Ida attracts a lot of attention, because she's the proprietor of a run-down motel. It's an inexpensive place to spend a few nights, so many men who are just passing through town take refuge there. The town is small and boring, and the townspeople's main source of entertainment is speculating on what's exactly going on behind the shabby doors. Everyone suspects Ida of being a lewd woman, who beds down with any man who's willing to pay her nominal fee. But Ida has her standards-she doesn't take just any man. She knows what she likes and won't settle for less....
CHAPTER ONE
It all happened so many years ago that it may be hard for me to remember all the facts just as they happened. But I'll try.
I was younger then. Ida was younger then. And you know, I think the world was younger then. Yes, we were younger and, as might be expected, had a stronger zest for life, for adventure, and, of course, for sex. But Ida and me, well, we still don't do bad in the sex department. Some people are just made for each other.
The town looked like something straight out of a Tennessee Williams yarn about the dusty ol' South. Even before I entered it, I hated it. I was just pulling away from the last light, going about twenty miles per hour in the right-hand lane, when some local in a beat-up old panel truck decided to come shooting backward out of his parking place without looking behind him.
There was another car on my left, so all I could do was slam on my brakes just before I plowed into him. There was a crash of metal, followed by a succession of tinkling sounds as fragments of grill-work and shards of glass rained onto the pavement. Necks craned up and down the sun-blasted street.
I locked the handbrake and got out, and shook my head with disgust as I sized up the damage. The Buick's front bumper was knocked loose at one end, and the right fender and smashed headlight were crumpled in on the wheel. But the worst of it was the gout of hot water streaming out through the wreckage of the grill.
The driver of the panel came charging out. He was about six feet, thin, dark, and hard-nosed, and the bony face he wanted to shove into mine was flavored with cheap muscatel. "Look, stupid," he said. "Maybe you think this is a race-track-"
The bad mood had been building up in me for a long time, and I was in just the frame of mind to be jockeyed around by some summer-replacement hard guy with a nose full of wine. I caught a handful of his shirt in my left and started to slap him across the mouth, but then the childishness of it caught up with me and I merely pushed him away. He sputtered some more, and at the same time somebody behind me clamped a big hand on my arm. I turned. It was a fat man with a hard and competent eye. He was dressed in khakis and a gunbelt.
"All right," he told me. "You want to start trouble around here, start it with me. I'm in the business."
"Okay, okay," I said. "There's no war."
He kept the flinty eye on my face. "You're a pretty big boy to be shoving people around."
The usual crowd was beginning to gather, and I could sense I wasn't likely to be named Miss Northern Florida of 1957. It looked as if I'd started the beef, in addition to running into him, and my California license plates probably didn't help any.
He turned to the driver of the panel. "You all right, Frankie?"
Fine, I thought sourly; they're probably cousins.
Frankie unburdened himself; the whole thing was my fault. Damned tourists, doing sixty through the middle of town. When he ran down, I had a chance to put in my nickel's worth, and that's about what it bought. I polled a few of the rubbernecks, looking for witnesses, but nobody had seen anything, or would admit it.
"All right, mister," the fat policeman told me bleakly, "let's see your driver's license."
I was getting it out of my wallet and making a mental note that if I ever came through here again I'd skip the car and walk, when a tall girl with dark hair stepped off the curb and came over.
"I saw the whole thing," she said to the officer. She told him just how it happened.
In some vague way I couldn't quite put my finger on, his reaction struck me as a little strange. He apparently knew her, but there was no word of greeting. He nodded, accepting the story, but it was a curt nod, grudging and perhaps faintly hostile. She wrote something on a card held against the back of the panel truck and handed it to me.
"If your insurance company wants me, they can reach me there," she said.
"Thanks a million," I told her. I slipped the card in my wallet. "It's very nice of you."
She went back onto the curb. Some of the bystanders watched her, and I sensed the same odd reaction I'd felt in the fat policeman. It wasn't quite hostility-or was it? I had a feeling they all knew her, but not a one had spoken to her. But she had poise.
I didn't know whether it was because of her story or because the officer finally got close enough to Frankie to pick up some of his muscatel fallout, but the picture changed somewhat in my favor. He cut Frankie down to size with a couple of parade-ground barks, and wrote up the report, but didn't issue any tickets. The damage to the panel truck wasn't extensive. We traded insurance company information, and a wrecker came after the Buick. I rode to the garage with the driver. It was back the way I'd come, near the river in the west end of the business district.
It was hot and still, around two in the afternoon of a day in midsummer. Shadows were like ink in the white sunlight, and I could feel perspiration soaking my shirt. I'd left New Orleans early that morning and had planned to go on through to St. Petersburg and have a dip in the Gulf before dinner. Well, it couldn't be helped, I thought sourly. Then I thought of the girl again, and tried to remember just what she'd looked like. The only thing I could come up with was that she was tall and quite slender. Attractive? Somewhat, but no real dish. About thirty, I thought. But there'd been something about her face, a quality that escaped me now. Well, it didn't matter.
The garage was a big place on a corner, a Chevrolet and Buick agency with a showroom in front and some gas pumps in the driveway. We towed the Buick on into the repair department, and the shop foreman looked it over. He was a thin slat of a man with a cold face.
"You want a bid, is that it?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I'll pay for it myself and let the insurance companies fight about it later."
"Day after tomorrow's the best we can do; might even take three days. We haven't got that radiator in stock, but we can get it out of Tallahassee on the bus."
"Okay," I said. I didn't look forward to spending two days or more in the place, but there was no point in griping about it. I lifted the two bags out of the trunk. "Where's a good place to stay?"
"One of the motels would be your best bet," he replied.
"Fine. Where's the nearest one?"
He wiped his hands on a piece of waste and thought about it. "Only one on this side is about three miles out. East of town, though, there's a couple of good ones, fairly close in. The Spanish Main, and the El Rancho."
"Thanks. Can I call a cab?"
He jerked his head toward the front office. "See the girl."
A big blond kid in a white coverall had come in to get something off a workbench. He turned and looked at us. "If he wants a motel, Mrs. Lang is out front now, getting some gas."
The shop foreman shook his head.
"Who's Mrs. Lang?" I asked.
"She runs the Magnolia Lodge, east of town."
"Well, what's the matter with that?"
He shrugged. "Suit yourself."
He puzzled me. "Is something wrong with it?" I asked.
"I guess not. It's run-down, and there's no pool, but where you stay is your own business, the way I look at it."
Just then the name clicked. I was almost sure it was the same one. Rather than fish it out of my wallet, however, I merely picked up the two bags, said, "Thanks," and walked out front to the driveway. I was right. She was standing beside an old Pontiac station wagon taking some money from her purse.
I walked over and put down the suitcases. "Mrs. Lang?"
She glanced around, and gave me a brief smile. "Oh, hello," she said. And all at once I realized what it was about her face that had struck me before. It was tired. Simply that. It was a slender and rather attractive face with good bone structure, but there was an almost unfathomable weariness far back in the fine gray eyes.
"I understand you run a motel," I said. She nodded. "That's right."
"If you have a vacancy, I'd like to ride out with you."
"Yes, of course. Just put your bags in back."
The boy brought her change and we took off back down the main street. I hoped if Frankie was still in town with his panel truck we'd see him in time to take the station wagon apart and hide it. I'd had all I needed of Frankie. We made it all right.
"When will your car be ready?" she asked, as we paused for a light.
"Day after tomorrow or later," I said. "By the way, I want to thank you again."
"You're quite welcome," she said. The light changed, and we went on.
I turned and looked at her. She had dark reddish-brown hair in a long bob just off her shoulders, and a rather creamy complexion, though she wore no makeup except for a touch of lipstick. The mouth was nice. Her cheekbones were high and prominent, giving an impression of faint hollows below them and adding to that overall suggestion of her being underweight and overtrained and tired. It was the face of a mature woman, and there was strength in it. Her wedding and engagement rings looked expensive, but the rest of her outfit failed to match them. The dress was a cheap hand-me-down and the sandals were old and beat-up. She had nice long legs, but wore no stockings.
On the right, just beyond the city limits, was the Spanish Main motel. It had a large pool set among colored umbrellas in front. It looked cool and blue in the white glare of the sun, and I remembered what he'd said about the Magnolia's not having one. Chump, I thought sourly. Well, I didn't like being conned. And she had been nice.
The Magnolia was about a quarter mile beyond, on the left. As she turned in off the highway, I could see what he'd meant about it; the impression was that it had never been quite completed. There were twelve or fifteen connected units in the usual quadrangle, or hollow square, with the open end facing the highway. The construction itself was solid and not too old, brick with red tile roof, but all the trim needed painting, and the grounds were bleak and inhospitable in the hot glare of afternoon. There'd been an attempt at a lawn in front, in the center of the square facing the highway, but it was brown now, and dusty, and the white gravel of the driveways was scattered and threadbare, with scrawny weeds poking up through it in places. I wondered why her husband had let it get in this condition.
The office was on the left. She stopped in front of it. There were two bags of groceries on one of the back seats. I gathered them up, and followed her inside.
The small lobby was cool, and pleasantly dim with the Venetian blinds closed against the harsh sunlight outside. There were two or three braided rugs scattered about the waxed floor of dark blue tile, and several bamboo armchairs with orange and black cushions. A TV set stood in one corner, and in front of a sofa was a long bamboo-and-glass coffee table with a number of magazines on it. On a table against the left wall was a scale model of a sloop. It was about three feet long, and had beautiful lines. Opposite the door was the registration desk, and at the closed end of that a small telephone switchboard and the rack of pigeonholes for the keys. Directly behind the desk was a curtained doorway that apparently connected with their living quarters. Beyond it, somewhere in the rear, I could hear a vacuum sweeper running.
I set the groceries on the desk. She called out, "Josie," and the sound of the vacuum sweeper cut off. A heavy-bodied colored girl in a white apron pushed through the curtains in the doorway. She had a fat, good-natured face and a big mouth overpainted with some oddball shade of lipstick that was almost purple.
Mrs. Lang placed a registration card before me, and nodded toward the bags of groceries. "Take those into the kitchen, will you, Josie?"
"Yes, ma'am." Josie gathered them up and started to turn away.
"Did the plumbers call?" Mrs. Lang asked.
I unclipped my pen and bent over the card to register, wondering-as I had for the past week-why I still gave San Francisco as my address. Well, you had to put down something, and at least that matched the license plates on the car.
"No, ma'am," Josie replied. "Phone did ring a couple of times, but I reckon it was a wrong number. When I answered they didn't say nothin'; they just hung up." She went on out.
I happened to glance up. Mrs. Lang's face was utterly still, but the creamy skin had gone a shade paler, and I had an odd impression she was having to fight for the composure she showed. She looked away.
"Is something wrong?" I asked.
"Oh," she said. She shook her head and forced a smile. "No. I'm all right. It's just the heat."
She turned the registration card around and looked at it. "San Francisco?" she said. "And how are you standing the heat, Mr. Chatham?"
"So you've been there?" I asked.
She nodded. "Once, in August. All I had was summer clothes, and I almost froze. But I loved it; I think it's a fascinating city." She reached back and took a key from one of the pigeonholes. "Take number twelve," she said.
"I'd better pay you now," I said. "How much is it?"
She started to reply, but the telephone rang. The effect on her was almost startling. She went rigid, as if she had been sluiced in the back with ice water, and just for an instant I could see the terror in her eyes. The phone was on the desk, just to the left of her. It rang again, shrilling insistently, and she slowly forced herself to reach out a hand and pick it up.
"Magnolia Lodge," she said in a small voice.
Then the color went out of her face, all of it. She swayed, and I reached out across the desk to try to catch her, thinking she was about to fall, but she merely collapsed onto a stool that was behind it. She tried to put the receiver back on the cradle, but missed. It lay on the blotter with faint sounds issuing from it while she put her face down in her hands and shuddered.
I picked it up. I knew I had no business doing it, but it was pure reflex, and I already had a suspicion as to what I'd hear. I was right.
It was an unidentifiable whisper, vicious, obscene, and taunting, and the filth it spewed up would make you sick. I thought I heard something else, too, in the background. In a minute the flow of sewage halted, and the whisper asked, "Are you hearing me all right, honey? Tell me how you like it."
I clamped a hand over the transmitter and leaned over the desk. Touching her on the arm, I said, "Answer him," and held the instrument before her.
She raised her head, but could only stare at me in horror. I shook her shoulder. "Go on," I ordered. "Say something. Anything at all."
She nodded. I removed my hand from the transmitter. "Why?" she cried but. "Why are you doing this to me?"
I nodded, and went on listening. The soft and whispered laugh was like something crawling across your bare flesh in a swamp. "Because we've got a secret, honey. We know you killed him, don't we?"
I frowned. That wasn't part of the usual pattern. The whisper continued. "We know, don't we, honey? I like that. I like to think about just the two of us-" He repeated some of the things he liked to think. He had a great imagination, with things crawling in it. Then, suddenly, there was a brief punctuation mark of some other kind of sound in the background, and the line abruptly went dead. He had hung up. But maybe not soon enough, I thought.
I replaced the receiver and looked down at the bowed head. "It's all right," I said. "They're usually harmless."
She raised her face then, but uttered no sound.
"How long has he been doing it?" I asked.
"A long-" she whispered raggedly, "long-" She collapsed.
I whirled around the end of the desk and caught her. Carrying her out, I placed her gently on the floor on one of the rugs. She was very light, far too light for a girl as tall as she was. I stood up and called out, "Josie!" and then looked back down at her, at the extreme pallor of the slender face and the darkness of the lashes against it, and wondered how long she had been running along the ragged edge of breakdown.
Josie pushed through the curtains, and looked questioningly at me.
"Have you got any whisky?" I asked.
"Whisky? No sir, we ain't got none." She had taken another step nearer the desk, and now she could see Mrs. Lang on the floor. "Oh, good Lawd in Heaven-"
"Shut up," I said. "Bring me a glass. And a damp cloth."
I hurried out front and brought in my two-suiter bag from the station wagon. There was a bottle of bourbon in it. Josie came waddling back through the curtains. I poured some of the whisky in the glass, and knelt beside Mrs. Lang to bathe her face with the wet washcloth.
"You reckon she goin' to be all right?" Josie asked anxiously.
"Of course," I said. "She's just fainted." I felt her pulse. It was steady enough.
"Ain't you goin' to give her the whisky?"
"Not till she can swallow it," I said impatiently. "You want to strangle her? Where's her husband?"
"Husband?"
"Mr. Lang," I snapped. "Go get him. Where is he?"
She shook her head. "There ain't no Mr. Lang. He's dead."
"Oh," I said.
"You reckon we ought to call the doctor?" Josie asked.
"I don't think so," I said. "Wait a minute."
Mrs. Lang stirred, and her eyes opened. I raised her with an arm about her shoulders, and held the whisky to her lips. She took a drink of it, and coughed, but kept it down. I handed the glass to Josie. "Get some water."
In a moment she was able to sit up. I helped her into one of the armchairs and gave her another drink, mixed with water. Some of the color had come back to her face.
"Thank you," she said shakily.
I waved it off impatiently. "Do you know who he is?"
"No," she said.
"You don't have any idea at all?" She shook her head helplessly. "But you reported it to the police?" She nodded. "Several times."
There was no time to lose. I went over to the phone and dialed Operator. "Give me the sheriff's office."
A man's voice answered after the second ring, and I said, "I'd like to speak to the sheriff-"
"He's not here. This is Magruder; what is it?"
"I'm calling from the Magnolia Lodge," I said. "It's about the psycho that's been calling Mrs. Lang. I think you've had a complaint on it-"
"On the what?"
"A psycho," I repeated. "A nut. He's been bothering Mrs. Lang, calling her on the phone-"
"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said. "What about him?"
"I think I can give you a lead, and if you work fast you may be able to nail him. He just hung up about two minutes ago."
"Hold it, friend. Not so fast. Who are you?"
I took a deep breath. "My name's Chatham. I'm staying at the motel, and I happened to be in the office here when the creep called this time. I listened to him-"
"Why?"
That might not be the stupidest question it would be possible for a police officer to ask, I thought, but it was close. I choked down a sarcastic reply. "Just to see if I could get a lead on where he was calling from."
"And he told you? That was nice of him."
I sighed. "No. I'm trying to tell you. I think I lucked into something that could help you-"
"Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You got his prints over the phone."
"Then you're not interested?"
"Listen, friend," he said coldly, "you think we got nothing to do but pussyfoot around looking for a drunk on a telephone jag? Tell Mrs. Lang if she don't want to listen to this goof, all she's got to do is hang up."
"She can't take much more of it," I said.
"She don't have to answer, does she?"
"A business phone?" I asked coldly.
"I can't help what kind of phone she's got. But nobody's ever been hurt over one of them, believe me."
"I never thought of that," I said. "I'll tell her and everything will be all right." I hung up, burning.
I looked into her face, and it reminded me of a girl I had once known. More than just known. It had been an intimate relationship, the kind you never quite forget. Her name was Beatrice, she was unhappily married, and now I remembered our last night together ... several years before.
She had come to my apartment and she looked like she had something on her mind. We had been sleeping together whenever we could for about six months. I didn't like it-I wanted her to leave her husband, make a clean break. I always thought that she would be happier that way. But she hung on, keeping me on the side, only this night seemed to be a showdown of some kind.
"He knows," she said as soon as I closed the door behind her. "So now what?"
"I told him I'd give you up," she said flatly. I nodded. It figured.
"OK," I said. "You gave me up. Goodbye." I opened the door and she closed it with a bang.
She walked into the bedroom without saying another word to me. I followed, still eager for her, but angry at being relegated to second place.
By the time I got into the bedroom she was taking off her raincoat. She wasn't wearing a thing underneath except her high heels, stockings, and a garter belt. Beatrice was a tall brunette who turned most men into stuttering fools as soon as they saw her.
She lay down on the bed and pawed her lovely cunt. "I can't get enough of you," she said softly. "It's going to be very hard for me."
"I don't have much sympathy," I said. "Why not leave Ken and move in with me?"
She shook her head. "I can't-and I can't tell you why, either."
I stepped out of my pants and climbed atop her on the bed. She gripped my dangling cock and worked it into a full-blown rod, hard, long and thick.
I edged forward on the bed, feeling her soft tits on my backside. I was inches from her face. She liked it like that. Beatrice raised her head and took my erection into her mouth. I worked my hips, more in anger than passion, loving the way she had to open all the way to take my hardness.
Then I scooted down and worked my angry root between her long, shapely legs.
If this was what she wanted, she had come to the right place. When the head of my cock penetrated her cunt, I saw the look of hot pleasure cross her beautiful face. She pulled back her lips in a snarl of pleasure and her large white teeth looked dangerous.
I shoved it in all the way.
She opened her eyes and stared at me and then blinked once or twice. She wasn't used to having it laid in there like that-she preferred a slower technique.
But I didn't care. I wasn't here for her pleasure anymore. There had been a time when I thought that I was, and I made every effort to please her. I thought her husband was the bad guy, but now I was getting the feeling that it wasn't that way at all, and that yours truly had been played for a stud-sucker.
I worked in anger, thrusting hard and deep, enjoying her sexual torment. Even though it hurt, I could see that she was enjoying it, getting off beautifully.
She wrapped her legs around my back as soon as I was all the way in. She urged me on with her heels, and I plunged into her with all the energy I had.
When she came it was like going over Niagara Falls in an inner tube. I didn't even know her name. Then when we cooled off, she dressed and said goodbye and I never saw her again.
Could it be happening again?
CHAPTER TWO
I turned back to Mrs. Lang. Josie had returned to work. She pushed a hand up through the dark hair with that weary gesture she had, and she was still too pale. One of these days she was going to come apart like a dropped plate.
"They ever do anything about it at all?" I asked.
"The first time or two. They sent a deputy out to talk to me. But I'm not sure they even believed me."
That figured, I thought; it was about par for the course.
"He bother any other women, do you know?"
She shook her head. "I don't think so." Then the horror came back into her eyes for a moment, and she cried, "Why does he do it?"
"I don't know," I said. "Why do they jump out of the shrubbery in a park without their clothes on? But they're nearly always harmless."
It occurred to me I was almost as silly as that clown Magruder. Harmless? Well, in any physical sense they were.
She glanced up at me. "Why did you ask me to answer him?"
I shrugged. "Force of habit. I used to be a cop."
"Oh," she said. "You wanted to keep him talking, is that it?"
"Sure. That's your only connection with him, and once he hangs up, he might as well be in another universe. The longer he spews, the more chance there is he'll say something that'll give you a lead. Or that you'll hear something else in the background."
She looked at me with quickened interest. "And you did hear something?"
"That's right. He was calling from a pay phone. That doesn't mean much, of course; they nearly always do. But this one was in a beer joint or restaurant, and I think it could be identified."
"How?" she asked wonderingly. "I mean, how did you find out?"
"Dumb luck," I said. "You play for the breaks, and sometimes you get one. Most of those booths have little fans in 'em, you know; this one did, and the fan had a bad bearing. It was just noisy enough to hear. And I heard a jukebox start up."
I stopped, thinking about it. This creep was off his rocker, but still he was smart enough to hang up when that music started. Well, it didn't mean anything. A sexual psychopath didn't necessarily have to be stupid; he was just unbalanced.
She frowned. "Then they might have caught him? I mean, if they had listened to you?"
"I don't know," I said. "With luck, and enough men to cover all the places in town within a few minutes-" Her county police force was none of my business. Anyway, they could have been swamped, and short-handed. Police forces usually were.
"You say you were a policeman?" she asked. "Then you aren't anymore?"
"No," I said.
I put the bourbon back in the bag and closed it. The room key was on the desk where she'd dropped it. I put it in my pocket. She stood up. Instead of helping her, I watched to see how she handled it. She was a little shaky yet, but apparently all right.
"Thank you for everything," she said.
"How many times have you fainted lately?"
She smiled ruefully. "It was so ridiculous. I think this was only the second time in my life. But why?"
"You ought to see a doctor. You need a checkup."
"That's silly. I'm perfectly healthy." '
"You're running on your reserve tanks now. And when they're empty, you're going to crash. You don't weigh a hundred pounds."
"A hundred and ten. You don't know your own strength."
"Okay," I said. It was none of my business.
I went out and lifted the other bag from the station wagon. No. 12 was across the court in the opposite wing. It was in the corner, and there were three more doors between it and the end; fifteen units altogether. As I put down the bags and fished in my pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the bleak areaway baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it; flagstones, deck chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass-it screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.
The room was nicely furnished with green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a blond dresser with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full-length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and draped window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were cheap and threadbare, the type of thing you'd expect in a $2.50 hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured a drink of the bourbon. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.
It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get ahold of with my hands. Building something. That was it.
You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn't throw away six years' work in five crazy minutes.
I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn't any particular feeling about it anymore, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness; we'd been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone-the job she'd blamed our failure on.
I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she had read about it when it finally happened. She'd married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There'd been no word from her, but there was no reason she should write. She wasn't the kind for that "I told you so" routine, and there wasn't much else to say. I hoped they hadn't sent her that picture, the one they'd run in the Call-Bulletin. It was a little rough. So was the simple caption. Victim of Police Brutality.
I crushed out the cigarette, and sat up. If I spent the whole afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts, I'd be walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Lang, and that telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The Galicia phone directory was over on the dresser. No, I thought sourly, the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?
He'd be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it do?
But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill the afternoon, wouldn't it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet of stationery from the top dresser drawer, and flipped through the yellow pages.
Cafes ... there were eight listed, three of them on one street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote down the addresses.
Taverns ... nine listed.
Beer Gardens ... one, a duplicate listing for one of the taverns.
That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in sport shirt and slacks. As we drove out I noted one of the places on my list was right across the highway. The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish, and said, SILVER KING INN. Well, I'd stop there on the way back.
I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the second block, before one of the cafes, paid the driver, and went in. There was a pay phone, but it wasn't in a booth. The next one was on the other side of the street in the next block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the fan came on, but it wasn't the one. It made no noise at all. I dropped in a dime, dialed four or five digits at random, pretended to listen for a minute, and hung up, retrieving the coin.
Inside a half hour I'd hit nine places, ranging from the glass and chrome and upholstered booths of the KC Steak House to a greasy hamburger and chili dive backed up to the river on Front Street, and from the one good cocktail lounge to dingy beer joints. I had a fairly good picture of the layout of the town. The river and Front Street ran along the west side. South of Springer was another street of business establishments, and then the railroad and a weatherbeaten station, with a colored section beyond the tracks. North of the wide main street were two more paralleling it, with the courthouse on one and a small post-office and Federal Building on the other, and beyond them a school or two and the principal residential area. There were four cross streets, beginning with Front. Springer, which was of course also the highway, was the only east-west street that continued across the river; the others terminated at Front.
But I still hadn't found it. I went on. Most of the places were air-conditioned, and stepping out of them was like walking into an oven. The blacktop paving in the street bubbled and sucked at the soles of my shoes. My shirt was wet with sweat. An hour later, I ground to a halt, baffled. There wasn't a public telephone booth in town that had a noisy fan.
I still had two places on my list, however. One was the Flamingo, the nightclub, with an address on West Highway. But the chances were it wouldn't even have been open at the time he called, around two-fifteen. The other was the Silver King Inn, across the highway from the motel. He wouldn't have called from there, would he? Practically in her lap? But who could guess what a creep would do? I'd go back and hit it. There was a cab stand around the next corner, by the bus station.
I climbed in one, and when we came out on Springer and stopped for the first light, the driver turned and glanced at me over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a pinched-up face, sad brown eyes, and a badly made set of false teeth that were too big and too symmetrical. He looked like a toothpaste commercial.
"Say," he asked, "ain't you the man that had the run-in with Frankie?"
"I wouldn't call it a run-in," I said. "A little fender-gnashing."
"I thought I recognized you. Man, you sure been lookin' the town over, haven't you? I bet I seen you three or four times."
I'd lived all my life in a city, and that hadn't occurred to me. It was a small town. I was a stranger in it, and a pretty big one at that. Add a dark red face, spikey red hair, and you'd never go anywhere unobserved.
"Just wandering around," I said. "Killing time while they fix the car."
"Where you staying?"
"Magnolia Lodge motel."
"Oh," he said.
I frowned at the back of his neck. There it was again, that same strange reaction you couldn't quite put a finger on. I thought of the bystanders at the accident, and that shop foreman at the garage. The light changed. We went on.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Nothing wrong with the motel, I reckon. Little run-down."
"Well, it's a big job for a woman alone. I understand her husband's dead."
"Oh, he's dead, all right."
Maybe I'd run across something new here. Varying degrees of being dead. "What's that mean?"
"That's right, you're from California, ain't you? I reckon the papers didn't play it up so big over there." He had to skid to a stop at the next intersection as the light went red. Then he looked back over his shoulder.
"Lang was murdered," he said.
I didn't say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a soft and filthy laugh, and a whisper. We know you killed him, don't we?
I snapped out of it then. "Well, did they catch the party that did it?"
"Hmmm. Yes, and no."
That was the kind of answer you liked. I sighed, lighted a cigarette, and tried again. "Did they, or didn't they?"
"They got one of 'em," he said. "The man. But they ain't found out to this day who the other one was. Or so they say."
The light came up green then, and he shifted gears and shot ahead in the afternoon traffic. It made no sense at all, of course. I waited for him to go on.
But the driver began talking about one of his buddies and I decided not to push it. He'd come back to the story when he decided to, and any untoward interest from me would probably dry him up.
I let him drone on. I fished out a smoke and fired it up, thinking about the cool evening fog in San Francisco. It's funny what weather can do to you. I felt like I was on Mars, what with the hot humid air in Florida. I didn't understand how the people who lived there could stand it, day in and day out.
Was I lonely for San Francisco? I smiled. It was a helluva town, all right. Crude, yet sophisticated. You could get whatever you wanted in San Francisco. And I had gotten quite a bit in my days there.
There are so many gays in San Francisco that a straight guy pretty much has his pick of some of the most beautiful, stylish women in the world.
Don't think that I didn't abuse that one. I remembered one afternoon, coming out of the St. Francis Hotel after having a couple of drinks. There was a blonde in the lobby, and when she saw me leave the bar, she fell in step behind me and followed me outside.
Just as I was about to cross the street into Union Square, she grabbed my arm and said, "Excuse me-do you live here in San Francisco?"
"Sure do," I said. She was about five-eight, and stacked.
She grinned at my response. "Well," she said, "good for you!"
I wasn't sure what the game was, but she was so damned attractive that I didn't care. "I'm just here on a visit," she said. "But I'm not having a very good time."
"Really?"
"I can't seem to find an escort."
I grinned. "There are services," I said. "You can give them a call, and-"
"That wasn't what I had in mind," she said. "My name's Lori. What's yours?"
I introduced myself and she let me in on it over a few drinks back in the hotel. She was from Spokane, and she had flown to San Francisco after discovering that her husband, a young and prominent executive with an aircraft company, had been carrying on with his secretary for the past year.
She was determined to have a fling on her own, and she had always heard how beautiful and romantic and all the rest of it San Francisco was.
Only nobody told her that half the men are gay and the other half are married.
So when she saw me, a big lunk who, if gay, couldn't be very successful at it, she couldn't resist. "What tipped you off?" I asked. "There are some pretty big, mean-looking guys here."
"Your clothing," she said.
My clothing? I looked down. I was wearing a Brooks Brothers gray wool suit that I'd bought a few years ago. Just a suit.
"No gay in this town would be caught dead in that outfit," she said. "They dress better than the women do!"
Fifteen minutes later we were in her room and she was stripping, casually unconcerned about nudity. I like that in a woman. She acted as if we were sharing a locker in some gym.
She had a body that made my eyes bug. Long, slender legs, with excellent muscle tone-maybe she was a jogger or a tennis player back home.
Lori had the tits of a movie queen, so big that they didn't look real. But best of all, there wasn't a trace of sag in those magnificent orbs. Her pink nipples only added to my growing hunger.
She eyed me with interest. I felt a bit like a bull on parade, because she even went so far as to walk around me, checking me out from all angles. "Do I pass?" I asked.
She nodded, a bright smile on her face. "Best I've seen in a long time," she said. She gripped my prick and quickly jerked it to hardness, then knelt in front of me and jabbed the root into her mouth.
As she knelt there, she fingered herself furiously. This was a girl with a real strong desire, I thought. That secretary of her husband's must be something else, if he's passing this one up for her.
Then she began cupping my balls in her hand and a few seconds later she withdrew my prick from her mouth and lowered her head.
She sucked on my balls gently, knowing full well that it's best to be careful around eggs. It felt wonderful, hot and wet, and her tongue traced its way on my scrotum and made my own tongue beat on the roof of my mouth with delight.
"I don't want to stop," I said, "but there's a nice big bed over there...."
Within seconds she was on her back and I was atop her, my head between her legs and my prick jabbing down into her wet, warm mouth.
She was gasping with pleasure as I licked a groove in her frothy slit. She was all for it, wrapping those thighs of hers around my head, pushing her hot center into my face. I tongued as well as I could, and I felt more and more of my cock disappearing down her throat.
This sure beat returning to my small apartment and watching Hollywood Squares. I gripped each of her legs and ran my tongue along her tan thigh and felt her fingers poking into places they shouldn't be, but it felt good, so what the hell.
Then I sat up and turned around. She was breathless with excitement, her legs open and inviting. "It was sure worth the trip down here," she said softly.
I was about to stick it to her-that was the way I felt, randy and mean-when she turned over and looked at me over her shoulder. "I really like it from behind," she said, wagging the most delicious set of asscheeks at me that I'd seen in a long time.
"Sure," I said. "Here we go!" I worked it between those creamy pillows, loving the feel of her hot, soft flesh as I eased my hardness through to her cunt.
As soon as I touched her hot lips she shivered and raised up on her knees and her legs came apart, and I shot right in, buried to the hilt, and she was working that ass on me so nicely that I felt I was going to come on the first stroke.
But I handled it and reached around her body until my hands were full of those giant, pillow-tits of hers. They were hanging due to her position and they flowed into my cupped hands and the nipples began to harden as soon as I touched them.
She was groaning, her head moving from side to side as I plunged into her. She knew that her other little hole was a tempting target and I don't think she would have minded a bit if I finished her off that way, but all I could think of was the wonderful wet, warm softness that I was feeling. It was good enough for me.
When we hit it, it sounded like the circus had come to town. Sitting in the back of a hot Florida cab, I grinned in memory.
The cabbie was talking again. I listened.
"Course, now, they could have a pretty good idea, what with one thing and another, if you know what I mean. But they just ain't sayin'."
I read him even less. "Wait a minute. It is against the law to kill people around here, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir, it sure is. But the law also says you got to have evidence before you arrest anybody and go to court."
We'd left the business district behind now and were passing the box factory and ice plant at the edge of town. I wished he'd slow down; there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask. "You mean they got one of them," I said, "and he admits there was somebody else, but won't say who? They can't get anything out of him?"
He tossed the words back over his shoulder. "Mister, they won't never get anything out of that feller. He tried to pull a gun on Calhoun, and he was dead before he hit the ground."
"Who's Calhoun?"
"Town cop. Mr. Big that stopped you from clobberin' Frankie."
"Hell, I wasn't going to hit him-" I stopped. Of all the idiotic things to waste time on.
"You look like a man that could take care of hisself just about anywhere, but let me give you a tip. Don't start nothin' with Calhoun."
"I'm not about to," I said impatiently. I was sorry I'd asked.
"You think that's fat. Mister, I got one word for you. It's not fat. You know, I seen that man do things-" He sighed, and shook his head. "Salty. What I mean, he's salty."
I wished he'd shut up about Calhoun and get on with it. "All right," I prodded, "you say one was killed instantly, resisting arrest. So he didn't say anything. Then how do they know there was another one? Did Calhoun catch them in the act?"
"No. That is, not exactly-"
We pulled to a stop before the Silver King. Heat shimmered off the highway, and the glare from the white gravel of the parking area was dazzling. I could hear a jukebox inside, and through the big window opposite us I could see some men drinking coffee at a counter. The driver put his arm up on the back of the seat and turned to look at me.
"What do you mean, not exactly?" I asked.
"Well, it was like this," he said. "When Calhoun jumped this man-Strader, his name was-he was down there in the river bottom about four-thirty in the morning tryin' to get rid of the body. Strader was drivin' Lang's car, and Lang hisself was in the back wrapped in a tarp with his head caved in."
"Yes, I can see where that might look a little suspicious." I said. "But was there anybody else in the car with Strader?"
"No. But there was another car, maybe fifty yards back up the road. It got away. Calhoun heard it start up and saw the lights come on, and he ran for it, but he couldn't catch it. He was just going to put a shot through it, when he stumbled in the dark and fell down. By the time he could find his gun and get up, it had gone around a bend in the road. But he'd already got the license number. They got them little lights, you know, that shine on the back plate-"
"Sure, sure," I said impatiently. "So they know whose car it was?"
"Yeah. It was Strader's"
"Oh," I said. "And where did they find it?"
He jerked his head toward the highway. "Right over there in front of Strader's room in that motel. And the only thing they ever found out for sure was that it was a woman drivin' it."
I said nothing for a moment. Even with this little of it, you could see the ugliness emerging, the stain of suspicion that was all over the town, on everything you touched.
"When did all this happen?" I asked.
"Last November."
Seven months of it, I thought. No wonder you sensed that gray ocean of weariness in back of the eyes when you looked at her, and had the feeling she was running along the edge of nervous breakdown.
"That'll be one dollar," he said. "Outside the city limits."
I handed him two. "Come on. I'll buy you a beer."
CHAPTER THREE
We went inside to air-conditioned coolness. It was an L-shaped building, the front part being a lunchroom. There were some booths to the left of the doorway, and counter with a row of stools in back of the window that looked out on the highway. Swinging doors behind the counter led into the kitchen. There were mounted tarpon on the wall on either side of the swinging doors, and another above the doorway on the right that led into the bar. Two truckers were drinking coffee and talking to the waitress.
The bar was a longer room, running back at right angles and forming the other part of the L.
At the rear, toward the left, were a number of pine booths, a jukebox that had gone silent for the moment, and a telephone booth. I glanced at the latter. It could wait.
In one of the booths a man in a white cowboy-style hat and a blue shirt sat with his back to me, facing a thin dark splinter of a girl who looked as if she might have Indian blood. Two more men were perched on stools at the end of the bar. They looked up at us as we sat down, and one of them nodded to the taxi driver. There was another mounted tarpon, the largest I'd ever seen, above the back bar mirror.
The bartender came over, glanced idly at me, and nodded to the driver. "Hi, Jake. What'll it be?"
"Bottle of Regal, Ollie," Jake replied.
I ordered the same. Ollie put it before us and went back down the bar to where he'd been polishing glasses. He appeared to be in his middle twenties, and had big shoulders, muscular arms, and a wide, tanned face with self-possessed brown eyes.
I took a sip of the beer and lighted a cigarette. "Who was Strader?" I asked.
At the sound of the name, the bartender and both the men down at the end turned and stared sharply. Even after all this time, I thought.
Jake looked uncomfortable. "That was the craziest part of it. He was from Miami. And as far as they could ever find out, he didn't even know Lang."
One of the two men put down his glass. He had long sideburns and the sharp and meddlesome eyes of a troublemaker. "Maybe he didn't," he said. "But he could still have been a friend of the family."
The bartender glanced at him, but said nothing. The other man merely went on drinking his beer. The ugliness of it hung there for a moment in the silence of the room, but it was something they didn't even notice anymore. They were used to it.
"I ain't sayin' he wasn't," Jake protested. "All I'm sayin' is that they ain't never been able to prove he knew either one of 'em."
"Then what the hell was he doing here?" the other demanded. "Why was he registered over there in that motel three times in two months? He wasn't on business, because they never found nobody in town he come to see. Besides, you don't reckon he'd be crazy enough to try to sell Miami real estate around here, do you?"
"How the hell do I know?" Jake asked. "Man crazy enough to try to gun Calhoun might do anything."
"Nuts. You know as well as I do what he was up here for. He was a ladies' man, a regular stud. He was a no-good with a big front and a line of baloney, and some woman was supportin' him half the time."
It was a charming little place, I thought sourly. She stood trial for murder every day-over here, and in all the other bars in town, and every time she pushed a cart down the aisles of the supermarket. I wondered why she didn't sell out and leave. Pride, maybe. There was a lot of it in her face.
Then I reminded myself I was going off halfcocked, and that it was none of my business anyway. I didn't know anything about her; maybe she had killed her husband. Murder had been committed by people who couldn't even tell a lie without blushing. But for the sordid reasons they were hinting at? It didn't seem likely.
"And ain't she from Miami?" the other went on. The way he said it, you gathered being from Miami was an indictment itself.
"Dammit, Rupe," Jake said with sullen defiance, "stop tryin' to make it look like I was taking up for her. Or for Strader. All I'm sayin' is, there's a lot of difference between knowing something and provin' it."
"Proof!" Rupe said contemptuously. "That's a lot of bull. They got all the proof they need. Why you reckon Strader went to all that trouble to try to make it look like an accident?"
I glanced up. That was deadly. And it reminded me of something that had been bothering me and that I'd intended to ask if I ever had the chance.
"Was that the reason for the two cars?" I asked Jake.
I had been momentarily forgotten in their argument, but now abrupt silence dropped over the place, and the chill you could feel had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. Jake gulped the rest of his beer and stood up. "Well, I'd better be hittin' the road," he said. "Thanks, mister." He went out. The others stared at me for a minute, and then returned to their own conversation.
I ordered another beer. Ollie uncapped it and set it before me. He appeared to be the most intelligent and least unfriendly of the lot. "Why two cars?" I asked.
He mopped the bar, looked at me appraisingly, and started to say something, but Rupe beat him to it. The shiny black eyes swung around to me, and asked, "Who are you?"
"My name's Chatham," I said shortly.
"I don't mean that, mister. What have you got to do with this?"
"Nothing," I said. "Why?"
"You seem to be pretty interested, for it to be none of your put-in."
"I'm just studying the native customs," I said. "Where I grew up, people accused of murder were tried in court, not in barrooms."
"You're new around here?"
"I'm even luckier than that," I said. "I'm just passing through."
"How come you're riding a taxi? Just to pump Jake?"
I was suddenly fed up with him. "Shove it," I said.
His eyes filled with quick malice, and he made as if to get off the stool. The bartender glanced at him, and he settled back. His friend, a much bigger man, studied me with dislike in his eyes, apparently trying to make up his mind whether to buy a piece of it or not. Nothing happened, and in a moment it was past.
I fished a dime from my pocket and went back to the telephone. The dark girl and the man in the cowboy hat had apparently been paying little attention to us. The girl glanced up now as I went past. I had an impression she was scarcely eighteen years old, but she looked as if she'd spent twice that long in a furious and dedicated flight from any form of innocence. Her left leg was stretched out under the edge of the table with her skirt hiked up, and the man was grinning slyly as he wrote something on her naked thigh with her lipstick. She met my eyes and shrugged.
I stepped into the booth, and the instant I closed the door, I knew I'd found it. The fan came on with an uneven whirring sound caused by the faulty bearing. I thought swiftly. From the lunchroom in there, he could even have seen her drive in when she returned from town; that was the reason he'd called almost immediately. But the maid had said he'd called twice before while she was out. Well, that meant those were from somewhere else and that he was moving around. The chances were a thousand to one against his being any of the three out there now.
I went through the motions of making a call, and as I left the booth I shot a glance at the literary cowboy. He could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and forty, with a smooth, chubby face like that of an overgrown baby, and had the beginnings of a paunch. The shirt, I noted now, wasn't blue, as I'd thought-at least, not all over. It was light gray in front, with fancy piping, pearl buttons, and flaps on the breast pockets, and was stained in two or three places in front as if he'd spilled food on it. His eyes were china blue and made you think of a baby's except for some quality of yokel shrewdness and sly humor you could see in them as he patted the dark girl on the leg and invited her to read whatever it was he'd written on it. He was probably known as a card.
I went back to my beer. From sheer force of habit I sized up Rupe and his friend, but they were as un-likely as the humorist. Rupe was thin, swarthy, and mean-looking, the one you'd always expect to find at the bottom of it any time there was trouble reported in a bar, but he appeared normal enough otherwise. The other was a big man with thinning red hair and a rugged slab of a face that could probably be tough but wasn't vicious or depraved. He wore oil-stained khakis, and had black-rimmed fingernails as if he was a mechanic.
Asking any questions was futile. The call had come over two hours ago, to begin with, and the air of coldness and suspicion the place was saturated with told me I'd get no answers anyway. I pushed back the beer and started to get up.
"I thought you said you was a stranger around here." It was Rupe.
I scooped up my change. "That's right."
"You must know somebody. You just made a phone call."
"So I did."
"Without looking up the number."
"You don't mind?" I asked. "Where you staying here?" I turned and looked at him coldly. "Across the street. Why?"
"I thought so."
Ollie put down the glass he was polishing. "You leaving?" he asked me. "I'd started to," I said. "Maybe you'd better."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Simple economics, friend. He's a regular customer."
"Okay," I said. "But if he's that valuable, maybe you'd better keep him tied up till I get out."
Rupe started to slide off his stool, and the big redhead eyed me speculatively. "Knock it off," Ollie said quietly to the two of them, and then jerked his head at me. "I don't want to have to call the cops."
"Right," I said. I dropped the change in my pocket, and went out through the lunchroom. The whole thing was petty and stupid, but I had a feeling it was only a hint of what was sub merged here, like the surface uneasiness of water where riptides run deep and powerful far below, or the sullen smoldering of a fire that is only waiting to break out. I wondered why the feeling against her was so bitter. They seemed convinced she was involved in the murder of her husband; but if there was any evidence in that direction, why hadn't she been arrested and tried?
I crossed the highway in the leaden heat of late afternoon, and again was struck by the bleak aspect of the motel grounds as they would appear to the traveler who had slowed and was considering turning in. The place was going to ruin. Why didn't she have it landscaped, or sell out? I shrugged. Why didn't I mind my own business?
She was in the office, making entries in a couple of big ledgers opened on the desk. She looked up at me with a faint smile, and said, "Paper work." I was conscious of thinking she was prettier than I had considered her at first, that there was something definitely arresting about the contrast of creamy pallor against the rubbed-mahogany gleam of her hair. Some faces were like that, I thought; they revealed themselves to you a little at a time, rather than springing at you all at once. Her hands were slender and unutterably feminine, moving gracefully through the confusion of papers.
I stopped inside the door and lighted a cigarette. "He called from the booth in the Silver King," I said.
She glanced up, startled, and I realized I had probably only made it worse by telling her he had been that near.
"How do you know?" she asked. "I mean, have you been-?"
I nodded. "The fan. I checked them out around town till I found the noisy one."
"I don't know how to thank you."
"For what?" I said. "I didn't find him. He'd probably been gone for hours. But you can pass it on to the sheriff, for what it's worth."
"Yes," she said, trying to sound optimistic, but I could tell she had little hope they would ever do anything about it. I was filled with a sour disgust toward the whole place. Why didn't somebody bury it?
I went across to my room and poured a drink. Taking off my sweaty shirt, I lay down on one of the beds with a cigarette, and stared morosely up at the ceiling. I wished now I had belted Frankie while I had the chance. Stranded in this place for at least another thirty-six hours.
You're in sad shape, I thought; you can't stand your own company, and you've got a grouch on at everybody else. The only thing you can do is keep moving, and that doesn't solve anything. You'd feel just as lousy in St. Petersburg, or Miami There was a light knock on the door.
"Come in," I said.
Mrs. Lang stepped inside, and then paused uncertainly as she saw me stretched out in hairy nakedness from the waist up. I made no move to get up. She probably thought I had the manners of a pig, but it didn't seem to matter.
I gestured indifferently toward the armchair. "Sit down."
She left the door slightly ajar and crossed to the chair. She sat with her knees pressed together, and nervously pulled down the hem of her dress, apparently ill-at-ease. "I-I wanted to talk to you," she said, as if uncertain how to begin.
"What about?" I asked. I raised myself on one elbow and nodded toward the dresser. "Bourbon there, and cigarettes. Help yourself."
You're doing fine, Chatham; you haven't completely lost touch with all the little amenities. You can still grunt, and point.
She shook her head. "Thank you, just the same." She paused, and then went on tentatively, "I believe you said you used to be a policeman, but aren't anymore?"
"That's right," I said.
"Would it be prying if I asked whether you're doing anything now?"
"The answer is no," I said. "On both counts. I have no job at all; I'm just on my way to Miami. The reason escapes me at the moment."
She frowned slightly, as if I puzzled her. "Would you be interested in doing something for me, if I could pay you?"
"Depends on what it is."
"I'll come right to the point. Will you try to find out who that man is?"
"Why me?" I asked.
She took a deep breath and plunged ahead. "Because I got to thinking about the clever way you found out where he called from. You could do it. I can't stand it much longer, Mr. Chatham. I have to answer the phone, and sometimes when it rings I'm afraid I'm going to lose my mind. I don't know who he is, or where he is, or when he may be looking at me, and when I walk down the street, I cringe-"
I thought of that farcical meathead, Magruder. Nobody had ever been hurt over a telephone.
"No," I said.
"But why?" she asked helplessly. "I don't have much, but I would be glad to pay you anything within reason."
"In the first place, it's police work. And I'm not a policeman."
"But private detectives-"
"Are licensed. And operating without a license can get you in plenty of trouble. And in the second place, just identifying him is pointless. The only way to stop him is a conviction that will send him to jail or have him committed to a booby-hatch, and that means proof and an organization willing to prosecute. Which brings you right back to the police and the district attorney. If they're dragging their feet, there's nothing you can do about it."
"I see," she said wearily. I detested myself for cutting the ground from under her this way. She was a hell of a lot of very fine and sensitive girl taking too much punishment, and I could feel her pulling at me. What she was, showed all over her, if you believed in evidence at all. She had courage, and that thing that horseplayers call class, for lack of a better word, but they couldn't keep her going forever. She'd crack up. Then I wondered savagely why I was supposed to cry over her troubles. They were nothing to me, were they?
"Why don't you sell out and leave?" I asked.
"No!" The anger of it surprised me. Then she went on, more calmly. "My husband put everything he had left in this place, and I have no intention of selling it at a sacrifice and running like a scared child."
"Then why don't you landscape it? It looks so desolate it drives people away."
She stood up. "I'm aware of that. But I simply don't have the money."
And I had, I thought, and it was the kind of thing I was perhaps subconsciously looking for, but I didn't want to become involved with her. I didn't want to become involved with anybody. Period.
She hesitated at the door. "Then you won't even consider it?"
"No," I said. I didn't like the way she could get through to me, and I wanted to get her and her troubles off my back once and for all. "There's only one way I could stop him, if I did find him. Do you want to hire me to beat up an insane man?"
She flinched. "No! How awful-"
I went on roughly, interrupting her. "I'm not even sure I could. I was suspended from the San Francisco Police Department for brutality, but at least the man I beat up there was sane. I would assume there is a difference, so let's drop it."
She frowned again. "Brutality?"
"That's right."
She waited a minute for me to add something further, and when I didn't, she said, "I'm sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Chatham," and went out and closed the door.
I returned to studying the ceiling. It was no different from a lot of others I had inspected.
Failure....
I'd always wanted to be a cop, and I'd been a pretty good one for six years. And now I was washed up, and had to start over at thirty-one because I'd lost my head for a few minutes. No, I thought; losing my head hadn't been the cause. It was merely another symptom, the one that had finally made me realize I didn't belong in police work, that I'd lost the level-headed impersonal attitude it required. I was no longer a pro; I was a crusader, a fanatic. Nan had seen it coming. She'd tried to warn me, but I wouldn't listen. I'd lost her. And now I'd lost the job that had broken us up.
It was dope. Not taking it; hating it. And hating the people who pushed it. Two years ago I'd been assigned to a narcotics detail, and almost immediately it began to get to me. I didn't know why. It was a dirty business, but then so are lots of things a policeman comes in contact with in his daily work. Maybe it was kids, and what it did to them; a teenager trying to walk up the walls of Juvenile Detention in the agonies of withdrawal isn't a pretty sight. Neither is a sixteen-year-old girl being forcibly treated for VD picked up in trying to finance a thirty-dollar habit.
THE ENDing was inevitable. I beat up a pusher who wisecracked with me. After I drew a 30-day suspension from the force, I decided it would be better for everybody if I resigned. A cop had to be an impersonal upholder of the law, not a fanatical crusader.
I went into town for supper that evening. When I got back, I saw a slim form silhouetted by the light over my door. I didn't recognize her until I got up close. It was the skinny, Indian-looking kid I'd seen in the place across the street, the comedian's girlfriend.
"You looking for me?" I asked.
She shrugged. "You worth looking for?"
"This is my room," I said, trying to move past her.
"Mine's down there," she said, nodding toward a cabin down the line and laying a hand on my arm to restrain me. "Want to take a look at it?"
The invitation was clear enough. She wasn't all that skinny, and she wasn't all that much of a kid, that I felt like turning her down. I allowed myself to be led back to the cabin she had indicated.
She didn't say anything as we walked. I studied her face, a smooth bronze mask with two deep pools of ink for eyes. Her raven hair was in thick braids. She wasn't wearing a bra under her flimsy muslin blouse, and her tits were high and firm. I had been wondering what people did around here for fun at night. It looked like I was about to find out.
"I got a friend," she said unexpectedly as I reached for the door.
"What kind of a friend?" I asked, suddenly wary. Maybe this crazy town had taken it into its head to punish me for consorting with Ida Lang. Maybe this was a trap.
"Take a look."
I stood back and kicked the door open. Another girl, not much older than the first, sat on the bed, staring at me in surprise. She was blonde. Not fat, but there was enough of every thing to grab hold of. I could tell that right away, because she wasn't wearing a stitch.
"Jesus, are you that horny?" the blonde demanded when she recovered from her surprise. "What kind of an animal did you bring, Lulu?"
"A big one," Lulu said, kicking the door shut behind her.
"You big enough for both of us, stud?" the blonde asked, her composure completely returned as she stretched her arms lazily above her head to put her big jiggly tits on display.
"Try this for size, kid," I said, unzipping my pants and flipping out my tool. It had swollen up for action at my first glimpse of the nude blonde.
Lulu reached down to fondle it with the expert interest of a connoisseur. "Not bad at all. Which one of us do you want to do first, big boy?"
"You haven't even introduced me to your friend yet," I said, jerking my thumb toward the blonde. "And you seem kind of overdressed."
"That's Brenda," she said, immediately taking steps to remedy my second complaint. She wiggled her snaky hips out of her tight jeans and cast her blouse aside. There wasn't much to her, but what there was, was perfect, a slim bronze spear of flame in the lamplight.
Taking Lulu by her tight little ass, I led her over to the bed and sat her down beside Brenda. Standing in front of them, I gave them each a thorough survey as I stripped for action. From the greedy stares of their hot eyes, the way they licked their lips at the sight of me, I knew I was in at last for a night of fast and furious fucking.
Before I could make my choice, Lulu leaned forward and seized my cock in her mouth. Watching with the interest of a true voyeur, Brenda kept her eyes on the action and absentmindedly began fingering her pussy. I rocked back and forward on the balls of my feet, sliding my long hot shaft in and out of Lulu's cherry-painted, hotly puckered lips.
"My turn," Brenda said, shoving her aside when she could stand merely to watch no longer.
Next thing I knew, Brenda was gobbling my dork, lavishing all of her considerable talents on its thick length. But Lulu, now that her appetite for cock had been whetted by a taste of mine, refused to be left out of the action. She leaned down to lick my balls while Brenda sucked my dick.
They soon worked out an interesting routine. They did it so smoothly I got the impression that they'd had plenty of practice. This must be what they did for kicks every night, instead of their homework.
First Brenda would suck my dick while Lulu licked my balls and tongued that portion of my tingling tool that the voluptuous blonde couldn't fit between her bee-sting lips. Then they would switch, with Lulu sucking and Brenda going down to titillate my testicles and the surplus of my immersed pecker. Sometimes they would alternate in rapid-fire succession, each one taking a quick suck before relinquishing my dick to her partner. It was a class act.
Then they tried a new variation. Each girl flicked her tongue up and down one side of my dick, giving it constant stimulation without actually sucking it. They moved so fast and so deftly in their intricate tongue-twisting that it was almost as good as having my prick sunk to the hilt in one or the other of their mouths.
It was so good, as a matter-of-fact, that I suddenly realized I was losing control. "Argh!" I cried. "Somebody, one of you-for Christ's sake-suck it!"
"You have to decide," Brenda mumbled, not missing a beat of her tongue-tickling witchery as she spoke.
"You choose," Brenda urged.
I don't think I made a conscious choice. There just wasn't time. I thrust blindly, and my rampaging prick wound up in the mouth of Lulu, the sultry Seminole, at the very instant that it erupted creamy torrents of gism. I rammed it all the way home, burying the head down in her throat and suffocating her with a nose full of pubic hair, riding her down onto the bed while she grunted beneath me.
Uncomfortable though it must have been for her, she was a cocksucking maniac, and she managed to take it all and suck it hard. She seemed to pull the hot spurts all the way up from my balls with her determined suction, finding more semen than I thought I had in me.
"Shit!" Brenda cried. "Lulu always gets them to cum in her mouth."
"Honest," I gasped as I finally unshipped my wet red tool from the depths of Lulu's ravaged gullet,"
"she was closer, that's all. If I knew it meant so much to you, I would have cum in your mouth."
Brenda still grumbled, but Lulu instantly mollified her by rolling over on her belly and slithering her head in between the blonde's big rounded thighs. Hardly pausing for breath after taking the full length of my cock and its explosive charge, she was busy at work eating Brenda's pussy.
Such a show never fails to grip my full interest, and I lay back on the bed and lit a cigarette while I watched the two succulent chicks at play. At first Lulu did all the work, but before long Brenda had completely gotten over her attack of the sulks and stretched out at full length on top of the ravishing redskin, eating Lulu's cunt while Lulu did a thorough number on hers.
All I needed to make my pleasure complete was Ida Lang herself, accompanied by Josie, the devastating black maid, and the five of us could suck and fuck and feel and fondle and lick the night away. But I realized that it was foolish to lie around wishing for more pussy when I'd barely scratched the surface of the possibilities that were wide open to me. The instant my dick began to tingle with renewed vigor, I snuffed out my half-smoked cigarette and gave the situation a thorough survey prior to choosing my next target of opportunity.
The welter of struggling limbs, bronze and rosy white, the number of available holes within reach of my swelling prick, gave me pause, but only for a moment. The quivering white cheeks of Brenda's big ass seized my interest above all else. Her cunt was plastered right down on Lulu's lecherous mouth, but I figured there was room to squeeze in there.
I knelt behind the big blonde and angled my prick, now stiff and hard as ever, down beneath her ass to the compressed opening of her cunt.
Lulu saw me coming, and she moved lower to work on Brenda's clit and give me room to enter. While she sucked on the blonde's lovebutton, her big dark eyes stayed fixed in lustful fascination on my prick. When finally I slid the head into Brenda's box, the shaft squeezed right alongside Lulu's cute little nose.
"Oh, God, yes, that's what I need!" Brenda squealed. "I forgive you for coming in her mouth-just as long as you give me the kind of fucking I need!"
Brenda might have said more, but the impatient aborigine grabbed her by her hair and shut her up by ramming her face down into her crotch again. Soon Brenda was hard at work on Lulu's cunt again, with only her moans and whimpers of pleasure indicating how much she liked the inward, squeezing thrust of my big cock.
Brenda's cunt was a little too crowded for comfort, I soon discovered. My balls barely had room to scrape past Lulu's face on each inward stroke. Matters were complicated by Lulu's eagerness to lick my dick, now that it was within licking range, and Brenda would squirm and wiggle with impatience whenever the other girl took her mouth away from her cunt to do it.
I decided to go where it was less crowded. I pulled my cock out of her cunt. It was all slimed with her pussy-juice, a perfect lubricant to ease the task I had in mind. I pressed the head firmly against her tight pink asshole and began to grind it inward.
"Get outta there, you-muff!" Brenda cried, or tried to, because her last words were cut off by Lulu's thighs as they gripped her head and pulled it down once more into her snatch.
"Do it!" Lulu mumbled around her mouthful of cunt. "Give her a good butt-fucking-nobody's done it to her yet, and I think it's high time she found out what she was missing."
It didn't matter what either of them had to say on the subject. My itching cock was doing my thinking for me now, and its only thought was to explore the innermost limits of Brenda's virginal bung-hole. I gripped her big fleshy ass firmly in both hands and twisted and thrust to corkscrew my prick deeper and deeper inside.
Pausing for breath, I knelt upright to take a good look, and found that all my efforts had succeeded only in burying the swollen head of my prick. Around its engorged girth, the ring of Brenda's asshole was shiny and purple with the strain of being stretched so far.
But I didn't stop, even though it was beginning to hurt me as much as it did her. The film of slimy pussy-juice that coated my cock was beginning to dry in the open air, and I would need its full lubrication to succeed. I forced my way inward, inch by slow inch, clawing at Brenda's buns for leverage until they burned bright red under my clawing fingers.
Seeing my difficulties, Lulu abandoned her efforts on the blonde's cunt and devoted all her attention to my prick, lapping at it with her saliva-coated tongue at the point where it was disappearing into Brenda's anus. That touch of delicious wetness was all the lubricant it needed, and soon the work went easily.
Brenda still struggled and bucked, but slim little Lulu was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked. The grip of her wiry thighs never slacked on Brenda's head, and her slim but muscular arms locked around the other girl's back in a vise-like grip. Brenda was meat on the hook, an irresistible piece of meat, while I kept pushing the hook deeper and deeper into her cherry ass.
At last I succeeded beyond all my expectations. My balls were squeezed up tight against her cunt, my pubic hair was nestled deep in the crease of her ass, and my cock was buried, every last possible inch of it, in her asshole. Lulu continued to lick my balls, the only parts of my genital equipment that she could now reach.
"God damn it, I feel like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey!" Brenda growled when Lulu at last slackened her grip and gave her a little room to breathe.
She sighed with relief when I began to remove the stuffing, but I was doing it only so I could put it back again, and she groaned once more as it began its inward slide. But before long she began to relax her uptight sphincter and learned to admit it as easily as she could to her cunt. She even began to enjoy it, and Lulu was able to ease her restraints and get back to the interrupted business of tonguing and sucking the blonde's pussy.
Even after she had relaxed thoroughly, Brenda's asshole was still tight and hotter and dryer than her pussy, so I was forced to move much more slowly than I would have liked. It seemed I went at a snail's pace as I fucked her in the ass, when I would have liked to gallop. But even that gave an extra little thrill to the task, so that when I finally let fly a load of cum into her rectal passage, it was one of the most satisfying ejaculations of the evening.
There were many more. I lost track and dozed off somewhere toward dawn, tangled in a heap with the two sexy girls. I was awakened sometime that morning by Josie's blood-curdling screams.
I disentangled myself, dressed and left the two girls to their dreams.
It seemed that someone who had registered during the night had wrecked one of the rooms with acid. When I called the police with his license number from the motel registration card, I discovered that the license number was my own. The vandal had apparently stolen my license plates.
CHAPTER FOUR
I found Ida sitting in the room with Josie. Fighting down the anger, I stepped over to her and knelt beside Ida's chair. "Can you describe him?" I asked.
Her head was bowed again, and her hands trembled as they pleated and unpleated a fold of her skirt. She was slipping back into the wooden insularity of shock. I hated to hound her this way, but when the doctor arrived, he'd give her a sedative, and it might be twelve hours before I could talk to her again.
"Can you give me any kind of description of him?" I asked gently.
She raised her head a little and focused her eyes on me, and drew a hand across her face in a bewildered gesture. She took a shaky breath. "I-I-"
Josie shot me an angry and troubled glance. "Hadn't you ought to leave her alone? The poor child can't take no more."
"I know," I said.
Mrs. Lang made a last effort. "I'm all right." She paused, and then went on in a voice that was almost inaudible and was without any expression at all. "I think he was about thirty-five ... about six feet, but very thin. He had sandy hair, and pale blue eyes, and he'd been out in the sun a lot. You know, wrinkles in the corners of the eyes ... bleached eyebrows...."
Her voice trailed off.
"You're doing fine," I told her. "Can you think of anything else?"
She took a deep breath. "He had on a white shirt ... but no tie."
"Any distinguishing marks? Scars, things like that?"
She shook her head.
A car came to a stop in the gravel outside. I stood up. "What's the doctor's name?" I asked Josie.
"Dr. Graham," she said.
I went out. A youngish man with a pleasant, alert face and a blond crewcut was slamming the door of a Chevrolet sedan. He had a small black bag in his hand.
"Dr. Graham? My name's Chatham," I said. We shook hands, and I told him quickly what had happened. "On top of all the rest of it, I suppose it overloaded her. Hysteria, shock-I don't know exactly what you'd call it. But I think she's on the edge of a nervous breakdown."
"Yes, I see. We'd better have a look at her," he said politely, but with the quick impatience of all physicians for all lay diagnosis. I followed him inside.
He spoke to her, and then frowned at the woodenness of her response. "We'd better get her into the bedroom," he said. "If you'll help-"
"Just bring your bag," I said.
She tried to protest and stand, but I picked her up and followed Josie in through the curtained doorway behind the desk. It was a combined living room and dining room. There were two doorways opposite. The one on the right led into the bedroom. It was cool and quiet, with the drapes closed against the sun, and furnished with quiet good taste. The rug was pearl gray, and there was a double bed covered with a dark blue corduroy spread. I placed her on it.
"I'm all right now," she said, trying to sit up. I pushed her gently back onto the pillow. Framed by her dark and tousled hair, her face was like a white wax.
Dr. Graham placed his bag on a chair and was taking out the stethoscope. He nodded for me to leave. "You stay," he said to Josie.
I went back through the Outer room. It had a fireplace at one end, and there were a number of mounted fish on the walls and some enlarged photographs of boats. I thought absently that the fish were dolphin, but I paid little attention to them. I was in a hurry. I grabbed up the phone in the office and called the sheriff.
"He's not here," a man's voice said. "This is Redfield. What can I do for you?"
"I'm calling from the Magnolia Lodge-" I began. "Yes?" he interrupted. "What's wrong out there now?" The voice wasn't harsh so much as it was abrupt and impatient, and somehow annoyed.
"Vandalism," I said. "An acid job. Somebody's wrecked one of the rooms."
"Acid? When did it happen?"
"Sometime between two a.m. and daylight."
"He rented the room? Is that it?" In spite of the undertone of annoyance or whatever it was, this one obviously had more on the ball than that comedian I'd talked to yesterday. There was a tough professional competence in the way he snapped the questions.
"That's right," I said. "How about shooting a man out here?"
"You've got a license number? Description of the car?"
"The car's a green Ford sedan," I replied, and quickly repeated her description of the man. "The license number was a phony. The plates were stolen."
"Hold it a minute!" He cut in brusquely. "What do you mean, they're stolen? How would you know?"
"Because they were mine. My car's in the garage, being worked on. The Chevrolet and Buick agency-"
"Not so fast. Just who are you, anyway?"
I told him. Or started to. He interrupted me again. "Look, I don't get you in this picture at all. Put Mrs. Lang on."
"She's collapsed," I said. "The doctor's with her. How about getting a man out here to look at that mess?"
"Stick around. We'll want to talk to you," he said, and he hung up.
I wasn't going anywhere. It suddenly occurred to me to be suspicious of the providential appearances of those two teenage temptresses. While I'd been having a ball with the blonde and the Seminole, somebody had figured it would be a good time to trash Ida's place. Maybe they had been sent to distract me. Maybe they could answer some of my questions. The biggest question in my mind was: Did they feel like having another go at it?
I hurried back to the cabin where they were still sprawled naked on the bed, out cold from last night's debauch. I jerked them off the bed and hurried them into the shower, shedding my own clothes on the way. They didn't really wake up until the hot water started to hit them.
"What the hell!" Lulu shrieked, struggling to free her slick wet body from my embrace.
"Shut up, kid. You don't expect me to eat your cunt when it's still full of last night's cum, do you?"
That shut her up, and she went to work soaping up her pussy while I shook the other sleeping beauty awake. She just sagged into my arms and began running her motor before she was fully conscious, rubbing her monumental tits against me and humping against my hard cock with her matted cum-crusted pussy.
"Knock it off, blondie," I said, shaking her some more. "A dirty mind in a clean body, that's my motto. Give my cock a wash, if you want something useful to do."
Her baby blues snapped open at last. She took the soap from Lulu and worked up a rich, foamy lather around my balls, spreading it onto my stiff cock, then down my legs and up my belly and chest. Then Lulu soaped up my ass. The feel of their busily caressing little hands drove my excitement up to a feverish pitch, but I held it under tight control, relishing the exquisite sensations that only a lot of warm soapy water and a lot of willing teenage cunt can give a man.
After I twisted around in the delightful crowded confines of the stall to rinse myself under the sting of a thousand hot needles, I took the soap and went to work on Lulu, lathering up her cunt and spreading the foam all over her slim nubile body. She twisted and arched her back, moaning with pleasure, digging it every bit as much as I had.
"Why don't you soap me up, too, Charlie?" . Brenda pleaded, pressing her nude wet body against my back, raking me with her diamond-hard nipples.
I turned, having soothed my hands all over Lulu's water-slicked body. I had just enough room to turn around between them in the narrow space, but that made it all the more pleasant. It seemed I was pressed everywhere by soft feminine flesh while the hot spray washed over us.
Brenda's tits looked good enough to eat, beaded all over with the glittering droplets. Before I began to soap her, I lowered my face and sucked one of her boobs into my mouth. Lulu pressed her soapy body against my back and reached between my legs to tickle my balls.
With all this stimulation, my cock felt like it was going to crowd us all out of the shower. I had wondered if it would ever get stiff again after the last round last night, when I had alternated rapid-fire fucking of these two girls, giving first Brenda five or six strokes, then Lulu, then switching back, doing it so fast and furiously that I made both of them cum at about the same time.
"Are there any more like you?" I asked Brenda, wondering if I could improve on my record with five or six chicks at once.
"There are three of them, plus my Mom, who looks like Angie Dickinson and can fuck rings around the four of us, but I wouldn't worry about that at the moment."
"You've got your hands full right now," Lulu agreed, and that was true, they were full of the blonde's tits, just as Lulu's hands were full of my prick and balls.
"What I'd like to fill up at the moment is my mouth," I said, squirming down between Lulu and Brenda until I was on my knees in the shower.
"Oh!" Brenda cried in surprise, and then she sighed with pleasure when I lifted my face and began licking her cunt. Warm water ran down the vee of her crotch in twin rivulets to splash over my chin as I ate her. She gripped my hair to maintain her balance in the slippery stall as I licked and sucked her dripping hair pie.
The shower curtain was yanked back abruptly and someone peered inside. Kneeling between the two girls, with the spray of the shower falling on my face, I couldn't see who it was, but I was horrified by the thought that it might be Ida. I was afraid she might think less of me if she found me in a situation like this.
"Who the hell are you?" I demanded, trying to brazen it out.
"My name's Frannie," she said, taking a big load off my mind.
"It's my Mom, that I was telling you about," Brenda grumbled. "Speak of the devil."
"Don't sass me, miss. I figured you'd be here in this den of iniquity. I was going to give you hell and drag you home by the hair if I found you just sleeping off another all-night gangbang, but seeing as your boyfriend is still here and so pretty-looking a fella, I'll just ask if I can join in."
"Come on in," I said, "the water's fine."
I had doubted Brenda's description of her mother, but when she pulled the curtain back all the way to reveal herself in stark-naked glory, I had to admit that the girl had done her justice. Her body was even lither and firmer than that of her somewhat overblown daughter. She certainly didn't look like the mother of such a well-developed young lady.
"Here, lover, try this flavor," she said, squatting slightly as she entered the shower and arching her pelvis forward to rub my ear with her muff. I turned from Brenda to plant a kiss on the tender flesh of her mother's pussy, untouched yet by the shower but already damp with its own seeping juices.
After I'd had a thorough taste of Frannie, I went back to my unfinished work on Brenda. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lulu slide her hand up the older woman's leg to finger her cunt.
"Hey, are you queer?" Frannie demanded.
"Sometimes," Lulu said candidly. "You don't want your pussy to get cold, do you? After all, Charlie's got only one mouth, and that's pretty full at the moment."
"It'd be frozen solid if I had to depend on this son of a bitch to keep it warm," she said, giving me a shove. "What do you see in my daughter that you don't see in me?"
"Give me time, honey," I mumbled around Brenda's muff.
At that moment Lulu moved forward to straddle my shoulders and rinse off the lather that covered her. I felt the hot suds sluicing from her body to run down my back.
"I think the soap's all off my cunt now, Charlie," the ravenous redskin said. "You feel like checking it out now?"
I struggled around on my knees until I faced Lulu. I had barely raised my face, blinded by the spray, when she shoved her cunt down hotly on my mouth. The taste of soap was gone now, but so was the characteristic taste of her delicious pussy. I had to content myself with enjoying merely the texture of the soft hairy delight without its fragrant taste and aroma.
At last under my skillful tonguing Lulu's juices began to flow freely, giving her pussy a definite taste of its own, when she abruptly turned it away from me. Her slick thigh rubbed my cheek, and the next thing I knew she had presented the wet dimpled cheeks of her ass to me.
"How about a rim-job, honey?" she wheedled. "That's one thing you never did get around to giving me last night."
Licking a girl's asshole was not high on my list of favorite things, but hers was such a pretty, puckered little bud, and she had asked so nicely, that I didn't see how I could deny her the pleasure. She leaned forward to urge me on, thrusting the voluptuous tawny hemispheres slightly upward.
"Doesn't anything disgust you people?" Frannie demanded-and then she added, with a giggle: "If not, I guess I've come to the right place."
"When you get finished licking, Charlie, how about fucking me in the butt?" Lulu asked sweetly. "I really got off last night watching you do that to Brenda, and you never did get around to me."
Her words made me tingle with excitement. Doing it to Brenda had been a special thrill for me, too. Now, with my tongue buried in Lulu's rectum, the idea was irresistibly appealing. I squirmed to my feet while she bent forward even further, gripping a towel bar for balance as she thrust her ass back. I guided my prick with my hand until the head nudged against the tiny opening. At the first pressure, its soap-slicked length began to slide easily inward.
"I can do that, too, you know!" Frannie cried in exasperation. "Are you one of those fellas that just gives a girl a lick and a promise?"
"You'll get your turn," I said, confident that I could keep this erection up for a long, long time after last night's herculean bout of cumming.
"I ought to be home feeding the alligators," Frannie grumbled. "They get nervous and irritable if ... oh, my, that feels good!"
I turned to see that Brenda was kneeling behind her succulent mother. The shower was damned crowded, but through the steamy haze and the luscious tangle of female flesh, I could discern that the voluptuous blonde was tonguing her ass. Frannie wriggled slightly forward, and I felt a rhythmic pressure as the older woman began to play with the Indian girl's pussy.
Lulu groaned, spreading her feet wider, leaning forward even more, as the last inches of my hot prick squeezed its way into her ass. The inward slide had been so easy that I was sure she'd played this game more than once. My excitement mounted feverishly as I looked down to see the bulging stem of my cock protruding from the wide-stretched rim at the base of her delicious ass cleft. I began stroking inward and downward, forcing her to grip the towel bar until her knuckles turned white.
The squeeze of Lulu's asshole had been delicious until now, but suddenly a new thrill was added that made the experience pleasurable beyond anything I had previously imagined. It was as if a pair of parallel ridges had developed inside the scalding tube that pressed against the head of my cock. I felt them squeezing and tickling me as I drove in and out. I couldn't explain it, but then I saw that Frannie was grinning at me, amused by my look of bafflement.
"How do you like that?" she asked.
"How do you know...?"
"I've got two fingers inside the redskin bitch's cunt. Feel?"
I felt Lulu's rectum give a little twitch as Frannie spoke, and I realized what was happening. Frannie's fingers, squeezed deep inside Lulu's cunt, were pressing the membrane that separated the two passages against the head of my prick.
"Wow, that's what I call attention!" Lulu cried. "It's almost too much of a good thing."
"How about if I eat you, will you let me have a turn on his cock?" Frannie asked eagerly. "I'm just about dying for it, if I get any more horny I'll go home and get one of the 'gators to fuck me."
"Well ... okay," Lulu said.
"All right, Charlie. Only I want mine in the cunt now. We can do all the fancy stuff later," Frannie said, tugging at my arm.
I was reluctant to release my cock from the clutch of the sexy Seminole's asshole, but the prospect of getting into the statuesque alligator farmer was a powerful inducement. Lulu sighed as I pulled my throbbing prick out of her rectum, and I believed at least half her sigh was due to relief. Experienced or not, I doubted she'd ever taken on a cock as big as mine in her ass before.
At Frannie's instructions, I leaned against the wall of the shower and inched down until I was squatting on my haunches, and then I worked my legs out through the tangle until I was sitting on the wet floor. My face pressed into Frannie's firm belly for a moment as she worked her way down over me. Her tits rubbed my mouth as she squatted further, and then I gasped as I felt an excruciating trickle of warmth and wetness lowering over the head of my prick, coming down on me as slightly as a gentle rain. Her cunt was every bit as good as I'd imagined. It seemed all the more squirmy and moist in comparison to Lulu's asshole.
Soon my mind wandered off into a euphoric haze of female flesh glowing rosily from the humid heat of the shower and the even hotter humidity of their inflamed pussies, a dream of running water and bulging breasts and dimpled buttocks, probing fingers and soft stickiness, hot kisses and lecherous squeezes, strokes and sighs and squeals and moans and grunts, with the piston plunges of Frannie's driving hips and my own hot cock in the center of the action. Soon I felt my cock begin to throb, to pump cum out of my balls and hurl it upward to flood Frannie's cunt with spraying jets of gism.
They wanted me to stay in the shower, but I already felt like I was growing webs between my toes, and I had work to attend to. I went back to my own cabin and found the name of a private investigator, Victor Lane, in the Miami directory. I called and asked him to get me all the dope he could on Strader, and to call me back at the motel.
I had just left my cabin when a deputy named Magruder showed up to check the ruined cabin. He wasn't much interested. I asked if he would at least look at the acid jugs.
"Well, what about the jugs? They had acid in 'em. So I know that already."
I was beginning to get it now, though not the reason for it. Even this scenic and posturing hero wasn't that stupid. He knew what you did with those jugs. You checked them for prints; you found out what kind of acid had been in them; then you found out where they'd been stolen from, and how, and went on from there. It was a deliberate goof-off.
"Then you're not interested? Is that it?"
"I didn't say that, did I?"
"How do you get hold of the sheriff of this county?" I asked. "Is there a password, or something? I've tried the office twice-"
"Try the Mayo Clinic," he suggested. Then he added. "It's in Minnesota."
"Thanks," I said. "But maybe somebody's in charge while he's gone? It's happened."
"Sure," he said. "Redfield."
"I see."
"You remember him; you talked to him on the phone." He grinned. "He mentioned it."
"Sure," I said, "I remember him. That's what puzzles me. He sounded like a cop."
He turned and stared coldly. "What do you mean by that?"
"Did he tell you to goof off? Or is it your idea?"
"He did tell me to find out who the hell you are," he snapped. "Turn around and put your hands against the wall."
"Cut it out," I said.
"Turn around!"
I sighed, and put my hands against the wall. He shook me down for the gun he knew I didn't have. Then he caught me by the shoulder and whirled me around facing him, and did it again. He managed to get an elbow under my chin a couple of times, pull my shirt tail out, and step on my feet, but as a rough frisk it was pretty crude. Any rookie could have done better. Humiliation is the only object of it, anyway, and without an audience it's pointless. He stepped back.
"You through?" I asked. "You got any identification?"
"It's in my hip pocket. You've been over it three times."
"Give it here."
I took out the wallet, deliberately removed the money from it, and handed it to him. His face reddened. He shuffled through the identification.
His eyes jerked up at me. "A cop, huh?"
"I was one," I said, "What are you doing around here?"
"I'm going to wash the acid out of that room, as soon as we finish this comedy routine."
"I mean, what're you hanging around for? What have you got to do with this place? And Mrs. Lang?"
"I'm staying here, while they fix my car."
"How come you're working for her? Can't you pay for your room?"
"Let's just say she's a friend of mine. And I thought she needed help."
"A friend, huh? How long have you known her?"
"A little less than a day."
He gave me a cold smile. "You sure make friends fast. Or maybe she does."
"Tell me something," I said. "How does it happen she can't get any police protection?"
"Who said she couldn't?"
"Look around you."
"What do you expect us to do?" he asked.
"Stay out here night and day because people don't like her?"
"Who doesn't?" I asked. "If you're supposed to be a cop, I'd think that would suggest something to you. It's just barely possible the guy who dumped that acid in there didn't like her."
"Round up half the people in town? Is that it?"
"You know better than that. There's not a half-dozen people in any town that'd do a job like this."
I was wasting my breath. He turned away, and stepped down on the gravel. "Here's your stuff," he said, and tossed the wallet on the concrete at my feet.
"Thanks," I said.
"Don't mention it. And there's one more thing. If it was me, I'd be plenty careful who I got mixed up with around here. She's going to have all the police attention she wants one of these days."
"Yes?" I said. I'd been wondering if he'd come out and say it. "Why?"
"If you've been around here a day, you know why. She killed her husband."
"Then you don't arrest people for that around here, and try them?" I asked. "You just let hoodlums burn their places down with acid?"
"You arrest 'em as soon as you've got a case," he said. "You're able to tell everybody how to run a police department, you ought to know that."
"Did you ever hear of slander?" I asked.
He nodded. "Sure. And did you ever try to prove it without witnesses?"
He went over and started to get in his car. "Wait a minute," I said. He paused and turned.
I reached down and picked up the wallet. "You wanted to see me do it, didn't you? I wouldn't want to spoil your whole day."
He stared coldly, but said nothing as he drove off.
CHAPTER FIVE
I located the electrical distribution box and killed the circuits in that wing of the building so I wouldn't electrocute myself with the hose. Changing into swimming trunks, I went to work. I stood in the doorway playing the hose on walls and ceiling and furniture until water began running over the threshold. I broke open a half-dozen boxes of the soda and scattered it around, and washed down some more. When I tried to move the bedclothes, drapes, and mattresses, they tore into rotten and mushy shreds, so I found some garden tools and raked them out onto the gravel, along with all the carpet I could tear up. It was sickening.
Even as diluted as the stuff was now, it kept stinging my feet when I had to step off the boards. I played the hose on them to wash it off. In about fifteen minutes I had the worst of it out. I dragged the bed frames and headboards, the dresser, the two armchairs, and the night table out onto the concrete porch and played the hose on them some more and scattered the rest of the soda over the wet surfaces. I showered and changed back into my clothes, and went over to the office. Josie said Mrs. Lang was sleeping quietly. She brought me the keys to the station wagon.
"Turn on the NO VACANCY sign," I said. "And if anybody comes in, tell him the place is closed."
She looked doubtful. "You reckon Miss Ida goin' to like that? She's kind of pinched for money."
"I'll square it with her," I said. "She needs rest more than she needs money, and we're going to see she gets it."
That wasn't the only reason, but I saw no point in going into it now. I drove into town and parked near the garage. In the repair department a mechanic was working on the Buick, unbolting the old radiator. He looked up and nodded.
"Borrow one of your screwdrivers?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "Here."
I went around back and tested one of the screws holding the rear license plates. It came loose freely. So did the other one. You could even see where he'd put machine oil on the threads to break them loose. I heard footsteps beside me, and looked up. It was the sour-faced shop foreman in his white smock.
He nodded. "What's all the whoop-de-do with the license plates? Man from the sheriff's office was fiddlin' with 'em a while ago. And dusting powder over them."
"Which man?" I asked.
"You wouldn't know him. That hard case."
"Magruder?"
He shook his head. "That's the one thinks he's hard. This one is. Kelly Redfield."
I thought he'd sounded like a good cop. He screamed about it and for some reason tried to slough it off, but in the end he had to come and see.
"What'd he say?" I asked. "Say? That guy? He wouldn't give you the time of day."
"But he did tell you where they broke in?" Surprise showed for an instant on the sour and frozen face before he brought it under control again. "How'd you know? He said there was a busted pane in the washroom window. And he wanted to know if we'd missed anything."
"Have you?"
He shook his head. "Not as far as we can tell yet."
"How about battery acid?"
"We haven't got any."
Well, he'd stolen it somewhere in this area, because he had it here at two a.m. He couldn't have gone very far after it. Maybe Redfield had some ideas. I should be able to catch him at the office.
It was at the rear of the courthouse, a dreary room floored with scarred brown linoleum and smelling of dust and sweeping compound. The wall at the right was banked with steel filing cabinets, and across the room at desks near a barred window Magruder and a bull of a man with red hair were doing paper work. The wall at my left was filled with bulletins and wanted posters. A large overhead fan circled with weary futility, stirring the heat. At the left end of the room there was a water cooler and a doorway leading into an inner office.
Magruder came over. I noticed he still wore the heavy gun belt and the .45 even while shuffling papers. Maybe he wore it to bed. "What do you want now?" he asked.
"I want to talk to your boss."
At that moment a lean-hipped man in faded khakis came out of the inner office with a handful of papers which he tossed on one of the desks. Magruder jerked his head at me. "Kelly, here's that guy now."
Redfield turned with a quick, hard glance. "Chatham?"
"That's right," I said.
"Come in here."
I followed him into the inner office. An old roll-top desk stood against the wall at the left. On the right there were two filing cabinets and a hat-rack on which were draped his jacket, a black tie, and a shoulder holster containing a gun. A locked, glass-fronted case held four .30-30 carbines. One barred window looked out onto a parking area paved with white gravel.
He nodded toward the straight chair at the end of the desk. "Sit down."
Without taking his eyes off me, he groped in the pocket of the jacket for cigarettes. He lighted one, not offering them to me, and flipped the match into the tray on his desk. He was a man of thirty-six or eight, with an air of thorough competence about him that matched the way he had sounded on the telephone. The face was lean, the jaw clean-cut and hard, and he had a high and rounded forehead and thinning brown hair. The hard-bitten eyes were gray. It was a face with intelligence in it, and character, but for the moment at least, no warmth at all.
"All right, Chatham," he said, "what are you after around here?"
"Magruder told you," I said. "You sent him to find out."
"I did. And you don't make any sense. Start making some."
He irritated me, and puzzled me at the same time. Honest, hard-working professional cop was written all over him, and he hadn't been able to resist a police problem, but why the antagonism? "Were there any prints on those plates?" I asked.
"No," he said curtly. "Of course not. And there wouldn't have been any in the room, or on those jugs. You think the man who worked out that operation was a fool, or an amateur? But never mind him; let's get back to you."
"Why?"
"I want to know who the hell you are, and what you're doing here. He went to all that trouble to use your plates. Why?"
"The message was for me," I said. I told him about the telephone threat, and the earlier call to her and my efforts to find the booth with the noisy fan.
He walked over in front of me. "In other words, you're not in town thirty minutes before you're up to your neck in police business. You're a troublemaker, Chatham; I can smell you a mile."
"I reported it to this office," I said. "And I was kissed off. Same way you're trying to slough off this acid job. What's the deal here, Redfield; why can't she get police protection?"
"Who says she can't?" he interrupted harshly.
"I do. The whole thing stinks. And I don't get it. I've seen dirt pushed under the rug, but you don't look like the type."
For an instant there was something goaded and savage in his eyes, and I thought he was going to hit me. Then he had it under control. "Nobody's being kissed off here," he said coldly. "Those descriptions have gone out to all adjoining counties and the Highway Patrol. The acid's a blank; in a place this size, he'd have to be from out of town, so if he was hired for the job he brought his own. That just leaves you."
"What do you mean?"
He jabbed a forefinger at me. "You stick out in this mess like a blonde with a pet skunk, and you get wronger every minute. For some reason it happens the very day you show up. They used your plates. You've got some cock-and-bull story about a mysterious phone call. Your identification says you're a cop, and you say you used to be one. What are you now, and who's paying you?"
"I'm not doing anything. I was just on my way to Miami."
"Well, you're still on your way to Miami," he snapped. "Or somewhere." Magruder, in the doorway, grinned nastily.
"Who says so?" I asked.
"That's a stupid question, for a man that used to be a cop. You know who says so. I don't like troublemakers and goons that wander in here for no reason and seem to wind up out there at that motel. We've still got the stink from the last one."
"I thought we'd get around to that," I said. "In other words, you don't care what happens to her, or how she gets pushed around. You've got an unsolved murder on your hands, and as far as you're concerned, she's guilty whether you can prove it or not. Well, I'm staying.
Somebody's deliberately trying to ruin her or drive her insane. I don't know who, or why, but he did that acid job to her because of me, so I'm going to help her find out."
He leaned over me with that savage expression in his eyes again. "Get this straight, Chatham. You make one phony move around here and I'm going to land on you, and land hard. Now get out!"
"I heard you," I said.
Magruder stared coldly as I went past him. "Big shot," he said. I ignored him and went on out. I'd just made things worse, but I was still angry enough not to care. Redfield was an enigma. He was a tough cop, and an honest one unless I was crazy, but he was being too hard, like a man on the defensive.
I stopped at a drugstore to have the prescriptions filled, and drove back to the motel. When I parked in front of the office, I looked at my watch. It was after eleven, and I remembered I'd never had any breakfast. Maybe I could catch Ollie alone at the same time. I walked across the road, ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and carried them into the bar. There was only one customer, a man in a phone linesman's outfit. He finished his beer and went out, clanking like a walking tool kit.
I put my stuff on the bar and pulled up a stool. "You don't mind if I sit here?" I asked. "As long as I'm not bothering your regular customers?"
He shrugged, but there was amusement in the level brown eyes. "I'm sorry about that. But you know how it is."
"Forget it," I said. He had a clean-cut look about him, and I had a hunch he wasn't one of the crowd that was on her back. I wished I could be sure.
He came over, propped a foot on the shelf under the bar, and leaned on his knee. He lighted a cigarette. "That was dirty pool, that acid."
"How did you hear about it?" I asked.
"Saw the stuff over there where you pulled it out. I went over, and the maid told me about it. Sheriff's office come up with anything?"
"Not yet," I said. I drank some of the coffee.
"That Redfield's a good cop. Tougher than a boot, but smart. And honest."
"Yeah," I said noncommittally. "Listen, do you think she was involved in that murder?"
"You want to know what I really think?" He met my gaze squarely. "I think I've got a nice place here. It makes me a good living, and I like it."
"Don't try to snow me. You're not bird-brained, or gutless."
"All right. Maybe I do think she's getting a rotten deal. But I'm not in the opinion business. I just sell beer and hotcakes to people who do have opinions. Strong ones, sometimes."
"You don't have to wear a campaign button," I said. "If you'd just answer a few questions-"
"Sure. Fire away."
I told him about the filthy telephone calls, and the noisy fan.
He nodded. "Same guy, you think?"
"Sure. He saw me checking all those booths, and caught on."
He made an effort, but couldn't recall who'd used the phone anywhere around that hour. "I never notice, unless they ask for change," he said. "They're in and out all the time. You know how it is."
"What about the ones who were here when I was?"
"Hmmm," he said. "Let's see. The hothead who wanted to jump you was Rupe Hulbert. He's harmless; he hasn't got brains enough to be mixed up in anything. The big guy with him was Red Dunlevy; works in that service station just up the road. He's a harum-scarum screwball, but a pretty good Joe. Pearl Talley gets off some fairly raw jokes, but nothing ever vicious-"
"What about the guy in the guitar-player's shirt, in the booth with the girl?"
Ollie grinned. "That's who I'm talking about; I don't know who the girl was. Talley's a clown type; to look at him you'd think they had to rope him every morning to put shoes on him, but it's a front. He's got the sharpest business mind in the county. Owns a lot of property around here. He can swap nickels with you, even money, and come out two dollars ahead."
There appeared to be nothing in those three to warrant any more questions at the moment. "Why's everybody so bitter about the Lang thing?"
"It was so cold-blooded and dirty, for one thing," he replied. "And Lang was kind of a hometown hero. Greatest football player the high school ever turned out. All-American end at Georgia Tech. Fine war record; executive officer of a submarine that sank a lot of Jap shipping. He went to Miami after the war and made a fortune in the construction business, housing and subdivisions. Then he crashed, like running into a wall. First wife divorced him-"
"Oh," I said. "I didn't know she was his second wife."
"Yeah. The first one got a big chunk of the money. Then he lost a lawsuit over land titles that just about cleaned him out. And to cap it off, his health quit on him. Two heart attacks. The medics said quit, or he'd had it. So just about the time he married again he gave up and bought the motel up here. Little over a year ago. Hunted and fished a lot with the local people he grew up with. And in five months he was killed. You see? He didn't have much time left anyway, and then to be murdered by a cheap stud like Strader-"
He nodded. "That's part of it. But there's more."
"Who got the insurance?" I asked. "Daughter. Kid about thirteen, by the first wife."
"There goes that motive. What about the fake accident?"
"It was like this. Lang had all his tackle and his motor in the station wagon, and was supposed to be going fishing-"
"At four-thirty in the morning?"
"Sure. You fish for bass at daybreak. Anyway, as I said, he was in poor health; and at Finley's Cut where he kept his boat tied up, there's a steep climb down about an eight-foot bank to get to the edge of the water. And a big log at the bottom of it that they padlock their boats to. His outboard motor weighed nearly fifty pounds. So you can see yourself what everybody would naturally think when he was found down there with his head busted open against the log with the motor on top of him."
I nodded. "And what was Strader doing when Calhoun jumped him?"
"He was down there by the water with a flashlight and a piece of the bloody tarp, fixing up the log."
It was deadly, all right. "And Strader was a stranger here, of course, so it had to be the woman who knew the setup where he kept the boat, and how to get there?"
"Sure."
"All right. Now, how do they know it was a woman?"
"My short-order cook saw her when she got out of the car over there. He was just opening up to make coffee."
"Could he describe her?"
"No. The light was too poor. He thought she had dark hair, but wouldn't swear to it. She went across and disappeared into that space between the office and the left wing of the motel building."
"How did Calhoun happen to be down there by the river? He's the city cop, isn't he?"
He nodded. "Just one of those things. He was on a fishing trip too, camped right below there. The car woke him up."
I thought about it. "It's too pat. Do they think she'd be stupid enough to drive the car right back here to the motel?"
"The theory is that she didn't know Calhoun got the license number. It's logical. She couldn't have seen him chasing her, in the dark, and he didn't shoot because he fell down and lost the gun. And if she left it somewhere else, she'd have to walk back, with the chance of being seen."
"But she was seen. And she didn't go into the office."
"There's a rear entrance. Out of sight from here."
"How soon did they find the car?"
"In less than thirty minutes. As soon as Calhoun could make it to town and report it, the sheriff drove out to tell her Lang had been killed. And the first thing he saw when he drove in was that same Dade County license they were looking for."
"Was she asleep when he knocked? He'd be able to make a pretty good guess."
"No. She was in her nightgown and robe when she came to the door, but she was wide awake."
"Did she say why?"
"Said it was a phone call. Just before he got there."
"Who was it?"
"A wrong number. Or that is, the wrong motel. Some woman that sounded about half-drunk wanted to talk to a party that wasn't even registered."
"So she had to shuffle through all the cards to be sure?"
"Yeah."
I nodded. This appeared to be a great place for telephone calls. I thanked him, and went back across the road. Josie had been in to make up the room. I switched on the air-conditioner and sat down to see if I could make sense of what I was doing. The only thing that was readily apparent was that I was going to get my head knocked off. In less than twenty-four hours I'd been warned by two different sets of people to leave town or get hurt. And since I had no intention of doing it, I must be crazy.
Two sets of people? Yes. It almost had to be. Redfield was a complex man I didn't understand at all yet, and potentially a highly dangerous one, but I simply didn't believe he was corrupt-or corrupt enough to be at the bottom of all this. Maybe the savagery in him was warping his judgment, but it could be the result of an honest conviction that she was guilty and that she had beaten him. Therefore, he probably didn't even know who the others were, and I did have two separate outfits bent on getting rid of me.
I lighted a cigarette. Somehow, you always came back to Lang's murder, and the thing that really damned her was baffling because of its very simplicity. One of them had known he'd be suspected if there were a homicide investigation; otherwise, there was no point in faking an accident. Strader and Lang didn't even know each other, so it had to be the woman. And when the accident thing went sour and there was a homicide investigation, Ida Lang was the only woman in sight. It was a perfect, unbreakable circle, like two snakes swallowing each other. Maybe she was guilty, I thought. And on the other hand, maybe somebody had deliberately tried to frame her. Some of the ugly little touches were there if you looked for them closely enough.
If you assumed the whole thing tied together, where did you start? There was no lead at all in the acid job. Strader, I thought. It all began with him, and whatever he'd come up here for. Maybe they'd missed it completely because the obvious answer was too easy and they hadn't tried to look beyond it. But Strader had come from Miami. Well, that presented no great problem The phone rang. When I picked it up, a woman's voice said softly, "Mr. Chatham?"
"Yes," I said. "Who is this?"
"You wouldn't know me, but I might be able to tell you something."
"About what?" I asked quickly.
"About some acid, maybe. If you thought it was worth a hundred dollars."
She left it hanging there, and then I caught something in the background that made the pulse leap in my throat. It was the rough whirring sound of that fan with the defective bearing.
"Yes," I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. "It might be worth that. Where could I meet you?"
"You can't," she said softly. "I wouldn't risk it for a thousand, let alone a hundred. But if you get the money to me, I'll phone-" She stopped abruptly, gasped, and the receiver clicked as she hung up.
I dropped the instrument back on the cradle and was out the door in three strides. The entrance to the Silver King was in plain sight from here. Nobody came out. I almost ran, going across the highway. When I pushed into the lunchroom a lone trucker was at the counter and the waitress was emerging from the kitchen with a tray. I forced myself to slow down, and strolled casually into the bar.
It was empty, except for Ollie. He was disassembling and cleaning a big salt-water reel on a newspaper spread out on the bar. I looked stupidly around. He glanced up and sighed. "Corrosion," he said.
"Where'd she go?" I asked.
"Who?"
"The woman that just used the phone booth."
"In here?" He stared at me, frowning. "There hasn't been any woman here. There hasn't been anybody since you left."
CHAPTER SIX
He was telling the truth, or he was one of the great actors of all time. I couldn't decide which as I went back to the room at the motel, where Josie was tidying up.
The room didn't need tidying, and something about her manner set off my pussy-detection alarm. I watched the way her lithe buttocks rippled under her maid's tight uniform as she bent over to dust or straighten ashtrays. There seemed to be an extra jiggle in the huge bazooms straining against her bodice.
"What you staring at, white man?" she asked in a particularly throaty suggestive voice.
"Just wondering," I said, "whether you painted your lips that crazy color to match your
"That's something you sure as hell ain't never gone find out."
"Don't bet on that," I said, reaching out for her wrist and dragging her toward me.
Her huge tits collided softly with my chest. They were as big as balloons. Incredibly, they felt as firm and high as those of a woman much less mightily endowed. I jammed down hard on her thick sensuous lips, and she responded by thrusting her tongue into my mouth and trying to eat my teeth.
My cock sprung up hard and stiff against her belly. She felt its impact on her soft flesh, and she began to purr and rub herself sensuously against its thick hard length through my pants.
I fumbled with the buttons down the front of her dress, freeing those titanic boobs. She wore no bra, just as I suspected. They jiggled out bare and brown and big, their nipples a darker shade of brown. They were already erected like the tips of her little fingers, the areolas were hard and wizened around them. They were the size of silver dollars-the old fashioned silver dollars, that is, each one a vast grazing area for my lips and tongue.
While I sucked at her big black boobs, she reached deftly between my legs and undid my zipper and then my belt. She shoved down my pants, freeing my prick for the skillful ministrations of her fingertips.
"You go for black meat, huh, honey?"
""As long as you got a hole down there, what difference does it make what color it is?"
As I spoke, I finished unbuttoning her dress and shoved it down over her shoulders and her arms. She had an hourglass figure, big lush tits and hips narrowing on a waist that I could have circled easily with both hands. Her legs were long and brown and muscular.
I pushed down her white panties to reveal the nest of crinkly black fluff in the vee of her crotch. I'd been exactly right: her cunt lips were exactly the same shade as the lipstick she wore, the sexy black devil. They were even thicker and fleshier than the lips of her mouth, and they glistened with the slimy ooze percolating up from the depths of her hungry cunt.
I shoved first one, then two fingers in there, and the heat inside her slithery tunnel of love was scalding. While I fingerfucked her, she squeezed and shimmied the hot tube to show me just what she could do. It was damned impressive.
She stepped all the way out of her panties while I all but tore my clothes off. She sat back on the bed. My cock stood up in front of her just inches from her face, and she knew enough to take the hint.
I sighed with pleasure as she sucked its hard length into her mouth. I didn't know where it was all going, but she had no trouble taking every last inch, swallowing it just as easily as I could chug-a-lug a can of beer. She just opened up her throat and let it glide in.
Meanwhile she kept every muscle of her talented mouth hard at work. As she swallowed, she sucked hard with her big lips, and her tongue lashed all over the hot surface in an infinitely complicated pattern.
Without letting my prick out of her mouth for an instant, I pushed her back to lie flat on the bed while I knelt over her, my ass cushioned by her huge tits. I pulled her head up until her pretty brown nose was buried in my pubic hair and my balls were mashed against her chin.
When I was satisfied she planned to keep up the good work, I twisted around, rotating my cock inside her throat, and went down between her strong thighs to get some of that steaming hair pie that fascinated me so much.
When I tongued it open, I saw that the sweet interior meat was a delicate pink color that contrasted deliciously with her brown skin and purple cunt lips. But much as I admired the color scheme, it was the taste and the texture I was down there to sample, and I plastered the slimy delicacy to my greedy mouth in short order.
She bucked and humped her big hips as if I was actually fucking her. It felt like she planned to swallow my head with her big hot cunt as it splashed and lashed against my sweating face. It was all I could do to breathe, surrounded as I was by a rich, ripe, heady atmosphere of percolating poontang. I sucked and drank her thick syrupy juices.
Meanwhile she was giving me the blowjob of my life, letting me slide my cock in and out of her throat while she sucked it and pumped it with her fleshy lips and titillated it with her constantly moving tongue. She moaned and groaned around it, turned on by the work I was doing on her shimmering quim.
Gradually I worked my way up to her big fleshy clit, and she went wild the minute I began to nibble it. She clamped down on my ears with her muscular thighs and jammed my face in hard and deep as I licked and sucked her quivering love-button. I jammed one finger inside her cunt and one inside her dark-brown asshole, working at the membrane between them with both fingers and driving her lust to an ever-higher pitch.
I had considered all this as foreplay, but she saw it as a main event. She began cumming like there was no tomorrow, the muscles of her belly going as stiff as an oak plank as she was whipsawed through a convulsive climax. She arched her back like a bow, quivering and vibrating with the strain, while I sucked and swallowed the hot juices from her pussy.
Her orgasm dragged me right along with it. The suction of her lips on my quivering prong became almost unbearable. It was all I could do to drag it out and push it in, drag it and push it, and the pressure and stimulation on the billion sensitive nerve-endings finally got to me. I groaned against her pussy as her hot suction dragged a superhuman load up from my balls and down my prick into her mouth.
She sucked and swallowed and gobbled for more, redoubling the ardor of her blowjob now that she could feel its effect. She dug her clawed fingers into my ass, giving me the same kind of finger-cornholing I was giving her, and she touched some special nerve that opened the floodgates and gave her more hot gism than I thought I had in me.
When at last I could breathe again, I rolled off her and wiped the hot smeary pussy-juice from my sore lips with the back of my hand.
"Does that come with the room, baby, or is there an extra charge?"
"There sure enough is an extra charge, honey. You gets yo'se'f a free blowjob with every fuck I get. I ain't got my fuck yet."
"Holy shit," I groaned. "Come back next week."
"Don't give me none of that next week shit, you miserable honkie excuse for a man. You get it up right now and put it where it belongs, else I tells Miz Ida what you been up to. That might kind of spoil your plans to pork her, right?"
She spoke good-naturedly, but I could see that she meant what she said. It unnerved me that she could see right through me so easily. My plan of giving her mistress a roll in the hay hadn't even been clearly formulated in my own mind yet, but she grasped immediately which way my interest was leading me.
I could do nothing but give in to this man-eating Negress. Not that that would be such a chore. Surveying her lithe brown length spread out on the white sheet, with the dribbles of my cum still smearing her thick and sexy lips, I felt the stirrings of a fresh erection. It blossomed almost immediately into full hardness when she reached down and began to stroke it with the shocking pink fingertips that contrasted so strikingly with her tawny skin.
"Your cock looks just about big enough to give me a little bitsy tickle, whitey. Stick it where it belongs and lemme see if you knows what to do wif it."
Her taunting challenge set my prick up to its final notch of stiffness and hardness. I rolled back on top of her, settling down in the strong brown saddle of her lap, while she curled her long legs around my back like the relentless coils of a jungle python. I felt as if I were being called up to test my fucking ability in a veritable acid test of screwing, a Kentucky Derby of fornication, to see if I could match up to the prowess of the hundreds who had gone before me.
My prick sank deep into her slippery quim the way a red-hot knife blade would sink into a warm pound of butter. There was hardly any resistance at all in the viscous well into which I plummeted as far as my prick would take me. Then, all at once, her muscles firmed up and gave me a squeeze that was almost painful. It was all I could do to haul my meat out of there and push it in again.
"Not bad," she said. "You almost as big as my twelve-year-old brother."
It amused her to mock me, I knew, but it was all she could do to sigh the words as the stiff action of my prick got to her, so I didn't take it personally. Each stroke evoked a fresh sigh, a fresh squeeze or ripple of her talented cunt-muscles as she switched to second and then third gear in her gradual escalation to the full fury of her lubricious fucking-machinery.
I slid my hands beneath her magnificent buttocks and pulled her up to make sure she was taking every last inch, digging my fingers deep into the sweating crease between her big brown cheeks. She responded by tightening the grip of her powerful legs on my back, digging into me with her dainty heels, rocking and rolling to syncopate the rhythm of my straight-on, head-to-head, belly-to-belly screwing.
I took one of her big tits into my mouth again, sucking it hard and licking the nipple up once more to quivering rigidity. I felt like a kid with the key to a candy store, not sure which delight I liked the best, as I switched from one big tit to the other while she twisted and writhed her torso beneath me, grunted and groaned and bit her lips. She couldn't even find the breath to tease or taunt me as my prick began to rip down her defenses and give her the kind of reaming she was dying for.
She had tricks and twists inside her big juicy gash that I hadn't even known about before. She could squeeze me, she could stroke me, she could ripple the walls of her cunt around my plunging cock six ways from Sunday. She would move the slithery sheath all at once, or select separate parts to tickle my cock in its constant, relentless, inward and outward plunge.
"Oh, Gawd! You fuck better'n you eat, and that's sayin' a mouf-full!" she groaned.
That was all the encouragement I needed to show her some world-class fucking as I rapidly slammed the old avenger home again and again in staccato rapid-fire strokes. Hot juice from her seething cunt spattered out to splash my thighs as I stoked it and stirred it with my shuttling pecker.
It was all I could do to hold on to her, her strong brown body was so soaked with sweat and pussy-juice, but I was nailed to her by the cock up her middle, and the slipping and sliding of my hands on her big bare ass didn't seem to matter.
I stretched out on top of her, pressing her big breasts against my chest. I wanted to suck them, but I needed my mouth for breathing now as my breath came in ragged hot gasps. I didn't let up for a minute, though, on the action at our gluey genitals, and she seemed to whirl off into an even higher gear of fuck-frenzy as I got closer and closer to my own climax.
"SHEE-IT!" she shrieked. "You doin' it, man-you doin' it with red ribbons and bells on!"
Her body rippled and heaved beneath me like a tempestuous black sea as I strove to match her tempo, matched it and outdid it with my hard-thrusting prick. Her nails clawed my back, her heels did a drum-beat on my kidneys as I drove her again and again over the edge of orgasm.
"Ah's GUMMING!" she groaned and roared alternately, again and again, "Here I CUMS!"
Just as it was beginning to seem that I was locked for all eternity in this ultimate embrace of steaming sexuality, that there was no way out of it, a golden door opened in my loins and a brass band with big bass drums marched through, pumping and pounding and draining me to fill her cavernous cunt.
"I forgot to tell you," she said when at last she could draw breath. "Some woman called and said you could find where that acid came from if you go to the barn of a burnt-out farmhouse about four miles from here."
Cursing her for not telling me earlier, I followed her directions to the farm and found myself at the door of the barn.
The door was secured only with a double strand of baling wire pulled through two holes and twisted together on the outside, but when I had unfastened it, I had trouble forcing it open far enough to squeeze inside because of the sand that had washed down the slope against the bottom of it in past rains. The interior was gloomy, and smelled of old dust and dried manure and straw. Narrow shafts of sunlight slanted in through cracks in the wall, illuminating the dust motes hanging suspended in the lifeless air. My shoes made no sound on the springy footing. There were some empty stalls on the right, and about halfway back, against the left wall, was the ladder going up into the hayloft. There was an opening about three feet square above it, the top rung of the ladder gilded by a shaft of sunlight coming in through one of the holes in the roof. I stepped over in the dead silence and mounted it.
My head was just coming up into the opening, my eyes level with the last rung of the ladder, when my breath sucked inward and the skin tightened up, cold and hard, between my shoulder blades. In the thick coating of dust there where the puddle of sunlight was striking the top of the two-by-four were the fresh imprints of four fingers and part of the palm of a hand. I threw my feet outward into space, pushing against the rung above as if I were trying to shove myself downward through clinging mud or tar, and for some awful fraction of a second I seemed to be hanging suspended in the air, unable to fall, like a balloon half-filled with helium. Then the gun crashed behind me, paralyzing my eardrums. Pain like a hot ice pick sliced across the top of my head and the air was filled with dust and flying splinters. Then I was falling at last, turning a little and trying to swim downward into the gloom below me and away from that deadly shaft of sunlight. I landed on my feet, but off-balance, and fell backward, and rolled, all in one continuing motion, and as my feet went up and over and I was staring in horror at the opening above me I saw the bent, denim-clad leg and the knee in the shaft of yellow light, and the beefy hand, and the searching twin barrels of the gun, still swinging.
I was over and down, then, with my knees under me, pushing up and turning, and the gun crashed again. The shot raked the powdery manure and dust and exploded it into the air about my head and into my eyes. I was blinded. I came erect and crashed into the wall, and fell again. I pushed up, tearing at my face with one hand to get my eyes clear, and felt the stickiness of blood mixed with the dust, but I could see a little, enough to make out the narrow oblong of light that marked the door. But even as I whirled and plunged toward it I heard the sharp metallic click of ejectors above me and then the thump as he closed the breech of the reloaded gun, and at the same time the swift and deadly rustling of dry hay as he ran toward the front of the loft. I was trapped.
While I was squeezing myself through the half-blocked door he would be right above me, leaning out that opening with the shotgun barrels less than six feet above my head. He'd cut me in two, like cheese under an ax blade. I veered and slammed against the wall with a hand to stop myself from going on into the opening and being blown to pieces, and whirled, looking behind me. There was no other way out, and all he had to do was jump to the ground and come in after me. Then my mind began functioning a little better, and I realized there had to be another way out because he hadn't come in at the front. I was running even as I heard the heavy thud of his feet against the ground outside the door, and was already three-quarters of the way to the rear wall when the light cut off behind me and I knew he had made it to his feet and was squeezing through the doorway with his gun. But there was no sign of a door or opening of any kind behind me. And I was already past the ladder. Before I could turn and make it up into the loft to try to get out the front that way he would blow my legs from under me and kill me at his leisure. There was nothing to do but keep going.
I could hear him struggling with the door. I swept my eyes frantically across the cracks of light ahead of me, and then I saw it, one that was a little wider at the bottom than at the top. It had to be the plank he had pried loose to get in. I hit it head-on, without slackening speed at all. It gave, and my right shoulder tore loose the one next to it, and then I was out into blinding sunlight, fighting to keep my balance because if I fell now I was dead. I stayed on my feet somehow, and when I was running under control again, I leaned and cut sharply to the left, like a halfback turning the corner, to get out of line with the opening behind me.
All the muscles in my back were drawn up into icy knots as I pounded across the open ground, expecting at any second to feel the shot charge come slamming into it, but there was only silence behind me. I turned on one more burst of speed and then risked a glance over my shoulder. There was no sign of him, and I was fifty or seventy-five yards away, well beyond the dangerous range of a shotgun. I cut left again, and began running toward the car before he could head me off. I made it and looked back, sobbing for breath as I fumbled in my pocket for the keys. The drowsy stillness of afternoon was unbroken by movement of any kind. He hadn't even come out. His gun was useless at this distance, and he was standing quietly inside somewhere, just waiting for me to go away. As long as I didn't know who he was, he could always try again. I shuddered.
Scrambling into the car, I whirled it out onto the road, conscious that I was dripping blood all over my clothes and the seat. I had to keep wiping my eyes free to drive. When I had put a mile behind me I slid to a stop and got out to see if I could find out how bad it was; I had an idea it was an isolated pellet from a blown pattern, but it hurt excruciatingly and was making a mess of the car whether the loss of blood was serious or not. I felt the top of my head. The scalp was split for some three inches where a shot had raked across it and then penetrated. I could feel it just under the skin.
He couldn't have been over six feet behind me, and at that distance with even a badly blown pattern the stray pellet wouldn't have scattered more than a fraction of an inch from the rest of the shot column. If I'd been one second slower in getting my head down out of that opening, it would have exploded like a dropped watermelon. The reaction hit me. I was weak and shaky and had to sit down.
I slumped back against the end of the seat and fumbled with a cigarette, but it was a mess before I could even get it in my mouth. I let it fall into the dust of the road beside the little tapping drops of red, and listened to the powerful droning of a few million insects out in the timber. There was something chilling about the way they had handled me. They'd used the oldest con game formula in the world, and I'd gone for it like a greenhorn.
These people were yokels?
I didn't know what the hell to do. I was bleeding like a stuck pig, but it wasn't serious. I figured I should get to the law as quickly as possible. As this had just happened, maybe they'd be interested.
I would've liked to track down that big cop, Calhoun-I liked the way he handled himself. But it was useless. He was out on patrol, I had learned. That left Kelly Redfield, a good cop, but with something gnawing at his insides.
I called the station, but he wasn't in. I looked up his address in the phone book and decided to surprise him at home. Even though he really didn't like me all that much, maybe he'd take the blood seriously.
His home was set back about thirty yards from the road.
I walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer. It had been a long hot drive and I was feeling pretty bad. It seemed a shame to come all this way and not check it out thoroughly.
The place looked like Kelly spent a lot of time working on it. The lawn had just been put in, and there was a wheelbarrow by the side of the house that looked like it got a regular workout.
I was conscious of the fact that I could see the motel from Redfield's house. I walked around the back of the house, using a walkway between the two wings that formed the building.
I almost stepped on the most beautiful woman I'd seen since arriving in town-excluding Ida Lang, of course. This one was nude, lying on a beach towel, her hands were folded behind her head. Long burgundy-colored hair framed her face.
Her eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. I couldn't tell if she was awake or not. If she was awake, she was looking right at me.
She must be asleep, I thought. And I also thought that I'd better get out of there fast. Kelly Redfield wouldn't be interested in any story I could come up with to explain how I interrupted his wife while she was sunbathing in the nude on her own property.
She sighed and opened her long lovely legs.
I almost ran. But I figured that if she were asleep, running could wake her up.
I stood, frozen in place, the hot blazing sun beating down on me. I could smell my own blood, and it didn't smell good.
Mrs. Redfield slowly reached down with one hand and rubbed her cunt. I was dry-mouthed and trembling. If she woke up, I was through.
She must have been having a helluva dream. She slid a finger down her slot, rolling her hips in pleasure. Then she formed a thick bundle of flesh with three fingers and worked them into her glistening cunt.
I couldn't handle it any longer. I turned and edged away, breathing a sigh of relief when I finally got into the car.
I fished around for a smoke and realized I was out of cigarettes. Fifteen minutes later I was in the emergency room of the local clinic, being treated for my wounds. A half-hour later I was back at the motel, a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels under my arm, along with a carton of smokes. I showered, had a couple of stiff drinks, and walked over to see Ida.
I was still completely discombobulated from my experience with Mrs. Redfield. There was something about that woman that could get under a man's skin. His foreskin, to be exact.
She was an odd match for Kelly Redfield.
Ida was asleep, and so I decided to take a nap as well. I had to be back at the clinic in a couple of hours-I'd been treated by a nurse. The doctor was on an emergency out in the farmlands, and wouldn't be back till then.
I could still feel the buckshot in my scalp.
My head had no sooner hit the pillow when I was lost to the world. I was back in Redfield's yard, watching his wife finger herself while she smiled at me. This time the sunglasses were gone.
"You like to watch?" she asked.
"Sure do," I said. "You're really fine with your fingers, but why don't you let me give you some help?"
She was lying on the beach towel and she kicked open those long legs and said, "Be my guest-only I like to see how well a man like you can use his tongue!"
That was all right with me. I'm from San Francisco, and a man there gets used to having pussies shoved in his face. It tells more about you, say the girls, than talking to your ex-wife.
She wrapped her tan, glistening thighs around my head and I tongued a furrow up her slit to her little stiff clit. I centered on that for a bit, loving the way she squirmed in pleasure as I worked her.
Then her hands were clawing at my fly so I unzipped and hauled out my cock and eased it into her warm lips. She knew what she was doing-she had it halfway down her throat immediately.
I returned to her hot and juicy cunt, loving the way the smooth soft flesh parted before my tongue.
And then it was time to get serious.
I turned around and edged between her legs, not even aware any longer that we were outside. She parted her legs quickly, grabbed my shaft and angled it into her hot cunt.
I plowed right into her, sending my prick all the way in, and she squealed with delight and wrapped her long legs around ray back.
It crossed my mind that if Redfield showed up, I was dead-but what a way to go!
She was breathing in my ear and I couldn't make out what she was saying, but it was apparent that I wasn't the first guy who'd nailed her while her husband wasn't looking.
She was hot inside, tight and muscular. She ran that pussy of hers up and down my rod like a greased glove, and I felt every delicious inch of it to the soles of my feet.
Then she was cupping her breasts, her fingers pinching the nipples. I ducked my head and sucked a tit, loving the salty warm taste of it.
And then she was coming, humping strongly, her mouth open, her even white teeth bared in a snarl of pleasure. I felt my own cum flooding her, and she loved it, moaning with delight.
I woke up and checked the clock. Time to head back to the clinic. As I got out of bed I realized that I was disturbed by my dream. There was something about Mrs. Redfield that had put me on guard.
Was it that it was but a short run from the motel parking lot to her back door? Even for a woman, it was a piece of cake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I kept thinking about licking some of the icing off that cake while they picked buckshot out of my scalp at the clinic. After Redfield and a tough deputy named Mitchell worked me over and questioned me as if I was a suspect in my own shooting, I decided to do something about it.
Mrs. Redfield was lying where I'd left her, naked as the day she was born. There'd been a hell of a lot of improvement since that day, though.
Thinking about what I'd seen before, I had convinced myself that she hadn't been asleep. That finger in her cunt was a beckoning finger of invitation, a clear direction to the place she wanted me to go.
She seemed asleep now, though. I moved cautiously forward, following the stiff prick that was tenting out my pants as if it were a pointing bird dog. When I stood over her, staring down at her opaque sunglasses, her thighs drifted slowly apart. As before, her index finger slid straight down to her cunt and probed it gently.
"I thought you got lost," she murmured. "It's still here."
"Didn't anyone ever tell you it's impolite to point?" I said, unbuckling my pants.
"You're doing it," she said, staring with interest at my stiff prick as she worked a second and then a third finger inside her pussy and began a slow pumping motion. "But don't bother to point it my way until you show me what you can do with your mouth."
I smiled as I knelt between her outspread legs. It was as if she'd taken a peek into my dream. I knelt there for a moment watching her as she kneaded the soft hairy flesh with her fingers and slipped them in and out of her quivering gash. They glistened slickly with her pussy-juice.
She had a delicious, golden, all-over tan. The only white spots were visible when she spread her legs all the way out, spread them so wide that the tendons of her thighs stood out like a vee directing the way to her hot cunt. Way up inside her groin, at the margin of her reddish cunt-hair, were thin slices that the sun hadn't managed to reach.
I kissed those spots first. She continued to play with herself, and her hand rubbed my cheek in an exciting rhythm as she now pumped four fingers in and out of her cunt. The odor of pussy-juice floated over me like a fog, an aroma that never failed to swell my dick to its fullest dimensions.
I kissed up and down her thighs and licked down over her salty asshole as she slipped the fifth finger inside to show me what she could do with that incredible cunt. She moved her hand in all the way to the wrist, distending the slick red lips to what must have been a painful degree.
"You trying to wear it out?" I asked.
"Don't worry, big boy," she said, pulling her wet hand out at last. "I can get it just as tight as it needs to get. I'm just doing my daily isometrics."
Now that the succulent red gash was free for the attentions of my lips and tongue, I pressed my mouth down on it and lapped up its sim mering trickle of hot juice. She flung her legs even wider and vibrated on her blanket, pummeling my mouth with her wide-open crotch.
As I said, we San Franciscans are champion muff-divers, but I like a little return on my investment. I tried to angle my way around to fuck her in the mouth, but she pushed me firmly back.
"What's the matter, Mrs. Redfield? Didn't anyone ever tell you that love is a matter of give and take."
"I'm not doing this for love, you asshole, so you give and I'll take, and if I like what I-get, maybe I'll return the favor." She paused while she twined her luscious legs around my neck and pulled my head into tighter contact with her pussy. "And since you know my name, you must know who my husband is, so you better make sure I stay friendly."
I didn't like that threat, but I sure as hell liked her cunt, so I swallowed one along with the other. I reached up to play with the gorgeous golden globes of her breasts while I rooted like a hog in her sopping muff, giving her a taste of what I could do in the cunnilingus department.
As far as I could tell, she loved what she got. She grunted and whimpered and moaned in time to my flickering flailing tongue-strokes. Each suck of my hungry lips made her quiver and twist with pleasure. Her nipples grew ruby-hard under the touch of my eager fingertips, and she grabbed my wrists to rub my hands more firmly against her breasts.
My cock was going crazy, down there all by itself, but I restrained myself firmly, telling myself that holding back like this would make it all the more pleasant when I finally spiked her pussy or her asshole or her voluptuous mouth-or maybe all three, if we found the time. I sure as hell couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing.
She wasn't kidding about her ability to tighten up her cunt. At one point I thrust my tongue deep into the juicy hole, and she clamped down on it so hard with her love-muscles that I thought for a minute she planned on pulling it out by the root. I made a stiff little dart of it and vibrated it like an electric dildo, and the walls of her vagina ballooned away from it in the involuntary response of her first orgasm.
"Yes yes YES!" she screamed, pumping her hips and her thighs in all directions and battering my recently-stitched head painfully. "Lick it-suck it-tickle it-eat me out!"
It took all the will power I could muster not to wrench my head free and replace it with my throbbing prick, but I hung on and did what I was told, driving her up to ever higher plateaus and peaks of climactic sexuality. At last even she was exhausted, and she fell back limp and sweating and begged me to stop.
All I could do was gasp as I got up on hands and knees and retracted my sore and swollen tongue. Without a word she motioned me to sit on a lawn chair. I all but collapsed back into it. everything was exhausted but my prick, which stood up as stiff and hard as a flagpole.
She came to kneel between my legs and took my stiff cock between her thumb and forefinger, examining it with a greedy little smile as she slowly pulled the foreskin back and forth and made little beads of anticipatory dew sparkle at the tip.
"Give and take, buster, you got it," she breathed, and each word carried a stream of moist warm air against the superheated skin of my cock to tantalize it even more. "I'm going to blow you till I suck the wax out of your ears."
I sighed with pleasure and gratitude as I felt the first soft moist touch of her tongue. She licked my dick as if it were a lollipop, in long, sweet, swirling sweeps, from the hairy root all the way up to the swollen purple knob that felt as if it would burst at any moment.
But even this relief became a torture as it seemed she planned on doing nothing but licking it. She licked every inch of it once, twice, three times, and when at last her lips puckered near the head and I was certain that she was going to take it into her mouth, she licked her way back down a fourth time and snaked her tongue into my pubic hair to examine the tight skin of my bulbing balls.
"For Christ's sake-suck it! I can't stand anymore!" I groaned.
"Make it last, big boy, enjoy it-you've never had a blowjob like this one before, and if you don't happen to catch me in the right mood, it might be the last one."
She was right, goddamn her! Not even the belles of San Francisco, who think of hot gism as high-protein breakfast food, could hold a candle to the kind of head this mysterious woman gave. I grit my teeth and spread my legs wider, giving her the freedom of my crotch and resolving to savor and relish every second of this exquisite torture.
She responded by going even lower, letting my balls rest on her pretty little nose while she flicked her tongue around the rim of my asshole and finally drove it deep inside, fluttering and twisting it like a captive cobra. I all but screamed with frustration as my cock was driven up to a new and unknown notch of thickness and stiffness. My hands whitened on the arm of the chair as I had to restrain myself from grabbing her head and fucking her teasing mouth.
At last she pulled out and repeated the performance, licking my balls and my cock and gradually working her way up to the inflamed and trickling tip. Compounding the torture, she took her lovely head away and knelt back on her heels.
"I don't want to waste that juice," she breathed, once again torturing me with her breathy words. "It does wonders for the complexion."
Now she took my cock in her hand and angled it down to rub the head around in slow and agonizing circles on her hard nipples and wizened areolas. Her nipples stiffened to meet the stiffness of my prick, sticking out like pencil erasers as she greased them with the lubricating fluid that was leaking so freely from my tortured rod. She went on to widen the circles and massaged the golden globes of her breasts with the head, smearing them and making them glisten.
"Please," I gasped weakly.
But even as that abject groan escaped my lips, she was moving to implement the desire that had blasted every other thought and emotion out of my heart and mind. She lowered her lovely face, moist lips parted, and raised my cock to her mouth.
And then, carrying my crucifixion one step further, she rolled the head around on her lovely lips as if it were a tube of lip gloss-as it indeed was, for it made them glisten wetly as she applied it lavishly to upper and lower lip and slowly, ever so slowly, moved it closer and closer.
Her teeth closed on it. She giggled. Her nip became firmer. I wanted to scream, but I held still and quiet while every nerve in my body sent off wild alarm bells. She relaxed her bite slightly and grazed her teeth forward, skinning the foreskin back with the pressure of her pearly white teeth and admitting the head at last-at long long last-into the moist warmth of her lovely mouth.
Tiring of that game, she released her teeth and clamped down with her lips. She hollowed her cheeks, sucking them in so that my prick was completely immersed in warm wet flesh. Her tongue began an intricate tickling glissade on the sensitive underside of my dick.
Talented though she was, Mrs. Redfield couldn't deep throat a cock the way black Josie could. I wanted to ram it down her gullet and give her a bellyfull of cum immediately, but she stopped me with her dainty fingertips to show me that I could go so far and no further. Even so, she had managed to accommodate half of my massive tool in her mouth, and that was no mean feat for any girl.
But this was a minor quibble. Even if she couldn't do that one stylish trick, she could do everything else to qualify herself as a skullfucker without peer. Never had any woman lavished such tender loving care on my tool with her lips and tongue and teeth. She wasn't just sucking my dick, she seemed to be like a pagan fanatic worshipping at the altar of some phallic deity, some deity of dick. It was as if her salvation depended on the salvation of her suctive mouth.
And even though she couldn't take every last inch, she didn't neglect those inches that had to stay out in the cold. Her fingertips kept up a soft jerking rhythm on the root, a rhythm that under-lined and complemented what her lips and tongue were doing to the tip. With her other hand she tickled my balls and asshole, using everything she had to make sure my pleasure in her blowjob was complete.
I leaned forward to stroke her shoulders and fondle her delicious breasts. She squirmed sensuously under my touch like a favored cat, and each squirm did something special for my cock as it quivered and throbbed in the tender care of her greedy mouth. She even seemed to purr, and the vibrations of that throaty vocalization added an extra-special tingle to my prick, a special little thrill that I had never experienced before or even dared to imagine in my wildest wet dreams. This incredible woman had raised cock-sucking to the level of a fine art. She was a Picasso of prick-licking, a Fellini of fellatio!
It could have lasted forever, as far as I was concerned. I could have died at that moment and I would have died happy and fulfilled, I would have been singing her praises all the way to heaven or hell. But nothing that good could have lasted. I would have had to be a marble statue not to respond to the kind of treatment she was giving my cock.
Try as hard as I would, I couldn't restrain myself for another instant. I gripped the arms of the chair painfully as I let out a howl of ecstasy and completion. Everything in me-God knows, maybe even the earwax she had promised to suck out-seemed to convert itself into fiery, jelly-like liquid and race to my cock so it could 'pump forth like a blasting geyser into the bottomless chasm of her mouth. Brain, nerves, bones, muscles, blood-all of it seemed converted to gism, it was like being swept away by a tornado as I pumped gob after gob of skyrocketing semen into the suction of her luscious lips.
I don't know where it was all coming from, but she swallowed it all, every last drop, the sinuous muscles of her golden throat working overtime as she gulped it down and sucked for more.
And at last it was over.
"Now," she said, "I think you'd better go before I call my husband."
* * *
It was twenty minutes of five when I paid off the cab in front of the office. One of the sheriff's cars was parked in the areaway, and the door of my room was standing open. I walked over and looked in. Mitchell was pawing through one of the dresser drawers. He looked up at me without interest, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and pushed the drawer shut.
"Looks like you just haven't got a gun," he said.
"Where's your warrant?" I asked. "I forgot to pick it up. Want me to go back for it and search you again?"
"No," I said.
"I'd be glad to," he said helpfully, "No trouble at all."
"Don't bother," I said. "I wouldn't want to monopolize you."
"You got a great sense of humor," he said. He looked around for the ashtray, saw it was on the night stand between the beds, and shrugged. He ground out the cigarette on the glass top of the dresser. "Yes, sir, a great sense of humor."
"How did you get in?" I asked.
"Maid. I told her you wouldn't mind a bit. Hell, I told her, a man with a sense of humor like that!"
I said nothing. He gave the room another indifferent glance and came out past me. "I guess you're doing all right, friend. You're from out of town, and that seems to be all it takes."
I turned and looked at him with my hands shoved in my pockets. He waited a minute, hoping I'd be stupid enough to swing at him, and then stepped off onto the gravel. "Well, give her back the key, huh? Tell her I said you wouldn't mind a bit." He climbed in the cruiser and drove off.
I stepped inside and closed the door, took a deep breath, and lighted a cigarette. In a minute or two I was all right. I went into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. The bloody clothes were still lying in the tub. Nothing was badly disarranged in the room; he'd merely been killing time, hoping I'd get back before he left. I went over to the office. Josie heard me, and came out, grinning. "Miss Ida's awake."
"Good," I said. "How is she?"
"Jest fine. You know what was the first thing she asked for?"
"A three-pound T-bone?"
"No, sir. A comb and a lipstick."
Well, I thought, a psychiatrist would probably score it the same way. "That's great. Will you ask her if I can come in?"
"Yes, sir. She's been asking where you was."
She went in back, and came out almost immediately and nodded. I went through. I still had the hat on, and wondered if I could get by without removing it. Probably, I thought, remembering the slob way I'd acted when she came over to the room. She no doubt assumed I slept in it, and ate with my feet. When I stepped into the bedroom, however, she solved the problem for me. She was propped up on two pillows with a filmy blue robe about her shoulders, still too pale perhaps, but damned attractive, and smiling. She held out her hand. Well, I'd been answering questions all day.
"I'm so glad to see you," she said warmly. "I was afraid you'd gone on without even saying good-bye, or giving me a chance to thank you."
She was the only one in town, I thought, who didn't know by now that I was her lover, bodyguard, partner, hired goon, sweetheart, private detective, and the father of her three Mongolian children. She'd been asleep.
"Josie kept saying you were still around. Oh, good heavens, what happened to you?" She broke off, staring at the bandage and the hell week haircut.
"Just a little accident," I said. "Nothing. Couple of stitches. But how do you feel? You look wonderful."
"How did it happen?" she asked firmly.
Maybe a few details would do it. "Your coloring's a lot better, and there's more light and animation in the eyes-"
"My coat's shinier, too," she said. "And my nose is cool." She pointed to the armchair beside the bed. "Drop the red herring, and sit down, Mr. Chatham. I want to know if you've been hurt, and how?"
I remembered what the doctor had said about rest, and no more emotional upheavals. Except for luck and a good constitution, she could be lying there now staring blankly at the wall. No shotguns.
"Clumsiness," I said. "And not having a flashlight. I got an anonymous tip some more of that acid was hidden in an old barn out in the country. I went out there, and while I was poking around in the loft I raked my head on a nail. The acid wasn't there, either, though I think it might have been at one time."
She appeared to believe me. "I'm sorry," she said simply. "It's my fault."
"Not at all," I said. "As a matter-of-fact, I'm partly to blame for their wrecking that room."
"How could you think a thing like that?"
I told her. "I think he caught on to what I was doing when I was checking those telephone booths. It's the same man. And probably the same one who sent those two kids out here last night trying to get you in trouble with the police. When I helped you get rid of-them, he decided I was meddling too much. The acid was just a hint that I was going to do you more harm than good by hanging around. I don't know what his object is, but let's find out."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Yesterday you wanted to hire me as a private detective to look into it. You still can't, because I have no license to do that kind of work; the minute the sheriff's office could prove you were paying me, I'd be in jail. But there's nothing on the statute books that says I can't take over the operation of this motel simply because you're a friend of mine and because I'm interested in buying a part of it-both of which are true."
"You're going a little too fast for me," she said.
"We'll go into the business angle later. Obviously you don't have to sell me a part interest in it unless you want to, but as of the moment that's what the status is. We're considering it. When they call you, tell them that. As a matter-of-fact, I've already taken over the operation of it, and to some extent, the operation of I you. I've closed the motel because there's no way in God's world you can stop them from coming back and doing it to another room as I long as you're open to the public, and you I obviously can't search your guests' luggage for acid. And I've accepted the responsibility for seeing that the doctor's instructions are carried out, and those instructions were that you were to stay in bed and rest, with this whole thing off your back, until he said you could get up."
"Ridiculous," she said. "I'm as healthy as a horse."
"Sure you are. A horse that hasn't had a square meal in a month, or a full night's rest since last year's Wood Memorial. You're going to stay right where you are and let me handle it."
"But-"
"No buts. Ever since I landed in town, I've been jockeyed around by some character who thinks I'm on your side. He's finally convinced me he's right."
The telephone rang out in the office. Josie appeared in the doorway. "It's for you," she said. "Long-distance."
CHAPTER EIGHT
I went out and took it at the desk. I told the operator we'd accept the charges, and Lane came on. "Mr. Chatham?"
"Yes. How did you make out?"
"Okay," he said. "So far, of course, it's mostly just the poop from the newspaper files of last November-"
"Shoot," I said, reaching for something to take notes on.
"Strader's full name was Albert Gentry Strader, he was thirty-five years old at the time he was killed, and if you were looking for a good one-word description of him, bum would probably do as well as any. Not a crook or a hood, however, just sleazy. No criminal record, aside from a few misdemeanors like an occasional D&D, assault and battery, and a drunk driving or two. FBI had nothing on him. His trouble was women-if that's trouble. Big, good-looking guy, probably oversexed, good front, easy manner, and lazy. It's nine hundred miles round-trip from Miami to Galicia, and there's never been any doubt in anybody's mind that when he drove that distance three times in two months, it was a woman. He called himself a salesman, but he wasn't much good at it, from all accounts.
"Came from a pretty good small-town family in upstate Louisiana. Played football in the military school he went to in Pennsylvania for four years. Flunked out his first year at Tulane. Went in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and got into an electronics school, and was a Radioman Second when he came out at the end of the war."
"He wasn't in subs, by any chance?"
"No. Jeep carriers, it says here. First showed up in Miami in 1946, disc jockey at a small radio station. For a while in 1948 he was shacked up with some racy old girl running a string of horses at Tropical and Hialeah. Apparently lived around here most of the time since, selling cars, real estate, boats, and so on, but not exactly burning up the course, as I said. He wasn't here continuously, you understand. There's one small gap he seems to have been in New Orleans, and he had a couple of traveling jobs for short periods. In the fall of '53 he was selling PA systems and motion picture projectors to lodges, schools, and so on, working for a Jacksonville distributor with a northern Florida territory. Then in '55 and early '56 he was traveling Florida and Georgia for an outfit called Electronics Enterprises, but I don't know what he was selling. Just a boomer, you see. Usually shacked up with some woman who helped support him.
"At the time he was killed he was working for a real estate outfit called Wells & Merritt in the northeast part of town. Dwelling sales, and rentals. So there's practically no chance at all he could have gone to Galicia on business."
"No record he ever knew Lang?"
"None whatever, and they dug into it for weeks. They were in different worlds. Lang was a pretty big wheel, till he smashed, and Strader was a penny-ante type that couldn't have bought his way into that crowd."
"How about the first Mrs. Lang?"
"Another nothing. No connection at all. Don't forget, Miami's a pretty big place. And, of course, where they really went to work was on the second Mrs. Lang, the widow. For obvious reasons. I mean, they had it made. Strader went up there to see a woman, presumably a married woman, and he winds up killing a husband, with a woman known to be with him while he was trying to get rid of the body, so where do you look? And in seven months they've come up with exactly nothing. She simply wasn't his cup of tea. She was a medical lab technician with no money except her salary, and she didn't run with any gay crowd. I think the way she met Lang was clipping those wires to him to take an electrocardiogram."
"Okay," I said. "I suppose they gave up long ago on the angle Strader was hired for the job?"
"Sure. In the first place, they couldn't find anybody who'd want Lang bumped off. The insurance went to his thirteen-year-old daughter. There was some bad feeling between him and his first wife, but what would she stand to gain? She already had the divorce, and a good chunk of the money. He'd made no particularly bitter enemies in business. He wasn't a chaser, and had never figured in any scandal. And even if somebody did want to hire a trigger man, why Strader? He was no hoodlum, and nobody ever starts out in crime as a professional murderer. Also, there's the way Lang was killed, being hit on the head. That's too much work for a pro. No, that angle was out from the first."
"All right," I said. "Right at the moment I don't see any lead to follow, but take another run at him tomorrow. Maybe you can find out what he was up to during those holes in his employment record. See how many old girl friends you can uncover, and where they are now. I gather there were no letters in his stuff, but did they check long-distance calls?"
"That's right; there were no letters. But there were two toll calls from Galicia. And in both cases they were made the day before he drove up there. No lead. They originated at pay phones."
I nodded. "Smart baby. Well, call me back this time tomorrow."
I went back. Ida Lang was sitting up in bed with her arms around her knees. "Have you had anything to eat yet?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I just woke up about a half-hour ago."
"How about having dinner with me?"
She smiled. "I thought you weren't going to let me out of bed."
"I'm not. Do you like steak? That's the only thing I know how to cook."
"That's not exactly the kind of meat I had my mouth set for," she said softly, the pink tip of her tongue appearing and sensuously wetting her lips as she stared pointedly, with unmistakable meaning, at my crotch.
"Jesus," I breathed. I was getting more pussy lately than I knew what to do with. My prick had no such problem, though. It stood right up at attention at the thought of getting inside the one woman I wanted far more than any of the others.
"Don't tell me that living in San Francisco turned your head around, Chatham," she said slyly. "Your eyes might say no-no, but there's yes-yes in that muffin-stabber between your legs."
I laughed. "It's not that-it's just that I tried to avoid coming on with you, knowing how sick-"
"I know precisely what's wrong with me, and you've got the only sure cure."
Maybe she was right. Frustration could take it out of you. And when she opened her robe to reveal her pale nakedness, all thought of refusal or even delay was blown out of my mind. Sick and underweight though she might be, she looked even better to me than the incredible Mrs. Redfield.
Ida's tits were high and firm and perfectly formed, with big nipples that stuck right up and said hello. Her skin was pale as polished marble, and as perfect. As I knelt on the bed beside her and stared in hungry fascination, I could see the fine tracery of blue veins beneath its translucent surface.
"I wanted to talk business...."
"I could suspect you of anything, except being a bore," she sighed, reaching up and pulling down my head for a long, languorous, open-mouthed kiss.
"It's not that," I said, coming up for air. "It's not that-I want you, too, it's just that I don't want to get the two things mixed up, to make you think-"
"I'll talk business with you, I'll be as prim and dignified as you like, if you promise to fuck me. Now!"
It was an offer-an order-I couldn't refuse, and I felt like a dope for wasting so much time when I had what I wanted before me on a silver platter. I shucked my clothes in record time while she peeled her robe all the way off.
While we stripped, I kept my eyes on her furry cunt, just as pink and pretty and desirable as could be. Even though I'd had more than my share of hair pie for one day, this was rare vintage pussy, and my lips went down to it like a hungry dog to his dish. She flung herself back on the bed, groaning and giving herself up completely to the delicious sensations as I tongued my way around the long, leaf-shaped convolutions of her prime pussy. The taste of the slick confection had a special delicate flavor all its own that Josie or Mrs. Redfield couldn't match.
"Oh, God, where did you learn to eat like that?" she moaned, running her fingers through my hair while I ran my tongue through hers.
I knew it was a rhetorical question, and I didn't want to tell her about my recent refresher courses, so I just kept right on eating, lifting her by her ass as a thirsty man might lift a big brimming bowl to his lips.
Good as it was to eat her, much as I would have loved to fuck her lovely face, I was overwhelmed by a burning desire to give it to her properly, long and lovingly, and her wish seemed to be the same. She twisted around in my embrace, presenting her trim rounded rump to me.
"I just love it from the back," she said. "Fuck me from behind-ream me out good-give it to me!"
Before I did, I gave her delicious ass a thorough lip-loving, running my tongue up and down the deep, salty cleavage between her cheeks, around the pink button of her asshole and down to the cleft peach of her cunt again. She wiggled up on her knees, twitching her delightful butt in anticipation.
At last I knelt up behind her and guided the head of my hard cock where my tongue had just gone, down between her buns. I hesitated for a moment at her asshole, knowing from my close examination that she was an anal virgin and wanting desperately to remedy that unfortunate situation, but that could wait until later. I rubbed it with the tip of my tool as if staking out a claim, and something about the way she quivered her delicious ass told me that she approved my claim as I hurried on.
My cock sank into her like a rock into a sea of oil that rapidly formed a second skin, as tight and as comfortable as the first, for a rampaging tool. I jammed it home until my pubic hair was jammed into the crack of her ass and began to give her the reaming she wanted.
I began to realize that this was just what the doctor would have ordered if he'd known his business. Ida was starved for screwing, and each stroke seemed to bring her a renewal of health and strength. Her motions became surer and firmer, her skin began to glow a healthy pink under its fine sheen of sweat, her grunts and groans of deep satisfaction weren't the whimpers of a sick woman.
I started off slowly, still careful of her delicate condition, but I gained confidence from her obvious blossoming under the thrusts of my rigid prick. I built up the tempo until the bedsprings screamed, their chorus supplemented by the rhythmic slap of my belly against her ass and the sucking squish of her hungry cunt as it bubbled its hot juices around my plunging, humping dick.
I had all but forgotten about her luscious breasts in my almost total concentration on her fantastic cunt, but now I remembered them and reached forward to cup them in my eager hands. They were every bit as taut and firm as they looked, and their perfect contours seemed to have been designed for my fingers. It was as if her tits and her cunt had been made for me alone, as if I had at last found what I'd been missing all these years.
"Don't forget my clit," she urged. "Play with that while you fuck me."
It was downright painful, taking one of my hands off those melon-heavy, strawberry crowned breasts, but I made the sacrifice and put my finger on the trigger between her voluptuous thighs. It felt so tight that it might burst at any moment, like a tiny sausage on a red-hot griddle, and the instant my finger caressed the hard little nubbin she began a spasmodic bucking and a bone-jarring vibration that signalled the onset of her first orgasm.
"Don't stop, don't stop!" she urged. "I want to cum and cum until I'm dead or unconscious!"
That was a pretty scary threat, considering my fears for her health, but again I figured she was just being rhetorical, carried away by her own enthusiasm, so I continued to give her what she wanted, fingering her clitoris and alternately feeling her tits while I lashed my stiff rod in and out of her.
As she wandered further and further into her world of orgasmic ecstasy, she drawled all over her former sickbed, bumping and twisting until it was like riding a bucking bronco. I stayed with her, though, and at last she fetched up against the head of the bed, which she gripped with both hands to steady herself as she powered her ass back to meet and match my thrusts with a vigor I wouldn't have believed her capable of.
Our bodies slapped and sweated and juiced and bumped and strummed as we tried to climb inside each other and pull down the lid of our separate identities forever. The experience became psychedelic in its intensity as time stretched out forever and thought and feeling became confused with the blending of bones and nerves and muscles in one new entity, a mindless beast whose only existence was in fucking.
But at last even that great beast staggered and stumbled and exploded in separate bursts of blasting gism as I filled her so full that the backwash of my cum splashed out hotly around my pumping thighs. Collapsed in a tangled heap, I finally realized I had an identity apart from hers, and I pulled away from her.
"Want to talk business now?" she purred.
"You ought to eat first," I said.
"Whatever you say," she giggled, and the next thing I knew she was down at my crotch with my soft but still thick prick in her mouth.
"Cut it out," I said-and believe me, it took a real effort to tear those words out. "You need some real food."
She moved upward and snuggled her head under my arm, utterly content. "After that fantastic fuck, I'll do whatever you say," she sighed.
But I was pretty tired out and had no desire to get up and start cooking. I took her earlier suggestion and talked business. I had some money saved up from my job, plus a comfortable legacy, and I offered to invest in the motel to the amount of half her equity. My capital would go toward a swimming pool, landscaping, and other physical improvements. I would do most of the actual work myself to keep expenses down, to give myself something to do, and to have a reason for sticking around besides slipping it to her regularly, which I also planned to do.
"Now that that's settled, can I eat?" she demanded, and before I could make a move toward the kitchen, she was down there on my prick again, sucking like there was no tomorrow.
I hated to admit it, it seemed disloyal, but Mrs. Redfield could suck rings around Ida. But the burgundy-haired beauty had been a special case, a connoisseur of cocksucking of the sort that happens once in every billion or so women, and so it was unfair to compare Ida's earnest but amateurish efforts.
Besides, Mrs. Redfield's superiority was entirely of a technical nature. That is to say, she knew all the moves, she had all the tricks and twists down pat, but I hadn't mattered to her. I had just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a stiff cock.
With Ida, though, it was different. Her blowjob came from the heart. She was doing it especially to please me; and pleasing me gave her pleasure. Besides, no amount of technique can match the ineffable sensation of having a face whose beauty goes through you like a knife-and Ida's face was like that for me-working on your prick. I lay back and soaked up the fantastic sensation as Ida's lips sucked my prick back to swollen rigidity and her tongue polished it with clumsy but heartfelt eagerness.
I found that I couldn't lie passively beneath her delightful work. As her head bobbed up and down over my stiff meat, I began to move my hips up from the bed to fuck her in the mouth. She nodded her head to tell me it was all right, to urge me on, and her hair wafted tantalizingly across my belly and thighs as I stepped up the pace and slipped my dick more quickly in and out of her lips.
As her blowjob drove up my excitement notch by notch, I rolled her over and got up to straddle her chest with my knees, not letting my cock slip from her mouth for an instant while I executed the maneuver. She lay back and took it, raising her head only slightly to achieve the proper angle as I pushed it down into her lovely sucking mouth. She seemed to love it so much, to want it so much, that I felt as if our roles were strangely reversed, as if I were a mother giving suck to a hungry baby.
I reached back to fondle her cunt, and I was amazed to find that her clit was just as stiff and hard as it had been when I was fucking her. Just giving me this blowjob had driven her excitement up to a feverish pitch.
She nodded encouragement, not wanting to take her mouth off my tool for the time it would take to tell me about it, and I picked up on her signal and began twanging her love-button like a little bowstring, shooting her off into the realm of climactic transcendence. She writhed and squirmed beneath me, her tits rubbing my ass tantalizingly, but she didn't forget the work she was doing on my cock. If anything, it got even better as her tongue began to vibrate as some kind of release for her surging orgasms.
Recalling Mrs. Redfield's incredible demonstration of fist-fucking, I began to wonder how many fingers I could stuff into Ida's delightful cunt. While one hand devoted all its attentions to the tiny pit in the squishy, mashed peach of her cunt, the other went to work fingerfucking her.
I hadn't expected her to take all five, and I wasn't disappointed when I was forced to stop at two. Mrs. Redfield, after all, was a kind of sexual freak. But I did the most I could with those two, pumping them in and out and spreading and contracting them inside her delicious pussy. She appreciated what I was doing, and it boosted the effect of my efforts on her clit until she was thrashing and groaning around the mouthful of cock in the grip of even more violent and exquisite orgasms.
But it wasn't all one-sided, not by a long shot, and that shot boiled up from my balls when I least expected it, sending a tingling glow through my prick that spread throughout my body. In the next instant I was blasting into Ida's sweet mouth like a runaway fire hose. Unlike Mrs. Redfield, she couldn't swallow it all, and I was delighted by the sight of my cream cum trickling down over her full lower lip as she struggled to choke down all she could.
"How was that?" she gasped, when at last I pulled my prick from her mouth.
"We'll have to work on it," I said. "At least three or four times a day, for openers."
I ran out to cook the steaks before she could hit me with a pillow. When she appeared for martinis and supper, she had put on her robe and a touch of make-up. We started talking of more serious things, of Strader and her husband.
I asked her to clear up one item that had puzzled me: why she had been awake when the sheriff knocked on her door that fatal morning. What about the phone call she had received just before?
It was substantially as Ollie had given it to me. I nodded. "She did sound about half-drunk, then? I mean, she had enough of a heat on to want to argue about it, and you had to shuffle through all the registration cards to be sure?"
"That's right," she said.
"Do you remember the name of the man she wanted to talk to?"
"Yes. It was a Mr. Carlson."
"And what did the sheriff and Redfield say when you told them that? Not at first, but later."
"Redfield said I was lying. There was no such person as Carlson."
I nodded. "That's what I wanted to find out. Redfield's too smart a cop to miss the phony ring of that one. So he did check, and found out there wasn't any Mr. Carlson registered anywhere in the county that night."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it's almost certain nobody was trying to get hold of a mythical Mr. Carlson at five o'clock in the morning in a country town. That boils it down to only two possibilities. If you were lying, you were obviously guilty. But they should at least have considered the second one. And that is, if you weren't lying, you were probably talking to the woman who did kill your husband."
She stared. "What kind of woman could do a thing like that?"
"A tough one and a smart one," I said. "Take a good look at her. In the space of a little over an hour she'd helped to kill a man, and then she'd seen her lover shot down by a policeman, and still she was able to get herself off the hook and figure out a way to set you up for it so she could stay off. Not exactly a chokeup artist. It was ad lib, you see, because Calhoun gummed up the first plan. I'd say she was about as flighty and hysterical as a cobra."
Ida considered that rather unhappy picture while she sipped her martini. I was keeping the drinks flowing. She looked like she needed them.
She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about it. She was exhausted, true. And no one looks good when the body can't rid itself of its poisons.
But the sleep she'd had already, plus the relaxation caused by the drinks already showed up on her face. She looked five years younger, and I could see that with the proper care, she would be a show-stopper.
She drained her glass and smiled at me. "How about another?" she asked.
"Absolutely," I said. The pitcher was beside me and the gin and vermouth was perfectly chilled. They were going down like water, and it didn't take long for the martinis to work their own special magic.
I refilled her cocktail glass and she laid her hand on my wrist as I poured. It wasn't much-just the touch of flesh to flesh-but it was enough for me to return to my seat with the beginnings of a stout hard-on.
I felt like a dumb teenager, hard as a rock and nowhere to go with it.
She was grinning. Apparently my discomfort had not escaped her attention.
I busied myself pouring my glass full of gin and vermouth and when I looked back she was still grinning. "You sure are an excitable man," she said.
I grinned. There wasn't a damned thing else to do. "Well," I said, "You're a very attractive woman. I guess my imagination just got the better of me."
"Is that right?" Ida said. She moved over next to me and sat down. She directed her gaze to the lump in my trousers. Naturally, all that attention didn't help me out. I was getting harder and harder and bigger and bigger.
"Beats watching television," Ida said. Then she sipped about half of her martini down, placed the glass on the coffee table, and then laid her hand in my lap, palm-down. The warmth of her hand traveled through my pants and bathed my prick in pleasure.
"I like the feel of it," she said. Her eyes were a bit glassy but she was all right. I grinned at her and unzipped my pants.
The time for modesty was over.
As I hauled out my cock, she smiled at me. I wondered how long it had been since she'd been turned loose. Probably since her husband was killed.
Ida knew what she was doing-or at least, she operated on the same sexual principles that I did. She didn't rush and she didn't get stupid, with a lot of giggling. She smiled at me and stroked my cock until it was standing tall, and her warm hand encircled it, jerking it smoothly.
Then Ida sighed. "I guess it's the drinks," she said. Ida looked into my eyes. "I'm not usually this ... open," she added.
But her Hand never left my cock. I placed my own hand atop hers, urging her on.
She began jerking it again, and this time her grip was tighter. Then she leaned forward and encircled the head of my prick with her warm, wet lips.
I froze in total pleasure.
She didn't take much of the shaft into her mouth. In fact, she centered her oral attentions on the head, licking, biting softly, and caressing it with her tongue.
I couldn't believe that this was happening to me. Still, if I'd had one wish for the evening, this would have been it. I knew I was attracted to her as I was to few women. But it was even more than that. I wanted her, all of her, and I wanted to take care of her and live with her and be with her.
As far as I knew, that spelled love, but I couldn't bring myself to face it. I was on my way to Miami, footloose, and I hadn't planned on settling down in a small Florida village.
But here I was.
Ida worked further down my shaft, taking it a half-inch at a time. She was slow and wonderful. She loved doing it, that much was obvious.
Finally I couldn't take it anymore. It was driving me crazy to sit there and be serviced like some Oriental potentate in his harem.
I ran my fingers through her thick hair and gently lifted her head. "Why don't you show me the rest of you?" I asked.
She blushed. Believe it or not, she blushed. Then she stood up. Ida looked uncertain for a moment and then she smiled.
"How about some music?" she asked.
"Just what's lacking," I answered. "How come I didn't think of that myself?"
"Not romantic," she sniffed. "All you men are a-like-interested in only one thing!"
She had me there.
Ida placed a few LP's on the stereo-Latin tunes, soft Cuban sounds. It was relaxing, sensual music. Then she began taking off her clothing.
Again, she wasn't cute or coy about it, but she made it damned interesting. By the time she was down to her panties, I was about out of my mind.
She had the slender body of a teenager, but with the full breasts and lovely thighs of a woman. As I watched her. I realized that my clothing was in the way. I stood up and took it off and threw it all in a corner.
She was still standing there, smiling at me. I knelt in front of her and quickly laid my tongue on her sleek inner thigh.
Ida opened up. She was standing, her feet planted wide apart. I twisted my head and lapped at her soft fragrant lips and she sighed with pleasure.
She was excited, and I turned around and sat down and then leaned back, my head directly between her legs. I turned up my face and she powered down a bit and laid her exciting softness on my mouth.
She loved my tongue and I loved doing it. She was gasping for breath by the time I was finished.
We went directly to the sofa.
She laid down on her back, her legs open, her arms outstretched and inviting.
I was atop her, guiding my throbbing prick in, and then as her soft flesh parted and then encircled my hardness, I relaxed into her arms and began moving my hips, working it in, loving the way she seemed to respond to every bit of movement.
She began to moan and writhe in my arms and I really went into high-gear. Her eyes were fluttering and I leaned down and mouthed a perfect nipple, working it hard, and then she began to come, slowly and quietly at first, but building quickly to a noisy, humping finish that left me totally drained.
It was what we both needed.
"Didn't you say something about a steak?" she finally said.
CHAPTER NINE
I cooked the steaks after a while and we had dinner, not talking about the murder anymore until afterward when we were having coffee. She was quiet, but she ate a little of the steak and drank some wine. I lighted a cigarette for her.
"Was anybody else ever arrested?" I asked. "Or even questioned?"
"Lots of people were questioned," she said. "But it was mostly in reference to me. No one else, apparently, was a suspect. There just weren't any grounds for suspicion, as far as anyone else was concerned."
"That's what's driving the police crazy," I said. "You see? The whole thing goes around in a perfect circle and always comes right back where it starts. The woman knew she would be suspected if there was a homicide investigation; there was a homicide investigation, and you were the only one they ever had any reason to suspect. QED, you're it. Except that they haven't got any actual proof you even knew Strader, let alone were carrying on an affair with him. And if they tried to go to court without that proof, any defense attorney who'd been out of law school an hour would cut 'em to shreds. Redfield probably wakes up screaming and chewing the bedclothes. However, that's his problem; mine is something else."
"And what is that?"
"Simply this-what in hell became of the other woman? The one who knew she would be suspected, and never was."
"Maybe she was mistaken, or exaggerating the possible danger."
"No. On the evidence she's a long-headed, cold-blooded type that doesn't get rattled, or panic easily."
"You say you think there's another man involved. Maybe he was the one."
"I don't think so. Strader came up here to see a woman; that's what you run into everywhere you turn. The woman was at the bottom of the whole thing. But say for the sake of argument, it was this other man. Why wasn't he suspected? From what you say of that sheriff, he wouldn't deliberately suppress evidence, for anybody. And I don't think Redfield would."
"No. I'm sure neither of them would. Redfield is a very hard man, but fair. And I think he's thoroughly honest."
I frowned. "That's the picture I get of him. But something's chewing him. I get the impression he hates you and doesn't care what they do to you out here, and at the same time he hates himself for it because basically he's too honest a cop for that kind of thing."
She nodded. "I think I understand what you mean. You remember I told you that during the investigation I began to feel he disliked me intensely. There are two reasons for it. Kendall-my husband-knew him quite well, and I remember his remarking once that Redfield was what was known as a dedicated police officer. There was nothing he hates worse than seeing a criminal get away with something. I gather you are the same way, and strangely enough the two of you are a great deal a-like, now that I think of it. You don't mind, do you?"
"No," I said. "I hadn't thought of it. But Redfield's a man you respect, whether you agree with him or not. But what about the other reason?"
"It's simply that Kendall was a sort of boyhood hero to Redfield, as he was to a lot of others around here who were a few years younger. You know, the high school football hero when they were in grade school, and the Ail-American end at Georgia Tech when they had reached high school themselves. Juvenile, perhaps, but it lasts. Especially when he went on to become quite a war hero and then made a name for himself in business in Miami. So to Redfield and a lot of others, the whole issue is crystal clear. I'm a tramp, and I committed murder and got away with it."
She said it calmly enough, with no evidence of cracking. You'd have to look closely to see the weariness and pain far back and under control. I had a strong desire to comfort her in some way, but at the same time sense enough to realize there was nothing I could do. Except get on with it.
"What time did Strader check in?" I asked. "Around six p.m. I think," she replied. "And he was alone?" She nodded.
"And those two times in October, did the cards show he registered alone then?"
"Yes."
"There's no record he was up here other times and stayed at another motel?"
"No. They checked. Apparently he was up here only those three times, and always stayed here. That was damaging, too, of course."
"Did you recall seeing him at any time later that same night? I mean, did you notice whether his car was still in front of the room?"
She shook her head helplessly. "I can't remember. There were several rooms rented that night, so I didn't even notice."
"And your husband was going fishing alone?"
"Yes."
"What time did he leave? Did you get up, too?"
"No," she said. "I always offered to, to make his coffee for the thermos, but he insisted on doing it himself. I was awake and could hear him moving around in the kitchen, of course, and he came into the bedroom before he left and kissed me. He made our standard joke about catching a bass so big he wouldn't have to lie about it, and then I heard him drive off. I-I-"
She took a sudden, shaky breath, and leaned forward to crush out the cigarette.
"You didn't hear him speak to anybody outside, or another car leave?" I asked quickly, to get her past it.
"No." She was all right now. "He was alone. There was no doubt of it. In a little while I went back to sleep. And the next thing was when the phone awakened me and this woman wanted to talk to Mr. Carlson. By the time I'd finally convinced her there was no such person registered, I was too wide awake to go back to sleep. In less than ten minutes the sheriff knocked on the door."
"Do you know exactly what time he left here?" I asked.
"It was ten minutes of four."
"And how long does it take to drive to this Cut where he kept the boat?"
"About twenty minutes."
"Did they fix the exact time Calhoun jumped Strader down there?"
She nodded. "Calhoun testified at the inquest that it was a squeaky brake on the car that woke him up. He looked at his watch, and it was four twenty-five."
"Umh-umh. There's just one more thing. Have you ever had any reason at all to suspect your husband was involved with some other woman here?"
"No," she said quickly. "Certainly not."
"Try to be objective about it," I urged. "Think carefully. He was in his late forties, wasn't he? Sometimes at that age-"
She flared up. "Mr. Chatham! My husband wouldn't even have been capable of anything as cheap and sordid as that. Everybody who's ever known him would tell you the same thing!"
I was surprised at the vehemence of it, and frowned. Maybe she was being just a little too vehement about it. Then she pushed her hand back through her hair with that weary gesture she had, and smiled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't intend to snap at you that way."
It didn't mean anything, I thought, except that she was tiring. I was doing a very poor job of carrying out the doctor's orders. I crushed out the cigarette and stood up. "Back to bed for you. I'll get your medicine." I brought over one of the sleeping pills from my room.
I locked the back door and left, and sat on the edge of the porch in front of my room smoking and watching the place until Josie returned. There was no telling what they would do next. Ida Lang was sleeping peacefully when Josie came back around ten-thirty and set up her cot in the living room. I told her to keep the front door bolted, and went across to bed.
I checked to be sure the window at the rear of the room was locked and the drapes tightly drawn.' There was something very chilling in the thought of that shotgun. I could still see the empty eyes at the end of its dual barrels searching for me down there in the gloom like some nightmarish radar. Only a fool wouldn't be scared. If I didn't flush him out before he had a second chance, I wasn't going to be very pretty when they found me.
The next day I went across the street for a cup of coffee and there was Pearl, with his back to the door. He didn't see me come in and he was in the middle of a joke.
He was speaking in a New York Jewish accent. Apparently anti-Semitic jokes were big with Pearl. But what interested me was how well he handled the accent.
When I got back to the motel there was a phone call from Cynthia Redfield. "It's a Mister Montoya," she said to me. "He says he knows something about the acid job. Kelly's not here, but he wants to see you."
I told her I'd be right over.
When I got there she was on the phone. She waved me in, and when Kelly got on the phone she started screaming and acting as if she were being attacked.
The oldest set-up in the world. When she put down the phone she tore her clothing off and looked at me with a smirk. "Unless you start running," she said, "you're going to be a dead man in three minutes."
In the distance I could barely hear the siren. I waited until he came crashing through the door. I took Kelly out as quickly as possible, tried to explain the situation to him when he woke up, after cuffing his hands. But it was like talking to a wall.
So Strader's girl friend was Cynthia Redfield. I checked around and found out that Cynthia had been married before Kelly came along, to a high school teacher in a nearby town.
I drove over to the town-Willow Springs-and found out that her first husband had died as a result of an electrical accident in the bathroom. He was insured for ten thousand dollars.
Willow Springs had been Strader's territory when he was selling film projectors. I checked with the local school and sure enough, Strader had not only sold one to the school, he had sold it through the good offices and recommendations of Cynthia Sprague, as she was known then. Her late husband, Bill Sprague, had died shortly after that.
So Strader had known Cynthia before she even met Kelly.
But why kill Lang? I thought about it. Ida didn't want to admit that her husband might have had a streak of tomcat in him, but he probably did. After all, a football star, then a war hero. Those guys ran to type.
Later I found out. I was talking to Ida about it and she remarked that on the morning of the fishing trip, when he was murdered, her husband was supposed to be accompanied by Kelly Redfield. They were great buddies, she said. But Kelly had called the night before to say that he had to travel to Georgia on an extradition. That answered it for me. Knowing Kelly was out of town, he'd dropped by Cynthia's to tear off a piece and had paid with his life.
What had he interrupted?
Calhoun cleared it up for me. He picked me up the next day because he'd heard I'd been in Willow Springs, asking questions.
Calhoun had had his suspicions too. "But Kelly Redfield's not only a friend of mine," he said, "he'd kill anyone who suggested that his wife wasn't four-square."
Redfield was looking for me, I knew that.
Only something was holding him up, because he could have found me by now. Was it that my little speech to him had sunk in, or at least given him pause?
And then Calhoun gave the final answer. The night before Lang had been killed, there had been two burglaries in Georgia. Two safes were stolen. From what I remembered, it was close to Strader's M.O.
So Strader was doing jobs, leaving the stuff with Cynthia, and she was turning it to someone local.
Pearl Talley. Sure. His mimic abilities were terrific, and when Calhoun added that Talley had shown up about eight years before with plenty of money, I got the full picture. They'd been doing jobs for years, with the perfect cover. She was married to a cop, Strader was a traveling salesman, and Talley was just a good ol' boy.
When Calhoun made the bust at Talley's, he got them all except Cynthia, who took off through the back door. Calhoun brought her in before Kelly could catch her. She was lucky that he did. Kelly would have killed her.
And Ida? Well, she needed a partner in that motel, someone who knew his way around a massive landscaping job, and had a few bucks to throw in the pot.
You should see the place now.
In 1971 a chain outfit bought up the motel and a lot of other property around town. They kept Ida and me on to manage the place, though. Then they gave us a two-month vacation while they tore the old joint down to the ground and put up this ultra-modern group of units, queen-size beds and color television and even a Jacuzzi. I never use it, though. It puts me to sleep and Ida complains, calling it my other wife, because for years that was her specialty. Putting me to sleep, I mean. She hasn't lost her touch. She could do it then, and she can do it now.
But then, when you think of it, I'm in my fifties now, so it doesn't take much to put me to sleep. Not as much as that first night when I wandered into this town, anyway.
