Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

6

Etta Toland arrived at 333 Heron Street at the stroke of ten on Monday morning. She was dressed casually — disdainfully, my partner Frank later said — in jeans, a loose-fitting, tunic-style, melon-colored blouse, low-heeled very strappy sandals, and a brown leather belt with a handcrafted brass buckle in the shape of a lion’s head. Her shoulder-length black hair was pulled to the back of her head and fastened there with a brass barrette. She wore no lipstick. The lids over her dark almond-shaped eyes were subtly tinted with a tan liner. It was obvious that she expected to get the hell out of here as fast as she could and get on with the more important business in her life.

This was for real.

This was under oath.

Her personal attorney, Sidney Brackett, was there in my office and so was a woman from the State Attorney’s Office, presumably to protect Etta’s rights, though depositions are customarily open-ended and nonleading, and no one does any cross-examination. I expected that if I asked Etta to reveal anything that constituted privileged communication — as, for example, a conversation between her and her psychiatrist, if she had one — I would at once hear from either Brackett or Mrs. Hampton, which was the ASA’s name, Helen Hampton. But I didn’t intend to tread any dangerous ground, and my partner Frank was there to nudge me in case I did.

I should tell you that people say Frank and I look alike, though I have never been able to see the slightest resemblance. I am thirty-eight years old and Frank is forty. I am an even six feet tall and I weigh a hundred and eighty-five pounds. Frank is five-nine and a half and he weighs a hundred and sixty. My face is long and narrow, what Frank calls a “fox face.” By contrast, he calls himself a “pig face.” There are also “rhino faces” and “turtle faces” in the system of categorization he invented. I am originally from Chicago, he is from New York. We both have black hair and brown eyes, true, and we both have corner offices at Summerville and Hope, but that’s all we have in common.

Frank has been nicer to me since I survived becoming a vegetable.

Everybody has been nicer to me, in fact.

In fact, that’s precisely the goddamn trouble.

Neither Frank nor I knew anything Etta Toland had told the grand jury. Like most depositions, this was a fact-finding exploration, or, if you prefer, a fishing expedition. But we could assume, as had the pot-smoking lawyer-boater Jerry Bannerman, that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had used Etta to establish yet another time sequence in the inexorable order that linked Lainie Commins to the murder of Brett Toland. Since the Bannermans had testified to hearing shots at eleven-forty on the night of September twelfth, I figured that was a good enough place to start, so I asked Etta where she’d been at about that time.

“Home,” she said. “Waiting for Brett’s call.”

“You were expecting your husband to call you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know where he was?”

“Yes, he was aboard Toy Boat. With Lainie Commins.”

“Why were you expecting him to call?”

“To tell me how it had gone.”

“How what had gone?”

“His meeting with Lainie. He asked her to come to the boat so he could offer a solution to our problem.”

“By problem...”

“Her suit for a permanent injunction.”

“What was the nature of this solution, can you tell me, Mrs. Toland?”

“He offered to buy her off.”

“Buy her off?”

“He offered a cash settlement if she would drop her claim.”

“A cash settlement?” I said, surprised.

“Yes. Five thousand dollars.”

“Are you saying your husband offered Ms. Commins...?”

“I don’t know if he actually ever made the offer. She may have shot him first, for all I know. I never saw him again after he left the house, you see. Or spoke to him, for that matter. But that’s what he was planning, yes. That’s what he and I had discussed.”

“You’d discussed offering Ms. Commins five thousand dollars if she’d drop her infringement claim.”

“Yes.”

“Did you and your husband discuss any other possible offer?”

“No. Well, the price, yes. We were trying to determine how much she was going for. But there was never any doubt in our mind that she’d agree to a cash settlement.”

“You didn’t, for example, discuss manufacturing Ms. Commins’s bear yourself and...”

“No.”

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

“Why would we do that? She designed the bear while she was working for us. In fact, the bear was Brett’s idea. And we have a witness to prove it.”

“What witness?” I said at once. “You offered no witnesses at the...”

“Brett remembered only later.”

“Remembered what?”

“That Bobby Diaz was there.”

“Who’s Bobby Diaz?”

“Our design chief. He was there.”

“Where?”

“In Brett’s office. When he first told Lainie about his idea for a cross-eyed bear.”

“When was this?”

“Last September.”

“And your husband remembered it only after the hearing?

“Yes. In fact, that’s what prompted him to invite Lainie to the boat last Tuesday night.”

“To make an offer of a cash settlement.”

“Yes. Because now we had a witness.”

“Did you tell this is your attorney?”

“We planned to. If Lainie didn’t accept the offer.”

“So, as I understand this, at eleven-forty you were waiting at home for your husbands phone call...”

“Yes. To learn whether she’d accepted the offer or turned it down.”

“Did you think she might actually accept such an offer?”

“Brett and I were confident she would.”

“An offer of five thousand dollars to drop...”

“The bear was ours,” Etta said simply. “We have a witness.”

“Did your husband, in fact, call you at any time that night?” I asked.

“No,” Etta said. “My husband was being murdered by Lainie Commins that night.”

I let that go by.

“Did you try to reach him at any time that night?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“By telephone.”

“You called the boat?”

“Yes. Well, the cellular phone number. There’s a cellular phone on the boat.”

“At what time did you call the boat?”

“Eleven forty-five? Around then. I was ready for bed, in fact. When I didn’t hear from Brett, I thought something might be wrong. So I called the boat.”

“And?”

“I got no answer.”

“What did you do then?”

“I got dressed and drove to the club.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t like Brett not to call when he said he would.”

“Did you think the meeting might still be going on?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“How long did it take you to get to the club?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes?”

“Just for clarification,” I said, “by ‘the club,’ I’m assuming you mean the Silver Creek Yacht Club.”

“Yes.”

“Where you keep your boat.”

“Yes.”

“What time did you get there, Mrs. Toland?”

“A quarter past twelve.”

“How do you know what time it was?”

“I looked at the dashboard clock just as I was nearing the club.”

“How’d you happen to do that?”

“I knew it was late, I guess I was wondering if they could still be on the boat discussing the offer. I guess I wanted to know just how late it actually was.”

“Is the clock in your car a digital clock?”

“No. It has hands.”

“Then you can’t say exactly what time it was, can you?”

“It might have been a minute or so later.”

“Twelve-sixteen, would you say? Twelve-seventeen?”

“More like twelve-sixteen.”

“You said earlier that you hadn’t heard from your husband since he’d left the house...”

“That’s right.”

“What time was that?”

“Around eight.”

“Are you aware that he called Ms. Commins at nine? From the boat?”

“Yes, he said he was going to.”

“Didn’t call her from the house, is that right?”

“No. Said he wanted to call from the boat.”

“Why?”

“Lend urgency to it. Tell her he was already on the boat, ask her to meet him there, discuss a solution calmly and sensibly.”

“Didn’t ask you to come along?”

“No. He didn’t want it to seem we were ganging up on her.”

“So he left the house at eight...”

“Yes.”

“And this was now sixteen minutes past twelve as you were approaching the club...”

“Yes, the big stone pillars at the club’s entrance.”

“What did you do then?”

“I made a right turn in front of the restaurant, where the driveway swings around the oval there, and I headed for the marina parking lot.”

“Toward the booth there at the entrance to the lot?”

“Yes.”

“Was there anyone in the booth at that hour?”

“No.”

“Were there any lights on in the booth?”

“No. Listen, let’s just get to it, okay?”

Frank raised his eyebrows.

I looked surprised.

“Get to what?” I asked.

“Your client,” she said.

“I’m sorry, what...”

“Elaine Commins,” she said. “In her little white Geo. Racing past that booth and out of the parking lot.”

My heart sank.

I was silent for a moment. Helen Hampton kept watching the tape recorder. Sidney Brackett sat with his arms folded across his chest.

“You just said there weren’t any lights on in...”

“There were lights outside.”

“Where?”

“Hanging on either side of the booth.”

“Overhead lights?”

“I saw her.”

“Even though...”

“I saw her! It was Lainie. I looked her dead in the eye as she went flying out of that lot. Lainie Commins. Fresh from killing my husband!”

“Did you know he was dead at the time?”

This from my partner Frank, who’d been silent until this moment.

“No, I did not know he was dead.”

“No one had yet informed you...”

“Of course not!”

“...that your husband was dead?”

“No.”

“Then you had no reason to assume, even if you did actually see Ms. Commins driving out of that lot...”

“Oh, I saw her, all...”

“...that she’d killed your husband, isn’t that right?”

“Until I found him, do you mean?”

She said this quite sweetly, nailing Frank right between the eyes. No, she was saying, I had no reason to connect a woman racing from the scene of a crime until I’d actually found the scene of the crime. But we are coming to that, counselors. Just keep asking your dumb questions, and we will slowly but inexorably get to my husband Brett Toland with two bullets in his head.

Wish to or not, we had to hear it.

“Can you tell us what happened next?” I asked.

What happened next...

And next...

And next...

And next...

...was that she’d driven her car to a parking spot facing slip number five, where Toy Boat was tied up, and she got out of the car and walked up the gangway to the boat, calling her husband’s name because there were lights on in the saloon and she figured he might be down there, though she had no idea at the time that he might be down there dead.

Far out on the water, she can hear a buoy’s foghorn moaning to the night. The wooden ladder creaks under her weight as she takes the four steps down into the saloon with its Oriental rugs and its paisley-covered couches and glass-fronted lockers and Currier & Ives prints, walks through the saloon and past the closed door to the head on her right, and down the passageway into the master stateroom.

She does not see her husband at first.

What she sees at once is a gun on the bed.

Blue-black against the white bedspread.

She knows this gun, it is her husband’s. But it is odd that he would leave it here in plain sight on the bed, and besides...

Where is he?

“Brett?” she calls.

And sees him in that instant.

Lying on his back, on the carpet, on the deck, on the far side of the bed.

He is naked.

A white towel is draped open around his waist.

His face is covered with blood.

He is red with blood.

Quite calmly...

She is amazed that she does not scream.

Quite calmly, she lifts the cellular phone from where it is resting on one of the cabinets, and quite calmly dials 911 to report that she has just discovered her husband murdered aboard their yacht.

Her watch reads twenty minutes past midnight.

The police arrive five minutes later.

If anyone in Calusa needs confirmation that the crime business here is in very good health, thanks, all he has to do is take a quick glimpse at what was once called the Public Safety Building. The old tan brick facade of the building is still there, but in place of the discreet lettering that had announced the police facility in the dear dead demure days, there are now bigger, bolder, bronze letters informing the public in no uncertain terms that this is the home of:

The day was hot and still. There seemed to be even less wind than was normal for September. It has always struck me as odd that the school year down here starts in August, when a person can wilt just stepping out of bed. September is no picnic, either. Sultry is perhaps the best word to describe September in Calusa, although at night cool breezes often blew in off the Gulf. It rained a lot in September. You expected the rain to cool things off, but no, all it did was cause steam to rise momentarily from the sidewalks. Tourists knew what Florida was like in the wintertime, but year-round residents knew the real Florida. Sometimes in September, when the days got steamy and sullen, an alligator waddling up Main Street wouldn’t have surprised anyone. September in Florida was what Florida was all about.

There were no alligators coming up Main Street on that hot and sunny morning of September eighteenth. I walked past the pittosporum bushes lining the sidewalk in front of the police facility, and glanced up, as I usually did, at the very narrow windows resembling rifle slits in a fortress wall. But there were no snipers behind them because they were designed for protection against heat rather than siege. Where once a person walked through a pair of dark bronze doors into an open space containing only a reception desk with a young woman behind it, there was now a metal detector unit with an armed Calusa P.D. blue standing to the right of it and another one sitting at a desk behind it. The one behind the desk conducted a hands-on search of my briefcase. He also asked who I wanted to see, and called upstairs to make sure I was expected.

Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place. On the third floor, the old orange-colored letter elevator is gone, a victim of high-tech delivery systems. The old somewhat cozy reception area has been enlarged to some four times its original size, and transformed into a bustling space that resembles a warship’s battle room, with computer terminals beeping and blinking, phones ringing, civil service employees mingling with P.D. blues and plain-clothes cops in a frantic boil resembling a famous borrowed television show. A bank of four elevators is on the entrance wall. The other three walls have more doors in them than a bedroom farce, constantly opening and closing, people coming and going in handcuffs or without.

Where earlier there had been no need for what in bigger cities is called a detention cage, there is now a rather large so-called Conditioning Unit, which makes the cell sound like a brainwashing center, but staid, sedate Calusa has never quite admitted to itself that crime is as rampant here as it is anyplace else in the United States. Calusa would rather believe that the miscreants dragged into this facility day and night are not “criminals” in the strictest sense but merely misguided souls who’ve somehow fallen afoul of the law and must be temporarily “conditioned” until the matter can be straightened out.

This morning, there were half a dozen recently arrested individuals in the C.U., as the huge cage was euphemistically called. One of them was a black woman wearing pink satin shorts, a red bikini bra, and red high-heeled shoes. I imagined she’d been picked up for soliciting sex on US. 41, near the airport. The other five people in the cage were men, three of them black, two of them white. The biggest of the black men was obviously drunk and kept shouting to anyone who’d listen that he wasn’t no African American, damn it! He was a plain ole American same as anyone else born in this country.

“Do I look like I drink goat’s milk and blood? You see flies eatin my eyes, man? Fuck Africa!” he shouted to me as I went by. “You hear me? Fuck Africa!”

One of the white men said, “Fuck you, man!” and then threw a finger at me when he realized I wasn’t the detective, lawyer, or state attorney he was waiting for. Nobody else paid any attention to me.

I found Morris Bloom in his office at the far end of the corridor.

“Got yourself another winner, I see,” he said, and grinned and extended his hand.

I told him I thought Lainie Commins was innocent.

He said, “Sure.”

I told him Pete Folger had already offered me a deal.

“What has he got, Morrie?”

“Is this on the record?”

“He suggested I talk to his grand jury witnesses.”

“Well, I was one of them,” Bloom said, nodding.

“Can we talk?”

“No tape.”

“However.”

“Sure”

In every man’s life, there are two cowboys who once beat him up and taught him the meaning of fear. I keep expecting my particular cowboys to show up again one day, to pay me back for what Bloom taught me to do to them. That is the kind of thing cowboys never forget. So one day I’m sure they’ll be waiting around the next corner. In fact, when those bullets came banging out of that parked car last April, I thought it might have been my cowboys coming to get me at last. I can tell you this. I will never be able to repay Detective Morris Bloom for what he taught me to do. What he taught me to do was almost kill them.

The walls of his office pretty much told the story of his life. Resting on a shelf was a boxing trophy he’d won while serving in the United States Navy. Hanging on one of the walls were a pair of laminated front-page stories from the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, headlining the daring capture of two bank robbers in Mineola, Long Island, by a young police officer named Morris Bloom. Hanging on another wall were several framed photographs of the detective squad he’d subsequently commanded up north, together with a citation plaque from the Nassau County chief of detectives. On yet another shelf was a Snoopy doll his then-nineteen-year-old son had given him on a Father’s Day some years back, the hand-lettered sign around its neck reading: To the best bloodhound in the world. Love, Marc. A framed picture of Bloom’s wife Arlene, a smiling dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, rested on his desk alongside a humidor of Cuban cigars he offered to rank but never smoked himself.

A heavyset man in his mid-forties, an inch over six feet tall and weighing either side of two hundred pounds, depending on how many pizzas he’d had this week, he stood waiting for my first question. There was a look of ineffable sadness on his face, as though he were certain my case was already a lost cause. But the look, exaggerated by shaggy black brows and soulful brown eyes, was always there, a bad failing for a cop. Arms folded across his chest, he waited. He was a blunt, plainspoken man. I knew there’d be no bullshit in this office today.

“Etta Toland says that you and Cooper Rawles were the first detectives to respond when the blues called in a homicide.”

“That’s right,” Bloom said.

“What time did you get to the boat, Morrie?”

“Twenty to one.”

“Can you tell me what you found?”

“Sector patrol car angle-parked into the walk running past the boats, I think it was Charlie Car, it’s in the report. Patrol sergeant’s car was alongside it, also angle-parked. Coop and I were driving one of the squad’s sedans, we parked alongside the sergeant’s car, his driver still behind the wheel. His name’s Brannigan, he’s supervisor in Sector Three. He took me to where the victim’s wife...”

“Etta Toland.”

“Yeah, was sitting in this little sort of outdoor... I don’t know boats, Matthew, I don’t know what the hell you call it. A little outside area with a table and banquettes around it, what looked like banquettes.”

“The cockpit,” I said.

“I thought that was airplanes.”

“Boats, too. But different.”

“Anyway, she was sitting there alone, her hands in her lap, staring down at her hands...”

“Lights on, Morrie?”

“What?”

“In the cockpit.”

“Oh. Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondered. Go ahead.”

“Coop and I went to her, and he handled the questioning while I took notes. You get a feel whether the white guy or the black guy should do the talking. I didn’t get a sense it would make any difference at all here. So he talked, and I wrote.”

“What’d she tell you?”

“How she’d gone on the boat around a quarter past midnight and found her husband dead downstairs. Coop asked her did she touch anything and she said No, just the phone, and Coop asked did she call anyone but the police, and she said No, just the police. So we all went downstairs to take a look.”

“Mrs. Toland, too?”

“No, no, she stayed upstairs in the cockpit, whatever. I went down with Coop and the M.E., who’d arrived by then.”

“What’d you find?”

“A dead man lying on his back on the far side of the bed, blood all over him. Looked like he took two in the face, which the M.E. said either one could’ve been the cause of death. We later found another spent bullet. Because we were looking for it, Matthew. There were three ejected cartridge cases, you see. We figure the third bullet missed him entirely, maybe it was the first one she fired, maybe her hand was shaking, who knows, you ought to ask her. Anyway, we later dug out the bullet from the wall behind the bed, near the door to the bathroom. Your client must’ve pumped the slugs into him from two, three feet away, very nice, Matthew.”

“And left the gun behind,” I said.

“Yeah, on the bed.”

“You think she shot him and then placed the gun neatly on the bed?”

“I just report the facts, Matthew. The S.A. decides what’ll play to the jury.”

“Does Folger think that’ll play, Morrie?”

“Gee, I guess not, since you say he’s already offered you a deal.”

“Was the gun on the bed the murder weapon?”

“That’s what Ballistics says.”

“You have a report?”

“We had it before we brought your client in.”

“Was the gun test-fired?”

“Of course.”

“What were the results?”

“The ejected cartridge cases and the bullet we recovered on the boat were fired from the .45 Colt automatic pistol we found on the bed. The bullets the coroner removed from the victim’s head were also fired from that gun. It’s the murder weapon, Matthew, no question about it.”

“Have you traced the gun?”

“Purchased by one Brett Toland.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s more, Matthew.”

“Okay,” I said, and sighed.

“We took your client into custody around seven that morning. As permitted by Miranda, we...”

“Brought her here?”

“Yes.”

“Questioned her here?”

“Yes.”

“I’m assuming, since she was in custody...”

“Come on, Matthew.”

“Then she was made aware of her rights, correct?”

Bloom merely cocked a baleful eye at me.

“Okay, okay. I was just wondering why she didn’t call me right then. Put an end to it right then.”

“Said she didn’t need a lawyer, this was all ridiculous.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Even agreed to let us print her. Though I guess you know, under the Miranda guidelines we don’t need permission to take fingerprints. We asked solely as a courtesy.”

“And she said okay?”

“Said she was innocent.”

“She is.”

“They all are, Matthew. I have never met a guilty felon in my entire lifetime.”

“This one is innocent, Morrie.”

“Then why are her prints all over the murder weapon?”

I looked at him.

“Palm prints?” I said. “Fingerprints?”

“Both.”

“You still don’t have her at the scene. She left that boat at ten-thirty. She was home in bed by...”

“Not according to four eyewitnesses.”

“All eminently reliable. One of them is Toland’s loving wife, another one was on a moving boat in the dark, and the last two were drunk and going back to their boat to smoke pot.”

“You don’t know that, Matthew.”

“It’s what they told me yesterday.”

“I guess you can prove...”

“The point is,” I said, plunging ahead regardless, “Lainie Commins wasn’t even on that boat when the murder took place. She got there at ten, drank a nonalcoholic drink, listened to what Toland had to say, advised him that she’d talk it over with her lawyer, and left the boat at ten-thirty, without once budging from that cockpit.”

“Then what was her scarf doing downstairs?”

“What scarf?”

“A Gucci scarf. Tiny red anchors on a blue field.”

“Where’d you find...?”

“The master bedroom. Downstairs.”

“You don’t know it’s hers.”

“She identified it as hers.”

“I can’t believe...”

“That’s when we called in the state attorney, Matthew”

I was shaking my head.

“That’s when we charged her with first-degree murder.”

Still shaking my head.

“I’m sorry, Matthew,” he said. “But she did it.”

No, I was thinking.

“No,” I said.

But it looked a hell of a lot like yes.

“I didn’t kill him,” Lainie said.

“Lainie,” I said, “your fingerprints are on the gun.”

She was sitting in my chair behind my desk. I was pacing the floor of my office. My partner Frank was half-sitting, half-leaning on the corner of my desk, his hands in his pockets, his shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. He was wearing suspenders today. He looked like Larry King interviewing a celebrity — except that Larry King had a fox face. Anyway, this was not a celebrity. Not yet, anyway. This was merely a woman who’d been indicted for murder in the first degree. With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she kept twisting the Victorian seal ring on her right pinky. The digital clock on my desk read 4:03 P.M.

“How do you know they have fingerprints?” she asked.

“Folger has a forensics report.”

“That’s impossible. They’re lying to you.”

“They know I’ll be seeing the report.”

“Even so.”

“How’d your fingerprints get on that gun?”

“Oh. Yeah,” she said. “Right.”

Frank and I both looked at her.

“Now I remember touching it,” she said. “The gun. When I asked Brett if it was loaded. I sort of put my hand on it. Ran my hand over it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’d never touched a gun in my life. I guess I wanted to see what it felt like.”

Frank raised his eyebrows.

“Lainie,” I said, “you told me you got to the boat at a little before ten, and left half an hour later.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly what I did.”

“Folger has the security guard seeing you go aboard at a few minutes past ten...”

“That’s exactly right...”

“...and he’s got another witness coming in on a sailboat at ten forty-five, and spotting you and Brett Toland drinking at the cockpit table.”

“No, he’s wrong about the time. I left the boat at ten-thirty.”

“Did you see that sailboat coming in?”

“Yes, but it was before I left the boat.”

“Were you still there at eleven?”

“No. I was home by eleven.”

“Folger has two witnesses who heard shots at eleven-forty.”

“I was already home by then.”

“Shots coming from the saloon. Three shots.”

“I didn’t go down to the saloon at all. Brett and I sat in the cockpit all the while I was there.”

“Then you couldn’t have been below, firing the shots they heard.”

“I couldn’t have been anywhere on the boat. Not at eleven-forty. I was home by eleven.”

“Your fingerprints were on the gun,” Frank reminded her.

“I told you how they got on the gun.”

“How’d your scarf get down there in the master cabin?” he asked.

Good old Frank. Straight New Yorker style. No bullshit.

“I told the police all about that,” Lainie said.

“How come you never mentioned it to me?” I asked.

“I told you that Brett asked everybody to take their shoes off.”

I saw the faint flicker of disapproval that flashed in Frank’s eyes. He knew, as I knew, but apparently Lainie did not know, that the word “everybody” was singular and that she should have said “his shoes” or “her shoes,” but certainly not “their shoes.” Or perhaps she knew the correct construction and was merely trying to avoid saying “his shoes” lest she fall into a sexist-pig trap. Besides, what did her shoes have to do with her scarf?

“You didn’t tell me he asked you to take off your shoes,” I said.

“I told you he asked everybody to take off their shoes.”

Again.

“Because of his precious teak decks,” Lainie said.

“You told me he asked a state senator’s wife to take off her shoes. “You didn’t mention anything about your shoes.”

“Well, I must have forgotten. He asked me to take them off.”

“How could you have forgotten something the police had already questioned you about?”

“Because I told them exactly what happened and I thought that was that. Brett asked me to take them off, and he carried them below when he went looking for the Perrier.

“The scarf, too?” Frank asked.

Lainie looked at him.

“He took my shoes and my scarf, yes,” she said.

“Why’d he take the scarf?” Frank asked.

“Because I didn’t need it. It was a warm night.”

“So he carried it below, together with your shoes.”

“Yes.”

“When did he ask you to take off your shoes?” I asked.

“When I reached the top of the gangway.”

“Asked you to take them off...”

“Yes.”

“...and then took them from you and carried them below.”

“Not right that minute. He carried them below when he went looking for the Perrier.”

“Did he ask you for the scarf, too?”

“No, I handed him the scarf. Because I didn’t need it.”

“What time did you leave the boat, Lainie?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“At any time before that, did Brett Toland offer you a cash settlement to drop your suit?”

“No. Never. Who told you that?”

“Do you know a man named Bobby Diaz?”

“Of course I do. How would he know what Brett told me?

“Was he present at a meeting last September, during which Brett Toland mentioned his idea for a cross-eyed bear?”

“Never. There was never such a meeting. The idea for the bear was mine.”

“And you’re sure Brett didn’t offer you a cash settlement last Tuesday night?”

“I’m positive.”

“And you’re equally certain you left the boat at ten-thirty?”

“Yes.”

“Drove out of the parking lot at ten-thirty?”

“Yes.”

“Then Etta Toland couldn’t possibly have seen you driving out at a little after midnight.”

“I was home asleep by midnight.”

“Then you weren’t racing out of that parking lot at a little past midnight, is that right?”

“I told you. I was home asleep.”

“Did you drive home barefooted?” Frank asked.

“No, I put on my shoes before I left the boat.”

“Went below to put them on?”

“No, Brett went down to get them for me. I was never anywhere on that boat except the cockpit.”

“But he forgot your scarf, is that it?”

“I guess we both did.”

“When did you discover you’d left it on the boat?” I asked.

“When the police wanted to know about it.”

“What time was that?”

“When they came to the house.”

“Were you asleep when they came to the house?”

“Yes.”

“What time was that?”

“Six in the morning.”

“So you’d been asleep... what time did you say you went to bed?”

“I didn’t. It was around eleven-thirty.”

“So you’d had six and a half hours sleep by the time the police came to see you.”

“Yes. Six, six and a half.”

“Didn’t miss the scarf when you got home, huh?” Frank asked.

“I guess not.”

“Didn’t notice you’d left it behind.”

“No.”

“How come?”

“I guess I’d had a little to drink.”

“You told me you were drinking Perrier,” I said.

“I also had a vodka-tonic.”

“When was that?”

“After Brett made his proposal.”

“Thought it was a good proposal, did you?” Frank asked.

“I thought it sounded good, yes. I wanted to check it with Matthew, but it sounded good to me, yes.”

“But you didn’t call Matthew when you got home.”

“It was late.”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Yes.”

“And you were in bed by eleven-thirty.”

“Yes.”

“How many drinks did you have?” I asked. “On the boat.”

“Just one. Well, maybe a bit more than one. I think Brett freshened it for me. Poured a little more vodka into the glass.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this.”

“I didn’t think it was important.”

“Is there anything else you didn’t tell me?”

“Nothing else. I didn’t kill him. And besides, I thought you guys were my lawyers.”

“We are,” I said.

“Then stop yelling at me!”

“Lainie, did you go below at any time last Tuesday night?”

“No.”

“Not the saloon...”

“No.”

“Not the master stateroom...”

“No. I told you. We sat on deck, in the cockpit, till I left the boat.”

“Without your scarf,” Frank said.

“Yes, without my goddamn scarf!” she said.

“Did anyone see you leaving the boat?”

“How would I know?”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Yes, I saw the man in the booth as I drove out.”

“He says he didn’t see you.”

“Then he must be blind. I drove right by him.”

“See anyone else?”

“People coming out of the restaurant.”

“Did you know any of them?”

“No. I mean, how could I tell? I was just driving around the oval, they were just people.”

“So you drove past the guard booth...”

“Yes.”

“Say anything to the guard?”

“No.”

“He say anything to you?”

“No.”

“Wave at you? Anything like that?”

“No.”

“And then you came around the oval in front of the restaurant...”

“Yes.”

“And saw these people coming out...”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I drove to the pillars at the club entrance and made a left turn onto Silver... oh, wait a minute.”

We waited.

“That’s right,” she said.

“What’s right?”

“I almost hit this car parked on the side of the road.”

“What road?”

“Silver Creek. To the right of the entrance. I was making a left turn out of the club, and this car was parked just beyond the stone pillar on the right there. I guess I was cutting the corner too tight. I almost hit it.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know. It was dark.”

“What color?”

“I don’t know. I almost didn’t see it. The headlights were off, it was just parked there.”

“Anybody in it?”

“No one.”

“Did you notice the license plate?”

“No. It was all very dark. I started to make the turn and saw the car and realized how close it was. I just yanked the wheel over and drove on by. I may have yelled something, too, I don’t remember.”

“Like what?”

“Like you jackass, you jerk, something like that.”

“But if no one was in the car...”

“I know, it was just a reaction.”

“This was at ten-thirty, correct?” Frank asked.

“Yes. Ten-thirty. Yes.”

“Did you see anyone wandering on foot in the parking lot at that time? While you were driving out?”

He was thinking the same thing I was. First, why would anyone park a car just outside the club entrance when there was a parking lot inside those stone pillars? And next, where was the person who’d left the car there? The Bannermans had heard shots at eleven-forty that night. If someone had been prowling the lot an hour or so earlier...

“Did you see anyone?” I asked.

“Nobody,” Lainie said.