Ed McBain - Cinderella

Also, you shouldn’t try to cross guys dealing dope.

That’s how amateurs got their brains blown out. Crossing guys who were dealing dope for a living. Nobody likes his rice bowl broken, she told him. You mess with a guy’s rice bowl, he’s gonna come break your head.

So I don’t think I want to do it, she said.

But at the same time she was thinking Oh God, this could be my way out.

This was back in March.

They were at this house he was renting in Hallandale. They were sitting by his swimming pool. This was the beginning of March, it was still too cold to swim here no matter what anybody said. She’d flown to Miami from LA, got there on the twentieth of January. A girlfriend on the Coast told her she heard they were paying two, two-fifty for an hour’s work in Miami, she ought to go down there, check it out. Any given city, you wanted to know what call girls were getting you looked in the Yellow Pages under “Massage” or “Escort.” In LA, Jenny was registered with an outcall massage service that advertised in the Yellow Pages and accepted credit cards. You dialed the number, you got somebody who told you what the agency fee was and asked if you wanted a girl to call you. What Jenny did when she called, she reminded you that the agency fee was fifty bucks, and then she mentioned that she usually got a hundred an hour. So what it was, it was a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, did you want some company or not? Some nights, she turned seven, eight tricks and went home with a thousand bucks when you figured the guys who tipped extra for an, ahem, exceptional blow job. Some nights she watched Johnny Carson. Miami was supposed to be two hundred, two-fifty an hour, which was a lot of bullshit as it turned out. She figured she’d get a few days’ sun — actually it was also rainy and cold — and then head back to the Coast.

The day before she was supposed to leave, she met a girl on the beach, told the girl she was an insurance investigator working for a company in LA, here settling a big claim, be leaving tomorrow. She always made up stories about what she did for a living. A lot of her friends were straight, and you couldn’t just say Hey, guess what, I’m a hooker. So she either worked for a bank, or an insurance company, or she did research for a computer company, or she was office manager for a textile firm, all bland jobs nobody would ask her much more about. She liked playing different roles. Well, that was why she’d gone out to LA in the first place, to become a big movie star, sure, some star. A hooker was what she was, plain and simple. But even so, she thought of hooking as playing different roles, sort of.

Anyway, she’d hit it off right away with the girl on the beach — Molly Ryder was her name — and Molly was saying like Gee, what a shame it is you’re leaving so soon, just when we’re getting to know each other, it’s a shame you can’t stay a little longer, get the feel of the place, ’cause it’s real nice here, it really is. And then she told Jenny that there was gonna be a party tonight at this guy’s house in Hallandale that had a swimming pool and everything, and there’d be some interesting quite far-out people there, if Jenny would like to come along.

So Jenny went to the party and met a lot of interesting quite far-out people who were doing coke and stuff and decided to hang around Miami a while, see if she couldn’t drum up a little trade at the fancier hotels on the beach, maybe even find some old geezer she could play house with, because Miami seemed to have less phonies here than there were in LA where they came a thousand to the square inch. What came a thousand to the square inch down here were the cockroaches. She remembered them from when she used to be a kid living down here. They called them palmetto bugs down here. They were as big as your forefinger, some of them. You stepped on them, you jumped up and down on them, they crawled away all crippled and broken but they wouldn’t die unless you hit them with a sledgehammer. Also, they knew how to fly. Staying with Molly the first few weeks she was in Miami, she almost wet her pants when one of them flew right up into her face.

That had been back in January.

By the beginning of March, she was sitting by a swimming pool and listening to talk about a quarter of a million dollars for a single night’s work.

What she usually got for an all-night stand in LA was five hundred, sometimes only four if things were slow.

This was a quarter of a million .

Split it with him, it still came to a hundred and a quarter.

That’s if there were only two kilos in the safe. If there was more...

How do I get in that safe? she asked him.

Because this was her way out.

Matthew disliked him on sight. Big beefy man with a wide forehead and prominent nose, coming across the deck to greet him, hamhock hand extended, blue jeans, and a T-shirt that had “Larkin Boats, The Way to the Water” printed on its front. The man was probably a saint, and yet — instant animosity. That happened sometimes. Even with women. Even with gorgeous women. Something clicked in the unconscious, who the hell knew? Maybe Larkin reminded him of a high school geometry teacher who’d given him an F. Or maybe there were just certain combinations of sights and smells that signaled to the brain and triggered defense mechanisms, watch out for this guy. Whatever it was, he didn’t like Larkin.

But there were some questions he needed to ask him.

And, after all, when he’d called, the man had been gracious enough to invite him to his home for an early afternoon drink, hadn’t he? Instead of asking him to stop by at his place of business. Gorgeous house on Fatback Key, all wood and glass and stone, sitting right on the Gulf. Matthew and Larkin sitting on lounges facing the water. Thunderheads building up out there the way they did every day at this time.

“It wasn’t Otto started calling her Cinderella,” Larkin said. “It was me.”

“When was that?” Matthew asked.

“When I hired him.”

“Which was when? I’m sorry to be asking all these questions, Mr. Larkin...”

“No, no, listen, I’m happy to help. What happened was I went to this ball in April sometime... well, down here there are more balls than you can count, I’m sure you know that.”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

“Over on the East Coast, in Miami, it’s your Cubans throwing a ball every time one of their daughters turns fifteen. That’s a custom with Spanish-speaking people,” Larkin said, educating Matthew. “The daughter turns fifteen, they dress her like a bride and throw a ball. All the friends rent lavender tuxedos and come to the party to wish the kid well on her fifteenth birthday because pretty soon she’ll be on her back on the beach with her legs spread and not too long after that she’ll be a fat old lady with a mustache.”

Larkin laughed.

Matthew said nothing. He was not liking Larkin any better.

“ La quinceañera they call her,” Larkin said, “a lot of bullshit. Anyway, here in Calusa, we got balls to mark the seasons of the year, which is even more bullshit. Around Christmastime, you have your Snowflake Ball for the American Cancer Society, and in the spring, when the purple jacaranda trees are blooming, you got your Jacaranda Ball for Multiple Sclerosis or Muscular Dystrophy, I always mix them up. That’s where I met her. At the Jacaranda Ball.”

“This was...?”

“In April.”

“When in April?”

“Beginning of the month sometime. The jacarandas were just starting to bloom. In she walks, a pretty young thing in a blue gown the color of her eyes, slit high up on her right leg and scooped low over a very good chest. Danced with her all night long. Had her picture taken by a photographer who was charging fifty bucks a pop for charity. That’s the picture I gave Otto. The one I had taken at the ball. Did you see that picture?”