Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (8 page)

“You’ve been very sick,” Spinaldo says.

There is now something close to unbridled joy on his face. I expect him to begin crying in ecstasy at any moment. I suddenly
like him. And just as suddenly I remember. But not everything.

“Did I get shot?”

“Yes,” he says.

“My chest hurts.”

“Good.”

“My shoulder, too.”

“Very good.”

I cannot imagine why he thinks hurting so much is good and very good. I do not realize that he’s telling me I’m
feeling
things again. He’s telling me I’m
awake
again. The problem is I don’t remember having been asleep. Euphemism of the week. Asleep. It will later be explained to me
that sometime while I was in surgery and they were frantically trying to repair the ruptured blood vessels in my chest, I
suffered cardiac arrest and…

Well, what happened was my heart stopped for five minutes and forty seconds, and there was subsequent loss of blood to the
brain…

No blood was being pumped to the brain, you see.

No blood was being circulated
anywhere
in my body.

In short, I was in a coma for seven days, eleven hours, and fifteen minutes, after which time—and with a mighty leap, don’t
forget—I sprang out of the pit.

A different face suddenly appears above me.

This one I know.

This one I love.

“Daddy,” she whispers.

Joanna.

My daughter. Blue eyes brimming with tears. Blond hair falling loose as she leans over the bed.

“Oh Daddy”

Nothing more. And hugs me close.

And the nurse who’d earlier run to fetch the doctor cautions her not to knock over the stand holding the plastic bag of
whatever
the hell is dripping into my arm, I am beginning to feel crotchety already, you see, I want to put on my pants and get the
hell out of here.

But now there is yet another face, and I love this one, too, and Patricia leans over the bed, and kisses my cheek, eyes as
blue as my daughter’s, shining and wet, hair as blond as my daughter’s, it occurs to me that I may have a thing for blue-eyed
blondes.

But, no, my former wife was a brunette, isn’t that so? And lo and behold, here she is
now,
right on cue, the once and future Susan Hope, leaning over me with a smile on her face and a whispered “Welcome back, Matthew,”
which causes me to wonder where I’ve
been
because no one has yet explained to me that I’ve been in a coma, you see, although I am beginning to recall, vaguely, a bar
someplace, I am waiting for someone in a bar, I leave the bar—and can remember nothing further.

I feel suddenly exhausted.

All at once, the room seems too noisy and too crowded and too active.

I want everyone to go away.

I want my pants back.

I want to go home.

I feel like crying.

I want to go to sleep again.

I have to pee.

Something is starting in this room on this bright day in April.

It is called recovery.

It is called recuperation.

Section 905.17 of the statutes plainly states that “no person shall be present at the sessions of the grand jury except the
witness under examination, the state attorney, designated assistants as provided for in Section 27.18, the court reporter
or stenographer, and the interpreter.”

This means that a grand jury hearing is a nonconfrontational thing. No defense lawyers there. No cross-examination of the
various witnesses. Just the state attorney munching on his own sweet ham sandwich. This further means that should an accused
elect to testify, his or her lawyer cannot be present in the room. Which may explain why, in most cases, any good attorney
will advise his client not to accept an invitation to go in there and face the music. I explained this to Lainie now, and
she nodded gravely and said it seemed unfair. I told her that perhaps the word she was seeking was “Draconian.”

I had picked her up at the County Jail after she’d changed back into civilian clothing, the jeans, T-shirt and sandals she’d
thrown on last night when the police came to arrest her. I was driving her home to North Apple because we needed to talk further
and also because she’d promised to show me the new stuffed animal she’d been sketching when the call from Brett Toland came
last night. I was eager to see her drawings because her frame of mind was important to the events that had subsequently transpired.
The important thing was that she’d been working on something
new,
you see. She was planning to move on, planning for the
future.
Contrary to her gloomy outlook at lunch, by the time she’d got back to her house, she’d come around to believing that Judge
Santos would find in our favor and order the preliminary injunction we were seeking. There was no reason for her to have wanted
Brett Toland dead. She hadn’t even been
thinking
of Brett when his call came later that night.

Her house on North Apple looked exactly as she’d described it to the Court yesterday morning. I parked my car under a huge
shade tree which I could not identify, and looked up to make sure there weren’t any birds in it. The car I drive is a slate-blue
Acura Legend which Patricia ran into just before our first meeting. She claims I will never forgive her for that. Maybe I
won’t. Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” I don’t smoke, but I
love
that car. Not as much as I love Patricia, he was quick to amend. But I still didn’t want birds shitting all over its hood
and its roof.

I followed Lainie up the path to the low cinder-block structure, and then into the house itself. She showed me around briefly,
asked if I wanted a cold drink—it was only three-thirty, so I guessed she meant a soft drink—and we each went into the studio
carrying a beaded glass of lemonade afloat with ice cubes. I felt as if I’d been in this house before, this work space before.
She threw a light switch. The fluorescents came on over the long drawing table she’d described at the hearing, illuminating
her sketches for Kinky Turtle. She pointed out the date she’d penciled into the lower right-hand corner of each drawing, just
below her signature. Unless she’d altered the notations, the drawings had, in fact, been made yesterday.

“Tell me everything that happened last night,” I said.

“From when to when?”

“From when Brett called to the last time you saw him alive.”

It occurs to me as she speaks that she would make a compelling witness if ever we decide to put her on the stand. Her eyeglasses
do nothing to correct that wandering right eye. But the visual defect gives her a somewhat startled look that attracts unwavering
attention. As beautiful as she is, it is the imperfect eye that lends to her otherwise flawless features a skewed look that
is totally compelling.

Sitting on a stool in jeans, T-shirt and sandals, hands in her lap, she tells me she was in the studio working on the sketches
when the telephone rang…

“What time was this?”

“Around nine o’clock.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when we were later talking about my going over there…”

Brett is calling to invite her to his boat.

“What for?” she asks him.

“I want to discuss a settlement,” he says.

“Then call my lawyer,” she says.

“I don’t want to drag the lawyers in just yet, Lainie.”

“Brett,” she says, “the lawyers are
already
in.”

“The lawyers are why we
have
this problem, Lainie. All lawyers should be
shot,
Lainie. I want to discuss this face-to-face, just you and me. “You’re familiar with the toy business, you’ll understand the
significance of what I want to suggest.”

“Okay, try me,” she says.

“Not on the phone.”

“Why not?”

“Lainie, trust me, my proposal…”

“Trust you, Brett?”

“I know we’ve had our differences…”

“Differences? You stole my fucking
bear
!”

“I’m willing to grant there are similarities between your design and ours. But what I’m about to propose…”

“Propose it to Matthew Hope.”

“Lainie, I promise you this won’t compromise your case at all. This isn’t a trick. I know you’ve been made aware of the fact
that if money alone could repair your injuries…”

“Forget money, Brett. If you’re about to…”

“No, I’m not offering a cash settlement.”

“What are you offering?”

“Come to the boat.”

“No. Call Hope. Make your offer to him.”

“Lainie, please. For old times’ sake. Please. I promise you this is a solution. You won’t be disappointed. Come here and let
me talk to you.”

She hesitates.

“Where’s here?” she asks.

“The yacht club.”

“Which one?”

“Silver Creek. You’ve been here.”

“You’re there now?”

“On the boat.”

“Is Etta with you?”

“No, but she’s aware of what I’m about to propose. We’re absolutely in agreement on it. How long will it take you to get here?”

She looks at her watch.

“An hour? Depending on traffic?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Brett…?”

“Yes, Lainie?”

“This better be good.”

She looks at me over her lemonade glass. I think she can sense my disapproval because she says nothing for a moment, and when
she does speak it is only to explain what she’d started to tell me earlier, about knowing the time of Brett’s call because
she’d looked at her watch in order to estimate how long it would take for her to dress and…

“Yes, I realize. How long
did
it take you to get there?”

“You’re thinking I shouldn’t have gone, right?”

“Why did you go?”

“Old times’ sake,” she says, and shrugs. Brett’s exact words on the phone. “We
did
work together for a long time, there
was
a history there. And I thought he might actually be ready to offer something that would simplify matters. No one likes lawsuits,
Matthew.”

Graciously, she did not add “No one likes lawyers, either.”

“What time did you get to the club?”

“Around ten o’clock.”

“Silver Creek? On the river and Polk?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you get there?”

“I drove.”

“What kind of car?”

“A white Geo.”

“Anyone know the exact time you arrived?”

“Well, Brett.”

“Unreliable witness. Dead, you know.”

“
I
didn’t kill him.”

“Dead nonetheless.”

“Stop acting so pissed off.”

“You should have stuck to your guns, Lainie. You were right telling him to come to me with his offer. Why’d you change your
mind?”

“I told you.”

“You weren’t so concerned about ‘old times’ when you brought the copyright suit.”

“All right, damn it, I was afraid we’d
lose
it, all right?”

“That’s not what you told me ten minutes ago. You told me you were feeling confident…”

“I was lying. I was scared shitless. I was sure Santos would eventually tell the Tolands to go right ahead with their bear.”

“Then what was all that business about Kinky?”

“I
was
working on Kinky when the phone rang. As insurance. For when Santos decided
against
me.”

“In other words, your frame of mind was anything
but
confident, isn’t that right?”

“Whose side are you on, Matthew?”

“I can’t help you if you lie to me, Lainie.”

I’m sorry.

Head bent. Little cockeyed girl in tight jeans and braless T-shirt, staring down at the hands in her lap now. Lemonade on
the drawing table, alongside her “insurance” sketches for a new stuffed animal.

“All right, what happened next?”

She does not answer for a moment. She keeps staring at her hands. Then she sighs heavily, and looks up at me. Bee-stung lips
slightly parted. I suddenly think it’s a long time since Patricia and I made love. I put the thought out of my mind. It occurs
to me that Lainie fully understands her cockeyed appeal to men. It further occurs to me that I had better be careful here.

“Have you ever been aboard
Toy Boat?”
she asks.

“No.”

“Well, she’s a marvelous
rig,
as Brett calls her, making her sound like a little
runabout,
when she’s actually a ninety-four-foot gaff-rigged yawl with three beautifully outfitted double staterooms and a crew cabin
forward…”

Walkway lights illuminate the dockside area, and there is a single lamppost at the far end of the parking lot, where Lainie
parks the Geo. She has dressed casually but elegantly for this meeting, perhaps because she knows the boat, and doesn’t want
to be intimidated by its teaked and varnished grandeur, or possibly because she truly believes Brett may be about to offer
a real solution to their problem, in which case she wants to look and feel festive when they break out the celebratory champagne.
So she’s wearing white-laced, blue Top-Siders—she knows the rules of boating—with flaring, bell-bottomed, blue silk slacks
and a white silk boat-necked shirt over which she’s thrown a blue scarf in a tiny red-anchor print. The red frames of her
eyeglasses are the color of her lipstick. The gold of the heart-shaped pinky ring echoes her blond hair, worn loose tonight.
The hair catches glints of light from the lamppost as she steps out of the car and strides toward the Toland boat. She feels
hopeful. She sometimes thinks her entire life, from the moment she learned her eyes weren’t like those of other little girls,
has been one long battle—but now there may be a happy ending in sight.

There are lights burning in the saloon.

From the bottom of the gangway, she calls, “Hello?” Silence.

“Brett?” she calls.

“Lainie?” a voice says, and she sees Brett coming topside from the short ladder leading below. He is wearing white cotton
slacks and a loose-fitting white buttonless cotton top slashed in a V over his chest. He hits a switch someplace on his right
and light spills onto the cushioned cockpit area where she now sees that a bucket of ice, a pair of tumblers, and several
bottles of liquor—she cannot read the labels yet—have been set out on the teak table. “Come aboard,” he calls. “I’m so glad
you decided to come.”