Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

“No.”

“Then kiss me. I know you want to.”

“I do.”

“Then do it.”

Green eyes wide.

“Please,” she said.

God, that mouth.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He rose, moved swiftly toward the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“So am I,” she said. “You’re breaking my heart, do you know that? I’ve known you for fifteen goddamn minutes, and you’re already breaking my heart.”

He looked at her.

Long and hard and wonderingly.

“Marcie... ,” he said.

“Oh, go the hell back to your office,” she said, and buried her face in her hands.

He looked at her a moment longer, and then opened the door and sidled out, and closed it immediately behind him.

It was Christmas Eve.

Ever since Monday, Tick and Mose had been running down every damn Dill in the Calusa telephone directory — eight of them in all — with no luck whatsoever. They were both exhausted. Mose wanted to go out and get drunk. This was at eleven o’clock in the morning. Tick wanted to find Margaret Dill. He said they had to go see Amber Wilson again. Mose said maybe Amber Wilson would like to go out and get drunk with them, and the hell with Margaret Dill. Mose had no head at all for business. Mose didn’t realize, as Tick did, how much money they could make on that movie, if they could find it.

But first they had to find Amber Wilson again.

They went back to the crumby little apartment she was living in down there in Newtown, and her talkative next-door neighbor — a big fat black woman who looked like Aunt Jemima, complete with a red bandanna on her head — told them she hadn’t seen Amber since early yesterday morning, heard she was out on a boat with some people. Tick took this to mean that she was out on a boat entertaining fishermen. He asked the neighbor if she knew which boat Amber was on, and the neighbor said when Amber usually went out on a boat, it was through Opus Charters, operating out from behind the Hyatt. Tick and Mose thanked her and then drove south on 41 to the Hyatt.

Opus Charters rented everything from fishing boats to yachts. The owner of the operation, a man named Charlie Oppenheimer, told Tick and Mose that Amber and two other girls had gone out yesterday on a thirty-six-foot Grand Banks with some men down from Clearwater. The captain of the boat had told Charlie they were heading down for Venice, planned to spend the night out on the water — the boat slept six comfortably in air-conditioned cabins. Charlie expected they’d be back sometime this afternoon. He told them all this when he thought Tick and Mose were interested in a similar excursion. Only later did he think they might have been cops. The thought would keep him awake all night while he was waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

At two o’clock that afternoon, Tick and Mose were sitting in the Hyatt bar, overlooking the dock and the Gulf of Mexico. Mose was drinking mimosas. Tick kept kidding him about a mimosa being a fag drink. He himself was drinking something called a Banana Dynamite, which had seven different kinds of rum in it and a little bit of banana cordial. On the gulf, the sailors were out in earnest. It was a fine bright day, and there was a good wind and no chop at all.

“We don’t find Connie today,” Mose said, “I want to go back to Tampa. I don’t want to spend Christmas in this shitty town.”

“I was thinking,” Tick said, “we don’t find her today, we go back up and give those two girls a ring we met last month.”

“Yeah, Revlon,” Mose said.

“I still got her number, the blonde’s,” Tick said.

“What was her name again?” Mose said.

“Rachel,” Tick said.

“No, the redhead’s. Revlon’s.”

“Gwen,” Tick said.

“Yeah, Gwen,” Mose said, and licked his lips. “That’s a good idea, we give them a call.”

“Christmas Eve, they’ll probably be busy.”

“Worth a shot,” Mose said. “Maybe we oughta call from here, set it up.”

“Well, let’s see we can’t find Connie first.”

“I was Connie, the money she got for that movie, I’d be up in New York right this minute, spending it.”

“She didn’t get all that much,” Tick said.

“How do you know what she got?”

“I’m just guessing. Two bills a day maybe?”

“New York’s great around Christmas,” Mose said. “Florida sucks around Christmas.”

“That must be it now,” Tick said, and nudged Mose.

A boat was pulling into the dock. Two men in Hawaiian-print sports shirts jumped ashore and began doing things with ropes. A third man in the same kind of shirt kept waving directions to them.

“There’s Amber,” Tick said.

She was standing on the bow, wearing a yellow wraparound skirt that flapped open to reveal the long line of her leg. With one hand, she was clutching a straw hat to her head. In the other hand, she was carrying a beach bag, the same one into which she had slipped Tick’s hundred and fifty bucks for giving him information about a woman who didn’t exist.

“Let’s go,” Tick said.

He looked at the check, put several bills on the bartop, and shoved back his stool.

Out on the dock, the men in the Hawaiian-print shirts were giving the girls last-minute holiday hugs and farewell kisses. Three girls. Two of them white, the other one Amber, who could’ve passed for white. The girls waved ta-ta to each other and went off in opposite directions, the two white girls heading for the bar, where maybe they hoped to drum up a bit more trade, giving Tick and Mose the once-over as they passed them, Amber heading for the angled wooden walkway that led toward the roundabout in front of the hotel. Tick and Mose fell into step beside her.

“Hello, Amber,” Tick said.

“Well, well,” Amber said.

“Ain’t no Margaret Dill in Calusa,” Mose said, straight to the point.

“Gotta be,” Amber said, unruffled. “Jake told me she lives here.”

“ Where here?” Tick said. “We checked every damn Dill in the phone book.”

“Maybe she’s unlisted.”

“Jake must’ve given you a clue,” Tick said.

“No clue a’tall. Just her name. Margaret Dill. Or Meg. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

They were at the roundabout now, under the hotel marquee. She looked up toward 41. Mose figured he’d break her nigger arm if she tried to get in a taxi before telling them what they needed to know.

“You sure he said Dill?” Tick asked.

“Dill, Dill,” Amber said. “Margaret Dill.” She turned to a uniformed bellhop who came out of the hotel. “Think I’ll be able to get a taxi here?” she asked. “Or should I call for one?”

“They come by every five minutes,” the bellhop said.

“I’ve been here five minutes already,” she said.

The bellhop shrugged. Amber looked up toward 41 again.

“Think,” Tick said. “Something he might’ve said. Like the mainland, or one of the keys, or out toward—”

“He didn’t say nothing but her name.”

“Margaret Dill,” Tick said.

“How many times you have to hear it?” Amber said. “Margaret Dill, that’s right. Dill, Dill .”

It was dumb Mose who finally tipped. Not for nothing had he come along in the fair state of Georgia.

“Are you saying Deal ?” he said.

“Dill is what I’m saying,” she said. “Right.”

“Like when somebody says it’s a good deal?”

“A good dill, right.”

“Like deal the cards?” Mose said.

“Dill the cards, right,” she said. “Margaret Dill.”

They can’t even talk straight, Mose thought.

There were thirteen names listed under orchestras & bands in the Calusa directory’s yellow pages: