Ed McBain
Beauty and the Beast
This is for Mile Peretzian
and Irene Webb
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 months, 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.