Ed McBain: Cinderella

Otto is still smiling.

This is a close shot of him behind the steering wheel. He has no idea what’s coming. Only Matthew knows what’s coming. Matthew hears a repeat of the news broadcast he heard only hours ago, while he and Susan were making love, Get out, you bastard , hears the broadcast as if it is coming from very far away, like a short wave broadcast, Otto’s smiling face filling the screen, In Calusa tonight —

Turn back, he thinks.

“Reason I think he’s made me,” Otto says, “is there’s something on the tape, I think he’s referring to me. I couldn’t be sure ’cause it wasn’t an absolute reference. But he could’ve been talking about me, about me following him. And last night when he’s coming out of her house, this must’ve been along around eleven, he stops dead in the street, he does like a take, you know, and looks straight at the car. So I think my days are numbered. What I’d like you to do is hear the tape and then decide whether you want to stay with this. You ask my opinion, he’s gonna go underground a while, maybe surface again in a few weeks, but meanwhile cool it till he’s positively sure nobody’s watching him. What I thought, maybe Monday I can—”

— killing the driver. The car swerved off the highway and into —

“Turn back !” Matthew screamed aloud.

He sat up in bed, wide awake.

He was drenched with cold sweat.

Morning was here.

He could still hear Otto’s voice.

So I think my days are numbered.

There were flies buzzing around the cheese Danish on Frank Summerville’s desk. He was drinking coffee from a soggy cardboard container, and he was glaring sternly at Matthew over the rim of it.

“I don’t want you getting involved in this,” he said.

“Otto was a friend,” Matthew said.

“Otto was a private eye who occasionally did work for us.”

“No, Frank, he was a friend . I liked him.”

“I liked him, too,” Frank said. “But now he is dead, Matthew. He was shot in the head, Matthew. Twice, Matthew. His murder has nothing whatever to do with us , and I want you to stay away from the Public Safety Building and Detective Morris Bloom, do you hear me, Matthew?”

“Morrie’s on vacation,” Matthew said.

“Good,” Frank said.

He was a half-inch shorter and ten pounds lighter than Matthew. They both had dark hair and brown eyes, but Frank’s face was somewhat rounder, what he himself called a “pig face.”

In Frank’s physiognomical filing cabinet, there were only two kinds of faces: pig and fox. Frank also believed that there were only two kinds of names: Eleanor Rigby names and Frère Jacques names. Benny Goodman was a Frère Jacques name. “Benny Goodman, Benny Goodman, dormez-vous, dormez-vous ?” Robert De Niro was an Eleanor Rigby name, “Robert De Niro, puts on his face from a jar that he keeps by the door...” Frank further believed that there were only two kinds of people in the world: the Tap Dancers and the Touchers. He considered himself a tap dancer because he was very agile at gliding away from any sticky situation. He considered Matthew a toucher because he was always getting involved in situations he had no business getting involved in.

“I’m going over to his office later today,” Matthew said.

“Whose office?” Frank said. “You just told me he’s on vacation.”

“Otto’s.”

“What for?”

“I want to hear what was on that tape.”

“Otto’s murder has nothing to do with us, Matthew.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“He was working a lousy surveillance !”

“Maybe somebody didn’t like the idea, Frank.”

“Matthew... please. Do me a favor...”

“I want to hear that tape.”

The people of Calusa, Florida, liked to believe there was no crime here at all; the uniformed cops and detectives who worked out of the Public Safety Building were concerned only with such things as citizens stubbing their toes.

Public safety.

Not crime.

But in Rand McNally’s most recent Places Rated Almanac , there was a section that rated metropolitan areas from safest — the number-one position — to most dangerous — the 329th position.

Wheeling, West Virginia, was rated the safest city in America.

Number One.

New York, New York — Frank’s beloved Big Apple — was rated the most dangerous city in America.

Number 329.

Chicago, Illinois — Matthew’s hometown — was rated 205.

And crime-free Calusa was rated 162, virtually midway down the Rand McNally list, only forty-three slots higher than big bad Chicago, and apparently not as safe as the citizens here dreamt it to be.

To hear them talk about the murder of Otto Samalson, you’d have thought this was the first time anyone had ever been killed down here. Oh my, how shocking. Shot twice in the head. Unthinkable. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Blue-haired ladies shaking their heads and refusing to believe that public safety meant anything more than avoiding banana peels on the sidewalks. Such an embarrassment. It annoyed Matthew that Otto Samalson had become an embarrassment to Calusa, Florida — where homicides never happened except on a motion picture or television screen.

He did not get to Otto’s office until a little after noon that Monday. By then he had spoken on the telephone to at least a dozen people who clucked their tongues (and undoubtedly wagged their heads, which Matthew could not see) over the unfortunate death on a public thoroughfare of a man whose profession was questionable at best. It took him ten minutes to walk from his own office to Otto’s office in downtown Calusa. Downtown Calusa. The words somehow conjured a giant metropolis. Like downtown Calusa , man, you dig? Same as downtown New York or downtown Chicago. Downtown Detroit. Downtown LA.

Well...

Downtown Calusa was exactly nine blocks long and three blocks wide. The tallest buildings in downtown Calusa, all of them banks, were twelve stories high. Main Street ran eastward from the Cow Crossing — which was now a three-way intersection with a traffic light, but actually had been a cow crossing back when the town was first incorporated — to the County Court House, which, at five stories high, was the tallest building anywhere on Main. The other buildings on Main were one- and two-story cinderblock structures. The banks were on the two streets paralleling Main to the north and south. So when you said “downtown Calusa,” you weren’t talking about a place that also had an uptown . There was no uptown as such. There was simply downtown Calusa and then the rest of Calusa.

Similarly, when you saw a frosted glass door and the lettering on it read—

— you expected to open that door and find behind it a suite , which by strict definition was a series of connected rooms and which in the popular imagination (like downtown Calusa , man!) conjured grandness, a suite at the Plaza Athenée, right?

Well, when you opened the frosted glass door to Otto’s office, you found yourself in a reception room measuring six by eight feet and crammed to bursting with a wooden desk, and a typewriter on it, and In and Out baskets to the left of the typewriter, and papers all over the desk, and a wooden chair behind it, and an upholstered easy chair opposite it, and green metal filing cabinets, and bookshelves, and a Xerox machine, and a coatrack, and walls hung with pictures of presidents of the United States, only two of whom Matthew recognized. On the wall opposite the entrance door, there was another door, presumably leading to the rest of the “suite.”