Cinderella (21 page)

    "Mr. Hope?" Jamie's receptionist-nurse. "Doctor will see you now."

    "Thank you."

    Jamie looked good. Two years ago his world had disintegrated. He seemed all right now, looked all right. He had not remarried. Rumor around town had him dating a twenty-seven-year-old interior decorator. It did not sound too serious.

    "I called Nathan," he said. He was referring to Dr. Nathan Schlemmer, who had identified Cinderella as Mary Jane Hopkins but had refused to tell Otto why she'd come to see him. "Do you know him?"

    "No," Matthew said.

    "Fifiyish," Jamie said. "Gray hair, closely trimmed gray beard, blue eyes so pale
they
look gray." He shrugged. "Dr Nathan Schlemmer. I know him well enough to be able to state, unequivocally, that if you'd gone to him directly, asking about this Mary Jane Hopkins, he'd have told you-and I quote more or less accurately-'Mr. Hope, this is not information I care to divulge.' That is Dr. Nathan Schlemmer very uptight, very tight-ass. However…"

    "Uh-huh," Matthew said.

    "Professional courtesy. Plus a slight lie. I told him the gin was a patient. I asked him why she'd gone to see him. I asked him if she was pregnant."

    "Was she?" Matthew said.

    "She was not," Jamie said.

    "Then why
did
she go see him?"

    "She suspected she had herpes," Jamie said.

    "Uh-huh," Matthew said. "And did she?"

    "Yes."

    

    

    The boat was a huge monster with a flying bridge.

    Larkin was behind the wheel, guiding her in toward the dock, careful not to bang her up. A deckhand wearing a Larkin Boats T-shirt ran forward to toss a line to someone on the dock wearing an identical T-shirt, The Way to the Water. Another hand dropped fenders over the side. More lines came over,
you'd think this was the QE2 Larkin was docking. Big boat, though, had to cost a pretty penny.

    Two people were standing on the bridge with Larkin. Tubby little man wearing a sports shirt as colorful as a Portuguese man-of-war, and a blonde lady wearing yellow shorts, a white shirt, and a pair of sunglasses. Larkin frowned the moment he saw Matthew standing on the dock. He clambered down off the bridge, jumped ashore, walked immediately to him, and said, "What are you doing here?"

    "Few questions," Matthew said.

    "Get lost," Larkin said. "I'm about to sell a half-million-dollar boat here."

    "I'll wait."

    "No, just get the hell off my property."

    One of the dockhands was helping the couple ashore now. First the lady in the yellow shorts. She was perhaps fifty years old, too stout, too heavily made up, and a bit unsteady in ankle-strapped sandals with very high heels. She come onto the dock with a smile of relief and a murmured "Thank you," and then turned to watch her companion jump ashore. The man was grinning from ear to ear. He was eager to buy this boat. Matthew wasn't sure the lady was half as eager. The man stepped back a pace, hands on his hips, and studied the boat from dockside.

    "This won't take a minute," Matthew said.

    "My customer's waiting," Larkin said.

    "No, he's admiring the boat."

    Larkin looked toward where the man was walking up and down the dock, reaching over to touch the boat's teak railing, running his hand over her gleaming white flanks.

    "What is it?" Larkin said.

    "Mr. Larkin, when I saw you yesterday, I told you that Otto-"

    "I don't want to hear another word about Otto. I've already got somebody
eke
looking for-"

    "Yes, I know. But I've learned something that-"

    "I don't care what you learned."

    "Mr. Larkin, Otto thought your Cinderella might have been pregnant…"

    "You already told me that. And
I
told you-"

    "But he was wrong. She went to see a doctor because she had herpes."

    Larkin glanced quickly down the dock to where the man in the rainbow sports shirt was pointing to something on the boat's transom. He said a few words to the woman, and the woman nodded, an uncomprehending look on her face.

    "So?" Larkin said.

    "I asked you yesterday if you could've made her pregnant."

    "So?"

    "I'm asking you today if you could've given her herpes."

    "I don't have to answer that," Larkin said.

    "Yes, you do," Matthew said. "Because Otto was killed. And there's got to be a reason for it."

    "Let's say I
did
give her herpes, okay? I'm the kind of guy who gives herpes to twenty-two-year-old girls. Twenty-three, whatever. When I don't even realize she's a hooker. I'm that kind of rat, okay? What's that got to do with Otto's murder?"

    "Well, Mr. Larkin, suppose someone in her family-a father, a brother-
learned
she had herpes and decided to find out who'd given it to her. This is Florida, you know. There're lots of rednecks down here who don't like their kin messed with."

    "This girl isn't a redneck."

    "But you don't know what her family's like, do you?"

    "What's your point?" Larkin said. "She stole my watch, that's all I-"

    "Yes, but Otto was killed. And to me that's a bit more important than your watch. What I'm suggesting is that perhaps this father or this brother spotted Otto following her and jumped to the wrong conclusion."

    "What conclusion?"

    "That
Otto
was the man who'd-"

    "Oh, I get it. This
father
of hers…"

    "Yes, if it was her father…"

    
"Or brother…"

    "Yes."

    "Or whoever… didn't realize Otto was a private eye, figured he was somebody who
knew
Cinderella…"

    "Yes."

    "Somebody, in feet, who knew her well enough to give her
herpes,
right? And then what?
Killed
him for it? Come on, man."

    "This is Florida," Matthew said again.

    "No way at all is it even a possibility," Larkin said. "Because to begin with, hookers don't
have
fathers or brothers."

    "I'm sorry," Matthew said, "but I don't find any of this even remotely funny. And you
still
haven't answered my question."

    "Too fuckin' bad," Larkin said, and glanced quickly down the dock toward his customer. "In case you don't know it, this isn't a court of-"

    
"Could
you have given her herpes?"

    "Oh, now I
really
get it," Larkin said. "If I'm the guy responsible, if I'm the one infected her, then the wrong man got killed, right? Poor Otto took the rap for
me,
right? So you're here to tell me what an unprincipled son of a bitch I am. Well, let me tell
you
something, Mr. Hope, and then I want you to, get the hell out of here before I have Kirk
throw
you out."

    He nodded down the dock to where one of the hands was hosing down the boat. Big muscular guy with pecs bulging in the white T-shirt, biceps bulging below the short sleeves, tattoo on the right forearm, a dagger dripping blood.

    "The only person selling herpes-and I hope to God nothing
else
-was Cinderella herself. Jenny Santoro or
whatever
the fuck her name is!" He glanced down the dock again, and then lowered his voice. "She's the one selling it, Mr. Hope, she's the one I bought it from. Which is why, the minute I realized what I had, I hired Otto to find her, never mind the gold watch. I can buy another gold watch, I can buy a
dozen
gold watches, but I can't buy a doctor in the world can get rid of what she gave me. Okay, Mr. Hope? You got it now? You think you got it now?"

    Matthew sighed heavily.

    "Yes," he said. "Thank you."

    "Good-bye," Larkin said.

    

    

    The conversation was entirely in Spanish, and Ernesto was doing most of the talking.

    Their private code name for cocaine was "hat."

    In Spanish, hat was
sombrero.

    On the phone, Ernesto kept talking about sombreros. Ten sombreros at sixty dollars each, very high quality. If anybody from the DEA had been listening, he'd have known right off that Ernesto was talking about a drug buy. Ten keys of coke at sixty thousand a key. Drug dealers never mentioned the word
cocaine
on the telephone. They hardly ever mentioned it
anywhere.
Cocaine was always something else. To Charlie Nubbs and his pals, cocaine was "heavy machinery." With the Ordinez gang in Miami, if you talked to someone about a typewriter, you were talking cocaine.

    "I tried to get the hats for less," Ernesto said, "but that's the lowest they would go. Very good hats, size nine."

    A DEA man would have figured in a minute that the coke was ninety-percent pure.

    "When do you have to take delivery on these hats?" Amaros asked.

    "Saturday. One-thirty."

    "Are the manufacturers reliable?"

    "We'll examine the merchandise very carefully before payment is made."

    "Do they require a deposit?"

    "They haven't mentioned one."

    "When will you need a check?"

    "As soon as possible."

    "I'll have one drawn," Amaros said.

    The "check" was total bullshit. Nobody ever wrote a check for cocaine. You would have to be crazy to accept a check for cocaine. Cocaine was as good as cash and what you
got
for it was cash. Amaros was merely telling Ernesto that he'd get the cash to him before one-thirty on Saturday. Ten keys at sixty a key came to $600,000. This was Wednesday, Amaros had two full business days to get the cash. He was not anticipating any trouble.

    "What about Cenicienta?" he asked.

    This was the first time Ernesto had ever heard her called Cinderella, but he knew immediately that Amaros was talking about Jenny Santoro or whatever her name was. Normally, Amaros referred to her as "the girl." But Ernesto guessed he didn't want to use the word
girl
on the phone because "girl" meant cocaine.

    "We haven't located her yet," Ernesto said.

    "I'm pleased about the hats," Amaros said, "but I very much want to see her."

    "Yes, I know," Ernesto said.

    "So find her," Amaros said, and hung up.

    So now they're inside the house on Key Biscayne, it's like multileveled with decks on each level, all of them looking out over the water, and Amaros is telling her to make herself comfortable, which is not difficult to do in a place like this. A place like this Jenny figures had to have cost him a mill-five, something like that, waterfront property? Sure, at least that. This is what she wants for herself. This is her dream. A place of her own. Just outside Paris. A place with a garden. Her own house. A little house on a quiet little lane. She will be the American lady. She will tell her neighbors she used to be a stage actress. She will tell them she starred in
The Crucible.
She will drive into Paris on weekends, and sit at a table on one of the boulevards, sipping creme de menthe over ice and trying to guess which of the girls strutting by are in the life, the way she used to be. Because this is the last one. If there really is coke here in this house, and if she can take it away with her, then she will never have to make love to a stranger again.

    He pours her a cognac, same Courvoisier she had in the Kasbah Lounge and then-big surprise!-the conversation drifts around to movies, has she seen any good movies lately? In his cute Spanish accent he tells her that occasionally he will watch a pornographic film because he feels pornographic films are an art form and that in fact many of them are superior to the films being shown in most theaters today. He's all at once a film critic, Luis Amaros of the
Village Voice.
She tells him she has never seen a pornographic movie in her life-big lie, especially since she had a bit part in an orgy scene in a skin flick they were shooting in L.A., went down on one guy while another guy was humping her from behind-and would probably be embarrassed seeing one. Oh, no, he says, not if it is a tasteful movie, you would not be embarrassed.

    Well, one thing leads to another, and he takes her to the bedroom at the other end of the house and shows her his expensive video equipment, and it turns out that the porn flicks he watches "occasionally" are a collection of a hundred or more tapes he keeps on a shelf in his closet, over where his slacks are hanging. The closet is a big walk-in thing. On the left-hand side, there are his jackets and suits, and on the right-hand side, his slacks and some long-sleeved sports shirts and over these the shelf with the porn flick tapes. The safe is to the left just as you come into the closet. It's a pretty big safe for a private house. Jenny hopes the girl Kim wasn't giving them a fairy tale. She hopes there is really dope in that safe.

    He says, "Would you like to see a truly tasteful pornographic movie?"

    She says, "Well, yes, I suppose so, if it's really and
truly
tasteful."

    "Oh, yes," he says.

    "But," she says, eyes wide and innocent, "you told me you had cocaine."

    She isn't interested in snorting cocaine just now, in fact she's very intent just now on keeping her wits about her. This man looks like the sweet little Pillsbury doughboy, you push his big tummy and he giggles, but maybe he won't be so cute if he catches her stealing his coke.

    
If
there's coke.

    That's what she wants to find out first, whether or not there's coke in the safe and whether or not it's enough coke to make the risk worthwhile.