Ed McBain - Cinderella

“My customer’s waiting,” Larkin said.

“No, he’s admiring the boat.”

Larkin looked toward where the man was walking up and down the dock, reaching over to touch the boat’s teak railing, running his hand over her gleaming white flanks.

“What is it?” Larkin said.

“Mr. Larkin, when I saw you yesterday, I told you that Otto—”

“I don’t want to hear another word about Otto. I’ve already got somebody else looking for—”

“Yes, I know. But I’ve learned something that—”

“I don’t care what you learned.”

“Mr. Larkin, Otto thought your Cinderella might have been pregnant...”

“You already told me that. And I told you—”

“But he was wrong. She went to see a doctor because she had herpes.”

Larkin glanced quickly down the dock to where the man in the rainbow sports shirt was pointing to something on the boat’s transom. He said a few words to the woman, and the woman nodded, an uncomprehending look on her face.

“So?” Larkin said.

“I asked you yesterday if you could’ve made her pregnant.”

“So?”

“I’m asking you today if you could’ve given her herpes.”

“I don’t have to answer that,” Larkin said.

“Yes, you do,” Matthew said. “Because Otto was killed. And there’s got to be a reason for it.”

“Let’s say I did give her herpes, okay? I’m the kind of guy who gives herpes to twenty-two-year-old girls. Twenty-three, whatever. When I don’t even realize she’s a hooker. I’m that kind of rat, okay? What’s that got to do with Otto’s murder?”

“Well, Mr. Larkin, suppose someone in her family — a father, a brother — learned she had herpes and decided to find out who’d given it to her. This is Florida, you know. There’re lots of rednecks down here who don’t like their kin messed with.”

“This girl isn’t a redneck.”

“But you don’t know what her family’s like, do you?”

“What’s your point?” Larkin said. “She stole my watch, that’s all I—”

“Yes, but Otto was killed. And to me that’s a bit more important than your watch. What I’m suggesting is that perhaps this father or this brother spotted Otto following her and jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“What conclusion?”

“That Otto was the man who’d—”

“Oh, I get it. This father of hers...”

“Yes, if it was her father...”

“Or brother ...”

“Yes.”

“Or whoever... didn’t realize Otto was a private eye, figured he was somebody who knew Cinderella...”

“Yes.”

“Somebody, in fact, who knew her well enough to give her herpes , right? And then what? Killed him for it? Come on, man.”

“This is Florida,” Matthew said again.

“No way at all is it even a possibility,” Larkin said. “Because to begin with, hookers don’t have fathers or brothers.”

“I’m sorry,” Matthew said, “but I don’t find any of this even remotely funny. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Too fuckin’ bad,” Larkin said, and glanced quickly down the dock toward his customer. “In case you don’t know it, this isn’t a court of—”

“ Could you have given her herpes?”

“Oh, now I really get it,” Larkin said. “If I’m the guy responsible, if I’m the one infected her, then the wrong man got killed, right? Poor Otto took the rap for me , right? So you’re here to tell me what an unprincipled son of a bitch I am. Well, let me tell you something, Mr. Hope, and then I want you to get the hell out of here before I have Kirk throw you out.”

He nodded down the dock to where one of the hands was hosing down the boat. Big muscular guy with pecs bulging in the white T-shirt, biceps bulging below the short sleeves, tattoo on the right forearm, a dagger dripping blood.

“The only person selling herpes — and I hope to God nothing else — was Cinderella herself. Jenny Santoro or whatever the fuck her name is!” He glanced down the dock again, and then lowered his voice. “She’s the one selling it, Mr. Hope, she’s the one I bought it from. Which is why, the minute I realized what I had, I hired Otto to find her, never mind the gold watch. I can buy another gold watch, I can buy a dozen gold watches, but I can’t buy a doctor in the world can get rid of what she gave me. Okay, Mr. Hope? You got it now? You think you got it now?”

Matthew sighed heavily.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Good-bye,” Larkin said.

The conversation was entirely in Spanish, and Ernesto was doing most of the talking.

Their private code name for cocaine was “hat.”

In Spanish, hat was sombrero .

On the phone, Ernesto kept talking about sombreros. Ten sombreros at sixty dollars each, very high quality. If anybody from the DEA had been listening, he’d have known right off that Ernesto was talking about a drug buy. Ten keys of coke at sixty thousand a key. Drug dealers never mentioned the word cocaine on the telephone. They hardly ever mentioned it anywhere . Cocaine was always something else. To Charlie Nubbs and his pals, cocaine was “heavy machinery.” With the Ordinez gang in Miami, if you talked to someone about a typewriter, you were talking cocaine.

“I tried to get the hats for less,” Ernesto said, “but that’s the lowest they would go. Very good hats, size nine.”

A DEA man would have figured in a minute that the coke was ninety-percent pure.

“When do you have to take delivery on these hats?” Amaros asked.

“Saturday. One-thirty.”

“Are the manufacturers reliable?”

“We’ll examine the merchandise very carefully before payment is made.”

“Do they require a deposit?”

“They haven’t mentioned one.”

“When will you need a check?”

“As soon as possible.”

“I’ll have one drawn,” Amaros said.

The “check” was total bullshit. Nobody ever wrote a check for cocaine. You would have to be crazy to accept a check for cocaine. Cocaine was as good as cash and what you got for it was cash. Amaros was merely telling Ernesto that he’d get the cash to him before one-thirty on Saturday. Ten keys at sixty a key came to $600,000. This was Wednesday, Amaros had two full business days to get the cash. He was not anticipating any trouble.

“What about Cenicienta?” he asked.

This was the first time Ernesto had ever heard her called Cinderella, but he knew immediately that Amaros was talking about Jenny Santoro or whatever her name was. Normally, Amaros referred to her as “the girl.” But Ernesto guessed he didn’t want to use the word girl on the phone because “girl” meant cocaine.

“We haven’t located her yet,” Ernesto said.

“I’m pleased about the hats,” Amaros said, “but I very much want to see her.”

“Yes, I know,” Ernesto said.

“So find her,” Amaros said, and hung up.

So now they’re inside the house on Key Biscayne, it’s like multileveled with decks on each level, all of them looking out over the water, and Amaros is telling her to make herself comfortable, which is not difficult to do in a place like this. A place like this Jenny figures had to have cost him a mill-five, something like that, waterfront property? Sure, at least that. This is what she wants for herself. This is her dream. A place of her own. Just outside Paris. A place with a garden. Her own house. A little house on a quiet little lane. She will be the American lady. She will tell her neighbors she used to be a stage actress. She will tell them she starred in The Crucible . She will drive into Paris on weekends, and sit at a table on one of the boulevards, sipping crème de menthe over ice and trying to guess which of the girls strutting by are in the life, the way she used to be. Because this is the last one. If there really is coke here in this house, and if she can take it away with her, then she will never have to make love to a stranger again.