Ed McBain: Doll

And to this, Carella had no answer.

A good modeling agency serves as a great deal more than a booking office for the girls it represents. It provides an answering service for the busy young girl about town, a baby-sitting service for the working mother, a guidance-and-counseling service for the man-beleagured model, a pied-à-terre for the harried and hurried between-sittings beauty.

Art and Leslie Cutler ran a good modeling agency. They ran it with the precision of a computer and the understanding of an analyst. Their offices were smart and walnut-paneled, a suite of three rooms on Carrington Avenue, near the bridge leading to Calm’s Point. The address of the agency was announced over a doorway leading to a flight of carpeted steps. The address plate resembled a Parisian street sign, white enameled on a blue field, 21 Carrington, with the blue-carpeted steps beyond leading to the second story of the building. At the top of the stairs there was a second blue-and-white enameled sign, Paris again, except that this one was lettered in lowercase and it read, the cutlers.

Carella and Kling climbed the steps to the second floor, observed the chic nameplate without any noticeable show of appreciation, and walked into a small carpeted entrance foyer in which stood a white desk starkly fashionable against the walnut walls, nothing else. A girl sat behind the desk. She was astonishingly beautiful, exactly the sort of receptionist one would expect in a modeling agency; if she was only the receptionist, my God, what did the models look like?

‘Yes, gentlemen, may I help you?’ she asked. Her voice was Vassar out of finishing school out of country day. She wore eyeglasses with exaggerated black frames that did nothing whatever to hide the dazzling brilliance of her big blue eyes. Her makeup was subdued and wickedly innocent, a touch of pale pink on her lips, a blush of rose at her cheeks, the frames of her spectacles serving as liner for her eyes. Her hair was black and her smile was sunshine. Carella answered with a sunshine smile of his own, the one he usually reserved for movie queens he met at the governor’s mansion.

‘We’re from the police,’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Carella; this is my partner, Detective Kling.’

‘Yes?’ the girl said. She seemed completely surprised to have policemen in her reception room.

‘We’d like to talk to either Mr or Mrs Cutler,’ Kling said. ‘Are they in?’

‘Yes, but what is this in reference to?’ the girl asked.

‘It’s in reference to the murder of Tinka Sachs,’ Kling said.

‘Oh,’ the girl said. ‘Oh, yes.’ She reached for a button on the executive phone panel, hesitated, shrugged, looked up at them with radiant blue-eyed innocence, and said, ‘I suppose you have identification and all that.’

Carella showed her his shield. The girl looked expectantly at Kling. Kling sighed, reached into his pocket, and opened his wallet to where his shield was pinned to the leather.

‘We never get detectives up here,’ the girl said in explanation, and pressed the button on the panel.

‘Yes?’ a voice said.

‘Mr Cutler, there are two detectives to see you, a Mr King and a Mr Coppola.’

‘Kling and Carella,’ Carella corrected.

‘Kling and Capella,’ the girl said.

Carella let it go.

‘Ask them to come right in,’ Cutler said.

‘Yes, sir.’ The girl clicked off and looked up at the detectives. ‘Won’t you go in, please? Through the bull pen and straight back.’

‘Through the what?’

‘The bull pen. Oh, that’s the main office, you’ll see it. It’s right inside the door there.’ The telephone rang. The girl gestured vaguely toward what looked like a solid walnut wall, and then picked up the receiver. ‘The Cutlers,’ she said. ‘One moment, please.’ She pressed a button and then said, ‘Mrs Cutler, it’s Alex Jamison on five-seven, do you want to take it?’ She nodded, listened for a moment, and then replaced the receiver. Carella and Kling had just located the walnut knob on the walnut door hidden in the walnut wall. Carella smiled sheepishly at the girl (blue eyes blinked back radiantly) and opened the door.

The bull pen, as the girl had promised, was just behind the reception room. It was a large open area with the same basic walnut-and-white decor, broken by the color of the drapes and the upholstery fabric on two huge couches against the left-hand window wall. The windows were draped in diaphanous saffron nylon, and the couches were done in a complementary brown, the fabric nubby and coarse in contrast to the nylon. Three girls sat on the couches, their long legs crossed. All of them were reading Vogue. One of them had her head inside a portable hair dryer. None of them looked up as the men came into the room. On the right-hand side of the room, a fourth woman sat behind a long white Formica counter, a phone to her ear, busily scribbling on a pad as she listened. The woman was in her early forties, with the unmistakable bones of an ex-model. She glanced up briefly as Carella and Kling hesitated inside the doorway, and then went back to her jottings, ignoring them.

There were three huge charts affixed to the wall behind her. Each chart was divided into two-by-two-inch squares, somewhat like a colorless checkerboard. Running down the extreme left-hand side of each chart was a column of small photographs. Running across the top of each chart was a listing for every working hour of the day. The charts were covered with plexiglass panels, and a black crayon pencil hung on a cord to the right of each one. Alongside the photographs, crayoned onto the charts in the appropriate time slots, was a record and a reminder of any model’s sittings for the week, readable at a glance. To the right of the charts, and accessible through an opening in the counter, there was a cubbyhole arrangement of mailboxes, each separate slot marked with similar small photographs.

The wall bearing the door through which Carella and Kling had entered was covered with eight-by-ten black-and-white photos of every model the agency represented, some seventy-five in all. The photos bore no identifying names. A waist-high runner carried black crayon pencils spaced at intervals along the length of the wall. A wide white band under each photograph, plexiglass-covered, served as the writing area for telephone messages. A model entering the room could, in turn, check her eight-by-ten photo for any calls, her photo-marked mailbox for any letters, and her photo-marked slot on one of the three charts for her next assignment. Looking into the room, you somehow got the vague impression that photography played a major part in the business of this agency. You also had the disquieting feeling that you had seen all of these faces a hundred times before, staring down at you from billboards and up at you from magazine covers. Putting an identifying name under any single one of them would have been akin to labeling the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building. The only naked wall was the one facing them as they entered, and it — like the reception-room wall — seemed to be made of solid walnut, with nary a door in sight.

‘I think I see a knob,’ Carella whispered, and they started across the room toward the far wall. The woman behind the counter glanced up as they passed, and then pulled the phone abruptly from her ear with a ‘Just a second, Alex,’ and said to the two detectives, ‘Yes, may I help you?’

‘We’re looking for Mr Cutler’s office,’ Carella said.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Yes, we’re detectives. We’re investigating the murder of Tinka Sachs.’

‘Oh. Straight ahead,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Leslie Cutler. I’ll join you as soon as I’m off the phone.’

‘Thank you,’ Carella said. He walked to the walnut wall, Kling following close behind him, and knocked on what he supposed was the door.