Nowadays, the cops seemed actually glad to see him.
Broke the routine, you know?
Guy coming in from left field with a plaster cast of a tire track, this was impressive. At least, that’s what Detective Nick Alston said to him at nine forty-four that Wednesday morning, when Guthrie unveiled his handiwork, first snipping the white cord he’d tied around his package, and then peeling off the layers of brown wrapping paper to reveal — ta-ra!
“That’s very impressive,” Alston said. “Where’d you get that?”
“I made it myself,” Guthrie said proudly.
“No kidding? That’s very impressive.”
Alston had never been what anyone would call handsome, but the last time Guthrie had seen him, his brown eyes were shot with red, and his craggy face looked puffy and bloated, and his straw-colored hair looked stringy, and there was a beard stubble on his face, and it was plain to see he’d already begun drinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Today, at nine forty-five now, he was clean-shaven, and he was wearing a neatly pressed suit and tie over a pristine white button-down shirt, and his hair was combed, and he looked... well... presentable.
Guthrie was impressed, too.
He basked in the glow of Alston’s approval of the cast he’d made at the scene, feeling very much like a sixth-grade pupil showing a clay ashtray to his teacher. The cast really was a very good one, if Guthrie said so himself. Sometimes they turned out lousy. But Guthrie had first sprayed shellac over the tire track in the sandy soil on the shoulder of the road, and then had used only the very finest grade of art plaster of Paris for his mixture. He had spread it over the water in the bowl, not stirring it, permitting it instead to sink eventually to the bottom of the bowl, and only then adding more plaster until the water couldn’t soak up anything further. After he’d poured the mixture onto the track, eyeballing it to a thickness of three-eighths of an inch or so, he reinforced it with snippets of twigs and twine and a few toothpicks for good luck, carefully laying on the material so that none of it touched the track itself. Pour on another layer of plaster, allow it to harden — you knew this was happening when it got warm to the touch — and voilà! The perfect specimen lying on Alston’s desk.
“So what would you like me to do with this fine work of art here?” Alston asked.
Guthrie knew he was joking.
Or hoped he was.
“Nick,” he said, “I would like you to seek a match in either your own files or the Feeb files. I have Polaroids, too,” he said, and dropped a thick manila envelope onto Alston’s desk. “I would like you to do me that favor, Nick.”
“How’s Gracie these days?” Alston asked casually.
Gracie was a hooker Guthrie had once sent around to Alston’s place as a favor when he was still a falling-down drunk.
“She’s fine. Asked about you just the other day, in fact.”
Alston said nothing for several moments. Then, still looking down at the plaster cast, he said, “I’d like her to see me sober.”
“Done,” Guthrie said. “I’ll send her over tonight.”
“No, just tell her I’ll call,” Alston said.
“Happy to,” Guthrie said, and waited.
“What’s this in reference to?” Alston asked, opening the envelope and looking at the very good Polaroids Guthrie had taken, if he said so himself.
“A homicide,” Guthrie said. “I’m working for the defense attorney.”
“Who?”
“Matthew Hope.”
“What happened to Warren Chambers?” Alston asked.
What they do is they treat you like an invalid. Which is what you are. This means that the moment I began speaking, they started a daily assessment of my functional status in addition to my neurological status. Test after test after test, tests enough to bend the mind and twist the tongue. Let us consider, for example, the Post Traumatic Amnesia Scale, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Bender-Gestalt Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index, all designed to determine the extent of injury or lack thereof.
They shave your scalp with an abrasive, and with elasticized tape they attach needle electrodes to it. Ten to twenty small electrodes on the scalp in a defined spacing. You feel like Frankenstein’s monster waiting for the bolt of lightning that will make you come alive. In metabolic insults such as mine...
Spinaldo kept using the term “metabolic insult.” I felt I should challenge him to a duel.
...in metabolic insults such as mine, then, the electroencephalogram usually shows slow diffuse waves. Recovery occurs in tandem with the resolution of slow waves toward normal brain wave patterns.
Every day, Spinaldo told me I was on the way to recovery.
I kept wondering when that would be.
The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up around the slip where Toy Boat was nudging the dock, but I had called the State Attorney’s Office beforehand, and had been told by Pete Folger that the prosecution had already gathered all the evidence it needed, and that I could visit the boat anytime I wished. I was surprised, therefore, to see a uniformed police officer standing at the head of the gangway as Andrew and I approached that Wednesday morning.
I told him who we were, and handed him a card.
He told us who he was, and explained that Assistant State Attorney Peter Folger had asked the police department to send an officer down to “extend every courtesy to Attorney Hope.” This was code. What it meant was “Stay with him every minute and make sure he doesn’t do anything that will damage our case against Lainie Commins.”
I told the officer — whose name was Vincent Gergin, according to the black plastic nameplate over the breast pocket of his blouse — that my associate and I merely wanted to take some Polaroids of the crime scene with a view toward better orientation. I also told him we might look around the boat a bit to see if there was anything the S.A.’s Office might have overlooked. He said, “No problem.”
I hate that expression.
I said, “Fine. In that case, we’ll go aboard.”
He said, “Fine. In that case, I’ll just go with you.”
We all went down the gangway and onto the boat.
Andrew was there for the very same reason he’d accompanied me when we talked to Folger’s witnesses. Whichever one of us later tried the case, the other would be called as a witness to whatever we happened to discover on the boat this morning. Quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find a damn thing. Say what you will about the office Skye Bannister runs, his investigators and criminologists are enormously efficient in picking a crime scene clean.
Here was the cockpit where Lainie and Brett had sat — according to her — from ten to ten-thirty. Here was where he had made a generous offer, according to her, or a merely insulting offer, according to his widow. Here was where, according to Lainie’s first story, she’d sipped Perrier that (oh-yes-I-remember-now) turned into a couple of vodka-tonics in her next version. Here was where she’d given Brett her Top-Siders and her scarf, something she’d neglected to tell me at first, which scarf was later found by the police in the boat’s master bedroom. She had not remembered the scarf until the police questioned her about it the following morning. She had not remembered either the scarf or the shoes until I later questioned her about them.