Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (15 page)

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

“You identified her from a photograph.”

“I did.”

“Can you now tell me who she was?”

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

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

“I was.”

“How fast were you going?”

“Idle speed.”

“And you say your spotlight was on?”

“It was.”

“Pointing in the direction of the Toland boat?”

“No, suh, pointing at the water.”

“Ahead of the boat?”

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

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

“Enough to see who was sitting there.”

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

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

“You saw them clearly?”

“Clear as day. Sitting there drinking.”

“Did you say anything to them?”

“No, suh.”

“Didn’t greet them in any way?”

“No, suh.”

“Didn’t call to them?”

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

“Did
they
call anything to you?”

“No, suh.”

“Was your slip alongside the Toland slip?”

“Oh, no. Much further down the line.”

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

“Six or seven boats.”

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

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

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

“Just about on the dot.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a clock on my dash.”

“Lighted?”

“Yes.”

“And it said ten forty-five?”

“Almost.”

“Is it a digital clock?”

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

“Then how can you know so exactly…?”

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

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

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

“Took your eyes off the water…?”

“Just for a second.”

“…to look at the clock.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Why’d you do that?”

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

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

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

“Was the water dark?”

“Not where the light was shining.”

“But you took your eyes
off
the water…”

“Just for a second.”

“…to see what time it was.”

“Yes, I did.”

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

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

“Just for a second, I told you.”

“To look at the clock.”

“Yes, suh.”

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

“No, suh.”

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

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

“And at that time you continued under power…”

“I did.”

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

“No, I would not.”

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

“Yep. Bringing the boat in.”

“To which slip?”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“I don’t believe I did.”

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

“No.”

“Before you left the wheel?”

“No.”

“Before you made her fast to the dock?”

“No, suh.”

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

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

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

Etta Toland wasn’t quite so gracious.

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

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

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

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

I looked at my watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were still people skating on the ice.

The tree was still lighted.

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

And suddenly, all the lights went out.

On the tree.

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

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

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

She was still wearing the mink.

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

They’d got the Judith Leiber bag.

Mark Loeb was dead.

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

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

Didn’t want to lose another man she loved.

But, Patricia…

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

“No, nothing,” I said.

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

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