Ed McBain - Cinderella

“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.