Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

They figured maybe she was a hooker in real life.

Otherwise, where’d she learn how to do all that stuff? Just watching her in action was like spending a month in a Chinese whorehouse. Had to’ve been a hooker.

So they decided that the best way to get a line on redheaded hookers in the fair city of Calusa was to cruise the topless joints here.

Such was their reasoning.

Which led them to The Naked Truth at 10:30 p.m. that Saturday night.

At 10:30 p.m. that Saturday night, Matthew and Susan were dancing to the strains of an orchestra called Oliver Lane and the Goldens. The Goldens were fourteen musicians who specialized in playing tunes of the forties, sometimes known as golden oldies. Matthew and Susan were dancing to the Artie Shaw arrangement of “Stardust,” though Oliver Lane’s orchestra did not have a violin section.

The people who put together the Snowflake Ball each and every December seemed not to realize that Calusa had during the past ten years attracted a great many young people to whom “golden oldies” meant tunes of the fifties or even the sixties. When Oliver Lane and the Goldens played “It Seems to Me I’ve Heard That Song Before,” none of these youngsters had ever heard that song before.

Blithely unaware, the gray-haired elders who put the annual event together for the American Cancer Society assumed everyone would be thrilled to dance to “Tuxedo Junction” or “I Cried For You” or “Song of India” or even “Elk’s Parade,” which, to tell the truth, no one there but Oliver Lane and the Goldens knew had been a Bobby Sherwood hit way back then when you and I were young, Maggie. Oliver Lane and his splendid aggravation had played all of these songs and more tonight. They were now playing “Stardust,” and Matthew was holding Susan close and Susan was remarking on how beautiful and handsome everyone looked.

Everyone did indeed look beautiful and handsome.

The main ballroom of the Calusa Hyatt (“overlooking the sparkling Gulf of Mexico,” the hotel’s advertisements in the New Yorker read) had been rented for the occasion, and the Volunteer Women of the Calusa Garden Society had decorated the hall awesomely. A Christmas tree the size of the one that grew to spectacular heights in The Nutcracker rose in dazzlingly ornamented splendor against the far wall of the mirrored ballroom, reflecting itself in myriad twinkling images aided and abetted by the several mirrored globes that rotated overhead and sprinkled sparkling reds and yellows and greens and whites across the dance floor and out through the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the sparkling Gulf of Mexico. Actually, the gulf was rather black and ominous tonight, except for a lone, fearless sailor pushing his forty-one-footer under power toward the bridge leading from the mainland to Lucy’s Circle. Dark, roiling clouds moved restlessly in the sky overhead, a certain promise of rain, somewhat unusual for December.

But inside the ballroom, all was glitter and gloss.

Smaller floral replicas of the magnificent Christmas tree sat in the middle of each of the tables with their red tablecloths and green napkins, these — the trees, not the linen — to be auctioned off later for the benefit of the American Cancer Society. All the men were in tuxedos, many of them rented, and all the women were in gowns purchased expressly for the gala. The younger women seemed to favor a couture that relied heavily on slits far up the leg and swooping necklines supported only by naked breasts. The elderly ladies — those pouter pigeons who had voted for the Oliver Lane orchestra — were wearing this year an astonishingly varied assortment of sequined and beaded gowns. Frank’s wife, Leona — whose firm, youthful bosom rivaled that of any of the young women who’d grown up rocking to the songs of Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix — was wearing a silver lamé concoction that seemed still steamingly molten and that caused her to appear more naked than if she’d been in the privacy of her own shower. She was dancing with the very same judge who’d denied Matthew’s motion in limine this past Thursday, dancing very close to the old bastard, in fact. Moreover, the old bastard had his hand on her silvery ass.

“Don’t touch,” the girl sitting in the booth with Tick and Mose said. “Read the sign. You can look, but you can’t touch.”

She said this because Mose had his hand on her thigh.

“Otherwise we’ll get busted,” she said.

She was in her mid-twenties, Tick guessed, a not very good-looking blonde wearing a costume that wouldn’t have been welcomed at the Snowflake Ball across town because her costume was her underwear.

Tick wondered where the notion had started that a woman in her underwear was sexier than a woman in just her skin. France, he guessed. La Directrice had dressed Connie in a startling array of underwear, coming up with variations Tick had never even seen in the pages of Penthouse . Connie had looked very sexy in all that underwear, but Connie would have looked sexy in a potato sack. Connie was what was known in the trade as a natural.

The blonde was wearing a black garter belt, black bikini panties, black net nylons, and black high-heeled shoes. No bra. Except for her naked breasts, she did not look very natural in her underwear, nor did she look particularly sexy. She looked too heavily made up and too sleazily underdressed, and she stank of cheap perfume, and she seemed much older than her twenty-some-odd years, and far more hard-edged, and far more worn. She looked like a hooker.

Which Tick guessed she was.

“How long have you been doing this sort of thing?” Tick asked.

“What are you, a social worker?” the girl asked. “Hey, listen, I mean it,” she said to Mose, whose hand was on her thigh again. She plucked the hand off as if it were a piece of lint. “The state attorney has people coming in and out of here all the time, Skye Bannister, you familiar with that name?”

“No,” Tick said.

“The state attorney,” she said. “He’ll close us down in a minute if he thinks anything funny’s going on in here, which of course it isn’t.”

“Of course not,” Tick said. “What’s your name?”

“Kim,” she said.

Tick guessed there were eight million girls named Kim in the topless joints across the length and breadth of America.

“Kim, we’re looking for a particular person,” Mose said.

Straight to the point. Good old fucking dumb Mose.

“What’s the matter with me?” Kim said. “I happen to think I’m pretty particular.”

“No, I meant—”

“What he meant,” Tick said, “is we think a friend of ours may be working in Calusa, and we’d like very much to find her.”

“What are you, cops?” Kim said.

“Do I look like a cop?” Tick said.

She looked at him. “No,” she said, “but who can tell nowadays? Nowadays you get cops they look more like crooks than crooks do.”

“We’re not cops,” Mose said.

She looked at Mose.

“Then what are you?”

“Friends of this girl we’re trying to find,” Mose said.

“What girl?”

“A redhead,” Tick said.

“What’s her name? We got four redheads here, two of them on tonight. One of them’s up there dancing right this minute.”

They looked toward the small stage around which a dozen or more tables were arranged. A short stout redhead was up there, flailing the air with her pendulous breasts.

“That’s not her,” Tick said. “The redhead we’re looking for is extremely beautiful.”

“ I happen to think Cindy is extremely beautiful,” Kim said.

Eight million Cindys, too, Tick thought.

“Who’s knocking Cindy?” he said, looking toward the stage again, where the girl was now bending over to throw an enormous moon at a baldheaded guy watching her in open-mouthed fascination. “But this particular person we’re looking for is really extraordinarily beautiful, you’d agree in a minute if you ever saw her.”