I should tell you that people say Frank and I look alike, though I have never been able to see the slightest resemblance. I am thirty-eight years old and Frank is forty. I am an even six feet tall and I weigh a hundred and eighty-five pounds. Frank is five-nine and a half and he weighs a hundred and sixty. My face is long and narrow, what Frank calls a “fox face.” By contrast, he calls himself a “pig face.” There are also “rhino faces” and “turtle faces” in the system of categorization he invented. I am originally from Chicago, he is from New York. We both have black hair and brown eyes, true, and we both have corner offices at Summerville and Hope, but that’s all we have in common.
Frank has been nicer to me since I survived becoming a vegetable.
Everybody has been nicer to me, in fact.
In fact, that’s precisely the goddamn trouble.
Neither Frank nor I knew anything Etta Toland had told the grand jury. Like most depositions, this was a fact-finding exploration, or, if you prefer, a fishing expedition. But we could assume, as had the pot-smoking lawyer-boater Jerry Bannerman, that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had used Etta to establish yet another time sequence in the inexorable order that linked Lainie Commins to the murder of Brett Toland. Since the Bannermans had testified to hearing shots at eleven-forty on the night of September twelfth, I figured that was a good enough place to start, so I asked Etta where she’d been at about that time.
“Home,” she said. “Waiting for Brett’s call.”
“You were expecting your husband to call you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know where he was?”
“Yes, he was aboard Toy Boat. With Lainie Commins.”
“Why were you expecting him to call?”
“To tell me how it had gone.”
“How what had gone?”
“His meeting with Lainie. He asked her to come to the boat so he could offer a solution to our problem.”
“By problem...”
“Her suit for a permanent injunction.”
“What was the nature of this solution, can you tell me, Mrs. Toland?”
“He offered to buy her off.”
“Buy her off?”
“He offered a cash settlement if she would drop her claim.”
“A cash settlement?” I said, surprised.
“Yes. Five thousand dollars.”
“Are you saying your husband offered Ms. Commins...?”
“I don’t know if he actually ever made the offer. She may have shot him first, for all I know. I never saw him again after he left the house, you see. Or spoke to him, for that matter. But that’s what he was planning, yes. That’s what he and I had discussed.”
“You’d discussed offering Ms. Commins five thousand dollars if she’d drop her infringement claim.”
“Yes.”
“Did you and your husband discuss any other possible offer?”
“No. Well, the price, yes. We were trying to determine how much she was going for. But there was never any doubt in our mind that she’d agree to a cash settlement.”
“You didn’t, for example, discuss manufacturing Ms. Commins’s bear yourself and...”
“No.”
“...and compensating her by way of a substantial advance against generous royalties?”
“Why would we do that? She designed the bear while she was working for us. In fact, the bear was Brett’s idea. And we have a witness to prove it.”
“What witness?” I said at once. “You offered no witnesses at the...”
“Brett remembered only later.”
“Remembered what?”
“That Bobby Diaz was there.”
“Who’s Bobby Diaz?”
“Our design chief. He was there.”
“Where?”
“In Brett’s office. When he first told Lainie about his idea for a cross-eyed bear.”
“When was this?”
“Last September.”
“And your husband remembered it only after the hearing?
“Yes. In fact, that’s what prompted him to invite Lainie to the boat last Tuesday night.”
“To make an offer of a cash settlement.”
“Yes. Because now we had a witness.”
“Did you tell this is your attorney?”
“We planned to. If Lainie didn’t accept the offer.”
“So, as I understand this, at eleven-forty you were waiting at home for your husbands phone call...”
“Yes. To learn whether she’d accepted the offer or turned it down.”
“Did you think she might actually accept such an offer?”
“Brett and I were confident she would.”
“An offer of five thousand dollars to drop...”
“The bear was ours,” Etta said simply. “We have a witness.”
“Did your husband, in fact, call you at any time that night?” I asked.
“No,” Etta said. “My husband was being murdered by Lainie Commins that night.”
I let that go by.
“Did you try to reach him at any time that night?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“By telephone.”
“You called the boat?”
“Yes. Well, the cellular phone number. There’s a cellular phone on the boat.”
“At what time did you call the boat?”
“Eleven forty-five? Around then. I was ready for bed, in fact. When I didn’t hear from Brett, I thought something might be wrong. So I called the boat.”
“And?”
“I got no answer.”
“What did you do then?”
“I got dressed and drove to the club.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t like Brett not to call when he said he would.”
“Did you think the meeting might still be going on?”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“How long did it take you to get to the club?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes?”
“Just for clarification,” I said, “by ‘the club,’ I’m assuming you mean the Silver Creek Yacht Club.”
“Yes.”
“Where you keep your boat.”
“Yes.”
“What time did you get there, Mrs. Toland?”
“A quarter past twelve.”
“How do you know what time it was?”
“I looked at the dashboard clock just as I was nearing the club.”
“How’d you happen to do that?”
“I knew it was late, I guess I was wondering if they could still be on the boat discussing the offer. I guess I wanted to know just how late it actually was.”
“Is the clock in your car a digital clock?”
“No. It has hands.”
“Then you can’t say exactly what time it was, can you?”
“It might have been a minute or so later.”
“Twelve-sixteen, would you say? Twelve-seventeen?”
“More like twelve-sixteen.”
“You said earlier that you hadn’t heard from your husband since he’d left the house...”
“That’s right.”
“What time was that?”
“Around eight.”
“Are you aware that he called Ms. Commins at nine? From the boat?”
“Yes, he said he was going to.”