Cinderella (2 page)

    

    

    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 standing 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.

    Matthew thanked him and hung up.

    When he came back into the bedroom, Susan was already dressed.

    "I just remembered why we got divorced," she said, and walked out.

    

    

    It was nightmare time.

    A nightmare of flashbacks.

    Invading Matthew's bed, invading his sleep.

    
I just remembered why we got divorced.

    Susan's words. Opening a floodgate of memories that triggered the first of the nightmare flashbacks: Matthew coming home at a quarter to one, the lights on in the study, Susan sitting naked behind the desk in the house they used to share. "I just had a phone call," she says, "from a man named Gerald Hemmings," and Matthew's throat goes suddenly dry.

    He and Aggie have rehearsed this scene a thousand times. They are lovers, Aggie and he, and therefore liars of necessity. They are lovers, he and Aggie, and therefore killers by trade, strangling their separate marriages. They are lovers, Aggie and he, he and Aggie, and therefore conspirators in that they are sworn to secrecy and know exactly what to say in the event of a trap.

    This is a trap, he knows it is a trap.

    But he knows in his darkest heart that it is nothing of the sort.

    She has spoken to Gerald Hemmings, she has talked to Aggie's husband, it is one o'clock in the morning, and Susan knows everything, Susan knows all.

    In the horror chamber of his mind, as he tries to sleep, the scene replays itself.

    Denial, denial, denial, for surely this is a trap.

    It is not a trap.

    She is suddenly laughing. He comes around the desk swiftly, wanting to stop her manic laughter before it awakens Joanna down the hall. He puts his hand on her shoulder and she recoils from it as if a lizard has crawled up her arm, and suddenly there is more to be afraid of than hysterical laughter. Without warning, her hand reaches out to grab for the scissors, clutching it in her fist like a dagger, and lunges at him, lunges again, tearing the sleeve of his jacket. She is naked in the emptiest hour of the night, a woman scorned, a deadly weapon in her fist, and she comes at him again and again, he cannot catch her wrist. The tips of the scissors flick the air, retreat, flick again, catch the lapel of his jacket, cling there an instant till she rips them free with a twist and comes at him again. He brings up his left hand in defense and a gash magically opens from his knuckles to his wrist. All at once he feels faint. He falls against the desk for support, knocking the telephone to the floor. She is on him again…

    And suddenly there is a scream.

    For a moment, he thinks it is he himself screaming.

    His bleeding hand is stretched toward Susan, his mouth is indeed open-it is possible that he is the one screaming.

    But the scream is coming from behind him.

    He spins to the left, partially to avoid the thrusting scissors, partially to locate the source of the scream.

    His daughter, Joanna, is standing in the doorway.

    She is wearing a long granny nightgown, her eyes wide, her mouth open. Her scream hangs on the air interminably, overwhelming the small room, suffocating murderous intent.

    The scissors stop.

    Susan looks down at her own hand in disbelief. It is shaking violently, the scissors jerking erratically in her fist. She drops them to the floor.

    "Get out," she says. "Get out, you bastard."

    In nightmares there is no fade out/fade in, there is no matching shot, no attempt at continuity, flashback overlaps flashback and there is horror in chaos. The naked woman dropping the scissors, the little girl rushing to her and throwing herself in her mother's arms, both are rudely and abruptly replaced on the screen of Matthew's mind by a slender woman wearing a wheat-colored suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat, pantyhose to match the suit, tan high-heeled shoes, dark sunglasses covering her eyes.

    Time outdistances time.

    Two years ago is suddenly two weeks ago.

    This is the twenty-third day of May,
anno domini,
the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend, and in his nightmare Carla Nettington has come to the law firm of Summerville and Hope, ostensibly to discuss the drawing of a will.

    Ten minutes later, she is telling Matthew that she suspects her forty-five-year-old husband is having an affair. That is why she is really here. She did not want to go personally to a private detective; there is, she feels, something sleazy about private detectives. So she is here to ask if Matthew can help her secure the services of someone who can ascertain (these are her exact words, nightmares do not lie) ascertain whether her husband's frequent absences from home are truly occasioned (the exact words) by a heavy work load or are instead attributable to the favors of another woman.

    "Because if the bastard's cheating on me," she says, "I want a divorce."

    The bastard is Daniel Nettington, her husband.

    
Get out, you bastard.

    In the distance, beyond the fringes of Matthew's unconscious, beyond the nightmare,
offscreen
so to speak, there is the sound of an automobile. He knows consciously-he is half asleep, half awake, he can hear for example the sound of raccoons outside, rummaging in his garbage cans, can hear a forlorn train whistle, for sometimes in the middle of the night Calusa gets trains bound for God knows where-he knows consciously, his
conscious
mind tells him that this offscreen automobile is Otto Samalson's. His conscious mind is a
raisonneur,
wide awake, explaining to half-asleep Matthew that this flashback nightmare will soon replay scenes he has never witnessed. The offscreen car is Otto Samalson's and soon Matthew will be subjected to the horror of his death, an event he can only blindly conjure, but such is the magic of nightmare.

    He is talking to Otto on the telephone. He is asking Otto if he can take on a surveillance case. Otto is saying he's working another case right now, but if Matthew doesn't mind a little time-sharing he can start maybe Tuesday, will that be all right?

    "What I'm doing," he says, "I'm taking Monday off like a normal human being."

    The sound of the car is closer, it nudges the unconscious, demands to be driven onscreen. Matthew knows the car is a blue Buick Century, he has seen the car before. That he can only
hear
it now, cannot
see
it now, is frustrating. And yet he does not
want
to see it. He knows that once it enters the dream, he will know true horror, he will witness a close friend dying. He wants Otto to stay alive, to
be
alive, he wants the car to drive all the way to Tampa on I-75, bypassing Calusa, bypassing the nightmare.

    Friday.

    Is it Friday already?

    Friday, the sixth day of June, 4:00 p.m. or thereabouts, Otto Samalson sitting in Matthew's office, smoking a cigarette. It is difficult to imagine this man as a private detective. He is no Sam Spade, no Philip Marlowe. He looks instead like a tailor or a shoe salesman. Short and slight of build, mostly bald with a halolike fringe settling above his ears, twinkling blue eyes, his mouth in a perpetual smile, he is the Eli Wallach of the sleuthing profession, enormously likable, immensely sympathetic, a man you would trust to drive your youngest sister to Napoli. Matthew suspects that Otto, with his wonderful bedside manner, could coax a devoted mother into revealing the whereabouts of her ax-murderer son.