“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.”
She has been aboard this boat many times before, for cocktail parties, small dinner parties, casual lunches, an occasional sail out on the Gulf. The saloon below is furnished with comfortable couches, and glass-fronted lockers that enclose a television set, a VCR, and a CD player. The dining table seats ten comfortably, and whenever she’s been here for dinner or lunch, it has been set with Wedgwood china, Waterford crystal, and damask napkins. The boat is truly luxurious, with Oriental rugs covering the teak decks, and framed Currier & Ives sailing prints hanging on the paneled bulkheads.
In the past, she has felt more comfortable in the informal cockpit area, and she’s happy he has chosen this space for their meeting now. Brett is barefoot. She remembers that he once asked a state senator’s wife to take off her smart linen pumps for fear she might damage his precious teak decks. “Sit,” he says, “please,” and indicates with an open-hand gesture one of the cushioned banquettes. She eases in behind the teak table, seeing now that the bottles on it are Johnnie Walker Black, Canadian Club, and Stolichnaya. She also notices a small white porcelain bowl with wedges of lime in it. Brett sits on the cushioned banquette on the other side of the table.
“So,” he asks, “what to drink?”
“Do you have any Perrier?”
“Oh, come on, Lainie,” he says, smiling. “I promise you’ll want to celebrate.”
“We’ll see,” she says, and returns the smile.
He is being his most charming self, which can be charming indeed. Again, she finds herself wishing this will truly be the end of all the turmoil and strife.
“Perrier? Really?” he says.
“Really,” she says. “Perrier.”
One more time, she thinks, and they’ll send me a case every week for the rest of my life.
“Perrier it is,” he says, and slides out from behind the table, and surefootedly slips down the ladder. She hears him rummaging below — the galley is modern and spacious, with Corian work surfaces and a four-burner stove, an oven, a microwave, a trash compactor, a freezer and she forgets how many cubic feet of refrigeration, had he once said sixty? Eighty? A lot, that was for sure. He was searching now in one of the fridges for the Perrier she’d requested, and she hears him cursing when something clatters to the deck, and then there’s some muttering below, and finally he comes up the ladder again with a green bottle clutched in one hand and a blue-black automatic pistol in the other.
She looks at the gun.
“Some people tried to come aboard last week,” he says in explanation, and places the gun on the table alongside the bowl of sliced limes.
“What people?” she asks.
“Two wetbacks,” he says.
Meaning Cubans, she surmises.
“What’d they want?”
“They said they were looking for work. Wanted to know if I was taking on hands. Por favor, are you takin on some hanns, señor,” he says in bad imitation. “Have to be careful these days. Too many boats are being hijacked.”
“From a marina dock?”
“Why not?”
“Is that thing loaded?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Sure you don’t want a little vodka in this?” he asks, pouring into one of the tumblers.
“Just ice and a lime,” she says.
Her artist’s eyes are studying the color scheme on the table. The green of the Perrier bottle and the limes, the bone white of the bowl, the amber whiskey in two of the bottles, the black label on the Scotch echoing the black cap on the other bottle, the red and black label on the Stoli, the blue-black dullness of the Colt automatic.
Brett pours himself a hefty blast of Johnnie on the rocks.
“To our future,” he says, and clinks his glass against hers. She remembers that it’s bad luck to toast with a nonalcoholic beverage. But the moment has passed, the glasses have been touched, the toast has been uttered. Still, she does not drink just yet, hoping to put some distance between the bad-luck toast and the act itself, waiting first for him to take a long swallow of Scotch, and then waiting another decent interval to take the curse off before she herself sips some of the sparkling water.