Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

8

He was trying to explain my condition to Patricia and me. What had been my condition. What my condition would be in the weeks ahead. What my condition could possibly become in the months ahead. The word “possibly” frightened me. I had just taken a mighty leap out of a very dark pit, what the hell did he mean by possibly? Patricia sat by the bed, gripping my hand.

Spinaldo explained that I had flat-lined briefly while they were attempting to remove the bullets from my chest...

“That’s not what you told us,” Patricia said.

Not for nothing was she the best prosecuting attorney in the entire state of Florida.

“When we were here at the hospital,” she explained, turning to me. “Frank and I.” She turned back to Spinaldo. “You told us there’d been a loss of blood to the brain for five minutes and forty seconds. That isn’t briefly.”

“No, it isn’t,” Spinaldo agreed. “But Mr. Hope has since reported that he recalls comments made during surgery...”

I did indeed.

Oh shit, he’s flat-lined... he’s in cardiac arrest... let’s pace him... Epinephrine... keep an eye on that clock... one cc, one to a thousand... still unobtainable...

“...and this would seem to indicate that he’d remained aware at some time during the arrest. I can only believe that the open cardiac massage we performed...”

Hands inside my chest. Massaging my naked heart.

“...did much to prevent total nonperfusion.”

“What’s nonperfusion?” Patricia asked.

I was letting her do all the talking.

I could think good, but it wasn’t coming out good.

“Total ischemia,” Spinaldo said.

Doctor talk. Worse than lawyer talk.

“And what’s that?”

Good old English. Good old Patricia. I squeezed her hand. Hard.

“Total loss of blood to the brain.”

“But you’re saying that didn’t happen.”

“It would appear so. I have to assume the brain was still getting something. You have to understand that the brain is the ultimate organ. It gets what it wants, and it gets it first, above all the other organs. It’s selfish. It has strategies for self-preservation in any crisis. The lidocaine helped, I’m sure. Turned what was most likely a ventricular tachycardia into a sinus tachycardia. But the brain was in there grabbing whatever oxygen it needed, struggling to autoregulate its blood supply. I’m guessing, of course. The point is... you were aware.”

There’d been darkness, there’d been intense light. There’d been unfathomable blackness, there’d been searing glare. There’d been no present, all was then. There’d been no past, all was now. Voices gone, concerned voices gone, lingering voices in the dark, voices swallowed in the then and the light. Whispering voices, pattering footfalls, flurries of movement, a circling of moths. Cold everywhere, hurting in the dark, shaking in the dark, sweating and hot...

Yes.

I’d been aware.

“Moreover,” Spinaldo said, “you began talking seven days after the cardiac arrest.”

“One word,” Patricia said.

She was thinking Seven days is a full week.

“Nonetheless. Any speech at all would indicate to me that his brainstem reflexes were intact, and that he was emerging out of a semicomatose state several days before he recovered full alertness.”

“Master of suspense,” Patricia said, and squeezed my hand again.

I did not feel like the master of anything at the moment.

I could not remember what had happened to me.

Everyone kept telling me I’d been shot.

Spinaldo said I would probably never remember all the details of the actual event. Spinaldo said this had to do with the way memory is moved from so-called short-term areas to long-term areas, where hardwired recollection is summoned up either consciously or unconsciously.

Here’s a loss-of-memory joke from the good doctor:

“The nice thing about recovering from a coma is that you get to meet new people every day.”

Some joke.

This was a week after I blinked up into his face.

I was already beginning to lose hope.

Guthrie Lamb could have chosen to become a cop instead of a private investigator, but the money wasn’t as good. Also, he hated all the paramilitary bullshit that was part and parcel of being a police officer. Guthrie hated any organization that evaluated a person by the uniform he was wearing. This was why he much preferred the company of naked broads.

Even so, he was forced to work with cops because there was no way he could otherwise get access to police and FBI files. This was a serious failing of the private-eye business. You had to depend on the people who were really empowered to investigate murders and such.

In fact, the last time Guthrie had ever heard of a private eye solving a murder case was never. It was one thing to gather information for an attorney who was defending a poor soul charged with murder, but it was quite another thing to be hired by some old tycoon who wanted you to find out who had murdered his beautiful blond daughter. Guthrie had never been hired by an old tycoon. Tell the truth, he had rarely come across too many beautiful blond daughters, either, dead or alive. What Guthrie did mostly was skip-tracing, or tailing wayward husbands for some woman wanted a divorce, or looking for some guy went out for a cup of coffee, didn’t come back in five years, his wife was beginning to get a little worried. Never once in his lifetime as a Famous Detective had he ever been hired to find out who’d killed somebody.

Even working for Matthew Hope this way — who seemed like a nice guy, by the way, except he’d got chintzy about Guthrie’s hourly rate, which, okay, it wasn’t the fifty an hour Guthrie had mentioned, but Hope could at least have gone to forty-seven fifty, couldn’t he? No, he’d stuck to what he was paying Warren Chambers, whoever the hell he was, and if he was so good why wasn’t Hope using him this time? Guthrie hated hassling over money. It made a person seem mercenary.

But even on a case like this one, which was in fact a murder case, Guthrie wasn’t actually looking for a murderer, he was simply looking for an automobile that may or may not have been parked outside the yacht club while a murder was being committed. Unless, of course, the person who’d left the car there was also the person who’d done the murder, in which case it could be said that Guthrie was, after all, looking for a murderer, though to tell the truth that would be stretching it.

A private eye was a private eye, period.

In the old days, when Guthrie was first starting in this business, the police were definite enemies. There wasn’t a time back then that the police wouldn’t at one point or another accuse the private eye himself of being the murderer, can you imagine? Big bulls from Homicide would drop in on him, maybe rough him up a little, haul him downtown to the cop shop, throw a scare into him, warn him to stay out of their way and keep his nose clean. If it wasn’t for the cops back then, any self-respecting private eye could have solved the most complicated murder case in ten seconds flat. But no, the cops were always interfering, making it difficult for a hard-working, hard-drinking shamus to get his job done.

Nowadays, the cops seemed actually glad to see him.

Broke the routine, you know?

Guy coming in from left field with a plaster cast of a tire track, this was impressive. At least, that’s what Detective Nick Alston said to him at nine forty-four that Wednesday morning, when Guthrie unveiled his handiwork, first snipping the white cord he’d tied around his package, and then peeling off the layers of brown wrapping paper to reveal — ta-ra!

“That’s very impressive,” Alston said. “Where’d you get that?”

“I made it myself,” Guthrie said proudly.

“No kidding? That’s very impressive.”

Alston had never been what anyone would call handsome, but the last time Guthrie had seen him, his brown eyes were shot with red, and his craggy face looked puffy and bloated, and his straw-colored hair looked stringy, and there was a beard stubble on his face, and it was plain to see he’d already begun drinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Today, at nine forty-five now, he was clean-shaven, and he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and tie over a pristine white button-down shirt, and his hair was combed, and he looked... well... presentable.

Guthrie was impressed, too.

He basked in the glow of Alston’s approval of the cast he’d made at the scene, feeling very much like a sixth-grade pupil showing a clay ashtray to his teacher. The cast really was a very good one, if Guthrie said so himself. Sometimes they turned out lousy. But Guthrie had first sprayed shellac over the tire track in the sandy soil on the shoulder of the road, and then had used only the very finest grade of art plaster of Paris for his mixture. He had spread it over the water in the bowl, not stirring it, permitting it instead to sink eventually to the bottom of the bowl, and only then adding more plaster until the water couldn’t soak up anything further. After he’d poured the mixture onto the track, eyeballing it to a thickness of three-eighths of an inch or so, he reinforced it with snippets of twigs and twine and a few toothpicks for good luck, carefully laying on the material so that none of it touched the track itself. Pour on another layer of plaster, allow it to harden — you knew this was happening when it got warm to the touch — and voilà! The perfect specimen lying on Alston’s desk.

“So what would you like me to do with this fine work of art here?” Alston asked.

Guthrie knew he was joking.

Or hoped he was.

“Nick,” he said, “I would like you to seek a match in either your own files or the Feeb files. I have Polaroids, too,” he said, and dropped a thick manila envelope onto Alston’s desk. “I would like you to do me that favor, Nick.”

“How’s Gracie these days?” Alston asked casually.

Gracie was a hooker Guthrie had once sent around to Alston’s place as a favor when he was still a falling-down drunk.

“She’s fine. Asked about you just the other day, in fact.”

Alston said nothing for several moments. Then, still looking down at the plaster cast, he said, “I’d like her to see me sober.”

“Done,” Guthrie said. “I’ll send her over tonight.”

“No, just tell her I’ll call,” Alston said.

“Happy to,” Guthrie said, and waited.

“What’s this in reference to?” Alston asked, opening the envelope and looking at the very good Polaroids Guthrie had taken, if he said so himself.

“A homicide,” Guthrie said. “I’m working for the defense attorney.”

“Who?”

“Matthew Hope.”

“What happened to Warren Chambers?” Alston asked.

What they do is they treat you like an invalid. Which is what you are. This means that the moment I began speaking, they started a daily assessment of my functional status in addition to my neurological status. Test after test after test, tests enough to bend the mind and twist the tongue. Let us consider, for example, the Post Traumatic Amnesia Scale, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Bender-Gestalt Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, all designed to determine the extent of injury or lack thereof.

They shave your scalp with an abrasive, and with elasticized tape they attach needle electrodes to it. Ten to twenty small electrodes on the scalp in a defined spacing. You feel like Frankenstein’s monster waiting for the bolt of lightning that will make you come alive. In metabolic insults such as mine...

Spinaldo kept using the term “metabolic insult.” I felt I should challenge him to a duel.

...in metabolic insults such as mine, then, the electroencephalogram usually shows slow diffuse waves. Recovery occurs in tandem with the resolution of slow waves toward normal brain wave patterns.

Every day, Spinaldo told me I was on the way to recovery.

I kept wondering when that would be.

The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up around the slip where Toy Boat was nudging the dock, but I had called the State Attorney’s Office beforehand, and had been told by Pete Folger that the prosecution had already gathered all the evidence it needed, and that I could visit the boat anytime I wished. I was surprised, therefore, to see a uniformed police officer standing at the head of the gangway as Andrew and I approached that Wednesday morning.

I told him who we were, and handed him a card.

He told us who he was, and explained that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had asked the police department to send an officer down to “extend every courtesy to Attorney Hope.” This was code. What it meant was “Stay with him every minute and make sure he doesn’t do anything that will damage our case against Lainie Commins.”

I told the officer — whose name was Vincent Gergin, according to the black plastic nameplate over the breast pocket of his blouse — that my associate and I merely wanted to take some Polaroids of the crime scene with a view toward better orientation. I also told him we might look around the boat a bit to see if there was anything the S.A.’s Office might have overlooked. He said, “No problem.”

I hate that expression.

I said, “Fine. In that case, we’ll go aboard.”

He said, “Fine. In that case, I’ll just go with you.”

We all went down the gangway and onto the boat.

Andrew was there for the very same reason he’d accompanied me when we talked to Folger’s witnesses. Whichever one of us later tried the case, the other would be called as a witness to whatever we happened to discover on the boat this morning. Quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find a damn thing. Say what you will about the office Skye Bannister runs, his investigators and criminologists are enormously efficient in picking a crime scene clean.

Here was the cockpit where Lainie and Brett had sat — according to her — from ten to ten-thirty. Here was where he had made a generous offer, according to her, or a merely insulting offer, according to his widow. Here was where, according to Lainie’s first story, she’d sipped Perrier that (oh-yes-I-remember-now) turned into a couple of vodka-tonics in her next version. Here was where she’d given Brett her Top-Siders and her scarf, something she’d neglected to tell me at first, which scarf was later found by the police in the boat’s master bedroom. She had not remembered the scarf until the police questioned her about it the following morning. She had not remembered either the scarf or the shoes until I later questioned her about them.

I was wondering now what else she had forgotten to tell me.

Perhaps prompted by the Tolands’ obsession with keeping their decks pristine, I now took off my own shoes and asked Andrew to remove his as well. Officer Gergin looked at us both as if we were slightly deranged and made not the slightest move to unlace his highly polished black brogans.

We all went below.

There is something about a room where a murder has been committed. This was not in actuality a “room”; there are no rooms as such aboard seagoing vessels, although “staterooms” are called rooms and “shower rooms” are called rooms, but these are truly compartments, as was this “dining saloon” we passed through which was, in fact, a dining room. Enough already. Shoeless, we padded in our socks to the master stateroom, Gergin clumping along behind us in his thick-soled regulation shoes.

If there is one area aboard a boat that truly looks like a room, it is the stateroom. Perhaps this is because it’s dominated by a bed, in this case a queen-size bed with cabinets flanking it and reading lights above it. The master bath, or the “en suite head” as it was nautically called, was on the port side of the bed, and there was a bank of dressers and several closets on the starboard side. Just opposite the foot of the bed, and flanking the entrance door to the cabin, there were glass-doored, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

“We’ll be taking pictures in here,” Andrew said.

“No problem,” Gergin said.

I normally feel like strangling people who say “No problem” or, especially, “Hey, no problem.” What the phrase really means is, “Yes, there is ordinarily a problem in honoring such a request, but in this single instance, and however irritating it may be, an exception will be made, although it is truly a severe pain in the ass.”

That is what “No problem” means.

And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

“We’ll be looking around, too,” I said.

“For what?”

“Don’t know.”

“No problem,” Gergin said, and shrugged, and then planted himself squarely in the door to the stateroom, where he could watch Andrew taking his pictures and me rummaging around.

Two shots to the head, the coroner’s report had said.

A third that had missed.

No stench of cordite here.

But the place reeked of murder.

The chalked outline of Brett Toland’s body was traced on the carpet alongside the bed. Bloodstains had turned black on the carpet. Raw wood showed where the third bullet had been pried from the wall alongside the bathroom door.

Gergin yawned while Andrew took his Polaroid pictures.

This was where the police had found Lainie’s scarf.

I didn’t know where to begin.

I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

I started in the bathroom, looking in the cabinet under the sink and finding nothing but extra rolls of toilet paper and boxes of Kleenex and a six-pack of Irish Spring soap bars. I then looked in the mirrored cabinet over the sink and found several toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste and a wide assortment of nonprescription medicines, and several prescription drugs as well, but nothing that would help me to prove my client was innocent of the crime with which she’d been charged.

If that was what I was looking for.

Andrew was still taking pictures.

I went to the cabinet on the starboard side of the bed, and opened the latched door. There was a pair of pompommed slippers with low heels on the floor of the cabinet. Nothing else. I closed the door and slid open the drawer above it. A pair of reading glasses, a packet of tissues, a tube of lipstick. I figured this was Etta Toland’s side of the bed.

I went around to Brett’s side.

Ran the same search of the cabinet base and drawer, and found nothing of importance. But I wondered if this was where he’d stored the forty-five that had later been used to kill him.

Walked back to the combination bookcase and entertainment center fitted with a television set, a VCR, and a CD player.

Started looking through the books.

Pulled out a copy of Great Expectations. Leafed through it. Placed it back on the shelf. Found The Rubaiyat. Blew dust off it. Opened it. Flipped through it. People sometimes tucked letters or scraps of paper into books. But there was nothing. The dust wrappers had been removed from all of the books. Not uncommon on a boat, where moisture caused paper to twist and curl. Took down a copy of Stephen King’s It. Big book, some two and a half inches thick. Black cover with the initials SK in red in the lower right-hand corner. Opened the book. Closed it, or It, put it back on the shelf. Started looking at some other books. Blew dust off them. Leafed through them. Put them back on the shelves again. There were a lot of books here. Hundred best books in the English language, it looked like. Some of them never read, judging by the dust on them. Began looking through the videocassettes in their black vinyl cases. The cover art on one of them showed a woman’s hands spread over the crotch of her lacy white panties. The ring on her pinky...

“How long you guys gonna be down here?” Gergin asked.

I put the cassette back on the shelf.

“You can leave us if you’re bored,” I said.

“Hey, no problem,” he said.

“We won’t be stealing anything.”

“Who said you would? It’s just it’s a little stuffy down here, the air-conditioning off and all.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs?” I suggested. “Get yourself some air.”

“No, that’s okay,” he said.

I looked at some other cassettes.

Gergin scratched his ass.

“Did you get any pictures of the cockpit?” I asked Andrew.

“Do we need any?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and looked him dead in the eye.

We’d been working together for a good long time.

“Okay to go up alone?” he asked Gergin.

Gergin smelled a rat.

The wrong one.

“I’ll go with you,” he said, and they both left the stateroom.

I waited till I heard Gergin’s heavy footfalls on the topside deck. I took the cassette down from the shelf again. It was titled Idle Hands. The ring on the woman’s right pinky finger was identical to Lainie’s Victorian seal ring with its heart-shaped face and its floret-covered band.

Without a second’s hesitation, I lifted my jacket and tucked the cassette into my trousers against the small of my back.

This was embarrassing.

Three attorneys who represented a person, watching a compromising videotape of that person. Idle Hands indeed. A tape that could easily be defined as pornography by prevailing community standards in that Lainie Commins, all by herself and looking quite cockeyed without her glasses on (or anything else but white panties and a gold Victorian ring, for that matter), was exposing her genitals, pubic area, buttocks and breasts below the top of the nipples, with less than a full opaque covering; was engaging as well in masturbation, which act constituted the commission of an abominable and detestable crime against nature, or suggested that such a crime was being or would be committed; was also exposing her genitals in a presumed state of sexual stimulation or arousal; all of this presumably done willfully (as witness the knowing albeit goofy smile on her face), which activities predominately appealed to the prurient, shameful or morbid interests, and were without serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Boy oh boy.

“Are you telling me you slipped this tape under your jacket while the cop was topside?” Frank asked.

“I did.”

“Boy oh boy,” he said.

“Do you intend to show this to the state attorney?” Andrew asked.

I merely looked at him.

“In which case,” he suggested, “I guess we’d better ask Miss Commins about it.”

Lainie arrived at our offices on Heron Street at a little before two that afternoon. She explained that we’d caught her working and asked us to please excuse the jeans, sandals and T-shirt she was wearing. She was also wearing the omnipresent Victorian ring on the pinky of her right hand. I asked her to please have a seat, and then I put the Idle Hands tape in our VCR, told her we were going to step outside for fifteen, twenty minutes, and asked her to hit the PLAY button after we were gone.

A half hour later, we rejoined her.

“So?” I said.

“Where’d you get this?” she asked.

“In the master stateroom of the Toland boat.”

“Yeah,” she said, and nodded bleakly.

We all looked at her. Andrew seemed not to understand quite what was going on. Then again, he was but a mere callow youth. I was wondering what Lainie meant by “Yeah.” She didn’t seem ready to amplify just yet. Frank caught my eye. The prompt, he was saying. Give the lady the prompt.

“Did you know this tape was on the boat?” I asked.

She hesitated, trying to determine which of the three of us would be most sympathetic to her story. I was guessing she was guessing Andrew. Instead, she pitched it to Frank.

“He was trying to blackmail me,” she said.

“Toland?” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“He showed you this tape, and...?”

“No.”

“Then...?”

“Said he had it.”

“Said he had a video of you in the nude?”

“Said he had this video,” she said, and nodded at the cassette vehemently, as if willing it to burst into flame — as well it might have, considering its subject matter.

“But he didn’t show it to you?”

“No.”

“Just said he had it.”

All of this from Frank in his clipped, no-nonsense New Yorker style. Sometimes I admired him.

“Yes, just said he had it. Showed me the case, the holder, whatever the hell it’s called, with my hands on the cover. But it was empty. Told me he’d have been stupid to bring the actual cassette there to the boat with him. Told me it was safe at home. Warned me that unless I dropped the infringement suit, all of kiddieland would learn about that tape.”

“All of...?”

“Kiddieland. He meant everyone in the toy world. He would let it be known that the woman designing toys for children... well... was... well... doing what... what you saw me doing on the tape.”

“And out the window goes your teddy bear,” Andrew said, nodding.

“No,” she corrected. “Out the window goes my life.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“When was what?”

“When did he tell you he had this tape?”

“While we were sitting upstairs.”

“In the cockpit?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking...”

“Yes.”

“Engaged in pleasant conver—”

“Until he tried to blackmail me.”

“But until then...”

“Until then, yes, he was telling me he thought he knew a way out of our problems, thought we could settle my claim without lawyers, and so on.”

“Is that when he mentioned the tape?”

“Yes.”

“Was this before or after he carried your shoes and your scarf down to the master stateroom?”

“I didn’t know where he carried them.”

“But before or after?”

“After. He took my stuff with him when he went down for the drinks.”

“Did you know which tape he was referring to?” Frank asked.

“Yes.”

“You knew this tape existed?”

“Well, of course I knew,” she said, and turned to Andrew with an exasperated look on her face.

Andrew shrugged sympathetically.

“I mean, this wasn’t Candid Camera,” she said.

“When was this taped?” Frank asked.

“Earlier this year. Sometime in March.”

“Who shot it?”

“Man I met.”

“Who?”

“Listen,” she said, “I’m not on the witness stand here.”

“Thank God you’re not,” Frank said.

“Lainie,” I said gently, “would you like to tell us about it?”

The way Lainie tells it — and she tells it exceptionally well, first removing her eyeglasses to heighten the Poor Little Cockeyed but Extravagantly Sexy Waif look — the bills begin mounting and the savings begin dwindling the moment she leaves her weekly-paycheck job with Toyland back in January. Her own business, Just Kidding, is not yet established and there is an unexpected dearth of the freelance assignments she was hoping for — in fact, counting on...

“I didn’t think it would be that difficult,” she said. “I had a track record and a good reputation, and I figured the jobs would just pour in. Frankly, I even began wondering if the Tolands weren’t engaging in a little industrial sabotage. Bad-mouth me in the trade, you know, in hope I’d come back when I was on the ropes. The thing is, Toyland is the only game in town down here, so I was sending résumés to people who’d known me in New York or on the Coast, trolling, you know, networking, and it was taking a long time for people to get back to me. Meanwhile, the bucks were shrinking and...”

Getting a bit desperate, she begins searching the want ads, first for any kind of job requiring an artistic background — a graphic designer for an ad agency, for example, or an art director for a magazine — and next for any job with the descriptive word “creative” in its newspaper listing, as for instance designing daily menus for a restaurant. The difficulty is that she’s looking for something part-time, so that she can continue designing on her own while earning enough money to pay the mounting bills. She left the job at Toyland with two thousand dollars in savings. By the end of February, she is down to six hundred dollars and is scanning the ads advertising for part-time waitresses or hostesses or cashiers or landscape assistants or...

And her eye stops.

The ad reads:

“I thought it was legitimate,” she says now. “Besides...”

...ever since she moved to Florida, she’s spent a lot of time on the beach... well, her house on North Apple is merely a five-minute drive or a twenty-minute walk to the Whisper Key Beach... and surely the thong swimsuit she used to wear before the Calusa P.D. cracked down on such “indecent exposure” as they’d labeled it, was very close to parading around in lingerie, wasn’t it? In fact, rather more revealing than any lingerie she ever wore in the privacy of her own bedroom or under her clothes on the street. Besides, she truly does think the ad is legitimate, a wholesaler or retailer seeking someone to model famous imported brands like Chantelle or Lise Charmel or Hanro of Switzerland. She’s always felt she had a fairly decent figure, so why not use it to good advantage now in a part-time job paying excellent wages.

She calls the number listed at the bottom of the ad.

A well-spoken woman who sounds somewhat matronly and British explains that the job is modeling very expensive lingerie like Chantal Thomass or Rien or Wacoal in a retail venue — the exact word she uses, “venue” — at flexible hours, and at a starting rate of thirty dollars an hour. She asks how old Lainie is...

“Thirty-three,” she says.

“Mm,” the woman says.

Lainie catches her breath.

“It’s just that most of our mannequins are younger,” the woman says.

“What age were you looking for?”

“Well, most of our mannequins are in their early twenties.

O-kay, Lainie thinks, and immediately figures she’s out of the running. Thirty-three. Ancient in the lingerie-modeling trade.

“But I do have a very youthful figure,” she says.

“Would you feel comfortable telling me your dimensions?” the woman asks in her pleasant voice with its mild British accent.

“Thirty-four, twenty-five, thirty-four. B cup.”

“You don’t have any visible scars or blemishes, do you?”

“No,” she says, and wonders if she should mention her wandering right eye, but that’s neither a scar nor a blemish, though it’s been a pain in the ass all her life.

“Tattoos?” the woman asks.

Tattoos? Lainie thinks.

“No,” she says. “No tattoos.”

“Although some of our mannequins do have tattoos,” the woman says. “Discreet ones, of course. A tiny butterfly on the shoulder. A little rose on the hip.”

“I don’t have any of those.”

But I can get one, she thinks. If a tattoo is required, just let me know, I’ll run out and...

“Well,” the woman says, and is silent for what seems an inordinately long time, no doubt studying the statistics she’s written down, no doubt trying to determine whether a thirty-three-year-old woman with a mere B cup and no tattoos is suitable for modeling higher priced lingerie like Simone Perele or Aubade or Gossard.

“You’re not married, are you?”

“No,” Lainie says at once.

“Mm,” the woman says. “Is there anyone who’d be likely to object to your modeling lingerie?”

“No,” she says.

Why would they? she wonders.

“Then do you think you’d like to come in for an interview?”

“Yes, I would,” Lainie says. “Yes.”

She waits.

“What would be a convenient time for you?” the woman asks.

The offices of Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., are in a strip mall on U.S. 41, situated at street level between a pet shop and a garden supply store. Lainie parks her white Geo nose-in, facing a battery of lawn mowers and spreaders, garden hoses on reels, huge sacks of fertilizer and seed, and variously priced rakes, hoes and spades racked against the front window of the store. In the pet shop on the other side of Buttercup, white puppies frolic and a very fat fluffy kitten dozes in the glancing afternoon sun. She raps on the glass. The kitten doesn’t stir.

The flowers painted onto the plate-glass windows flanking the entrance door to Buttercup resemble sunflowers more than any buttercups Lainie has ever seen. She wonders immediately if the company would like her to design a new logo for the window The lettering is none too elegant, either. It is the simplest form of graphic, what graffiti writers called Bubble, a sort of ballooning, overlapping face that any child could master in moments, a totally inappropriate font for a firm specializing in high-style lingerie. She would have chosen something like DESDEMONA (and here she visualizes it in her head) or HARRINGTON (again visualizing it) as more appropriate to the nature of the business.

She does not yet know what the nature of the business actually is.

The man who interviews her is perhaps thirty years old, a good-looking man dressed in a white linen suit and white patent-leather shoes, wearing under the suit jacket a vibrant blue cotton sports shirt, open at the throat, no tie. He looks like he just stepped out of the pages of GQ, his black hair slicked back wetly in a look too fashionable for staid Calusa. Pleasantly, cordially, he offers her a chair in front of his wide desk — ebony top, polished chrome legs and trim — and sits in a black leather chair with the same chrome appointments as the desk, a mate to the chair in which Lainie sits and crosses her legs demurely. She is wearing a straw-colored suit, lighter panty hose, a mossy-green silk blouse, low-heeled sandals of the same color. The office is modestly but nicely decorated, modern prints on the walls, a pair of Chagalls, one Calder. A triangular black plastic nameplate on his desk announces C. WILSON in white letters.

“Call me Chris,” he says, and smiles. “So,” he says, “I understand you’re interested in modeling for Buttercup.”

“Yes,” she says. “But I do have some questions about the job.”

“Certainly,” he says. “What would you like to know?”

“Well, it doesn’t involve any traveling, does it?”

“What do you mean by traveling? You would have to travel back and forth to the venue, of course.”

The word venue again.

“Do you have transportation?”

“Yes, I have my own car.”

“Good.”

“But I meant traveling out of town,” she says. “Would the job entail...?”

“Oh no. No, no, no,” he says, reassuring her with his pleasant smile. “All of the venues are right here in Calusa. Most of them on the Trail, in fact.”

Meaning U.S. 41, the Tamiami Trail, which is good because what she wants to do is spend most of her day in the studio on North Apple, designing toys while she does this modeling thing only part-time. This seems to suit Mr. Wilson quite well... Chris... since the venues are open from twelve noon to two A.M., and she can more or less choose her own work schedule depending on how much time she wishes to spend at it and how much money she chooses to earn...

“It’s all entirely flexible, you see, entirely dependent on you yourself, Lainie... if I may call you Lainie,” he says. “Which is a very pretty name, by the way, if you choose to use it.”

“I’m sorry?” she says.

“Some of our mannequins prefer using different names.”

“Different?”

“Other than their own names.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Personal idiosyncrasies,” he says, and shrugs.

She still does not smell a rat.

By this time in her recitation, Matthew and Frank are way ahead of the pleasantly smiling Mr. Wilson. Even young Andrew seems to have caught the drift. But Lainie, to hear her tell it, is still blissfully unaware.

“We do insist on a minimum of four hours a day.”

Which would be perfect, she thinks. Four hours a day in a five-day week would come to twenty hours a week at thirty dollars an hour, for a total of six hundred dollars a week. Her fixed expenses are something like twenty-five hundred a month, so, actually, this would work, particularly if she could choose her own...

“There should be some lingerie in your size in the dressing room,” Mr. Wilson says.

Chris says.

She blinks at him.

“We stock only the finest imported brands,” he says, “Felina, lejaby, Jezebel, La Perla, I wonder if you’d mind trying something on for me? Just any bra, garter belt and panties, whichever color suits you. There’s matching hosiery in there as well,” he says, “you’ll find it. If you’ll tell Clarice your shoe size...”

Who’s Clarice? she wonders.

“...she’ll bring you a pair of heels as well.”

Smiling pleasantly.

“You mean you want me to... uh... try it on now?”

“If you would.”

“Well, I... I didn’t know I’d be...”

“If you’d prefer coming back some other time...”

“No, no. It’s just...”

“Whatever makes you comfortable,” he says.

Chris says.

“Well... did you want me to come back in here?” she asks. “After I’m dressed?”

“Yes.”

Undressed, she thinks.

“In the lingerie?” she says.

In my underwear, she thinks. Their underwear, actually, she thinks. Buttercup’s high-priced line of underwear. But thirty dollars an hour, she thinks.

“Yes,” Chris says. “Because that’s what you’d be doing, you know,” he says. “Modeling lingerie, you see. For upward of thirty dollars an hour.”

Still smiling.

Upward of thirty, she thinks.

“Well...” she says.

“Maybe you’d like to think it over?” Chris says, and starts to rise.

“No, no,” she says. “Hey, I guess you have to see what I look like.”

“Only if you feel comfortable about it.”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

“Shall I ask Clarice to come in then?”

“Sure.”

“Show you where the dressing room is?”

“Sure.”

Clarice, she learns, is a nineteen-year-old college dropout who is trying to earn enough money so she can go to Jackson, Wyoming, “away from this freakin heat,” she says, where she can become a ski instructor, though she’s never skied in her life. She tells Lainie that she only helps out here once a week because she and Chris have a sort of a thing going, but most of the time she models under the name of Kristal at a venue on the South Trail and Beaver Street, “appropriate, huh?” she says, and smiles a dazzling teenybopper smile, and still Lainie doesn’t catch on, sweet little cockeyed girl who grew up singing hymns in l’il ole Winfield, Alabama.

What is finally explained to her by Clarice is that Buttercup Enterprises, Inc., runs a string of lingerie-modeling shops along the Trail. These shops have names like Satin and Lace, or Midnight Lingerie, or Silk ‘n’ Garters, or Lace Fantasies, and their ostensible purpose is to sell lingerie. Toward that end, the chain employs what Clarice calls “a bevy of young girls” to model the lingerie for potential customers. All of these potential customers are men who pay an initial fee of fifty dollars a half hour for the privilege of seeing these girls in their scanties. Of this fifty, the house takes thirty-five and the girls get fifteen. An hour-long session costs ninety-five dollars, of which the house gets sixty-five. The modeling takes place in cubbyhole rooms — two at some locations, more at others — clustered around the main showroom. There are low platforms in these rooms and the girls stand on these platforms while they parade their wares. Nobody ever buys lingerie.

What the men who frequent these shops pay for is a variety of services...

“No touching allowed,” Clarice says, “supposedly.”

...ranging from a slow striptease for which every article of clothing dropped costs another ten dollars over the initial entrance fee, to stripping oneself while the girl gyrates, which costs another ten dollars, to masturbating while the girl lies on the platform and spreads her legs to you...

“Twenty dollars for that privilege,” Clarice explains,

...to allowing the girl to take your penis between her breasts...

“This is not considered touching,” Clarice explains, “since her hands never make contact with the organ.”

...subsequently stroking the client to climax mammillarily, to coin a phrase, which — speaking of coin — costs another fifty dollars. Since this usually occurs after the girl has taken off her bra for ten, this means she earns an additional sixty for a half-hour Tit Job, as it is known on the circuit, a total of seventy-five dollars all told, or ninety for a full hour. The girls prefer negotiating up front for whichever little service they’re going to perform, carefully explaining to the client that no one is selling sex here...

“Ha!” Clarice says.

...and that touching is strictly prohibited by law.

“Some of the men like the slow strip while they jack off,” she says, “they like being teased, you know, enjoy tossing the ten-dollar bills on the platform each time they order you to take off another piece of clothing, makes them feel like big financiers. Some of them like you to take off just the panties and spread for them while they do their number. There are girls who tell me they actually like the tit jobs, ick, because they’re not just gyrating while some guy does himself. Maybe they have sensitive breasts, which I don’t. Even so. I mean, ick. Some weeks, I go home with three, four thousand dollars, it depends on how many hours I want to work, and how far I want to go, because — just between you, me, and the lamppost — if nobody’s looking, a handjob or even a blowjob isn’t entirely out of the question provided the guy is nice and the price is right. This doesn’t mean you have to do anything you don’t want to do. “You’re hired to model lingerie, and if that’s all you want to do, the guy comes in and sits down in a chair, and you model whichever lingerie he asks you to put on — there’s a screen in the room, you dress and undress behind it and you get your fifteen bucks for the half, or thirty for the full, which is a lot better than you get at McDonald’s, honey, believe me. What’s your shoe size?”

At first, Lainie is astonished.

She listens to all this while she is putting on a black garter belt and sheer black panties and a black Wonderbra, fastening the garter snaps front and back to black nylons, listening in amazement to all that Clarice tells her, wondering what she’s supposed to do when she goes back into Mr. Wilson’s office. Chris’s office. Chris with whom Clarice has “a sort of a thing going.” Will she have to do a little dog and pony act for him, prove to him that she will be a moneymaker at one of his little sex emporiums called Nylon Legs or whatever the hell?

She has passed these little shops in the strip malls along the Trail, the discreet orange neon OPEN sign in the window, but she actually believed they were legitimately selling lingerie to women, and that the “models” advertised in the window were genuine models in some sort of trunk show that moved from store to store. Calusa is, after all, the city where women are arrested for wearing thong bikinis on the beach. It is also the city where a famous comedian was arrested for masturbating in a pornographic movie theater. So how can these thin disguises for whorehouses be allowed to stay in business? Because, yes, that is what these are. They are whorehouses. And, in effect, she is being asked to become a whore. That is, if she does anything more than merely pose for the nice gentlemen callers.

As she takes the size seven, very high-heeled pumps Clarice hands to her, she remembers that this is the nation where Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired as Surgeon General because she dared to suggest that schoolchildren be taught the meaning of masturbation. Not taught how to masturbate, no one even remotely suggested that. And she remembers that right here in Calusa the famous comedian was convicted for the heinous crime he’d committed — whereas the theater was still open and still showing dirty movies. America.

Besides, she needs the money.

The following Monday night, she begins working as Lori Doone in a shop called Silken Secrets, and in six hours, from eight P.M. to two A.M., she earns ninety dollars without once having to take off a single article of clothing and certainly without once touching anyone, which she carefully explains is strictly prohibited by law.

——Then how about touching yourself?

——No, we’re not allowed to do that.

——Be worth fifty to me if you took off your panties and showed me how you do yourself.

——I’m sorry, we’re not permitted to do that.

——Jenny does it for me.

——She’d get fired if anyone found out.

——Come on, who’d ever know?

——They make spot checks.

“How long were you doing this?” Frank asked.

“Only until I did the video.”

“What do you mean?”

“A photographer came in one night.”

“What’s his name?”

“Why do you have to know?”

“We don’t, Frank.”

“All right, we don’t. Tell us what happened.”

“He said I could make some very good money if I posed for a video.”

“This video?”

“Yes. As it turned out.”

“Did you know what kind of video it would be?”

“I had an idea.”

“When did you learn precisely what he had in mind?”

“He made it clear.”

“When?”

“That same night. The money was good.”

“What did he pay you?”

“A thousand dollars. For what turned out to be a half-hour’s work. He edited it down to fifteen minutes later. There were three other girls on the tape. I know them all, one of them is only sixteen.”

“When did he shoot the video?”

“That same week.”

“Where?”

“He has a studio not far from here. On Wedley.”

“Did he pay you the money?”

“In advance.”

“What did you think he was going to do with the video?”

“He said there were collectors for this sort of... well... specialty act, he called it. All of us... well... you saw the tape.”

“Apparently Brett saw it, too.”

“I don’t know how he got hold of it.”

“But he did.”

“Apparently.”

“And you say he didn’t show it to you?”

“No. But he showed me the holder. I knew he had the cassette, too. He wouldn’t have tried to blackmail me otherwise.”

“Do you know what the prosecution could make of this video? If they knew it existed? If they knew it was on the Toland boat the night you went there? The night he was killed?”

“Yes,” Lainie said. “I know what they can make of it.”

“They’ll say you killed him to get this damn tape!”

“Yes, but I didn’t.”

“They’ll say...”

“And I didn’t get the tape, either, did I?”

“She has a point, Frank.”

“Why’d you remove this from the boat, Matthew?”

“No reason I shouldn’t have.”

“No reason?”

“He’s right, Frank.”

“No reas—?”

“Thank you, Andrew.”

“How about tampering with evidence? How about obstruction of...?”

“How do you figure that?” I said. “Lainie’s already been indicted, the grand jury’s finished, no one told me I couldn’t remove evidence from the scene. Since when am I not allowed to gather evidence in support of a client’s defense?”

“Do you intend to submit this tape to the Court?”

“Come on, Frank. We’re under no obligation to turn over any evidence we don’t intend to use in our direct case.

“Which doesn’t change the fact that you removed this from the boat without prior permission and without...”

“I was gathering evidence at a crime scene. Is the S.A. the only one entitled to gather evidence? This is America, Frank.”

“Yeah, bullshit,” Frank said. “You removed this tape from the boat to make sure Folger wouldn’t get his hands on it.”

“No, I gathered evidence so I could present it to my client...”

“Bullshit.”

“...and question her about it. Which we’ve now done. Would you have preferred Folger surprising us with it later on?

“How the hell can he surprise us if he doesn’t even know it exists?”

Which suddenly worried me.

“Lainie?” I said. “I’m assuming there are other...”

“I’m sure there are,” she said at once.

“Huh?” Frank said.

“Copies,” she said.

“In which case,” he said, “what is that photographer’s name?”