by Ed McBain
The way Grown-ups Inc. worked was really quite simple. If, for example, your building superintendent wasn't sending up enough heat, and you were either afraid or embarrassed to call him and demand more heat, you called Grown-ups Inc. instead, and you said, "I don't know what I'm going to do, there's not enough heat in the apartment, and I have a three-year-old daughter-"
That would've been about right for when they'd invented Grown-ups Inc. Joanna had been about three, and they were still living in Chicago where it got damn cold in the wintertime and where if you didn't have heat you could freeze to death.
"-and the apartment is like an igloo."
"We'll take care of it," the man from Grown-ups Inc. would say.
And he would call the super and tell him, "This is Grownups Inc., we're calling for Matthew Hope, we want the heat turned higher in his apartment at once, thank you very much."
The uses of Grown-ups Inc. were manifold.
Need theater tickets? An indoor tennis court from five to six? A dinner for eight served on your veranda? A birthday telegram, Valentine's Day chocolates, Mother's Day flowers, Father's Day tie?
Grown-ups Inc. would take care of all or any of these things painlessly. Grown-ups Inc. was premised on the sound concept that everyone needed a grown-up he could turn to. Marine generals needed grown-ups they could turn to. Women activists needed grown-ups. The president of the United States needed a grown-up. Terrorists needed grown-ups. In Grownups Inc. there was a grown-up for everyone, a grown-up to serve every need. Want to ask for a raise? Grown-ups Inc. would call your boss. Want to plan a trip to Bombay or Siam? No need to call a travel agent. Grown-ups Inc. would take care of it because Grown-ups Inc. took care of everything.
In fantasy, they had used Grown-ups Inc. more times than they could count. There was once a rat the size of a zeppelin in the Chicago apartment and the moment Susan saw it, she yelled, "Call Grown-ups Inc., quick!" Out on The Windbag one day, they were caught in a sudden squall that threatened to capsize the boat, and Matthew-clinging to the wheel for dear life-grinned weakly, and told Susan to get on the radio to Grown-ups Inc.
There was nothing Grown-ups Inc. could not do.
"Do you know…?" Susan said softly, and then stopped, and shook her head.
"What?" he said.
"When…" She shook her head again.
"Tell me."
"When I… when I found out that night about you and… shit, I still can't say her name."
"Aggie," he said.
"Aggie, yes," Susan said, and sighed. "When I found out about her that night, I… I… went all to pieces, you know, I didn't know what to do. And I… I thought… when Matthew comes home, we'll have to call Grown-ups Inc. They'll solve it for us." She nodded bleakly. "But of course that's not what happened, is it? Because there isn't any Grown-ups Inc."
"We're Grown-ups Inc.," Matthew said.
"The way we used to be Santa Claus," Susan said. "For Joanna."
"Yes," he said.
They were silent for several moments.
"Do you think Grown-ups Inc. could have saved it?" she asked. "Do you think we could have saved it, Matthew?"
"I don't know," he said honestly. "There was so much anger."
"There still is, don't kid yourself," Susan said and smiled. "I still think of her as The Cunt. Aggie What's-Her-Name. The Cunt."
"You're different," he said.
"How?"
"Two years ago, you never would have used that word."
"Maybe you didn't know me two years ago."
"Maybe not. You used to call your period The Curse."
"I still do. Some things never change, Matthew."
"We've changed, Susan."
"Older," she said.
"For sure."
"I'm thirty-six," she said. "That makes me middle-aged, doesn't it?"
"Hardly," he said, and smiled.
"You should see some of the gorgeous creatures in my exercise class," she said. "If you ever want to feel ancient, go to an exercise class."
"Frank says the reason exercise classes are so popular is because of the costume. It makes women feel like Bob Fosse dancers. Tell them they'd have to come to class in faded blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, and enrollment would drop off by half. That's what Frank says."
"Frank," she said, and nodded, as though fondly remembering someone half-forgotten.
They both fell silent again. A bird called somewhere. Another bird answered.
"Are there any more of these little mothers?" she asked, and extended her empty glass to him.
"Jack Lemmon," he said. "The Apartment The scene in the bar."
"We were still living in Chicago when we saw it."
"Yes."
She nodded again. Taking her glass he went into the house familiarly, as if he had never left it, and walked to the bar, and poured what was left of the martinis equally into her glass and his. When he came back out onto the patio again, she was sitting with her face turned toward the pool and the canal beyond, one leg extended, one leg bent at the knee. He felt an extraordinarily sharp urge to place his hand on the inside of her thigh. He sat instead, in the lounge beside hers, and handed her one of the glasses.
"We musn't drink so much that we won't know what we're doing," she said, sipping at the drink.
"We can always call Grown-ups Inc. later on," he said.
"Yes, and ask them what we did."
"The eyes and ears of the world."
"The mouth of the world," Susan said.
"I felt like calling them yesterday," he said, and told her all about his telephone encounter with Detective Cooper Rawles. She listened intently. It was like the old days, when he used to come home from the office and relate to her one problem or another and she listened because she cared, she still cared. It was like then.
"So what are you going to do?" she asked.
"Just what I've been doing," he said. "If there are questions I want answered, I'm going to ask them."
"Despite the warning?"
"I don't feel I'm interfering with his case," Matthew said.
"But that's not it," Susan said. "Even if you were interfering, you'd continue, wouldn't you?"
"Well," he said, smiling, "as an officer of the court, I don't think I'd knowingly obstruct justice or impede the progress of an investi-"
"But you'd continue."
"Yes."
"Because you enjoy it," Susan said.
"Well, I…"
"You do, Matthew."
"I guess I do."
"Why don't you simply learn all there is to learn about criminal law-?"
"Well, there's a lotto-"
"-and start practicing it?"
He looked at her.
There was a shrug on her face.
Eyebrows lifted.
Brown eyes wide.
Questioning.
Why not practice criminal law?
The simplicity of it.
"Just like that, huh?" he said.
"Why not?" she said. "I have a feeling you find it more interesting than real estate."
"Anything's more interesting than-"
"Or divorce or negligence or malpractice or-"
"Yes, but…"
"So do it," she said, and this time actually shrugged.
Why not, he thought, and leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. "Thank you," he said.
"That's a thank-you?" she said, and reached up to him, and put her arms around his neck and drew him down to her on the lounge. For a moment, they teetered awkwardly, Matthew on the edge of the lounge, struggling for purchase, Susan trying to make room for him, the normal clumsiness of foreplay exaggerated by the suddenness of her move and his unprepared reaction to it. Like groping adolescents-and perhaps this was good because it, too, reminded them of another time long ago-they shifted weight, bumped hips, tangled arms, and finally settled, or more accurately collapsed onto the lounge in an approximate position of proximity, Susan on her side, the robe pulled
back to expose her left flank, Matthew seminestled into her, his left arm pinned under his body, his right arm draped loosely over the curving arc of her hip, their lips at last meeting abruptly and in surprise.
Later, he would try to understand that kiss.
They had kissed many times before. Kissed as true adolescents in steamy embrace, when kissing was all she would permit and therefore the sole expression of their passion. Kissed after kissing had become a prelude to heavy petting, something to be got through hastily, like the dull passages of a novel, something to be skimmed or skipped entirely, merely the necessary overture to nipples and breasts and the exciting electric touch of nylon panties and the crispness beneath and the moistness below. Kissed only perfunctorily in the waning years of their marriage, on the cheek in greeting or farewell, passionlessly on the lips in bed before what had become a mechanical act. Kissed last Sunday night hurriedly and somewhat frantically, eager to get to the real thing, both of them fearful of what they were about to do and simultaneously afraid they wouldn't get to do it before one or the other had a change of mind or heart.
Now…
It was in many respects a first kiss.
First in the sense that it brought back to each of them, in a rush of memory, the actual first time they kissed in Chicago, on the doorstep of her house, a porchlight glowing, the sounds of summer insects everywhere around them, I had a good time, Matthew, So did I, their lips tentatively rushing, clinging, her arms coming up around his neck, his hands in the small of her back, pulling her close, into his immediate erection, Jesus, she said breathlessly, and pulled away and looked fiercely into his eyes, and kissed him again quickly and hurried into the house.
But first in another sense as well.
First in that for perhaps the only time in their separate adult lives, they brought to the simple act of kissing each other an expertise they had learned not only from each other but from others as well, so that the mere anatomical joining of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction became something much more intense and heated and all-consuming.
They broke away.
She said what she had said back in Chicago, more years ago than he could count.
"Jesus."
Breathlessly.
And then:
"Let's go inside."
9
Ernesto figured what they should do first thing this morning was start spreading the word around. This was Monday already, they'd been here in Calusa four days already, this was ridiculous. They had contacted this Martin Klement person at his Springtime restaurant, just the way Amaros had told them to, but they hadn't heard anything from him since, so what they had to do now was let the word out they were looking to score. Ernesto figured unless the girl was a pro, she wouldn't know how to get rid of four keys of coke, she'd be looking for buyers.
"She'll be shopping around looking for a buyer, am I right?" he said to Domingo. He said this in Spanish. Whenever the two were alone together, they spoke Spanish.
Domingo said, "Maybe she plans to snort the whole four keys all by herself."
Ernesto said, "That isn't why a person steals four keys of coke, to snort them. A person steals four keys to sell them is what a person does."
Domingo said, "Maybe, but even so I think it's risky to say we're looking for big cocaine. We don't know what the narcotics situation is here in Calusa."
It looked to him like a very clean town on the surface, but in Spanish there was a proverb that said, Las apariencias enganan. In English, this meant, "You can't judge a book by its cover." Domingo didn't know what was going on here in the city of Calusa, Florida. Perhaps it was a very strict town, policewise, in which case they could find the Law on their motel doorstep if word got around that they were looking to buy dope in quantity.
On the other hand, it could very well be the kind of town where you could buy four keys of coke right on Main Street, in which case somebody already had the trade nailed down and they might not like the idea of two Miami Beach dudes strolling in talking a big dope deal.
"These are all things to be considered," Domingo said, "if a person is interested in staying alive and staying out of jail."
Actually, the most recent figures from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement didn't mention anything about narcotics in Calusa County or in the city of Calusa itself. It reported that the crime rate in the entire state of Florida had begun to climb again only recently, after two years of decline, and it defined "crime rate" as the number of "serious" crimes committed per 100,000 people. Serious crimes included murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. Selling four keys of cocaine on Main Street either wasn't a serious crime or else the FDLE had no figures on it. In any case, there were 13,236 serious crimes committed in Calusa County in the year just past, an increase of 11 percent over the 11,928 reported during the year before that. Sixteen murders, most of them -involving people who knew each other, had been committed in the county during the past year. Rapes went up from 97 to 127. There were similar increases in every category except auto thefts.
Calusa County Sheriff Alan Huxtable said that rapid population growth might have accounted for the increase in the number of crimes. He also pointed out that completion of the interstate highway might have been another contributing factor.
"We've traced some of these crimes back to I-75," he said. "People come into Calusa to commit a crime, and then go back into the other counties. The interstate just brings a lot of undesirable people through."
Ernesto and Domingo hadn't read the newspaper article in which Sheriff Huxtable was quoted, otherwise they might have taken offense. They did not consider themselves undesirable people. They were here, in fact, looking for an undesirable person who had stolen four keys of cocaine from their j employer, taken the stuff out of Dade County, in fact, and into Calusa County, where for all they knew it had already been sold to someone who'd already run it up to New York in the back of a pickup truck carrying lettuce and tomatoes.
Ernesto and Domingo were merely two righteous citizens trying to correct an outrageous wrong.
***
It didn't sound like a warning until a moment before he walked out of Matthew's office.
At the start of their conversation-this was at ten-fifteen on Monday and Matthew was feeling too good to be bothered by anyone or anything-Daniel Nettington was quietly telling him that he'd been visited by a big black detective at eight o'clock last night-a goddamn Sunday, could you believe it? Cops had no respect.
Daniel Nettington was Carla Nettington's philandering husband.
Daniel Nettington was the star of the porn show Otto had recorded in the bedroom of a woman named Rita Kirkman.
Carla had told Matthew her husband was forty-five years old. He looked a good deal older. His graying hair was combed sideways across his forehead in a vain attempt to hide his encroaching baldness. His teeth and the index finger and middle finger of his right hand were nicotine stained. Hi? small brown eyes were embedded deep in puffy flesh. He was an altogether unattractive man, and Matthew could not for the life of him imagine why: (a) Rita Kirkman kept pressing him to leave his wife and/or at least take her out to dinner, and (b) Why Carla Nettington would care if he was sleeping with the entire state of Florida.
"This black detective," Nettington said, "informed me that the man who was killed had been following me. That my wife had gone to you, and that you had hired this man to follow me.
He seemed inordinately fond of the verb "to follow" in all its declensions. The verb "to follow" incensed him. He was outraged by the fact that Otto Samalson had been following him. That Otto had been killed was a matter of only secondary importance.
"This was all in the file this black detective got from Otto Samalson's assistant, a Chinese lady from what I understand. A regular little United Nations, huh?"
Matthew said nothing.
"According to what I was told by this black detective, whose name is Cooper Rawles…
"
"Yes, I know Detective Rawles."
"Yes, I gathered that. According to what he told me, I was being followed for something like ten days before this man met with his accident. Is that true, sir?"
"It wasn't an accident" Matthew said. "Otto Samalson was murdered."
"Yes," Nettington said. "And because he was following me, it now appears I'm a goddamn suspect here."
"Is that what Detective Rawles told you? That you're a suspect?"
"I don't need a black detective to tell me I'm a suspect when he comes to my home-on a Sunday night, no less-and begins asking questions about where I was the previous Sunday, June eighth, at a little before eleven, which happens to be when the man who was following me got shot and killed on U.S. 41. Now what I want to know, Mr. Hope…"
"Yes, what exactly is it you want to know?" Matthew said.
"And I don't want to hear any bullshit about the confidentiality of the lawyer-client relationship," Nettington said, "because it so happens I'm an attorney myself."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Matthew said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Only that I'm sorry to hear it. What law firm do you work for?"
"I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind," Nettington said, and then immediately answered the question anyway. "I don't work for a law firm," he said, "I'm house counsel for Bartell Technographics."
"I see," Matthew said. "And does your work ever take you out of town?"
"Rarely," Nettington said.
"A pity," Matthew said.
Nettington looked at him.
"That's exactly what I want to talk to you about," he said.
"My wife tells me she's got some kind of tape-she hasn't heard the tape yet, but there's some kind of tape supposed to be between me and some woman, God knows what she's talking about-is there such a tape?"
"I'm not in a position to discuss that, Mr. Nettington."
"There's either a tape or there isn't one," Nettington said.
"That is a safe assumption," Matthew said.
"So is there one?"