I was wondering now what else she had forgotten to tell me.
Perhaps prompted by the Tolands’ obsession with keeping their decks pristine, I now took off my own shoes and asked Andrew to remove his as well. Officer Gergin looked at us both as if we were slightly deranged and made not the slightest move to unlace his highly polished black brogans.
We all went below.
There is something about a room where a murder has been committed. This was not in actuality a “room”; there are no rooms as such aboard seagoing vessels, although “staterooms” are called rooms and “shower rooms” are called rooms, but these are truly compartments, as was this “dining saloon” we passed through which was, in fact, a dining room. Enough already. Shoeless, we padded in our socks to the master stateroom, Gergin clumping along behind us in his thick-soled regulation shoes.
If there is one area aboard a boat that truly looks like a room, it is the stateroom. Perhaps this is because it’s dominated by a bed, in this case a queen-size bed with cabinets flanking it and reading lights above it. The master bath, or the “en suite head” as it was nautically called, was on the port side of the bed, and there was a bank of dressers and several closets on the starboard side. Just opposite the foot of the bed, and flanking the entrance door to the cabin, there were glass-doored, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
“We’ll be taking pictures in here,” Andrew said.
“No problem,” Gergin said.
I normally feel like strangling people who say “No problem” or, especially, “Hey, no problem.” What the phrase really means is, “Yes, there is ordinarily a problem in honoring such a request, but in this single instance, and however irritating it may be, an exception will be made, although it is truly a severe pain in the ass.”
That is what “No problem” means.
And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
“We’ll be looking around, too,” I said.
“For what?”
“Don’t know.”
“No problem,” Gergin said, and shrugged, and then planted himself squarely in the door to the stateroom, where he could watch Andrew taking his pictures and me rummaging around.
Two shots to the head, the coroner’s report had said.
A third that had missed.
No stench of cordite here.
But the place reeked of murder.
The chalked outline of Brett Toland’s body was traced on the carpet alongside the bed. Bloodstains had turned black on the carpet. Raw wood showed where the third bullet had been pried from the wall alongside the bathroom door.
Gergin yawned while Andrew took his Polaroid pictures.
This was where the police had found Lainie’s scarf.
I didn’t know where to begin.
I didn’t even know what I was looking for.
I started in the bathroom, looking in the cabinet under the sink and finding nothing but extra rolls of toilet paper and boxes of Kleenex and a six-pack of Irish Spring soap bars. I then looked in the mirrored cabinet over the sink and found several toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste and a wide assortment of nonprescription medicines, and several prescription drugs as well, but nothing that would help me to prove my client was innocent of the crime with which she’d been charged.
If that was what I was looking for.
Andrew was still taking pictures.
I went to the cabinet on the starboard side of the bed, and opened the latched door. There was a pair of pompommed slippers with low heels on the floor of the cabinet. Nothing else. I closed the door and slid open the drawer above it. A pair of reading glasses, a packet of tissues, a tube of lipstick. I figured this was Etta Toland’s side of the bed.
I went around to Brett’s side.
Ran the same search of the cabinet base and drawer, and found nothing of importance. But I wondered if this was where he’d stored the forty-five that had later been used to kill him.
Walked back to the combination bookcase and entertainment center fitted with a television set, a VCR, and a CD player.
Started looking through the books.
Pulled out a copy of Great Expectations. Leafed through it. Placed it back on the shelf. Found The Rubaiyat. Blew dust off it. Opened it. Flipped through it. People sometimes tucked letters or scraps of paper into books. But there was nothing. The dust wrappers had been removed from all of the books. Not uncommon on a boat, where moisture caused paper to twist and curl. Took down a copy of Stephen King’s It. Big book, some two and a half inches thick. Black cover with the initials SK in red in the lower right-hand corner. Opened the book. Closed it, or It, put it back on the shelf. Started looking at some other books. Blew dust off them. Leafed through them. Put them back on the shelves again. There were a lot of books here. Hundred best books in the English language, it looked like. Some of them never read, judging by the dust on them. Began looking through the videocassettes in their black vinyl cases. The cover art on one of them showed a woman’s hands spread over the crotch of her lacy white panties. The ring on her pinky...
“How long you guys gonna be down here?” Gergin asked.
I put the cassette back on the shelf.
“You can leave us if you’re bored,” I said.
“Hey, no problem,” he said.
“We won’t be stealing anything.”
“Who said you would? It’s just it’s a little stuffy down here, the air-conditioning off and all.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs?” I suggested. “Get yourself some air.”
“No, that’s okay,” he said.
I looked at some other cassettes.
Gergin scratched his ass.
“Did you get any pictures of the cockpit?” I asked Andrew.
“Do we need any?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, and looked him dead in the eye.
We’d been working together for a good long time.
“Okay to go up alone?” he asked Gergin.
Gergin smelled a rat.
The wrong one.
“I’ll go with you,” he said, and they both left the stateroom.
I waited till I heard Gergin’s heavy footfalls on the topside deck. I took the cassette down from the shelf again. It was titled Idle Hands. The ring on the woman’s right pinky finger was identical to Lainie’s Victorian seal ring with its heart-shaped face and its floret-covered band.
Without a second’s hesitation, I lifted my jacket and tucked the cassette into my trousers against the small of my back.
This was embarrassing.
Three attorneys who represented a person, watching a compromising videotape of that person. Idle Hands indeed. A tape that could easily be defined as pornography by prevailing community standards in that Lainie Commins, all by herself and looking quite cockeyed without her glasses on (or anything else but white panties and a gold Victorian ring, for that matter), was exposing her genitals, pubic area, buttocks and breasts below the top of the nipples, with less than a full opaque covering; was engaging as well in masturbation, which act constituted the commission of an abominable and detestable crime against nature, or suggested that such a crime was being or would be committed; was also exposing her genitals in a presumed state of sexual stimulation or arousal; all of this presumably done willfully (as witness the knowing albeit goofy smile on her face), which activities predominately appealed to the prurient, shameful or morbid interests, and were without serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Boy oh boy.