Ed McBain - Cinderella

Today, while they were trying on clothes in the dressing room, neither of them discussed their mutual profession, except peripherally. In fact, neither of them even discussed men except peripherally, which was odd since a lot of women, when they were alone together, discussed nothing but men.

What they were discussing was career moves.

What Sandy was going to do, as soon as she settled a few financial matters here in Calusa, was get out of Florida entirely. Get out of the country, in fact. She had very big plans for the future and they didn’t include sucking some married businessman’s cock. She was only hanging around here till a few things were settled, that was all. It wasn’t a bad place to wait, she told Merilee.

Merilee thought she might stay with what she was doing till she was thirty. She already had fifty grand in Dreyfus Liquid Assets, and it was paying good interest at the moment, and she guessed in the next six years — she had just turned twenty-four — in the next six years, if she kept adding to the account and if the interest rates stayed good, she could maybe hope to have something like five, six hundred thousand in cash. That was a lot of money. You had cash like that, you could do a lot of things with it.

For example, there was a guy she knew here in Calusa, his name was Martin Klement, who’d been born in London but who was now an American citizen with a restaurant on Lucy’s Key. Martin had spent a great deal of time down in the Caribbean — first running a hotel on Antigua, and then a restaurant in St. Thomas, and then another restaurant on Grenada — before coming up to Florida and settling in Calusa. His restaurant here was called Springtime, all done up in green and white and fresh with flowers every day of the week, an immediate hit the moment it opened six years ago, perhaps because there was no such thing as a real springtime in the state of Florida although longtime residents insisted they could tell when the seasons changed.

Martin was maybe fifty-three years old, a giant of a man some six feet three inches tall with white hair and a white walrus mustache, tattoos on both arms, reputed to have done some shady deals down there where the trade winds played, a keen eye for a quick penny had old Martin Klement. Merilee also suspected that Martin was AC/DC, or at least that was the rumor circulating, not that Merilee cared in the slightest.

Well, last night Merilee dropped in at the restaurant to see what was shaking — Martin sometimes had guys sitting there at the bar who would perhaps be interesting — and he came over and bought her a drink on the house and the two started chatting. Martin liked her a lot, and she liked him, too. He still spoke with a British accent, and sometimes used funny British expressions. When he’d first met Merilee, in fact, he’d tried to teach her Cockney rhyming slang, but it was far too difficult and all Merilee had come away with was “bread and honey” — if she was remembering correctly — which meant “money,” which was the only thing in the world that interested her.

They started talking about the unusually hot weather they’d been having and its effect on the restaurant business. It was Martin’s theory, and maybe he was right, that extremely hot weather sent people out to eat, maybe because a woman didn’t want to toil over a stove when it was ninety degrees outside.

One topic led to another and eventually Martin asked, “Have you been out to Sabal Beach since the crackdown started?”

“No, I haven’t,” Merilee said.

“They’re still letting the women go topless, but catch anyone bare -arsed, male or female, and it’s into the wagon with them.”

“Awful, the police down here,” Merilee said.

“Think they’d find a way to spend their time more profitably, wouldn’t you?”

“Really,” Merilee said.

“They’ll have their hands full soon enough,” Martin said, “never mind chasing after nude bathers. Did you read the stories on the big drug arrest in Miami a few months back?”

“No, I didn’t,” Merilee said.

“Took the DEA almost a year to set it up, but they netted some very big fish indeed. What I’m saying is I wouldn’t be surprised if bearing down on the other coast won’t send the drug people scurrying here to Calusa. The police’ll have plenty to do, believe me, without rounding up nudists.”

“Well, there’s not much of that here in Calusa,” Merilee said. “Narcotics.”

“True enough, I’ve yet to see anyone openly smoking marijuana in my place,” Martin said. “But I’ll tell you, Mer, on occasion I’ve happened upon a few people doing a bit of coke in the men’s room, eh? So it’s not as uncommon as you might believe.”

“Well,” Merilee said.

“I’ve been asked myself once or twice,” Martin said, lowering his voice.

“Asked what?”

“Y’know. Whether I knew where to get any stuff.”

“Oh.”

“Recently, in fact,” Martin said. “Two Hispanics came in the other night, told me they were looking to buy quality cocaine, ready to pay top dollar for it. I’ll tell you, I wish I could’ve accommodated them. I figure the way they got to me... I wouldn’t repeat this, Mer—”

“Cross my heart,” she said.

“—is years ago, when I had the restaurant on Grenada, I was... well... engaged in what one might call ‘redistribution,’ eh? Helping merchandise find its way from one place to another. There was money to be made in redistribution, I can tell you. You’d get your banana boats up from South America, they’d be carrying other than bananas sometimes, eh? You accepted whatever cargo you thought you could safely handle, you merely redistributed it to Barbados, and it found its way from there to Guadeloupe or Martinique and then on up the chain to Haiti and finally into Florida, this was, oh, six, seven years ago, Mer. Grenada’s a stone’s throw from Venezuela, y’know, and once you were past British Customs, you had the whole Caribbean open to you. A great deal of money was waiting to be untrousered back then. Now, too, for that matter. All you need is the merchandise to redistribute, eh? Which is why these two men came to the restaurant, sat at the bar, ordered a few drinks, mentioned they’d heard my name here and there. Hispanics, y’know, the Colombian word gets around, look up Martin Klement, he used to own The Troubador on Grenada, he’s got a restaurant in Florida now, maybe he can help you.”

“I can see how that might happen,” Merilee said.

“I truly wish I could help them,” Martin said, and sighed. “They were talking real commitment. Excellent money, too. If you should hear of anyone, let me know.”

Merilee was standing in front of the dressing room mirror as she repeated this story to Sandy. She was pulling up the zipper on a pair of very tight jeans. She sort of did a little leap off the floor as she pulled up the zipper.

“What I’m saying,” she said, “is six years from now, I’ll be like those two Spanish guys, you know? I’ll have myself a real bundle, I’ll breeze back here into Calusa, tell Martin I’m looking to make a big dope buy, are these too tight?”

“A little,” Sandy said.

“Mustn’t look cheap, must we?” Merilee said, and both girls giggled. Merilee took off the jeans and tried on another pair, talking as she smoothed them over her hips and turned this way and that in front of the mirror.

“Martin knows everything,” she said. “That’s ’cause he owns a restaurant, all kinds of people come in. He was the first one in Calusa to recognize me for a hooker. You were the second one, but you’re in the life yourself, so that’s understandable. Do you know what la moglia del barbiere means? That’s Italian. It means the town gossip. Actually, it means ‘the barber’s wife,’ but everybody knows what it really means. Because the barber hears everything there is to hear, and he tells it to his wife, and she gossips about it. Well, people tell restaurant owners and bartenders the same things they tell barbers. That’s how come Martin hears so much. Which, speaking of barbers, when did you do that to your hair?”