“Yes.”
“Of a decision on who owns what.”
“Yes.”
“So we can start moving. If we’re going to get those test bears out there plugging for us, the judge not only has to decide correctly he has to decide soon. So Brett wouldn’t have died for no reason at all.”
I missed the logic of this.
“Why weren’t you called as a witness?” I asked.
“At the hearing, do you mean?”
“Yes, the hearing.”
“From what I understand, Brett didn’t remember until it was too late.”
“Remember what?”
“That I’d been there at the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“When he told Lainie about his idea for the bear.”
“When you say ‘From what I understand...’”
“That’s what Etta told me.”
“When was that?”
“Last week sometime. After what happened.”
“After Brett’s murder, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Etta told you that he’d suddenly remembered...”
“Yes.”
“...the fact that you’d been there at this important meeting.”
“Yes. Well, I was there, you see.”
“Before the hearing, did you happen to mention this to either of the Tolands?”
“Well, Brett already knew I was there, you see. So I figured if he wanted me as a witness, he’d let me know.”
“But he didn’t, as it turned out.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Because apparently he’d forgotten all about it till the day he was murdered.”
“Apparently.”
“But you remembered being at the meeting.”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you still remember being there?”
“Well, of course.”
“Tell me about it.”
It is one of those steamy sulky September days in Florida, when everything and everyone seems wilted by the heat and the humidity and the promise of more heat and humidity. Bobby Diaz — he is familiarly called Bobby by everyone at Toyland — is working here in his office when Brett buzzes him and asks him to come down the hall a minute.
“Do you remember the actual date of this meeting?”
“No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Or the time.”
“I don’t remember, I’m sorry.”
But he does remember that it was in the afternoon sometime and that he had just taken a call from an insider at Toys “
” Us who’d phoned to whisper in his ear that the company thought Toyland’s new video game, Rush to Judgment, was “entirely fresh.” In fact, he would’ve hurried down the hall to report this to Brett, anyway, even if Brett hadn’t buzzed him first.
“Down the hall” is where Brett’s huge corner-window office is. A secretary sits behind a desk in an anteroom adjoining it, but she scarcely glances up at Bobby as he raps his knuckles on her desk in passing greeting. Walking into Brett’s office is like walking into a rich kid’s playroom. There are toys and dolls and games strewn on every flat surface, including the floor. Brett himself sits behind a very large desk similarly covered with toys in various stages of development. As Bobby recalls it now, last September they were still searching for a good face for a doll they’d since abandoned, and a dozen or more models of the tiny doll’s head are scattered on Brett’s desk like the remnants of a mass decapitation. During the conversation that follows, Brett keeps rolling one of these miniature heads between his fingers. Bobby tells Brett the good...
“Was Lainie in the office when you got there?”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Go ahead.”
He tells Brett the good news he’s just received from his informer at Toys “” Us, and Brett immediately gets on the phone to call, first, his wife in her own large (but not as large) office down the hall, and then Toyland’s sales manager, asking him to stand by for a possible confirming call and big order from Toys, and then his production manager in the Bradenton factory (which explains why there are no elves here in the Calusa building) to tell him they may have to up their initial run order on Rush, as the game is familiarly called in-house. Idly picking up two of the tiny doll heads, he asks Bobby to sit down, and offers him a wrapped mint from the jar he keeps on his desk (he’s just quit smoking for the fifth time). As Bobby unwraps the hard candy, Brett tells him all about this idea he’s had for a teddy bear.
Rolling the heads between his fingers the way Queeg rolled the stainless-steel marbles in The Caine Mutiny (but reforming smokers can be forgiven their little physical tics), Brett says that he suddenly remembered a hymn they used to sing in church when he was a Baptist growing up in Overall Patches, Tennessee...
“Did he actually say that?”
“No, no. I don’t know where he was from in Tennessee. I just made that up.”
“But you’re not making up the rest of this, are you?”
“Of course not. I’m telling it just the way I remember it.”
The way Brett remembers it in that meeting last year is that one of the lines in the hymn was either “Gladly the cross I’d bear” or “Gladly the cross I’ll bear,” either one of which referred to joyously carrying the cross for Jesus. It doesn’t matter what the line actually was, he says, it’s an old hymn in public domain. The only thing that matters so far as Toyland is concerned was that all the kids thought there was actually a cross-eyed bear named Gladly.
“What I’d like to do,” Brett says, “is come up with a cross-eyed teddy bear.”
Sucking on the mint, Bobby looks at him.
“A teddy bear with crossed eyes, okay?” Brett says.
“O-kay,” Bobby says slowly and skeptically.
“Which, when you put eyeglasses on him, the eyes get uncrossed.”
Bobby is beginning to get it.
“We tell the kids to kiss the bear on the nose and put the glasses on him, and all at once the bear’s eyes are straight,” Brett says.
“How do we do that?” Bobby asks.
“I don’t know how we do it. Am I a designer? We have this cuddly little bear who happens to have a handicap...”
“Visually challenged,” Bobby says.
“Strabismally challenged,” Brett says, nodding. “It’s called strabismus. When you’re cockeyed.”
“Must be millions of kids in America who have to wear glasses,” Bobby says, sucking pensively on the mint now, beginning to recognize the possibilities inherent in Brett’s brainstorm.
“And who hate wearing glasses,” Brett says. “This way we give them an incentive to wear glasses. Because they can see what the glasses do for the bear. The glasses fix the bear’s eyes.”
“I think it’s terrific,” Bobby says. “We’ll get endorsements from every optometry association in the world.”
“Who do we get to design her?”
“Lainie,” they both say at once.
Brett reaches for his phone.
Lainie has worn to work, on this insufferably hot day in September, a very short green mini, a darker green T-shirt with no bra, strappy green sandals to match. The heart-shaped ring is on her right pinky. She is bare-legged, and her blond hair is massed on top of her head, held up and away from her neck with a green plastic comb. She looks sticky and sweaty and somehow desirable...
“Well, she’s a very sexy girl, you know,” Bobby says now.
...and vulnerable, her wandering eye giving her a slightly dazed appearance. Bobby is fearful at first that her own affliction might cause her to bridle at the notion of a bear similarly handicapped, but, no, she takes to the idea at once, expanding upon it, even making a few on-the-spot sketches of what the bear might look like with and without glasses.