Ed McBain - Cinderella

Ernesto looked at the photograph.

Blonde, good, that was more like it. Sexy chiquita grinning into the camera, silky low-cut dress, tits spilling over the top, one hand on her hip, the other holding a drink, long legs in high-heeled sandals.

He handed the picture to Domingo and then said, “Have you any more like this?”

“I think she sent some from Seattle when she was up there, let me see.” She began rummaging through the box again. “Is that wrong of me?” she asked. “To love her the most?” She turned to look into Ernesto’s face. “Detective Garcia?” she said. “Is that wrong of me?”

Domingo suddenly tensed.

“One cannot dictate to the heart,” Ernesto said, and tapped his chest.

“I’m sorry,” Annie said, puzzled. “You did say Garcia, didn’t you?”

Domingo was perched on the edge of the couch now, the picture of Jenny Santoro at a Hollywood party in his left hand, like Fay Wray in King Kong’s huge paw.

“Gomez,” Ernesto said, and placed his hand gently on Domingo’s right arm.

“Gomez, yes,” Annie said, and smiled. “I have a terrible time with names.”

“If you can find those other pictures,” Ernesto said, and returned the smile. “Por favor.”

In his pocket, Domingo loosened his grip on the switchblade knife.

Luis Amaros was known as El Armadillo to those in the drug trade. This was not because he looked like an armadillo. Not many people looked like armadillos. In fact, not many people knew what armadillos looked like. Most people confused armadillos with anteaters. An anteater had a long narrow snout, and a long sticky tongue, and a long shaggy tail, and it looked like a hairy flying saucer with legs. An armadillo, on the other hand, had a covering of armorlike, jointed, bony plates, and it looked like a small tank with legs. Luis Amaros did not look like a tank. He looked more like a fire hydrant. Short and squat and a bit chubby. An amiable fire hydrant was what he looked like. A good-natured fire hydrant. He looked like Baby Doc Duvalier of the island Haiti, was what he looked like, but he was not a member of the Duvalier family. Luis was a fire hydrant member of the Amaros family of Bogotá, and he was into dealing drugs. Well, that was a given. If you were Colombian, and you lived in Florida, you were not moving coffee beans.

The reason Luis Amaros was called El Armadillo was because, like the armor-plated burrowing mammal that was his namesake, Luis was very well-armored. There was hardly any way anyone could get to him. Anybody took a fall for dealing dope, it wasn’t going to be Luis. It was going to be a dozen other people lower in the echelon, but it was not going to be Luis. That was why so many other Colombians lived in shitty prison cells and Luis lived in a luxurious house on Key Biscayne.

Luis smiled a lot. He had a chubby little face, and an infectious Bugs Bunny sort of grin. It was a wonder people didn’t call him El Conejo, which meant “the rabbit” in Spanish. Because actually, he resembled a chubby little rabbit more than he did either a fire hydrant or an armadillo. Women thought Luis was cute. Even some men thought he was cute. “You some sweetheart, baby,” customers would often say to him, which Luis took to mean he had a nice friendly smile and chubby cheeks everybody wanted to pinch. Actually, his customers meant he drove a hard bargain. “You some sweetheart, baby.” And he would slit your throat for a dime. Or get someone else to do it for a nickel.

Luis prided himself on the size of his penis.

He would often ask girls if he was bigger than Johnny Holmes. Johnny Holmes was a porn star who couldn’t act at all, but he had this enormous organ. In the movies Luis had seen with Johnny Holmes in them, Holmes always looked a little soft, as if the damn thing was too long to stay hard all the way to the head. Luis would play a Johnny Holmes movie on the VHS, and ask whichever girl he was with who was bigger, him or Johnny Holmes. They all said he was ten times bigger than Holmes, and also a lot cuter.

On Thursday morning, when the call came from Ernesto Moreno in Calusa, Luis was showing a twenty-year-old black girl a trick with an apple and a handful of cocaine. Luis himself was very light-skinned, but he had a terrific yen for black girls. He also had a terrific yen for apples. Cocaine, he could take or leave, mostly leave. Cocaine was business. The trouble with Al Pacino in that movie Scarface — aside from the fact that he was ugly and wanted to fuck his own sister — was that he mixed business with pleasure. Every time you saw Pacino, he was snorting a bucketful of coke. Luis rarely touched the stuff. But there were a lot of girls who enjoyed coke a lot and Luis always kept some in the house to meet the need. Coke-snorting girls were often very grateful girls, except when every now and then you came across a cheap cunt who needed to be taught a lesson.

Luis spoke with a Spanish accent that a lot of girls thought was cute. Not Hispanic girls. They didn’t think the accent was cute, they thought everybody talked that way. Anglos, though, slender young things in thin little dresses, flitting around the hotel bars, they thought his accent was cute. They also thought he might have some coke. They heard a Spanish accent, they automatically figured coke. Young girls nowadays, you said, “Hello, how do you do?” they answered, “Hi, my name is Cindy, you got any blow?” That was one of the names for cocaine. Blow.

Before he’d come to Miami, even though he was in the business, Amaros hadn’t known there were so many names for cocaine. Americans were so inventive. C, coke, snow, he knew. Happy dust, too, he’d heard it called that and also gold dust. But star dust, no, that was new to him, and so was white lady and nose candy and flake. The names he found most peculiar were Bernice, Corinne, and girl. For cocaine. People calling cocaine Bernice, Corinne, or girl. As if they were equating sniffing a noseful of dope with fucking. Calling the dope girl . Maybe they were fucking when they sniffed the stuff, the looks on their faces, some of them.

He impressed girls with the cobalt thiocyanate trick. Mix it in with the dope, watch it turn blue. The brighter the blue, the better the girl. Always kept three, four kilos in the house, never knew when there’d be a party. The brighter the blue, the better the girl. Luis had his own expression. The better the girl , the better the girl. Meaning you gave a girl good dope, you got good action in return. Except every now and then a cunt got too smart for her own good.

“What you do,” Luis said, “you scoop out the middle of the apple like so.”

The black girl watched him, eyes wide. Her hair was done like Bo Derek’s in the movie 10. She had informed him last night that this particular hairstyle was really African in origin. According to the blacks, everything these days was African in origin. Even the Torah was African in origin. She had sniffed coke like she was a vacuum cleaner, sucked cock the same way. When he asked her was he bigger than Johnny Holmes, she said, “Man, you are bigger than God !”

He worked the apple with a corer.

“What’s that do, what you’re doin’?” the girl asked.

Her name was Omelia. Black people, they made up names, the names were never right on the money. Like Omelia sounded like Amelia, but it wasn’t. He’d balled black girls named Lorenne, Clorissa, Norla — none of them real names at all, just names that sounded like they could be names. He loved black girls with their funky sounding names.

“What we’re doing here,” he said, “is we’re making a hole in the apple here. Right in the center of the apple.”