Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

Unless one considered the indisputable fact that the state’s attorney would be working during those days to compile the evidence he hoped would put Harper in the electric chair. I supposed Dale would take the news of a canceled vacation like the adult she was. But Joanna had just turned fourteen, and she had already planned a term paper on her “Mexican Adventure,” and had bought a new bikini to wear poolside at the Camino Real, where she planned to exhibit breasts that, after a prolonged delay, were at last maturing at an alarming rate — alarming at least to a father who would have beaten off with a stick any pimply faced teenager who dared openly ogle them. When she’d modeled the bikini for Dale and me, I commented mildly and with some embarrassment that it was, ah, a bit revealing, didn’t she think, for someone who was only fourteen? Joanna, with her customary candor, said, “You should see the one I didn’t buy, Dad.” End of argument. But how was I to tell her that I was thinking about canceling our Mexican trip in favor of defending a man I didn’t like, a man who’d been accused of murdering his wife in the most horrible manner, a man I “felt” was innocent (“Never feel,” Benny had told me just before I’d left his office. “ Know !”) when all the signs indicated that he was guilty as hell?

By Friday of that week, I still hadn’t decided whether to represent George N. Harper (as he had asked me to do) or to advise him either to find another lawyer who would accept his case or request the public defender to appoint one for him. Joanna was supposed to be with her mother that weekend, but at the last minute my former wife called to ask if I would mind having her two weekends in a row because she, Susan, had been invited to attend the Tampa Bay Bucs football game that Saturday, and she and Arthur planned to spend the weekend up there, not returning till late Sunday night — so would I mind?

I never mind seeing my daughter two weekends in a row; I would like to see my daughter every day of my life. Neither do I mind Susan’s apparent need to tell me just which eligible bachelor she is currently seeing and presumably sleeping with. Earlier in the year, she had enjoyed a brief but doubtlessly torrid fling with a man named Georgie Poole, reputedly the richest man in all Calusa, a bachelor in his mid-forties who, it was rumored, had a penchant for television cuties in situation comedies, hence his frequent “business” trips to Los Angeles. The romance had cooled by March, at which time Susan promptly informed me that she had taken up with “a very dear man” named Arthur Butler, the one who would be taking her to Tampa this weekend.

In one of her brighter moments, Susan mentioned wittily that not only had the Butler done it, but he’d done it exceedingly well, and was, moreover, continuing to do it on a regular basis. I don’t know why Susan keeps reminding me that she’s a desirable woman; I knew she was desirable when I married her, and I even thought she was desirable when at last I divorced her. (I also don’t know why so many divorced women seem to drift into selling real estate, which was what my former wife now did.) I wish she would keep her various relationships to herself. So long as none of them is harmful to my daughter, so long as she doesn’t frighten the horses, so to speak, I really don’t care what she does with her own life. But I do object to hypocrisy.

Susan was poised to spend the weekend with Arthur Butler in Tampa, there to enjoy the football game and, I was certain, sundry indoor sports as well. On her block (as my partner Frank would put it), this was perfectly acceptable behavior. But the first words my daughter said to me when I picked her up after school that Friday were, “Mom won’t let me go to Mexico if Dale’s coming with us.”

I must tell you, first, that Joanna is blonde and blue-eyed and long legged and easily the most beautiful child in all Calusa, and perhaps the entire state of Florida, or maybe even the world. She is also a scientific genius. Or, at least, she gets As in biology and provides fierce B-plus competition for the boys in her geometry class, even though some unenlightened sexists would maintain that these subjects would best be left to the male of the species.

On the other hand, Joanna does very poorly in English, and she cannot boil an egg properly, and I have never caught her knitting or tatting or playing the harpsichord or doing any of the little feminine curtseying things that used to be considered the mark of a domesticated American female back when Abraham Lincoln was president.

Joanna wants to be a brain surgeon.

She read somewhere that a famous surgeon in Indianapolis used to practice tying one-handed knots inside a matchbox. Whenever Joanna and I dine out together, she prays that the matches on the table will not be of the book type, but rather of the box type. Often, she sits by the pool at the house I am renting, and ties knots inside a matchbox while simultaneously reading Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life . She finds Freud “neat.”

The next thing you should know about Joanna is that she absolutely adores Dale. Her sudden infatuation came as a total surprise to me; before Dale, Joanna had been known to demolish in her tracks any lady I had the audacity to introduce. Her sotto voce nicknames for these hapless unsuspecting beauties were in themselves devastating: she secretly labeled one woman “Bubbles La Tour,” merely because she was as magnificently endowed as a burlesque queen; she privately called another “Houdini the Great” only because she had a not-unsurprising habit of vanishing whenever Joanna put in a surly appearance; she dubbed yet another “El Dopo,” because her name was Eleanor Daniels and she made the mistake one bleak October afternoon of wearing a sweater monogrammed with the initials E.D. (In all fairness to my daughter, Eleanor really wasn’t too terribly bright.) Joanna’s smoldering gaze could reduce to steaming ashes the strongest of suitors for her cherished father’s attention; she once grew extravagantly jealous of a twice-weekly cleaning woman who was in her sixties, and about whom I made an unfortunate and idle comment to the effect that she was “a nice person.” Electra had nothing on my daughter Joanna. But all that was before Dale; Joanna would walk through fire for Dale O’Brien.

So now she was telling me that my beloved former wife would not allow her to go to Mexico if Dale would be accompanying us.

“Why not?” I asked.

“She says she has custody.”

“I know she does. What’s that got to do—”

“She says she’s responsible for my moral rectitude.”

“That’s redundant.”

“Huh?”

“Rectitude means ‘moral uprightness.’ Is your mother saying she’s responsible for your moral moral uprightness?”

“Whatever. She won’t let me go, Dad.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been planning on this for months !”

“So have I. I’d better call her.”

“I think she’s already left for Tampa,” Joanna said.

“I’ll try her, anyway.”

She had not already left for Tampa. She was, in fact, still packing when I phoned her at the house I used to share with her.

“What is it?” she said. Her tone of voice was the one a mother might have used on a wayward child who’d just stamped into the kitchen while a soufflé was in the oven.

“You tell me ,” I said.

“Oh, it’s riddle time, right?”

“No, it’s Q and A time. What’s this about Joanna?”

“What’s what about Joanna?”

“Did you tell her she can’t go to Mexico with me?”

“Oh, so that’s it.”