There are those who will tell you that the insurance business is dull and uninteresting. Now if you happen to be in an office all day working with figures-and I don't mean the flesh and blood kind-or dictating correspondence into a sexless machine or being a file clerk who happens to be male and therefore doesn't get whistles from girls when he bends over (and I assure you that I don't want whistles from my own sex because I happen to be a cocksmith and not a queen), then you probably would accept that generalization. But my job at Duron Casualty Assurance is that of a claims adjuster, which means that I'm a sort of undercover investigator whose business it is to make sure that tricky and imaginative policyholders don't try to swindle money away from dear old Duron. And while taking care of old Mr. Duron's business, it is not infrequently that I run into a little "business" I can handle for my own profit.
For instance, I've lately finished a rather interesting case-a rare book caper. It seems there had been an Evanston book dealer by the name of Amherst Dawson who had two perfectly gorgeous chicks working for him, supposedly as clerks. Their names were Kitty Fentriss and Myrna Williams. And it turned out that Amherst Dawson was just an alias for a guy named Dewherst Ames, and Myrna and Kitty and he had worked out a highly ingenious swindle which was threatening to take away several hundred dollars in policy claims from dear old Duron.
Ames would sell a couple of elderly and wealthy guys some rare editions, and the Kitty and Myrna would beat it over to their homes, snitch back the books, give the old geezers just enough prick teasing to make them hot and distracted, and in the end the unhappy first edition collectors would phone the police and raise a hue and cry that the books had been stolen. Then, of course, they'd put in a claim for the full insured value.
On discovering the modus operandi of this little group of con artists, I decided to visit Kitty and Myrna and ask them for particulars. I have no use for prick teasers, and besides these two fast-talking women were convinced that they were pretty damned clever and I can't stomach smart-ass women. So, when I arrived at their apartment I was in a pretty mean temper and was determined to get all the facts even if it means spanking their bouncy young bottoms till they glowed like a desert sunset. I had gotten more than the facts (and much more than my ever ready dong had bargained for) by the time I left their place.
Their apartment was located in the home-grounds of the Chicago jet set-the spiraling Marina Towers. I used the old Boston Strangler's ploy of "man about your leaky toilet, ma'am" to gain entrance through the locked vestibule doors. Once in the building I was zipped to the fourteenth floor by an ear-poppingly fast elevator and I strode towards their apartment with a scowl on my face and my right hand flexing in anticipation of their pert bottomglobes. I had hardly touched the bell when the door was flung briskly open by Kitty Fentriss. She was dressed in a brightly patterned western version of the kimona, and though the costume dropped nearly to her ankles in length, it was slit boldly up one side to the hip exposing a quietly tanned thigh around which (clinging suggestively near her mound of love) was a crimson garter. My eyes traveled longingly up the slit, stopped at the garter momentarily, and then passed over her flat stomach to come to rest on her unfettered bubbies pressing against the silken second skin of her kimona. Her tiny tittie-nipples stood out sharply from the rest of her bubbies, and I swear they swelled slightly as my eyes lingered unabashedly on the twin swells.
Clasping her hands behind her back, thereby more tightly stretching the silk across her bubbies, Kitty opened sarcastically with, "Well, if it isn't Jack Warren, the insurance sleuth. Why don't you take your hands out of your pockets, Jack, and let your tiny joint do its own thing."
To which I smilingly replied, "I would, Kitty baby, but it's retreating so fast at the crummy sight of you that I'm afraid it might flee into my body and never risk a return."
With this the door came flying towards my face, but my foot stopped it before it got half way home. I gave a shove and in an instant I was inside the apartment and Kitty was yelling.
She cried, "Myrna, get your bottom out here fast." And, "Listen, you sneaky s.o.b, if you're not down on the street in sixty seconds I'll have the cops up here and watch them drag you down."
Myrna came dashing from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and as she moved swiftly across the room the towel she was wearing (the only thing she was wearing) hiked higher up her thighs, exposing with each step a little more of her damp thatch of pussyfur.
Myrna was no small package, though said package was delectably wrapped. She stood some five feet, eight inches and weighed in the neighborhood of one hundred and twenty pounds. That weight, I could see, was nicely distributed, with special emphasis on firm, upstanding pear shaped bubbies and a jostly, just slightly oversized heart-shaped derriere. Her long auburn hair was still damp from washing and clung like flaxen tendrils to her bare shoulders.
I was surrounded, in a manner of speaking, by those two angry beauties. Their mood was intensely vicious and I felt that I would momentarily be pounced upon from all sides. Immediate action was required in order to save my face from their feminine claws, and to save my entire body from incarceration should I give them the opportunity to jingle the cops. So I moved. I grabbed the most petite one, Kitty, by the waist, folded her over my shoulder and dumped her in the bedroom. Though part of me would have liked to stay there with her, the more rational parts said move, so I left the bedroom, locking the door behind me. Returning to the living room, I found Myrna at the phone. Her back was to me, and while her left hand held the phone and her right hand spun the dial, the bath towel was dropping away from her fair wondrous backside, exposing those magnificent twin bottomglobes.
About half of one word had passed her lips when my anxious hand smacked powerfully into her unsuspecting bottom. Shocked by the surprise as much as by the sting of the blow, she screeched and flung the phone from her hands.
While she stood in shock rubbing her tingling behind (and, incidentally, letting the towel fall away from the remainder of her creamy smooth body), I grasped the phone and smiled, "Sorry, wrong number," and hung up.
And then I turned my entire attention to the shocked, gasping, naked Myrna.
"Why you rotten bastard," she noted, "your ass is going to burn when the cops get done with you."
"And yours," I replied as I moved towards her, "will be consumed with a painful fire unless you give me the full particulars on the little con you and Kitty and Dewhurst Ames have been working, much to the detriment of my good employer."
She had barely finished screaming, "We'll get you for this," when she realized her Garden of Eden nakedness. With a hint of a blush she swept one hand to cover her prominent mount of Venus, and a forearm and hand to cover her titties.
Examining unabashedly her light red aureoles as I spoke, I paraphrased, "A hand in the bush is presently worthless."
So saying, I grabbed her wrist, and gripping it with no little force pulled her over to the couch, and then over my lap as I seated myself on the couch. I am not a gentle man when it comes to dealing with high handed women, and so I wrapped her still damp hair around my left hand until it touched her skull and slung my right leg over her two legs, effectively pinioning her across my lap and against my burgeoning penis.
For a moment, before I began demanding answers, I studied the rosy palm print, for which I had been responsible, standing out on her pale taut bottomovals. And then I began.
"Just the facts, ma'am," I quipped.
"You'll never get away with this," she screamed.
SMACK! I answered with my palm.
Her bottom muscles twitched and she struggled to wriggle from my lap. But I merely tightened my grip on her hair and pulled her tightly to my now throbbing organ.
Rather than go through the routine of my question, her epithet, and my deftly applied persuasion to her smooth vulnerable bottom, I reckoned as how a quick series of persuaders would bring the answers I needed more swiftly. And so I applied my hand over her entire reddening rear with vigor.
My palm slapped over her flexing quivering bottomglobes, searching for the supersensitive areas to which I might apply my "questions."
And with each slap she replied, "EERAH OH I GOD! STOP NOW PLEASE!" And, also, her legs kicked and spread further, exposing more and more of the pink slit I vowed to enter with my now hugely turgid rod. The smarting of the spanks caused her to curl her toes, kick her feet, and wriggle her body against my increasingly sensitive cock. Each jump of her body was pushing me closer to a release of my pent-up fuck. The more she squirmed, the faster I slapped her now crimson bottom, until finally I was thrust over the edge-arching, groaning, and slapping Myrna Williams' flinching rear like a madman in my orgiastic frenzy. I found, after the final burst of my sex cannon, that Myrna was groaning in submissive anguish and that my left hand, wrapped in her auburn hair, was pulling severely against her scalp. My seed was spent, as was my passion, temporarily, and so I relented momentarily in my attack on her glowing bottomovals.
And when I had gathered my faculties enough to listen, I heard Myrna cry, "I'll tell you everything I can! I'll do anything you ask! But please, God, please stop!"
"All right," my voice was still husky with passion, "I want all the details on this rare book hustle; the full particulars."
"But I know so little," she said as she slyly moved her hands towards her flaming bottom. "I'm just along for the ride. Kitty has all the facts and figures and inside dope."
And so it was. Kitty had all the inside dope all right and she was begging to tell me everything by the time I had covered her bottom-cheeks with the crimson stripes my leather belt caused and had, by way of making her more submissive and humble, forced her to kneel and gammahuch Myrna while I blasted my ever ready rocks into her tight young pussy.
"Well, by the time all the 'fessing up was done on this particular caper, several important businessmen went to jail for fraud, notably: Joshua Vernon out in Highland Park, Daniel Corday who resided in one of those imagine new high-rises on North Sheridan Road, and Matthew Armisted out on Chicago's South Side.
Matt Hollister, my boss, was properly grateful, and so was Duron. I got a few bonuses out of that job, and some of them didn't appear on the payroll ledger. For example, there was flaming-red-haired Mara Corday whose husband had been old enough to be her father, and she had offered me a long, lingering drink at her place when the case was over, on which I had had to take a rain-check. And then there was prissy blonde virginal Carol Vernon, who had hated my guts when I sent her father to the clink, and who lately, thanks to a couple of dates I had had with her, had begun to see my better qualities. And finally there was coppery-haired Peggy Armistead and her sexy stepmother Laura, who were both turning out to be rivals for my carnal attentions.
I figured that this was a pretty good bonus to compensate me for the loss of Kathy, because Matt Hollister had stolen her away from me while I was busy out in Evanston uncovering Dewherst Ames's nefarious schemes. But at least Kathy had leveled with me and been honest about it all, because she had just told me that Matt thrilled her with his good looks and his James Bond-ish personality. I couldn't very well beat that; and after all, when it came down to athletic prowess, Matt had me beaten hands down, because after all he had scored that winning touchdown which had given Northeastern a piece of the Big Ten Championship. Me, I had just broken my nose ignominiously in front of a miniskirted blonde who probably hadn't even shed a tear at my cruel fate.
But now let's get back to cases-no pun intended. It was a warm day in July I was out in Highland Park having lunch with Carol Vernon. I was also thinking fondly of thirty-six-year old Laura Armsted and her twenty-one-year old stepdaughter Peggy, who behaved more like a teenager in bed than a mature young woman in her twenties.
On the other hand, the challenge of hard-to-get pussy has always put me on my mettle and made me produce my best efforts. And Carol Vernon's maidenhead was one cherry that I just had to pluck. She had thin penciled brows which usually arched in an imperious frown; her voice was crisp, about midway between an alto and a mezzo-soprano. It expressed utter contempt for menials, trades people, and non-socialites. The first time I had seen her, I had had a sudden urge to turn her over my knee and see if she was as impervious to a spanking as she seemed to be to the ordinary garden variety of hospitality when a stranger was in the house. All I knew was if, when I was a kid, I had greeted a caller the way she had greeted me when I came on company business, my folks would have hauled off and broken a yardstick over my tail.
But in spite of those two strikes debited against her account, I had to admit that Carol was a home-run hitter in the pulchritude league. She stood about five feet four inches, but she wore high heeled sandals which always made her seem taller. She had a supple and slender waist, which flared into magnificently ripe but not at all excessively curved hips, and she had small, firm, saucy apple-round titties, which made a delightful contrast. Her face was somewhat arrogantly oval in cast, with a high forehead, slantingly set cheekbones, a firm but deliciously oval chin, nicely dimpled, and a small, thin, decisive mouth. She had a small aquiline nose which usually uptilted in disdain.
Carol Vernon wore her sandy-blonde hair in a Psyche knot at the back and the hair combed straight away from the forehead. She was twenty-six, a graduate with honors from a select Eastern finishing school, and she had been helping her father with secretarial work at home. She had never had any romantic interests, she was something of a bookworm, she liked concerts and highbrow lectures, and she had hated my guts from the very first. She also had marvelously pale white skin which was enough to make me want to throw her down on the floor and fuck the hell out of her at the slightest provocation. It was a credit to my well bred upbringing that I had been able to restrain this impulse, especially after the snubs she had given me during my professional calls upon her.
But now it was different. Now we were casual friends, and there was a chance that maybe it would grow into something even better. At least that was what I was working on.
CHAPTER TWO
Now there are cocksmiths and cocksmiths. There are those who are greedy and selfish. They keep a little black book and they register the tallies of their cuntquests (a word I have coined to designate the triumph which a Don Juan scores, or so he thinks, when he has thrust his shaft into the vulva of a susceptible female). Myself, I am as opportunistic as the next one, but I believe in a little dalliance first. The proof of a real cocksmith is when he is so randy he thinks he's going to burst into his best Sunday pants and the female of his choice is well aware of it and is playing cat and mouse with him to see just how he is going to go about relieving the ache in his groin and the load in his testicles. Meanwhile, the true cock-smith plays it nonchalant and goes on dallying.
As for me, my motto in fornicatory endeavors has always been, "Don't diddle until you can see the whites of their thighs." It's only when a girl is sprawled before you, gloriously bare and ready to receive you that you can really tell yourself that you're on the high road to Paradise.
Now, Mara Corday was one of those smoldering beauties who can make the act of taking a cigarette out of a silver cigarette case as obscenely provocative as if she had slid a hand to your crotch and were manipulating to find out whether you would fit into her scabbard. What was that motto the noble families in the Middle Ages used to have about a sword-something like "Never draw me uselessly but sheathe me in honor." I feel the same way about my priapic attachment. And I figured that Mara Corday would just about rape me once I was inside her door, so it could keep and so could the rain check on the drink she had offered me. With a woman like that, it's always better to hold her at bay, because then you get very interesting to her. You're a challenge, and she wonders whether she's really the sex trap she always thought she was, and as a consequence when you finally do give her the nod, she goes all out to prove that you really should've taken up with her a helluva lot earlier.
By which laborious process, dear reader, I'm trying to tell you that the holier-than-thou, aloof and chilly virgin Carol Vernon excited me a great deal more than Mara Corday, because it would take all my artistry and talent to get this gorgeous and snippy, white-skinned blonde into a horizontal position. Even a Boy Scout could service Mara Corday without having to do enough difficult tricks to qualify for his Eagle badge. And to me that wasn't a challenge at all.
And so, as I started to say, here it was a warm Saturday in July, and I was up at Vernon Mansion. Carol and I had had exactly four dates since her father had gone off to jail for his part in the rare book caper. She even had had a letter from him this morning which she was showing me as we sat on the veranda of that gorgeous two-story mansion, in front of a nice round little table on which the maid had deferentially laid two Wedge-wood plates piled high with sandwiches and such appetizers as radishes, stuffed olives and anchovies. There was a cut glass pitcher of iced tea and a plate piled with lemon, because Carol happened to like lots of lemon in her iced tea and so did I. And for dessert there was sponge cake on one plate and another cut glass bowl full of big ripe red strawberries and plenty of juice. This was living. Of course, the dessert I wanted was Carol Vernon herself, but I wasn't rushing things. We had progressed quite a long ways since that first meeting of ours when she had taken me for the meter man or a bill collector and had made me feel that I was lower than the grass itself on her daddy's lawn. By now she had become properly wistful because she was all by herself in this big house and Daddy was in jail, and here she was, all of twenty-six and looked upon as a bluestocking and a female egghead, and she was beginning to find out that life wasn't quite so much fun as she had heard it could be.
I knew damn well she was a virgin. Even her father had confided in me to the effect that she had never really cared much for boys, and the eligible young bachelors in the neighborhood who would have been attracted by Carol's money had been given the cold shoulder so often that they didn't bother to ask for dates any more.
She read me the letter while I munched thoughtfully on a deviled ham sandwich. Joshua Vernon had been thinking things over, and he didn't regret what he had done at all except that he had brought disgrace on his one and only child. He didn't even feel too badly towards me because, to quote him, "Mr. Warren is a very amiable young man, and efficient, and knows his job. With anybody else, I might have got away with the little scheme. Forgive me, Carol. And now my only aim in life is to serve my time and get maybe a couple of years knocked off for good behavior so that I can come back and be a grandfather. Now that you're alone, my dear, I think you ought to take inventory of yourself and see what it is you want to do with your life. You ought to think about getting married, but of course I know you're discriminating and so you're not going to run out and pick the first man who seems interested in you. Just the same, my dear, if your mother had been alive I might never have got into this mess, because there's no fool like an old fool when it comes to sex and a pretty young girl offering herself. What I'm trying to say in my obscure way, Carol, is that it's better to marry than to burn. So do give some thought to going out more with decent young men and finding yourself happiness and a home and a family."
It was very sound advice, and the arrival of that letter from the State Penitentiary was perfectly tied with my appearance on the scene. It had made Carol pensive and dewy-eyed, and when she glanced up at me after she had read the letter, she blushed deliciously. I'm sure she read in my eyes an offer to help get Daddy to realize his lifelong ambition of becoming a grandfather, even though what my eyes were saying was hardly a proposal of marriage. But I was certainly willing, and eager and able to procreate the grandchild that Joshua Vernon hoped to have.
"I'm beginning to admire your father very much, Carol," I told her, "and I'm glad he has no ill will towards me. Of course, to be honest with you, I'm much more concerned with the kind of will you have towards me."
My delectable blonde luncheon companion toyed with a stuffed olive, a distant look in her widely spaced, large and extremely eloquent dark blue eyes. The first time I had seen her, she had been wearing a blue voile dress with a very modest cut so the skirt hems hit her just below the knees and beige-colored nylons. This afternoon, she had on a close-fitting white voile dress, and the hems came down to the tops of her knees, so you see progress had been made. However, so far as my getting those hems up to where I could see the whites of her thighs, I hadn't quite brought that off yet, but I was certainly working on that this afternoon. She was in a mellow mood, Daddy had forgiven me and had resigned himself to his lot. As a matter-of-fact, Joshua Vernon had got himself a job as librarian at the State Penitentiary and was absorbing his mind with finer things where there was no opportunity for peculation and pussy, two things which had been his downfall in civilian life.
"I think you're very nice, Jack," was all she would give me after she had popped the olive in her mouth, chewed it daintily and let it go down that slim white throat. She turned those dark blue orbs on me and looked at me for half a minute without a word, as if she were reading my character, telling my fortune and appraising my sterling qualities all in a single computerized look. I had on a sport shirt, tailored brown dacron slacks, and a sports coat which I had already discarded because the weather was so warm. Besides, there's nothing so uncomfortable as trying to dally with a girl when you have a sports coat on in hot weather, because you get all sticky in the armpits and it tends to bind you. Where I wanted Carol to get sticky was between those delicious white thighs of hers. In fact, after those four dates of ours, I still didn't know-apart from the essential fact that she must be a virgin-whether she had even felt the slightest amorous inclination, self-induced or otherwise.
Still waters run deep, is the old saw. I was certain that this was quite apt in Carol Vernon's case. Some of the chastest and most puritanical girls I've met on my job have also been the sexiest and the most brazenly uninhibited when you've finally peeled them down and got them into a horizontal position on bed, couch, or even floor. I can remember one caper about two years ago, involving the theft of some rare stamps from a numismatist's shop, of a living case in point. This numismatist, Darek Fenstrom by name, had called Matt Hollister up excitedly one Saturday morning as he had opened up his shop and discovered a whole page of rare Maltese one-centers had been neatly pilfered from his safe. His assistant didn't know the combination, he insisted. Well, as things turned out, this assistant was a rather prim, bespectacled black-haired spinster of about thirty-five, with her hair pulled up in a really quaint Gibson pompadour and a skirt that fell down practically to her ankles and hung rather loosely on what I later found was a prick-hardeningly svelte figure. Her name was Maude Cantrell, and she had worked for the numismatist for about ten years. I interrogated her, and she was indignant and righteous by turns, and I had got absolutely nowhere and was ready to conclude that some light-fingered safecracker must have found his way into the shop and magically hit upon the combination to that safe-when I played a hunch.
I visited Maude Cantrell's one-room efficiency apartment on North LaSalle Street late one evening, rang the bell in the lobby and told her I was a special delivery messenger and went on up in the elevator. She answered the door, and I saw that she had on a very sexy black satin negligee. She tried to close the door when she recognized me, but I had already put my foot into it and I backed her over to the couch, after first closing and locking the door, and then I gave a long, low whistle of admiration. She turned as pink as a prizewinning rose at a county fair, and I told her that the real reason I had come to see her was that I had been smitten with her voluptuous charms and she would just have to forgive me if I expressed myself. She got indignant again, but not too righteous. I started putting my hands on her hips and kissing her, and all of a sudden she gave a groan and locked me in a half-nelson and we rolled on the floor together, and the next thing I knew, the satin negligee gaped wide and so did the fly of my trousers and I was fucking Maude Cantrell and there was nothing prim or old-maidish or spinsterish about her performance on the floor, either. She drained me of about every drop of sap I had stored up for a week, and that took some doing, let me tell you. And then I told her that I wanted to take care of her and take her off to maybe Rio on Australia and start a new life all over again with her. And sure enough, she had the Maltese stamps and she was just dying to share her ill-gotten gains with a virile cocksmith like me who could appreciate her brand of pussy.
It turned out that she had had the hots for her boss for all these long years, but he had been a faithfully married man and never even given her a second look. I felt like rather a dirty dog on that caper, because I had to break poor Maude Cantrell's heart by putting her under arrest until a boy in blue could come along and take her down to headquarters where he was there to prefer charges. She kept looking at me reproachfully and finally she said, "Damn! If only I'd worn that negligee in the shop, maybe my darling Derek would have given me a tumble and all this wouldn't have happened."
So you see, dear reader, still waters run very deep and very hot. So there I was sitting staring into Carol Vernon's dark blue eyes and hoping she could read me loud and clear, and finally I couldn't stand the suspense any longer and so I said, "I'll give a dollar for your thoughts this time, Carol baby."
"I'm thinking that you're very nice. But please don't try to rush me, Jack. It's still too soon after what happened to poor Daddy. I know I've been practically a hermit and I know I'm not getting any younger, and Daddy's letter makes me want to sit down and have a good cry. But I can't help it."
"If you would only let yourself learn how to relax and not be so terribly tense, Carol baby, you wouldn't have all these terrible tensions and neuroses," I philosophized.
Now she really blushed. She caught me looking at her titties and the white voile dress limned them out in all their firm glory. I am not really a mammary man, and if I had the choice of fucking partners on a desert island for the rest of my intrepid days, I should invariably select a long-legged, slinky-bottomed piece over a Jayne Mansfield type every time. Just the same, it would be heaven to have my lips on one of Carol's nipples and one of my hands on her other tittie, while my other hand was squeezing the cheeks of her compact behind and steering myself between those squirming thighs. There would be no better way to teach her to relax and enjoy herself, and that was my firm opinion-and I do mean firm!
"I'll give you all the time you want, Carol baby," I said, reaching across the table and taking her slim hand in mine. "I know you're all alone and I still can't help feeling like a scoundrel for having broken up your home. The least I can do is give you my tender loving care."
Her hand squirmed about nervously in mine and her cheeks grew fiery red. That was an excellent sign. "I-I think we'd better have our dessert. It-it's getting awfully warm out here, don't you think, Jack?" she finally stammered.
I let her ease her hand away from mine. Slow and easy did it with Carol Vernon. Now if I had been enjoying that long-deferred drink with Mara Corday, I would have slid my hand under her dress after the first thirty seconds, and by now I would have been coming up for my third wind after two burningly hot but excruciatingly thrilling fucks. And yet as a connoisseur of cunt, I have always told myself that the longer and more ingenious the chase, the better the pussy feels in the end. I know that's mixing metaphors, but you get the general idea. Besides, there was a little matter of relieving Carol of her cherry, which I have never looked forward to doing with any woman. And the first such time is never any fun for the cherry-giver, believe me, because it's only in fiction that you read that a virgin gets perforated and has an orgasm at the same time. It doesn't happen that way.
So we ate our dessert. She sliced off a generous slice of sponge cake, put it in a bowl, heaped it with strawberries and juice, and handed it to me.
Her eyes were shyer now, and those apple-round titties of hers were beginning to rise and fall rather more quickly than at the start of our luncheon. She didn't take quite such a large portion for herself, and then she poured me out another glass of iced tea and then with her own dainty white hands squeezed two pieces of lemon into it. I smiled encouragingly at her. She could squeeze my lemon any day in the week and twice on Sunday. I began to feel myself getting an erection, a sure sign that my prick was fully appreciative of all that Carol Vernon had to offer a man. Before I got up from the table outside here, I would have to get rid of that rather shocking sign of carnal admiration, because it might affront my luncheon partner. I didn't think she was the type you could win by being an exhibitionist. Not that I wasn't tempted to show her my full seven inches in manly erection, swollen and heroic in its eagerness to quest between those pale white thighs of hers. But then, out here on the veranda the neighbors might see, and out here in Highland Park they're terribly stuffy. On the several trips I had made to this swanky community, I had yet to see any couples necking out in public.
So then we went back to the living room and chatted a while, and Carol got reminiscent about her schooling and the fact that she'd always been so close to Daddy and done his secretarial work, and had somehow sort of forgotten what career she wanted to pursue. By this time I had my arm just edging around her slim waist, and the smell of her delicate perfume and of her bare skin was beginning to get to me. I hadn't had pussy in over a week now, and I was beginning to feel the need. I was almost wishing I had made it this afternoon with Mara Corday. Well, maybe tonight, I told myself. I would just have to cross off this afternoon as an investment in the future.
"You must never denigrate yourself, Carol baby," I told her, "and you certainly don't look twenty-six. To me you look about nineteen, and fresh and delicious."
She shivered a little, and my arm could feel it. I tightened my hold around her waist a little more, and then I put my right hand over both of hers, which were in her lap and as close to pussy as I apparently was going to get that afternoon. "Let's see you smile, because I hate to see you get so moody and depressed, baby."
She smiled tremulously, and the aloof, icy Carol Vernon who had met me at the door while I was on that rare book caper had vanished forever It was such an exciting discovery to have her close to me and smiling at me like that, and with her dark blue eyes full of trust and confidence-although with a few reservations, naturally-I got carried away. I leaned over and kissed her right on the mouth, and she gave a startled little "Ohh!" and tried to pull away, but my left arm around her waist was like a vise and my right hand was holding both of her wrists tightly so she couldn't haul off and clobber me. Then presently she relaxed, closed her eyes, and with a little sobbing moan, "Ohh, Jack, dear Jack!" I felt the miracle! Her lips opened, and they were sweet and warm and moist and trembling, and it was all I could do to keep from sticking my tongue between them, because, big girl that Carol was, she was sure to realize that this was a symbol of my real intentions toward her-slipping my prick between the lips of her tender virgin vulva. So manfully I desisted, and I just prolonged that kiss and sucked in the sweet mouth-nectar, and my heart was pounding and I was just thinking I might get pussy after all, when suddenly her phone rang.
"Oh-I-Excuse me, Jack dear. I'll be right back," she quavered. Disappointedly I let her go. She stood up, smoothed her rumpled voile skirt, gave me a fleeting and somewhat startled look, and then hurried away. I loved the way her calf and ankle muscles flexed. If I could ever get her bare-naked, I was certain I would see one of the most mobile, agile, wriggly behinds in all of Highland Park.
But while I was dreaming this pleasant reverie, she came back and said, "It's for you, Jack. Somebody by the name of Mr. Hollister."
Dear reader, some people tell you that when you have a hard-on and have to get rid of it in a hurry, a cold shower will work wonders. I'm here to tell you that all it takes is one phone call from the boss on a Saturday afternoon you figure to be your very own, and that'll do it every time. I was able to rise from that couch in Carol Vernon's living room without embarrassing either of us.
"What the devil do you mean by calling me on my day off, boss?" I growled as I stepped into the hallway cubbyhole and picked up the phone.
"This is an emergency, loverboy," he said in his inflexible voice which meant business. "Something has really come up."
"I see. Well, for your information, Matt, something has just come down over here, and I don't appreciate it one Goddamn bit," I told him irrasci-bly. "What's this emergency of yours?"
"Well, you seem to be the adjuster who goes in for intellectual capers. You had this numismatist a couple of years ago, and now this rare book case. Now we've got a stolen Stradivarius to worry about. And a policy on it to the tune of two hundred thousand bucks."
I had forgotten all about Carol Vernon, and this time my whistle was one of shock. If dear old Duron went down the river for two hundred thousand smackeroos, it wouldn't be easy to get a raise from the boss this fall, and I had been meaning to ask him for one for work beyond the call of duty.
"You mean you want me to give up my weekend and start working on this new caper right away?" I asked. I should have known better.
The other end of the phone crackled with expletives which reputable publishers dislike to see in print and which they reserve for critics who pan their books.
"To answer your question," Matt Hollister finally simmered down and said, "the answer is yes. You get right down here to the office."
"Just one question, boss. How the hell did you know where to call me on a Saturday afternoon?"
"I didn't. But I started calling all the dames that you interviewed when you were trailing down Dewhurst Ames. Carol Vernon was the last one on the list. Oh, by the way-"
"Yes?" I hopefully asked.
"I have a message for you from Mara Corday. She says for me to tell you that that offer of a drink isn't going to last too much longer. She plans to sail for England the 10th of August. But just don't let me catch you over there on company time. Now get yourself down to the Loop before I decide to get me another adjuster. I don't think Carol Vernon is going to love you if your only source of revenue is your weekly check from the unemployment office."
That was Matt Hollister, the most appreciative boss a guy could ever ask for. Always thinking of his hired help's welfare, every blessed minute of the day. Come to think of it, where the hell was he when he made that call, because I'd thought I heard some soft feminine giggles in the background.
I knew with a sinking heart where he was. He was with my ex-girlfriend, Kathy Murnow. He had probably just been showing her that his resemblance to James Bond wasn't just facial. James Bond, if you've read Ian Fleming's thriller-dillers, was almost as formidable a cocksmith as yours truly.
CHAPTER THREE
I told Carol Vernon that duty called and that we would have to postpone our little heart-to-heart chat until some time later. I hopefully asked her if I could come back tomorrow, which was Sunday, but she shook her head and said that she was going to play tennis with a girl friend and then she'd been invited out to dinner at the girl friend's parents' home. I heartily cursed Matt Hollister under my breath. Because if I could have stayed there, in the dreamily reminiscent mood Carol was in, and with her being all ready to forgive me for having sent her dad to the pen, I might have got under that white voile dress of hers and seen the whites of her thighs. And also the seven cities of Cibolla, that mystic citadel which was her virgin cunt. So I kissed her chastely on the forehead, thanked her for the lunch, told her I'd give her a call some evening next week, and got into my Thunderbird.
This was something new for me, because up to now, even though I had worked for dear old Duron for quite a while and gone traveling all over the city to track down cases, I had either used public transportation or a cab. Till now I'd been dubious of owning a car in Chicago, and for good reason. The streets were crowded, the freeways broke down at the rush hour, there were teenaged gangs who specialized in swiping hubcaps and smashing windows, and there was always one hell of a time finding a parking place on just about any street you could name. However, cab fares from where I live in Hyde Park, which is around the southeast side of the Windy City, are ruinously high, and for that amount of money I could probably buy myself a piece of tail in one of the nearby motels. But I never have yet paid for it and I don't like prosties, not because I look down on them, which God forbid, but simply because it's too mechanical and I want a little tender loving care from the girl whose thighs I've got myself between. I had been doing all right with Kathy Murnow, that twenty-seven-year-old, dark-brown-haired divorcee with the luscious titties and a creamy skin all over and thighs and bottom-cheeks which measured up to all my idealistic specifications of what a mistress ought to have for a horny guy. But, unhappily, Matt Hollister had taken Kathy away from me, and so I had sublimated my frustrations by buying a car out of the bonus I had got for winding up the rare book caper. I figured that I would much rather ride out to Highland Park in my own car than pay cab fare two or three times a week, and so far it had been a good idea. Then too, it would take me out to the swanky apartment of Mara Corday or to see Peggy Armisted and her stepmother Laura any time I wanted.
Anyhow, I hightailed it down the Drive to the Loop, tinned over the keys to a surly attendant in a parking lot near the Duron Building on West Jackson, signed the register book for the Saturday afternoon assistant starter, and got into a self-service elevator and pushed the ninth-floor button.
Matt Hollister was in his office waiting for me. He had made a rush trip too. His hair was still a little tousled, and there was a faint smudge of lipstick on his left cheek just near the jawbone. Sorrowfully, I recognized Kathy Murnow's brand.
I sat down in the upholstered chair facing his desk, lit a Pall Mall, and glowered at him. "Thanks for interfering with my love life, boss," I told him. "But from where I sit, it looks to me as if your own drew a postponement. How's Kathy these days?"
"That's my business," he snapped. "Now get this straight, Warren, when you and I are working on company time, I don't want any palaver about after-hours frolics, get me? But unofficially, since I'm aware that you and Kathy once had something going, the better man just won, just as he did in the Northeastern game with Purdue. Be-member? Kathy just wanted to know how you were, that's all, and I told her that you were doing fine. Now let's cut out the crap and get down to cases."
"What's this about a stolen Strad?" I wanted to know.
Matt Hollister gave me a glare, then rummaged through a stack of manila file folders on his desk and picked out a thick one and opened it. "It's a Stradivarius insured by one Mona Wilhelm."
"Hey," I said excitedly, for the name had just registered. "Is that the raven-haired, tall, slinky leader of an all-girls band?"
"The very same, buddy. Why, are you trying to make some time with her too? I often wonder whether you ever spend any company time screwing females. Because if I ever catch you with your pants down on company time, Warren, you're going to be looking for another job."
"I suppose you wouldn't turn down a piece if it were offered to you during business hours," I said indignantly.
"I happen to be your boss, and what I do is none of your business. Now let's get back to Mona Wilhelm. This Stradivarius was insured six months ago with our company, and Miss Wilhelm brought in the certificate of purchase and title and an appraisal from Reimecke & Helder, which as you know is Chicago's oldest and finest music store, so the company was satisfied that the instrument was worth two hundred thousand dollars, and we issued her a policy in that amount. Miss Wilhelm called her this morning, and the answering service took the message, and I had just got it before I called you in Highland Park. You're to go over and see her right away."
"Just one question. Did she call the police yet?"
"Not yet. She felt her first duty was to the insurance company, and also she has a feeling it might be an inside job."
"You mean one of her girls might have decided to hock it in lieu of a raise," I ventured.
"I thought that fine legal mind of yours would think of an angle like that. Well, unfortunately, Warren, you've turned up a few nice saves for Duron since I put you to work, but I don't mind telling you that the president of our company sometimes gets the feeling that your methods are a little unorthodox. In this case, so long as you don't rape any virgins and get any criminal charges against you for indecent liberties and that sort of thing, I don't care what you do to get that Stradivarius back. We don't feel like paying out two hundred thousand dollars, even if the premium was one of the biggest we've collected in many a moon."
That was good old Matt Hollister for you, sentimental down to the last drop of red blood in his veins.
"I'll get on it right away. Have you got an address for Miss Wilhelm?" I asked.
"She's staying at the Drake Hotel. She and her girls are leaving in a couple of weeks for a three-month tour of Southern California and Mexico. I understand it's a very profitable arrangement. She's quite a drawing card, you know."
I had to agree with him. Mona Wilhelm had long black hair which fell just below her shoulder blades, she was about five feet eight, her face was that of a serene and ethereal Madonna, but when she wore a glittering black satin gown that hugged her shapely ass and long thighs and pear-shaped titties, and with that cameo-like ivory skin of hers, and those huge big brown eyes, she made every man in the audience feel as if he wanted to hear her play Brahms' "Lullaby" to him in bed for the rest of his natural life. The mental image of Mona Wilhelm standing beside my bed wearing just high-heeled pumps and her long black hair and playing that Strad with her legs spread well apart and a soulful, dreamy expression on her exquisite face was enough to make my prick stand at attention, but this was no time for that sort of demonstration. I wasn't trying to impress Matt Hollister, though he had been nastily trying to impress me with his newly acquired mistress.
"Please try to remember that Miss Wilhelm is one of our clients," he said frostily as I sauntered out of the office. "It's bad enough we might have to pay her out two hundred thousand bucks for a stolen violin, Warren, I just don't want her to sue
Our company for criminal assault with intent to rape."
"How can you think such a thing of me, boss?"
"Because I saw the speculative look on your face when I mentioned Mona Wilhelm's name for the first time, that's why. Now get the hell out of here and start working. You can reach me through the answering service Saturday or Sunday, but I'd just as soon you wouldn't call my apartment. I'll be busy."
He was still rubbing it in after all these years. He was never going to let me forget how I had muffed both that winning touchdown pass and the sexy blonde on the fifty-yard line at the Purdue game.
I gave him one last reproachful look and slammed the door behind me on my way out.
CHAPTER FOUR
I got to the Drake Hotel half an hour later, and luck was with me. The desk clerk icily informed me that Mona Wihelm was in her suite, but unless I had an appointment, I was S.O.L. I just as icily told him that I represented the company with which her Stradivarius was insured, and I waited until he got her on the phone and gave an okay for me to go right up. She was on the tenth floor, and just as I was about to knock at the door, I heard the sweet strains of a violin. The tune was "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," and it had some nostalgic memories for me. That happened to be one of Kathy Mumow's favorite tunes, and I can remember one passionate evening when she had the record on the player repeating while she and I screwed on the couch. I lived up to the title of the song, too, as I recall. Some five times, to be exact.
Greatly heartened by this auspicious cue, I knocked manfully at the door. It was opened a moment later by a slim, boyish-looking ash-blonde in a black silk dress that showed a good two inches above her thighs, and they were extremely shapely. Beyond her, standing at a piano, was Mona Wilhelm, a violin bow in her right hand, and a violin pressed against her dainty chin. She had her back to me, and I gulped. With high-heels, her five feet eight was practically five feet eleven, which is just about my own height soaking wet. But she looked much better in a pair of white nylon panties and matching bra than I did in the altogether. The pale ivory of those long luscious legs-she didn't have any stockings on-hypnotized me. So did the ripe, solid oval cheeks of her bottom. They were flexing and undulating, and as she kept on playing that tune, it seemed to me that the cheeks of her behind were keeping perfect time to the melody.
"Mr. Warren?" the blonde in the short black silk dress asked, arching her quizzical and very thin eyebrows.
"The very same," I breathed. I'm afraid I wasn't looking at her, because my eyes were riveted to Mona Wilhelm's behind. I only wished that I could play a musical instrument and could dress like a girl and get into that band. You may remember the movie, "Some like It Hot" in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis impersonate female musicians in order to get away from murderous gangsters and so get next to the immortal Marilyn Monroe. But seeing Mona Wilhelm in the flesh right now, I was far more eager for a piece of her, because my taste goes far more to long-legged brunettes than undulating blondes.
"If you're from Duron, aren't you?" Mona Wilhelm finally turned around, lowered the violin from her lovely chin, and she held it like a baseball bat. She had strength in those lovely forearms, and she was sapping my strength just facing me in that scanty costume because I could see the black triangle of her lovemuff through the tight cling of those panties. Whatever lingerie maker had turned out those nylons, he hadn't allowed for any room at the crotch. Black sprigs of pussy-hair were just about ready to tear through. And considering that I had just come-or rather-not come at all!-from what I had hoped would have been initiation of Carol Vernon into the sweetjoys of prick and cunt in unison, it was like showing Niagara Falls to a man dying of thirst.
But what got me was Mona Wilhelm's utter disdain for my presence as a representative of the babymaking sex. But probably she regarded me as no more dangerous than a sofa or a chair, though of course indirectly each article of furniture has its hazards for a girl. She turned her head and with an indifferent glance at me remarked to the ash-blonde, "That will be all, Elsie. I'm going to take a short nap before dinner, and don't you dare forget to wake me at quarter of six, or your bottom will pay for it,"
My eyes widened and I glanced at the potential recipient of Mona Wilhelm's obviously fustigatory threat. She was about five feet four and one half inches tall, with widely spaced high-perched small but beautifully rounded titties to which the black satin bodice of the dress clung the way Joe Namath clings to a football. She had a lissome waist which curved into really mouthwatering hips, and her thighs weren't bad either. I myself would have been very happy to while away a rainy afternoon by spanking Elsie's bottom. However, in my case, the spanking would have inevitably led to consolation, of the kind which I seriously doubted Mona Wilhelm was capable of tendering. Elsie caught my glance and turned scarlet, which made her even more becoming. She said hastily and in a flurried voice, "Yes, Miss Wilhelm, and I won't forget." Then, with an indignant glance back at me, she left the suite, slamming the door effectively behind her.
Mona Wilhelm went back over to the piano and stared at the open score, once again presenting me with a breathtaking view of her behind and those fascinatingly long, nervously muscled pale-ivory-skinned legs. From over her shoulder she tossed a conversational gambit at me: "So you're from the insurance company?"
"I'm still on their payroll, if that's what you mean, Miss Wilhelm."
"Don't be impertinent, young man. I thought I had made myself sufficiently clear with Mr. Hollister so that it wouldn't be necessary to bother me when I'm getting ready for a performance."
She was giving a performance right then and there, and although I had never heard her all-girl orchestra perform, I was of the opinion that what I was receiving was certainly worth more than the price tab for the show tonight at the Civic Opera House. I had read about the concert, of course, and I had read also that Mona Wilhelm's troupe would play there tonight and tomorrow afternoon, then spend two weeks at the Happy Medium, a popular Rush Street nightspot. And Matt Hollister had let me know that from there the girls would be on their way south of the border.
"You'll forgive me for intruding upon you like this, Miss Wilhelm," I said sarcastically, "But I'm just a working man who learned early in life to take orders from his boss if he wanted to stay on the payroll. Matt Hollister called me and told me to start checking about your stolen Stradivarius. Apparently you didn't give him too many details. You see, I'm a claims adjuster."
"You mean you're doubting my word? What's your name anyhow?"
"It isn't anyhow, it's Jack Warren. No, I'm not doubting your word, Miss Wilhelm, but an insurance company isn't in the habit of paying out two hundred thousand dollars to a claimant just on the mere statement that the insured item has been snatched." I don't know why I used the term "snatched", unless it was because Mona Wilhelm had just turned to face me, swinging the violin in her left hand as if she were limbering up for a turn at bat in the ninth inning with the bases loaded, two men out, and the home team behind by one run. And when she did that, her pelvic basin seemed to project itself, and the thin white nylon panties pressed more tightly than ever against the black triangle of her snatch. And after all, I had been thinking of about snatch all afternoon, beginning with lovely Carol Vernon.
"All right, Mr. Warren," she snapped nastily and her eyes were narrowed and hard. "But I'd rather have the Stradivarius back than the two hundred thousand, I can tell you. In the first place, it would be impossible to replace that violin. I bought it four years ago from the firm of Densing and Stanson in New York City. I had not only a bill of sale and a certificate of ownership, but also some very rare papers attesting to the authenticity of the violin. It had once been owned by the great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull."
It was all I could do to keep from telling her that sounded like a lot of bull to me, but I didn't. She had a long arm, and that violin bow in her right hand could easily have swacked me across the face. She was quite a hunk of woman, and I was beginning to get a little hot and bothered by her completely oblivious attitude. On the other hand, there are countless women who treat bellboys, icemen, insurance salesmen and Fuller Brush men as if they were sub-human and parade around in their panties or their sheer nighties just for the hell of it. These are also the same kind who are the first to yell rape when a guy even looks at them. I've been accused of many things in my time, but not of rape. No intelligent man really prefers it, because cooperation makes a girl's pussy that much more binding and provides the priapic implement with an indescribably greater amount of frictional pleasure than can be obtained by force.
So all I said was, "I'm sure that Duron wouldn't have issued the policy, Miss Wilhelm, unless our underwriters were perfectly satisfied that your Stradivarius was authentic..."
"How nice of you," she sneered. "Now let's make this quick because I need a nap before dinner, or I'll be all out of tune tonight. It's bad enough having to play with this miserable substitute..." She glanced at the violin which she still swung in her left hand. "It's worth only about five thousand dollars, and of course it couldn't possibly have the tone of my Strad."
"I'll make it as quick as possible, Miss Wilhelm. All I want is the answers to a few questions. First of all, when did you first know it was stolen?"
"This morning, you idiot! Isn't that what I told your boss Mr. Hollister?"
"I wasn't present at the telephone conversation, Miss Wilhelm, so I don't know what you told him."
"Now you're being insolent," she flashed. "And you're beginning to upset me, which I just won't tolerate before a concert. Now I'll make it very quick so you can leave at once. And I've a good notion to tell this boss of yours that I don't particularly care for the people he's got working for him. Very well. I keep my Stradivarius in a special case, and it's locked in a suitcase to which only I have the key. I put it in a closet and I lock the door and I keep that key either on my person on in my purse. We had a rehearsal at the Civic Opera House, and I played the Strad then. We took the limousine, which my concert management furnished, back to the hotel here, and all of us had supper in our rooms. This morning when I woke up, I had Elsie-she's my pianist-open the closet door and bring me the suitcase. When I opened it, there was just the case, but no violin. Does that answer your questions?"
"Almost. One thing I'd like to know, do you know whether anyone had tried to steal the Strad before?"
"I don't think so. In fact I'm sure of it. What difference does that make?"
"Motive and person, that's all. But from what you've told me, Miss Wilhelm, it seems pretty obvious that it's an inside job."
"I'm sure it is too. I think one of my own girls did it, but I don't understand how it could have been done. I didn't let the keys to either the suitcase or the closet out of my possession between last night and this morning. I put them both on a little chain and I wore it round my neck when I went to bed. And they were around my neck when I got up in the morning."
"This Elsie, your pianist-was she with you last night?"
"Elsie is the last person in the world I would suspect, Mr. Warren. She was one of the first members of my orchestra, which I founded five years ago. We're very dear friends, and she has absolutely no reason to try to steal the Strad."
I caught that implication of "very dear friends," and then I remembered what penalty Mona Wilhelm had promised her round-bottomed pianist if the latter failed to wake her from her nap at the proper time. It sounded to me as if Mona Wilhelm and ash-blonde Elsie had a Lesbian thing going for themselves. Well, that was their business. But it was a pity if Mona went the dyke route all the way, because she was quite a piece of snatch, as I've already remarked. And it wasn't doing my metabolism any good to stand there facing her with those filmy white nylon panties showing me ever so transparently that she was as much a natural brunette as any man could ever hope to find.
"Well, as I see it, if you're going to be in town two more weeks, Miss Wilhelm, I'm going to have to talk to just about every member of your orchestra."
"I expect you to do that. And I don't want any publicity whatsoever, do you understand? If you know anything about my career, you realize that my press agent has made quite a profitable point of featuring my rare violin. A great many people pay good money to hear my orchestra play and to listen to me on the Strad. If it should get out that I'm playing on a cheap violin, it might hurt the box office receipts."
Her face had been cold and hard and suspicious all this time. It was such a paradox as against that prick-hardening peepshow she was giving me in her bra and panties that I couldn't resist a Parthian shaft: "I'm not sure I agree, Miss Wilhelm. If your audience could see you like this, they wouldn't care if you played on a kazoo."
Her ivory cheeks turned scarlet, she sucked in her breath, and then she took two steps forward, swung her right arm, and the violin bow smacked across my forehead. The wooden side of it hit me, and I saw stars. I also saw red.
I lunged for the violin, wrested it out of her hand, and tossed it carefully at a low armchair nearby. Then I seized her wrist, doubled it behind her back, and as she yelled in pain, I pulled her over to the big low divan, flung her down across my lap, picked up the violin bow which she had dropped, clamped my right leg over her struggling ivory calves, tucked my left arm around her waist. Then I lifted up the bow and brought it down with a very satisfying crack over those juicy bottom ovals which the filmy nylon panties snugged as if they were a second skin.
"Eeeee!! You filthy brute! How dare you! Oh, you'll pay for this, you let me go now! Damn you anyway!" Mona Wilhelm squealed. She twisted her lovely face back to glare at me, and the daggers which her eyes were sending out would have cut my heart to ribbons if they had been made of steel. For that, she got two hard stingers right across the plumpest curves of her rump, and again the loud cracks which the wooden side of the bow inflicted made sweet music to my ears. So, too, did her wail of pain. She managed to plunge one hand back to her luscious posterior, but not until I had seen the angry pink splotches which those three spanks had already left, because those panties of hers were practically transparent.
I simply wrapped her over the offending hand, hard enough for her to pull it out of the way, and then I dealt her three more good ones, all across the fleshiest curves of her bottom summits. The way her thighs stiffened and jerked, with all those gorgeous agile muscles flexing under the satiny ivory skin, made me experience one of the most tremendous hard-ons I had ever had. And it wasn't all because of Carol Vernon's hard-to-get behavior a little while ago. I gave Mona full credit for stirring up my hormones.
I realized that this could cost me my job, but I had just about had it with her. Her contemptuous attitude, her insolent ego, and then her method of retaliation when I had simply paid her a compliment which any red-blooded man would have done, had made me determined to teach Mona Wilhelm a lesson. With that in mind, I applied two or three more crisp whacks across the base of her backside, and her hips lunged and reared and swerved in a way that did nothing to diminish my erection. Now her wails were growing more harassed and poignant: "Eeeeowww! You're hurting me! Oh, stop it, Goddamn you anyhow! Aahhh! Ooouuuuui"
Now I gave her a good diagonal cut from right to left, and then, with a deft turn of my wrist, sent another backhander from left to right over that ample resilient backside of hers. Once again her hips bounded up, then flattened, and she began to wriggle over my knee. I swear I could feel the rasp of her prickly pussy-hairs through my dacron sports slacks, and that too did nothing to diminish my hard-on. Now she turned her face back to me, and it was streaked with tears, and her eyes were very wide and they weren't sending daggers anymore, only petitions in her behalf. I had managed to clamp both her wrists with my left hand, and keep her from covering up, so I now administered two more hard swats which drew plaintive, "Ahhrrrooww! Oh, please, please, Mr. Warren, no more! You're hurting me awfully! I'm sorry I hit you with the bow! Oh please let me up, please!"
The husky, tearful tremolo was the most satisfying concert music I had heard in many a day. I flung the bow towards the armchair on which the violin reposed, and then, as I pulled my right leg from over her struggling calves, I warned, "No tricks now when I let you up, or back you go, Miss Wilhelm!"
"N-no t-tricks, I-I promise! Ooohh, my poor bottom, I won't be able to sit down for a week!"
"'Well, that won't hurt your concert tonight any since you always stand through it anyhow," I quipped. Warily I released her wrists, and she at once clamped both hands to her bottom, making no move to get up from my left knee, as she frantically rubbed the source of the trouble. There was a most interesting pattern of angry red lines running over both luscious oval cheeks, and now I became conscious of the devastating perfume she used. It was compounded by the subtle body sweat and the woman-odor of this raven-haired, long-legged piece of quim. And to me it was far more potent than Spanish fly, although probably just as dangerous in its own way.
"I'll help you up," I gallantly offered. I put my hands to her waist, and began to lift her. Suddenly, with a sobbing little moan, she wriggled around and flung herself into my arms, and the next thing I knew those red lips of hers were crushing mine and her tongue was delving inside of my mouth to find my own tongue and tell me that all was forgiven.
"Ohhhh," she gasped," you were so cruel to me-what's your first name?"
"Jack, baby. But you had it coming."
"I know. But you're the only man who ever did anything like that to me, you are, you are!" Mona Wilhelm insisted. Then she stopped talking and thrust her mouth on mine again, and this time my tongue went forward to meet hers. She had wriggled up to a half-sitting position on the edge of the divan, and her long legs were twisted about in the most delicious way, and those hard pear titties of hers were mashing their dark points against my chest as she locked her arms around my shoulders, closed her eyes, and went on trying to scoop up all of my saliva with that voracious tongue of hers.
"You were so cruel to me," she whispered, nibbling at my earlobe with her fine little sharp white teeth. "You've made me so excited, you've just got to take care of me now, it's all your fault!"
An insurance claims adjuster learns to take things in his stride and to adapt himself to unusual situations. I'm not sure that Matt Hollister would have approved of my tactics, but I couldn't have cared less, especially since he had walked away with my own girl, Kathy. My fingers expertly unhooked the bandeau of the filmy white nylon bra and let it slip down to the floor, and then my hands cupped those shuddering naked ivory pears with their wide dark aurolae, and my palms felt the flinty tumescence of her nipplebuds. I rubbed them gently and lingeringly, and Mona Wilhelm sobbed and her tongue drove even deeper into my mouth. Then her left hand slipped down my body towards my crotch, and the next thing I knew she had yanked down my zipper and was foraging to find out whether I had something more than a Parthian shaft to give her. I did indeed. What Carol Vernon had begun early this afternoon, Mona Wilhelm finished and I mean finished!
She uttered a gasp, and her eyes were very wide as she observed the effect her being spanked had had on my cock. Then with a cry of frantic command, she called out, "Ohh, for God's sake, don't waste anymore time but give it to me, Jack darling!" And regardless of the pain it must have cost that luscious bottom of hers, she flung herself back on the divan, and her hips were squirming in that rhythmic threnody which imitates the copulatory choreography of the female in heat. In a word, Mona Wilhelm wanted desperately to be fucked.
I took hold of the panties and she arched her bottom up so that I could yank them down those long ivory legs of hers. The hair of her bush was black as an alley on the West Side of the Windy City at two in the morning, but I've never been afraid of dark alleys when I know that I'm well armed. And my vigorous seven inches would be, I felt certain, enough for the encounter ahead.
In a luxurious suite like this one at the Drake, I would have given at least a weeks pay to be able to take off all my clothes, enjoy a warm shower, dally with Mona Wilhelm on one of those huge soft double beds, smoke a cigarette, enjoy a glass of wine while we cuddled until I really couldn't stand it anymore. But I understood that there wasn't time before the concert, and right now Mona Wilhelm wanted to be manhandled, screwed and fucked to make up for the burning in her bottom. So I didn't even bother to take off my shoes or sox or even my sports coat; I simply twisted about and mounted over her. She reached up for me wirh a cry, her nostrils dilating and shrinking, and then her long beautiful bare legs clamped around my thighs as my hard ramrod pierced through the black silky curls of her cunt and found her vulva. It was moist and twitching, ready to receive me. She gave another throaty cry, baring her teeth in a rictus of lustful eagerness, as she felt me penetrate her core. And with a single lunge I was in her to the hilt, as she bit me on the shoulder and dug her sharp scarlet-tinged fingernails into my neck.
I've never fucked a hula dancer, but I've always wanted to go to Hawaii and try it for size. Yet in about two minutes I was convinced that if Mona Wilhelm ever lost her violinistic artistry, she could make a sensational living on the stage of the Queen's Surf in Honolulu, where after a fabulous buffet-style dinner (all you can eat for $3.75), you go out into the garden and watch a dancing show and the sexy hula girls come down to the audience and take back sheepish-looking men to the stage with them. Mona Wilhelm's hips wriggled and vibrated and rotated until I was almost shaken out of her saddle. She was moaning and clawing at me, constantly shifting those beautiful long legs until she finally had them clamped over my behind, and she was grinding her pussy as hard as she could to meet every down-piercing thrust I could give her.
We exploded together, and we nearly rolled off the divan. She let out a shriek, turned her face to one side, and then her entire body spasmed. I could feel her nipples digging into my chest, and I felt myself burst in a cataclysmic upheaval.
Then she emitted a long languorous sigh, and slowly turned her face towards me, her beautiful big brown eyes wide and humid, as she murmured lazily, "That was the best fuck I've ever had. Now what else do you want to know about my stolen violin, Jack darling?"
CHAPTER FIVE
A few minutes later, Mona Wilhelm had kicked off her pumps and, wriggling languorously on the low, wide and beautifully upholstered divan which the Drake Hotel provided its richer patrons, purred at me, "Jack, honey, why don't you get real comfy and shed all those clothes you've got on? Besides, they're scratching my skin awfully badly and I've got to wear a revealing evening gown on the stage for my concert tonight, you know." Then she giggled and gave me a sultry look. "It's a damn good thing I don't have to show my poor bottom, 'cause I'll bet it's black and blue already."
Bemarks like that can only get girls into trouble, but they keep making them. Maybe they want to. So naturally I did what any healthy American male would do, which was to roll Mona over and inspect her Callyphygian charms. The violin bow had left a most interesting pattern, and it was darkening now, which made the pale ivory skin that much more obscenely white. I told her that I would kiss it and make it well, and I proceeded to do just that, my tongue tip caressingly tracing each and every welt. Before I had finished with the first half-dozen, the raven-haired girl orchestra leader had pillowed her head in her anus and was slowly wriggling her bottom to and fro in a manner which indisputably asserted her desire to be fucked once more. Since I felt more solicitous toward her now than I had while whacking her patrician rear, I slyly suggested that she get up on all fours because in that way I could penetrate more deeply while fondling those magnificent tittie-pears of hers, and at the same time spare her the discomfort of rubbing her well-spanked bare seat on the upholstery.
As she felinely assumed this extremely provocative pose, I swiftly divested myself of all my clothing except my socks. Not that I would impugn the Drake Hotel by suggesting that I might get atheletes' feet by walking on their carpeting, but my own little idiosyncrasy had always been that a man's feet are perhaps the most inelegant and unhandsome parts of his entire anatomy. However, if you want to know the real Freudian reason for my wearing socks when I go to bed to screw, I'll put it to you bluntly. Once I had a ten-weeks-old Irish terrier puppy...he ought to have been called an Irish terror. He loved to bite, and he especially went for my bare toes. When I got out of bed in the morning in my lonely apartment in East View Park, which faces the lake and is one of the most attractive areas in all Chicago, I would nobly forego all my own needs, including my breakfast, to let him out of his cage. And if I didn't take the precaution of putting on socks or slippers, my bare toes would look like appetizers.
As I clambered back onto the couch, Mona Wilhelm was looking back at me with an arch little smile, and she had spread her knees invitingly so that the pink petals of her loveportal daintily gaped through the thick, crisp black fleece of her pubes.
"You're just wonderful, Jack," she breathed, because she had seen that I was back at attention again as if I had just met her and not so recently lubricated her lovesheath with at least a quart of masculine vitality. I remember reading in a medical journal when I was in high school that somebody was experimenting over in Russia with concocting a toxic injection principally made of male sperm that would be shot into a woman's rear and would prevent her having the nine-month trouble which so often follows a love bout. Now this seems like a very sensible idea to me, because it's esthetic and it completely eliminates the ludicrous and grotesque nonsense of applying prophylactics at the strategic moment or, from the woman's viewpoint, with fitting in her diaphragm with the fatalistic knowledge that she is going to be fucked before the night is over. There ought to be some leeway for romance and impulse, I've always felt. Unfortunately, nothing to date has come from that Russian idea, but I wish somebody would do something to bring about a foolproof safeguard. The theory was that one shot would render a girl sterile for a couple of months, so that she could do all of the fucking her itching quim desired. And the fortunate male who encountered such an impregnable piece had only to make certain that he could stand and deliver as often as possible until the toxic shot wore off, at which time of course she would have herself injected again, and so on delightfully ad infinitum.
What led me to this devious line of philosophizing was that I had gone at Mona Wilhelm so ferociously that I hadn't even thought of the danger I had put her into by trying to console her for that spanking. That was why, kneeling behind her, stiff as ever, I hesitated. But our radar was on the same beam.
"Silly boy," she giggled, giving her lips a salacious wriggle as if to hurry me up. "You couldn't get me pregnant if you tried. In the first place, I have it on the best medical authority that I'm probably sterile anyway-I had three husbands who did their best to disprove the doctors and failed, and in the second place, just in case the doctors are wrong, I'm never without my little diaphragm. For God's sake, darling, what in the world are you waiting for? Pretty soon it'll be time for my dinner, and then I'll have to go play my concert, though I'd much rather have you do this to me."
Looking back, it didn't seem very long since I'd got my face slapped with a violin bow for suggesting that Mona Wilhelm could sell to standing room only by displaying herself as she had paraded in front of me. Now, since we were obviously on less inimical terms, I could more boldly venture a familiarity: "You know, baby, if we could do this on the stage, you could play Chicago for the rest of your life and the scalpers would make a fortune."
"I know. But the trouble is that very few men could keep up with me, even if such a thing were legally possible. Oh, Jack, will you please shut your big fat mouth and stick that big hard cock where it belongs?" she moaned impatiently.
There was only one reply to such a question, and I made it. I grabbed for those pear-shaped bombers of hers, reveling in the warm, quivering satin of the bare flesh against my fingers, and I targeted in on the pink gape framed by the crisp black curls between her lasciviously straddled thighs. I was following my own rule, I was diddling when I could see the whites of her thighs. And they were whiter than ever against the darkening stigmata of that violin-bow spanking I had just dished out to man-hungry Mona Wilhelm.
With a single thrust, I felt my belly slap against her tender bottom, and she moaned deliciously, bowed her head down to the upholstery, arched herself back against me to absorb every single inch of my manhood. I drew back very slowly to the brink of her quim, till the tip of my meatus just rimmed the twitching lips of her vulva, and then I slid back very slowly again until I was once again hilted inside her sheath. I felt the clamping of her vaginal walls against my embedded prong, and I don't care whether medical science denies that a woman's vagina has any muscles, it has clinging and staying power, regardless of what the cause may be. I felt myself clamped and constricted, gobbled up and held in the hot, furnace-like vise of Mona Wilhelm's cunt. And the way her titties shudderingly rose and fell against my clutching fingers rewarded me for my long continence and for my heroic if somewhat shortsighted behavior with that blonde mantrap, Carol Vernon.
We established a slow and intoxicating rhythm, and again she showed me that a girl didn't have to be from Hawaii to make her hips execute the hula. I felt as if I were threading a needle on Madison and State Streets at high noon, the way she rocked and weaved and rolled and twisted and jerked, accompanying all these gyrations with sobbing gasps and unintelligible groans, and, on ecstatic occasions, salacious verbiage that would have made a blue-nose blush.
But all good things must come to an end, and finally her greedy lovesheath drained me dry as I rammed home a final time and felt myself drawn into that voracious vortex until I had no more spending left. And when I drew out this time, I wouldn't have done Carol Vernon any good whatsoever, even if she had been there waiting in line, all ready and willing to be next.
I swung my legs to the floor and leaned back against the divan and sighed with weary depletion. I was honked out and it was wonderful. I no more felt like going on a case for Duron than I did taking the astronauts' place in the lunar missle, but Mrs. Warren's only pride and joy Jack had long ago learned that in order to have a mistress who spreads her thighs for you, you have to have an apartment of your own, and in order to have an apartment of your own, you have to earn enough money on the job to pay the rent. So as Mona was clambering off the couch and giving me sultry looks of pleasure on her way to the biffy, I drawled, "Don't you think it might be a good idea if I went along to the concert tonight, baby, and met all the rest of your girls? If it's an inside job, the way I think it is, I'd better start interviewing each and every musician in your combo."
"I want you to. But you've got to promise me one thing," she shot back as she paused in the threshold of the John, having flipped her feet back into the high heeled pumps, standing there like a tall ivory statue whom some vandal had marred by painting red streaks on that magnificent bottom of hers.
"That depends what I've got to promise, baby."
"I don't mind your meeting them, Jack baby, but now that I've found you, I'm a possessive, jealous type of bitch. Besides, I'm their boss, so I get first dibs at anything nice and new in pants-or out of them. You can meet them all you want, but just don't let me catch you screwing any of them. Especially little Elsie. The poor darling, you startled her out of a year's growth by giving her that undressing look of yours. Elsie happens to prefer girls like me to naughty boys like you, Jack. Try to remember that, will you? She's the best pianist I've ever had in the band, and I'd hate to lose her because you made her play off key."
"I can promise you that in advance without any mental reservations, Mona baby. In fact, I might even wangle it so that I can follow you down to Mexico City. That's one place I've always wanted to visit."
"If you're an awfully good boy and take awfully good care of me, Jack, I just might tell your boss to let you do just that," was Mona's reply as she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door, leaving me with the delightful feeling of pleasant aftermath which always comes after mutual orgasm.
There's another Latin proverb to the effect that after coitus, all animals feel sad; but in my case when I can make a girl give down her lovecream at the same time when I'm spending my own tribute deep into her sweet tight snatch, I don't feel a damn bit guilty. Doctor Freud, please note.
When Mona came out of the John, she had on a blue satin wrapper which made her pale ivory legs take on an even sexier glint, and it was reflected by the glint in my own eyes. But in this case, my eyes were bigger than my prick, because I just couldn't get it up for a third go-round, not so soon. But in surroundings like this, with champagne cooling in an ice bucket beside a Chateaubriand and an all-night s�ance in prospect, I had no doubt that I could keep Mona Wilhelm busy. In fact, my mood had changed so greatly in a few hours that I almost thought I'd call up Matt Hollister and tell him to forget about that raise; the assignment he'd just handed out was going to make it imperative that I get one raise after another just as fast as my willing but weakened flesh could arrange it.
"In case you're wondering, darling, I'm thirty-two," Mona Wilhelm said, reading my mind again. "And right now one reason why I'm on my way to Mexico City is to get a fast divorce from my Number Three. We've been separated the last six months, though, so you don't have to worry about his coming around with a shotgun."
"Poor guy," I said commiseratingly, "if you were my wife, we wouldn't be separated and you wouldn't be going your lonely way to Mexico City with a guy like me."
"What a sweep compliment, darling," Mona came over and brushed my forehead with her moist, warm lips. My hands rose, even if my prick couldn't, and fondled those hard, swelling, pear-firm titties of hers, and for a minute there I thought she was going to abandon the wrapper and forget all about dinner and the concert. But at last she pushed my hands away and shook a playful forefinger at me.
"Not until after the concert, and then I'll really want you. I'm going to play as if I'm inspired tonight, you'll see, Jack dear. But in case you're wondering about Number Three, he didn't like tall girls in bed, not really, and I guess maybe I was too much for him. He's shacking up now with a cuddlesome little chorine in Las Vegas who isn't quite five feet tall. Besides, he didn't much like my sleeping with Elsie."
"I wouldn't let a little thing like that stop me, baby," I told her as I let my fingers roam down her bottom and gently squeezed the cheeks to see if the spanking still hurt her. The squirmy movements she gave out with indicated that she was revving up for another command performance after the concert, rather than from pain at the whacks which I had laid on so smartly.
"I've always dreamed of having a harem, with a girl on each side of me and a couple standing around to help out," I playfully added.
"If you're going to talk like that about Elsie, you and I are going to have a little argument, Jack dear. Elsie is a virgin, and she's going to stay that way. She adores me, and there are times when I like to have a girl love me up. Maybe you find it hard to understand that, but it's true."
"I won't discuss the point. Besides, you're more than woman enough for me, and if Elsie were in bed with us, I'm afraid I might get a little bit too distracted."
"That's a good boy. Now look, I'll call the box office and have them leave a front-row seat for you tonight. But you'd better not have dinner with me. Some of my girls are really chasers after anything in pants, You see, I have a permanent crew of about fifteen girls, but in every city where we play, I have the musicians' union dig up a couple of local dolls who've had some background in either symphony or band work. It makes for a nice local public relations angle, and Mr. Burdick, my press agent,--likes that sort of thing. So I'd say that so far as my violin is concerned, and discounting Elsie, who I know didn't have a thing to do with the theft-you've got about fourteen broads to investigate."
Well, at the rate of one a day, that would just about take care of the two weeks Mona Wilhelm would be in town before she left on her trip for the land of the castanets and the frijoles and die maiiachi.
"I'll go get a bite and then go on to the concert, Mona baby. Do I pick you up after the concert and come back here?"
"Of course not, stupid. You just write down your address and go on home after the show, and I'll join you at your place," the raven-haired orchestra leader whispered. She was standing very close to me now, rubbing her loins back and forth against my crotch, and her long, slim hands were cupping my cheeks, and her lips were brushing the tips of my nose and then my eyelids, and I was certain that after I had grabbed myself a sizeable corn-fed steak, I could more than rise to the occasion when she tried that little stunt of hers again. I was afraid to ask about the first two husbands, though. My guess was that they'd died either of a heart attack or of emasculation. The tune which Mona Wilhelm had been playing on her "cheap" violin when I made my business call on behalf of dear old Duron wasn't appropriate enough by half, I decided as I hastily dressed and prepared to exit the luxurious hotel as nonchalantly as if nothing had happened. Mona's theme song ought to have been "No Matter What I Do, I Can't Get Enough of You."
CHAPTER SIX
It was a good thing that I had earned my ticket to Mona Wilhelm's concert, because it was all sold out, and after I had parked my car and handed the attendant a sizeable tip so he wouldn't forget and give me a broken-down Rambler when I came back for my vehicle, there were long lines out as far as Washington Street, all handsomely dressed and most of them male. That figured. There were also huge full-life and full-color blowups of Mona in her lip-and-tittie-hugging evening gown and the baton in one hand and the famous Stradivarius in the other, staring right out at you from the facades at the entrance to what had once been known as Samuel Insull's Folly, and now housed Chicago's own opera company and numerous recitalists through the year.
I suppose I was the only male in that crowd who could stand opposite one of those breathtakingly real reproductions of Mona and wink back at her image with a sweet little secret between the two of us, because I don't think she had had time to spread her ivory thighs for anybody else since she had flown in to Chicago with her troupe about two days ago. It gave me a nice, warm, comfortable, ego-boosting feeling to be able to tell myself that less than two hours ago I had had that gorgeous piece of quim over my lap fantailing her magnificent bottom, and then had turned her over to get her as hot in front as she was behind.
I felt much better after the steak and a half-bottle of Pommard Clos de la Camarraine vintage 1964, which I had consumed downtown before picking up my ticket at the box office. Sure enough, Mona had remembered. It was a neat little envelope marked "Jack Warren," and it was in the very front row, dead center.
I hadn't bothered to dress, not really. I'd gone into a public washroom and used my electric shaver, a little lotion, and I washed my face. I never wore a hat, and since I wasn't wearing a coat in this warm weather, I was perfectly at my ease. I had a lot of sneers thrown in my direction by tuxedo-clad males thronging in the lobby for tickets, but I gave the sneers right back with interest. After all, which one of those guys could truthfully say he had fucked and spanked the illustrious Mona Wilhelm? Only Mrs. Warren's one and only and inimitable.
I bought a souvenir brochure for a buck because it had some breathtaking pictures of Mona doing interesting things, like standing in the kitchen whipping up some lobster d la Newburg or chicken croquettes, with a music rack by the window, and she was glancing over at the score with one eye and keeping the other eye on the skillet. She was also wearing a miniskirt, which made those juicy long legs of hers still longer, and a fetching little apron. There was a story of her life, naturally glamorized, and a few pictures of some of the other members of her all-girl show, I amused myself by staring at them intently while I waited for them to come out onto the stage, get into their places, and then at last the lights dimmed and out came Mona, amid thunderous applause. She bowed her raven head, bowed to all of us, turned her luscious back, lifted her violin bow, tucked the chinrest of the "cheap" violin under that indomitable chin, then swept down her bow in the opening strains of "Chicago, It's My Kind of Town."
I beamed at her bottom, since naturally she had her back to me. I was grateful to her bottom for more reasons than one. By dint of spanking it, I had gotten ample relief for the frustrating continence I'd had to practice this afternoon with Carol Vernon. Also, so far as being a company man was concerned, I felt that having fucked Mona Wilhelm, I was more--likely to get intimate news from her about all her girls which would help dear old Duron in solving the mystery of the missing Strad. Because, after all, she had been icy enough to me when I had just been asking routine questions and I hadn't gotten anywhere at all. Just the same, I didn't think I was going to put this in my report to Matt Hollister.
Mona's band had a nice style. It was jaunty without being too old-fashioned, it paid some tribute to rock-and-roll and the influence of the Beatles and even to some of the psychedelic music which seems to be making the rounds these days. By and large, and I know this remark will date me, it reminded me of the Glen Gray's Casa Loma Orchestra back in the happy days when the big band meant Saturday night dancing and dating and petting in the rumble seat and flasks taken out of raccoon coats and all the happy pleasures that mankind used to enjoy before they discovered that you could soak the taxpayer enough to finance a lunar missile and even a trip to Mars. Of course, I had been born just a little after the unforgettable Depression of the Thirties, but I was somewhat of a record buff myself, even though rather a longhair, and I still get a kick out of playing Glenn Miller and Ted Weems and Artie Shaw in his "Frenesi." In those days, music was music and not just discordant harmonies and hideously electronic sound effects which aim at hitting you in the pelvis. When I want to be hit in the pelvis, it's in bed and by the soft breath of a beautiful bitch like Mona Wilhelm.
The concert ended at about quarter of eleven, with an intermission and a couple of encores, and Mona let some of her star solo players stand up and take the spotlight as they played their instruments. I had my eyes on a couple of those girls right from the start from their pictures in the brochure. When the spotlight hit them, I felt my prick standing in admiration, and I was glad Mona wasn't looking down and seeing my reactions at the moment. There was an auburn-haired gal who played the bass fiddle like a man. She stood against it, her chest pressed hard against it and she slapped it with her hand as if she was whacking a man on the tail and urging him to accelerate his fucking tempo. The way she shook her hips indicated that nobody had to tell her to do the same when the lights were low. She also did one little vocal solo, and she sent shivers up and down my spine, because she had a really husky bedroom voice, not a whiskey voice, which is different, and I know what the difference is-which did things to my hormones. And then there was a piece that was playing the cello, and she was practically having a love affair with it on the stage. She was about six feet tall, or at least she looked that way under the lights, with wheat-colored hair wrapped around her head in a coronet braid, which made her look very distinguished and haughty. She was squeezing the cello with her legs, and I would have given a week's pay to have replaced the cello, even if it meant public exhibitionism. She had a skin that was the color of pale old ivory, midway between white and yellow, and I don't know how she did it, but it made her look so damn sexy that I had to keep my program over my fly lest the man at my left and the rather prim featured wife to my right simultaneously glance down at me and then have me arrested for indecent exposure. I mean, I told myself that in my next life I wanted to be reincarnated as her cello.
She played it pretty well, too. Once in a while she'd give it a good slap, like the auburn-haired piece who was strumming the bass fiddle. But then I got interested in the saxophone player. She was slim, she had honey-colored hair that fell almost to her deliciously rounded hips, and a little girl face with great big baby-blue eyes (I had brought along a pair of binoculars in case my own twenty-twenty vision happened to be defective on this particular occasion), and I could tell what color they were. She stood up, tilting her eyes to the ceiling as well as the saxophone, and her fingers tootled the keys as she blew. She made it wail and cry and sob and talk about pussy and prick in the night under the sheets with no one watching, and it was a language that every man in the audience could understand, because everybody was breathless except for hoarse pants and quickened breathing. There was a thunderous roar of applause when she finished the solo of "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and just about every man in the audience including myself was ready to take the honey-blonde saxophonist home to his pad and build a roaring fire and show her how hot things could be if she would only give him the chance.
Don't get me wrong. The other girls in the orchestra weren't bad either. In fact, during the intermission I amused myself by closing my eyes and pretending I was on a desert island with all of them around me, and that they were drawing lots by pulling palm tree leaves out of my hand to determine whom I was going to fuck tonight. The girl with the shortest leaf would get the honors. As I recall, in my fantasy, it was down to the last two girls and one of them was the Amazon with the cello and the other was the little baby doll with the sax, and I was really wondering if I couldn't change the rules and declare the game a tie and take both of them off to the nearest grassy knoll and change partners and gain a stroke, when suddenly the lights went up again and then down and told me the second half of the concert was going to start.
At last it was over, and I had written a few things down on the brochure opposite the pictures of the girls I had been concentrating on, except Mona, of course. There were at least three girls who looked sexy enough to be capable of stealing an expensive and antique violin-and again this was just a hunch. But in the insurance business, just as in every other line of endeavor, you can save an awful lot of time with hunches, especially if they are right.
I got my car back safely, without any dents, and drove back to East View Park. It was a residential park in a sort of semi-circle, I lived right in the middle of the semi-circle, on the second floor, and I had a full view of the park beyond and a glimpse of Lake Michigan when the weather was clear and sunny. About an hour later, my doorbell rang. I was already in my pajamas and robe and slippers, and I had been making some more notes, but these were on the typewriter and for the benefit of Matt Hollister, who would doubtless expect me to come into the office bright and early on Monday morning and let him know how my investigation was proceeding.
I pressed the buzzer to let my visitor in. I warily opened my front door because I happen to have some nosey neighbors on the other side of me who are forever coming out on the landing just about the time my girl of the moment is coming up the stairs, and I always have to give them a sheepish grin and say something like, "Hello, sister dear! Mother is on long distance asking for you." Unfortunately, by this time, that gimmick doesn't work any more, but it used to at first, when I first moved in.
Sure enough, it was Mona Wilhelm. She had her raven hair in a golden snood, and she wore a marvelous-looking black cloth cape, which wrapped her round from her neck down to her ankles. She gave me a wink and went right on in, and let me close the door behind her and myself before she turned and dramatically began to unbutton the buttons. The wrapper came off like a cocoon, and my jaw dropped. Under that wrapper Mona Wilhelm wore just her bra and garter belt, panties, hose and pumps.
"I disrobed in my dressing room, lover," she breathed as she came towards me. "Tins is my special fucking costume. like it?"
"That's the understatement of the year, baby. Although I ought to be jealous. It implies that you've been wearing it elsewhere."
"Of course I have, Jack darling. Wherever I travel. Because after all, I feel the urge in New York just as much as I do in Chicago, or in Butte, Montana, just as much as I do in St. Louis. Besides," by this time her arms were around my neck and she was rubbing her crotch against mine, "don't tell me you've been keeping yourself pure and innocent for me all these happy years. And I had a pretty good idea you weren't faithful to me with your mind or with your eyes, either, you naughty boy, at the concert tonight. I saw the way you were ogling Gloria Kent, yes, and Madge Thorberg, and Penny Wilson, too. You were looking at them more than you were looking at me, and there I was standing right above you."
"You noticed?" I said weakly.
Her crotch was rubbing even more insistently now and those panties were awfully filmy. They were black nylon, and I could see pussy-hairs in that thick triangulated patch which proclaimed Mona Wilhelm's hot lovechasm.
She nodded: "You were so busy looking at them when the spotlight went on for their solos, lover, that I could stare at you without your even being aware of it, you naughty boy. Oh my, what's this?"
She glanced down at me. My prick had risen to attention, thanks to the rubbing her pussy was applying against my manhood. "You were doing that, too, when you were looking at those girls of mine, darling. I don't know that I trust you around the troupe at all. I might have to lock myself up with you every night during my stay in Chicago just to know where you are and what you're doing."
"I wouldn't say no to that at all, but I don't think we'd better try that scheme. I'll never find the stolen Strad that way."
"That's true, lover, you won't. I've been doing some thinking, too, since this afternoon." Now her hand stole down to the fly of my pajama pants and unbuttoned it. I gave a groan as she took hold of my swollen prick. She began to rub the tip against the crotch of her panties, right where all the hair was. It tickled and scratched deliciously. The combination of filmy nylon, pussy, and girl-flesh is one of the reasons why I get down on my knees every night and thank the Creator for having me born with blue booties and a dangler instead of a slit. If I had been born a girl, the way I like fucking, I would have been very unhappy every time my monthly time rolled around. This way I can be permanently in heat. And I was right then. Mona's slim fingers were playing a tune on my cock just as she had on the "cheap" violin, and I think the title was something like "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."
I couldn't stay passive any longer. My fingers inserted in the waistband of those filmy nylon panties, shoved them down, then I unhooked her bra, then I took off my pajama tops, and she very accommodatingly unbuttoned and pulled down my pajama pants. I have a very wide, low couch in my living room, and it doesn't creak when it's being put to violent use. Only this time Mona was rapacious for a return engagement, that she practically forced me over to the couch on my back, shoved me down and got on top of me. The next thing I knew, she'd opened her pussy lips with her left thumb and forefinger, took hold of my cock with her right hand and guided it into the parlor of passion.
As she sank down on me, sighing deeply with delight, she put her lips to my ear and whispered, "Spank my bummy good and hard while we're doing it, darling. You've no idea how it excites me! I'm so hot for you, I almost had my press agent call you to my dressing room during the intermission, only it wasn't long enough for what I needed. I warn you, Jack, you aren't going to get much sleep tonight,"
Neither of us did, for that matter. I started slapping her ivory bottom, first with one hand and then with both as she neared her climax. She had about three before she finally drew a frantic ejaculation from my swollen and throbbing prick which she kept housed in that tight box of hers. After that, she announced that she was hungry, and we raided the refrigerator together. After about a half hour of this and that, I suggested that we might be more comfortable in my double bed, and this time I was on top of her. A little later, she wanted to try the all-fours position again because she loved to have her titties squeezed and feel a man's belly smack against her bottom while she was getting pronged. And so I obliged. I will admit that I had a helluva time getting my cock up for that third and last fuck, but to my surprise and delight, Mona Wilhelm helped me out with her soft lips and tongue. And when a man is just about drained of juice and yet manages a hard-on, it can turn out to be the best fuck of all. He doesn't have the urge to burst all his seed out, so he can go on fucking endlessly while his prick remains hard. Conversely-or maybe I should say cuntversely-his female partner has one furious climax after another. And this time I did discover that my double bed creaked, where the couch didn't. We both collapsed and went to sleep, after that final bout. Mona didn't have a concert on Sunday until two-thirty, so she whispered that she would have brunch with me.
Happily I had set the alarm, or we might both have been late to that concert. As it was, we didn't wake up until about eleven-thirty, and she promptly proved that that publicity picture of her in the kitchen with a skillet wasn't just ballyhoo. She made an omelet and fried some bacon nice and crisp and dry, the way I like it, and toasted a couple of English muffins, and then we chitchatted. She filled me in about the background of some of those girls in her troupe, especially the three who had caught my roving eye.
"Why don't you date one of them, lover?" she suggested as she emerged from the bathroom, her wrapper on again. It was so ingeniously modeled on her long, rangy body that you couldn't tell she wore only lingerie underneath. "I'll tell you what. I'll pass the word around that you're a rich bachelor playboy on the make. The one trouble I have with some of my girls is that they're man-crazy." (Look who was talking!) "Then it's up to you, Jack. I'd rather you didn't let the word out that you're an insurance investigator. Besides, I think that playing it like a love-starved playboy, you'll get the girls' confidence a lot faster. Don't forget, two weeks from tomorrow night, we start heading for California and then Mexico, and if I don't get the Strad back before I leave Chicago, I'm really going to be in trouble with my career. Now give me a good, sweet kiss. I'll leave another ticket for you at the box office, and then you be hanging around the stage door when the girls go out."
"Are any of them staying with you at the Drake?" I wanted to know.
"Only Elsie. The others have checked in at the Conrad Hilton. The manager gives me a special rate when all the girls stay there and we put them about three to a room. That way, one checks the other and it keeps from having any out-of-line sex life."
"It's a good thing nobody puts a check on you, darling. And I'm glad you picked me to be the man to see your fucking costume while you're playing Chicago," I told Mona Wilhelm as I squeezed her bottom and gave her a last French kiss and sent her back to the Civic Opera House to her public.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mona Wilhelm had gone back for her Sunday afternoon concert at the Civic Opera House and, per her agreement with me, I'd begun to spread the word that her girls might expect a stage door Johnny who was a playboy, rich and a most eligible bachelor. Accordingly I chose my best double-breasted suit for the occasion, my nattiest of Florsheims, made sure that I was clean-shaven and had used ample deodorant, and drove my shiny new car into the Civic Opera House parking lot.
Once again Mona had left a ticket for me at the box-office, and sure enough, it was right up front. I had brought my binoculars along anyhow for a closer look at the girls, because now this was official business. My next move would be to flirt with some of the charming girl musicians of her combo and try to find out what I could about the missing Strad.
One thought had already occurred to me, and I'm sure it must have occurred to Mona also. If she had the only keys to the closet and to the case of the Strad, somebody very close to her must have lifted them from that slim ivory neck of hers. This could only have been done by one of her bedmates, So all I had to do was to find out how many of those steady girls in the band were of the garden dyke variety, which would narrow down some, and then start doing some intensive interrogation with the most--likely suspects. I had just two weeks, because after her final show at the Happy Medium a week from next Saturday night, she and the girls would take off for sunny California and then the land which Marlon Brando had made famous in his movie, "Viva Zapata!"
I'll give Mona credit for this much, she changed the program from Saturday night so it wasn't repetitious or boring. It wouldn't have been anyway, not with all those gorgeous babes sitting up there on the stage in those gleaming and low-cut evening gowns which emphasized titties and thighs and bottoms all over the place. You could get randy just sitting there minding your own business and using your 20-20 vision and I did. But now I had narrowed my own daily selection down to the dish that was playing the cello, the Amazonian blonde beauty, According to the brochure, her name was Madge Thorberg, and she had once played for just one night with Lawrence Welk. I figured she was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, but that was a minor detail. What she had was well preserved and there was plenty of it.
At the end of the concert, I was stationed backstage, because Mona had told the doorman that I was a trustworthy character. Besides which, I gave him five bucks. It would go on my expense account, and I knew that if I found the Strad, Matt Hollister wouldn't lop it off.
When Madge Thorberg came out of her dressing room and sauntered down the hall towards the exit, I gave her a great big smile and the compliment, "I've never seen a cello played more beautifully." That was no he, either. Now there are some girls who play cellos who would do better to hold a man between their legs, and when I went to Northeastern I almost got kicked out of school by reviewing a local concert and by intimating that the first cellist would do better to look for a husband than to continue wrapping her stately thighs around a musical instrument, I still feel that way.
She looked at me, and she had gorgeous gray-green eyes, and she was just about six feet tall. She was wearing a cool red cotton dress whose tight skirt came down to about her dimpled knees and hugged long smoothly muscled thighs which could strangle a man to death without half trying. She had a pair of big upstanding and well spaced bombers, and they were straining at the dress too as if eager to break the leash and run looking for playmates. They wouldn't have had to run far, because I was standing about five inches away from her when I confronted her.
She had a full wide mouth, as sexy as you can imagine. It curved in a great big smile to meet and match my own as she purred, in a lovely husky voice that sounded Scandinavian, "How very sweet you are, Mr.Mr.--? "
"Jack Warren, at your service. You're Miss Thorberg, aren't you?"
"You can call me Madge," said my Amazonian blonde cellist, hooking onto my arm and making her eyes go very starry at me. "I'm terribly hungry after a concert."
I like the direct approach. I've always been in favor of the Scandinavian countries because they don't ban sex or books about sex, and they seem to have a zest for life in a directness which is refreshing. Besides, I was hungry myself, and not entirely for Madge. My brunch had worn off, and my bouts with Mona had left me in the need of replenishing my energy. If I was going to tackle about thirteen girls in as many nights before the troupe left on its goodwill tour, I was going to need raw eggs in a glass of beer or sherry three times a day.
"Let me take you to one of Chicago's best restaurants for the finest steak you'll ever sink those beautiful white teeth into, Madge," I purred. She gave my arm a nice little hug and squeeze and nodded, her eyes starry again. And in about thirty-five minutes, we were seated in Morton's restaurant, at 56th and South Shore Drive, a stone's throw from Lake Michigan, where luscious Lisa, my favorite waitress, and a dish from Breslau, Germany with three kids, was taking out orders.
Madge asked me if I liked music, and I told her that I had quite a record collection in my apartment. She gave me a sultry look and then giggled, then shook a playful forefinger at me: "You naughty boy, you just want to get me up there alone, don't you?"
"I'd be a liar if I said no, Madge. Yes I do. But I honestly have an awful lot of records, like by Pablo Casals, Emanuel Feuerman, and Gregor Piatigorsky." These happen to be about the three greatest cellists that ever lived. I was testing her. But she tested me right back with a cute quip: "Really, Jack, if you prefer to listen to male cellists, I can't be of much use to you. I'm just a big girl who needs love and lots of it."
"I just listen to their records, I don't go to bed with them," I chuckled. "Besides, I told you I'd never heard a cello played more beautifully, and I meant just that literally. But here come our steaks, Eat up every bite, because people are starving in Patagonia."
She ate up every bite, plus a generous helping of shrimp cocktail, plus two bowls of salad, plus strawberries Romanoff, which means they are flamed with liqueur and a good big gob of French vanilla ice cream beside them. I was very glad that it was only a few blocks away to my humble pad, because if I had had to go back downtown to screw Madge, I might not have had the strength. I just wanted to float away with my head on her lap and those gorgeous bombers coming down over my face. I wanted to be primitive and worship Mother Earth, the fertile goddess of the harvest and planting. Especially planting seed. Most of all, I wanted to measure my length between those long, classically sculptured thighs of Madge Thorberg's.
Well, I won't bore with you with the technical details. Suffice it to say that we got back to my apartment about eight-thirty, and she roamed around the place as if she owned it. First of all she kicked off her shoes, which brought her a little down to my size, though she was still about even with me. She was really a big girl, no two ways about it. Then she ambled into my den, where I have metal shelving on which my hi-fi system, hundreds of records and tapes and books are stacked. There was everything in there except a couch, but she stayed long enough to examine the titles of some of my albums and had to agree that I hadn't been conning her about my love for music.
Then we went back into the living room and I mixed her a pretty good daiquiri if I do say so myself, as she sat beside me on the long low wide couch and leaned back with a sigh of delighted content. "This is really lovely here. Sometimes I wish I didn't have to travel so much. It's such a nuisance packing and getting used to new places when you've begun to like where you are and the people whom you've met," she confided. "You mean you don't have any family ties at all, Madge?"
She shook her head and sighed wistfully. Then she put her head on my shoulder, and she turned a little bit towards me, and there was an electricity between us right off. "You've no idea how tough it is to get any ties at all when you work for Mona," she murmured. Her gray-green eyes were swimmingly humid now. "Why, do you know, Jack, that bitch actually took a cut out of my pay because I went off on a toot with a nice guy like you who came back stage to see me in St, Louis. He was a terrific lover, and I don't meet many like that. You know, I'm so tall. Lots of men are scared and they get an inferiority complex. Me, I'm just a woman and I like to be loved and hard."
"That's the only way," I quipped. I was starting to feel that way myself. The firm lovely muscles of Madge's thighs and hips were flexing against my body now as she kept pressing against me and now she had her arm linked around my neck and was pulling my face down to hers. I didn't fight it.
"But it's true," she persisted, after we had exchanged a long wet kiss and I had felt just a flicker of her nimble tongue. "I've been with her since she started her crummy band back in Buffalo about five years ago. She had a rich husband then who happened to be a big shot in the Musicians' Union and I guess he backed her into starting the group."
"How did you get into it?"
Madge Thorberg shrugged. "Well the thing about it is, I had just got jilted by a guy I thought was going to marry me, an I always did play the cello, ever since I was about twelve. And I figured that maybe traveling would get me over my heartache for that son of a bitch. He went and married a girl who was just about five feet high, do you know that?"
"He was running scared. He didn't know what he was missing."
"The trouble was, he did," Madge whispered as her fingernails began to play with the strands of my hair at the nape, reminding me that I needed a quick haircut. "We were sweethearts for about six months. He had everything I had to offer, the louse."
"I take it you don't care for going the girl route, then?" I chanced.
She straightened up and her eyes were flashing angrily, "Say, what kind of a nasty crack is that? Are you a writer or something trying to get to the bottom of my self-conscious? I hate dames. They're selfish and greedy and bitchy and they can't satisfy a woman like me."
That was almost convincing enough, but I had to slip her the real convincer to make sure. "I'm sorry I asked. I ought to have known better," I apologized. Then I put my hands on her titties and leaned forward and gave her a good hard stinging kiss, and this time my tongue went to work between her lips.
She moaned delightedly, flung her arms around me, and nearly pulled me down onto the floor. The next thing I knew, I was on my back, fighting for my honor. She crouched above me like a glorious blonde wrestler moving in for the kill, and then her eyes fixed on the crotch of my trousers. "Ooooh!" she squealed, and then her hand was tugging down my zipper and then I had to grind my teeth to keep from shooting off most ungallantly and prematurely; her slim long fingers had wrapped around my cock and were beginning to milk it with long and slow drawing movements. I was proud of myself then, because my ferocious efforts with Mona hadn't apparently weakened my vigor. However, I wasn't sure I could stand and deliver like this every night in the week for the next two weeks. But it would be fun trying to find out whether I could or not, and on company time too, whether Matt Hollister liked it or not.
She grabbed the hem of her evening gown and hoisted it up to her waist. Then it was my turn to goggle. She didn't have any panties on. She had played on that stage bare-ass-naked under that slinky gleaming evening gown. Not only that she didn't have a bra on either. Because I could see those great big bombers of hers sort of flapping out of that low-cut bodice, and the nipples were pouting and darkened and stiff.
And then she sank down on me, and I was certain that her ex-boyfriend had been a stupid idiot. This was primitive and primeval Woman, this was Eve and Astarte and Lilith and Cleopatra all wrapped up into one practically six foot-tall blonde package. Her cunt was already moist and hot and it was gloriously tight. She sucked me in to the roots, as she lay there on top of me with her hands cupping my cheeks, while I clamped my legs around the small of her back so that she wouldn't think of breaking off this happy union. I was convinced. Madge Thorberg couldn't possibly have stolen those keys from around Mona's neck, if the only way to get them would have been by going to bed with the raven-haired bandleader. Because Madge Thorberg was definitely not a gay girl in the sense which that adjective has these days. She just wanted to be fucked.
So for the next hour or two, I forgot all about the missing Strad and tried to acquit myself heroically. When it was over at last, my best suit was going to have to go to the cleaner's, and Madge was going to have to buy a new dress. I had practically torn it off her, and we had wrestled around on the floor in our priapic duel. I hadn't exactly made her cry uncle, but she hadn't made me cry it out either. It was a draw. I told her we could settle the championship maybe clown in Mexico, and she giggled, bent her head and kissed the tip of my fairly limp cock and whispered, "I'd love that, Jack dear! But we're going to be here two weeks in Chicago, you know. Can't we do this again very soon sometime? like maybe tomorrow night after the concert? I'm staying at the Conrad Hilton."
"I won't promise, baby," I sighed. And this was from delighted depletion. "Let's play it by ear. Let's let it be a surprise the way it was tins evening."
She left me limp and panting on the floor while she moved that gorgeous tall satiny carcass of hers into my bathroom. I reached weakly up to the coffee table for a couple of Pall Malls, lit one, and just lay there meditating on the strange quirks of fate which had got me this job in the first place. Because if I had caught that pass and scored with that blonde, at the Purdue game, I don't think Matt Hollister would ever have hired me. And if he hadn't, I wouldn't have been romping with sweet aggressive pieces of cunt like Mona Wilhelm and Madge Thorberg.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I awoke on Monday morning, the clock said 9:15 and I had a hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach and a much hollower one a few inches farther down. Between Mona and Madge, I felt like the victim of a vampire bat which had sucked me dry. So my first reaction was to put through a call to Matt Hollister's secretary, and lo and behold, he had just started his vacation! But he had left a message for me with Jane Bowers, who was Mart's very slinky but somewhat thin and peaked, black-haired and thirty-two-year-old secretary. She had been working on getting herself engaged for the past three years, but her guy was one of these dawdlers who was waiting for the right moment and a big raise before he would settle down and make an honest woman out of poor Jane. Meanwhile, because she happened to be a decent girl and would never have given me a tumble, even on a desert island, she was slowly but surely getting neurotic because she wasn't getting any regular fucking. If she hadn't been Matt's girl, I might have intimated that regular copulation would clear up her complexion, put more bounce to the ounce in her step, and make a new woman out of her. Anyhow, the message was that he wouldn't be back for three weeks and I was to report direct to the president of Duron as to my progress on the Mona Wilhelm case. I asked her to transfer me to the prexy's office, and a minute later I was talking to Priscilla Landridge, the icy, bespectacled, gray-haired right-hand amen-uensis of J. Stanley Duron.
Very briefly I filled Miss Landridge in on my interview with Mona Wilhelm-naturally omitting the carnal details-and as she transcribed my immortal words over the phone, I reported that I planned to interview all of the regularly employed members of her band and that I had already checked off one of them, namely Madge Thorberg. Miss Landridge haughtily informed me that Mr. Duron was off to a stockholders' meeting in Boston this week, but that when he got back to Chicago next week, he would expect some action. I said he could rely on me, and she just sniffed and hung up.
But the one good thing was that my boss and watchdog wouldn't be on my neck every five minutes. I had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do during his vacation, too. He was going off to the country or the lake or, for all I knew, maybe to Hawaii or Mexico, with my former sweetheart, Kathy Murnow. That hurt. Kathy, now twenty-seven, happens to be a divorcee with a handsome cash settlement from an important socialite who'd been something of a Mama's boy who didn't know how to keep a wife except to insult her and give her the back of his hand when things weren't going smoothly. After Kathy had had three years with Junior Liscombe, she had filed suit for divorce, and that's how I had met her. My lawyer friend Al Aaronson happened to be handling her divorce and I walked in one afternoon into his office, and there she was, and it was love at first night, so to speak. Well, we had been good friends and lovers for about three years, when suddenly and inexplicably Kathy had met my boss and thought that he was a double for the James Bond of Filmdom, Sean Connery.
I really hated to lose her, and least of all to the guy who kept razing me whenever he could about my broken nose and dropped pass. I loved the way she wore her dark brown hair in helmet style with a trim fringe along the top of her creamy forehead. I was crazy about her Grecian nose with thin, flaring wings, and I could drown myself in those big, dark brown eyes, and, while I was drowning, cradle my head on those magnificently widely spaced titties that never needed a bra, and were just the right size for a man's hand to cup.
Whenever I got a little sluggish in the passion department, Kathy's cool contralto voice could get husky in ways that suggested the most salacious intimacies, and that vocal expertise of hers never failed to get my cock up where it belonged. Yes, I knew where Matt was going to spend his vacation...spend it right in Kathy's tight, burning cunt, and probably spend it in her Lake Shore Drive apartment. And here I was without any permanent attachments at the moment.
Anyway, since both the big boss and my immediate boss were away, I decided to take most of Monday off recuperating from my wanton weekend. First I opened a bottle of sherry, broke two eggs into a glass, filled the glass with sherry and gulped it down. Then I went right back to bed and slept till about one in the afternoon. My next step was to telephone Mona's press agent, Eugene Burdick. He had an office in the Pure Oil Building, and a couple of offices in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well. Of course, he was in town with Mona, and as luck would have it, he was there to answer the phone.
He recognized me, because Mona had already told him I was trying to find the missing Strad without any bad publicity, and he was all for it. Was there anything he could do for me? He had the excited kind of a voice that made me think he would be much happier at a place like Finnocchio's in San Francisco, where they have female impersonators and queens in drag. But that was perfect if you had to have a business relationship with a broad who had fifteen gorgeous chicks working for her. That way you wouldn't get into trouble by playing house with your clients. I told Eugene Burdick that I would swear him to secrecy and that he could trust me for being confidential in return, but I wanted him to tell me something about the private lives and habits of the broads in the band. I took a cab down to his office and got there about four in the afternoon, after having taken a good cold shower and another sherry with two raw eggs. I was feeling nicely relaxed, and I was wishing it would be my turn for a vacation, but it wouldn't be offered until I had solved this case, that was for damn sure.
Eugene Burdick was a plump, almost bald man who wasn't much more than forty, with big horn-rimmed glasses, the smell of cologne, a paunch on him, and wearing an expensive English tweed suit, even in hot weather. He also had a limp wrist and a silk shirt with cuffs. He was swish. But actually he was a better source of information than a guy who got horny when he saw an ass undulate as its owner moved up a staircase. It's funny, but women make pals of swishes, because they realize the latter are no danger to them and they can have lasting friendships. That's a fact. That's why swishes who work in beauty parlors get along just dandy with all the real girls there, and they know all the secrets, too. Any private eye can tell you that.
When I got finished talking to Eugene Burdick, it was five-thirty and I gratefully offered to buy his dinner, which he gratefully accepted. He gave me a limp-wrist look, but I shook my head gently and said, "I'm already engaged, Gene. Sorry." I had already got to the intimacy of calling him Gene, so he figured maybe I played in his league. He pouted and looked disappointed, but the prospect of a free meal at La Tour, on the top of the building at 400 East Randolph Street, looking right out over the lake, consoled him. I had been making copious notes while I had been talking to him, and I had some very interesting bits of information. First of all, when I had first learned about the missing Strad and then gone to see Mona, there had been one jarring note that didn't quite ring true and didn't match what I'd been told by Matt Hollister. He had said something about a big music dealer in Chicago authenticating the certificate of title, but Mona had mentioned a New York dealer. Well, it wasn't very much. In the case of a really rare violin, as Mona's Strad undoubtedly was to have been worth two hundred grand in insurance, it was quite possible she had got herself two authentications, just to be sure there'd never be any question as to the value of the violin. But that little thing kept nagging at me, because I wondered why Mona had never bothered to tell me about the Chicago dealer. However, the real meat of the conversation, and I don't refer to the prime steaks I had the waitress bring my limp wrist new friend and myself, was that Penny Wilson, the slim little-girl-like honey-haired saxophonist was causing Eugene Burdick a great deal of worry. It seems that Penny had a yen for big bad brutal men, and the last time around in Chicago when Mona's band had played (that time at the Empire Boom of the Palmer House), she had taken up with a guy by the name of Phil Fioritto, who was well known as a minor hoodlum and might even have the more sinister Casa Nostra affiliation. In case you don't know what Casa Nostra means, it spells out the Mafia or the Black Hand, and when one of that big happy family latches himself onto a piece of pussy, the ordinary citizen better stay two thousand miles away from it or he'll get his dick permanently chopped off as the least that can happen to him.
Eugene Burdick tried to talk her out of the affiliation, but she wasn't having any. She told him with a very innocent look on her face that "Phil is a wonderful gentleman, Mr. Burdick, and I'll thank you not to criticize him to my face, if you please."
There was also Gloria Kent. When Eugene Burdick mentioned her name, I had an inner glow. She was the girl with the husky bedroom voice who played the bass fiddle. And was she ever a dish. But Gloria Kent had been married and divorced, and she gave out that she hated men. In the personality sketch that Eugene Burdick had made out on her and which he kept in his confidential file, it appeared that Gloria loved jive and sleeping in the raw and pet Siamese cats. And if she hated men, the chances were she liked girls. It was quite possible that she had been one of Mona's Lesbian lovers, either recently or at the outset of the inception of the combo. There were a couple of other chicks whose pictures I had particularly picked out from that brochure, about whom Eugene Burdick told me some interesting things. He swore me to secrecy about one of the girls, Dale Hornston. Dale was a fluffy blonde-haired, rather shy girl who played the flute, and she had been secretly married for four years to a union organizer who was twice her age. She had a father complex, and she had been very close to her own father, who had died of a heart attack when she was only fourteen. The union organizer had been a friend of her father's; well, I didn't hold that against the poor chick. But Mona had a rule that any time a girl got married, she didn't belong to the combo any more. So between not permitting marriage and docking her workers out of their pay if they tried to get in a little non-married fucking, I could see that a lot of girls wouldn't exactly love the happy little sorority Mona Wilhelm had created out of her band. It could lead to neurosis, frustration, trauma, and spinsterish pussy. But it could also lead to Mona's bedroom...because if a girl wasn't allowed to fuck, she tried to do the next best thing, which was girl fuck.
All that information was well worth the price of the dinner tab which I picked up, to Eugene Bur-dick's beaming approval. I told him that I was posing as a rich and eligible playboy, so if he got any reports that I was trying to date up some of Mona's girls, not to worry about it. He said he had every confidence in me. We shook hands, he gave me a last lingering, reluctant look, hoping I might change my mind about the way my hormones went, but he was disappointed. I went right back home and slept the sleep of the just until eight on Tuesday morning, because my next interview was going to be with pert little Penny Wilson.
CHAPTER NINE
Penny Wilson wasn't staying at the Conrad Hilton, Eugene Burdidk had informed me. She had rented a furnished apartment for the two-week stay on North LaSalle Street near Schiller, right on the fringe of garish, hippie-infested Old Town. Now, since the girls were going to start at the Happy Medium and finish out the rest of the two weeks, they would be playing nights exclusively. This meant that I would have to do my investigating work either early afternoons or after the final show. I could see that I would put in a lot of overtime for dear old Duron.
But the more I studied the picture in the brochure of vivacious, cute little Penny, I felt that the old maxim about a penny saved is a penny earned definitely had its points. She was, according to the data both the brochure and Eugene Burdick had given me, twenty-three, which meant that she had been about eighteen when she had first started to work for Mona Wilhelm. I had got plenty of sleep over Monday night, so I woke up at about eight on Tuesday with all of my old time zest. Of course, knowing that nobody was going to cut me off the payroll down at the office, especially since Mr. Duron and my boss were vacationing, I dawdled with breakfast. Six crisp strips of bacon, two almost blackened English muffins, three scrambled eggs, dry and hard, about four cups of coffee and a good cigar, after about a pint of frozen orange juice, made me feel like a new man. I was careful about using that remark in the presence of the opposite sex, however. One of Kathy Murow's favorite cracks, whenever I had come out with that buoyant statement, was a cynical "So do I!" and unfortunately for me, she had felt exactly that way, because now Matt Hollister was seeing the whites of her thighs, not yours truly, alas.
I dressed in a sport shirt, cool Dacron slacks, white sport shoes, I had a haircut, and then I drove out to LaSalle Street. Eugene Burdick had given me the exact address, and there was a parking lot next door, which made it very convenient. I went into the lobby and a supercilious and rather limp-wristed young man wanted to know whom I wanted to see. I told him I had Penny Wilson in mind, and he snootily remarked that she had gone out for some groceries and he didn't know how long it would be before she got back. I parked myself in a comfortable armchair, closed my eyes, and indulged in fanciful reverie. Her image floated into my ever-active brain, and it kept me company until Penny in the flesh tripped in, carrying two big shopping bags in her arms against that lovely pair of bubbies she had. Naturally I sprang up like a retriever, introduced myself in the same breath: "I'm Jack Warren, Miss Wilson, and I caught your act at the Civic Opera House and I wanted to tell you what a terrific sax you play."
First she looked flustered, then she flushed and dimpled, then she lowered her baby-blue eyes and cooed, "That's awfully nice of you to say, Mr. Warren. Thanks ever so much. These bags are awfully heavy to carry. I just love to cook, don't you?"
"We've already got something in common, Miss
Wilson," I said as I steered her towards the elevator by leaning myself in that direction. The desk clerk looked annoyed, but Penny was much prettier to look at, so I ignored him completely. She was on the tenth floor, and she had her key. I was practically breathing down her neck when she opened the door, and she told me to just put them in the kitchen, if I didn't mind, and I didn't mind, that is. She asked me if I would like a drink, and I said that if she would join me, yes. She came into the kitchen and stood beside me, and I could inhale a very spicy perfume. I forget the name of it, but it had a French title that roughly meant "the power of seduction." Penny Wilson didn't need an artificial stimulant to seduce her male admirers, I am here to tell you.
She was about five feet four and a half, cuddle-some, and absolutely mouth watering from head to toe. That honey-colored hair of hers fell almost to her hips, and it was newly shampooed, clean and shimmering. I wanted to run my fingers through it. Better still, I wanted to run my cock through it. She had a willowy figure, and her legs were somewhat longish, rather more than I had noticed at the concert. She had nice springy calves, just a bit fleshy, but it wasn't a black mark against her. Her thighs were delightfully curved, and they merged into the sauciest, most spankable bottom I have looked at since Kathy Murnow used to parade for me in the altogether back in the dear dead days beyond recall. Her titties were perky, too They were spaced closely together, they were round and high-set, not too big, and certainly a refreshing contrast after Madge Thorberg's magnificent mammaries. She had a baby-pink-and-white skin, the type you call carnation, winch was even more devastating in die soft light of a living room than under the glare of a concert spotlight. She didn't use and she didn't need much makeup. Her long lashes were mascaraed, and those baby blue eyes of hers were big and wide and appealing, and they seemed to say, "You're such a great big man, and I'm such a terrified little girl and please don't hurt me, 'cause I can't do anything about it if you do."
Her face was heart-shaped; she had adorable dimples at the chin and at the cheeks. Tiny little ears set closely against the skull, a saucy and up-tilted nose with very sensuous wings, and a rosebud of a mouth. My prick was starting to harden already.
I introduced myself to her as a fellow who had been left a big inheritance by doting parents and who just happened to like pretty girls and music. I told her that the combination of her sax and her beauty had made an indelible impression on me. As we sat together on the couch and she clasped white hands over one dimpled knee, I let my gaze wander over the tightly snug and exquisitely pleated white cotton skirt which went down to about one inch above her bended knees. It took all my manly self-control to keep from showing her my indelible impression right then. I felt as if I hadn't tasted pussy in years. I was grateful to Mother Nature for the renewal of this eternal cycle of vitality. Now if Penny had come around, say, Sunday night, I'm afraid she would have written me off her list forever. But now was a different story.
"I really think I oughtn't to have let you in, Mr. Warren," Penny stammered with a delicious little lisp.
"Why not, Penny? And please call me Jack. After all, I've got plenty of it," I quipped.
"I know. But you see, Mr. Warren-I mean, Jack-I-well, I've got an awfully jealous boyfriend."
"Are you married, or engaged to him? I don't poach on other people's property, as a rule," I told her. She giggled at this, and seemed to sit closer to me than ever. I felt that rounded, warm thigh of hers press against mine. She didn't have any stockings on, either, and the adorable pink and white nakedness of her calf and knee made me realize that I had neglected lunch. And I couldn't have asked for a prettier leg of lamb.
"Well, no, not exactly," she confessed, blushing even more exquisitely. "Just the same, Phil-that's my boyfriend, you know-he gets awfully mad if I go out with anybody else when I'm here in Chicago, you know."
"You came from Milwaukee originally, didn't you?" I ventured. I'd got that from Eugene Burdick.
"Oh my! You are a fan of Mona's, aren't you? you must have bought her anniversary souvenir yearbook."
"No. I just did some checking. I always do that when I meet a pretty girl I'd like to know better," I told her.
She didn't seem to mind that either. She pressed even closer, and I was feeling the vibrations of that firm round thigh of hers and thinking that maybe I could get between them. She said, "I'm sort of in disgrace back home, though. You see, I took music lessons but they were on the piano, and Daddy wanted me to play Bach and
Hayden. Me, I like popular music, ballads and things like that, they're so sweet, you know."
"So are you, Penny," I murmured, as my left arm stole around her lissome waist. She glanced down at my hand curling just around her side, gave a little giggle, looked at me, and then showed me a dimpled smile. "Well," she went on, "I eloped with a piano player who played an awful lot of boogie. Daddy had the marriage annulled, and he gave me a good hard spanking, like he always did when I was naughty. But I liked Ed-that was my husband, the boogie player-so much that this time the spanking didn't cure me, so I ran away again, and Mona Wilhelm happened to be in Cleveland-I went there because I had a cousin living there-and I went to hear her concert and talked with her backstage, and-well, here I am," she finished with a triumphant little smile.
Well, Penny Wilson wasn't a virgin. I didn't think that a boogie piano player, unless he was out of his mind, would take a girl along and be married to her, whether or not he knew it was going to be annulled, without demanding his marital rights. But what interested me was the way she had talked about the spanking her Daddy had given her for running away from home. Her eyes had grown all big and humid and her lips moist and parted, and those big titties of hers had begun to rise and fall excitedly. Could it be that Penny Wilson enjoyed a spanking? Did it give her kicks that got her little pussy hot and excited enough to screw? Or would she accept a spanking from a woman like Mona Wilhelm?
"Do you mean to say that your father spanked a big, grown-up woman like you when you were eighteen, Penny?"
My arm tightened around her waist. She moved even closer, until we were practically glued together. "Oh, yes! Daddy started spanking me when I was ten. When I got to be fifteen years old, he said I was big enough to know better and from then on it would be on the bare. I used to average at least two a week. You see, Mommy ran away with a trombonist when I was about six, I think. That's one reason Daddy hated jazz so and got so mad when I married Ed."
"What do you think of Mona Wilhelm as a boss and as a person, Penny?" I pursued. I wish I could have taken along a pocket tape-recorder, just to show Matt Hollister how I was thinking about dear old Duron every minute of the day and night, even when he was away from his office enjoying himself with my former lover. He would have been touched by my devotion to the cause, I'm sure.
"Oh, she's awfully strict but very nice. She's always treated me very well."
"How well?" I tried to move even closer, but it was impossible. Peggy was pressing her thigh against me as hard as she could, and now she had put her left hand down against my left to sort of clamp my arm around her waist and make certain I wouldn't pull away. I had no intention of doing that.
"Well, she sort of is like a big sister to me. She doesn't mix too much with all the girls, only a couple. like Elsie, who plays piano, you know."
I wondered if dear little Elsie who had been so scared when I undressed her with my eyes back in the Drake Hotel on the occasion of my first meeting with the fabulous raven-haired Mona Wilhelm mightn't be a pretty good suspect, in spite of what Mona had said about her being trust-worthy. But that could be taken up later. If Elsie was a squeamish and tender virgin, I'd rather save her until I had all my manly confidence restored with plenty of fucking along the way with pretty girls who weren't afraid when they saw a prick bare itself and get ready to go between their twitching white thighs. As I thought about it, I got a very hot erotic image. I was naked and seated at a Steinway. Elsie was seated on top of me wearing her glasses and her high heeled pumps and nothing else. She was playing a piano solo and moving her hips up and down in time to the movement of the tune, each movement of which impaled my prick the deeper into her tight young cunt. It was a wonderful image. Maybe I could turn it into reality before the all girl band packed up and deserted the Windy City.
"Me, I'm a guy who--likes girls who--likes guys," I told her with a knowing wink and moved my left hand up slowly towards the curve of her beautiful round bubbie. "You know, Penny, some girls are so mixed up that they don't care where they get their affection, whether it's from a girl or a guy. I'm sure you're not that kind, are you?"
"Oh no!" Her baby blue eyes registered startled and unhappy surprise that such a thought should even enter my mind. "Oh my-my gracious-if you mean what I think you do, I really ought to send you out of here. When I was in high school, my classmate in gym tried to-well, feel me up in the shower-and I slapped her so hard she feel down and dislocated her hip."
Well, I could cross Penny off the fist of Mona's bedroom acquaintances. But I knew that J. Stanley Duron wasn't interested in speculation, only in hard facts, and the hardest fact of all was right between my legs, and it was bulging through my fly. And once I had a chance to fuck sweet Miss Penny Wilson, I was pretty sure I could bury any rumors that she had the slightest interest in rubbing pussy with Mona Wilhelm.
But how to do it on such short acquaintanceship? Then the answer came to me. "You know I wouldn't imply such a thing, Penny honey. You look to me like a man's woman. You look to me like Daddy's little girl. I still can't get over it."
Now her right arm was around my neck and her satiny cheek was brushing against mine, and those soft red lips were parted and I saw the most adorable little white teeth. Also, her nostrils were opening and closing, a sure sign that she was getting emotionally excited.
"What can't you get over, Jack?" she whispered.
"That your Daddy actually dared to spank such a beautiful young woman as you when you were eighteen. And on the bare, too. You mean he actually did that, took your panties down and everything?"
"Uhuh. Yes, he did, Jack. Sometimes when I was awfully naughty I had to go up to my room, take off everything except my jammies and my slippers, kneel down by my bed and say my prayers and ask forgiveness for being such a naughty girl. He would keep me waiting for an awfully long time, and then he would come in and I would have to get up and go get my hairbrush and bring it to him, and then I would have to take my jammy pants down while he sat on the edge of the bed and lectured me about being so naughty, and then go over his lap and count off the spanks he gave me with that awful hairbrush. Oh, how I cried! But it never did any good. Daddy just spanked harder, it seemed." Her eyes were distant now, as if she were reliving those exquisite adolescent memories. Also, I noticed that her lovely rounded thighs had begun to rub together under that thin, tight skirt of hers.
"Suppose," I hazarded, "just for the sake of argument, Penny dear, Daddy were to walk into the room right now and find me with you like this? And see me kissing you like this?"
I turned to her, cupped her lovely dimpled chin, and applied my lips to hers. Then delicately I probed my tongue tip just between her lips. Penny Wilson moaned, and she clutched me in a stranglehold. It didn't quite have the power of Madge Thorberg's grasp, but if I had let her keep it up, I might not have been able to finish this report that you are now reading, dear reader. And her tongue kissed back with unmistakable fervor.
It was a long, exciting kiss. By the time she broke away, my breath was coming in short pants, and I was almost coming in my pants, too. She was flushed, her titties were rising and falling wildly, and her thighs kept squirming together as if she had a candle stuck up her pussy and was trying to move it back and forth and still appear perfectly proper and virginal. Finally she stammered in a tiny little-girl voice, "My gracious, if Daddy saw us now, he'd really paddle my poor bare bummy! And he'd make you watch, too. I once had a fellow in high school, an awfully nice boy, but he had a motorcycle and Daddy didn't hold with motorcycles at all. And one evening, Ben dashed up to the porch with the motorcycle when he brought me home after our date, and Daddy called him in and read him the riot act and then he had me go upstairs and put on my jammies and my slippers and come back downstairs with the hairbrush, and then I had to give him the hairbrush and pull down my jammy pants and tell him why I was going to get fantailed. I could have just sunk through the floor that night, honest. And he spanked awfully hard."
"Whatever happened to Ben after that?" I couldn't help asking.
"Fresh!" Penny giggled teasingly and looked away. Her cheeks were fiery red now. And I wanted to see the other set of cheeks just as red. Now I knew the key to Penny Wilson's love-strongbox. A good sound spanking, by which she would know that someone stern and affectionate really cared for her and would drive the evil thoughts and deeds away from her sweet chaste nature.
"And suppose I did this, what do you think Daddy would do?" I went on. This time, while my left hand went up to her tittie and squeezed the side of it, my right hand ran up under her skirt all the way up to her thin panties. They were nylon, they fitted her like a glove, and my forefinger went right to the source of all the trouble: her plump, soft, furry pussy.
"OOOOOHH! Oh, Jack, oh my darling-OOOHHHH, you mustn't, no, not really!" she breathed. But she was rubbing and arching herself against my finger as if she wanted it to press all the way home to the hilt inside her smoldering lovebox. "He'd make me take off everything, and then he'd tie me to the foot of the bed and take his razor strap and use it on my bare bummy and legs, he would."
"The brute," I said sympathetically. But that was the wrong line to use. Right away Penny flared up, her eyes big and indignant and she moved away from me.
"You mustn't say wicked things like that about my Daddy. He never spanked me unless he had a good reason. And it kept me a good girl for a long time, I'll have you know, Jack Warren."
"Well, Penny dear," I told her, and my voice was rather hoarse at the time, "I'll bet you one thing right now."
"What's that?"
"That I can spank you every bit as good as Daddy ever could, that's what."
She looked at me, and her eyes got big and soft and humid again and formed a quivering, moist O, as she regarded me with a hypnotic fascination.
I seized her by the shoulders, made her stand up, shifted her around to my right, and then flung her down across my lap.
"OHHHH, what are you going to do, Jack darling?" she gaped. But she didn't make any attempt to get away. She turned her head back to watch me as I folded back her skirt, then her slip over that luscious, round, saucy bottom of hers. She had on pale peach-colored nylon panties, and they were very snug along the crease that separated those two juicy bottom-globes. I had to be cruel to be kind, I knew.
"You've been a naughty little girl, Penny Wilson, and I'm going to give you a good hard spanking on the bare bummy," I said thickly.
"Oh yes! I've been awfully naughty with Phil, I know I have. Even Mona has told me it isn't proper to go around with a fellow like Phil, not when I'm a member of such an important organization as she has. But I just can't help it. I'm awfully weak where strong men are concerned, Jack. Oh my, are you really going to take my panties down? Oh, darling, Ooohhh, darling, darling!"
She was wild for it. She arched up her hips so I could swiftly pull down her panties to about her knee-hollows. She had a white satin elastic garter-belt on whose tabs tightly pinched the ends of flesh-colored clockwork stockings, the kind of stockings that used to be popular in the days of the Follies Bergeres, and which you see these days only on the hippie girls.
Her buttocks lay bent over my lap, quivering, the cheeks pouting, the muscles tensing to clench and diminish that shadowy groove which separated them.
"Give me your hands, Penny," I sternly commanded. She obeyed automatically and swiftly. She entwined her fingers together, surrendered her hands together at the small of her back, my hands encompassed her wrists, and then, after fondling her naked and shrinking bottom a moment or two, I raised my right hand and rendered a very noisy slap on the right buttock. Penny squealed and wriggled her bottom excitingly. Her eyes were shining, and I could see the cords in her throat stand out and tremor with the erotic agitations running through her.
As soon as her behind was bared, I heard her suck in her breath, glance back with shining and widened eyes at me, and then a long, trembling quiver ran through that voluptuous and cuddle-some body of hers. At the same time, the pouting summits of her backside seemed to arch up a little, as if to beg me to start the spanking as soon as possible and not keep her waiting. I knew now that Penny Wilson was a delicious little masochist, and this also explained her connection with a hoodlum like Phil Fioritto. There are women who are born, it seems, to glory in being whipping girls and slaves for uncouth and unimaginative men, and who get their jollies by hoping nobly they can reform the bastards while secretly hoping for more of the same. Penny was of that genre.
It took only about five good swats on that tempting naked ass of hers, each of which drew a tremulous squeal and the most delicious pink flush to outline where my hand had fallen on the satiny flesh, to convince me of this. For by then Penny Wilson was weaving her hips back and forth in the slow, inimitable pattern of fucking, and I could feel her furry muff rubbing against my thigh for all it was worth. I also felt that if I were to hoist her up and look at my slacks, there would be a suspicious moist stain to evidence that she was already anticipating what would follow the spanking. And who was I to mislead a charming and ingenuous nymph like Penny Wilson.
"You've been a bad girl, Penny," I scolded her, as I kept smacking first left, then right, starting at the base of each and working up to the summit, "the idea, letting a strange man come up to your apartment and compromise you like this! Maybe this'll teach you to be more cautious in the future. And this, too! Are you ashamed of what you've done, you naughty little girl, you?"
Penny was in seventh heaven. Her bottom was tossing this way and that, and sometimes it reared up so high I caught a glimpse of the little blonde garden which blossomed over her sweet young cunt.
"Ooooohh! Jack darling, oh yes, Daddy-I'm awfully ashamed-I won't ever do it againooohhh-ooouuuu!! It stings my poor bummy sol Oh, dear Daddy, dear darling Daddy, I won't ever be naughty again-oh, please don't spank so hard on the same place-oh Daddy, Daddy, I love you so!
By the time pert, honey-haired Penny Wilson was sobbingly entreating her Daddy not to spank her so hard in the same place, I had laid on about thirty good stinging slaps all over that voluptuous satiny bottom of hers. She had begun to kick her pretty legs, but I noticed she hadn't tried in any way to throw herself off my lap or evade the spanking. In fact, the harder my spanks got, the more she seemed to lift up her bare behind to invite them. She had the ecstasy of a martyr at the stake, head tilted back, eyes brimming with tears, enormous andingenuous, nostrils flaring and shrinking, her sweet soft tremulous mouth twisted as might a little girl's be under the maternal hairbrush, Penny Wilson was undeniably working herself up to a fucking fever. And my thermometer was just about to be taken out of its case and burrowed into her to test the degree of Fahrenheit my hand on her bare bottom had induced in her. I was much too polite to ask whether Daddy had ever concluded a spanking on the bare with such an instrument of his own, but I wouldn't have put it past him. Few virile men could have resisted the child-like, Lolita-inspired temptation of Penny Wilson. And I wasn't half trying not to succumb.
I paused a moment, then gave her about ten more swats. She really wriggled then, and her bottom twisted and leaped and jerked in the air, but she always came down against my thigh, and she always rubbed her furry little cleft against my leg. Now she turned her face back to me, tears running down her cheeks, and she whimpered, "Oh, Daddy, won't you please forgive your naughty little girl. She'll be so good. She won't disobey any more. Please, Daddy, let me off just this once. I'll show you how good I can be!"
Her timing was perfect. My prick was just about ready to tear through the zipper and all and ruin a perfectly good pair of Dacron slacks. I completed the removal of her panties and flung them onto the floor. I scuffed off my shoes, I dragged down the zipper, and let my prick bulge out in all its swollen need. She had wriggled over onto her bottom across my lap now, her palms down on the couch for support, and her enormously widened eyes staring at my prick as though it were the sword of the avenging angel on Judgment Day.
"Ohhhh, Daddy! Daddy!" she breathed, and her pink tongue rimmed the corners of her lips.
I took her by the shoulders and forced her down on her back on the couch. I got over her, and already her knees were swinging wide like the gates of Paradise to welcome the prodigal son. With a single thrust, I felt my prick dig into the moist and greedy confines of her burning snatch.
"Ohhhh, Daddy!" she wailed. "Give it to me, give it to me, I've been such a naughty girl, I need it so!"
I obliged her. As I drew back for about the third time, not rushing too much because I wanted to explore the sweet crevices of that cunt of hers, Penny Wilson whispered in my ear, after first flicking her tongue tip into it, "Daddy, please talk dirty to me when you fuck me. It makes me feel so dirty and so naughty, and then I need another spanking, you know. Do it good and hard and be dirty, Daddy. Please, Daddy dear!"
"All right, you naughty little bitch," I whispered back as I sank slowly down to my hilt, "I'm going to fuck that hot, tight little twat of yours until my orgasm comes out of your little brown hole. Do you hear me, Penny? I'm going to sink my fingers into that big reel naked ass of yours and squeeze it until you beg to suck my cock off instead of being fucked!"
"Oh, Yes! Ahhhh, oh Daddy, oh Daddy Jack, that's what I want, oh do me, fuck me, screw me, shoot me full of your sweet hot spunk, Daddy and then you've got to spank me awfully hard and all naked next time, do you hear me? 'Cause I'm talking like such a naughty girl!" she moaned.
I myself was in seventh heaven of delight. There was nothing Lesbian about Penny Wilson. And I did sink my fingers into that smarting, inflamed naked behind of hers, and I held on tight while she pitched and lunged and lurched and squirmed and wriggled, clawing at me in her fervor, mouthing naughty words which, if she had known them in her teens, must certainly have given her real Daddy at least two good occasions per week to use the hard hairbrush on her burning rear.
How Daddy managed to chase all the boys away who must have collected like a swarm of bees around the honey of Penny Wilson's pussy, I'll never know. All I do know is that my prick was pumped and squeezed and sucked and nibbled at until I finally felt myself explode with a final thrust as her legs wrapped practically around my waist and her mouth fused to mine with her tongue frantically rapiering between my lips as her own spasm made her buck and lunge and twist and writhe.
Then she fell back panting, and I cradled my head on her heaving titties and thrilled to the exciting aftermath of her vaginal enclaspment of my dwindling tool.
I was just emerging from her, just shoving my deflated cock back into my pants and pulling up the zipper when suddenly the front door opened and in strode a short, squat, black-haired, ugly-faced character wearing a derby over one side of his face and spats and carrying a cane. "Phil!" Penny Wilson wailed. "Yeah," he growled. "How many other guys you expecting, you dirty little tramp? Screwing anybody in pants when my back's turned, are you? I told you what would happen the next time I caught you fucking anybody else but me, you cock-crazy little whore!"
"Now wait a minute!" I heroically protested. Phil Fioritto pitched his cane onto the couch as if to claim ownership of the terrain. Then he came at me, and before I knew what he was about to do he caught me on the right side of the jaw with a short punch that was as pretty a punch as you would ever see at a Golden Gloves tourney, and which I hadn't been expecting from a hoodlum. I thought he would have pulled a rod, or maybe a stiletto. I measured my length on the floor, and the birds began to twitter in the distance. I was almost out for the count, but not quite. I could vaguely see and vaguely hear, though everything was a blur.
Just the same, I was a witness to what happened next. Phil Fioritto took off his bowler hat and pitched it into a chair in the corner with unerring aim. It was evident that he was familiar with his surroundings and even more so with its delectable tenant.
"So you want to get me mad, Penny huh? Okay, you know what it's gonna cost you, you little bitch. Maybe this'll teach you a lesson, though I doubt it. Come here to your Daddy. This minute, you whore."
"Phil, please, not in front of him," Penny began to sob in her little-girl voice. I blinked my eyes and through the haze I could see her go down on her knees. She had pulled her dress and slip off, and all she had on was a bra. Her muff was still tangled with the stickiness left by our commingled love juices.
"You know what to do-start doin' it!" he commanded.
She went down on all fours and crawled at his feet. She began to lick his spats, then she straightened up, pulled down his zipper and pulled his cock out. I had to hand it to him, he was almost as virile as I was. But then, we both had a common denominator when it came to a stimulus. She took the tip of his cock in her mouth and began to suck it, until he finally growled, "Okay, that's enough for now. You know what comes next, and don't waste any time, or I'll give you double where it hurts!"
"Yes, Daddy Phil, yes, Daddy Phil, right away, Daddy Phil," she sobbed. She crawled back over to the couch, picked up his cane, crawled back to him and handed it to him. Then she turned around, put her forehead to the floor and whimpered, "I've been an awful naughty girl, Daddy Phil. I've let a strange man fuck me. Please spank me good and hard, I need it sol"
And then before my blurred eyes, I saw the slim cane rise in the air and flash down with a wicked crack over the tops of her hips. I heard her squeal and I saw her bottom wriggle. I saw the plump pink fig of her cunt gape, the mossy garden I had profaned by entering. And if I thought she had shown furiously lustful inclinations under a simple handspanking, I find myself now at a loss for words to describe the lewd choreography which her naked bottom-cheeks described under Phil's cane. He gave her about twenty strokes, give or take a few and mostly give. She bore them bravely and she was dying for it, because when he threw down the cane, she cried out in a dying voice, "Oh, Daddy Phil, oh please, I'll never do it again, fuck me hard now, give it to me in the ass, Daddy Phil, and then spank me hard for using such a naughty word."
At the same time she tilted up her swollen bottom to him. He knelt down, grabbed the cheeks of her bottom and yawned them apart, and then I saw him jam his prick against the puckering rosette of Penny Wilson's ass-hole. Just about then the twittering birds claimed me as their very own, and everything went black.
CHAPTER TEN
When I came to, I found myself stretched out in the hallway of Penny Wilson's apartment, and my jaw throbbed from that right cross which the squat little gangster had dished out. I didn't especially feel like going back in there and seeking a return bout. I had learned what I wanted to know. Penny Wilson could never in a million years be classified in the dyke category. She was a born masochist, and I was willing to bet that if I had gone back into her family tree, I would have discovered that she not only had a father image, which was plain enough to start with-but also had been brought up to believe that sex was awfully wicked and that if a girl got any enjoyment out of anything at all she did, she inevitably had to be punished because enjoyment wasn't righteous. So dear old Daddy had taught her this lesson via her bare behind and probably got his own kicks in the process without actually committing incest. Except of course in his mind.
All in all, it had been a very exciting afternoon for honey-haired Penny Wilson, and I didn't think that her tender bottom could take a third spanking, not after the energetic way I had used my hand and then the cracks her gangster boyfriend had laid on with the cane.
I finally got up, rubbed my jaw uneasily, made sure that there weren't any loose teeth, and grog-gily made my way downstairs in the elevator and back out to my car. But I telephoned the office from a public pay phone just on the edge of the
Loop, and discovered that there hadn't been any change. I told Matt's secretary that I had interviewed a couple of more suspects, and that in a few days I would have another report to turn in to her to forward either to Matt or the big boss of Duron, J. Stanley himself.
Then I drove home, took a hot bath, and a long nan. Besides, the weather was in the nineties, and I'm sure that even J. Stanley didn't expect me to interview more than one girl a day or night. I had to find a Lesbian, and of course it would have been easier if Mona had just come out and told me whom she had girl fucked around with, because then I could have pinpointed my efforts until I blew the case wide open. This way, I had to do it the hard way-and I do mean hard.
I had a light snack of cold cuts and pumpernickel, some bock beer which I had bought in the spring and hoarded because I happen to like it better than any other beer made, and some cookies and coffee. It seemed to hit the spot, and after I did the few dishes, I went to my den-library and did some reading up on that species of violin known as the Stradivarius, trying to find out why it was so high-priced.
It was a fascinating subject. The violin had been named after the Italian violinmaker of Cremona, Antonio Stradivari. He had been a pupil of the great violin virtuoso Nicolo Amati. The best the historians could do was tell me that he had been born about 1644 and that he had died in 1737, which would have made him about ninety-three. Then there was a great deal more about the type of wood he used, fret, the string, the kind of glue and the way he fashioned the back to get what we today call acoustic sound.
There is no doubt that the richness of a Stradivarius can be detected by a blindfolded expert the first time, just as a great vintage wine can hit a great taster's tongue and be named almost at once. It was an impressive story, and there had also down through the centuries since Stradivari's death, been quite a number of famous historical cases where there had been ingenious and almost convincing copies made and sold to gullible idiots for a young fortune. There was a catalog by a very reputable musicologist who pointed out exactly how many violins Antonio Stradavari and the rest of his violin-making family had turned out, where most of them were and what their approximate worth was in today's market. I had made some notes, as I've already told you, when I spent an hour or two in Eugene Burdick's office about Mona's particular instrument, and when I checked the catalog, I whistled almost reverently. J. Stanley Duron was definitely going to have to shell out two hundred thousand bucks of his company's money unless I came up with that missing Strad. It had a long history, and it was true that it had once been played by the great Norwegian artist Ole Bull. So I owed Mona Wilhelm a partial apology-Then I studied the brochure again of the all-girl orchestra members, I skipped by Mona's pictures and biography because I was familiar with them already, and because my prick nostalgically remembered how hospitably her hot pussy had housed it. I was certainly going to have to visit between her thighs again before this assignment was over, but that wouldn't produce the missing Strad. I did put in a call to the great Chicago music shop which had helped furnish proof of the authenticity of Mona's violin, and I talked to the head of the department and asked him to keep an eye out for anybody who might come in, in the next few weeks and try to offer him a genuine Strad. I identified myself, and then I asked him about Mona's certificate, and he verified that. So the fact that she hadn't told me that she had had certification from both Chicago and New York wasn't really too important. Nonetheless, any investigator or private eye will always tell you that in the middle of a case something perfectly inconsequential starts bothering him about midway through the caper, and at the time it seems like a whole ball of wax. As a rule, it's way off the mark, but what it does is to sharpen your wits so that you ultimately wind up with the right answer. That's why I was getting paid by J. Stanley and that's why Matt Hollister was tolerating me and my rather flexible office hours.
I went to bed early for me, which was about midnight, and I got up at eight on Wednesday morning, made my own breakfast, showered and shaved, and then went on down to the Conrad Hilton. I had a list of names which Eugene Burdick had given me of those girls who had checked in at this great convention hotel. He had told me that just Penny Wilson had deviated from the norm and found her own place on North LaSalle Street. I had decided to go calling on Gloria Kent. She was the auburn-haired voluptuous piece with the husky bedroom voice who had crooned a song so sexily that my prick had wanted to clap hands in admiration. She was also the chick who had been divorced and hated men, loved jive and sleeping in the raw with her pet Siamese cat. I was interested in verifying that detail of her background. It would tell me how successful Eugene Burdick was as a publicist. But it might also tell me whether Gloria, seeing that she had reason to hate men, had actually attempted to stir up a sweet pillow-talk intimacy between herself and the boss girl of the band, Mona Wilhelm.
I decided to let my pursuit of the third girl on the list-the aforesaid Gloria Kent-wait until Thursday. I planned to go to The Happy Medium this Wednesday night, listen to the group give out, stroll around backstage and give all those chicks the eye and get myself talked about. Mona had already spread the word, to be sure, and maybe Madge Thorberg had approved enough of my direct approach to tell her colleagues that playboy Jack Warren could serve as a very useful substitute instrument in case a girl had an itch between her white thighs and was too lazy to scratch herself.
I took in the last show at The Happy Medium, and there was Mona waving the bow of her "cheap" violin and all the girls were playing their hearts out, and smiling at the customers and looking very sexy in their gleaming low cut evening gowns. I had a front-row table, and a cute little waitress who made eyes at me and gave me to understand that she had just given her boyfriend back his ring and was available for a steak dinner when she finished her shift. Heroically, I put Satan behind me, just in case there were any company spies around. And I studied Gloria Kent with increasing interest.
She sang two solos on this particular occasion, and I felt my prick throbbing with delight from the vibrations of her voice. She was about five feet five and a half or six in height, and her auburn hair was worn in a long thick pony-tail with a silver barrette at about the nape of the neck. Her face was slightly oval, the eyes hazel and very large and widely spaced apart. She had a straight nose but with extremely thin and sensuous wings, and her mouth was haughty and sensual at the same time, not too large, with the upper lip a bit more ripe than its red and kissable twin. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, along with those rosy flecks which are typical of the pigmentation of a natural redhead. And her auburn hair certainly didn't look as if it had come out of a bottle.
She threw herself into her work with creditable energy. Just as she had done at the Civic Opera House, she sat at the bass fiddle and she rocked her pelvis and hips to and fro, and I saw Mona slip her a wink and a quick pointing gesture of the violin bow which she used as a baton. At this point, Gloria got up and really strummed her bass fiddle to a fare-thee-well. The applause rocked through the room, and the spotlight was turned on her and she bowed her head and held out her palms towards the audience as if in humble thanks for their cheers.
Then the lights went up for intermission, and I saw Gloria Kent go over to the leader's stand and whisper something to Mona Wilhelm. Then I saw Mona put out her right hand and slyly pat Gloria Kent's ripely rounded, tightly spaced buttocks. It certainly looked like a gesture that two lovers would make. When the cute little waitress came around again, I ordered another drink so that nobody would fault me for lack of loyalty to the management which was providing so entertaining a show.
Mona caught my eye too, and winked at me herself. I winked back. She blew a kiss towards me, and the customers thought it was all for them and they ate it up. As I sipped my second drink, I began to think things out rather slowly and rationally. Now let's suppose that one of the girls in the combo actually stole the missing Strad. What would she do with it once it was in her possession. If she took it to any reputable music shop in just about any major city in the country, she was due for a great surprise because she would be cut off and marked in advance before she could dispose of it. No reputable dealer would touch it, so if it were a question of making immediate money, it was a pretty badly chosen idea.
Either that, or the thief of that Strad wanted to have some kind of potent hold over Mona Wilhelm, maybe return the violin in her own due time in return for certain concessions. And, I couldn't blame the thief too much for that, because Mona Wilhelm certainly ran a tight ship. I wonder if she really knew how many really cock-hungry girls she had working for her. I wondered if she knew about Madge Thorberg and how Madge was always looking for a tall lanky guy who wasn't scared by her height and could at least temporarily satisfy her insatiable lust for cock.
But if the thief had taken the Strad to get concessions from Mona, what assurance did she have that Mona wouldn't prosecute after she'd gotten the violin back? How did she know that Mona wouldn't try to make her life a living hell by imposing a stricter curfew, by preventing dates, by a dozen and one little tricks which only a woman would think of to punish a too ambitious rival?
I paid my tab as the lights went up after the last number, I left the cute little waitress a big tip (because maybe one of these days when I was hard up for pussy, she might yet oblige and give me a rain check). I thought momentarily of luscious Mara Corday whose rain check on the drink and a private s�ance in her swanky apartment certainly wouldn't last forever. I was almost tempted to call her right now and find out if she was in town and if she needed a bed partner for the rest of the night. But I didn't. Instead, I went backstage and resumed my roll of the rich stage-door Johnny who was out looking for glamorous pussy and was making a pest of himself wherever the all-girl orchestra played because he figured that a girl who played an instrument would probably know how to make beautiful music with his.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gloria Kent played a mean bass fiddle, so I hung around till after the end of the last show on Wednesday night at The Happy Medium to ogle and applaud. I had made another call to Eugene Burdick before I set out for my date at the Rush Street Nitery, and got a few more intimate details about Mona's regular chairs (when you talk about horseback riding, you talk about a girl's seat; when you talk about an orchestra, you use the term "chairs" to designate the instruments that are played by the female sitting in those chairs). Just thought I'd toss in a little bit of sophisticated jargon for you perfectionists out there.
Mona's limp-wristed press agent had given me a few more interesting tips, since he apparently was warming to me after that free steak dinner I had bought him, the other night. Not only had Gloria Kent been married and divorced, but she had actually had a couple of kids. She didn't have them now, the press agent finally informed me, and at times she got very moody about it. He didn't know where they were or where the ex-husband was, but the divorce proceedings had taken place a little over two and one half years ago. Gloria had come to Mona right about the time her marriage was breaking up and asked if she could be released from her contract, but Mona and the press agent had sat her down with a drink and a cigarette and talked to her like the proverbial Dutch Uncle, about how it was better to distract oneself by working hard and not letting the slurs and arrows of outrageous fortune get you down. Mixed metaphors or not, the line had worked and Gloria had gone on playing her bass fiddle. She had also had a couple of offers from stage-door Johnnies, even of marriage, but she was a loner and she went right back to her hotel room after a concert. Her hobbies were the Siamese cat and sleeping raw, apparently, and also she spent a lot of money on jive records.
It wasn't hard for me to meet Gloria, though, because she was about the last one off the stage and she had to trundle that huge bass fiddle after her, the way a cavewoman dragged her man back to the cave in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and scared men stayed in their caves and screwed their wives to be sure of safety. The late Serge Koussevitsky, the immortal conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had himself been one of the greatest bass fiddlers in die world, but he played classical music and Gloria played swing and sweet stuff and rock 'n roll. Still, the girl had talent, and she had a good beat and rhythm, except that she always played with an intense look of concentration on her face and when she whacked that fiddle, it was as if she were whacking her ex-hubby for lousing up her fife. At least that's what I thought after having learned about her past.
The way things started, I wasn't--likely to have much of a future with Gloria Kent, because I hardly had even a present. All I got to say was, "Miss Kent, you really thrilled me out there tonight. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?" and she gave me a dirty look, said "Excuse me, please," in a snide tone and brushed by me so that I had to back up lest I trip over the little metal bar-stand at the end of the fiddle. It could be used as a spike and a weapon, assuming that someone would grab hold of it and jab the end at you. If it had been Madge Thorberg, the Amazonian, wielding it, I'll bet she could have broken it over my head by lifting it with one hand. Nonetheless, Gloria had a magnificent body and she didn't look like a weakling, either when it came to playing the bass fiddle or just fiddling and diddling around. But at the moment, it looked as if I wasn't going to find out about her diddling abilities and much less about any girl-rubbing she might have done with Mona.
I was now more than ever convinced, still playing my hunch, that Gloria could throw a great deal of light on this mystery of the missing Strad. If she had been broken up about an unhappy marriage and the loss of two kids, and she still looked like a very young woman to me, the chances were she had got herself despondent somewhere along the line. That was about the time when Mona and Eugene Burdick had tried to talk turkey with her. And since Eugene Burdick had told me that everything had straightened out after that, my private guess was that Mona had slipped her the convincer of inviting Gloria to her bed and consoling her as only two girls can one another.
I stood looking after Gloria Kent, and admiring the way the cheeks of her behind shifted and rolled this way and that as the black satin evening gown clung to their voluptuous curves. Then I heard a soft giggle, and somebody took hold of my hand and squeezed it, and when I looked around, it was none other than pert Penny Wilson. She was blushing, "I hope you're not too mad, Jack honey," she whispered in her little-girl voice.
"I tell you, sometimes Daddy Phil scares me, he gets so mad at me. Did he hurt you much? He sort of apologized to me later, when I told him that you were a rich playboy and might have helped my career along. He said he wouldn't stand in the way of my career for anything, but it just got him so darned mad to see me getting loved up by somebody else when he was paying the rent."
"I can't say that I blame him there, Penny baby," I said sympathetically. "You can tell him for me that there's no hard feelings, and that my jaw is still there. I'm only sorry my timing was off. But it was fun, wasn't it?"
She glanced around carefully as if to make sine her gangster boyfriend wasn't within hearing distance and then giggled again and whispered back, "Wasn't it ever! But Phil is going to Florida in about a week to have a big meeting with his bosses, and maybe we could get together then. We'll be in town, you know, all next week too."
She blinked those roguish baby-blue eyes at me again, and my prick started to itch and stiffen. I was remembering what a cute little masochist she was. I guess maybe Phil was smarter than most gangsters usually are, because he apparently knew which way the ball bounced when she threw it, and figured he could get his kicks too just by letting her have all the rope she wanted to hang herself with. I mean, he must have followed me, I'm convinced, and given me all the time in the world to spank and fuck his girlfriend, then calmly walked in and had a wonderful excuse to knock me out and then give her a good sound caning and a buggering. I had probably underestimated him. But at the moment, I really didn't have any good excuse to fuck Penny Wilson again, because I had dismissed her as a suspect.
"We'll see," I told her and I patted her on the behind. She sucked in her breath softly, wriggled and pressed against me and hastily whispered, "Ooooh, Jack honey, you don't know how much it thrills me when you put your hand on my seat! I'm such a naughty little girl, I need taking care of all the time. Don't you want to be my regular daddy next week when Daddy Phil is in Florida?"
I definitely did not. If, "Daddy Phil" was going to Florida to meet his "bosses," it could only mean that he was being summoned for a parlay with some of the top boys of the Mafia, and I didn't want to be within a hundred miles near any little bitch who spread her white thighs for even an office boy on the Mafia payroll. Not that I loved dear old Doran so much, but I loved my own cocksmith's life a helluva lot more.
So Penny Wilson marched off with her sax, giving me a reproachful little look as she left, and I slowly walked out into the parking lot and reclaimed my car and drove back home for a good night's sleep again.
But on Thursday night, I got a break. Lady Luck was trying to make up to me for muffing that pass in the Purdue game and the blonde as well, because as I was leaving The Happy Medium after the last show and after still another rebuff by Gloria Kent, I sauntered out in search of a cab, and I saw the delicious auburn-haired bass fiddler suddenly step back and utter a cry as a man came out of a dark alley at her and grabbed her by an elbow.
"What do you want-let go of me-Help-Oh, help me, someone-"
I ran up to the assailant, who was wearing a dark suit and a fedora hat pulled down over one corner of his face and seemed to have a mustache, and I spun him around with my left hand jerking at his shoulder while my right fist smashed against the point of his jaw. He went down like a felled ox, and lay breathing heavily. The fedora hat fell off and rolled into the gutter. He had a swarthy face, and what looked like a broken nose and cauliflower ears. He must have been a boxer at one time or another in his career. But he apparently had a glass jaw.
At the same time, a Yellow Cab came cruising by and I whistled for it. "Let me get you to your hotel, Miss Kent," I offered. "Here, let me handle the bass fiddle."
"It won't go in there," Gloria Kent said in a weak faltering voice, holding it with her left hand and tossing her right over her forehead. She was obviously shaken by the encounter. "I've already phoned for the usual limousine from a private rental agency, and the man ought to be along any minute now. But it was awfully kind of you to do what you did."
"Do you know who that guy is, Miss Kent?"
"N-no. I never saw him before in all my fife. Maybe he was just a thief."
"Maybe," I hazarded," he wanted that bass fiddle of yours. Is it insured for a lot of money, by the way?"
"This old thing?" she said contemptuously, glancing at it. "I should say not. I don't play it with bow as you may have noticed. I just slap it with the back of the bow or I slap the bottom with my hand. It's just for rhythm. It's not as if I were playing a solo. You know, I sing."
"I know you do. I caught it at the Civic Opera House last week. You really sent me, Miss Kent."
"That's very nice of you, Mr.--? "
"I'm Jack Warren, at your service."
This time Gloria Kent gave me a more intent look. Apparently I didn't look too much like a Martian, because she managed a little smile. "Oh yes, now I remember. Mona was saying that there's a rich playboy in town who's got an eye for girls. So you're he?"
"Guilty as charged. Am I disqualified because I can't help liking beautiful girls who make beautiful music?" I said lightly.
"I suppose not. Oh, here comes the limousine! Why don't you come back with me, Mr. Warren, in case you're going back to the Loop?"
"All right." I made a quick decision. I could leave my car in the lot and give the guy a five-dollar bill to watch over it, go back to the Conrad Hilton with Gloria Kent and start my investigation of her, and I could always get a room over night at that huge convention beehive if I had to. "Just excuse me for a second, till I check my car. I'd really like to go back with you, Miss Kent."
I ran back to the lot, gave the attendant the dough, and he gave me the sign of the lodge with a congenial shake of his hand. Now that we were blood brothers, I could cheerfully go back to the limousine and clamber into the back with Gloria Kent. The bass fiddle was hoisted onto the rack on top of the limousine, strapped firmly, and then the chauffeur got behind the wheel and drove us downtown on Michigan Avenue.
If you've never been to Chicago and on what they call the "Magnificent Mile" on Michigan Avenue from about Chicago Avenue to the bridge over the Chicago River and where the Wrigley Building stands like a bleached skeleton against the night, you've missed one of the most dramatic and exciting panoramic views of a great city that you're--likely to see anywhere in the world. The wonderful shops, the lighting system, the streams of cars in never-ending processional, the passersby who are browsing in the windows and dreaming of the day when they can walk in there and lay down the wherewithal for the goodies they covet-this is part of the heart of the Windy City...But on this particular occasion, I had eyes only for Gloria Kent...
The chauffeur got us to the Conrad Hilton and around the back where they had their parking lot, unstrapped the bass fiddle, and took it to the back of the hotel where a checkroom attendant locked it in a special closet and gave gorgeous Gloria the key. I made the grandiose gesture of paying the chauffeur his fee, reminding myself to charge clear old Doron as a legitimate expense, and then I escorted Gloria Kent around to the front of the hotel and asked her to have a drink with me at the bar. To my pleasant surprise she agreed.
The indirect fighting, the pretty waitresses, and at various tables and booths the sight of handsomely dressed couples starting their pitch, which would ultimately wind up in horizontal positions on some mattress somewhere in the city-and maybe even at the good old Conrad Hilton-put me in a most convivial mood.
Gloria Kent looked more relaxed now and she could even manage a better smile than when she had thanked me for saving her from what might have been a fate worse than death. "I really didn't put too much stock in what Mona and the other girls said," she told me. "They had us all thinking that you were just one of those girl-chasing guys with too much money and no sense who thinks he can buy his way into a bedroom with anybody he looks at."
"I'm a little more discriminating than that, Miss Kent. But I am a bachelor and it does get lonesome, and I do have enough money to pay the tab here," I told her airily.
"Don't you do anything for a living at all?" she wanted to know.
"I certainly do, I investigate beauty," I made a joke of it again. She frowned a little, shook her head: "In other words, you want me to go to bed with you. That's what it's going to wind up being, isn't it?"
"Not if you talk like that, it won't," I reassured her. "I'm not interested in the mechanics of the act, but I am interested in the spirit and the soul behind it. If our chemistry doesn't work in harmony, I'm not one of those guys with a little black book who makes a tally after they've scored, then goes on to the next victim. Not little Jack Warren, not on your tintype. But you're really very beautiful, and your singing made me think of a girl I once knew. A girl I was very much in love with."
That wasn't any bull. Kathy had had a habit of singing love songs to me while we were fucking, during the first few months of our idyllic relationship. And right now I was beginning to think mournfully of Kathy, secluded somewhere with Matt Hollister, and he learning the thousand and one little secrets about her body, how she moaned when you pulled your prick just up to the brink of her cunthole and kept it there to tease her, how she scratched and clawed when she was getting ready for her climax, how she wriggled her toes and threw her head back and tried to put all her muscles into the act when she was just about ready to come...memories that bless and burn. And now the man who had cheated me out of my blonde on the fifty-yard line and who had caught the pass and made himself a little hero and become my boss, was finding out those things which I had once possessed and loved and cherished.
She patted my hand and smiled. "I'm sorry. You do seem like a very nice guy."
"Thanks. So do you, Miss Kent."
"It's all right if you call me Gloria."
"I'd like to call you lots of other things, baby."
"Don't call me baby, please." She winced. Now that I was close up, I could see that she was really gorgeous. She had a certain sensitivity to her, and a brooding and haunting wistfulness, like a little girl who stands at the window of an orphanage and watched two well dressed and cheerful people lead another little girl out to an awaiting car and drive away forever. Gloria was twenty-seven, and her auburn hair didn't come out of a bottle. I was to find all that out a little later, as you'll see. She wore it in a kind of upsweep, yet with two great big curls at each side of her cheek dangling like earrings, if you get the idea. Women's hairdos always throw me for a ten-yard loss. Mostly, I like girls with long hair, but because it's very practical; you can drag them by it to the connubial couch, run your fingers through it, even let them wind the strands around your stiff cock and hold you a prisoner of love. But you get the general idea. She had a graceful, a somewhat aquiline nose, with very widely and delicately thin wings, which right there indicated a sensuous temperament. Her mouth was full and rich, but not overly ripe, and the lower lip had just a trifle more fullness to it. I had seen it trembling a couple of times already tonight. Once, when I had got in her way and tried to make time after having muffed it the night before, and then just after I had knocked out that character from the alley. She had a chin that was very firm and a deep dimple at the base. There was also a tiny little scar at the left side. Her cheekbones were slanting, and I could see those great big hazel eyes full of all sorts of colorful glints, which seemed to change from gray to green and even to cat's-eye-yellow at times.
She had beautiful breasts. They were closely spaced together, and they were high-perched and they weren't exactly pears and they weren't exactly cantaloupes either. But they were titties you could get your hands over and squeeze and hold on for dear life while you fucked her. She had a very supple waist, like a dancer's, and then her hips became juicily ample, with spacious and full and upstanding round bottom globes, lovely rounded full thighs, somewhat sinuous and perhaps rather sleek. That peaches-and-cream complexion of hers with tiny flecks was enough to set my pulses pounding now that we were at close range. She had ordered a Scotch and Soda, and I just took a gin and tonic to keep her company.
After we had finished the one drink, to my pleasant surprise, she asked if I would like to see her upstairs. My answer was: "Gloria, I'd like to see you anywhere in the world, but mostly alone."
She laughed then, and it was good to hear her laugh. She took my hand and squeezed it, and she said, "You know, I think you're a nice guy. I don't think you're half the wolf and half the playboy Casanova Mona was telling me you were, either."
"Did Mona tell any of the other girls about me?" I asked.
"Sure. That cute Penny Wilson got the worst fit of giggling you ever heard and she said she already knew you. What did you do to that poor girl, Jack?"
"You want to know the truth or shall I invent a story?" I said, looking into her glorious hazel eyes.
They grew wider and I felt the squeeze of her fingers on my hand. "All of the truth. I can't stand liars," she murmured.
"I turned her over my knee, pulled her panties down and spanked her, if you want to know," was my instant reply.
The wave of vivid crimson which suddenly spread over the lovely peaches-and-cream complexion of my beautiful drinking companion was something that only a color camera could have caught and immortalized, and I wish I had brought mine along. Then she looked down, and her lower lip was trembling a little, and then she suddenly murmured, "Let's go upstairs to my room. All of a sudden I need company. What happened back there on Rush Street has got me awfully worried. I don't want to involve you in my troubles, but maybe you've got broad shoulders."
"And a willing heart," I finished as I helped her up from the chair and walked with her to the bank of elevators, my heart skipping a beat, because I said to myself that I was on my way to the choicest pussy I had ever put my prick into, if I only had brains enough to play it right. Because if Gloria Kent was a manhater, once she was converted to forgiving and forgetting in the arms of a guy who wasn't a louse, this piece of quim could really break a man's back as well as his heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Now when you stay at a mass assembly place like the Conrad Hilton, you usually don't have much more than a small room and bath. Gloria Kent surprised me. however. She had what you might call a salon if you were old fashioned enough, and then a modest little bedroom and a bathroom. The tab was plenty a day, and I wondered how she rated. Naturally, being her guest and wanting to get very close to her-at least mentally if not physically-, I wasn't impolite enough to bring up this point. I did comment, "A home away from home," as I lounged back on the couch at her invitation. All of a sudden there was a vibrant hiss and then an outraged "Meow!" and a ball of fur detached itself from what I had mistakenly taken to be a pillow and leaped across my lap and fell to the floor, its tail waving angrily back and forth as it turned back to glare at me. It was the Siamese cat.
"I'm terribly sorry, Gloria-I honestly didn't see it. I guess I haven't had a pet of my own for so long, I'd forgotten that other people do," I lamely apologized.
Gloria stooped-which did marvels for the glories of her titties in proving that they were firm and jouncy-and scooped up the cat. It was silvery-gray, actually, with black markings on its face. I personally have never liked cats because they think they're a Little bit too smug, too self secure, and too narcissistic. They just tolerate you, they don't need you. And so most of my adult life, the only kind I've shown attention to are sweet pussies, if you know what I mean.
Nevertheless, the sight of auburn-haired Gloria Kent holding the cat in her arms against those magnificent bubbies of hers was enough to give me the interesting idea that in my reincarnation it would be nice to return to earth in the form of a household pet belonging to as gorgeous a piece of pussy as Gloria Kent was. Then too, there are a lot of gorgeous chicks who use their pets for sublimatory purposes. Until I started reading spicy literature, I never really analyzed the true meaning of the term, "Lapdog," but you'll have to admit that it's highly appropriate and very graphic.
"Can I get you something, Jack?" Gloria Kent broke into my obscene train of thought.
"Nothing, thanks. Can we just sit and talk?"
"If you like. But let me change into something a little more comfy. If you only knew how much I hated this tight evening gown!"
"It's certainly very attractive," I complimented her.
She was already moving towards the bedroom, the cat still cradled against those swelling love-globes of hers. She turned to answer me: "I think Mona makes me wear this tight thing on purpose, because she knows that I don't sit down on stage when I play my bass fiddle."
"You know, I'm always interested in motivations, Gloria. Out of all the musical instruments in the world, what made you take up that one?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders, considered the matter a moment as she narrowed those lovely hazel eyes, and finally answered, "It was something satisfying to hold on to. As a little girl, I was brought up by a governess a lot of the time because my parents traveled. My father was something of a celebrity, because he wrote a book, and my mother happened to work in a public relations agency at the time she met him, so she just appointed herself his press agent. They were always away on lecture tours and leaving me with Miss Douglas. She was a very pious and frustrated woman, and so she was always telling me that a girl's place in life was to grow up and marry a man and be dependent on him and be a good wife." Gloria Kent shivered a little. "I suppose that's why I married Jackson. It had been droned into my ears so often that maybe I did it out of self-protection. And of course Jackson was absolutely the last man in the world I ought to have married. I knew that about six months after I married him, but it was too late then. I'd already got pregnant with Marcy."
Now was the time for me to lend the sympathetic ear, the friendly shoulder, the consoling arm. "You mean to tell me you actually were married and had kids, Gloria. My God, you don't look a day over twenty-one."
She smiled rather wearily, shifted the now purring Siamese up a little over that wonderful pair of titties she had, and then said, "Thanks for trying, Jack. I know how old I am. I'm twenty-seven, going on twenty-eight, and there are times when I wonder if I'll reach thirty."
"Now that's no way to talk," I chided. "You're beautiful, you're desirable, you're an excellent musician, and one of these days you'll meet the right man who'll change your mind about men in general."
"I don't think so. Anyway, I can't. But let's not talk about that. And forget I said anything about Marcy and Joan."
"If you want me to, of course I will," I gallantly responded. She gave me a less weary smile this time, and vanished into the bedroom.
So she had two little girls, and the name of her ex-husband was Jackson Kent. The name rang a bell. He wasn't a bigwig in the musicians' union anymore, because he had gone on to bigger and better things, such as being the head of a publishing company in New York that had put out about five of the nation's hit tunes in succession. He must be worth a couple of million dollars by now, and he was just about in his mid-sixties. I remembered having seen a story about him with plenty of pictures lounging about at his ease in his imagine two-story mansion on Long Island Sound. So he was the guy who had made Gloria Kent hate men. It figured. He had practically caused a split in the union with a couple of cockeyed stands on issues, he had narrowly escaped citation and a criminal charge in an automobile accident in which a little girl had been killed, and his picture was often to be seen in some of the spiffier society pages squiring some cute young bitch to the opening of a Broadway show. He must still be one hell of a cocksmith. But if that was true, why had he shed a sweet piece of cunt like Gloria Kent? Especially when she had given him two kids out of her warm pulsating womb. But that wasn't my business.
Or maybe it was. Maybe this whole background of hers, her loneliness and despair over not having her kids, had a great deal to do with Mona's missing Strad. Getting the information wasn't going to be easy. But tonight Gloria Kent seemed to be in a talkative mood. And it had been my great good luck to have been on the scene of action when this stranger had made a pass at her out of the dark alley back at The Happy Medium.
There was a little corner of my complex brain which begins to act excited when my hunch is extremely strong and I've got a feeling it's on the beam. And right now I was getting those radar emanations which told me that I wouldn't have to go out with every girl in Mona Wilhelm's band to find out who had copped one of Antonio Stradivari's finest instruments. All I had to do was keep a close watch on Gloria Kent and be palsy-walsy enough to start her talking and putting her auburn head on my shoulder.
I lit a cigarette and pondered this new development. Gloria Kent must have money of her own, unless Mona Wilhelm paid her an exceptionally bigger salary than the other girls got, to be able to afford this suite at the Conrad Hilton. And if she did have money of her own, a large part of it must have come in a settlement which Jackson Kent had made. Maybe that was part of their bargain. Dough in exchange for the kids. Two little girls living with a sexagenarian, and a sexagenarian whose prime concern was the first syllable of that age designation. Yes, I was beginning to remember what I had read about Jackson Kent in some of the national weeklies. like Ponce de Leon, he believed that he had found the Fountain of Youth, and its name was pussy. He had a different girl every week, and he could afford it. I only hoped that when I reached his age, I'd have one-tenth of his money and one-half of his priapic prowess.
Then the bedroom door opened and Gloria Kent came out, still holding the Siamese cat against her titties, but I didn't see the cat at all. She had on a pale blue chiffon negligee and dainty matching fluffy mules. There was nothing under the chiffon, and the wonderful warm roundness of her thighs, the dark significance of her mount, the suave goblet of her belly with its shallow and wide niche, were all almost transparently displayed to my eager eyes. Once again Mother Nature told me that I hadn't lost my potency, because my prick started to ache and harden. I was at one end of the beautiful upholstered couch, and Gloria came down to sit at the very opposite end, cradling the Siamese cat in her lap. She smiled at me. "You seem to like it," she ventured.
"If you are referring to what you've got on, of course I do. Did you think I wouldn't?"
"No. The fact is, well, Jack, this is about the first time I've ever worn what I call encouraging clothes. You know, to encourage a man to make a pass at me. That is, since Jackson. I've been scared of guys. They only wanted one thing, and that's all Jackson really wanted from me. Yet he was more than old enough to be my father, and he was a domineering bastard."
"You must have been young when you married him, because you still look awfully young," I said.
"I married him when I was twenty. There were good reasons, or so I thought at the time. And of course I was a virgin. Our wedding night was just about a rape. But a very scientific one. Jackson gave me a long lecture about how little I knew about the facts of life, in a kind of pitying and condescending way. Then he went about making me his bitch, with all the pleasure for himself and of course none for me. I began to hate his guts just about the time he went into me all the way."
She was saying this to punish herself, I knew, and maybe to find an answer to the bitterness that had been seething in her all these years. She wasn't looking at me, and her jaw-bones stood out and her face was taut and she was pale. But she was still a hell of a lot of woman, and I mentally damned Jackson Kent to hell and back for having soured her on the decent guys in this world. She had probably been just a possession to him, and consequently a challenge. He had made sure that she would stay his bitch by impregnating her twice. And obviously he had custody of the children, because Eugene Burdick had intimated as much. A woman is a highly complex animal. She can screw like a mink, think like a fox, be shy as a deer-and run just as fast when she wants to. But sometimes she runs right into trouble by having all those animal characteristics. So Gloria Kent was mad for her kids, even if they had been fathered from the prick of a son of a bitch and even if his seed had been acid for her when it had dropped into her cunt. But that was the way life was.
"So he's got the kids," I said softly. I wanted to get this around to the stolen Strad in my own meandering way.
"Yes." She turned to look at me. "And he won't give them back, and he's got a court order. I'm an unfit mother."
"How was that figured out?"
She shrugged and gave a bitter little laugh. "Well, for one thing, I had this job. Of course it was true that he arranged it in a way, but I know now why he did. He wanted to have a kind of blackmailing hold on me. When he wanted to get rid of me, he could say that I traveled a lot, that I played in nightclubs of sleazy reputation, that probably I had lots of men coming to the stage door and also to my bedroom after the show was over. And so of course with the money and the influence he had, a kindly judge decided that I was a bad influence on the children. I haven't seen Marcy and Joan in over a year now. I didn't even get visitor's rights."
"I'm sure you did. No court could be that heartless," I offered.
"Well, yes, I did, but it means I'd have to go to New York to exercise my rights. And we don't play in New York very often. Mona doesn't like the town. She's got her memories too. Her number one hubby came from there and he was a louse too. I tell you, it's as if we were a convent on wheels, traveling around and trying to hold on to a routine way to live but without really believing in it. Except that we're stuck with it."
"I know how that can be."
"No you don't." She turned to me with a fierce look on her face and she was stroking the cat. It was against her lap now. "It's so easy for you, because you're a man. You can show up in any woman's apartment any time of day or night, and nobody's going to say anything about you because it's expected that you will try to make a pass and screw the girl. But a girl on the road, a girl who plays a bass fiddle on the stage, everybody's going to say, Why, what do you expect? She's just a round-heeled tramp, so that's why she's got her job so she can have all the fun she wants in any place she goes to.' And I just don't happen to be too promiscuous. Of course I want sex. In a way, I was almost fascinated by Jackson when he was courting me. He had a nice suave, bedside manner, and he talked a wonderful lay. But he was just a selfish clinical bastard. At the end of our marriage, he was cheerfully telling me in detail of the other girls he had laid and how they compared with me in bed. And I mean everything, Jack. How many orgasms he could give them. Whether they yelled or whimpered, what position they liked best-it was filthy!"
"But that's because he was a sadist and he treated you like a chattel. Not every guy is like that. I wouldn't treat you that way."
"You wouldn't?" She left off stroking the cat and let it He in her lap and put her arms behind her head and leaned back. She stuck out her titties in a way that made my prick jump with renewed zeal. Then she looked hard at me and said, "You're not really a playboy, are you, Jack?"
"Of course I am. Escort service cheerfully provided to all unhappy and unrequited girls," I said lightly. But she didn't buy it, not the least Little bit. She shook her head: "That's only because you're a bachelor. You don't act like a playboy, or when I walked in here in this filmy thing, you would have had your hand inside of it and making me get rid of the cat. Don't you want me?"
"Now that's a stupid question from a bright young girl," I said, a Little annoyed at her sarcasm. "How do you expect me to answer that, and what kind of answer would you prefer? Just take a look at the state of my trousers, and you'll see an immediate answer. And then don't slap my face for being fresh. You asked for it."
Then she giggled. It was a sweet Little-girl giggle, and it reminded me of Penny Wilson. Only I had the feeling that Gloria Kent was a great deal more woman than Penny Wilson would ever be. Penny's emotional threshold had halted at about the age of twelve or thirteen, and all her life, maybe even when she got gray hair, she would go on being a naughty little girl who wanted her bare butt paddled so her pussyjuices could start flowing and lubricating the way for a stiff cock. I had the feeling that when Gloria got wet between her thighs, she just wanted to fuck.
"I like you, Jack Warren. But what do you do for a living?"
"I'm in the insurance business." I decided to level with her, at least half of the way. I didn't think I could con her anymore. And this first week was nearly gone, and in another ten days or so Mona and her band would be on their way to sunnier climes.
"That's very interesting. It must be a good business."
"It is, unless you have to give away a lot of money to your customers instead of the other way around," I made a joke of it.
"Is this your vacation? I mean, all the time you seem to be spending coming to our shows and getting to know us better-or is that in the fine of duty too?" No doubt about it, Gloria Kent was a sharp cookie.
"Well, if you want to know the truth, I'm working on a case." I hadn't meant the pun, it had just slipped out. But her eyes widened, and I thought that I had struck pay dirt. I said, "Is that bass fiddle you're playing very expensive?"
"I guess so. It's one of the best I could buy. Of course, various instruments have different price levels, as you probably know."
"I do. like maybe a violin that was made a couple of hundred years ago by a guy in Cremona," I told her.
"Oh?" Her tone didn't tell me anything, nor did the arching of her delicate eyebrows. She had gone back to stroking the cat, which lay purring in her lap. I would have been purring too if I had been there, because my prick was aching like the very worst case of chilblains on a cold rainy night.
"Well, you see," I decided to give her a Little more leeway and see what she would do with it, "it's a habit of our insurance company that when an important chent comes into town, a chent who has a big policy with us on something very valuable that she's bringing with her, we assign a trustworthy and dependable and hard working guy to stay on the scene and make sure that nothing happens to the merchandise.
"Oh, I see. May I ask what you had in mind?"
"If you're referring to company business, I had Mona's Stradivarius in mind. If you're referring to my extra-curricular activities, I had you in mind, Gloria baby," was my flippant answer.
"Mona's Strad? Oh yes-I've noticed that she hasn't been playing it ever since we got to Chicago."
The way in which she said that didn't show a single tremor. I was watching her very carefully. Only for a second had she stopped fondling that damn cat. Now her slim hands were wandering over it again, and it turned its green eyes on me and mewed a Little, as much as if to say, "Don't you wish you could take my place?" And that was sure as hell a useless question in my condition.
"Well," I said glibly, "after all this is a pretty big town, and there are lots of unscrupulous characters around who might want to snatch that Strad and do my company out of about two hundred thousand bucks. So you see, Gloria baby, as long as all of you girls are in town, I'm going to be tagging along for the ride."
"Then it's not just me you're after?"
"You're certainly one of the prettiest in the band. And I'm saying this to you as a man, not as an insurance agent."
She left off stroking the cat, put her hands at the back of her neck and leaned back. It was a dirty trick. It was hitting me below the belt where it hurt. The way those gorgeous titties of hers thrust out against the filmy pale blue chiffon made me feel like kicking the cat out of the window, ripping off the negligee and teaching Gloria Kent that she could go only so far and no farther when she was fooling around with a stiff cock whose stiffness she had purposely brought about. She looked at me and a little smile crept over those red lips of hers. She seemed to arch her titties out even more, and then she glanced down at the cat in her lap, and murmured very huskily, "Wouldn't you like to pet my pussy?"
I ground my teeth together, and then I decided to take the plunge. I got up and moved closer to her, and then I put out my hand very, very carefully and tried to stroke the damn cat's head. There was a hiss and a little screech, and then I screeched in turn. I had just got myself bitten. It had been such a swift flurry of movement that I hadn't time to anticipate it. But there the cat lay as before, its green eyes a little bit narrowed, purring again. It had made its point. It wasn't going to be the pussy that I was going to pet, that was for damn sure.
"Oh, you poor darling! Ethelbert, you bad boy, just see what you've done!" She was instant contrition. She put her right palm against the cat's bottom and shoved, and the indignant animal leaped off her lap, turned back to give her an angry look, and then majestically stalked away, its tail in the air, its dignity obviously offended.
"Come here to me, Jack," she murmured very softly. "I want to get a good look at your hand. That was mean of Ethelbert."
"That's a sissy name for a cat that defends his mistress's honor," I joked.
"I know it is. It was my husband's middle name. Jackson E. Kent. I used to think it was Edward, and he never led me to believe otherwise. When I started to hate his guts, I did a little checking and found out. Then I used to call him by that name, and he would slap me around but where the marks wouldn't show, and then he'd take me out for some imagine dinner with his business associates and show me off. And then at night in bed he'd be like a Roman Emperor with a slave girl," she told me. The haunting shadows had come back into those lovely hazel eyes again, and her mouth was twisted into a gash of contempt and suffering and fear and hate. Right now wasn't the time to talk about the missing Strad. Here was a beautiful piece of tail wasting her sweetness on the desert air just because some egotistic prick had given her cunt a raw deal.
"I don't feel like a Roman Emperor, Gloria. And I do want to pet your pussy. Why don't you try my style for a change?" I suggested. I was beside her on the couch now, though I was at a disadvantage because I would have preferred her at my left instead of my right. Just the same, my right arm went around her waist, my left hand moved to her chin, tilted it up and turned her to me, then I gave her a long hard kiss. She whimpered a little, and her hands lay passive in her lap, and then as my hand slipped down along the lovely curve of her throat and on down to feel those gorgeous bubbies of hers, she suddenly gasped, "Oh my God, Jack, yes!" and flung her arms around me.
There was almost nothing holding that pale blue chiffon negligee together. My left hand found its way inside and cupped that beautiful tittie, and I gently caressed the nipple until I felt it throbbingly turgify under my insistent touch. By then her mouth had opened and her tongue was exploring my dental work, and I could feel her fingertips digging convulsively against my shoulder blades.
I husked her out of the blue chiffon negligee and it fluttered to the floor. Out of the comer of my eye, just as I hurriedly pulled down my zipper, scuffed off my shoes and mounted over Gloria Kent, I saw that silver-gray ball of fur detach itself from the other end of the room and make a flying jump at the negligee, claw it and roll round and round and round, the way a puppy plays with a ball.
I ought to have taken Gloria into the bedroom and closed the door against that damn cat. As a matter-of-fact, the fluff at the base of my spine crawled with the dread that the lovable little animal might take a notion into its head to leap on me and claw me out of sheer vexen. I may be many things, but I'm not a masochist, and as I've said before, the only cats I like are the pussy and kitty variety.
But Gloria was not in a giving mood, and I didn't want to break the spell and waste time carrying her to the bedroom, Besides, my ramrod was already thrust to the very hilt inside her hot soft cunt. It was moist, indicating that she was ready to receive me. Now her beautiful creamy legs locked over me, and her arms held me tight, and she whispered huskily, "Oh Jack, Jack dearest, it's good, oh Jack, it's so good, don't rush, make me know what it's like to be a woman again-it's been so long!"
A thousand questions rushed into my brain, but I kept my big fat mouth shut. There was time enough after we had fucked to ask them. In a way, a good screwing is like sodium pentothol; it relaxes the nerves and the mind, and it puts the recipient in a nice languid mood and often ready for conversation.
The main question I had, you can guess yourself, dear reader: was this really the first honest cunt-to-prick loving Gloria Kent had had since she had parted from the bed and board of Jackson Ethelbert Kent...or had Mona Wilhelm consoled her in the sweet ways of Bilitis? At that moment, I honestly didn't know, and I could have cared less. Because while the Siamese cat who bore her ex-hubby's name cavorted on the Conrad Hilton rug with the fallen negligee. I was plunging back and forth inside of Gloria Kent's cunt as if I had been discovered fucking and, the same unhappy day, learned that it was going out of style.
She was all woman. Her hot perfumed breath, her wet mouth, her sultry, rasping tongue, worked with and against me as her arms clutched me, and her legs enfolded themselves over my thighs to keep me steered the right way. Her titties had lovely brownish aurolae, rather wide, with just a hint of coral, while the nipples were big and soft and a kind of interesting dark pink. This was because she had had a couple of kids, I had no doubt, but her titties themselves were magnificent. My hands told me that at once as soon as I squeezed them, and after the first furious ecstasy had died down and I had learned all the convolutions of Gloria Kent's quim, I began to fuck her with slow and rhythmic strokes while my hands fondled her bubbies in the same rhythm. Her face began to turn this way and that, her eyes bulging and glassy, filmed with tears of rapture. Her voice was husky now, the way I had heard it in that love song at the Civic Opera House, She had powerful thigh muscles, paradoxically as strong almost as Madge Thorberg's, considering how soft and rounded and creamy those luscious naked columns looked. I had always given a lot of credence to the proverb that still waters run deep, and apparently I had tapped Gloria Kent's inner reservoir of passion. She had one orgasm almost as soon as I had thrust myself in about three times, and she had two more before I finally felt myself shattered by the explosive fury of my own needs.
We lay wrapped together on the couch, and this time I had the nice feeling that no hoodlum was going to walk in with his own key, clobber me, and then finish with Gloria Kent what I thought I had rather well started.
This wasn't just a quickie, I knew. She was still trembling and gasping when my senses stopped swimming and started to crystallize again. I whispered to her, "Let's take a shower together, and then go to bed. And let's lock the door and keep Ethelbert out. He might go back to his namesake and make the poor guy jealous over what he threw away so stupidly."
I couldn't have said anything that would have pleased her more, judging by her reaction. She uttered a sobbing cry, "Oh Jack darling, you sweet darling," and then she almost strangled me with those lovely white arms, and her mouth crushed mine and our teeth clashed together, and I felt my prick harden all over again.
I slowly helped her up from the couch, and we looked at each other like a couple of children who have just done something naughty in the woods and are wondering when their parents are going to find them, and then we laughed out loud. She had a wonderful, rich, throaty laugh, nothing affectatious about it. Her bubbies danced deliciously when she laughed, too. I was glad I hadn't tried to break the record for screwing the past few nights, and kept a little something in reserve for a piece of quim like gorgeous Gloria.
In the shower, we were again like babes in the woods. She soaped me and I soaped her, and she goosed me playfully, and I did the same thing to her, and I gave her a good Little stinging slap as if I were spanking her, and it sounded most interesting what with the water glistening on her naked flesh. When we turned off the shower, I toweled her and she did the same for me. Then I knelt down and, running my hands over her voluptuous bottom, put my lips to her cunt and kissed it lovingly.
She turned very red in the face, and she almost shoved my face away, as she gasped, "Jack-why did you do that?"
She didn't have to ask any more questions, and I didn't have to answer any. The long convulsive shudder which had gone through her when my lips had touched those sweet soft pink twitching lips of her vulva had told me all I wanted to know. There was no doubt about it: after her divorce, hating men as she said she did, gorgeous Gloria had sought solace in the arms of Mona Wilhelm. And if she had done that, she could very easily have snatched the keys to the closet and the Strad case after Mona had gone to sleep following a passionate bout of pussy rubbing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There was only one other girl in the troupe who might have qualified as a dyke. Her name was Tess Manton, she played the trombone and also doubled on the snare drum, and she had been one of the first girls whom Mona Wilhelm had signed up for her all-girl ensemble. Tess Manton came from Billings, Montana, and according to the press book out on her, she was twenty-five, had come from a sheep farm out in the wide open spaces where the air still isn't polluted to this date, and had run away from a young husband who apparently was balling all the chicks as well as the loose sheep around the community. She had been married just a year when she found that he didn't care what he stuck his cock into just so long as he got relief. Tess had quite an ego and she was very brash and belligerent, which always shows up a defense mechanism.
She had straw-colored hair which she wore originally in a braid, but since touring the country with Mona's sexy outfit, had changed to the more sophisticated do of spit curls all along the fringe of the forehead and helmet style at the sides and the back. She reminded me just a little of Kathy Minnow, but just from the hairdo viewpoint. Because she was about five feet six, lean as a boy, with hard, small round bottom-cheeks set very tightly together, and she could wear jeans or slacks with a pullover sweater and get by without too much scrutiny. Her titties were small and didn't make much of a bulge against the evening gown. She had a lean and hungry kind of face, with very dark blue eyes, a small button-like nose and an even daintier mouth like a rosebud. That mouth of hers didn't go along with the rest of her wiry build, but she was a very aggressive dyke. She wasn't entirely a man hater, however: on Saturday night, after doing some more checking with Eugene Burdick, I went down to The Happy Medium to enjoy a long tall cool one and the show. Mona was playing on her "cheap" violin, Gloria was thumping her bass fiddle to a fare-the-well, and pert Penny Wilson was tottling her sax mournfully in my direction and giving me reproachful looks to remind me that all next week "Daddy Phil" would be in Florida with the Mafia and why didn't I come over and use the hairbrush because she was so naughty and needed regular taking care of.
I played king impervious to that signal, but I did wink back at cute Gloria, and then I concentrated on Tess Manton. I was going to have another session tomorrow afternoon with Mona, and report back to her directly as to what I had found out about her missing Strad. I was convinced now that Gloria Kent held the solution, either between her slim fingers or between her creamy thighs, but it would have been the wrong thing to do to name Gloria outright as the culprit and start any police action. Whoever had taken the Strad hadn't peddled it yet anywhere in the country. The big Chicago firm to whom I had talked to at the outset of the caper had feelers out all over, and they were accepting collect calls from any large city-or any other place, for that matter-where the stolen handiwork of Antonio Stradivari might turn up. So, as I say, whoever stole that violin was holding it on the q.t. for reasons best known to himself or herself-and I suspected herself the most. Maybe there was blackmail involved; maybe there was going to be some sort of shakedown. In any case, Eugene Burdick and I both agreed that publicity to the papers would be the last thing in the world Mona wanted, and certainly the last thing in the world to bring the criminal to justice. If it were a family affair, it could be handled inside the family. And yours truly had just been nominated a charter member of that adorable bevy of gorgeous girls.
None other than limp-wristed Eugene Burdick himself had proposed as much to Mona, saying that I ought to come along to Mexico and California with them on their trip and wind this case up, because the publicity otherwise would be very unfortunate. And Mona had agreed.
Now all I had to do was have the powers that be at Duron agree with Mona, and I was on my way to my first vacation in more years than I cared to remember. I could also catch up on my screwing, and I could forget my local chicks for the time being. Maybe absence would make the pussy grow fonder, or something like that, Just the same, out of habit, I dialed Mara Corday's number before I went off Saturday night to concentrate on Tess Manton. The number didn't answer, so I still had my rain check for that long tall drink with Daniel Corday's prison-widowed young spouse. I also called Carol Vernon and told her that I might have to go out of town for a while, but that I'd send her postcards and that when I got back we'd have a nice little chat, and she said that would be lovely. Then finally I called the Armisted household and I got luscious Laura, the stepmother, on the phone. She was glad I called because she and Peggy were going to Europe on a sort of reconciliation trip. She thought she had neglected Peggy badly, and Peggy was beginning to pal around with her, and that was all to the good. She said that Peggy wanted to be remembered to me, and then she said that she did too, and that when she got back from Europe, probably in the middle of September, we could get together again.
So I felt very benign with the world and I sat at my table in the nightclub and nursed my gin and tonic, and I watched Tess Manton. She could play a hot trombone, and she could also get in some good licks on the snare drum. When the show was over, I dawdled about until Tess came off the bandstand, and then I introduced myself to her and asked if I could buy her a late supper. She said she would be delighted. Once again I got the reproachful look from Penny Wilson, and I got a little smile and teasing wink from gorgeous Gloria, and Madge Thorberg glared at me. I blew Madge a kiss on my way out. Mona Wilhelm merely packed her violin in its case, told her girls to get cutting and back to the hotel, and off we went in a cloud of dust, only I took a cab and Tess and headed back to my East View Park apartment. First we stopped over at Morton's for one of those mammoth hamburgers on black bread which they serve only after ten in the evening, and some cold draft beer. Tess ate as if she had been out bear hunting in Montana for about six months and had been living off roots and grass. She had three hamburgers and four bottles of beer, and then she leaned back and patted her lean tummy and said that had hit the spot.
She had a curious sexual charm to her. Perhaps it was because she looked so much like a young boy, with that hard defiance so many young kids have these days, because they're protesting the world and want to get off and can't. When I took her a couple of blocks away to my apartment building, she looked at me as she got out of the car and she said, "Are you going to make a pass at me now, Jack?"
"If you want me to, sure. You're a very attractive wench."
"I don't dig your root, man," she said rather vulgarly, "so let's cool it, shall we? I go for girls, and I'm not ashamed of it. I had a bastard of a husband who took me for a sheep one night and tried to put it in the back door, and I almost killed him with a pitchfork. A little while later I found him doing it to a sheep, and then he got the farm girl next to us pregnant and tried to tell me it was some traveling rodeo rider who did it. I can't stand men, they're all pricks."
"There's something more to the species than just that, Tess. Yet if that's the way you feel, I promise I won't even put my hand on your knee. But I do want to talk to you."
So we talked. She was especially bitter. She had always been sort of interested in musical instruments and played in the high school band, and she had even had high hopes of going to Europe for musical training. But her folks didn't have that much money and her young hubby laughed at the idea of her going on the stage. He would much rather play sheep-counting with her and keep her as one of his flock. So she had managed to sneak away and get to L.A., where she had found a good teacher, got a job as a waitress so she could live, and then she had tackled Mona Wilhelm through an agency booking office just about the time Mona was starting up her combo.
"I don't blame you, Tess, for hating men," I said sympathetically, "but this big happy family of the Wilhelm band might just break up for all the girl-loving that's going on unless somebody levels with me.
"What do you want to know? There isn't anything I wouldn't do for Mona Wilhelm," Tess said fiercely.
"Have you been to bed with her?"
"A couple of times, not that it's any of your Goddamn business," she said fiercely, and she stared at me as if to make me eat crow.
"I'm not knocking it," I chuckled. "I wouldn't mind going to bed with Mona myself, and if I had to use my lips and fingers and tongue instead of my cock, I wouldn't feel cheated at all."
"You men!" she said disgustedly. "All you think of is pussy. All you think of is sticking in that ugly thing of yours, and you think it's the magic wand that will change them overnight into loving creatures. And you also think that if a girl happens to prefer her own kind, you can just come along, stick your cock into them, and right away they don't want to be Lebbies any more, Well, you're dead wrong if you think that. I'll only sleep with girls, and I'll never again let a man touch me or take my clothes off."
"You've made your point, and I concede it. But tell me this-if you've been to bed with Mona, does she usually wear the chain with those keys to her expensive violin around her neck?" I asked.
"Of course she does. It's a wonderful instrument. She hasn't played it in Chicago, and I've been wondering why."
"Well, I'll tell you something very off the cuff, Tess. I'm an insurance investigator, and Mona insured that Stradivarius of hers for two hundred thousand bucks. While she's in town, I've been assigned to stay close to her so I can see if anybody is going to try to snatch that Strad away."
Tess seemed satisfied with that explanation, and her reactions didn't indicate the slightest bit of guilt. She loved Mona. Mona had given her a break, an unknown from a hick town out in the sticks, and there wasn't anything she wouldn't do to make Mona happy that she had hired her. Such loyalty is rare in our cynical age, and I complimented her for it. I also kissed her chastely on the forehead as I took my leave.
Well, just spot-checking as I had done, I knew now that Mona had kept her mouth shut about the missing Strad. Otherwise Tess would probably have known all about it. With that fierce loyalty Tess had, and her yen for girl-loving, it was pretty obvious that she and Mona were confidantes in bed and in business too.
I spent Sunday catching up on my sleep and drinking more sherry with raw eggs in it. And on Monday morning, I waltzed into J. Stanley Duron's office in my best bib and tucker, putting on my most appreciative and deferential smile, and I informed him that I had a pretty good idea of how to keep the company from shelling out two hundred thousand bucks. He was a lantern-jawed man with iron-gray hair in a stiff shock and a lean, almost scrawny figure. He, too, fancied himself as a great cocksmith, but he was careful to do his screwing away from town where nobody could find out about it. I'm sure he must have known something about my extra-curricular activities, especially from the rare book caper, but he was all business when I faced him in his luxuriously furnished office.
"I'm all for that, Warren," he said curtly. "What's involved?"
"I may have to go on to California and then Mexico City with Mona Wilhelm's group. Mr. Duron," I said, and then I quickly explained why. He nursed his chin with his thumb and forefinger, scowled at me, and then said: "All right. As a matter-of-fact, you've got some vacation time coming up, and a little extra bonus of time for what you did to keep us from paying that scoundrel Dewhurst Ames and those three conniving crooks a great deal of money. The company will underwrite your expenses-but just don't go hog wild, Warren. No bottled champagne every night, and you don't have to stay at the finest hotel in Mexico City. I'll have my secretary phone the travel agency and get you an itinerary."
So there it was. I could take the rest of the week off, and my excuse would be that I was still working on the case, and maybe I could even find time for lovely blonde Carol and cement the bond between us before I shoved off for the lands of sunshine. So that noon I called Carol, but a maid answered and said she had gone to Muskegon for the rest of the week and wouldn't be back until the following Tuesday. By then, of course, I'd be on my way with Mona and the girls.
I then went over to the Drake Hotel and had my interview with Mona Wilhelm. The raven-haired beauty was all business too, and you couldn't have detected from any word or any look on her face that we once had made beautiful music together right there on the Drake Hotel's beautifully upholstered couch. She turned crimson when I mentioned that I had talked to Tess and to Gloria about their fondness for her. She gave me a cold, hard look and said, "I trust you will not forget that all this is confidential. I have a little influence here and there, Mr. Warren, and if you impugn my good name or that of my girls, I'll see that you're out of a job and I'll cancel my insurance-until, of course, I collect on my claim for the stolen violin."
"I'm not trying to talk dirty or blackmail you or get any hold on you, Mona. You ought to know better than that by now. I'm just telling you-the person who stole that Strad was someone who is very close to you. I don't know how it happened, but somehow she managed to get those keys from the chain around your neck when you were sleeping, helped herself to the Strad, and is hiding it somewhere, for what reason I don't yet know. But I have a few ideas, and that's why I'm going along with you. The president of our company has just okayed that. Beyond that, I'll naturally keep my mouth shut, except to you."
Then she smiled, gave me her hand and I shook it, then suddenly she flung her other arm around me, pressed awfully tight to me, rubbed pussy against my crotch, and gave me a long, sizzling kiss. "I'm so glad you're coming along, darling," she breathed.
"I've never been to Mexico, and I might need a guide. Especially at night, in bed," I told her.
"Just watch yourself while you're down there, Jack sweetie. I can get awfully jealous, you know," Mona purred.
"That's very flattering, Mona. I'll be glad to guide you in any position you want. And I'll get your Strad back too. See you later."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The rest of the week was pure gravy. With the official authorization of J. Stanley Duron, I absented myself all day long from the dreary office on West Jackson Boulevard and spent the time in the Drake Hotel in Mona's suite or at The Happy Medium, leaning back with a good drink and listening to those beautiful babes give out with the soothing music. I even managed to sneak in a return engagement with Madge Thorberg, the Amazonian blonde. But it wasn't all sex, and it was on Wednesday night of the second week of the troupe's engagement at the Rush Street nitery. I let Madge take it away from me, and I mean that literally.
No sooner was I inside her pad, than she began undressing me, taking off my light dacron suit-coat, then running her hands down my ribs, then along my thighs, then beginning to caress my prick through my fly until it bulged enough for her to make out its outline plainly and then to pull down my zipper and fondle it between her moist warm palms. Next thing I knew, I was down on the couch and she was over me, and I was just about smothered, but it was certainly the way to go. I let her do most of the work, but I asked her an occasional question along the route. like, did she know about any of the girls who had a particularly hot crush on marvelous Mona. After she had relieved herself, and drained me in the process, she cuddled next to me, taking one of my hands and putting it to one of those magnificent titties of hers and having me squeeze and fondle it while she purred like a contented cat after three saucers of cream. She had emitted about that quantity herself in her furious orgasm, by the way.
By the time she got through giving me the low-down on what particular itching stirred the various pussies of the troupe, I was pretty sure I had just about got to everybody who had ever been to Mona's bed. Mona had been rather selective about the process. She never came right out and made a pass, according to Madge. She just started being protective. She'd call extra rehearsal time and limit it to just one or two girls, and work with them for about an hour. She'd coax and lecture and plead and be motherly, and then when they were in tears from all that extra work and the nerve-wracking tensions, she'd start to kiss and cuddle them. And inevitably they wound up in her bed.
Madge checked off with me on Gloria and Tess and, of course, the pianist, Elsie Doran. Now Elsie was a pretty good bet herself as a suspect, and I hadn't done a thing about her. But there was no hurry; I'd get to her in Mexico. She stayed pretty much in her room, she was very quiet and meek on the bandstand, even when she was playing a hot number on the pian. She seemed to move about as if Mona were pulling the strings and doing a Svengali act. She was really mesmerized.
On Friday evening I tried to call Mara Corday to see if maybe I couldn't sneak over there and claim my long-lost rain check of a drink, but she still wasn't there. But at the last show at The Happy Medium, something very curious happened again.
I had broken down and was talking to Penny, because it seemed that "Daddy Phil" wasn't going along to California and Mexico City. Since I wanted a little pussy to keep in practice, I had no objections to first spanking, then boffing that charming honey-haired masochist, so long as her Mafia sponsor wasn't along for the ride. We were holding hands, she was darting me naughty little looks from those baby blue eyes as we came out of the exit, when I saw Gloria Kent go out to the limousine which had come to pick up her and the bass fiddle. There was somebody in the limousine already, like a passenger, and he wore a fedora. And, strangely enough, it was the same guy I had knocked out last week. I was grateful to him, because it was as a result of my heroics I had got between gorgeous Gloria's thighs. So I told Penny to excuse me, and I moved forward in case I was needed.
The guy tipped his fedora and leaned out of the window to talk to Gloria in a low voice which I couldn't overhear. She looked scared, but she kept nodding. A couple of times she moistened the corners of her mouth, but she kept nodding and her eyes were awfully big. Then he got out of the other side of the limousine and vanished into the night, running across the street into a parked car with the lights out, got into it and drove away with a squealing of tires. Gloria glanced back at me, seemed to gasp and leaned forward and said something to the driver, and the limousine drove away just as fast.
Now what did that all mean? I decided to keep this to myself, because it was just another little part of my hunch that Gloria Kent knew more about the missing or stolen Strad than she was about to let on. I could even see myself in the role of "Daddy Jack" when it was all over, taking a trembling, tearful Gloria over my lap with her skirt up and her panties down, sternly admonishing her for pulling a silly stunt like that, and then making the peaches-and-cream tint of her bare bottom turn into the fiery red of a peony, after which I would manfully console her.
I had already packed a single suitcase and brought it along to the nightclub so that I could accompany the girls back to their hotels for checkout, and then out to O'Hare International Airport for the take-off to sunny California.
I sat next to Mona on the plane, and we looked like a couple of lovebirds. She asked me if I had found out anything else since our last chat, and I said that I definitely had but was going to keep it to myself in order to give the suspect a free hand. The move was going to be made pretty soon, I felt certain. But Mona had had Eugene Burdick check all the baggage at the airport before we took off, and he had also reported to her that there wasn't a sign of any extra musical equipment, which meant the Strad wasn't coming along. This worried Mona a little; it meant that the thief had already disposed of it back in Chicago. I told her that the chances were very slim: the legitimate music shops had been tipped off, and we have a couple of pretty good private eyes working for dear old Duron who knows just how to get information out of stoolies when there's a big caper on. So every avenue of escape for that Strad was blocked. Somehow Gloria, if she really had taken it, had managed to hide it or camouflage it. But after I had seen her talking to that character in the limousine, I was more convinced than ever that she was the girl who was going to get her panties taken down for a good shellacking when it was all over.
There's no need to bore you with the details of our California stay, because it lasted for about a week, and it bored hell out of me. California usually does. All I like out there is Mrs. See's Candy, which I think is the finest in the country and which I think is the only thing I would miss if the sovereign state of California tumbled off into the Pacific and announced its divorce from the United States of America. I don't like their beef, which is usually Manteca, because it's usually grass or slop fed and it tastes lousy. And most of their people go around with their noses in the air because they're all "natives," even though they came from the East about eight years ago and they hate your guts because you're from Chicago. If you made the social blunder of walking in uninvited on a neighbor just to say hello, the chances are you'd me ostracized for life and a whispering campaign would go out about you which would very definitely make you unloved at the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.
However, the audiences loved the girls, so I had to give them credit for a Little intelligence. And then when we had finished our run, we got aboard a PanAm jet to Mexico City, which is 1560 air miles from Los Angeles. The current rate of exchange is about 12 pesos for one American dollar. Mexico City itself has nearly three million people living in it, and it takes a Little over three hours by jet from L. A.
Mexico City is located at 7349 feet above sea level and has a wonderful spring-like climate. I knew enough to take things easy because of that altitude, but a lot of tourists didn't. The time of year we were arriving, you could expect light afternoon rains, though the mornings were invariably sunny. The sun was shining as we landed at the airport. There were gorgeous girls in those wide, multicolored blouses and flowing skirts, there were the mariachi with their guitars, their sombreros and their soulful eyes and their sentimental songs, and Mona pinched me as we walked past the colorful groups of entertainers who were out there to meet the plane. She had caught me looking down the blouse of one of those gorgeous senoritas and she was trying to remind me that I was supposed to keep my eyes on her and her girls. Maybe the altitude had made me just a bit giddy after all.
We were billeted at the world-famed Reforma Intercontinental, on the fashionable Paseo de la Reforma. It was just renovated, is modern throughout, uses only filtered artesian well water, magnificent kitchens, superb cuisine, and the average cost, in case any of you are tourist-minded, is about fourteen bucks a day on doubles. Mexico, as we all know is the land of the ancient Aztecs, and has something for everybody, from the fabulous beaches and world-renowned resorts, modern cities flavored with the charm of Old Spain, to volcanoes, snow-capped mountains and blooming deserts. You can see a bullfight and you can see a fiesta. And if you happen to like the arts, you can see the National Palace with frescos by Diego Rivera, or the Palace of Justice with works done by the rugged and magnificent artist Orozco. The Fine Arts Palace features a curtain of Tiffany glass depicting two extinct volcanoes.
There's hardly a day in the year that there isn't a fiesta in some province or town of Mexico. They have their Independence Day, which they call El Grito on September 16. I had already got my tourist card which was good for thirty days, and I had to show my passport and birth certificate, and also a smallpox vaccination certificate. On the plane to Mexico City, just to get us in the mood for the exotic food we were going to get where we were going, they served us mole de quaplote, which is turkey in spicy chocolate sauce. In the evening, at the hotel, we had red snapper Vera Cruz style, which was saut�ed with pimientos and spices. Just about everybody spoke English in Mexico City, and I knew enough Spanish words to get along.
Mona's troupe had been booked at the Jacaran-da, one of the best nightspots in all Mexico. My opinion of Eugene Burdick went up considerably, because he had been responsible for the billing. Well, we settled down, got accustomed to Mexican food and the siesta, and it was on our second night in the city that we began to thrill the natives with that bevy of gorgeous girls. Mona hadn't taken along any of her local sit-ins, just the original cast.
So I was sitting in the nightclub, with a tequila, sipping it cautiously, because it hits you a long time afterwards, and feasting my eyes on the girls. They wore red and green, in honor of the country where they were playing, red blouses which were practically transparent, and red skirts ditto. All of them wore black opera-length hose and red leather pumps.
Mona was up there at the helm of the bandstand, directing with the violin bow and waving the fiddle in her left hand to emphasize the beat, and there was gorgeous Gloria, thumping away for dear life at the bass fiddle.
There was something very strange about that bass fiddle, and I couldn't make it out at first. On the other hand, maybe the lighting down here in Mexico was a little different from what we were accustomed to back in the Windy City, but I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the lacquer on that bass fiddle was a much darker shade back in Chicago. Also, when she thumped the wooden box itself, the noise seemed to be hollower.
And then a great light dawned on me. A bass fiddle is a huge monstrosity, and since it's used in a popular or rhythm combo almost entirely for rhythm like slapping or plucking the strings, you don't have to use the bow on it and play extended passages. If you did, the tone that would come out if something were stuffed in the great big box would be muffled or way off pitch.
Gloria Kent had smuggled the stolen Strad through Mexico somewhere in the bass fiddle which she had played on in Chicago. It was as simple as that.
Now all I had to do was prove it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Jacaranda was packed with customers for the opening night of Mona Wilhelm's All-girl Orchestra, and, needless to say, the audience was mostly men. The Latin American has a romantic soul, and he appreciates a piece of good-looking pussy just as much as we fair-skinned brethren from the North. He only takes longer in his courtship, which is often devastatingly effective, especially with a girl from the States, who usually has to fend off five or six rape attacks a week even on ordinary dates back home. He wouldn't dream of slipping his hand under a girl's skirt until she had practically gone down on her knees and begged him to do just that. He will serenade her with a guitar, send flowers, passionate and usually bad poetry, and make her believe that she is the most beautiful goddess ever created in this world for the pleasure of a male prick.
I take my hat off to the Mexicans, because they are sensible enough to take a two-hour siesta after lunch, and yet they seem to get along just as nicely as we do commerce-wise. Already there were huge bouquets on the stage to acclaim Mona and her girls when they came out to thunderous applause. And Mona naturally had coached them into playing Mexican airs like "La Paloma."
I nursed my tequila on through the many encores of the last show, which wound up a little after one-thirty in the morning. Mexicans, like South Americans, have a habit of eating dinner rather later than we are accustomed to, probably because of the siesta. What I wanted to know was what Gloria Kent was going to do when she left the Jacaranda.
I had told Mona to ignore anything I did, and if I seemed to follow one of her cuties, not to call attention to it with the other girls. It was a beautiful evening, a perfect night for love. Pleasant, not too warm, and the excellent dinner, drinks and music had put me in a very romantic mood. But this wasn't the time for pussy, not if I wanted J. Stanley Duron to pick up the tab for my Mexican vacation.
As usual, Gloria Kent was one of the last to leave the bandstand, lugging her bass fiddle. As usual, and every time they played, a special limousine transported the instrument and its luscious performer back to the hotel. But this time I noticed something odd. Gloria seemed to stop for a minute and whisper to a gaudily uniformed bellhop, who nodded, took off his cap and gave her a very flourishing bow, and then hurried down the narrow hallway to the dressing rooms. Meanwhile, she propped the bass fiddle against the wall and waited till the kid came back with an exact replica. This one had a slightly lighter color than the one she had been playing on the bandstand. The plot began to thicken.
She took this one, gestured to the bellhop to take the one she had just slid against the wall, and then the two of them went out towards the exit. I was hiding in a cloakroom, making sure they didn't see me. I crept toward the exit when they were outside, opened the door just a crack and looked out. The bellhop was handing his bass fiddle to the liveried driver of the big black limousine, and Gloria stood on the curb holding the other one. The chauffeur tipped his cap, got into the limousine and drove away, and then another big black limousine rolled up. There was another chauffeur behind the wheel; he was wearing a uniform too. He got out and took the bass fiddle and strapped it on top of the rack on the roof of the car. Gloria got in the back and drove off with him. The bellhop looked after her wistfully, scratched his head, replaced his cap, and went back into the nightclub. He was a versatile little son-of-a-gun. He had been selling cigars and cigarettes during the performance, and he had also been acting as a busboy. Now he was a bellhop. But he was small fish in the ocean of the sharks I was trying to hook.
I got myself a cab and I spoke just enough Spanish to make myself understood to the driver. I told him to follow that big black limousine which had pulled out and headed north along the main drag from the Jacaranda. I told him also not to get too close so that the driver might think we were following him, but not to lose the limousine either and I promised him something like ten American bucks if he got me to the limousine's destination without a hitch. He looked at me as if I had been Benito Juarez come back to life and promising freedom and wealth for every peon in Mexico. Then he took off. He drove like a fiend, and I held my breath and closed my eyes a couple of times, because he seemed to be going through lights and right smack up against cars coming from the opposite direction, but somehow fortune was with us and we overtook the limousine heading out of the city to the east and along a beautifully paved highway.
The cab driver turned back and said to me, "They go towards El Portal, Senor. It is about halfway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. There are many wealthy homes up this way, Senor."
"Never mind the guided tour, Senor," I quipped back. "Just don't lose that limousine. There'll be another ten bucks if we make it."
His eyes lit up as if he had just been made a brigadier general in the Mexican Army starting with a three-month tour of duty in Hawaii, and he gripped the wheel and leaned forward with a concentration that boded no good for the so-far unsuspecting driver of the limousine ahead of us.
We were coming to the edge of a town, I could see, and suddenly the limousine veered off to the left and onto a winding road. My cab driver followed, but he let the limousine pick up a little speed. He was a smart cookie. He had been so excited by the prospect of his tips that he hadn't even pulled the flag on his meter. But he didn't have to worry. J. Stanley Duron wouldn't mind a little thing like a twenty-buck cab fare if his agent spending it could save his shelling out two hundred thousand bucks.
At last the limousine disappeared through a row of hedges, and entered a picturesque estate. Stone columns, an iron gate that had swung wide between them, a magnificent rolling lawn, and gardens far to the rear drowsing under the moon-fight. Whoever owned this place was in the bucks. I told the driver to stop right there and not go in through the gate. I would do this on my own.
Before I had set out for the nightclub this evening, I had done a little talking to one of the jefes of police, and I had told him my suspicions, identified myself, and explained that I might need his help. I wanted to have some of his best men tail me when I tailed my suspect, who of course was none other than Gloria Kent. He was most cooperative, and he winked at me and said that he himself was going to the opening night of Mona Wilhelm's all-girl band at the Jacaranda. So officially as well as unofficially the caper had his blessing.
I paid my cab driver, told him not to wait too close to where he had left me off, and to give me about half an hour. By then, I figured, the cops should be in the vicinity, and I could get myself a ride back to the hotel.
Then very carefully I began to move in towards the really lavishly built house, with white columns just like an old Southern plantation mansion, but with a very tropical touch so far as vegetation and foliage and trees were concerned. The moon was full, and it was really a beautiful night. I made my way to one side so that I could skirt the edge of the house. I could see from my hiding place behind a sweet-scented hedge that the chauffeur of the limousine was unstrapping the base fiddle from the top of the car and handing it down to Gloria Kent, and then he got back into the limousine and headed out back to the road and civilization. There didn't seem to be any watchdogs or guards around the place, so I crept out of the hedge and got up closer towards the house. I crouched down behind a beautiful stone bench, just in time to see the door open and a woman in a black gown stand framed in the doorway. She said something to Gloria Kent, and the latter went inside the house and the door closed.
I had to find out exactly who this woman was and what Gloria was doing there with the bass fiddle. I got up to the door of the house, and I started moving around and then to the right side and suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks and crouched low and tried to merge into the blackness of the night. I had come to an open window and a kind of balcony on the ground floor, just a little elevated from the ground, so that a lover with his guitar could stand right up close to his beloved and, if she seemed to like the tune he was playing, could invite him to jump up to the balcony, and then jump her if she was in the mood. There were French windows and they had been opened up, and the room was lighted and I could see and hear everything. I didn't want to look, I just wanted to listen.
Gloria was first to speak: "I've kept my part of the bargain, Dona Elena. I want you to tell Jackson that I expect to get my children back now. I've gone through hell these last few weeks. You don't know how difficult it's been. You know also I could go to jail for what I've done."
In reply, there came, a mocking insolent voice, in perfect English but with a superb Castillian accent, "You Americans are such cowards, really! There was no difficulty whatsoever. Who could suspect that the real reason for taking the Stradivarius was to throw everyone off the scent as to what was really being brought to us in Mexico by your very gifted and ingenious husband?"
"My former husband, Dona Elena," Gloria said frigidly. "I wish to God I'd never married him."
"But you did, Senora, and my husband and I are very grateful for that. You needn't have any worries. You'll get your children back as soon as we collect the money for the heroin. And now let's open up the bass fiddle and see if you've really brought the right one. If you haven't, Senora, you'll never see your children again, I can promise you that. There's too much at stake here for someone to make a mistake."
My curiosity got the better of me. I moved closer to that low metal balcony and the invitingly open French doors into the bedroom. A very low wide bed which occupied almost all the room, and on it was the bass fiddle. The one which had the darker color and the stranger tone. Gloria was standing there, her fists clenched, her head bowed, tears in her eyes. She was still wearing the very sexy red and green blouse and skirt and the red pumps, and with her auburn hair and her peaches-and-cream complexion and that gorgeous figure of hers almost plainly transparent through the filmy clothes she was wearing, made my prick rise in admiration again. But there's a time and place for everything, and this was neither one.
The woman she had called Doha Elena was very tall, with glossy black hair coiffed in an oval bun at her nape, and the hair pulled away from her high forehead. Diamond pendants sparkled as they dangled from her dainty Little ears. She had a cool, sensual face, almost with a hooknose, with a very fleshy and ripe red mouth, sparkling black eyes and slanting cheekbones. She also had a terrific figure. She was wearing a black satin evening gown and since she was standing with her back to the French doors, I could see the olive sheen of her naked flesh practically down to her chink-bone. She had long legs and a wonderfully oval-shaped firm bottom. And right now she was bending towards the bass fiddle and the cheeks of her behind were tightening against the clinging black satin gown, and she Had taken up a little silver hatchet and was beginning to whack here and there on the reverse side of that overgrown cello.
A section of wood fell away, and Dona Elena let out a gasp of pleasure, and reached her long bare arm inside, and came out with a black violin case. She opened it, and there was the missing Strad. She lifted the hatchet again, and then Gloria gasped out tremulously, "My God, isn't there any other way? That's one of the rarest of all violins, Dona Elena!"
The sexy brunette turned to Gloria and mockingly retorted, "You are such a sentimental little idiot. It's no wonder that dear Senor Kent could force you to do anything he wished. This violin is of absolutely no worth to us, and besides it is well insured. The woman who owned it will be reimbursed in full for its value. But what is important is the merchandise inside. Several kilos of pure heroin. Do you think I am going to let a piece of wood and some catgut stand between myself and a fortune, Senora?"
"Heroin?" Gloria stammered, backing up against the wall. "If I'd known that, I would never have agreed to smuggle this thing across the border.'
"You had no choice, Senora. We know that your husband has your children and that the bargain was that you were to take this bass fiddle with you and bring it here to my villa."
"Yes, Dona Elena, but he said I was just to steal the Stradivarius and that one of his men would arrange to have it concealed inside the bass fiddle, and that he was going to get a lot of money as a reward by sending it back through a third party so that Mona Wilhelm could get her violin after she had paid the ransom."
"You are as stupid as you are sentimental. As I said before, it's no wonder Senor Kent was able to dupe you. It's also evident why he tired of you so quickly. But that's of no consequence. Now if you won't interfere, I'll get the little prize you've brought and then you can leave. I'll have Arturo drive you back to Mexico City and I'll call Senor Kent in New York to tell him that you've kept your part of the bargain."
At this point I eased myself over the rail of the little iron balcony, and strode through the French door just as Doha Elena was raising the hatchet. I grabbed her hatchet wrist and twisted it, she yelled and the hatchet dropped to the floor. She reached into the bodice of her evening gown with her left hand and came out with a Little dagger. Gloria screamed," Look out, Jack!" But I had seen her dip her hand into her big round titties and I was expecting the attack. Before he could raise her hand with the dagger, I let go of her right wrist and sent a right hook to her jaw which was every bit as neat as the one Penny Wilson's gangster boyfriend had given me. Doha Elena crumpled in an unconscious heap on the floor. Gloria Kent uttered a little sob of relief, and then she almost fainted and I had to catch her in my arms. It was delicious holding her gorgeous body close to mine, and still more gorgeous to hear the police sirens shrilling outside in the summer night.
It was all over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The jefe to whom I had given the story of the missing Strad was effusive in his thanks to me. It would mean a great promotion for him. He and his men had long suspected Elena and Arturo Ariza of smuggling, but they hadn't dreamed that the contraband was dope. And several of kilos of pure uncut heroin on the present market were worth a great deal more than a million bucks. It was no wonder that Dona Elena didn't care on what she used her hatchet to get the loot
The jefe placed a long-distance call himself to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief in New Yorg, and Jackson Ethelbert Kent was picked up soon after. The next afternoon, while I was relaxing with Gloria in her room, lying in bed with her as naked as I had always wanted to be with a dish like her, and while she was fondling my cock with one hand and stroking the back of my neck with the other and looking at me with worshipping eyes, a phone call from the jefe gave me more details on how right my hunch had been.
Gloria's ex-hubby had always been rich, but he wanted to prove that he was beyond the law and he wanted to pull of a coup that would net him a couple of illegal millions which he wouldn't report to the Bureau of Internal Bevenue. He wanted to shove for exotic climes like Rio or maybe Tahiti and take along a harem and live like a king of yore. To do that, he needed a lot of dough and fast. In his contacts abroad, he had run into an agent of a big drug cartel in Marseilles who had arranged to get the heroin to him on a freighter which would touch at one of the smaller Florida ports, then be transported by chartered plane waiting in a little clearing near the Everglades to take off to a private airstrip near Long Island Sound where he had his big summer mansion. There he had had a couple of his thugs get in touch with Gloria and tell her that if she ever wanted to see her children again, she would have to pull a little job for him. He'd had this swarthy cauliflower-eared character meet her in Chicagot hat was the guy I had knocked out at The Happy Medium-and give her all the details.
He had known, of course, that Gloria sometimes went the dyke route and he had figured that she and Mona would be playing footsie in bed after the divorce. All Gloria would have to do was to slip a potent sleeping powder into Mona's nightcap, make love with her, and then when Mona was dead to the world, unlock the little silver chain around her neck, unlock the closet in the Drake Hotel and take the Strad out of its case. The thug had put on a uniform like a Western Union messenger and had come up to the suite and taken the Strad out to a contact on the South Side. This guy had very ingeniously opened a strip at the back of the Strad, put in the heroin, sealed it up again with glue, and then opened up a bass fiddle and hidden the Strad inside, packing a lot of foam rubber around it so it wouldn't slip.
Gloria hadn't been told that it was heroin she was smuggling and not the Strad. I managed to get the jefe to forget her name in return for the international publicity which he was bound to get for his dashing deed of breaking up a very big drug cartel. At the border, a Federal Bureau of
Narcotics official who had flown in from New York relieved me of the Strad, had one of his own experts open it up and show me the happy dust inside. Then the expert had glued back the wood, and Mona's Strad was just about as good as new. I then got on the phone to J. Stanley Duron, told him that I had found the missing violin, that the policy was still in effect and that Mona was very happy with dear old Duron. He boomed out over the phone that I had done a great job and that I could take all the vacation I wanted and that he would stand the tab. That was music to my ears.
I hung up the phone and went back to cuddling Gloria. We had two more weeks there, and I screwed her practically every day, and then we flew back to the States. She and Mona and the other girls were going to start an engagement in Miami, and I was going back to Chicago. I didn't know if I would ever see my auburn-haired bass fiddler again, but I had a feeling she would be straightened out by now for good. She was going to get her children back, and I told her that the courts frowned on a broad with two kids and no hubby and a yen for dykes. She blushed at this, and stammered something about trying to find a man who was half as good as I was in bed and she wouldn't need a dyke. I told her I didn't think she'd have any trouble if she looked and kept working at it.
So I got back to Chicago, suntanned, having escaped Montezuma's curse and knowing that I was probably in for a sizeable raise and a bonus.
It was on a Thursday when I got back to Chicago. The weather man had predicted torrential rain until the following Monday when I was due back in the office. It was ideal weather for fucking, and even though I had just about depleted my vigor with Gloria down in Mexico, I couldn't let those rainy days go to waste.
So I called Mara Corday, and lo and behold she was there at the phone, but her message wasn't comforting at all. I had waited too long for that rain check. She was engaged to be married to some guy in Los Angeles. She was subleasing her apartment and flying out there on Sunday and they would be married the following Sunday. I wished her the very best and I sighed ruefully as I hung up the phone.
Laura and Peggy Armisted were still in Europe, to be sure, but there was always Carol Vernon. I dialed her house, and the butler answered. I don't think he'd ever really liked me. He had a great deal of sadistic pleasure in informing me that Miss Vernon was engaged to be married to a young doctor in Salt Lake City. How the hell she'd met him in the short time I'd been away from Chicago, I'll never know. But that was just my luck.
So there I was, back home. A conquering hero, and no pussy. And Matt Hollister had my girl.
It was raining too hard to think of dressing and going out for dinner, and I had a couple of frozen TV dinners on hand, so I cooked one, had a little wine, turned on television and watched a John Wayne movie. Just about halfway through, when they paused for about ten commercials in a row, I got up and walked back to the kitchen to pour myself another glass of wine. As I lifted it to my lips, the phone rang.
"Is that you at last, Jack darling?" came a familiar voice.
"Kathy!" I exclaimed. "Sure I'm back. I got in from Mexico today."
"I know," came her husky voice. "I read all about it in the papers. You were just wonderful."
"Papers?" I answered blankly.
"Silly darling, you're a hero! Even Matt Hollister says you're quite a character. And you know, he's right."
"Thanks for the compliment, Kathy. But I thought you and Matt were off somewhere roughing it," I said sarcastically.
"Darling, can you ever forgive me?"
"For what?" I suspiciously demanded.
"For being off my rocker enough to throw you over for your boss. He does look like Sean Connery, but he's got a very grumpy temper. And he's not the lover you are. He's starting to take me for granted, and I just won't have that. We're finished, lover. In fact, we were finished last week. I've been calling your place every day, just hoping you would be back. But then when I read the afternoon papers, I was sure it would be today at last."
I began to laugh uproariously. I heard Kathy's voice on the other end of the wire anxiously, "Hello? Hello? What's the matter, Jack darling? Hello?"
Finally I controlled myself, and I answered her: "I couldn't help it, baby. If you feel like coming over now, I'll tell you what the joke is."
"Can I, really?" Her voice was humble and worshipful. That was a wonderful sign. And then I remembered about Penny Wilson, and a blazing new idea struck me.
"You can on one condition, woman," I told her coldly. "As I recall, you've got a black wooden hairbrush on your dresser. Do you still have it?"
"Why, yes, Jack," she said wonderingly.
"Get into a cab and bring it along. Come just as you are. If you're naked, put your fur coat on. But bring the hairbrush. I'm going to punish you for being unfaithful to me. Here I am, a national hero, and it's a rainy night and I'm all alone here just because my girl got her head turned by a double for James Bond. Baby, the caper I just pulled off has James Bond beat all hollow."
"You-you mean you're going to spank me, lover?" Kathy purred.
"Let's see," I consulted my wristwatch, "It's exactly eleven eighteen. For every minute that you're late after midnight, you get two extra spanks. Goodbye, Kathy."
I don't know how she managed it, because on a rainy night in Chicago it's pretty hard to get a cab. But at six minutes past midnight, my doorbell rang and Kathy Murnow bounded up the stairs to the second floor wearing her fur coat, high heeled pumps, smoke-colored nylon hose, and rushed into my arms.
My arms enfolded her, and we exchanged a long passionate kiss. I had forgotten what a lovely perfume she used, and how she felt in my arms. But I was going to find out all over again.
She reached into the pocket of her fur coat and handed me the hairbrush. Then she pulled off her coat, and she was naked except for garter belt and the hose and pumps. Then she blushed and hung her head.
I took off all my clothes, and then I took her by the hand and I led her into the bedroom. I sat down on the edge of the bed and she obediently draped herself across my lap, I circled my left arm around her waist, and then I began to spank her voluptuous creamy bottom. She wriggled and squealed and pleaded with me to stop, and promised she would be a very good girl.
When I finally did stop, she wasn't a good girl at all. I had a helluva time getting to the office on time Monday morning, but it was worth it.
Because all I did between Thursday night and Sunday night was fiddle between the whites of Kathy Murnow's thighs. And my Stradivarius wasn't an antique. But then, as I've always said, there's more than one string to my bow.
