Ed McBain - Cinderella

He pours her a cognac, same Courvoisier she had in the Kasbah Lounge and then — big surprise! — the conversation drifts around to movies, has she seen any good movies lately? In his cute Spanish accent he tells her that occasionally he will watch a pornographic film because he feels pornographic films are an art form and that in fact many of them are superior to the films being shown in most theaters today. He’s all at once a film critic, Luis Amaros of the Village Voice . She tells him she has never seen a pornographic movie in her life — big lie, especially since she had a bit part in an orgy scene in a skin flick they were shooting in LA, went down on one guy while another guy was humping her from behind — and would probably be embarrassed seeing one. Oh, no, he says, not if it is a tasteful movie, you would not be embarrassed.

Well, one thing leads to another, and he takes her to the bedroom at the other end of the house and shows her his expensive video equipment, and it turns out that the porn flicks he watches “occasionally” are a collection of a hundred or more tapes he keeps on a shelf in his closet, over where his slacks are hanging. The closet is a big walk-in thing. On the left-hand side, there are his jackets and suits, and on the right-hand side, his slacks and some long-sleeved sports shirts and over these the shelf with the porn-flick tapes. The safe is to the left just as you come into the closet. It’s a pretty big safe for a private house. Jenny hopes the girl Kim wasn’t giving them a fairy tale. She hopes there is really dope in that safe.

He says, “Would you like to see a truly tasteful pornographic movie?”

She says, “Well, yes, I suppose so, if it’s really and truly tasteful.”

“Oh, yes,” he says.

“But,” she says, eyes wide and innocent, “you told me you had cocaine.”

She isn’t interested in snorting cocaine just now, in fact she’s very intent just now on keeping her wits about her. This man looks like the sweet little Pillsbury doughboy, you push his big tummy and he giggles, but maybe he won’t be so cute if he catches her stealing his coke.

If there’s coke.

That’s what she wants to find out first, whether or not there’s coke in the safe and whether or not it’s enough coke to make the risk worthwhile.

She is carrying a huge blue tote bag that looks out of place with the ice-blue gown and the Lucite slippers, but she’s already covered that by telling him she was supposed to sleep over at this party she was going to, and has brought along a few things. She has even shown him the few things. A peach-colored baby doll nightgown, bikini panties to match, high-heeled pom-pommed slippers.

So now he goes into the closet, and he kneels in front of the safe.

Will he go through the whole four-to-the-left, three-to-the-right, two-to-the-left, turn-back-slowly-to-the-right routine? Or has he simply left the dial a few figures away from the last number in the combination, the way people do who are in and out of a safe every ten minutes, what burglars call “day combination” or simply “day-com.”

Kim said the safe was on day-com.

Jenny wonders if it’s still on day-com.

She waits, holding her breath.

He gives the dial a simple flick to the right.

Day-com.

Good.

He reaches into the safe.

Her dream could be inside that safe. Her ticket to Paris could be inside that safe, I used to be a stage actress.

She looks over his shoulder.

Oh my God...

Oh my sweet loving Jesus!

There are four fucking bags of cocaine in that safe!

So now they sniff a little, talk a little, watch Johnny Holmes unreel his garden hose—

“Who do you think is bigger?” Pudgy asks. “Him or me?”

“Are you kidding, you’re enormous !” she says, and ten minutes later drops the chloral hydrate in his drink.

The safe is on day-com again, he has given it that little flick to the left, some ten or twelve numbers away from the last number in the combination. She simply goes into the closet and turns the dial slowly to the right, and it stops on the last number — eighty as it happens — and she grabs the handle and yanks open the safe door and reaches in for all that sweet white dust.

Five minutes later, she’s got the shoulder bag full, and she’s running across the lawn to the front gate.

It’s a little after midnight.

The Caddy is gone.

In its place is a blue Ford.

The minute she’s in the car, she says, “Four keys.”

Vincent — who waved his magic wand and turned her into a princess — is no longer wearing the chauffeur’s uniform.

He rolls his eyes and says, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

The two girls shopping for jeans at Coopersmith’s were both in their twenties, one of them with dark black hair cut almost shoulder length, the other with russet-colored hair cut in a wedge.

The brunette was wearing a wide skirt, a peasant blouse, and flat sandals. She had brown eyes and she looked very Italian. Her name was Merilee James.

The redhead was wearing tan slacks, a brown blouse, and low-heeled tan shoes. She had blue eyes, and she looked very Irish. Her name was Sandy Jennings.

Coopersmith’s was one of Calusa’s better department stores. The girls probably could have found the designer jeans they were looking for at Global, which was a discount clothing store on the South Trail, but neither of them would have dreamt of shopping there.

They were both call girls.

In Calusa, there were very few bona fide call girls as such. This was not a convention town or a gambling town, it was just a rather pleasant family resort town — at least when the weather was good. Not too many men came down here looking for the kind of good time a hooker might show them. The singles who came to Calusa were looking for other singles who’d care to spend a freebie night or two in the hay. The married men were with their wives and children. So a bona fide call girl — the ones who charged a hundred bucks an hour — were as rare as snowflakes. What you had down here were some girls doing ten-dollar blow jobs for teenage kids in pickup trucks behind either of the two topless joints, or else — and this was rare, too — a free-lance, scaly-legged whore in her forties who sat on a bar stool toying with a ginger ale and hoping somebody would find her attractive enough to pay for her favors.

Both Sandy and Merilee were genuine call girls.

This meant that Sandy and Merilee were not their real names.

They had met each other a month ago, at a lounge on 41. Merilee said she was down here on vacation. She worked in New Orleans as a computer programmer for Shell Oil. That was what she told Sandy. But that was okay because Sandy told her she was a graduate student in psychology at UCLA. She was in Florida looking over the universities here because she was thinking of perhaps applying for a teaching job down here after she got her master’s.

At the time, Sandy suspected Merilee was a hooker, and Merilee suspected the same thing of Sandy, but neither of them mentioned it until one rainy afternoon when they went to an early movie together — the five o’clock movie in Calusa cost only $2.25 — and the movie had a hooker in it, and later on over dinner Merilee and Sandy began discussing the girl in the picture and it turned out they were both hookers, too, well, well!

Merilee, in fact, was working pretty steady down here, at night, which was why she had to go to five o’clock movies. She had a couple of old guys she serviced on Fatback Key. She thought one of them was in love with her. Or maybe he was kidding. But he kept saying he wanted to take her out to dinner, maybe go away for a weekend together, buy her jewelry, like that. Only he never did. She asked him once whether he was jealous of her making love to other men. She didn’t say fucking other men, she never talked dirty when she was with him, he despised dirty talk. He said he was very jealous because he loved her so much. But he never suggested like making this a permanent live-in thing, you know, even though he was a widower. Sandy told Merilee she herself wasn’t turning any tricks down here, just taking it easy for a while.