Cinderella

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 clichés. 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 supposed 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 US 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 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 US 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.

The sound of the car.

Closer.

Louder.

Matthew tosses in half-sleep, half-wakefulness. Outside, the raccoons argue heatedly among themselves, their voices shrill.

“The guy’s been fucking this widow lives in Harbor Acres,” Otto is saying. “I’ve got him going in and out every night since I started tailing him. That was Tuesday a week ago, I got him going in and out nine days already. Nice pictures, Matthew, he gets there when it’s still light, I catch him with the long lens. I also got a tape I want you to hear. This lady, she thinks this is still Calusa twenty, thirty years ago, she goes out, leaves doors unlocked all over the place. I been in and out twice already. I put my recorder right under the bed, voice-activated. I got some very hot stuff, Matthew, wait’ll you hear it. I couldn’t bring the tape today ’cause I only got the original, it’s in the safe. I’ll make a copy, let you hear it next time I see you. Very beautiful stuff, Matthew, the two of them talking very dirty, she’s a widow, nice-looking woman in her late—”

The Buick suddenly roars into view.

The office is gone.

There is only US 41 and the blue Buick.

Otto is behind the wheel. He is smiling.

Turn back, Matthew thinks.

“Pictures of them in action are gonna be impossible, I think,” Otto is saying, “because so far they only been makin’ it with the drapes closed. You maybe have all you need on the tape, anyway, names, everything, a guided tour of what they’re doing there in the lady’s bed. I shoulda brought it today, but I didn’t want to risk it ’cause I’ll tell you the truth, if anything happens to that tape I’m not sure I can get in the house so easy again. I think he’s on to me, Matthew, and I think the two of them are gonna start being very careful in the not too distant—”

Otto is still smiling.

This is a close shot of him behind the steering wheel. He has no idea what’s coming. Only Matthew knows what’s coming. Matthew hears a repeat of the news broadcast he heard only hours ago, while he and Susan were making love, Get out, you bastard, hears the broadcast as if it is coming from very far away, like a short wave broadcast, Otto’s smiling face filling the screen, In Calusa tonight—

Turn back, he thinks.

“Reason I think he’s made me,” Otto says, “is there’s something on the tape, I think he’s referring to me. I couldn’t be sure ’cause it wasn’t an absolute reference. But he could’ve been talking about me, about me following him. And last night when he’s coming out of her house, this must’ve been along around eleven, he stops dead in the street, he does like a take, you know, and looks straight at the car. So I think my days are numbered. What I’d like you to do is hear the tape and then decide whether you want to stay with this. You ask my opinion, he’s gonna go underground a while, maybe surface again in a few weeks, but meanwhile cool it till he’s positively sure nobody’s watching him. What I thought, maybe Monday I can—”

— killing the driver. The car swerved off the highway and into—

“Turn back!” Matthew screamed aloud.

He sat up in bed, wide awake.

He was drenched with cold sweat.

Morning was here.

He could still hear Otto’s voice.

So I think my days are numbered.