Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

7

He kept remembering what Amberjack had told him about keeping an eye on the weather. Warren didn’t want to get caught out here on a small craft some thirty miles from shore in case any storm was on the way. Not much traffic out here, just your occasional fishing boat and now and then a big motor cruiser passing by in the distance. But the way he figured it, all of these boat people knew more about weather than he did, so as long as there was anybody out here, he didn’t feel foolhardy. Minute he saw any boats heading in, he’d be right behind them. Meanwhile, if there was any danger he expected he’d begin hearing Coast Guard advisories on the weather channels.

A big storm was already raging belowdecks, however, and her name was Toots, who’d come past being irritable and jumpy and quivery, all of which he’d expected in the twenty-four to thirty-six hours following her last hit on the pipe, whenever that had been. The symptoms always outlasted the initial big crash every crackhead experienced sooner or later, one time or another. So she’d come past the inconceivable craving during the first three days, and she’d also come past the insomnia and fatigue and now he could hear her below, crying hysterically again, today was going to be one fine clambake, Clyde. This was now Tuesday morning, so assuming she’d scored Thursday night sometime, it was now Crash-Plus-Four-Days and... what? Ten, twelve hours? He’d tried giving her some breakfast ten minutes ago, she’d knocked the tray out of his hands, spattered eggs and coffee all over Amberjacks spanking-clean bulkheads and deck. She’d been like this since late last night, these crazy mood swings, fine one minute, screaming and yelling the next.

Made a man want to start smoking again.

What worried her most was that she’d remain this way forever. Like when she was a little girl and she made a funny face and her mother warned her she’d freeze that way. She didn’t think she could bear this forever. Last time she’d kicked the habit, it hadn’t been this bad. Then again, cocaine wasn’t crack, well yes it was, well no it wasn’t! Whatever the fuck it was, she could not endure the thought that her present condition might turn out to be something permanent, she might be trapped eternally on this roller coaster that kept plunging her into hell through flames and then leveled off onto a grassy plain in a shaded valley before it started its climb again which was when she wanted to scream and scream and scream.

The last time around, when she was on cocaine but not freebase, she’d done whatever had to be done to get the white powder. Whatever. Anything. You named it, she would do it. Yessir, whatever you say. You, too, ma’am, this is Tootsie La Cokie, didn’t you know? I will eat your pussy, suck your cock, take you in my ear, my nose, my armpit, my ass, wherever you want to put it, whenever you’d like it, I’ll do it if you just give me the candy or the money to buy it.

She was sure he still had the stuff hidden somewhere on the boat.

Thing to do was to get it from him.

Convince him to give it to her.

Any which way he wanted.

The man’s name was Guthrie Lamb.

He was telling me he’d been a famous private detective for more years than I’d been on earth, having started his agency back in 1952, when he used to operate out of New York City. He had moved down here twenty years ago, which accounted for his longevity and good health at the age of sixty-something.

He did, in fact, look entirely fit.

I had no way of knowing what he might have looked like when he first put in an appearance as a Famous Detective, to hear him tell it. But he was still a tall, youthful-looking, wide-shouldered man who, I guessed, was capable of handling himself in any situation calling for physical exertion. In fact, if ever I ran into my cowboys again, I would not have minded Guthrie Lamb at my side — particularly since he seemed to be carrying a very large gun in a highly visible shoulder holster. His eyes were a pale blue, but they appeared deeper against the pristine white of his hair and his eyebrows. He had a wide glittering smile. I wondered if his teeth were capped.

I had called him early this morning because there was no way on earth I could raise either Warren or Toots on the telephone, and the last time I’d done my own legwork, I’d got myself shot, thanks. There were three other private detective agencies in town, none of them any good, and Benny Weiss had recommended Mr. Lamb highly. There were rumors in town that he had changed his name from Giovanni Lambino or Limbono or Lumbini or something like that, but why this should have been anyone’s business but his own was quite beyond me. It certainly wasn’t my business. My business was finding out if anyone at the Silver Creek Yacht Club had on last Tuesday night noticed a car parked just beyond the pillar on the right-hand side of the entrance gate.

“What kind of car?” Lamb asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“What color?”

“She couldn’t tell.”

“No light at the gate?”

“She said it was dark.”

“Have you ever been there at night?”

“Yes, but I never noticed.”

“Well, I’ll check it. Usually, if there are pillars, there are lights on top of them.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe one of them was burned out.”

“Maybe.”

“So we’ll see. What time was this supposed to be? When she saw the car.”

“Ten-thirty.”

“Drove through the gate, you say, and was making a left turn...”

“Yes.”

“When she noticed the parked car and swerved away from it.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Well, let me see who saw what out there. Did we discuss my rates?”

“I’m assuming they’re standard.”

“What’s standard by you?”

“Forty-five an hour plus expenses.”

“I usually get fifty.”

“That’s high.”

“Expertise,” Lamb said.

“I pay Warren Chambers forty-five an hour and he’s the best in the business.”

“I’m better,” Lamb said, and grinned like a shark.

When she called to him from below, her voice was so soft he almost didn’t hear her. The boat was drifting, drifting, he hadn’t put a hook down, there was nothing to hit out here, nothing to run into, just a huge circle of water wherever you looked. Faint breeze blowing, a few white-caps out there, fishing boat far out on the horizon to the west, where Corpus Christi, Texas, was the next stop.

“Warren?”

Almost a whisper.

“Yes?”

“Can you come down here, please?”

He went to the ladder, took a step down, bent, and peered into the boat. She was sitting on the bunk up forward, wrist in the handcuff fastened to the grab rail on her right, legs over the side of the bunk, ankles crossed. The high-heeled pumps that matched the short black skirt were on the deck. He went down the ladder.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have knocked that tray out of your hands.”

“Well, listen.”

“Really, I hate being this way,” she said, and smiled. “Besides, now I’m hungry.”

“I’ll fix you something,” he said, and went to the stove.

“If you have some cereal, that’ll be good enough.”

“No eggs?”

“I’m not sure I can keep them down.”

“That’s not supposed to be one of the symptoms.”

“It’s the boat rocking.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you, Warren.”

“Did you?”

“Well, sure, you know I did. You’re right, I’m hooked. Or was. I know I’ll be thanking you for this when it’s all over.”

“No need for that.”

He was standing at the countertop alongside the stove now, shaking cornflakes from their box into a plastic bowl. He poured milk over them, found a tablespoon in the utensil drawer, put bowl and spoon on a tray and carried it to the bunk.

“Some coffee?” he said. “I can heat it up again.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

He went back to the stove, turned on the gas under the coffeepot. Blue flame licked at its bottom. The boat rocked gently.

“Boy, it’s funny the way this comes in waves,” she said.

“Bit of a chop today,” he agreed, nodding.

“No, I mean the craving for it. You think it’s gone, and then all at once it’s back again.” She shoveled a spoonful of flakes into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Shifted her weight on the bank. “What’d you do with my stash?” she asked.

“The jumbos I found in your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Deep-sixed them.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did, Toots.”

“Terrible waste.”

“Not the way I look at it.”

“I’d love one of those rocks right this minute,” she said, and looked at him.

“I can’t help you,” he said. “They’re on the bottom of the ocean.”

“I don’t believe you, Warren.”

“I’m telling you.”

She shifted her weight again. He realized all at once that her legs were bare. She’d taken off her panty hose. He saw them crumpled against the bulkhead now, a wad of sand-colored nylon.

“I keep wondering where I’d be if I was a vial of crack,” she said. “Did you used to play that when you were a kid, Warren?”

“No, I never wondered where I’d be if I was a vial of crack.”

“I mean if you couldn’t find one of your toys or games. Didn’t you used to say Where would I be if I was a fire engine? Or a doll? Or a...?”

“I didn’t play with dolls.”

“Where on this boat would I be?” she asked in a cute, feigned little-girl’s voice.

“No place,” he said. “There’s no place on this boat you’d be. Cause they ain’t no crack on dis here boat,” he said in a thick, feigned watermelon accent.

“Wanna bet?” she asked, and smiled, and shifted her weight again, her legs parting slightly, the black skirt edging higher on her thighs. “I’ll bet if I asked you really nice, you’d tell me where you’ve hidden that crack, Warren.”

“You’d be wasting your time, Toots.”

“Would I?” she said, and suddenly opened her legs wide to him. “Tell me,” she said.

“Toots...”

“Cause, honey, right now I’d do anything for some of that shit, believe me.”

“ Toots...”

“Anything,” she said.

Their eyes met.

She nodded.

“Not this way, Toots,” he said softly, and turned away from her, and walked swiftly to the ladder and climbed the steps and was gone.

She stared at the empty space he’d left behind him.

What? she thought.

What?

What you expected from a firm that called itself Toy-land, Toyland was a yellow-brick road leading to a gingerbread house with white-sugar icicles hanging from the roofline and jelly-drop doorknobs and mint-clear windows. You did not expect a low yellow-brick factory in a Cyclone-fenced industrial park off Weaver Road, the Toyland, Toyland boy-girl logo sitting on the rooftop in three-dimensional bliss. What you expected when you stepped into that fantasized gingerbread house was a band of bearded elves on high stools at low tables, wearing red stocking hats and whistling while they worked. What you got was a reception area with a glass-tiled wall beaming late morning sunshine, two teal-colored doors flanking a circular desk centered on the opposite wall, and huge framed glossy photographs of the company’s several hit toys and games hanging on the other two walls. Among these toys were a green frog wearing scuba-diving gear; a menacing treaded black tank whose helmeted commander was a little blond girl; and a red fire truck with a yellow water tower which, from the photographic evidence, shot a real stream of water.

I was here to see the man Etta Toland claimed was a witness to Lainie Commins’s thievery, the man who’d been present at a meeting last September when Brett Toland first proposed his idea for a cross-eyed bear. Robert Ernesto Diaz’s office was at the end of a long corridor lined with doors painted in various pastel shades, as befitted Toyland’s image. Etta had defined him as the company’s design chief. His office at once fortified that concept.

A rangy man with black hair, a black mustache, and dark brown eyes, Diaz stood behind a huge desk cluttered with what I assumed were models of future toys. A bank of windows behind the desk streamed sunlight onto a wall bearing a huge poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, or Bram Stoker’s, or whoever’s, flanked by a pair of Picasso prints. A Toys “” Us catalog was open on the desktop, resting beside a digital clock that read 11:27, and a pair of clay models for a very slender somewhat buxom doll...

“Our annual bid to dethrone Barbie,” Diaz said with a rueful grin.

...and models in five different colors for a helicopter which I assumed would fly if you put batteries in it, and four painted ceramic models of men and women in space suits, which looked very much like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to me, but I currently had one infringement suit going against the company.

“Toyland’s already begun cutting steel on the helicopter,” he said, “but we haven’t yet decided on the color. Which one do you favor?”

Diaz saw my puzzlement and immediately defined “cutting steel.”

“Tooling up,” he explained. “Making the molds we’ll be using for years and years to come, I hope, I hope, I hope. The helicopter’s my design. It’s called Whurly Burly, and the pilot’s a blond girl like the one in Tinka Tank, which you may have seen on the wall in reception, and which was a big winner for us three Christmases ago. I designed her, too. Kids love blond dolls. Even black kids love blond dolls. Six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tooling on that bird, plus another four for R&D... research and development... in hope it’ll fly next Christmas. That’s a million dollars going in. But we’re betting a lot more on Gladys — which I guess is why you’re here.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

“A terrible thing, terrible,” Diaz said, shaking his head. “To kill a man over a toy? Terrible.”

I said nothing.

“Look, she must have felt enormously threatened, I realize that. If that bear’s going to be under the tree by next Christmas, it’s got to be in the stores no later than May. By next month, all your major chains — Kmart, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘’ Us, F.A.O.’s — will be planning exactly which toy is going to be in which aisle on which shelf come spring.”

“That early,” I said.

“That early. October. Everything planned by then. With Tinka Tank, we had the choicest location in every goddamn store in America. There wasn’t a girl alive who didn’t want that toy. We’re hoping the same thing will happen with Gladys. Test her this Christmas, have a runaway toy next Christmas.”

I did not mention that if Judge Santos decided in Lainie’s favor, either Mattel or Ideal would be testing Gladly and not Gladys this Christmas.

“Say we put out twenty, twenty-five thousand bears for the test launch,” Diaz said, “which we’ve now got priced at a hundred and a quarter. If we see we’ve got a sure winner, we can drop the price to ninety-nine, keep her under that forbidding hundred-dollar price point. Mass-producing her will cost about a third of that, something like thirty-five dollars a bear, including the glasses, which are expensive to make. My guess is we’ll have sunk close to two million dollars in Gladys before we really begin marketing her. If we sell only a million bears next Christmas, you’re going to see some very long faces around here. But if she’s a big seller next year, she’ll be even bigger the year after that and the year after that and then we’re in clover. So I think you can see the urgency here.”

“Yes.”

“Of a decision on who owns what.”

“Yes.”

“So we can start moving. If we’re going to get those test bears out there plugging for us, the judge not only has to decide correctly he has to decide soon. So Brett wouldn’t have died for no reason at all.”

I missed the logic of this.

“Why weren’t you called as a witness?” I asked.

“At the hearing, do you mean?”

“Yes, the hearing.”

“From what I understand, Brett didn’t remember until it was too late.”

“Remember what?”

“That I’d been there at the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“When he told Lainie about his idea for the bear.”

“When you say ‘From what I understand...’”

“That’s what Etta told me.”

“When was that?”

“Last week sometime. After what happened.”

“After Brett’s murder, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Etta told you that he’d suddenly remembered...”

“Yes.”

“...the fact that you’d been there at this important meeting.”

“Yes. Well, I was there, you see.”

“Before the hearing, did you happen to mention this to either of the Tolands?”

“Well, Brett already knew I was there, you see. So I figured if he wanted me as a witness, he’d let me know.”

“But he didn’t, as it turned out.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Because apparently he’d forgotten all about it till the day he was murdered.”

“Apparently.”

“But you remembered being at the meeting.”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you still remember being there?”

“Well, of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

It is one of those steamy sulky September days in Florida, when everything and everyone seems wilted by the heat and the humidity and the promise of more heat and humidity. Bobby Diaz — he is familiarly called Bobby by everyone at Toyland — is working here in his office when Brett buzzes him and asks him to come down the hall a minute.

“Do you remember the actual date of this meeting?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Or the time.”

“I don’t remember, I’m sorry.”

But he does remember that it was in the afternoon sometime and that he had just taken a call from an insider at Toys “” Us who’d phoned to whisper in his ear that the company thought Toyland’s new video game, Rush to Judgment, was “entirely fresh.” In fact, he would’ve hurried down the hall to report this to Brett, anyway, even if Brett hadn’t buzzed him first.

“Down the hall” is where Brett’s huge corner-window office is. A secretary sits behind a desk in an anteroom adjoining it, but she scarcely glances up at Bobby as he raps his knuckles on her desk in passing greeting. Walking into Brett’s office is like walking into a rich kid’s playroom. There are toys and dolls and games strewn on every flat surface, including the floor. Brett himself sits behind a very large desk similarly covered with toys in various stages of development. As Bobby recalls it now, last September they were still searching for a good face for a doll they’d since abandoned, and a dozen or more models of the tiny doll’s head are scattered on Brett’s desk like the remnants of a mass decapitation. During the conversation that follows, Brett keeps rolling one of these miniature heads between his fingers. Bobby tells Brett the good...

“Was Lainie in the office when you got there?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Go ahead.”

He tells Brett the good news he’s just received from his informer at Toys “” Us, and Brett immediately gets on the phone to call, first, his wife in her own large (but not as large) office down the hall, and then Toyland’s sales manager, asking him to stand by for a possible confirming call and big order from Toys, and then his production manager in the Bradenton factory (which explains why there are no elves here in the Calusa building) to tell him they may have to up their initial run order on Rush, as the game is familiarly called in-house. Idly picking up two of the tiny doll heads, he asks Bobby to sit down, and offers him a wrapped mint from the jar he keeps on his desk (he’s just quit smoking for the fifth time). As Bobby unwraps the hard candy, Brett tells him all about this idea he’s had for a teddy bear.

Rolling the heads between his fingers the way Queeg rolled the stainless-steel marbles in The Caine Mutiny (but reforming smokers can be forgiven their little physical tics), Brett says that he suddenly remembered a hymn they used to sing in church when he was a Baptist growing up in Overall Patches, Tennessee...

“Did he actually say that?”

“No, no. I don’t know where he was from in Tennessee. I just made that up.”

“But you’re not making up the rest of this, are you?”

“Of course not. I’m telling it just the way I remember it.”

The way Brett remembers it in that meeting last year is that one of the lines in the hymn was either “Gladly the cross I’d bear” or “Gladly the cross I’ll bear,” either one of which referred to joyously carrying the cross for Jesus. It doesn’t matter what the line actually was, he says, it’s an old hymn in public domain. The only thing that matters so far as Toyland is concerned was that all the kids thought there was actually a cross-eyed bear named Gladly.

“What I’d like to do,” Brett says, “is come up with a cross-eyed teddy bear.”

Sucking on the mint, Bobby looks at him.

“A teddy bear with crossed eyes, okay?” Brett says.

“O-kay,” Bobby says slowly and skeptically.

“Which, when you put eyeglasses on him, the eyes get uncrossed.”

Bobby is beginning to get it.

“We tell the kids to kiss the bear on the nose and put the glasses on him, and all at once the bear’s eyes are straight,” Brett says.

“How do we do that?” Bobby asks.

“I don’t know how we do it. Am I a designer? We have this cuddly little bear who happens to have a handicap...”

“Visually challenged,” Bobby says.

“Strabismally challenged,” Brett says, nodding. “It’s called strabismus. When you’re cockeyed.”

“Must be millions of kids in America who have to wear glasses,” Bobby says, sucking pensively on the mint now, beginning to recognize the possibilities inherent in Brett’s brainstorm.

“And who hate wearing glasses,” Brett says. “This way we give them an incentive to wear glasses. Because they can see what the glasses do for the bear. The glasses fix the bear’s eyes.”

“I think it’s terrific,” Bobby says. “We’ll get endorsements from every optometry association in the world.”

“Who do we get to design her?”

“Lainie,” they both say at once.

Brett reaches for his phone.

Lainie has worn to work, on this insufferably hot day in September, a very short green mini, a darker green T-shirt with no bra, strappy green sandals to match. The heart-shaped ring is on her right pinky. She is bare-legged, and her blond hair is massed on top of her head, held up and away from her neck with a green plastic comb. She looks sticky and sweaty and somehow desirable...

“Well, she’s a very sexy girl, you know,” Bobby says now.

...and vulnerable, her wandering eye giving her a slightly dazed appearance. Bobby is fearful at first that her own affliction might cause her to bridle at the notion of a bear similarly handicapped, but, no, she takes to the idea at once, expanding upon it, even making a few on-the-spot sketches of what the bear might look like with and without glasses.

“Does Toyland’s finished bear look anything like those first sketches she made?”

“I don’t remember what those sketches looked like.”

“Do you recall exactly how Brett proposed the idea to her?”

“He told her essentially what he’d told me.”

“Do you know exactly what her response was?”

“I told you. She was very enthusiastic.”

“Yes, but her exact words.”

“I don’t remember.”

There seemed to be a lot of things Bobby Diaz didn’t remember. I wondered if he was related to Rosa Lopez, who claimed she’d seen O.J.’s Bronco parked on the street earlier than it could have been if he was out doing murder. Murders.

“How did the meeting end?”

“He told Lainie to get to work on it. Said he wanted drawings by the end of the month.”

“The end of last September?”

“Yes.”

“Working drawings?”

“I don’t remember if he said working drawings or not.”

“Did you see the drawings Lainie supposedly delivered by the end of the month?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you see any drawings Lainie delivered?”

“Well, I saw drawings. I don’t know if they were Lainie’s or not.”

“When did you first see these drawings?”

“Before we made up the prototype.”

“When was that exactly?”

“When I saw the drawings? Or when we made the bear?”

“The drawings.”

“I don’t remember.”

“When did you have a finished bear?”

“The prototype?”

“Yes.”

“In May sometime.”

“This past May.”

“Yes. We had a working model by the fifteenth.”

I remembered that Lainie claimed to have designed her bear in April.

“Lainie Commins left Toyland in January, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, I believe that’s when it was.”

“Did she discuss this with you?”

“What? Leaving Toyland?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you’re Toyland’s design chief, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“And she was working in the design department...”

“Yes.”

“So didn’t she tell you she was leaving?”

“Well, yes, I’m sure she did. I thought you meant did we discuss why she was leaving, or what she planned to do next, or...”

“Well, did you?”

“I told you. I don’t remember.”

“Did you ever see her again? After she left Toyland?”

Diaz hesitated.

“Did you?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

Which in Spanish was No me acuerdo.

Which, according to O.J.’s Dream Team, meant “No” in many Spanish dialects like Rosa Lopez’s.

Oh?

Sí.

The way Guthrie looked at it, women’s lib was the biggest con mankind had ever foisted on the female gender. First we — meaning Guthrie and every other conniving male in America — convinced women that they deserved the same sexual freedom men had enjoyed for centuries. This sounded good to the feminists. Why should men be the only ones to decide when sex was appropriate or indicated? Why shouldn’t women be the aggressors whenever they felt like it? Why shouldn’t women demand sex when they wanted it, initiate it when they wanted it, be the equals of men in every respect as concerned sex.

Men like Guthrie were very sympathetic to these attitudes and ideals.

Men like Guthrie agreed it was definitely unfair that for all these eons women had been used and/or abused sexually but had never been granted the opportunity of calling the shots themselves. Men like Guthrie agreed that this was a despicable situation. In repentance, they were willing to do everything within their power to see to it that women enjoyed equal sexual rights. This meant that women could introduce the sex act, and encourage the sex act, and follow through on the sex act, all without stigma, humiliation or disapprobation. Women thought this was terrific. Freedom at last. Men thought it was terrific, too, because it meant they were getting laid a lot more often with a lot less hassle.

And since there was now nothing wrong with going to bed with a man whenever the spirit moved one, so to speak, then why not take the liberation a step further and move in with a man who pleased a person spiritually and sexually besides? Why not indeed? Men encouraged this new notion. Whereas back in the Dark Ages, a man couldn’t get into a woman’s pants, so to speak, without pledging his troth to her and perhaps not even then, now it became possible for a man and a woman to live together on a sort of trial basis, which — if it worked out — might lead to marriage. But now that women had liberated themselves, there was no need for them even to be thinking about old-fashioned, restraining concepts like marriage. It was perfectly okay to share an apartment and incidentally to share the rent and the bills and everything else that went along with living together, vive la liberté! Et I’égalité, aussi.

Guthrie was all for women’s lib.

He also thought it was wonderful that women now felt so confident and secure that they could walk in the street practically naked or else wearing only clothes they used to wear under their clothes. Pick up a fashion magazine like Vogue or Elle or Harper’s Bazaar and you saw pictures of women wearing practically nothing at all, which only a few years ago would have got the publisher of Penthouse arrested, but which nowadays was an expression of female freedom, more power to them, and God bless them all.

The manager of the Silver Creek Yacht Club was a redhead named Holly Hunnicutt, which name Guthrie found provocative, and she was wearing a suit that looked like the sort frails used to wear when Guthrie was plying his trade back in the Big Bad Apple, a pale pastel-blue number with huge lapels and big breast pockets, you should pardon the expression. She was wearing the jacket over a short tight skirt, no stockings, just suntanned legs. Whenever she uncrossed those legs you could see Miami on a clear day. Under the jacket, she was wearing nothing but herself so that whenever she leaned over her desk, you could see Mount St. Helens in Washington even on a rainy day. Guthrie Lamb felt as if he were back in the pulp magazines again, the days of the pulp magazines, that is.

Holly Hunnicutt was too young to know what pulp magazines were. Guthrie guessed she was twenty-two, twenty-three years old, managing this swank yacht club here in one of Calusa’s more desirable areas, close to Manakawa County and Fatback Key. Guthrie himself lived in a rooming house not too far from Newtown, one of the city’s worst areas. He was wondering if Holly Hunnicutt — God, that name! — might be interested in one day visiting his cozy little room at the Palm Court, as it was aptly called since there were four spindly palm trees out front. Show her his newspaper clippings or something. His private-eye license. Which some people found quite impressive. Meanwhile, he was asking her whether anyone on Tuesday of last week had reported an outage of the light on top of the right-hand pillar at the entrance to the club.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Then the light was on that night?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Is there any way you could check?”

“Well, I guess I could call the electrician...”

“Yes, please do,” Guthrie said, and flashed his dazzling smile which had cost him twelve thousand dollars for implants, not to mention the time and the pain. Holly found the dental work impressive, he guessed. At least she smiled back at him and bent over her desk to punch a few buttons on the phone, causing her jacket to fall somewhat open again, which Guthrie, gentleman that he was, pretended not to notice.

Holly spent a few moments on the phone with someone named Gus, which was a good name for an electrician, as opposed to a private investigator, who should have a classy name like Guthrie, Guthrie felt. During that time, she ascertained that Gus had not in recent weeks changed any lightbulbs on either of the two pillars at the club’s entrance, and unless they had burned out last night after he’d gone home, they were still working. If she liked, he could circumvent the timer on the lights — which was set to go off at seven twenty-nine P.M. sunset in Calusa these days — and see if the lights came on now, which according to Guthrie’s watch was three-twenty P.M. Guthrie heard all of this because Gus the electrician was on the speakerphone. He heard Holly, in person, tell him “No, that won’t be necessary,” and then she hit a button on her phone, and Gus disappeared, and she crossed her long sleek legs and settled back in the big leather chair behind her desk, and smiled, and asked, “How else can I help you, Mr. Lamb?” which Guthrie felt was provocative, but did not say.

“I’d like to talk to any of your employees who were working here last Tuesday night, the twelfth,” Guthrie said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Very good,” Guthrie said, and smiled. “I hate mysteries as much as you do. What I’m trying to learn is whether any of them might have noticed a car parked just outside the entrance pillars last Tuesday night. On the right-hand side. Facing the club, that is. As you go in. Did you, for example, happen to notice such a car?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Which narrows the field,” Guthrie said, and smiled again.

But not considerably.

It turned out that the yacht club employed forty people, among whom, and in addition to Holly Hunnicutt herself, were an assistant club manager, a dockmaster and two dockhands, three security guards and a night watchman, an electrician — Gus, of course — four maintenance men, a restaurant manager and assistant manager, a bartender, a hostess, ten waiters and/or waitresses, a chef, three assistant chefs, two dishwashers and four busboys. Not all of these people had been working last Tuesday night. Two had called in sick, and one had gone back to Cuba.

Of the remaining thirty-seven, only ten had seen a car parked on the shoulder outside the club, but not at the hour Lainie Commins had specified. The time estimates varied, but they were consistent in being somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, rather than the ten-thirty Lainie had reported as the time she’d driven out of the club.

A waiter and a waitress who’d seen the car were reluctant to say so because they’d been outside necking, when they should have been in the restaurant helping to set up for Wednesday’s lunch. In any case, neither of them was of much help in identifying the car because they were otherwise busily occupied. The waiter seemed to remember pressing the waitress against the car as he fumbled under her skirt. She seemed to remember something hard, cold and metallic against her buttocks, but she may have been understandably confused.

The remaining eight waitresses were absolutely positive they had seen: a dark green Acura, a blue Infiniti, a black Jaguar, a bluish-black Lexus, a brown Mercedes, a blue Lincoln Continental, a black Cadillac, and/or a grayish BMW. All of them agreed there was no one in the car. All of them further agreed that the car’s lights were off. One of the assistant chefs said he’d seen the car — he was the one who claimed it was very definitely a blue GS 300 Lexus — at twenty after eleven when he’d stepped onto the road for a peaceful smoke, but that it was gone when he left for home at a little before midnight.

Most of which added up to zilch.

Guthrie walked to where he’d parked his own car — neither an Acura, Infiniti, Jaguar, Lexus, Mercedes, Lincoln Continental, Cadillac, nor Beamer, but instead a little red Toyota — unlocked the trunk, and took from it his Polaroid camera and his casting kit.

Then he went out to the shoulder of the road outside the club, where eight different witnesses had seen eight different cars at eight different times on the night Brett Toland was killed.

There are people who maintain that if you haven’t seen Calusa by boat, you haven’t seen Calusa at all. The house I was renting was on one of the city’s many beautiful canals, and the boat tied up at the dock was a sailboat I’d bought a few months before I got shot. When I was married to Susan, we owned a sailboat she’d named Windbag, but no one ever said she wasn’t clever. I might have named the new boat Windbag II, but Patricia was very touchy about my former wife, and so the boat still wasn’t named some seven months after I’d bought her.

Patricia, who doesn’t much care for boats, suggested the name Wet Blanket. Which is no worse than two lawyers I know who have boats respectively named Legal Ease and Legal Tender. Another of my friends owns both a discount furniture store and a boat with a big red mainsail. He calls her Fire Sail. A dentist I know has a high-powered speedboat he has named Open Wide. A gynecologist who has since been sent to prison for molesting one of his patients used to have a boat called Wading Room. Another doctor who is still around should have been sent to prison for naming his boat simply Dock.

In Calusa, Florida, there are as many cute names for boats as there are boats on the water. In the entire United States of America, in fact, there are almost as many cute names for boats as there are cute names for beauty salons. The naming of beauty salons and boats seems to bring out the worst instincts in everyone on the planet. Show me a city that does not have a beauty salon called Shear Elegance and I will show you a city that does not have a boat named Sir N. Dippity.

My partner Frank says I should name my new boat Wet Dream.

The boat, still unnamed, was bobbing on the water at the end of my dock that Tuesday night while Patricia and I sipped after-dinner cognacs on my screened-in patio. All the lights were out. A week ago at about this time, Brett Toland was getting himself shot, allegedly by my client. I put down my glass. I put my arm around Patricia. I kissed her.

Once upon a time...

But that was then.

We met at a motel on the South Tamiami Trail. We sneaked into the room like burglars and fell into each other’s arms as though we’d been apart for centuries rather than days, not even days, a day and a half, not even that, twenty-eight hours since we’d kissed goodbye yesterday morning. She was dressed for work, wearing a dark blue pinstripe tropical suit with wide lapels, “My gangster suit,” she called it, an instant before she hurled the jacket onto the bed. My hands had been on her from the moment the door clicked shut behind her, “Lock it,” she whispered under my lips, but I was unbuttoning the front of the long-sleeved white blouse instead, “Oh, Jesus, lock it,” she whispered, but I was sliding the tailored skirt up over her thighs, my hands reaching everywhere, my hands remembering her, my mouth remembering her, “Jesus,” she kept murmuring under my lips, we were both crazy, kicking off the high-heeled shoes, a garter belt under the skirt, dark blue stockings, “For you,” she whispered, “for you,” lowering her panties, silken and electric, the skirt bunched up above her waist, her legs wide, entering her, “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “Oh, Jesus,” I said, clutching her to me, pulling her onto me, enclosing, enclosed, “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “I’m coming,” she said, “this is crazy,” she said, “this is crazy,” I said, we were crazy, we were crazy, we were crazy.

But, as I said, that was then.

And this was now.

And now, Patricia returned my kiss gently, afraid I would break, and then put her head on my shoulder and said, “This is nice, Matthew, sitting here.”

“Yes,” I said.

In a little while, she told me she had a busy day ahead tomorrow...

“Yes, me too,” I said.

...and really ought to be running on home.

Before I got shot, mi casa was su casa and vice versa.

But that was then.

And this was now.