“Are you telling me you slipped this tape under your jacket while the cop was topside?” Frank asked.
“I did.”
“Boy oh boy,” he said.
“Do you intend to show this to the state attorney?” Andrew asked.
I merely looked at him.
“In which case,” he suggested, “I guess we’d better ask Miss Commins about it.”
Lainie arrived at our offices on Heron Street at a little before two that afternoon. She explained that we’d caught her working and asked us to please excuse the jeans, sandals and T-shirt she was wearing. She was also wearing the omnipresent Victorian ring on the pinky of her right hand. I asked her to please have a seat, and then I put the Idle Hands tape in our VCR, told her we were going to step outside for fifteen, twenty minutes, and asked her to hit the PLAY button after we were gone.
A half hour later, we rejoined her.
“So?” I said.
“Where’d you get this?” she asked.
“In the master stateroom of the Toland boat.”
“Yeah,” she said, and nodded bleakly.
We all looked at her. Andrew seemed not to understand quite what was going on. Then again, he was but a mere callow youth. I was wondering what Lainie meant by “Yeah.” She didn’t seem ready to amplify just yet. Frank caught my eye. The prompt, he was saying. Give the lady the prompt.
“Did you know this tape was on the boat?” I asked.
She hesitated, trying to determine which of the three of us would be most sympathetic to her story. I was guessing she was guessing Andrew. Instead, she pitched it to Frank.
“He was trying to blackmail me,” she said.
“Toland?” Frank said.
“Yes.”
“He showed you this tape, and...?”
“No.”
“Then...?”
“Said he had it.”
“Said he had a video of you in the nude?”
“Said he had this video,” she said, and nodded at the cassette vehemently, as if willing it to burst into flame — as well it might have, considering its subject matter.
“But he didn’t show it to you?”
“No.”
“Just said he had it.”
All of this from Frank in his clipped, no-nonsense New Yorker style. Sometimes I admired him.
“Yes, just said he had it. Showed me the case, the holder, whatever the hell it’s called, with my hands on the cover. But it was empty. Told me he’d have been stupid to bring the actual cassette there to the boat with him. Told me it was safe at home. Warned me that unless I dropped the infringement suit, all of kiddieland would learn about that tape.”
“All of...?”
“Kiddieland. He meant everyone in the toy world. He would let it be known that the woman designing toys for children... well... was... well... doing what... what you saw me doing on the tape.”
“And out the window goes your teddy bear,” Andrew said, nodding.
“No,” she corrected. “Out the window goes my life.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“When was what?”
“When did he tell you he had this tape?”
“While we were sitting upstairs.”
“In the cockpit?”
“Yes.”
“Drinking...”
“Yes.”
“Engaged in pleasant conver—”
“Until he tried to blackmail me.”
“But until then...”
“Until then, yes, he was telling me he thought he knew a way out of our problems, thought we could settle my claim without lawyers, and so on.”
“Is that when he mentioned the tape?”
“Yes.”
“Was this before or after he carried your shoes and your scarf down to the master stateroom?”
“I didn’t know where he carried them.”
“But before or after?”
“After. He took my stuff with him when he went down for the drinks.”
“Did you know which tape he was referring to?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
“You knew this tape existed?”
“Well, of course I knew,” she said, and turned to Andrew with an exasperated look on her face.
Andrew shrugged sympathetically.
“I mean, this wasn’t Candid Camera,” she said.
“When was this taped?” Frank asked.
“Earlier this year. Sometime in March.”
“Who shot it?”
“Man I met.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” she said, “I’m not on the witness stand here.”
“Thank God you’re not,” Frank said.
“Lainie,” I said gently, “would you like to tell us about it?”
The way Lainie tells it — and she tells it exceptionally well, first removing her eyeglasses to heighten the Poor Little Cockeyed but Extravagantly Sexy Waif look — the bills begin mounting and the savings begin dwindling the moment she leaves her weekly-paycheck job with Toyland back in January. Her own business, Just Kidding, is not yet established and there is an unexpected dearth of the freelance assignments she was hoping for — in fact, counting on...
“I didn’t think it would be that difficult,” she said. “I had a track record and a good reputation, and I figured the jobs would just pour in. Frankly, I even began wondering if the Tolands weren’t engaging in a little industrial sabotage. Bad-mouth me in the trade, you know, in hope I’d come back when I was on the ropes. The thing is, Toyland is the only game in town down here, so I was sending résumés to people who’d known me in New York or on the Coast, trolling, you know, networking, and it was taking a long time for people to get back to me. Meanwhile, the bucks were shrinking and...”
Getting a bit desperate, she begins searching the want ads, first for any kind of job requiring an artistic background — a graphic designer for an ad agency, for example, or an art director for a magazine — and next for any job with the descriptive word “creative” in its newspaper listing, as for instance designing daily menus for a restaurant. The difficulty is that she’s looking for something part-time, so that she can continue designing on her own while earning enough money to pay the mounting bills. She left the job at Toyland with two thousand dollars in savings. By the end of February, she is down to six hundred dollars and is scanning the ads advertising for part-time waitresses or hostesses or cashiers or landscape assistants or...
And her eye stops.
The ad reads:
“I thought it was legitimate,” she says now. “Besides...”
...ever since she moved to Florida, she’s spent a lot of time on the beach... well, her house on North Apple is merely a five-minute drive or a twenty-minute walk to the Whisper Key Beach... and surely the thong swimsuit she used to wear before the Calusa P.D. cracked down on such “indecent exposure” as they’d labeled it, was very close to parading around in lingerie, wasn’t it? In fact, rather more revealing than any lingerie she ever wore in the privacy of her own bedroom or under her clothes on the street. Besides, she truly does think the ad is legitimate, a wholesaler or retailer seeking someone to model famous imported brands like Chantelle or Lise Charmel or Hanro of Switzerland. She’s always felt she had a fairly decent figure, so why not use it to good advantage now in a part-time job paying excellent wages.