A ring she still wears, by the way.
The very ring that captured my attention when first I discovered the cassette.
Which he shows her now in the master bedroom of the yawl called Toy Boat.
Shows her Idle Hands.
Her hands.
On the cover of the cassette case.
Undeniably her hands wearing his ring.
The case is empty.
——I’d have been stupid to bring it here to the boat, wouldn’t I? It’s safe at home.
He makes no mention of blackmail just yet, merely shows her the cover photo of her hands working her crotch, and mentions that he watched the tape that afternoon and that it aroused old memories and isn’t it foolish of them to be battling in court over something as nonsensical as a fucking teddy bear, you should pardon the expression, when not too very long ago they’d meant everything in the world to each other?
At which point he kisses her.
So there they were.
In what was unmistakably a bedroom (albeit on a boat it is called a stateroom) standing beside a bed, which is what a bed is called even on a boat (although on naval vessels it is frequently called a sack or a bunk), their lips together again for the first time (at least since December), his fingers spread on what is called an ass, hers, even on a boat, his cock growing what is called tumescent in certain novels or tumid in others, a palpably steamy urgency rising between them as they stand clinging to each other, hoo boy!
So what was a fun-loving couple to do under such circumstances, even if in court they were adversaries? Well, it could reasonably be assumed that they might fall together onto the bed, locked in each other’s arms, and it could further be assumed that his hands might slide down into the back of the blue silk slacks she’s wearing to find the cheeks of her aforementioned ass, and then inadvertently to find, from behind, the lips of her swollen pudendum although only grazingly. They are expert at this. For two years they were doing this before Brett called a halt to it on Christmas Eve, some present, sweetie. Doing it in motels hither and yon, in and around the environs of Calusa, Bradenton and Sarasota, the so-called Calbrasa Triangle, even doing it two or three times in this very stateroom on Toy Boat when the unsuspecting Etta Toland was in Atlanta, Georgia, visiting her mother in a nursing home there.
They know just what they’re doing, these two.
They’ve done it again and again until they are rather knowledgeable about the heres and theres, the goings and comings, so to speak, practice makes perfect. In fact, they are sooo good at what they’re doing that the time just flies by, honeylamb, and it is close to eleven-thirty when Brett withdraws physically and emotionally, and mentions casually that unless Lainie drops the infringement suit...
——all of kiddieland will learn about that tape. I’ll send copies to every company in the field...
...although he did very much enjoy fucking her again, for which his heartfelt thanks.
Lainie tells him he’s a no-good son of a bitch and leaves the boat in high dudgeon, putting on her Top-Siders first, but forgetting the blue scarf in her haste to get away.
It’s eleven-thirty, not ten-thirty as she’d claimed in her initial telling of the tale now retitled Babes in Toyland Redux.
A car is parked on the road outside the pillars at the club’s entrance.
This has not changed from her second telling.
Ten minutes later, Jerry and Brenda Bannerman hear shots coming from the Toland boat.
I was thinking about time.
I was thinking about ten crucial minutes.
Because if Lainie had previously lied about an hour, why not now lie about a critical ten-minute period when she could still have been on that boat, shooting and killing the man who’d fucked her and later tried to blackmail her?
If she told me one more time that she didn’t kill him, I would scream.
“Believe me, Matthew,” she said.
Toots had slid open the bathroom window just a crack. She could hear the two of them topside, talking in Spanish. One of them driving the boat, the other one standing alongside him, both of them yelling over the sound of the boat’s motor. She guessed Warren was still trussed on the lounge down here, but she didn’t hear a word from him. All she heard was the sound of the motor and the two men yelling. What they were yelling about was cocaine. Getting the cocaine down to Miami on the east coast.
They could yell as loud as they wanted out here in the middle of the Gulf, nobody was going to hear them. Except Toots, who was all ears, Spanish coming back to her in a welcome rush, courtesy of all those Hispanic dealers past and present, near and far. Mother is the necessity of invention, dears, and when you are hooked, the dealer is Mother, and don’t you ever forget it. Enough cocaine on this boat to keep her high for a year and a half, from what she could gather. Problem was their people in Miami were expecting some other boat, their own boat, the one they’d had to ditch because of something wrong with the carburetor, whatever, she couldn’t make out all the technical language, fumes in the engine compartment, a flash fire, burned wiring — the Spanish she heard was “carburador defectuoso” and “gases dentro del motor” and “auto combustionón” and “cables quemados.” Transferred the shit to Warren’s boat when they realized they weren’t going to make it to Miami in their own vessel. But now they were afraid their people wouldn’t recognize this boat coming in, so they were trying to figure how they could make contact so they could get the stuff ashore. Eight kilos, she was hearing. Ochos kilos. Worth a hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars, she was hearing. Ciento treinta y dos mil dólares.
Tengo que orinar, she was hearing.
Which in English meant “I have to take a piss.”
At lunch earlier today, Bobby Diaz told me that on the night of the murder he was in bed with a woman in her condo on Whisper Key.
— She’s free, white, and twenty-one, and she has nothing to hide. We were together all night long, ask her. I left the condo at eight the next morning.
It was now precisely four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, some eight days, sixteen hours and twenty minutes after the Bannermans heard someone firing three shots aboard the Toland boat. I was driving over the Whisper Key bridge on my way to see a woman named Sheila Lockhart because a long-ago law professor once told me, “Matthew, an alibi isn’t an alibi till a second party swears to it.”
Whisper is a bad marriage between Florida as it used to be and Florida as the big real estate interests would wish it to be. It is less developed than Sabal Key, for example, which has been thoroughly exploited to its legal and environmental limits — albeit tastefully, to be sure. Taste is the middle name of SunShore Development, which bought up most of this northernmost barrier island when it was worth less than two cents and a collar button and turned it into a vast overlapping retirement theme park of high-rise condos, golf courses, swimming pools, cluster homes, tennis courts, white sand beaches, and private homes in gated enclaves. Flamingo Key is fully developed as well, but only with private homes, some of them quite luxurious, most of them looking pink and Floridian on the outside and brown and Middle Western on the inside, meaning that all that heavy dark furniture inherited from Grandma Hattie in Lansing or Indianapolis or Grand Rapids has been bodily transported down here where it wages staid and stuffy battle with clear blue skies and bright green water.