“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 crème 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 LA, 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.
She is carrying a huge blue tote bag that looks out of place with the ice-blue gown and the Lucite slippers, but she’s already covered that by telling him she was supposed to sleep over at this party she was going to, and has brought along a few things. She has even shown him the few things. A peach-colored baby doll nightgown, bikini panties to match, high-heeled pom-pommed slippers.
So now he goes into the closet, and he kneels in front of the safe.
Will he go through the whole four-to-the-left, three-to-the-right, two-to-the-left, turn-back-slowly-to-the-right routine? Or has he simply left the dial a few figures away from the last number in the combination, the way people do who are in and out of a safe every ten minutes, what burglars call “day combination” or simply “day-com.”
Kim said the safe was on day-com.
Jenny wonders if it’s still on day-com.
She waits, holding her breath.
He gives the dial a simple flick to the right.
Day-com.
Good.
He reaches into the safe.
Her dream could be inside that safe. Her ticket to Paris could be inside that safe, I used to be a stage actress.
She looks over his shoulder.
Oh my God...
Oh my sweet loving Jesus!
There are four fucking bags of cocaine in that safe!
So now they sniff a little, talk a little, watch Johnny Holmes unreel his garden hose—
“Who do you think is bigger?” Pudgy asks. “Him or me?”
“Are you kidding, you’re enormous!” she says, and ten minutes later drops the chloral hydrate in his drink.
The safe is on day-com again, he has given it that little flick to the left, some ten or twelve numbers away from the last number in the combination. She simply goes into the closet and turns the dial slowly to the right, and it stops on the last number — eighty as it happens — and she grabs the handle and yanks open the safe door and reaches in for all that sweet white dust.
Five minutes later, she’s got the shoulder bag full, and she’s running across the lawn to the front gate.
It’s a little after midnight.
The Caddy is gone.
In its place is a blue Ford.
The minute she’s in the car, she says, “Four keys.”
Vincent — who waved his magic wand and turned her into a princess — is no longer wearing the chauffeur’s uniform.
He rolls his eyes and says, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
13
The two girls shopping for jeans at Coopersmith’s were both in their twenties, one of them with dark black hair cut almost shoulder length, the other with russet-colored hair cut in a wedge.
The brunette was wearing a wide skirt, a peasant blouse, and flat sandals. She had brown eyes and she looked very Italian. Her name was Merilee James.
The redhead was wearing tan slacks, a brown blouse, and low-heeled tan shoes. She had blue eyes, and she looked very Irish. Her name was Sandy Jennings.