Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (28 page)

“I’m the defense attorney on the Toland murder case,” I said. “I just wanted to see the boat again.”

“We get lots of sightseers,” he said.

“Matthew Hope,” I said, and extended my hand.

“Henry Karp,” he said.

We shook hands.

A cloud scudded past the moon, darkening the dockside area. It passed in an instant. We stood looking out over the water.
A Florida night. Silver wavelets dancing in the moonlight. Boat sounds all around us. Insects in the tall grass. September
sounds.

“Almost didn’t see you,” Karp said. “The black.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Quiet night, ain’t it?”

“Very.”

“Almost always like this. I don’t mind it. Quiet like now, you can hear the sounds. I like nighttime sounds.”

“So do I.”

“You think she done it?”

“No,” I said.

“Me, neither,” he said. “Did they ever find The Shadow?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The man I told them about.”

“What man?”

“The one I saw going aboard the boat here. I told them all about it.”

“Told who?”

“The detectives from the State Attorney’s Office.”

There is nothing that compels a state attorney to follow a lead that will not support his version of events and take his case
where he does not wish it to go. On the other hand, it is his constitutional obligation to disclose any evidence that might
support the innocence of the accused. If what Henry Karp was telling me was true, I could very well argue during trial that
the police had been sitting on exculpatory evidence that was not turned over to me during disclosure and that this, Your Honor,
warranted immediate dismissal of the case. The judge would undoubtedly give a variation of the “Now, now, counselor” speech,
advising me that he would admonish the prosecutor for his oversight, and if I needed further time to find a witness, he would
give me, oh, “What would you say is fair, Mr. Hope? Two weeks? Three weeks? Would that be a sufficient amount of time?”

I would not, of course, argue for dismissal unless I had already attempted, and
failed,
to find the man Henry Karp was now describing to me, in which case an additional two or three weeks would be redundant. I
intended to put Guthrie Lamb on this immediately, or at least as soon as Karp finished his description, which was turning
out to be sketchy at best.

What he saw was a man who looked like the pulp magazine hero called The Shadow, wearing black trousers and a black cape and
a black slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, moving out of the shadows and onto the Toland boat.

“That’s why I call him The Shadow,” Karp said. “Cause he
looked
like The Shadow and he came
out
of the shadows.”

“From where?”

“The parking lot. Moved across the lot and went straight to the boat. Cape flying behind him. Hat pulled low.”

“Did you see his face?”

“No, I was down the other end of the lot. He went up the gangway, was out of sight by the time I came abreast of the boat.”

“What time was this?”

“Around a quarter past eleven. I’m supposed to relieve at eleven-thirty, but I got there a little early that night.”

A quarter past eleven. Twenty-five minutes before the Bannermans heard shots coming from the Toland boat.

“Before you spotted him, did you happen to see a car pulling into the parking lot?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you hear a car door opening and closing?”

“No.”

“You just saw this man…”

“The Shadow.”

“On foot, coming across the parking lot…”

“And going on the boat, yes.”

“Did you see him
leaving
the boat at any time?”

“No, I didn’t. I move all over the grounds, you see. I don’t cover just the marina. I have regular rounds I make all around
the club.”

“Were you still in the parking lot at eleven-forty?”

“No, I wasn’t. I was back behind the main clubhouse by then.”

“Did you hear any shots coming from the marina?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And you say you told all this to some detectives from the State Attorney’s Office?”

“Yes, I did.”

“When was this? When they talked to you?”

“Day after the murder. I figured I was giving them a good lead, you know? Seeing a man go aboard the boat.”

“Did they think so?”

“They said they’d look into it.”

“Ever get back to you?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember their names, would you?”

“No, I’m sorry. But one of them had a knife scar on his right cheek.”

The lights were on in Lainie’s studio when I got there at ten minutes to one that morning. I had called ahead from the car
phone, and I knew she was expecting me, and so I was surprised to find her in a robe and slippers. She told me she’d been
getting ready for bed when I called, and apologized for looking so “casual.” We went into the main section of the house, where
she turned on a living room lamp, offered me a drink, which I declined, and then poured herself a glass of white wine. I sat
on a sofa upholstered in a nubby white fabric. She sat opposite me in a matching armchair. When she crossed her legs, the
lacy hem of a short blue nightgown showed momentarily.

“Lainie,” I said, “when you left the parking lot at ten-thirty that night…”

“Or thereabouts,” she said.

“You saw a car parked just outside the entrance pillars, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t see anyone in the car.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see anyone walking around in the parking lot?”

“Positive. Well, just the people coming out of the restaurant.”

“Yes, but aside from them.”

“No one.”

“No one lurking in the shadows? Someone who might have been watching the boat? Waiting for you to leave?”

“I wish I could tell you I had.”

“Someone who looked like The Shadow?”

“Who’s The Shadow?”

“A magazine character.
And
radio.
And
a bad movie.”

“I never heard of him.”

“A man wearing a black cape. And a black slouch hat.”

“No. A black
cape?
No. I didn’t see anyone like that.”

“Lainie, there’s a gap of about an hour and a half between the time you left the boat and the time Etta Toland found the body.
If we can place someone else on that boat
after
you left…”

“I understand the importance. But I didn’t see anyone.”

He had allowed her to use the bathroom again, and now they stood topside, the boat drifting on a mild chop, its running lights
showing its position to nothing but a starlit night, not another vessel in sight for as far as the eye could see. They were
silent for a very long time.

At last she said, “I’m sorry.”

He said nothing.

“I don’t know how it happened, Warr, I really don’t. I hate myself for letting it happen again.”

He still said nothing, grateful that she was at last admitting she
was
hooked again, but knowing this was only the beginning, and the hard part lay ahead. Back in St. Louis, Warren had seen too
many of them lose the battle, over and over again. Relapse was the technical term for it. Again and again and again. And kicking
the habit seemed so very
simple
at first because what the dealers told you was partially true, cocaine
wasn’t
addictive. Hey, man, this ain’t heroin, this ain’t morphine, this ain’t no downer like Seconal or Tuinal, this ain’t no tranq
like Valium or Xanax, this ain’t even a Miller
Lite,
man, ain’t
no
way you gonna get hooked on
this
shit, man.

True.

Cocaine wasn’t physically addicting.

The lie was in the claim that there was no way this shit could harm you, man, nothing to fear, man, quit anytime you want,
man, no pain, no strain. And even
this
was partially true because when you quit cocaine—when you
tried
to quit cocaine—you didn’t experience any of the physical symptoms that accompanied withdrawal from the opoids or the tranquilizers
or even alcohol. There was no shaking, no sweating, no vomiting, no muscle twitching…

“Did you know…?” he started, and then shook his head and cut himself off.

“What?” she asked.

The night black and silent around them.

“Never mind.”

“Say,” she said.

“Did you know where the expression ‘kicking the habit’ comes from?”

“No. Where?”

“When you’re quitting the opoids, you lie there in your own sweat, and your legs start twitching involuntarily, like they’re
kicking out. So it became
kicking
the habit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah,” he said, and the night enveloped them again.

No muscle twitching when you quit—
tried
to quit cocaine—no gooseflesh either, no appearance of a plucked turkey, which is where the expression “cold turkey” came
from, such a weird and wonderful vocabulary for the horrors of hell, did she know the origin of
that
one? He didn’t ask.

Thing the man selling poison in a vial forgot to mention was that cocaine was psychologically and emotionally addicting, concepts
too lofty for anyone to comprehend, anyway, when what we are selling here is a substance that will make you feel like
God.

Oh yes.

So when you quit cocaine—
tried
to quit cocaine—you were trying to forget that for the last little while, or the last longer while, you were God. No physical
symptoms of withdrawal. Just madness.

He was here to see her through the early madness.

Keep her here on this fucking boat while her depression was keenest and the desire to kill herself was strongest. Nobody ever
kicked cocaine on a boat. Nobody ever kicked it on the street, either. Later there would be choices for her to make. For now…

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

And he believed she was.

T
he scar-faced detective to whom Guthrie Lamb spoke early on Thursday morning, the twenty-first of September, was named Benjamin
Hagstrom. He told Guthrie at once that the scar was a memento of a little knife duel he’d had with a burglar when he was still
a uniformed police officer twelve years ago. The duel had been somewhat one-sided in that the burglar had the knife and Hagstrom
had nothing but his underwear. That was because the burglary was taking place in Hagstrom’s own condo unit, which he shared
with a then stripper named Sherry Lamonte, later to become his wife, subsequently his ex. All of this in the three minutes
after the men had shaken hands and introduced themselves.

In the
next
three minutes, Hagstrom explained that on the night of the attempted burglary Sherry was downtown stripping while Hagstrom
himself was doing a little stripping of his own. That was because he’d just got home from a four-to-midnight shift on a very
hot Calusa summer night, and had begun undressing the minute he stepped into the apartment, peeling off clothes and dropping
them on the floor behind him as he made his way toward the bathroom shower. He was down to his underwear shorts when he stepped
into the bedroom and found himself face-to-face with a kid of nineteen, twenty—
eighteen,
as it later turned out—going through his dresser. Hagstrom had left his holstered gun on the seat of an upholstered living
room chair alongside which he’d dropped his uniform pants. Now the teenybopper burglar had a surprised look on his face which
matched the one on Hagstrom’s. One thing else the burglar had was a knife, which appeared magically in his right hand. Before
Hagstrom could say anything like “Stop, police!” or “Put down the knife, son, before you get yourself in trouble,” or any
such warning or admonition that might have detained the burglar from slashing out in panic at Hagstrom, the knife came at
him. He put up his hands in self-defense and got cut across both palms, and he backed away in terror and got cut again down
the right-hand side of his face…

“This scar you see here now,” he explained, “a beaut, huh?”

Backing away from the flailing knife, he banged up against the dresser, glimpsed a heavy glass ashtray on its top…

“I used to smoke back then…”

…spread his hand wide over it, picked it up, and hit the kid across the bridge of the nose with it and then again on the cheek
and again on the right temple, by which time the kid had dropped the knife and there was blood all over the place, from Hagstrom’s
hands and face and also from the kid’s bleeding nose and cheek.

“He drew twenty years and was out in seven. I drew twelve stitches and a lifetime souvenir. So what can I do for you, Mr.
Lamb?”

“Call me Guthrie.”

“Fine, call me Benny. What can I do for you?”

“September thirteenth?” Guthrie said.

Question mark at the end of it. His little trick. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the prod was all they needed. Not this time.

“What about it?” Hagstrom asked.

“Day after the Toland murder?”

“Yeah?”

“Down at the Silver Creek Yacht Club?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Understand you talked to a night watchman named Henry Karp, who told you…”

“I talked to a lot of people the day after the murder.”

“This one told you he’d seen someone boarding the Toland yacht shortly before the shots were fired.”

“He did, huh?”

“Didn’t he?”

“What if he did?”

“Somebody dressed all in black. Like The Shadow.”

“You’re asking did the S.A.’s Office Squad follow up on it, is that what you’re asking?”

“That would be a reasonable question,” Guthrie said.

“The reasonable answer is that we follow
all
leads in an ongoing murder investigation.”

“Yes, but did you follow
this
lead?”

“I believe I said
all
leads.”

“So you tried to locate this person described as ‘The Shadow,’ is that correct?”

“First, Mr. Lamb…”

“Call me Guthrie.”