“Bit of a chop today,” he agreed, nodding.
“No, I mean the craving for it. You think it’s gone, and then all at once it’s back again.” She shoveled a spoonful of flakes into her mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Shifted her weight on the bank. “What’d you do with my stash?” she asked.
“The jumbos I found in your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Deep-sixed them.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did, Toots.”
“Terrible waste.”
“Not the way I look at it.”
“I’d love one of those rocks right this minute,” she said, and looked at him.
“I can’t help you,” he said. “They’re on the bottom of the ocean.”
“I don’t believe you, Warren.”
“I’m telling you.”
She shifted her weight again. He realized all at once that her legs were bare. She’d taken off her panty hose. He saw them crumpled against the bulkhead now, a wad of sand-colored nylon.
“I keep wondering where I’d be if I was a vial of crack,” she said. “Did you used to play that when you were a kid, Warren?”
“No, I never wondered where I’d be if I was a vial of crack.”
“I mean if you couldn’t find one of your toys or games. Didn’t you used to say Where would I be if I was a fire engine? Or a doll? Or a...?”
“I didn’t play with dolls.”
“Where on this boat would I be?” she asked in a cute, feigned little-girl’s voice.
“No place,” he said. “There’s no place on this boat you’d be. Cause they ain’t no crack on dis here boat,” he said in a thick, feigned watermelon accent.
“Wanna bet?” she asked, and smiled, and shifted her weight again, her legs parting slightly, the black skirt edging higher on her thighs. “I’ll bet if I asked you really nice, you’d tell me where you’ve hidden that crack, Warren.”
“You’d be wasting your time, Toots.”
“Would I?” she said, and suddenly opened her legs wide to him. “Tell me,” she said.
“Toots...”
“Cause, honey, right now I’d do anything for some of that shit, believe me.”
“ Toots...”
“Anything,” she said.
Their eyes met.
She nodded.
“Not this way, Toots,” he said softly, and turned away from her, and walked swiftly to the ladder and climbed the steps and was gone.
She stared at the empty space he’d left behind him.
What? she thought.
What?
What you expected from a firm that called itself Toy-land, Toyland was a yellow-brick road leading to a gingerbread house with white-sugar icicles hanging from the roofline and jelly-drop doorknobs and mint-clear windows. You did not expect a low yellow-brick factory in a Cyclone-fenced industrial park off Weaver Road, the Toyland, Toyland boy-girl logo sitting on the rooftop in three-dimensional bliss. What you expected when you stepped into that fantasized gingerbread house was a band of bearded elves on high stools at low tables, wearing red stocking hats and whistling while they worked. What you got was a reception area with a glass-tiled wall beaming late morning sunshine, two teal-colored doors flanking a circular desk centered on the opposite wall, and huge framed glossy photographs of the company’s several hit toys and games hanging on the other two walls. Among these toys were a green frog wearing scuba-diving gear; a menacing treaded black tank whose helmeted commander was a little blond girl; and a red fire truck with a yellow water tower which, from the photographic evidence, shot a real stream of water.
I was here to see the man Etta Toland claimed was a witness to Lainie Commins’s thievery, the man who’d been present at a meeting last September when Brett Toland first proposed his idea for a cross-eyed bear. Robert Ernesto Diaz’s office was at the end of a long corridor lined with doors painted in various pastel shades, as befitted Toyland’s image. Etta had defined him as the company’s design chief. His office at once fortified that concept.
A rangy man with black hair, a black mustache, and dark brown eyes, Diaz stood behind a huge desk cluttered with what I assumed were models of future toys. A bank of windows behind the desk streamed sunlight onto a wall bearing a huge poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, or Bram Stoker’s, or whoever’s, flanked by a pair of Picasso prints. A Toys “
” Us catalog was open on the desktop, resting beside a digital clock that read 11:27, and a pair of clay models for a very slender somewhat buxom doll...
“Our annual bid to dethrone Barbie,” Diaz said with a rueful grin.
...and models in five different colors for a helicopter which I assumed would fly if you put batteries in it, and four painted ceramic models of men and women in space suits, which looked very much like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to me, but I currently had one infringement suit going against the company.
“Toyland’s already begun cutting steel on the helicopter,” he said, “but we haven’t yet decided on the color. Which one do you favor?”
Diaz saw my puzzlement and immediately defined “cutting steel.”
“Tooling up,” he explained. “Making the molds we’ll be using for years and years to come, I hope, I hope, I hope. The helicopter’s my design. It’s called Whurly Burly, and the pilot’s a blond girl like the one in Tinka Tank, which you may have seen on the wall in reception, and which was a big winner for us three Christmases ago. I designed her, too. Kids love blond dolls. Even black kids love blond dolls. Six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tooling on that bird, plus another four for R&D... research and development... in hope it’ll fly next Christmas. That’s a million dollars going in. But we’re betting a lot more on Gladys — which I guess is why you’re here.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said.
“A terrible thing, terrible,” Diaz said, shaking his head. “To kill a man over a toy? Terrible.”
I said nothing.
“Look, she must have felt enormously threatened, I realize that. If that bear’s going to be under the tree by next Christmas, it’s got to be in the stores no later than May. By next month, all your major chains — Kmart, Wal-Mart, Toys ‘’ Us, F.A.O.’s — will be planning exactly which toy is going to be in which aisle on which shelf come spring.”
“That early,” I said.
“That early. October. Everything planned by then. With Tinka Tank, we had the choicest location in every goddamn store in America. There wasn’t a girl alive who didn’t want that toy. We’re hoping the same thing will happen with Gladys. Test her this Christmas, have a runaway toy next Christmas.”
I did not mention that if Judge Santos decided in Lainie’s favor, either Mattel or Ideal would be testing Gladly and not Gladys this Christmas.
“Say we put out twenty, twenty-five thousand bears for the test launch,” Diaz said, “which we’ve now got priced at a hundred and a quarter. If we see we’ve got a sure winner, we can drop the price to ninety-nine, keep her under that forbidding hundred-dollar price point. Mass-producing her will cost about a third of that, something like thirty-five dollars a bear, including the glasses, which are expensive to make. My guess is we’ll have sunk close to two million dollars in Gladys before we really begin marketing her. If we sell only a million bears next Christmas, you’re going to see some very long faces around here. But if she’s a big seller next year, she’ll be even bigger the year after that and the year after that and then we’re in clover. So I think you can see the urgency here.”