Ed McBain: Cinderella

“Profession like yours, you can settle anywhere, I guess.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Just take a pair of scissors with you,” Larkin said, and smiled.

“Sure. Actually, though, I may leave the business altogether. I just don’t know yet.”

“Quit being a barber?” Larkin said.

“A stylist, yes,” Vincent said.

“What would you do?”

“Live the good life,” Vincent said. “Become a degenerate. Who knows?”

“Takes money to live the good life,” Larkin said.

“Well... I’ve saved a bit,” Vincent said.

“Where would you go?”

“Asia maybe,” Vincent said.

Larkin could just imagine him in Asia. Bunch of hairless Chinese fags smoking dope, Vincent in the middle of them wearing a long blue gown, ice-blue gown like the one Cinderella was wearing at the Jacaranda Ball. He could never get used to saying it the way the Cubans did — Hacaranda. To him it was Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack Aranda. Listen, what’s in a name? His own maiden name was David Largura. All his wop cousins had names like Salvatore and Silvio and Ignazio and Umberto, his mother comes up with David, a Jewish name. Largura meant “space” in Italian. Changed it to Larkin back, oh, thirty years ago must’ve been. You called him Mr. Largura now, he wouldn’t know who the fuck you meant. He’d been Larkin longer than he’d been Largura.

How do you do, my name is David Larkin.

Hi. I’m Angela West.

Want to have your picture taken, Angela?

Sure, why not?

“Sri Lanka,” Vincent said. “Or Goa. Or Bali in the South Pacific. Lots of places a person can go.”

(In Miami Beach at that moment an ambulance was carting away the body of the knifing victim. A man picking his teeth outside the hotel said the lady who got juked was Alice Carmody, the junkie who lived in 2A.)

“Lots of places to go if you’ve got the money,” Larkin said.

Want to come home with me, Angela?

Sure, why not?

All so simple. Gorgeous girl in her twenties, he’s fifty-three, it never occurs to him she might be a pro. Well, listen, he kept himself in good shape, jogged on the beach, worked out at Nautilus. He’d even been to bed with teenagers who said he looked terrific, two of them together one time, took care of them both very nicely, thank you, no complaints. Pizzichi e baci no fanno buchi — his mother used to say that. It meant you could kiss and pinch all you wanted, it wouldn’t leave scars. Pizzichi e baci no fanno buchi : Wrong, Mama.

Want your picture taken? Sure, why not? Watch the birdie, click, click, click.

Want to come home with me? Sure, why not? Pinches and kisses. But plenty of scars later, Mama. Molti buchi .

Angela West, my ass.

Catch up with her, he’d give her Angela West.

“Or Thailand,” Vincent said. “Lots of places.”

As Vincent’s scissors snipped away, the men continued talking about Asia. Neither of them had ever been there, and they were full of speculations about it.

In Miami at about that time, Ernesto and Domingo were just entering the Sunshine State Parkway, driving a red Chrysler LeBaron convertible on their way north to Orlando.

Domingo confessed that he had found Alice Carmody quite charming and attractive. What he said, actually, was “Me gustaría culiarla.”

During the summer months, the weather forecasts in Calusa were the same day after day after day. Temperature in the nineties. Humidity in the nineties. Showers in the afternoon. Clearing before evening. Temperature in the nineties again. Humidity the same as it was before the showers. There was, Matthew supposed, something to be said for dependability. On the other hand, there was nothing quite so boring as predictability.

He had put on a tan tropical-weight suit when he’d left for the office that Tuesday morning. By two o’clock that afternoon, as he started the drive out to Sabal Key from downtown Calusa, the suit was rumpled and limp. He drove with the windows of the Karmann Ghia closed tight, the air-conditioning up full blast. To his left was the Gulf of Mexico, the water still green under broken clouds close to shore, the sky much darker to the west where thunderheads were already building. By three, three-thirty — four at the very latest — it would rain. Visitors, of which there were only a handful during the summer months, always thought the rain would mean a break in the humidity.

He had already driven past most of the Gulfside condos; the remainder of Sabal Key, running northward, was virtually as wild as when it had been inhabited by the Calusa and Timicua tribes of Indians back in the good old days. Flanked on the west by the Gulf and on the east by Calusa Bay, the key here at the northern end narrowed to a tangle of mangrove and pine and sabal palm in which only a few isolated houses nestled. Carla Nettington lived in one of those houses.

A woman in her thirties, not spectacularly beautiful — what a discreet journalist might have called “handsome” — she had come to the offices of Summerville and Hope on the twenty-third of May, elegantly dressed, slender and tall, somewhat flat-chested, and wearing a telltale sorrowful look that had nothing to do with preparing a will. There had been something very old-fashioned, almost Victorian, about Carla Nettington. At the time, Matthew had found it difficult to visualize her in a swimsuit.

She was, nonetheless, wearing a swimsuit when he arrived at the house that afternoon. She expected him, he had called first. In fact, she had told him on the phone that she’d probably be out back. Matthew rang the front doorbell. When he got no answer, he started around back, past a garden lush with red bougainvillea and yellow hibiscus. As he came around the corner of the house, Carla rose from a lounge chair and walked toward him with her hand extended.

The swimsuit was a black bikini, a bit more than nothing in its bra top, its black panty bottom snugly brief below her angular hips. She looked tall and leggy, her skin very white against the patches of black, the whiteness totally unexpected here in Florida, a stark paleness of flesh that caused her to appear somehow fragile and vulnerable and inexplicably sexy. He had not supposed she would look more exciting with her clothes off than she had with them on. With most women, in fact, the opposite was usually the case. But undeniably sexy she was, in spite of her virtually adolescent figure, the angular hips and collarbones, a coltish look — well, boyish to be more exact — dark hair cut close to her narrow face, eyes hidden behind overly large sunglasses, no lipstick on her generous mouth, lips wide in a smile now as she came closer.

“Mr. Hope,” she said, “how nice to see you.”

Her voice was somewhat husky, a cigarette-smoker’s voice, or a drinker’s, he couldn’t tell which.

She took his hand.

“I hope this isn’t a bad time for you,” he said.

“No, no, not at all. Well, as you can see, I was just sitting here reading.” She released his hand and gestured languidly to the lounge chair she had just vacated, and to the magazines strewn on the table beside it. A pitcher of lemonade and an ice bucket were on the table. Two empty glasses, both upside down, rested on a tray beside the bucket.

“Some lemonade?” she asked.

“Please,” he said.

She filled both glasses with ice cubes. She poured lemonade. All angles in the sun. Black and white and yellow in the yellow sunshine. His shirt and jacket were sticking to him. She handed him one of the glasses. He waited for her to fill her own glass.

“Please sit down,” she said.

He sat on the chaise beside hers. They sipped at the lemonade. A pelican swooped in low over the mangroves, settled on the water. The pool was a rippled blue under a patchy blue sky, the patio and pool ending at the line of mangroves, the bayou water beyond that a grayish green. In the distance, the storm clouds were closer. There was the smell of rain in the air. But the sun was lingering, if tentatively, for yet a little while. She crossed one ankle over the other, white on white.