“You looked at the clock as you passed the Toland boat?”
“I did. And it said almost ten forty-five.”
“Took your eyes off the water...?”
“Just for a second.”
“...to look at the clock.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Wanted to know what time it was, I guess.”
“Why’d you want to know what time it was?”
“Wanted to see what time I was coming in.”
“Was the water dark?”
“Not where the light was shining.”
“But you took your eyes off the water...”
“Just for a second.”
“...to see what time it was.”
“Yes, I did.”
He was beginning to get annoyed, I could see that. On the phone, I had sold him “a friendly little informal interview,” but now I was coming at him like Sherman entering Atlanta. He didn’t like it one damn bit. He was a Southerner, however, and a gentleman, and I was a guest in his home, and he had agreed to talk to me, and so he went along for the rest of the ride.
“So when you say you kept your eyes on the water all the time, you didn’t actually...”
“Just for a second, I told you.”
“To look at the clock.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Could it have been earlier than ten forty-five when you looked at...?”
“No, suh.”
“Could it have been ten twenty-five, for example?”
“No, it could not have been earlier than about ten forty-five.”
“And at that time you continued under power...”
“I did.”
“...past the Toland boat... which slip was that, by the way, would you know?”
“No, I would not.”
“You looked at the clock as you were passing the Toland boat, and then turned right back to the water?”
“Yep. Bringing the boat in.”
“To which slip?”
“Number twelve. That’s my assigned slip.”
“Some six or seven boats down the line. From the Toland boat, that is.”
“Yes.”
“Did you look at the clock again as you were coming into your slip?”
“I don’t believe I did.”
“Did you look at it before you cut the engine of your boat?”
“No.”
“Before you left the wheel?”
“No.”
“Before you made her fast to the dock?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t want to know what time you were getting in?”
“Already knew that,” Werner said curtly, and rose in dismissal. “It was almost ten forty-five.”
From my home phone, I called the next two witnesses on the list Folger had given me, a man and wife named Jerry and Brenda Bannerman, who lived in West Palm Beach. They graciously agreed to see Andrew and me tomorrow, provided we didn’t mind coming to their boat. We arranged to be at their yacht club by twelve-thirty, which meant an early rising and a three-to-four-hour drive across the state.
Etta Toland wasn’t quite so gracious.
Although we’d known each other socially before the infringement matter came up, on the phone she called me “Mr. Hope,” and told me at once that she had no interest in doing a taped, informal reprise of her grand jury testimony. On the other hand, she would be delighted, Mr. Hope, to come to my office on Monday morning and testify under oath, because — as she so delicately put it — “I want to bury your fucking client.”
I asked her if ten o’clock would be convenient.
“Ten o’clock would be fine, Mr. Hope.”
I thanked her for her courtesy, and she hung up without saying goodbye.
I looked at my watch.
It was almost six o’clock and I was supposed to pick up Patricia at seven.
All during dinner that night, I kept wondering why Patricia didn’t want to make love anymore. I figured it had something to do with the fear of losing me. Fuck me and my brains would curdle again. Fuck me and I would lie in coma again for the rest of my life, a fate some people might have wished for me, but not Patricia, certainly not Patricia, who loved me. But she had also loved someone named Mark Loeb, and I think he loomed large in the equation. Mark was one of the partners in the firm she worked for at the time — Carter, Rifkin, Lieber and Loeb, he was the Loeh. She was thirty-one years old at the time, this must have been five years ago. He was forty-two. They had celebrated his birthday not a month earlier. October the fifteenth. Birth date of great men.
They’d been living together for almost two years, in a little apartment on Bleecker Street in the Village. It was his apartment, she’d moved in with him. Her own apartment had been uptown on Eighty-ninth near Lex, which was a longer subway ride to the office on Pine Street. His apartment was nicer, and closer to the office. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Everything had seemed so right at the time, they were so very much in love.
He was Jewish, and so it had always seemed so ironic that he was the one who’d wanted to go uptown to see the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. He’d never had a tree in his own home while he was growing up, never had a tree during his marriage to a Jewish girl, who’d divorced him after five years of what she called turmoil and anguish — just before Christmas, incidentally, but that was a coincidence. He’d always thought of Christmas as a time to escape, get down to St. Barts or Caneel, get away from the insistent Christian barrage that made him feel excluded in his own city, made him feel somehow... un-American.
Because New York was his city, you know, he’d been born here and raised here, had only once in his life lived outside of it, and then not too distant — in Larchmont, with his ex, whose name was Monica. Patricia had met her at a party once. This was three years after the divorce, Mark hadn’t expected to see her there, he seemed flustered when he introduced them, three years after the divorce. She was a tall and gorgeous brunette who made Patricia feel like a frump. He’d apologized afterward. Never would have gone there if he’d known, and so on. In Patricia’s apartment later — they hadn’t yet started living together — it was as if seeing her again... seeing Monica... he realized he truly loved Patricia.
At the time, the firm had been litigating an important case, a mere matter of tax evasion that could have sent their client to prison for the next fifty years and cost him millions in fines. December eleventh fell on a Friday that year, which also happened to be the day the trial ended in an acquittal for their client. So they’d gone out to celebrate with the other partners and their wives, and afterward Mark suggested that they all go uptown to look at the tree in Rockefeller Plaza. None of them wanted to go except Lee Carter, who wasn’t Jewish, but his wife said she had a headache, which Mark thought was a euphemism for Let’s go home and fuck, Lee. So they all went home and Patricia and Mark got into a taxi and headed uptown.
This was pretty late. Neither of them knew what time they turned off the lights on the tree. She guessed they both had some vague idea that the tree couldn’t stay lit all night long, but they didn’t know exactly what time the plug was pulled. Neither of them was paying any attention to the time, anyway. It had been a wonderful victory today, and a great party, and they’d each had too much champagne to drink, this was now maybe eleven-thirty, maybe later, when they climbed into a taxi, and told the driver to take them uptown to Rockefeller Plaza.
There were still people skating on the ice.
The tree was still lighted.
They got out of the cab and stood on the sidewalk on the almost deserted street, holding hands, looking up at the tree. Below them, on a sunken ice-skating rink, young girls in short skirts were cutting fancy figures on the ice, and old men with their hands behind their backs were plodding along like ocean liners. The giant tree with its multicolored lights dazzled the night air above them.