Ed McBain: Cinderella

Vincent Hollister was a fag, no doubt about that. This was only the third time he’d cut Larkin’s hair — well, he’d only been working here at Unicorn since the beginning of April — but Larkin knew definitely that Hollister was a fag. Still, he was the kind of fag Larkin could get along with. Not the flouncy type, you know? Not mincing. No limp wrist. Talked like anybody would, no lisp. Dressed like a normal human being. No jeans tight across the buns. A very interesting person, too. The things he talked about were very interesting. Like which hotel to stay at in Positano, Italy. Or where to buy good amber in London, England. Also, if he’d been a woman, Vincent had what a man would consider a very pretty mouth. Larkin wondered if he ever dressed up like a woman. He wondered what fairies did when they got together, other than blow each other and fuck each other in the ass. He was almost tempted to ask. He felt he knew Vincent well enough to ask. But then Vincent might take it the wrong way. You never knew with fags.

“So,” Vincent said, “what have you been up to?”

“Oh, I been busy,” Larkin said.

“Always busy, busy, busy,” Vincent said and smiled, and began combing out Larkin’s hair, his eyes on each separate strand as it passed through the comb, searching each strand the way Larkin’s mother used to search her fine-tooth comb when he was a kid growing up in New York City. Larkin was fifty-three years old. When he was growing up, you’d go to school in the morning, come back that afternoon with a head full of lice. His mother used to fine-comb his hair, looking for nits. Every time she found a nit, she’d squash it against the comb with her thumbnail. Vincent was maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, he didn’t know about nits. Christ knew why he studied the hair that way.

Maybe it was an act.

Make the customer think you were paying great attention to the way the hair fell or whatever. Fags were great actors. In fact, some of the best actors in the world were fags. It always came as a shock when somebody told Larkin this or that actor was a fag. Last month sometime it must’ve been, he told this girl he had in bed with him — she was nineteen years old, this juicy little girl down from Atlanta, ass like a brewer’s horse and an appetite for coke that was astonishing — he told her Burt Reynolds was a fag. She almost started crying. She should have realized he was lying, Burt Reynolds used to have that big thing going with Dinah Shore, didn’t he? And then Sally Field. So unless every woman in Hollywood was a beard, then how could Burt Reynolds be a fag? Her eyes going big and round, misting over, he really thought she was going to start crying. Hey, I was only kidding, he said. It’s Clint Eastwood who’s the fag. Had to smile even now, just thinking of it.

“What’s comical?” Vincent asked.

“Oh, just remembering something,” Larkin said. “Just remembering something.”

In Miami Beach, Domingo thought Alice Carmody wasn’t getting the address fast enough to suit him.

He cut her again, on the arm this time.

She said, “Hey, come on, I’m dancin’ as fast as I can.”

A minute later, while she was opening the top drawer of the dresser across the room, he cut her again, over the eye this time. She said, “Shit, what’s the matter with you?” and angrily threw her address book on the dresser top and stamped off into the bathroom to get a towel. There were only two rooms, the bathroom and the other room with the daybed and the dresser in it. As she turned on the water in the sink, Ernesto and Domingo began talking in Spanish about whether or not they had to kill her. It was Ernesto’s contention that Domingo had now cut her a few more times than were necessary to scare her, and she might go to the police once they were gone. Alice didn’t know what they were talking about out there, jabbering away in Spanish. She was trying to stop the flow of blood from the cut over her left eye. It didn’t occur to her for a minute that they might try to kill her. She had already given them her sister’s address, hadn’t she? All she was thinking was that she had to get out of there fast because her connection sure as hell wasn’t going to wait on Collins Avenue and Lincoln Road forever.

In the other room, they decided they had to kill her.

When she came out of the bathroom with a Band-Aid over her left eyebrow, Domingo had the knife in his hand again. There was a funny look on his face.

Ernesto was standing just inside the door to the apartment, blocking it. He had a funny look, too.

She ran right back into the bathroom, and locked the door.

It was very quiet out there.

All she could hear was the sound of her own heart.

And then, all at once, they began whispering in Spanish.

What she had to do was get the bathroom window open. Get through it and jump down to the street. She was on the second floor, she knew she’d hurt herself if she jumped, but not as much as they were going to hurt her if she didn’t. The lock on the door was one of those push-button things on the knob, a Mickey Mouse lock, they could kick open the door in a minute if they wanted to. She figured if they hadn’t done it already they were afraid it would make too much noise. She once had a dealer kick in her door because she owed him money, man, it woke up the whole building. So she figured that’s why they weren’t doing it. Just whispering outside there in Spanish instead.

The window was painted shut.

She looked around for something she could work the paint with.

Nothing.

She looked around for something she could smash the window with. She had to get the fuck out of there!

Nothing.

She heard a sound at the door behind her.

A scraping sound.

They were trying to loid the door. They were sliding a credit card between the doorjamb and the door, working the spring lock, trying to force back the bolt with the card. She picked up the towel she’d used earlier to stanch the flow of blood over her eye. She wrapped the towel around her right hand. She hit out at the window with it, smashing the glass, and just then the door behind her opened. She screamed even before she turned.

Domingo was standing there with the knife in his hand.

Hair fell on Larkin’s shoulders, on the faded blue smock they gave you when you came in, it was impossible to figure out how to tie the thing, you had to be a magician. Same kind of smock they gave the women on the other side of the salon. He wondered if Vincent ever wore women’s clothes. Some of these fairies, Larkin bet they dressed up like girls when they were alone together. Wore lipstick and everything. Larkin looked at himself in the mirror and wondered how his mouth would look with lipstick on it. Brown hair, dark eyes, wide forehead, prominent nose, strong mouth — an overall impression of rough-hewn good looks. Put lipstick on that mouth, it’d be like painting a gorilla’s toenails. Vincent’s face was more delicate. A pale oval. Hazel eyes. High cheekbones. The pouting feminine mouth. Black hair done like a fairy’s, though, that was the clue.

“Been hot enough for you?” Larkin asked.

“Please,” Vincent said, and rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask.”

Sounded like a fag, too, sometimes.

“You still plan on going to Europe this summer?”

“I may leave Calusa permanently,” Vincent said.

“Oh? How come?”

“Just tired of it.”

“Where would you go? You just got here.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

(In Miami Beach at that moment, a medical examiner leaning over the body of the blood-smeared woman lying on the bathroom floor ventured the learned opinion that she was the victim of multiple stab and slash wounds and that the cause of death was severance of the carotid artery.)