Cinderella

by Ed McBain

  "That's what I call…" Matthew started, and then simply shook his head and turned his back, and walked to the front door and out into the rain.

  ***

  What he called it was a triumph of illusion over reality.

  Or something.

  We're going to turn you into a Wasp princess from Denver,

  Colorado, he told her. Daughter of a rich rancher. Spoiled rotten, there's nothing any man on earth can possibly give you. It'll flatter Pudgy to death to think you might, if he minds his fat little spic manners, actually deign to talk to him.

  We won't do anything with your hair, you truly have lovely hair, long and blonde, is it natural? Well, Pudgy'll find out, won't he, dear? Put it up in a bun, perhaps, to give you an elegantly glacial look. We're going for an image, darling. It's the image that'll get you into that palace of his and into his bed and into his safe.

  And then we'll find a gown, he told her, sexy enough to cause Pudgy to drool, but not cheap, do you follow me, darling? Something in an ice-blue, don't you think, to echo those gorgeous peepers of yours. Enough bust showing to entice, but careful, careful, mustn't touch, Pudgy, uh-uh-uh. Something very clingy, ice-blue, yes, and slit very high on one leg, thigh showing whenever you choose to show it, a long-legged stride into the Kasbah Lounge, Pudgy's eyes will pop.

  Jewelry, we'll have to get you something that looks genuine, he's a fool when it comes to telling a hooker from a nun, but I'm sure he knows Tiffany's from Woolworth's. We'll find something small but tasteful, run up to Bal Harbour one day, shop the better stores. One piece is all we want. Something for just here, do you see? Right where the cleavage begins. Draw his eyes to the bust, not that you need any help, darling, don't be offended. And shoes. Wonderful shoes to go with the gown. I want you to come into the lounge all starry-eyed and aghast, virtually popping out of the gown, tits, tits, wonderful, looking for someone who should be there but isn't, Miss Colorado who's been stood up, searching the room, Oh my goodness where is he, slippers that look as if they're made of glass, they do wonderful things with plastic nowadays, we'll find something in Bal Harbour, this will cost us a penny or two, but well worth it.

  And we'll rent a black Caddy, it shouldn't cost more than twenty, thirty an hour, should it? And of course a chauffeur will accompany you into the lounge. Oh, Charles, where is he?-that's the chauffeur, Charles-he promised he'd be here. And then a Wasp snit, Oh, wait for me outside, this is so annoying…

  Exactly the way it worked.

  She came in all breathless and starry-eyed, Junior Prom time except there was a chauffeur in gray behind her, who'd have dreamt she was a hooker going after four, five, six, who-the-fuck-knew keys of cocaine? Ice-blue gown, cost twelve hundred dollars, slippers looking like glass for another three, brooch that looked like a sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds, fake but gorgeous, who'd have known? You walk in trailed by what looks like a real chauffeur, everything else looks real.

  They were going for the gold.

  She sits at the bar, looking at her watch. Seventy-five dollars, but it looks expensive. If the chauffeur looks real, the sapphire looks real, the watch becomes real, too. Only real thing here is a hooker from L.A. who knows this is her ticket out of the life. One last trick. No more hands on her after this one. After this time, she won't have to look rich, she'll really be rich. Meanwhile, she's the fake rancher's daughter from Colorado. Annoyed. Tapping her foot in the looks-like-glass slip-per. The chauffeur pops in every six minutes, wants to know is. she going to wait any longer or should they start for the party? She keeps telling him another five minutes, that's all I'll give him, waiting for Pudgy to make his move. Pudgy keeps watching her. Does he suspect a scam? He's sort of cute, actually, with cheeks you want to pinch and a Bugs Bunny smile. She is not going to give him much longer. If she sits here at the bar another two minutes, he'll know she's a hooker with a gimmick and he'll run for the hills.

  The girl, Kim, the one who tipped them to this, she said she gave him twenty minutes before he made his move. Sat at the bar like an actress-singer. Talking about clubs she'd played, off-Broadway shows she'd done. Took him twenty minutes before he got off his fat ass, sitting on one of the brocaded banquettes-the Kasbah Lounge, right? Red embroidery with little mirrors sewn in-twenty minutes to make his move.

  Jenny's about to leave. The chauffeur pops in yet another time.

  "Miss Carmody?" he says.

  Note of servile impatience in his voice.

  She looks at her fake watch supposed to cost seventy-five hundred dollars, cost only seventy-five, she sighs in exasperation, and swings the bar stool around, long ice-blue gown slit to Siberia, you can see all the way to eternity if you care to look because she isn't wearing any panties. And all at once- will miracles never?-Pudgy comes off the banquette just as she's heading for the door, and he says something like, "What a pity, has your friend been delayed?"

  Spanish accent.

  She looks at him like he's a roach flew up into her face.

  "I beg your pardon," she says.

  Nose smelling something vile in the gutter.

  From the door, the chauffeur says, "Miss Carmody, shall I bring the car around?"

  "Yes, please," she says.

  Pudgy says, "Forgive me."

  She says, "Excuse me, but would you please get out of my way?"

  He says, "I know you must be upset…"

  "Please," she says, playing it to the hilt, the single word saying Who wants anything to do with you, you greasy little spic?

  He says, "Perhaps a liqueur would make you feel a little better."

  She thinks of the joke about the waiter saying to the prudish British lady "Liqueurs, madame?" and the lady swats him with her purse because she thinks he said "Lick yours, madame?"

  She looks deep into Pudgy's eyes, as though trying to fathom his intentions, trying to determine whether he is a pimp or a pusher or a South American rancher and from the door the chauffeur says again "Miss Carmody?"

  "Come," Pudgy says, "let's have a liqueur. My name is Luis Amaros, I am a banana importer," and she thinks Yeah the way I am a research scientist at IBM.

  A half-hour later, she starts telling him how at the University of Denver when she was the Snow Festival Queen, soma guys brought in some cocaine from Los Angeles, and oh wow, that was the most exciting time in her life though Daddy would have killed her if he'd found out.

  Pudgy looks at her. She knows he is thinking that all Anglo girls will suck his dick to oblivion if he lays some coke on them.

  He says, "Will you still be going to this party?"

  "What party?" she says.

  "Your friend…"

  "Oh, him," she says, her heart leaping because she's such a dumb cunt. "The hell with him," she says, and wonders if she's using language too strong for a rancher's daughter from Denver. "Forty minutes late already, I mean fuck him," she says, figuring it's only hookers who watch their language until they're in bed, ladies say whatever the fuck they feel like saying.

  He buys it.

  She must be a lady.

  She just said fuck.

  "If you want to come to my place," he says, "I have something that might interest you."

  She says, cautiously, "Oh?"

  "Would you like to come home with me?" he says, and smiles. "Cenicienta? Would you like to come home with me?"

  "I'm not that kind of girl," she says, and wonders if she's playing too much Doris Day. "And what does that mean, what you just said?"

  "Cenicienta?" he says. "That means Cinderella." He glances at her legs. "In your glass slippers."

  "They do look like glass, don't they?" she says, and smiles.

  "So?" he says. "What do you think?"

  "I really don't know," she says.

  "It's entirely up to you," he says.

  "You are awfully cute," she says.

  He says nothing.

  "What is it that you have?" she asks. "That might interest me?"

  "Blow," he says.
r />   She blinks at him.

  "Blow? What's that, blow?"

  She's thinking if you come from Denver, you're not supposed to know blow means coke, right?

  He lowers his voice.

  "What you had in Denver," he says. "What your friends brought from L.A."

  "Oh," she says.

  Comes the dawn.

  "Mmm," he says.

  "Gee."

  "Mmm."

  "Wow."

  "So?"

  "Sure," she says.

  And she's home free.

  11

  Jimmy Legs showed Stagg the picture.

  "Where'd you get this?" Stagg asked.

  "I found it in somebody's office," Jimmy said.

  "This is what she looks like, huh?"

  "Yeah," Jimmy said.

  "Like to take a run at that sometime," Stagg said.

  "We find her," Jimmy said, "nobody's gonna wanna take a run at her no more, believe me. Some broads they gotta be taught you don't steal a person's watch."

  "Be a terrible waste, you mess her up," Stagg said, looking at the picture and shaking his head.

  "Maybe just bust her nose," Jimmy said. "You break somebody's nose in a coupla places, it hurts like hell. She'll look terrific with a smashed nose like a gorilla's, huh?" Jimmy laughed. "Squash it right into her face, we find her. Face like she's gonna have, she'll be lucky to get half a buck a blow job." He laughed again. Stagg was still looking at the picture.

  "The thing is," Stagg said, "nobody heard nothing about this Rolex. I think I must've contacted every fence in town, none of them-"

  "Whattya mean you think?" Jimmy said.

  "What?" Stagg said.

  "Did you contact every fence or didn't you?"

  "Well, I…"

  " 'Cause either you done the job right or you didn't do it at all. You miss one fence you might as well not've talked to any of them."

  "I maybe missed one or two," Stagg said.

  "I'm surprised at you," Jimmy said, shaking his head.

  "I'll see I can find them this afternoon. You gonna need this picture?"

  "I got the picture especially for you," Jimmy said.

  "'Cause maybe it'll help, I can show a picture."

  "Yeah, but take care of it. You come up blank, I'll prolly have to make some prints, you know?"

  "They can do that, huh? You don't need the negative?"

  "No, they can do it right from what you got in your hand there."

  "It's amazing what they can do nowadays, ain't it?" Stagg said.

  He rose from where the men were sitting on the deck at Marina Lou's, looking out over the sailboats on the water. Nobody in the place would have dreamt they'd been discussing the rearrangement of a beautiful girl's features.

  "I'll get on this right away," he said, putting the picture in the inside pocket of his "Miami Vice" sports jacket, "see what I can do, okay? I'll give you a call later."

  "Yeah," Jimmy said.

  This was at eleven o'clock on the morning of June 17.

  At exactly eleven-ten, May Hennessy called Matthew to say that every cloud had a silver lining.

  ***

  What had happened was that she'd been trying to put together the shambles the burglar had made of the office-papers strewn everywhere, drawers overturned, books thrown helter-skelter-when she'd come upon a spiral bound notebook of the sort Otto used when he was on surveillance. She figured he'd tucked the book into his desk drawer on the Friday before he was killed, intending to give his notes to her for typing on Monday morning.

  There had been no Monday morning for Otto.

  The notes were still where he'd left them, still in his handwriting.

  They were the notes he'd made for the last week of activity on the Larkin case.

  Did Matthew want to see them?

  ***

  Matthew's partner Frank believed that the best writers in the world wrote exactly the way they spoke, their style being a sort of voice-print. Which further meant, Frank said, that a great many highly acclaimed writers were boring conversationalists. Frank was probably wrong; he was wrong about a lot of things. In any event, Otto wasn't writing for publication, and the prose style in his notes was indeed somewhat like his speaking style, condensed into a rapid shorthand and sounding far different from the typed reports Matthew had earlier read. Perhaps May Hennessy edited for client consumption as she went along.

  The typed reports had been a chronicle of futility.

  Small wonder that Larkin had been dismayed by the lack of progress on the case. Otto had first checked the telephone directories for Calusa and all the neighboring towns. No Angela West. He had checked every motel and hotel. Nothing. He had checked all the condominium rental offices. He had checked all the car rental companies. He had checked all the banks. Nothing anywhere. If Angela West was living in Calusa, Sarasota, or Bradenton, he did not know where.

  But the handwritten notes…

  On Monday afternoon, June 2, after more than a month on the case, Otto spent a harrowing morning with a supervisor from the telephone company, trying to learn whether or not Angela West might have an unlisted telephone. The supervisor was adamant in protecting the rights to privacy of any telephone company customer. Otto wanted to strangle her. Or so he had written in his notes for that day, a comment May undoubtedly would excise when later typing them.

  On Tuesday, June 3, Otto had gone to see a friend of a friend who worked at the airport, and the friend's friend was going to see what he could do about checking the various airline manifests for a possible Angela West traveling to or from the tri-city area. He was having lunch later in a hamburger joint in the South Dixie Mall on Smoke Ridge and 41…

  Sitting at a table in a place across the corridor from a games arcade and a bookstore…

  When a girl carrying a shopping bag walked out of the bookstore and…

  Holy shit!

  It was the girl in the picture Larkin had given him.

  Long blonde hair trailing down her back, high heels clicking as she glided past him not four feet from where he was sitting, he almost jumped out of his socks.

  He followed her out of the mall and into the parking lot where she got into a white Toyota Corolla with the license plate 201-ZHW and a yellow-and-black Hertz #1 sticker on the rear bumper. She made a right turn on 41, Otto on her tail, and continued north till she got to Egret Avenue where she made a left heading west and finally pulled into the parking lot of the Medical Arts Building on Egret and Pierce, a two-story, red-brick complex with what Otto figured had to be at least twenty or thirty doctors' offices in it. Otto ran in after her, but she was already wherever she was going by the time he got into the lobby, and he had no way of knowing which of the doctors she was going there to see. He copied down the names of all the doctors listed on the lobby directory board-it turned out there were only sixteen-and then went out to wait for her in the parking lot.

  She was in there about an hour.

  In his notes at this point, Otto did a bit of editorializing on doctors in Florida, who figured everybody here was old and in no hurry and who overbooked more outrageously than the airlines did. You sometimes waited an hour and a half before a nurse led you into a little cubicle where you undressed and waited another half-hour, reading last year's Sports Illustrated until a doctor walked in and said, Hello, how are we feeling today? We are feeling annoyed. Otto wrote in his notes. Matthew suspected that some of this was for May's benefit, keep his assistant smiling and shaking her head as she excised any extraneous material from the typewritten report.

  Anyway, Cinderella was in there for an hour, with Otto sitting in his car waiting for her to come out. When she finally did, he followed her out of the parking lot and across Egret to the traffic light on Sea Breeze. She made a left just as the light was turning. A traffic cop waved Otto down as he started to follow, so he was forced to stop at the light, and wait for it to change, by which time he'd lost her heading east on Sea Breeze.

  He went
back to the office, called Hertz, told the young girl who answered the phone that he was a private detective working for an insurance company, and that he was trying to trace a girl who'd been named beneficiary of a substantial policy. It was his belief that she may have rented a Toyota Corolla from Hertz, and he wondered if she could check her files for the license plate 201-ZHW and let him have the name and address of the renter.

  The young girl-eager to help a working girl like herself inherit a zillion dollars-checked her files and came back five minutes later with the information that on April 3, at the tri-city airport, Hertz had rented the Toyota Corolla with the 201-ZHW license plate to a woman named Jenny Santoro who had since renewed the rental twice.

  Otto asked how she was paying for the car.

  The girl told him American Express.

  Otto asked if that was the name on the card, Jenny Santoro.

  The girl told him Yes.

  Otto asked if Jenny Santoro had given an address here in Calusa.

  The girl told him No, but that wasn't unusual. Lots of people rented a car before they'd found a place to stay. She had given her home address, though, as 3914 Veteran Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

  Jenny Santoro.

  More editorializing here. Otto was astonished that she was Italian. That long blonde hair? Those blue eyes? Italian? Well, now he had a name, and now he had to start all over again with the new name.

  By the end of the next day, Wednesday, June 4, Otto was beginning to think the Jenny Santoro was a phony, too, this despite the fact that you had to show a driver's license before any rental company would let you drive off with a car. Otto noted gratuitously, however, that you could buy a phony driver's license for a hundred bucks anyplace in America, and since the work he'd been doing all day long-the same routine checks he'd made for Angela West-were coming up blank for Jenny Santoro, there was a strong likelihood that the lady was carrying queer documents.