Beauty and the beast mat.., p.1
Beauty and the Beast (Matthew Hope), page 1
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)
SCREEN PLAYS
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 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
ISBN-13: 9781612181912
ISBN: 1612181910
CONTENTS
* * *
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
About the Author
1
* * *
IN CALUSA, Florida, the beaches change with the seasons. What in May might have been a wide strand of pure white sand will by November become only a narrow strip of shell, seaweed, and twisted driftwood. The hurricane season here is dreaded as much for the damage it will do to the condominiums as for the havoc it might wreak upon the precious Gulf of Mexico shoreline.
There are five keys off Calusa’s mainland, but only three of them—Stone Crab, Sabal, and Whisper—run north-south, paralleling the mainland shore. Flamingo Key and Lucy’s Key are situated like massive stepping-stones across the bay, connecting the mainland first to Sabal and then to Stone Crab—which had suffered most during autumn’s violent storms, precisely because it had the least to lose. Stone Crab is the narrowest of Calusa’s keys, its once-splendid beaches eroded for decades by water and wind. In September, Stone Crab’s two-lane blacktop road had been completely inundated, the bay on one side and the gulf on the other joining over it to prevent passage by anything but a dinghy.
Sabal Beach suffered least—perhaps because there is a God, after all. It was on Sabal that the law-enforcement officers of the City of Calusa looked the other way when it came to so-called nude bathing. Well, not quite the other way. The women on Sabal were permitted to splash in the water or romp on the beach topless. But let one genital area, male or female, be exposed for the barest fraction of an instant, and suddenly a white police car with a blue City of Calusa seal on its side would magically appear on the beach’s access road, and a uniformed minion of the law would trudge solemnly across the sand, head ducked, eyes studying the terrain (but not the offending pubic patch) to make an immediate arrest while citing an ordinance that went all the way back to 1913, when the city was first incorporated.
My partner Frank is a transplanted New Yorker who stubbornly insists that the police interpretation of this particular ordinance is merely another indication of Calusa’s lack of true sophistication. Nudity is nudity, Frank maintains, be it partial or otherwise. Calusa would like to consider itself sophisticated enough to allow beachgoers to enjoy the sun au naturel, Frank says, but at the same time the city fathers feel they must appease all those puritanical citizens who migrated south from such unimaginably unenlightened places as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Hence the compromise, according to my Big Apple partner Frank Summerville. I don’t think Frank even knows where Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois are. Somewhere up there. Somewhere to the left of New York. He knows, of course, that I myself am originally from Illinois—a native, in fact, of that incredibly unsophisticated and unbelievably dull small town called Chicago. Perhaps that is why I am gauche enough to appreciate the sight of naked breasts in the sunshine, and to thank God for small favors. Frank and I are both lawyers. So is Dale O’Brien.
Dale is a woman. That’s an understatement. She’s a woman with a scalpel-sharp mind that has reduced to whimpering incoherency the bravest of unfriendly witnesses in many a Calusa courthouse. Moreover, she’s an extraordinarily beautiful woman, five feet nine inches tall, with red hair (she prefers to call it auburn), glade-green eyes, and a fair skin that, contrary to old wives’ tales, stubbornly refuses to turn lobster red in the sun but instead tans graciously and gorgeously. I had known her since January, when we’d met professionally. Our relationship had survived the seasonal onslaught of the northern snowbirds, their departure early in May, the oppressive heat and humidity of Calusa’s summer mont hs, and the torrential autumn rains that had all but washed away what remained of Stone Crab’s beaches, but had miraculously spared Sabal’s. We had spent last night together in my rented house on the mainland, had awakened at noon, and had gone to lunch together at a new restaurant called (prophetically, we both agreed) Custer’s Last Stand, doomed to close before the end of the month if the runny eggs Benedict were any measure of success. Now, in bright mid-November sunshine, we strolled along North Sabal, grateful for the capricious whims of hurricane Gloria, grateful too for a glorious Saturday that was somewhat unusual for this time of year.
Dale was wearing a green bikini a shade darker than her magnificent eyes, which were shielded from the sun now by oversized prescription glasses. I was wearing white cutoffs; I had no intention of going in the water even though the air temperature was still quite warm for November, sixty-two that morning (or seventeen Celsius, as the television forecaster had insisted on informing us) and the temperature of the gulf water was only two degrees higher than that. I had lived in Calusa long enough to begin thinking like one of the natives: autumn came on September 21, and only the snowbirds were crazy enough to go in the water after that.
“I’m a sissy, is what it is,” Dale said.
“No, you’re very brave,” I said.
“Matthew, please. If I had a single ounce of courage in my body, I’d take off my top.”
“It has nothing to do with courage,” I said.
“Then what? Never mind, don’t tell me. I’m going to do it.”
“So do it.”
“I will. Just give me a minute.”
“Take all the time you need.”
“A minute is all I need.”
“Okay, fine.”
“I’m really going to do it, Matthew.”
“I know you are.”
“You don’t believe me, but I am.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do. Believe me, I believe you.”
“You’ll see.”
“Everyone’ll see.”
“Now you’re scaring me again.”
“Sorry,” I said.
We were walking close to the shoreline, the better to avoid dog shit; in Calusa, the ordinance against dogs on public beaches is somewhat less stringently enforced than the one against total nudity. Everywhere around us there were bounding, panting, untethered dogs: Labrador retrievers and German shepherds, dachshunds and poodles, huskies and goldens, Scotties and spitzes, bassets and beagles, Dobermans and Chihuahuas, mongrels of every persuasion—a veritable veterinarian registry of canine diversity. And everywhere around us, too, there were naked breasts: breasts shaped like apples and breasts shaped like pears, breasts the size of grapefruits and breasts the size of plums, breasts the color of eggplants and breasts the color of sweet young corn, breasts as firm as pomegranates and breasts as wrinkled as prunes, breasts with nipples like cocoa beans and breasts with nipples like cherries—a veritable vegetarian feast of mammillary proportions.
“If she can do it, I can do it,” Dale whispered.
She was referring to a woman who came splashing topless out of the water, wearing only bright red bikini panties that struggled valiantly to cover her truly enormous watermelon belly and wide cantaloupe buttocks. Her breasts (to abandon the greengrocer metaphor) were dun-colored dugs that hung halfway to her waist and flapped unabashedly in the sunshine. As she collapsed on a blanket some three feet from where the waves were nudging the shore, she clasped both prized possessions in her hands as though delighted she hadn’t lost them in the ocean.
“I’ll do it,” Dale said.
“So do it.”
“I will.”
She was actually reaching behind her to untie the straps of her bikini top, when something stopped her. I could not see her eyes, hidden as they were behind the dark lenses of the sunglasses, but she was unmistakably looking up the beach, her attention caught by something there, her hands still behind her back, her arms bent at the elbows, frozen, like the wings of an elegant water bird poised for imminent flight. I followed her hidden gaze and saw the most spectacularly beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life.
I thought at first that she was entirely nude.
And then I realized that the triangular black patch below her waist was not a pubic echo of the long black hair that trailed to her shoulders but was instead the minuscule bottom half of a string bikini. She could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, easily as tall as Dale, and so voluptuously curvaceous that by comparison Dale (a beautifully proportioned woman in her own right) seemed almost angular. On a beach populated with women displaying bodies tanned to various degrees of bronzed perfection, the woman who approached us appeared carved of alabaster, pale-white exquisite face framed by ebony cascades of hair, the flesh of her naked breasts almost translucent, lustrous in the hot rays of the sun, wide hips flaring above the restraining strings of the bikini patch, a shimmering mirage in black-and-white that came closer and closer, pale-gray eyes in that incredibly lovely face, the scent of mimosa as she passed and was gone.
“There oughta be a law,” Dale said.
The woman we’d seen on the beach came to my office on Monday morning at a quarter past ten. She was wearing tight-fitting blue jeans, a white T-shirt, sandals, and sunglasses. Her arms, where they showed below the short sleeves of the shirt, were covered with black-and-blue marks. The bridge of her delicate nose was plastered with adhesive tape. When she took off the glasses, I saw that both her eyes were discolored, one of them puffed almost entirely shut. Her lips were swollen and bruised. As she parted them to speak, I saw empty gaps where once there had been teeth.
“My name is Michelle Harper,” she said. “You must forgive me, please, my English.”
Her English was unmistakably tinged with a French accent, her voice low, rather huskier than one might have expected from a woman so young.
“You were recommend,” she said, “by Sally Owen.”
I nodded.
“You made for her a divorce,” she said.
“Yes, I remember.”
“She says to me you will know what to do.”
“What is it you want me to do?”
“I want to have arrest my husband.”
I pulled a lined yellow pad in front of me. I picked up a pencil.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“George Harper.”
“H-a-r-p-e-r?”
“Oui. Mais le ‘George,’ il est sans…pardon. The ‘George,’ it is without an s, he is américain.”
“George Harper.”
“Oui, exactement.”
“Why do you want him arrested?”
“For what he has do to me. Ila…he has broke my nose, he has knock from my mouth three teeth…dents? Teeth?”
“Yes, teeth. When did this happen, Mrs. Harper?”
“Last night. Regardez,” she said, and suddenly pulled her T-shirt up over her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The breasts I’d seen naked and unblemished on the beach Saturday were covered now with brutal black-and-blue marks. “He do this to me,” she said, and lowered the shirt.
“Did you call the police?”
“When he is leave, do you mean?”
“What time was that?”
“Two o’clock.”
“Two o’clock in the morning?”
“Oui. I did not call the police, I was afraid he would come back, I did not know what to do. So after I have my breakfast, I go to see Sally.”
“What time was that?”
“Nine o’clock. I don’t know what to do, vous comprenez? She says to me I must have a lawyer. She says George is gone, you know, so I do not have the proof…proof?”
“Yes, proof.”
“Oui, that he is the one who does this to me. She says I must first see a lawyer.”
“Well,” I said, “Sally may be a good beautician, but she’s not a very good lawyer. You should have called the police at once. But it’s not too late, don’t worry. I’m not a criminal lawyer, you understand…”
