I’d been shot, you see. Twice. That was the start of all my troubles. Getting shot. And I was recovering from a pair of serious wounds that had taken me to the very brink of oblivion. While I was on the operating table, the surgeons had performed a thoracotomy, which — translated from Spinaldo’s medicalese — meant they had cracked open my chest, some fun. And whereas I hadn’t felt a thing while they were opening me up, or while they were reaching in there to massage my heart and whatnot, I was now in excruciating pain, which the good staff at Good Sam tried to alleviate by administering epidural morphine and anti-inflammatories and Tegretol. Controlling the pain helped me to cough, which Spinaldo said was one of the body’s most important protective reflexes. Controlling the pain meant increased activity and mobility. Controlling the pain meant I could tie my own shoelaces.
But I was a lawyer.
And I wanted to get back to work!
I caught Bobby Diaz coming out of the Toyland offices at ten past twelve that Thursday afternoon. He told me he was on his way to a luncheon meeting and I told him this wouldn’t take a minute, and he said, “You always keep saying this won’t take a minute, but it always takes half an hour.”
“Shows how the time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.
“What is it now?” he asked, and looked impatiently at his watch. Behind us was the low yellow-brick building with its boy-girl logo on the roof. Employees were coming out of the building now, heading toward the Cyclone-fenced parking lot. We stood in brilliant sunshine. I was wearing my seersucker suit with a white shirt and a tie the color of sand. I felt I looked like a lawyer. Bobby was wearing gray tropical slacks, a pale blue sports shirt, and a white linen jacket with the sleeves shoved up on his forearms. He looked the way the cops on Miami Vice used to look.
“Bobby,” I said, “I sent your fingerprints to a forensics lab...”
“My what?”
“I’m sorry. That’s why I handed you the photograph.”
“The what?”
“The black-and-white glossy. I’m sorry.”
Diaz shook his head.
“What a cheap private-eye trick,” he said.
“I agree. But your prints match prints on both the videocassette and its case. So now there’s a chain of custody from you to Brett Toland.”
“So what?” he said.
“So now maybe you’d like to tell me when you gave him that cassette.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I’ll be calling you for a deposition, anyway...”
“You’re going to introduce as evidence a cassette that shows your client...”
“What I choose to introduce in evidence is my business. Whether the cassette is relevant to the murder of Brett Toland is another matter.”
“How could it be?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “That’s why I want to talk. What do you say? Now, informally. Or in my office at a later date, with a tape recorder and witnesses.”
“Let me make a call first,” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
The phone was in his car, a metallic-gray BMW, with black leather upholstery. He called a restaurant named Manny’s Manor on Flamingo Key, to leave word that he would not be joining Joan Lensky Robert for lunch, and then he drove us west on Weaver Road and south on the Trail to a Chinese restaurant called Ah Fong, which several Italian-speaking friends of mine have nicknamed Ah Fong Gool. I ordered one of the six-ninety-five luncheon specials, which consisted of the egg roll, the chicken chow mein, the white rice, and a pot of tea. Bobby ordered the wonton soup, the pepper steak, the fried rice, and his own pot of tea for the same six ninety-five. We both asked for chopsticks.
Clicking and munching away, we began discussing how Bobby’s hot little tape had landed in Brett’s hot little hands. Bobby seemed more interested in his pepper steak than in his recitation. Almost offhandedly, he told me that he had called Brett the moment he recognized Lainie on the tape...
“This would have been on the night of September eleventh...”
“Yes, but I didn’t get him.”
“You called him...”
“Yes, and kept getting his answering machine.”
“So when did you reach him?”
“Not until the next day.”
The next day would have been the twelfth of September. Brett Toland had appeared in Judge Santos’s courtroom at nine that morning, in the company of his wife and his attorney. I had been there with my client and my sole witness. We had all left the courtroom at about one o’clock, when Santos adjourned.
“What time did you finally reach him?” I asked.
“Not until later in the afternoon.”
“You phoned him again?”
“No, I saw him in person. At the office.”
“What time was that?”
“After lunch sometime. Two, two-thirty?”
“Did you give him the cassette at that time?”
“I did.”
“How did you present it to him?”
“I said I thought it might be of interest to him.”
“In what way?”
“I said I knew he was involved in this lawsuit with Lainie, and I thought the tape might be of importance to him.”
“Did you suggest how it might be of importance?”
“Well, I told him it might be useful to him.”
“In what way?”
“Well, as leverage. I told him to take a look at it, he’d see what I meant.”
“Did you describe the contents of the tape?”
“More or less.”
“How did you describe it?”
“I said the graphic on the cover pretty much said what the tape was about. And the title.”
“Did you mention that Lainie was on the tape?”
“No, I wanted him to discover that for himself. I did say the ring looked like the one Lainie wore all the time.”
“The ring in the cover photo?”
“Yeah. On the case.”
“So in other words, you suggested that the tape was about a woman masturbating, and that Lainie Commins was the woman depicted on the...”
“Well, her ring, anyway.”
“The ring was Lainie’s.”
“I said the ring looked familiar.”
“So Brett pretty much knew what you were talking about.”
I guess so.
“He pretty much knew what to expect when he looked at that tape.”
“Well, I think he knew what I was getting at.”
“What was his reaction?”
“He seemed pleased.”
“Did you suggest he might be able to use the tape as a means of settling the lawsuit?”
“Well, I told him a designer of children’s toys might not want to have such a tape gain circulation in the trade.”
“You said this to him.”
“Yes, I said it to him.”
“And you also said he’d know what you meant after he looked at the tape.”