Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

Warren closed in on her.

It was very easy to close in on her, in that she weighed perhaps two hundred pounds and somewhat overspilled the stool she was sitting on. She was wearing blue slacks and a blue T-shirt with the words fat is beautiful lettered on the front and back of it. Her sandaled feet were crossed on the rung of the stool. Her hair was the color of straw, falling loose over one ear, pulled back and clipped behind the other ear with a pale blue barrette. A long rhinestone earring dangled from that ear. Warren guessed she was in her mid-forties. It was sometimes difficult to tell with fat people.

“This would’ve been around the twentieth of November,” he said. “A Thursday night.”

“The twentieth is right,” the woman said. “A Thursday night.”

“Around ten to eleven.”

“Walked in right about that time is right,” the woman said, and nodded, and picked up her drink, and drank heartily from it, and then put it down and belched.

“Did he talk to you?” Warren asked.

“Nope. Just drank his martini, et the two olives, sat here watching television, paid his bill, and walked out.”

“Around what time?”

“What time what?”

“Did he walk out?”

“Don’t have a watch,” the woman said, and showed him her naked wrist.

“Then how do you know what time he walked in?”

“ Had a watch then, ” she said. “Had to hock it to do my Christmas shopping.” She reached down for a shopping bag sitting beside the stool, hoisted it as evidence.

“You’re sure this was the man?” Warren asked, and showed her the picture again.

“Positive,” she said. “But he wasn’t with that woman. He was alone as ice cream.”

“Ice cream?”

“Alone as ice cream is right,” she said.

Uh-oh, Warren thought, and at that same moment, one of the green-derbied, green-gartered, red-skirted barmaids caught his eye and twirled her forefinger against her temple, signaling in universal sign language that the woman was nuts.

“He didn’t have any stains on his clothing, did he?” Warren asked.

“Stains?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of stains?”

“You tell me.”

“No stains is right,” she said. “Walked in nice and clean and neat and ordered a Tanqueray martini, very dry, with two olives.” She swiveled on the stool, raised her hand to the barmaid who’d signaled she was crazy, and said, “Let me have another one of these, please.”

“That’s your third one, Hannah,” the barmaid said.

“What’s wrong with four?” Hannah asked.

The barmaid shrugged and brought her another drink.

“Would you remember that?” Warren asked her.

“Remember what?” the barmaid said.

“This man ordering a Tanqueray martini, very dry, with two olives?” Warren said, and showed her the picture again.

“No, I don’t remember,” she said.

“Ask your friends,” Warren said.

“What is this?” the barmaid said. “Are you a cop?”

“Yes,” Warren said.

“What’d he do?”

They always wanted to know what a person had done. Even if you were showing a picture of a victim , they always asked what the person had done.

“Nothing,” Warren said.

“Sure,” the barmaid said skeptically. “You come in here asking about a guy supposed to have been here in November, he didn’t do nothing.”

“He’s a friendly witness,” Warren said.

“You two remember this guy ordering a Tanqueray martini, very dry, two olives?” she asked, carrying the picture to where the two other barmaids were standing near the cash register, their green-gartered arms folded across their white shirts.

“Straight up or on the rocks?” one of them asked, sarcastically, it seemed to Warren.

“Straight up,” Hannah said. And then added, “Yours,” and burst out laughing.

The other two barmaids were looking at the picture again.

“You remember that, do you?” Warren asked Hannah. “That he ordered the martini straight up?”

“Yep.”

“A Tanqueray martini, very dry, straight up, with two olives.”

“Is right,” Hannah said, and nodded.

“Madam,” he said, “I wonder if you—”

“Miss,” Hannah corrected.

“Miss, excuse me,” Warren said. “I wonder if I might have your full name and your address.”

The barmaid was back with the picture. “Why?” she asked. “You gonna ask her out?”

“Either of them remember that martini?” Warren asked her.

“Nope.” She handed back the picture. “He wants to take you out, Hannah,” she said.

“Fat chance,” Hannah said, and then laughed at her own unintentional pun.

“Could I have your name and address, please?” Warren said.

“Fat Hannah,” the barmaid said.

“Fat Hannah is right,” Hannah said.

“Fat Hannah what?” Warren said.

“Merritt,” Hannah said.

Warren was already writing. “And your address?”

“Three-seventy-two Waverly.”

“Here in Calusa?”

“Here in Calusa is right,” Hannah said. “You want my phone number, too?”

“Please.”

She gave Warren the phone number, and then winked at the barmaid. She finished what was left in her glass, belched again, struggled off the stool, said, “I better hurry on home, case my phone starts ringing.” She put her hand on Warren’s shoulder, gave it a friendly little squeeze, winked at the barmaid again, and walked out of the bar.

“She spent six years at Ice Cream,” the barmaid told him. “Up in Tallahassee.”

“Ice Cream” may have been a euphemism for “I Scream,” which in itself might have been hyperbole. Both nicknames had evolved from the true and proper name with which they slant-rhymed: Iscrin. The Iscrin Institute in Tallahassee was a private mental hospital named after its founder, Dr. Theodore Iscrin. It was sometimes called “The Icepick Institute,” in that an alarming number of frontal lobotomies had been performed there in the dim recent past.

A check with the facility revealed that Hannah Isabel Merritt’s uncle and sole guardian had committed her to the institution in 1971. She was released in 1977, after a panel of Iscrin psychiatrists suggested to the uncle that her illness could better be controlled by drugs administered in the bosom of the family home. The uncle’s name was Roger Merritt, and they found a telephone number for him in Tallahassee. He was ill himself now, scarcely audible on the telephone, but not without a wry sense of humor. He told Matthew (and Warren on the extension) that his niece’s release may have been “a matter of expedient economy” on Iscrin’s part, since he’d fallen behind on the payment of her bills after the automobile accident that had put him in a wheelchair, debilitated his strength, and was now threatening his very life. The last time he’d seen Hannah, “poor soul,” was in 1983, when she’d gone down to Calusa to take a job working in a nursery. He hoped she was okay.

“So we’ve got a witness who spent time in a nut house,” Warren said to Matthew the moment they were off the phone. “But she damn well didn’t come up with that Tanqueray martini out of a clear blue sky. What do you want to do?”

“Ask her to come in for a deposition,” Matthew said. “She’s all we’ve got.”

You had to know orchids before you could love them.

Biggest of all the plant families, widest spread geographically. Ranged in height from less than an inch to eighteen feet tall. Some of them had blooms so tiny you almost couldn’t see them, others had blooms ten inches across. Came in all colors except black, the good Lord knew what he was doing.

Lots of orchids blooming this time of year.