Except Lainie Commins, I thought.