Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE MATTHEW HOPE SERIES

  “A master. He is a superior stylist, a spinner of artfully designed and sometimes macabre plots.” —Newsweek

  “He is, by far, the best at what he does. Case closed.” —People

  “McBain has a great approach, great attitude, terrific style, strong plots, excellent dialogue, sense of place, and sense of reality.” —Elmore Leonard

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.” —Robert B. Parker

  “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

  Jack & The Beanstalk

  “A cracking good read...a solid, suspenseful, swiftly-paced story.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  The House That Jack Built

  “Deft plotting, crisp dialogue, and intriguing characters rack up solid entertainment.” —San Diego Union

  “When McBain sets his tale to wagging, he commands close attention.” —Los Angeles Times

  Three Blind Mice

  “Matthew Hope, the suave Florida lawyer, is back in the latest of McBain’s series of cynically titled nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale themed novels...McBain is an undisputed master of the genre—slick, wry, and satisfying.” —Booklist

  There Was a Little Girl

  “McBain does it again! A brilliant piece of writing...and you won’t put it down.” —Larry King, USA Today

  Cinderella

  “The first page of a McBain novel is like the first potato chip: It whets the appetite for more.” —Newsday

  Snow White & Rose Red

  “Guaranteed to raise the hackles you didn’t know you had.” —Kansas City Star

  ALSO BY ED McBAIN...

  THE 87TH PRECINCT NOVELS

  Cop Hater (1956), The Mugger (1956), The Pusher (1956), The Con Man (1957), Killer’s Choice (1957), Killer’s Payoff (1958), Lady Killer (1958), Killer’s Wedge (1959), ‘Til Death (1959), King’s Ransom (1959), Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960), The Heckler (1960), See Them Die (1960), Lady, Lady, I Did It (1961), The Empty Hours (1962), Like Love (1962), Ten Plus One (1963), Ax (1964), He Who Hesitates (1964), Doll (1965), Eighty Million Eyes (1966), Fuzz (1968), Shotgun (1969), Jigsaw (1970), Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here! (1971), Sadie When She Died (1972), Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (1972), Hail to the Chief (1973), Bread (1974), Blood Relatives (1975), So Long As You Both Shall Live (1976), Long Time No See (1977), Calypso (1979), Ghosts (1980), Heat (1981), Ice (1983), Lightning (1984), Eight Black Horses (1985), Poison (1987), Tricks (1987), Lullaby (1989), Vespers (1990), Widows (1991), Kiss (1992), Mischief (1993), And All Through the House (1994), Romance (1995), Nocturne (1997), The Big Bad City (1999), The Last Dance (2000), Money, Money, Money (2001), Fat Ollie’s Book (2002), The Frumious Bandersnatch (2004), Hark! (2004), Fiddlers (2005)

  THE MATTHEW HOPE NOVELS

  Goldilocks (1977), Rumpelstiltskin (1981), Beauty and the Beast (1982), Jack and the Beanstalk (1984), Snow White and Rose Red (1985), Cinderella (1986), Puss in Boots (1987), The House That Jack Built (1988), Three Blind Mice (1990), Mary, Mary (1992), There Was a Little Girl (1994), Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear (1996), The Last Best Hope (1998)

  OTHER NOVELS

  The April Robin Murders (with Craig Rice) (1958), The Sentries (1965), Where There’s Smoke (1975), Doors (1975), Guns (1976), Another Part of the City (1986), Downtown (1991), Driving Lessons (2000), Learning to Kill (2005), Transgressions (2005)

  AND BY EVAN HUNTER...

  The Evil Sleep! (1952), Don’t Crowd Me (1953), The Blackboard Jungle (1954), Second Ending (1956), Strangers When We Meet (1958), A Matter of Conviction (1959), Mothers and Daughters (1961), Buddwing (1964), The Paper Dragon (1966), A Horse’s Head (1967), Last Summer (1968), Sons (1969), Nobody Knew They Were There (1971), Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972), Come Winter (1973), Streets of Gold (1974), The Chisholms: A Novel of the Journey West (1976), Walk Proud (1979), Love, Dad (1981), Far from the Sea (1983), Lizzie (1984), Criminal Conversation (1994), Privileged Conversation (1996), Candyland (2001)

  PLAYS

  The Easter Man (1964), The Conjuror (1969)

  SCREENPLAYS

  Strangers When We Meet (1960), The Birds (1963), Fuzz (1972), Walk Proud (1979)

  TELEPLAYS

  The Chisholms (1979), The Legend of Walks Far Woman (1980), Dream West (1986)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Find the Feathered Serpent (1952), The Remarkable Harry (1959), The Wonderful Button (1961), Me And Mr. Stenner (1976)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Jungle Kids (1956), The Last Spin & Other Stories (1960), Happy New Year, Herbie (1963), The Easter Man (a Play) and Six Stories (1972), The McBain Brief (1982), McBain’s Ladies: The Women of the 87th (1988), McBain’s Ladies, Too (1989), The Best American Mystery Stories (2000), Running from Legs (2000), Barking at Butterflies (2000)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1981, 1977 HUI Corporation.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  eISBN: 9781477855485

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  * * *

  JAPANESE LANTERNS festooned the outdoor gardens of the Ca D’Ped. Their glow only seemed to add to the suffocatingly moist heat of the August night. The Ca D’Ped was Calusa’s art museum, a vast hacienda back when Florida was still a Spanish possession, renovated and refurbished in 1927 when its original name—Casa Don Pedro—was abbreviated to its present form. Calusa natives called it “The Ped.” My partner Frank called it “The Carport.”

  The party on that eighth night of August was a formal affair in honor of Calusa’s resident artists. “Formal” in Calusa, at least during the summer months, meant white dinner jackets and black ties for the men, and long gowns for the women. Frank’s wife was wearing a slinky black creation slit to her waist, the better to expose what Frank proudly called “the family jewels.” Like a juggler defying an expectant crowd, Leona kept daring one or the other of her precocious treasures to spill from the front of the gown, seemingly unaware of how dangerously close they were to indecent exposure.

  Frank was holding forth on his favorite topic. Frank is a lawyer, like myself, but he is also a transplanted New Yorker, than which there is nothing worse in the entire world. When a New Yorker moves to California, he will eventually stop reading The New York Times, and after a brief period of mourning he will begin referring to New York as “back east,” as if it were a remote province somewhere in China. Most migrants to Florida will refer to New York (or Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh or wherever they’ve come from) as “up north,” but not my partner Frank. New York is New York is New York, and there is no place like it in the world, and any other city, country, or even continent is but a pale reflection of that glittering city Frank still thinks of as home. The Sunday New York Times costs him two and a half bucks down here. He would
gladly pay a full month’s draw for it. He is an impossible chauvinist, but he has been my partner for many years now, and he is a good lawyer and an endearing man when he is not comparing Calusa to the Big Apple. He was doing just that tonight, within earshot of the museum’s curator, who, I was certain, did not enjoy hearing the Ca D’Ped compared unfavorably to MOMA. I tried to hush him when he got on the topic of Calusa’s pretensions to culture, but once Frank boarded the Lexington Avenue Express, there was no stopping him.

  “If Calusa was a fat banker—”

  “Were,” Leona corrected.

  “Were a fat banker,” Frank said, and glanced into the open front of his wife’s gown as though discovering an enticing stranger, “and if all its various writers, sculptors, and painters were the banker’s mistresses, they would all pack their frilly underwear and leave tomorrow morning. Nowhere in America is the local talent so taken for granted as it is in this sad excuse for a real city.”

  “Frank’s a New Yorker,” Leona said to Dale, as though the obvious needed explanation and amplification.

  I should explain that Dale O’Brien is a woman. There are still many telephone callers to her office who ask for Mister O’Brien, assuming that any lawyer named Dale O’Brien must also and perforce be a male. She is a female. Very much so. She is a female who is five feet nine inches tall, and she has red hair she prefers to call russet, and glade-green eyes, and a beautifully proportioned figure that was draped tonight in a shimmering green gown that matched her eyes. Those eyes seemed vacant and bored just now. Perhaps she had heard Frank sounding off once too often. Perhaps she was disenchanted with the insipid white wine the museum was serving in tribute to its “honored” artists. Or perhaps the heat and humidity had got to her. It is easy for the heat and humidity to get to you in Calusa during the month of August.

  “I know a playwright down here,” Frank went on, “—I believe you know him, too, Matthew—who won the Drama Critics Circle Award back in his heyday, and who can’t get a house seat at the Helen Gottlieb, can you believe it? This is a man who can call any theater in New York, and get sixth-row-center seats to the biggest hit, but he can’t get a choice seat down here for any of the moth-eaten road shows that pass through. At the same time, of course, anytime there’s a charity benefit, no one’ll think twice about calling him and asking him to speak. The same applies to artists. The Carport decides to honor the local painters and sculptors, right? Okay, so when does it throw its munificent party? On a Monday night in August! You won’t find a goddamn iguana down here in August! Have Motherwell passing through in January, however, or Warhol, or anybody who doesn’t live here, and out comes the red carpet. And you can bet they won’t be serving warm white wine, either. Do you know what I think it is? Do you know what I really think it is?”

  “It’s that it isn’t New York,” Leona said.

  “Well, of course it isn’t New York,” Frank said. “But that’s not it. What it is, deep down in its heart of hearts, Calusa knows that most of the artists down here are dilettantes. Uproot a cactus plant, and you’ll find a self-proclaimed writer, painter, or sculptor sitting there in a hole in the sand. My friend says he’s afraid of identifying himself as a playwright down here because the dentist he’s talking to at a party will say, ‘Are you? Gee, I’m a playwright, too!’ The cultural pretensions of this city—imagine calling itself the Athens of Florida!—are simply unimaginable in terms of what the real world considers—”

  “Matthew, let’s go,” Dale said.

  I blinked at her.

  “Please,” she said.

  Her abrupt request seemed not to faze Frank at all. He turned to Leona and continued with his premise as though trying to impress a new girl in town, his eyes continually flicking to breasts he surely knew as well as he did the Florida Statutes. We said our good nights, thanked the curator for a wonderful show, and went out to where I’d parked the Karmann Ghia. Dale was unusually quiet.

  “Frank get on your nerves?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  A Karmann Ghia, for all its recent status as a “classic,” is perhaps not the best vehicle for transporting a leggy woman in a long gown. Dale was fidgeting on the seat beside me, trying to make herself comfortable. The air conditioner wasn’t working. When my former wife and I were divorced, she got the Mercedes-Benz with the air conditioner that worked. I got the Karmann Ghia. She also got custody of my daughter, whom I saw every other weekend and on alternating holidays. My daughter absolutely adored Dale, and was constantly asking me when we were going to get married; for all their hip attitudes about sex, today’s teenagers nonetheless seemed a bit uneasy about grown-ups sharing the same bed without benefit of clergy. The bed Dale and I shared was actually two beds, hers on Whisper Key or mine on the mainland, whichever way the wind blew. The wind tonight seemed to be blowing out of the south: Dale’s house on the Gulf would be cooler than mine on the mainland. I made the right turn onto US 41, and immediately found myself in a traffic jam as monumental as anything conceived by Fellini.

  “Shit,” Dale said.

  It was unusual to find heavy traffic on the Tamiami Trail at 10:00 P.M. on a sweltering night in August. In August, the snowbirds and their automobiles and campers were up north, where they belonged, with not a thought of migration in their heads. The roads were normally empty, the restaurants uncrowded, the lines outside the movie theaters nonexistent. Year-round residents like Dale and myself were grateful for the respite, while at the same time mindful of the reason for the peace and quiet: as Frank had put it, almost, only an iguana would find Calusa habitable during the summer months. Despite what the calendar said, summer in Calusa began at the beginning of May and often lingered through October, though many of the full-timers insisted that those two bracketing months were the nicest ones of the year. Native Calusans tended to forget that May and October were lovely anywhere in the United States. They also conveniently forgot that in May down here, you could have your brain parboiled if you didn’t wear a hat. August was worse. August was impossible. But a traffic jam in August? On a Monday night?

  “What now?” Dale said impatiently.

  It occurred to me, belatedly, that she had been somewhat impatient all night long. She had been impatient, first, with the gown she’d originally planned on wearing, telling me the moment I entered her house that it had come back from the cleaners with a spot on it. She had next been impatient with the green gown she finally chose to wear, the one she was in fact now wearing, telling me that it was too tight and that the line of her panties would show. When I suggested that she forsake the panties altogether—an idea she might normally have found interesting if not particularly inventive—she had turned away and stomped off into her bedroom, leaving me waiting in the living room for the better part of a half hour, after which she’d emerged triumphantly resplendent, but complaining that she looked like a stuffed sausage. She had seemed impatient to get to the Ca D’Ped, and then impatient to leave it. As I got out of the car now to see what the trouble was up ahead, she was impatiently jiggling one sequin-slippered foot.

  The trouble up ahead was a trailer truck that had jackknifed across the road, smashing into two automobiles in the process. The state trooper I spoke to said it might take an hour or more before the ambulances and the wreckers were out of the way. He suggested that I go back to the car and listen to some good music on the radio. Dale suggested instead that we pull off onto the dead-end street on our right, and then walk over to a place called Captain Blood’s, glaring its neon just up the road. Neither of us had ever been to this particular watering hole before, but a tall cold drink was a tall cold drink. In Calusa, it should be mentioned, there are more lounges called Captain Something-or-Other than there are orange trees. The town is nautically oriented, situated as it is on both the Gulf of Mexico and Calusa Bay. Captain Blood’s seemed from the outside like any one of the other Captains sailing US 41. A blue pickup truck was parked close to the front entrance. Orange and then blue neon blin
ked onto the barrel of a shotgun resting on a rack just inside the rear window.

  The decor inside the place was exactly what one might have expected. Timbers and ropes, fishing nets and running lights in red and green, a huge brass engine-room telegraph just inside the entrance door. An old man wearing a yachting cap was sitting alone at the bar on the right. A waitress turned from the bar at the sound of the bell tinkling over the entrance door, and came over to us with a smile on her face.

  “Just the two of you?” she asked, and then led us into a vacant back room with a jukebox. There were a dozen or more booths fashioned of high-backed wooden benches and varnished hatch-cover tables. We settled in a booth farthest from the juke, which was blaring a country-western ballad. Dale sat on one side of the table, I sat on the other. She ordered a gin and tonic. I ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks.

  I think I should mention right now that the last time I’d had a fistfight was when I was fourteen years old. An important point, perhaps, since I am now thirty-eight and presumably wiser, and certainly bigger, and possibly stronger than I was back then when a high-school jock named Hank advised me to keep away from his cheerleader girlfriend, whose name was Bunny Kaplowitz. Until then, I had always thought only the good guys were named Hank. What Hank said was, “Keep away from her, dig?” or jock words to that effect. I told Hank he was a moronic turd. I remember the words clearly and distinctly. They are etched in acid on the restoration Dr. Mordecai Simon put into my mouth in the city of Chicago, where I was living at the time. No sooner had I uttered those memorable words than Hank blackened both my eyes, dislocated my jaw, and knocked out one of my molars. Under anesthesia in Dr. Simon’s office, I vowed eternal fidelity to the policies of a man named Gandhi, since immortalized for a whole new generation in a film of the same name.

  The fight back then had to do with protecting one’s disputed turf, a masculine prerogative in this land of the free and home of the brave, where macho males strut about in Calvin Klein designer jeans. The turf in that long-ago instance was a nubile cheerleader. The turf tonight, as I was about to discover, was a thirty-two-year-old woman named Dale O’Brien. We are both sensible, mature attorneys, Dale and I, officers of the court sworn to uphold the laws of the state and the nation. Together, and considering the vast sums of money our respective parents had invested in the pursuit of our separate law degrees, we should have known better than to allow ourselves to become a “turf” and a “defender of the turf,” which was most certainly what we did become at precisely ten-fifteen. I remember looking up at the clock—set into a ship’s wheel on the other side of the room—a moment before disaster loomed.