Cinderella Read online

  Ed McBain

  Cinderella

  ***

  Matthew Hope was in bed with his ex-wife when Otto Samalson met his violent end on a dark Florida highway. Samalson was investigating a kinky case of adultery for attorney Hope, who then had to make sure the case hadn't done the detective in. It hadn't. Instead, kindly, bald-headed Otto Samalson had the misfortune of crossing paths with a beautiful girl of many names, a high-priced hooker cutting a path of tricks through South Florida. Now Hope has crossed her path, too. And whether he likes it or not, he is going to find out why some very dangerous men, having once invited a Cinderella to the ball, are now moving heaven and earth-and everyone in between-to make sure they punch her ticket.

  ***

  From Publishers Weekly

  This is the sixth in McBain's series of fearful "fairy tales" starring lawyer Matthew Hope of Calusa, Fla., as compelling a character as those in the author's popular 87th Precinct novels. When Hope's friend, private eye Otto Samalson, is killed while on an assignment for him, the lawyer makes up his mind to find the murderer. The investigation leads Hope into the affairs of several men involved with a gorgeous hooker known as Cinderella. Hired thugs on her trail leave behind them the bloody bodies of people they question, and the lawyer is in constant danger. Cleverly eluding pursuers, Cinderella guards a fortune in stolen cocaine with which she expects to secure a rosy future until time and her luck run out. This is a violent story, more horrifying than its gory predecessors (Goldilocks; Beauty and the Beast), but very well written and a natural attraction for McBain fans.

  ***

  "It is hard to mink of anyone better at what he does. In feet, ifs impossible."

  -Robert B. Parker

  "McBain has a great approach, great attitude, terrific style, strong plots, excellent dialogue, sense of place, and sense of reality."

  -Elmore Leonard

  "I prefer Ed McBain to Raymond Chandler and place him far ahead of Dashiell Hammett"

  -Roald Dahl

  "The Matthew Hope novels do for the world of Florida sleaze what the 87th Precinct books do for big-city vice. The reader is hooked and given not a moment's letup."

  -New York Times Book Review

  "McBain is as convincing as Scott Throw or John Grisham when he puts his lawyer, deadpan, before a judge and jury."

  -TIME

  "When McBain sets his tale to wagging, he commands close attention."

  -Los Angeles Times

  "A master. He is a superior stylist, a spinner of artfully designed and sometimes macabre plots."

  -Newsweek

  "Hope springs eternal, and hurrah for mat"

  -New York Daily News

  "You'll be engrossed by McBain's fast, lean prose."

  -Chicago Tribune

  "The best crime writer in the business."

  -Houston Post

  "The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting."

  -Miami Herald

  "McBain has stood the test of time. He remains one of the very best"

  -San Antonio Express-News

  "McBain is the unquestioned king… light-years ahead of anyone else in me field."

  -San Diego Union

  ***

  This is for Jane Gelfman

  1

  Otto knew he was being followed.

  Thirty years in investigation, he'd never had anybody following him. Such a thing never happened to him. He guessed he was getting too old for this business, fifty-eight and closing fast, smoked too much and ate too much junk food, but those were occupational hazards. Didn't carry a gun, never had, private detectives carrying guns were for the movies. Even if he'd had a gun with him tonight, he wouldn't have known how to use it. Guns scared the hell out of him.

  Anyway, nice Jewish guys didn't carry guns unless they were Louis Lepke or Legs Diamond-he could remember the newspapers full of them when he was a kid. His mother would shake her head and mutter "Jewish gangsters, wot a ting!" and then would spit twice on her extended forefinger and middle finger, ptui, ptui! Nice Jewish guys weren't supposed to drink, either. There'd been tests made and Indians came out highest and Irishmen next highest on the scale of heavy drinkers and

  Jews came out lowest, which showed there was some truth to the cliches. He personally drank a lot, though, which meant it was a bunch of bullshit.

  The tail must have picked him up leaving the Sea Shanty half an hour ago.

  Everything here in Florida had a cute name. The Sea Shanty. Like it was supposed to be the Sea Chanty, you know, so they got cute and made it Sea Shanty because the place looked like a shack. Had three drinks sitting there at the bar and watching two chesty girls in tube tops playing PacMan. Never too old for watching chesty girls in tube-top shirts. He'd worked divorce cases where there were ninety-year-old men fucking around outside the marriage.

  So that's where the tail must have picked him up.

  When he was leaving the Sea Shanty.

  Stop for a couple of drinks, next thing you knew you had a tail on your ass. Maybe the two tube-top broads had decided his bald head was very cute and were following him back to the condo to introduce him to all kinds of kinky sex, fat chance. The last time he'd had any sex, kinky or otherwise, was with a black hooker in Lauderdale who was scared of catching herpes and who washed his cock with what must have been laundry soap. Lucky she didn't wring it out later. She was good, though. Hummed while she blew him. Very nice.

  He kept wondering what she was humming.

  It had sounded like Gershwin.

  ***

  Matthew didn't recognize her at first.

  She was wearing red, which had always been her favorite color, and that should have been a tip-off, but she'd done something to her hair, and she'd lost he guessed ten or twelve pounds, and she looked taller than when he'd last seen her, and tanner, and he honestly didn't know she was Susan. He was, in fact, staring at her as she came into the room. Actually staring at her. Standing on a deck with his back to the Gulf of Mexico, and staring across the room at his own wife from whom he'd been divorced two years earlier, and wondering who she might be, and thinking he would like to cross the room right away and corner her before somebody else did. And then her dark eyes flashed, and all at once he was back on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, strolling hand in hand with the most beautiful girl he'd ever met in his life and the girl was Susan and she was here and now, but she wasn't his wife any longer.

  Smiling, he shook his head.

  She was coming toward him.

  Fire-red gown held up by her breasts and nothing else. Dark brooding eyes in an oval face, brown hair cut in a wedge, a full pouting mouth that gave an impression of a sullen, spoiled, defiant beauty. Black pearl earrings dangling at her ears. He had given her those earrings on their tenth wedding anniversary. Three years later, they were divorced. Easy come, easy go.

  "Hello, Matthew," she said.

  He wondered who she was going to be tonight. The Witch or the Waif? Susan had a marvelous way with the art of transmogrification. Ever since the divorce, you never knew who she was going to be next.

  He could not take his eyes off her.

  "You cut your hair," he said.

  "You noticed," she said.

  He still couldn't tell whether to expect a mortar attack or a shower of rose petals.

  "Are you still angry?" she asked.

  "About what?" he said. Warily. With Susan, you had to be very wary.

  "Joanna's school."

  Joanna was their fourteen-year-old daughter, whom Matthew saw only every other weekend and on alternate holidays because Susan had custody and his daughter lived with her. The last holiday he'd spent with Joanna had been Easter. Since then, he had seen her a total of four times. Today was the eighth of June, and he was suppos
ed to have seen her this weekend, but since next weekend was Father's Day, he and Susan had agreed to switch weekends. They had similarly switched weekends when Mother's Day rolled around. The logistics of divorce. Like generals planning pincer attacks. Except the battlefield was a young girl growing into womanhood.

  In April, Susan had come up with her brilliant idea to send Joanna away to school next fall. Far away. Massachusetts. Their separation agreement gave her that right. Now she was asking him if he was still angry.

  He did not know whether or not he was still angry.

  Oddly, he was wondering if she was wearing panties under the red silk gown.

  Once, years ago, when they were much younger and actually happy together, she had startled him in church one morning by telling him she wasn't wearing any panties. This was when Matthew still went to church. He had thought at the time that the roof would fall in on them. Either that, or a little red creature with horns and a forked tail would pop out from under Susan's Presbyterian skirts, grinning lewdly.

  She was looking at him, waiting for an answer.

  Was he still angry? He guessed not.

  "Actually it might be good for her," he said.

  Susan raised her eyebrows, surprised.

  "Getting away from both of us," he said.

  "That's what I was hoping," she said, and they both fell silent.

  Two years since the divorce and until this moment they could barely manage civil conversation. It was Joanna who bore the brunt of it. Away from them, she wouldn't be forced to take sides anymore. She was fourteen. It was time for her to heal. Maybe time for all of them to heal.

  Beyond the deck, the beach spread to the shoreline and a calm ocean. A full moon above laid a silvery path across the water. From somewhere below the deck, the scent of jasmine came wafting up onto the night. Some kids up the beach were playing guitars. Lake Shore Drive again. Except that on the night they'd met, it was mandolins and mimosa.

  "I knew you'd be here tonight," Susan said. "Muriel phoned and asked if it was okay to invite you. Did she tell you I'd be here?"

  "No."

  "Would you have come? If you'd known?"

  "Probably not," he said. "But now I'm glad I did."

  ***

  The tail was still with him.

  He had deliberately turned south on U.S. 41, away from his condo, the last thing he wanted was to get cold-cocked in an apartment that had only one way in or out. He figured he'd find another bar, go in there, hope the tail would follow him in, see if he couldn't make the guy, play it from there. Maybe do like they did in the movies. Walk up to whoever it was, tell the guy "Hey, you gonna stay with me all night, why not sit down and have a drink?" Eddie Murphy did that once, didn't he? In that movie where he played a Detroit cop?

  Could see the lights of the car in the rearview mirror.

  Following.

  Steady.

  Twenty, thirty feet behind him. Very ballsy.

  Not anyone's car he knew.

  He'd spotted the car three blocks after he'd left the Sea Shanty. Stopped to buy himself some cigarettes at the Seven-Eleven on 41, noticed the car pulling in behind him. Still there when he came out with the cigarettes. Car was a black Toronado with red racing stripes and tinted windows, couldn't make out the driver through the almost-black glass. Pulled out almost the minute he did, though, the guy had to be an amateur. Or somebody just didn't give a shit.

  Otto himself was driving a faded blue Buick Century. The whole thing in surveillance work, you wanted the car to blend in with the surroundings. You drove something showy, they made you in a minute. If automobile dealers sold pre-faded cars, he'd buy a dozen of them. This one had faded by itself over the years and was perfect for making itself disappear.

  It wasn't doing too hot a job of that tonight, though, because the guy in the black Toronado was still on his tail.

  ***

  It was a black-tie party. Muriel and Harold Langerman's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. All the men were in white dinner jackets, the women in slinky gowns. The band's drummer had gone up the beach to disperse the kids playing guitars, and then had come back to join the piano player and the bass player on the patio below the deck. They were now playing "It Happened in Monterey." The moon was full. The Gulf of Mexico glittered beneath it like shattered glass.

  "What are you thinking?" Susan asked.

  "I'd get arrested," he said, smiling.

  "That bad?"

  "That good."

  "… a long time ago," the lyrics said.

  "You look beautiful tonight."

  A shy smile.

  "You look handsome."

  "Thank you."

  He was an even six feet tall (though his sister Gloria insisted he had once given his height as six-two, to impress an adolescent girl), and he weighed a hundred and seventy pounds, and he had dark hair and brown eyes and what his partner Frank called a "fox face." He did not consider this handsome. This was adequate. In a world of spectacularly handsome men in designer jeans, Matthew Hope thought of himself as simply and only okay.

  "… lips as red as wine," the lyrics said.

  He wanted to kiss her.

  "But then, Matthew, you always did look marvelous in a dinner jacket."

  She had called him Matthew from the very beginning.

  Back then, people were calling him Matt or Matty. In fact, his sister Gloria used to call him Matlock, God only knew why. But Susan had called him Matthew, which he preferred. Nowadays, hardly anyone called him Matt. He guessed he could thank Susan for that. In fact, he guessed he had a lot of things he could thank her for.

  He was staring at her again.

  "Something?" she said.

  "Yes, let's get out of here," he said in a rush.

  ***

  The black Toronado was closer now.

  Fifteen feet behind him maybe.

  And then, all at once-like the scene in Close Encounters where the headlights in the rearview mirror are almost on the guy, whatever his name was, the guy who was also in Jaws, and they swerve up and away and you know it's a spaceship behind him-just like that scene except that the lights in Otto's mirror swerved to the left, and all at once the Toronado was alongside him, and the smoked window on the right-hand side of the car glided down and Otto looked over at a gun.

  He thought Oh, shit, and that was the last thing he thought because the gun went off once, and then another time, but he didn't hear or feel the second shot because the first one took him clean in the left temple and his hands flew off the steering wheel like a pair of startled birds and the Buick swung out of control onto a sidewalk outside a television repair store and went through the plate-glass window of the store and smashed into a dozen or more television sets and the Toronado continued driving south on 41, the smoked window on the right-hand side gliding up again.

  ***

  He could not believe later that he was in bed with Susan when he first heard the news about Otto Samalson.

  His daughter would have thought they were both crazy.

  Maybe they were.

  The bed was a brierpatch of memories.

  The radio was playing softly in his bedroom. Music of the fifties. Their music.

  Memories of her.

  Susan as he'd first seen her, sitting on a Styrofoam ice cooler, the lake behind her, singing along with a boy playing a mandolin, her legs widespread, skirt tucked between them, long brown hair blowing in the wind off the lake, dark eyes flashing as Matthew approached.

  The pool lights were on outside. He could see her naked body in the reflected light.

  A tangle of memories.

  Susan as virgin queen, radiant in white, billowy white skirt and white sandals, white carnation in her hair, gleaming white teeth, face flushed as she rushed to him, hand outstretched, reaching for him, reaching…

  She whispered that she liked his house.

  He whispered that he was renting it.

  Memories.

  Susan as wanton hooker s
tanding in their bedroom door, black garter belt and panties, seamed black nylons and high-heeled black shoes, dark hair hanging over one eye, Come fuck me, Matthew…

  She asked him if he enjoyed living alone.

  He told her he didn't.

  So many years together, you learned the hollows and curves, you learned the spaces, you molded yourselves to remembered nooks…

  "In Calusa tonight-"

  The news.

  He looked at the bedside clock: 11:03 p.m.

  He kissed her.

  "-killing the driver. The car swerved off the highway and into the front window of a television repair-"

  Her mouth the way he remembered it when she was young.

  Breasts still firm.

  Legs…

  "-identified as Otto Samalson, a private investigator with offices on Highgate and-"

  "What?" Matthew said.

  Susan gasped, startled.

  "Did you hear that?"

  "No. What? Hear what? What?" she asked, frightened, and sat up, clutching the sheet to her naked breasts.

  "Shhh," he said.

  "In Sarasota, the county commissioners have outlined a plan to open-"

  "Did he say Otto Samalson? Did you hear…?"

  "No," Susan said. "Who?"

  "Jesus," he said, and got out of bed.

  "Matthew, what…?"

  "I have to… I'd better call… Susan, if it was Otto… look, you'd better… listen, I have to make a call, excuse me."

  He went into the room he'd set up as an at-home office, and called the Public Safety Building, and asked for Detective Morris Bloom. A detective named Kenyon told Matthew that Bloom was on vacation, but yes, the man who'd been shot and killed on U.S. 41 was indeed a private investigator named Otto Samalson.