Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

“My daughter, too,” he said.

“Well, if you know this bothers me, you shouldn’t—”

“I think you’d be making a big mistake if you—”

“Can you please stop this?” she said. “Can’t you see? Can’t you? How can you possibly suggest that Joanna and this boy—”

“They’re kids, Susan! What the hell do you think kids do? They neck, they pet, they even—”

“Damn you, shut up, ” she said, and hurled her drink into his face.

On the radio, a choral group began singing “Silent Night.”

He took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his face. His shirt was wet down the front. He looked at his shirt as if wondering how it had got all wet. He kept staring at his shirt. He was about to tell her he had kissed someone yesterday. And enjoyed it.

The telephone rang.

On the radio, the singers were telling the world that all was calm, all was bright.

The telephone kept ringing.

Susan got up and walked into the kitchen. She snatched the receiver from the wall phone. “Hello,” she said icily. She listened. “Just a moment, please,” she said, and came back into the living room.

“For you,” she said. “Warren Chambers. And then you can go, please.”

Bad enough when she was only kissing him.

That was in the beginning.

Early on in the movie.

The real fairy tale, the one he’d read when he was a kid, was about a miller who when he died left his mill to his oldest son, and his donkey to the middle son, and his cat to the youngest son, whose name was Tom. Tom figured all he could do with the cat was make a pie of him and then sell his skin. But the cat started talking, told him all he needed was a pair of high boots, and a fine hat with a feather, and a small sack, and he’d make young Tom rich. So Tom got him all these things, and through a lot of lying and finagling the cat pretended first that Tom was a marquis or something — a baron, maybe a count, this was a long time ago when he’d read the story — and tricked the king into thinking Tom was rich, and finally Tom married the king’s daughter and lived happily ever after.

That was the fairy tale.

In the movie...

But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers...

In the movie, this nigger just out of jail meets a girl who is a harlot, and he dresses her up in high red boots and fine clothes and she lies and connives with two other girls and a young white boy, and in the end the nigger is rich and the harlot is a movie star.

Meg.

A movie star.

Bad enough at the beginning of the movie.

Only kissing him then. Kissing the nigger. Mouth open wide to receive his mouth, promising him diamonds and gold, only buy me the boots, baby, lips meeting, and a fine hat with a feather on it, and silky underwear, opening her mouth to him, her blouse to him, showing him her breasts. Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed; how then art thou turned into the degenerate vine of a strange plant before me?

Later on in the movie...

The things she did with the nigger and the three other women, the boy, the things she did.

Was the nigger bothered him most.

For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me.

Sitting in the living room of the main house, he watched the flickering images on the screen, watched them over and over again, over and over.

And I brought you into a plentiful country, he thought, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

“I think you got it wrong,” Tick said. “I think maybe she meant Dill, after all.”

“No, she was saying Deal,” Mose said. “I know how niggers talk, she was saying Deal .”

“Then how come we called every fucking Deal in the phone book, eleven Deals altogether, and none of them ever heard of a Margaret Deal? You got it wrong, Mose.”

“I got it right,” Mose insisted.

“I want to go back over the Dills again,” Tick said. “Maybe we missed one.”

“I’m telling you it’s Deal !”

“Where’s that phone book?” Tick said.

“You’ll be wasting your time looking at all those Dills again.”

“I wasted my time looking at all the Deals , too.”

“Wasn’t no Margaret Dill , either. All those numbers we called, nobody knew of any Margaret Dill.”

“ ’Cause maybe we missed one. Where’s that book?”

He opened the directory again to the page starting with Dieckmann at the top and ending with Diners Club/Carte Blanche at the bottom.

“Check these off on your list,” he said.

“I’m telling you we got them all.”

“Check them off anyway ,” Tick said, and began reading. “Dill, Abner.”

“Got it.”

“Dill, Bernard.”

“Right.”

“Dill, Evan.”

“Right.”

“Dill, Roger.”

“Yeah.”

“Dill, Rosalie.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dill, Samuel.”

“Yes.”

“Dill, Thomas.”

Mose sighed.

“You got a Dill, Thomas?”

“I got a Dill, Thomas.”

“Dill, Victor.”

“Yes. That’s all of them,” Mose said.

“That’s all of them, yeah,” Tick said.

He was starting to turn back to the page the Deals were on, thinking maybe they might’ve missed one or more of the Deals, had his hand ready to turn back the page, when his eye fell on the first listing at the top of the page, “Dieckmann Frank,” and his eye and his hand hesitated, his eye drifted several names down the page to where first one name, and then six other names, popped out of the page at him:

Diehl Andrew

Diehl Bertram

Diehl Burgess

Diehl Candace

Diehl Carl

Diehl Joseph

Diehl Randolph

“Well, well, well,” he said to Mose.

It was almost six o’clock.

Some four blocks away from Warren’s office on the corner of Ross and Cameron, the First Congregational Church chimed the hour three minutes too early. Matthew looked at his watch. Warren looked at his watch.

“There are thirteen people listed under Orchestras and Bands,” he said. “I managed to reach only eight of them.”

“In person or on the phone?”

“Three in person, the rest on the phone. I had to do a bit of tightrope dancing, Matthew, ’cause I couldn’t come right out and say, Hey, you didn’t happen to clean out a storage bin rented by a lady was killed back in November, did you? What I said was, I was looking to rent a van to transport some instruments in, and I heard you had such a van, and if you do I sure could use it on New Year’s Eve for this gig in Sarasota. None of them had a van, none of them I spoke to anyway.”

“So where do we go from here?” Matthew asked.

“Let it go till tomorrow, I guess, though I doubt we’ll have any better luck on Christmas Day.”

“Which ones did you cover?”

“Well, take a look,” Warren said, and opened the telephone book to the yellow pages, and leafed past NURSES and OFFICE and OILS and OPTOMETRISTS, until he came to the page listing ORCHESTRAS & BANDS. “The ones with the check marks after them are the ones I got to.”

“Did you look under Music?”

“No,” Warren said. “Shit, why didn’t I think of that?”

He was starting to turn the pages back, when Matthew said, “Wait a minute.”

The last listing under ORCHESTRAS & BANDS was:

Under that, there was a new heading:

▸ ORCHID GROWERS

Elite Orchids, Inc.

Franco’s Orchid Farm

Graham Orchids

Green Orchid The