Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 Read Free Page A

never thought of Calusa as a tropical paradise. Even in the springtime, when everything is in bloom, nothing really
     looks as lush or as bursting with color as it does in the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, to me, Calusa usually looks more
     brown than it does green, as if the grass, and the leaves on the trees and bushes, have been overlaid with a fine dust. Even
     the bougainvillea and hibiscus seem somehow limp and lacking in luster when compared to the extravagant display of these plants
     in truly tropical climates.
    But in April…
    Which is when the idea for Gladly first came to Lainie and which, coincidentally, was when I was flat on my ass in the Intensive
     Care Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in a coma as deep as—but that’s another story.
    In April, then, as Lainie tells it, the street on which she lives and works resembles a jungle through which a narrow asphalt
     road has been laid and left to deteriorate. The entrance to North Apple Street—there
is
no South Apple Street, by the way—is a mile and a half from the mainland side of the Whisper Key bridge. A sign at the street’s
     opening reads DEAD END appropriate in that North Apple runs for two blocks before it becomes an oval that turns the street back upon itself in the
     opposite direction.
    Lining these two short blocks are twelve shingled houses with the sort of glass-louvered windows you could find all over Calusa
     in the good old days before it became a tourist destination for folks from the Middle West and Canada. The houses here are
     virtually hidden from view by a dense growth of dusty cabbage palm and palmetto, red bougainvillea, purple bougainvillea,
     white bougainvillea growing in dense profusion, sloppy pepper trees hung with curling Spanish moss, yellow-clustered gold
     trees, pink oleander, golden allamanda, trailing lavender lantana, rust-colored shrimp plants, yellow hibiscus, pink hibiscus,
     red hibiscus, eponymous bottlebrush trees with long red flowers—and here and there, the one true floral splendor of Calusa,
     the bird-of-paradise with its spectacular orange and bluish-purple crest.
    People say about this street, “It’s still very Florida.”
    Meaning it’s run-down and overgrown and wild and fetid and hidden and somehow secret and silent. “You expect to see alligators
     waddling out of the bushes on this street. “You expect to see bare-breasted, bare-chested Calusa Indians. What you do see
     are suntanned young sun-worshippers—some of them bare-chested or bare-breasted, true enough—living six or seven in each small
     house, performing any service that will keep them outdoors most weekdays and on the beaches every weekend. There are more
     gardeners, pool-cleaning people, house painters, window washers, tree trimmers, road maintenance workers, lifeguards and boatyard
     personnel living on the two blocks that form Apple Street than there are in the entire state of Nebraska.
    In at least three of the houses here, there are people with artistic pretensions, but that is not unusual for the state of
     Florida in general and the city of Calusa in particular. Calusa calls itself the Athens of Southwest Florida, a sobriquet
     that causes my partner Frank—a transplanted native New “Yorker—to snort and scoff. Four people on Apple Street call themselves
     painters. Another calls himself a sculptor. A sixth calls herself a writer. Lainie Commins is the only true professional on
     the street. She is, after all, a trained designer with a track record of production, though none of the toys or dolls, or
     even a
game
in one instance, ever took off the way the companies for which she’d worked had anticipated.
    The walls of her tiny studio are hung with actually
manufactured
toys she designed first for a company named Toy-works in Providence, where she worked for a year after her graduation from
     Risdee, and then for a company named Kid Stuff in Birmingham, Alabama, not far from her birthplace, and next for Toyland,