“Lainie,” I said, “were you having an affair with Brett Toland?”
Not a word from behind the curtain. Blurred flesh tones moving among the big daisies. Water splashing. I waited. At last:
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s not the topic under discussion.”
The topic under discussion, or rather the topic under recitation because I merely listened and said nothing, was a two-year-long love affair that had started shortly after Lainie moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Calusa and began working at Toyland. The affair had ended just before Christmas of last year. According to Lainie, both she and Brett had been inordinately circumspect, limiting their torrid romance to after-hours trysts, never publicly revealing by the slightest glance or touch that there was anything untoward happening between employer and employee.
Which made me wonder how Bobby Diaz had known they “had a thing going,” but I said nothing.
“Did you ever notice,” she asked, “that married men tend to end affairs during the holiday season, when the tug of home and family is strongest? On Christmas Eve, right after Brett handed out the Christmas bonuses, he told me he wanted to end it. Merry Christmas, Lainie, it’s over. I gave my two weeks’ notice at the beginning of January.” She turned off the water. A wet arm slithered from behind the curtain. “Could you hand me the towel, please?” I picked it up from the stool, put it in her hand. Behind the curtain, she began drying herself.
I was silently piecing together a timetable.
Christmas Eve of last year: Brett ends the affair.
Middle of January this year: Lainie leaves the company.
Beginning of Apriclass="underline" She comes up with the idea for Gladly.
Twelfth day of September: Brett is mur—
The curtain rattled back on its rod. Lainie was wearing the towel now, wrapped around her, its loose end tucked between her breasts. She stepped out, sat on the stool, began putting on her sandals again. Long wet blond hair cascaded over her face.
“Ever see him again?” I asked.
“Around town now and then. But we didn’t travel in the same social...”
“I meant was it really over?”
“Yes, it was really over.”
“Never called you again...”
“Never.”
“Never asked to see you.”
“Never.”
“Until he phoned on the night of the twelfth.”
“Well, that was strictly business,” she said.
“Was it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said at once, and sat erect, tossing the wet hair in what I took to be a gesture of annoyance. Rising, she reached into the stall for the wet bathing suit, picked it up, and started walking back to the house, the suit swinging in her right hand. I followed her.
The living room was cool and dim.
A clock somewhere chimed three times.
The afternoon was rushing by.
“If you haven’t any other questions,” she said, “I’d like to get dressed.”
“I have other questions,” I said.
“Really, Matthew, can’t they wait?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Exasperated, she let her body go limp, her shoulders slumping on an exhalation of breath, her wandering right eye seemingly more vexatious than usual.
“Okay, what?” she said.
“Did you go to bed with Brett Toland on the night he was killed?”
“Yes, damn it!”
11
“So there we were.”
This is Lainie talking.
This is what she is now telling me about the time she spent on the Toland yacht on the night of September twelfth, a revised version, to be sure. I sometimes think all of life is Rashomon. If you have not seen the Akira Kurosawa film, too bad. It is almost as good as his High and Low, which was based on an American mystery novel the title of which I have now forgotten. Rashomon is about variations of the truth. It is about reality and the different ways in which reality can be perceived. It is about the nature of verity and falsehood. It is almost as good as the five-finger exercise Lainie Commins now performs as she sits in a towel in a white wicker chair in the living room of her small studio-house. Her suntanned legs are stretched out in front of her. She is relaxed in the chair. It is as if the truth — if this is, at last, the truth — has made her free.
I listen.
So there they were.
Lainie Commins and Brett Toland, lovers until December of last year, at which time Brett simultaneously handed her a Christmas bonus and her walking papers. There they were. Sitting on a sultry September night in the cockpit of a sailboat that has been described as “romantic” in the various magazines devoted to great yachts of the sailing world. Alternately described as “opulent” or “luxurious.” Asking her if she’d like a drink. Why, yes, she says, that might be nice. This is now some five minutes after she gets to the boat. She has taken off her white-laced blue Top-Siders and her blue scarf with its tiny red-anchor print...
It occurs to me that this is now the third version of Lainie’s story, her own personal Rashomon — “but I didn’t kill him,” she has told me over and over again.
...and she hands these to Brett as he goes below to mix their drinks. Perrier and lime for her, at least the first time around. Vodka-tonic in the second telling, bit more than one, she says, Brett freshened the drink for her, right? It is perhaps five minutes past ten or thereabouts. In this telling — the third and final one, I hope — she has drunk two rather strong vodka-tonics, which may explain why she is now amenable to his invitation to revisit old times and renew old acquaintances.
In her first version, Brett offered her a licensing agreement. In a second version of the tale (though admittedly not hers) Brett offered her a flat settlement of five thousand dollars to drop the infringement suit — thus spaketh Etta Toland. In Lainie’s own second version, Brett tried to blackmail her by threatening to disclose the nature of Idle Hands to the kiddie world at large. But now...
Enfin...
The truth.
I hoped.
In this version, Lainie does not, in fact, leave the boat at ten-thirty. Instead, she is drinking her second vodka-tonic in the cockpit when a sloop comes in under power, its spotlight guiding the way to a slip further down the marina dock. This is Charles Nicholas Werner, though she does not know the man’s name at the time, or that he will later testify to having seen her and Brett sitting there tête-à-tête, drinking, at ten forty-five. Understandably, and considering the fact that someone later thoughtlessly pumped two bullets into Brett’s head, Lainie afterward felt it expedient not to mention that Brett at that very moment was inviting her belowdecks to see his etchings. Or rather, to show her the videocassette case with its cover photo insert of two busy hands, one of which is wearing a heart-shaped Victorian ring Brett himself gave her one Valentine’s Day, back when their affair was running as swift and as torrid as the waters of Babylon.