Ed McBain: Cinderella

“Yes?” he said.

One hand on his hip, extremely bored expression on his face.

Was he?

“I was here Thursday,” Matthew said. “I spoke to a young woman—”

“There’s no young woman here,” the man said.

“She told me she was visiting—”

“No, you must have the wrong apartment.”

“I’m sure it’s the right apartment,” Matthew said, and consulted the list he’d copied from the downstairs directory. “Hollister,” he said, “2C. Are you Mr. Hollister?”

“I am.”

“There was a girl here on Thursday—”

“I’m sorry, you’re wrong,” he said.

“A young girl with blue eyes and red hair. Short red—”

“No.”

“Mr. Hollister...”

“You’re annoying me,” he said, and closed the door.

The nameplate was at eye level.

HOLLISTER.

Matthew kept looking at it.

He debated knocking again. Instead, he went downstairs, walked slowly to the Karmann Ghia, looked up toward the second-floor corridor again, got into the car, and sat behind the wheel thoughtfully for several moments. At last he nodded, started the car, and moved it to a space that afforded a good view of both the staircase and the lobby entrance.

He did not know whether or not the redhead was in there with Hollister right this minute.

If so, he intended to wait here till she came out.

He did not know if Hollister was expecting the redhead to visit him again today.

If so, he intended to wait here till she arrived.

The only thing he did know was that Hollister had lied to him.

Each kilo of cocaine was packed in a brown paper bag.

Last night, when Jimmy Legs saw the paper bags, he said, “You cheap fucks, you can’t afford Baggies?”

You could fit a kilo of coke in a gallon-size plastic Baggie and then tie it shut with a little blue plastic tie. Jimmy and Charlie were doing that now. Transferring the twenty kilos of coke to plastic Baggies from the brown paper bags the fucking farmers had packed it in.

Last night it had taken the Excalibur exactly five minutes to get out beyond the three-mile limit where the ship was waiting. Panamanian registry. Rusting old hulk. Neither the ship nor the cigarette showing any lights, and besides they were out well past the limit. Anyway, if the Coast Guard showed, the cigarette — traveling at close to a hundred miles an hour — would leave them in the dust in a minute. Everybody on the ship was nervous as a cat. Amateurs, all of them. Two bearded guys looking like Castro and his brother. We wann to see d’money firs’. Hardly speak English. Greed in their eyes, fingers itchy. We wann to see d’money.

Jimmy told them they’d get the money after the coke was tested.

Both he and Charlie Nubbs were packing guns. Anybody got frisky here, there was going to be a lot of spics with holes in them. Besides there were three other guys down on the Excalibur where the money was.

They went down to this cabin.

The ship stunk. Of everything. Jimmy could hardly decide what stunk worst, the two bearded dope entrepreneurs or the ship. There were five more guys down in the cabin. Bad odds there in the cabin, seven to two. Jimmy didn’t like being way the fuck out here on the Gulf with seven guys who looked liked the bandidos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was counting on them being new in the business, though, and trying to make a good impression on the big boys. They fucked up this time around, the next time they showed their asses it was adios, amigos . Also, they knew the million bucks was still on the Excalibur down there on the water with three guys packing Sten guns. If the coke tested good, they’d work out a step-by-step exchange that wouldn’t put either the money or the coke or anybody involved in jeopardy.

Twenty brown paper bags to check.

They used three tests.

Sometimes only one test for any given kilo, sometimes two, sometimes all three in combination. They wanted these raggedy-assed farmers from the wilds of South America to know they were dealing with professionals here.

The first of the tests was the old standby cobalt thiocyanate Brighter-the-Blue. The chemical dissolved in cocaine leaving some kind of blue shit, and if it was a very deep blue, you had yourself very high-grade coke.

The second test was with plain water.

You scooped a spoonful out of the brown paper bag, and dropped a little of it in a few ounces of water. If it dissolved right away, it was pure cocaine hydrochloride. If any of the powder didn’t dissolve, the shit had been cut with sugar.

The third test was with Clorox.

You dropped a spoonful of the powder in a glass jar with Clorox in it.

If you got a white halo as the powder fell, the stuff was coke.

If you saw any red trailing the powder, then man, the stuff was cut with some kind of synthetic shit.

It took them quite a while to test the twenty bags.

Satisfied that they were buying good coke, they shook hands with the bearded farmers, transferred the coke to the Excalibur and the money to the rusting tub, and went their separate ways.

Today, Saturday, the twenty-first day of June, they were making some discoveries.

They were discovering, first of all, that you couldn’t be too careful when you were dealing with guys who looked like farmers that had never seen or used a toilet in their lives, which was why the ship stunk so bad. What you had to do — no matter how nervous and inexperienced any guy selling dope looked — was not take anything at all for granted in the dope business. Because, as they were just discovering, it was possible for certain fucking thieves to fill a bag with three-quarters coke and one-quarter sugar, the sugar wrapped in Saran Wrap on the bottom of the bag.

It wasn’t that the fucking farmers couldn’t afford Baggies, it was that you could see through Baggies.

Jimmy recalled now that they had dumped several brown bags of the shit on the tabletop there in the cabin. Show the farmers how careful they were being, take their test samples from anywhere in the pile there on the table.

But Charlie Nubbs recalled it was the farmers who’d handed them the bags for testing, one by one. The first few bags, the ones they knew would be carefully tested, had contained coke right down to the bottom. Go ahead, dump it on the table, we’re honest farmers.

Jimmy and Charlie both recalled that after they’d dumped three, four bags on the table, they’d stopped doing that. You had twenty keys of coke, it made a hell of a mess you went dumping it all over the table. Besides, how could you not trust these two bearded dopes, bringing their coke up in brown paper bags and nodding and grinning while the tests were being made — thank you for testing our coke, thank you for dealing with such unworthy peasants, nodding, grinning, also smelling very bad.

What they were discovering now was that only five of the brown paper bags were actually filled with coke down to the bottom. Fifteen of the bags ranged anywhere from sixty percent to seventy-five percent coke and the rest Saran-Wrapped sugar.

So what had happened was they’d paid a million bucks for twenty keys of coke, but they’d only got something like sixteen keys for their money because the other four keys were Domino, man. So instead of paying $50,000 a key, they had actually paid $62,500 according to Charlie’s pocket calculator. Moreover, they had agreed to sell ten keys to the two Miami spics for $60,000 a key, which meant they would be losing $25,000 on those ten keys.

Jimmy said if he ever caught those farmers he would cut off their balls.

Charlie wanted to know what they were going to do about the two Miami spics.

“Pack the shit back in the paper bags,” Jimmy said, “the way the farmers done to us. Only we go them one better ’cause we ain’t farmers. With us , it’ll be fifty-fifty separated by Saran Wrap. We’ll be selling them five keys for the six-hundred K instead of ten keys, which means we’ll be getting a hundred and twenty thou per key, and that ain’t zucchini.”