It was a regular incantation of sex and sound engaged in an unraveling of high voltage fury that crossed the bridge of sanity and was on its way to the Funny Farm.
The wildly clad chicks stood red-faced at the end of the number in varied stances of rest. The musicians had ground the Basie number to a jolting halt and sat conversing in a foreign tongue.
A sharp intake of air preceded the next number as six sax men blew out the theme of a Les Elgart arrangement with just enough lip pressure on their reeds to make Moonglow sound like Manhattan, the town where Erotica was born.
Billy's Spot was a progressive joint where they quoted Tennison in mellow moments between gin shots when the arousal of sexual urges struck against the glands. It wasn't a cheap jazz joint, far from it.
Billy was a swollen-faced character, a great, hulking, beer-breathed, fire and brimstone guy whose raptures ran to Greek and Italian broads. He usually graced the cash register like a large Sultan, sitting erect before it in shrine tender fashion, a man possessed of little faith in humanity.
Billy was also prone to garlic and was usually grim-faced. He seldom paid his employ; they were his harlequins, his assorted troop of talent who offered their creative skills to the "best cafe crowd in Manhattan," merely for exposure.
There was no way of getting around it, Billy was known as "The Great One" in a somewhat smaller sense than Jackie Gleason, but with identical emphasis whenever his name was mentioned.
If he chose to do so, Billy could bathe in chicks. All he had to do was snap his fingers and they would come running in bikinis or in the nude.
Chicks throughout the world flocked like locusts to Billy's Spot. Most of them were counting pennies when they entered the frayed portals of the establishments but his name started powerful entertainment wheels in motion.
It was Billy Bloom who rocketed a dozen or more limelighters into the Broadway and Television heavens. Striesand had fallen into his orbit, so had numerous others.
When I entered his office looking like a poverty stricken Shelley, he sat bolt upright and fastened those penetrating eagle eyes of his on me.
"Yeah, what's on your mind?"
I could look him directly in the face. I only had twenty-three cents in my pocket.
Impatience was written on his Jewish face. "Well?"
I forced a stronger voice into my throat, "I've just retired from the Vietnam scene, Mr. Bloom, and I'm looking for work."
He scowled across at me with mixed emotions. "I don't like hand grenade acts, anything to do with war."
"Quite the contrary, Mr. Bloom; I'm a comedian by profession."
His eyes brightened with a glint of amazement, his rather fleshy lips parted in mute testimony to this utterance and he drew in a deep breath of air that made a whistling sound against his teeth as he did so. "I thought all comedians were Jewish. Where do you get off calling yourself a gag man?"
"Does a guy have to paste on a false nose and talk flat bush in order to prove he's funny?" My words were spiced with just enough venom to let him know I was for real.
"O.K. Mr. whatever your name is-"
"Al Jones," I spat out with assurance.
"That doesn't sound like a name fore a head liner. A handle like that sounds rural, tank town to me," he spat back with belligerence. "Where you ever air your act?"
"Frisco-the Apollo, for one."
His leer of disbelief was eating away at my thoughts. His eyes were like cutting-tools as he continued to size me up. "That rundown shack on the west coast went out with the romper age. What's your bag, Jones, you pullin' my leg?"
I weighed my thoughts as they slowly took form, editing them before I slid them into words. "Look, Bloom, I'm good! I write my own stuff-it comes easy to me. Cold, dry humor, that's my style. My last engagement was a between the acts filler in Fresno. I got good mention in the press."
He gave me a double take that ended with an underlook of displeasure as I thumbed a selection of tattered newspaper tears sheets from my jacket pocket and slid them across the desk in his direction. He scanned the copy with lightening speed then looked up, a faint smile etched at the corners of his mouth. "How many weeks did you run?" He lowered his eyes then pushed his excessive stoutness back into the wicker chair with persuasive elbows.
I inhaled deeply, allowing the words ample freedom, "Seven."
He nodded a kind of decisive nod that was calculated to throw a guy off guard. "This stuff is strictly from Dixie. Ham-bone." His eyes took on a censuring stare. "How many of the cast did you screw in seven weeks?"
I was shocked but I managed to coax a smile to my face.
"As a matter-of-fact, none. Sex and business don't mix."
A transformation slowly settled into his features, like the distillation of good grain turned to mellow brew. "I like you, Jones. Like what you say and how you say it. Tell me something-."
Some of the pang ebbed from my chest. "Have you ever had an affair with a soldier boy?"
Pure lunatic fringe from the word "go," but I was fortified with answers. "Action like that takes place in any man's war. It's not my particular forte. I'm a pussy man by nature, of the slow freight variety."
"Good dialogue, Jones. Unrestricted as Kansas, good." He slid the clippings in my direction and I pocketed them. "When's the last time you had a piece of ass?"
I told myself he was nuts. Nuts like a fox. Bloom was out to assure himself that I was not a four-flusher, a guy with butterfly inclinations. "What in the hell kind of a question is that? Do you keep tabs on your talent to the extent of whenever they go to the head? Look, Bloom, I might look like some feigned character from scenes out of a Lumberlost text, but I can assure you, I'm for real. I haven't eaten a square meal in two days, and either you hire me or I'm headed for the local bible-sing-handout."
"You're hired. You start at $200.00 a week!"
Electrodes exploded behind my eyes. I was unable to speak.
He nodded, fanning the air with his left hand as he got to his feet. "Is that O.K. with you?"
I nodded back like a fallow deer.
He stood with arms akimbo in the stance of a Falangist. I knew a sermon was coming. "You screw one of my girls and you're finished, Jones. I either create or kill people in this industry. Understand?"
I was dealing with a sharp article. There was a brain in action, a big brain.
"No fallopian tube activity in my employ," he continued. "Do I make myself clear!"
"I understand." I put enough exertion into my next remarks to let him know I got the message. "When do I start?"
He drew toward me and beat a tattoo on my chest. "As of now. I've heard enough of your dialogue to know that you can deliver for my kind of club activity. Material has to be blunt, bold to the hilt, remember. But you're a good-looking limberknead character that can sell a bill a goods."
He walked briskly passed me and flung the office door open, jutting his head forward beyond my vision. "Ella! Ella!" Then in a conversational tone, "Make tracks, honey. I've just added a new member to our family."
A beautiful blonde materialized before me, clad in a wispy shred of material that barely hid her gateway to heaven. She was a luxury of flesh, uncommon to her kind. The machines that had created her must have worked overtime.
The scent of her spelled sex, it carried a kind of Machiavellian compulsion of body essence that lodged in a man's brain in an instant.
"Ella, this is Al Jones, our new comedian. Show him the ropes-he can take it from there."
She was a seasoned trooper at first glance, a whole committee of women rolled into one.
My nearness to her was close to breathtaking. I had been dodging RED lead for months and the taut strings of my emotions were about to give way.
"Another funny man, Billy?"
She sized me up with a sidelong glance, a kind of lucid, free-wheeling glance that was shingled with half hunger. Her walk was well lubricated with professional sex. The kind of walk apes over fifty go luggage-packing over.
"He must be good if you say so, boss."
Her words seemed callous to me, filled with the reproachful knowledge of comic errors who had preceded me at Billy's Spot.
"He has something different to offer, Ella. What's more, he writes his own stuff."
Her expression took on new luster, replaced by a kind of wronged suffering which was part of her nature. Ella also had a brain.
At that moment I strove to concoct the two into an imaginary tangle of sexual activity. The great condor Billy mounted on professionally statecrafted flesh. The image drew a blank. All the conjuring of a century would not allow such an image to ring true.
"I've never developed a tin-ear," was her answer, as she studied me more closely, adjusting her eyes to where my pants were buckled together.
Billy caught her action and I smiled to myself as rage built up in him.
"Ella! Show him around. He'll go on tonight-right after I go over his lines with him." He flashed Jewish eyes on me. "Hungry?"
His hand moved playfully toward his wallet as the female action piece minced toward the door. I chewed out a couple subservient words and accepted a five spot which he gingerly edged in my direction. A wink of good faith passed between us, but I knew he was leaning heavily on the other end of the bill.
"Coming?" Ella cooed beyond the opened door. Loud music poured through the room like coal down a long, gray chute.
"You've got a one-way ticket to success with Billy's name on it," she enlarged, once we started down a short hallway.
I gave her a puzzled look, one of half worry. "What happened to all the other clowns?"
"They went up in smoke. Billy's a funny guy. He can write a check for five hundred thousand without batting an eye, but he'll kill his brother for five cents if it fails to bring a quarter." She stopped short of an entrance to back stage.
A skin-flint character with eyes like an owl stood watching us with folded arms, his face flush red from long years of drinking.
"I gotta have a few bucks, Ella." His delicate features went into a kind of .ticket salesman enactment as he spoke the pleading words to her.
She mumbled something inarticulate beneath her breath and I saw the baffled expression that settled into her face.
"I'm sorry, pop, but I'm broke until pay day."
The bag of flesh was immediately reduced to a whimpering outcry of childish self denial. "But Ella-."
She flipped a pack of cigarettes she had been holding into his accepting hand. Her voice became a whisper, "Later. See me in an hour-."
He gave me a nervous inspection, then, as if he was alone in the world, voiced a confidential whisper in her ear and vanished as we approached pale green door on which was written, ELLA PALMER.
It was a cheaply appointed, lavish room. One of these staged wonders of paint and varnish, of gilted edges that goes into refurbishing rundown holes-in-the-wall to make them look like a million.
She slinked toward a makeshift bar, one of those Sears affairs and extracted a tall bottle of scotch, extending it in my direction for inspection. "This your brand?"
"They all are, after the first one."
She struggled with the cap, her full breasts spilling forward into the cavities of her brassiere. "How much is Billy paying you?"
"Are you the back stage boss, Ella?"
She scurried toward me with bottle and glasses. "Sort of. Fact is, I like to keep the record straight-balances in order, so to speak."
She placed a glass in my hand with something close to polite fury. "A star in any act has to make more than the supporting case."
I articulated her meaning. Pure platform dialogue toward the real thing.
"Look, Ella, I'm no wiseacre. I just joined Billy's sideshow-straight from the garbage heap. But, let's face it, from my side of the ledger, what he's paying me is like the top of the Empire State Building at the moment."
She began to fill my glass with impulsive nudges from a full bottle. "Smart. That's what you are, a regular smarty ass."
Age, true lines of it were written on her face for the first time. The true Ella was seeping through her pancake makeup.
"Every guy is a smart ass when he's down on his luck. He plays for high aces all the way."
She elbowed my glass to the brim, her chest heaving with heavy wonderment. "If you're gonna drink-don't play around with it. That's my motto."
Her features were coarse as she walked away allowing me a view of her flanks from the rear. She had been though many sexual wars, knew all the answers. Her body exuded the facts. They were all there.
I wanted her on my side. The first intake of booze told me so. "I'm on the edge of nowhere at $200.00 a week."
She turned on me like a bull in a wind storm. "Why that dirty son-of-a-bitch!-"
She was half way down the hall and headed in the direction of Billy's office when I reached the doorway.
CHAPTER TWO
Heavy verbal shellfire came in repetitive tides from just beyond the partitioned wall that encased Billy Bloom's office.
"Where in the hell do you get off paying some green joker almost as much as you dish out to me?"
"You mean-you mean to tell me he bigmouthed to you?"
"Like right now," Ella stormed back. "Look, I do everything but clean the toilets around this crummy joint and I'm only getting $300,000.
"That's beside the point-. I'm running this show and no middle-aged skirt is gonna tell me what to pay who and when."
"You bastard! You miserable, no good bastard!"
Billy's voice took on more beef as he said irritably, "You were a second rater when I picked you out of a burlesque row, nothing more. Your ass was sagging and you know it!"
"My ass?" she raged, hitting all the octaves. "What about your big round butt? Why you need a hydraulic jack to climb on one of those horsy broads you like to lay."
Billy's voice took on dramatic emphasis. "I've had enough of your gutter lip. It's no secret that the tide has changed between us."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Ella raked forth with teeth in her question. "You've been diving in the muff so long your brain has gone dull. You listen to me-"
"No! You listen to me, whore! Get your lard ass off my property-and as of now! I'm bringing the curtain down on you-"
"Schmuck! Dirty, low down Schmuck!"
Her words reverberated throughout the arteries of Billy's establishment. A door was heard to slam and I drifted back into Ella's dressing room.
Her face was beet-red, her eyes a tabloid of her spiked thoughts. "Let's get drunk," she shouted, slamming the door behind her.
I watched as her body grew momentarily taut, the soft whiteness of perfectly etched legs hardened, the loaded mounds of breasts jutted aggressively forward in a stance of supreme anger. She grinned as her hand reached for the bottle. "I've just been put out to pasture."
A hundred thousand answers sprang into my mind, none of them worthy to be placed into speech.
"Show business is nothing more than a great big con job, Jones. I'm forty-three and never grossed more than five hundred dollars a week. Loew's State Newark was my only skyrocket to fame. It lasted two and a half weeks." Her laughter was self destructive.
She studied me with eyes that looked on a distant sky. A kind of introspective gaze hardship imprints, fixes in the focal hindsight of those who have seen stark reality. "Go out and get a job that pays a weekly salary."
It was too late to say anything; her life was beyond solution, all the spikes of her words were growing dull. Any minute she would end up in tears. Any minute her rage would melt and she would become a woman again.
She dusted off a double shot in one gulp, collecting her thoughts as she did so. "I've got the biggest tits in show business, Jones. Look!"
She provided me with a profile view of her bust, the pasty grin still glued on her features. Her hands worked playfully across her breasts as she directed a series of burlesque bumps toward me.
Passion began to flicker in her dark green eyes, and as I explored her body from the distance of a few feet, a glimpse of blonde pubic hair escaped the wisp of concealment between her thighs.
A white glow of desire was building up in my groin, a slow pulsating glow of warmth that comes over a guy when he's aroused.
She spread her legs a little while shifting her body from side to side in short, abrupt jolts, then drew her hands downward between her legs, cupping the secret hollow while cooing, "Tell me I'm the best dish you've ever seen."
I was beginning to flip my mind. A guy who had just returned from a two-year stint of jungle warfare would lay his grandmother if he had the chance.
She was whispering a confidential kind of sexy whisper in a show girl voice. I told myself that she was putting on a whorehouse scene for me, a practiced trick she had probably enacted before a mirror a thousand times.
"You're the best," I busted out, slow beads of perspiration appearing on my forehead.
I lunged upward in a mist of passion, struggling with my manhood. I reached for her. She escaped me with a step aside, playful laughter tempting me.
My temples were pounding, the room began to spin. I reached again, my whole body gone into the action. Her eyes shown wickedly as she stepped aside.
"Mamma just wants to play, Mr. Jones-."
I felt like a bull in Chinatown with a thousand needles stuck in my hide.
"Play on your own time," I challenged, leaping toward her like a Cossack.
I grasped her by the arm as she tried to run past me. She jerked back, tugging to set herself free, sent a roundhouse left toward my face. I ducked. Bending forward, I gathered her into my arms. Straightening, I drew her up snugly against me.
Her breasts felt like overstuffed cushions against my chest and the resolute stiffness of her body against mine made me think of a taut spring.
"Now now-Billy will come in here and jerk you inside out. You don't know Billy-."
"To hell with Billy! It's now, baby, now or never."
I dug my hardened manhood into her while reaching down to grasp rigid hams that worked a secret message into my moist palms.
"Later-later," she gasped. The muted denial trembling in her voice.
I was shaking all over in pure agony. "Now-"
I yanked the wisp of rubbery cloth that clothed her downward beyond the swollen fullness of her buttocks. Her mouth shot open as she dug against me. "Lock the door-"
I turned from her feeling heavy all over, my breath laboring.
A curse escapee, my lips when I saw him standing in the doorway. That strange mixture of alarm and poised cunning etched in his darkening features.
"You haven't even stepped foot on stage and you're almost in the sack with my girl Friday." His words came out flat as if they had passed through a machine, not a man.
I managed a sidelong glance at Ella who nudged her way back into the wisp then turned meaningful eyes on Bloom. "That's the way the ball bounces."
His eyes turned dull like those in the head of a five dollar doll. "Cool off and come to my office."
He turned and swept past my vision. Something in the sound of his heels on the frayed carpet stretched my mind in many directions. I choked home the facts, pinned them in proper prospective as I peered across at Ella. "What the hell-it was worth it."
Her face was pure granite. "Like I said, Jones, get out of this business."
I slid out of the room like nothing had happened. The world outside was made up of a lot of wooden people who aped the Gary Grants, the eternal Harlow image. Five and dime, store characterization, second hand merchandise, wooden structures toward the grave. An entertainer had to have an exoskeleton, a backbone of a dinosaur. All the pressures the world could dish out could not melt his ambition away.
Billy stood half suspended on his way to filling the wicker chair behind his desk. His face was writhed in anger. "I thought I made myself clear!"
He sprawled into the chair, his barrel like stomach forcing its plentitude beyond the expanse of his pants buckle.
"It won't happen again, Mr. Bloom."
He clawed the words out from a tight throat, "Can that garbage! I know, you've been a soldier boy and you're hot to trot. But that don't cut no ice with me. This ain't no whorehouse operation, Jones. Understand?"
I nodded.
"Repeat to me what I just said."
Rage overcame me. "What is this, a kindergarten session?"
He shot upright at this remark. "Do you realize who you're talking to? Do you know I can blacklist you in show business?"
I bucked his storm with my next remark. "And you'll be cutting your nose to spite your face. I've got a million dollar product to sell and no one is going to stop me from proving it."
He sat blinking his eyes like a guy who had just been hit by a sack of cement. "O.K., we'll try it for a week-"
He came out of his chair like a dirigible then floated across the room behind me, flinging the door aside. "First show goes on in an hour."
I walked through the doorway like nothing had happened and came face to face with Ella. She gave me an underlook as Billy closed the door behind her.
Soft whimpering sounds came from a female voice, sounds of a trapped animal.
I walked with an assured step, something close to Billy Bloom's kind of smile was projected on my face. His shrill voice was the last thing I heard as I rounded the corner of the hallway leading backstage.
I would have to go on stage cold. No makeup, no comb to even part my hair. What I did out there would have to be straight from the hip-a mingling of farce and sarcasm wedged into reality by sheer hindsight. Brass knuckle stuff hammered home by a veteran of two wars, Vietnam and my former experience with the craft of make believe.
I glanced upward at the "teasers," the many curtained set changes that had been hoisted away in the secret gables of what appeared to be a former legitimate theatre construction.
There was a rancid odor about the place, a clammy distillation of lost moments of greatness. My imagination went on a free for all tour of the past. Great names sprang to mind as I felt a faint tap on my shoulder.
She was probably five foot three, maybe four. A pocket sized girl in mid teens with a body that packed a wollop. Pure innocence faced me, eyes of deep lake waters when summer sun bakes down on them.
"You must be the new comedian-" She hesitated. A little trick of wrinkling up her nose in an excited way reached out and took hold of me.
I extended my hand which she accepted in one no larger than half my own, withdrawing it quickly.
"Al Jones," I greeted. "Yours?"
"Mona-Mona Lane."
"Sounds like a song," I chuckled, dusting a few old gags off at the back of my mind.
"I suppose you'd like to know where your dressing room is-correct?"
I grinned like a kid in first long pants.
She pointed to a spiral stairway and indicated a door that was half hidden in a semi-glow of ill light.
"Looks eerie," I jested. "Want to hold my hand and lead the way?"
"You've got broad shoulders. Further more, I know you're not the type of man to scream when you see a mouse-"
I was bandying words with her, horse-playing all the way. "You mean the joint's lousy?"
"What old place like this one is worth its salt without the proper bohemian atmosphere."
"Bostonian?"
She pointed to her beautiful chest plate of tight-fitting elastic sweater ware. "Further north, Maine. The land of Calvin Coolidge and fish canneries."
I gave her a comic's stamp of approval when I placed a hand on her shoulder and called out in barker like tones, "Grade A Stock, product of Maine."
She shook her head and walked off toward some unknown destiny.
"Hold it. I really meant what I said. I'm afraid of the dark. Ever since I was big enough to crawl from my cradle and swipe my old man's beer, I've been-"
A disinterested stare settled in her eyes as she brushed my hand aside. "Jack Benny once used that dressing room-and he's much older than you."
She sailed away on a sea of youth.
When I got to the head of the stairs I noticed the door was ajar. I kicked it open, went inside. Old, familiar odors greeted my nostrils. Makeup odors mingled with the strong moldy exudation of soiled clothing.
I elbowed the door shut.
"Don't reach for the light," a voice called out, a voice that seemed to be nestled in strong desire. It was Ella.
"I thought you were down in Bloom's office-"
"Every house has twin entrance ways, Mr. Jones. Just sniff the air and it'll lead you to mamma."
CHAPTER THREE
I followed my nose as Ella directed. She was obviously Billy Bloom's High Priestess and an adequate sample of womanhood for any man's nightly diet.
She was stretched out on a canvas camp bed affair, her thighs spread wide.
"It's nesting time, Mr. Jones"
I bent forward and ran my hands slowly over the smooth curves of nakedness.
Her fingers began to toy with my throbbing phallus. Sitting up she bit down through my pants in an act of cannibalism.
Jolts of passion coursed through me.
She pulled back. "Name your kind of sex play."
I didn't say a word.
My eyes were adjusted to the darkness as she got to her feet. The fantastic thrusts and gyrations were begun again. The cunning movement of her pelvis, the rolling almost breathtaking, cascading waves of feminime flesh were soaking up my mind.
I freed myself of my pants and shorts. "Lay down," I demanded.
Her moans and groans might have been part of an act, but I didn't care.
"Let's play some more," she cooed in a babyish voice, beginning to move about me like a phantom.
I had had enough!
Whirling about in the direction of where I let my clothes fall, I reached down. The Army had taught me how to dress in nothing flat.
I was zipping my fly when she came twisting toward me, agony for a voice. "Honey! You can't do this to me. I'm all worked up."
"Too late, sister. I'm all cooled off. A certain wetness was soaking up my shorts. "Get your clothes on-it's damn near show time."
I could feel her eyes burning into my back as I turned in search of a light switch.
She was shouting to the top of her voice as light flooded the room. She stood there cupping her privates with both hands, her face crimson with rage. "Jesus H. Christ, don't you know how to treat a woman?"
She backed slowly away, her stooped posture accentuating her monstrous fullness of her breasts.
An overcast of confusion settled about the corners of her mouth as she uttered something inarticulate as she raised a leg and drew an onionskin brief into place.
"Later-a little later," I mocked, half-hearted, exploring the room as I spoke the words. As she said, there was a back door to the room. I wanted to ask her where it led to but I knew she was in no mood to be civil.
She came toward me like a civet cat, a meat eater if I ever saw one. Pure Girlie Magazine stuff, right down to the heavy purple eyelid shading. Up close, real close, crow-feet of approaching middle age were gathering moss beneath her eyes. But the rest of her was pure harmony, the kind of rounded fullness a guy dreams about when he shuts his eyes.
The certain graphic quality of sex personified was fulfilled in every inch of Ella's being, right down to her painted toenails.
She slid trembling hands under her breasts like a strip house darling and murmured a strangling cry. "Eat them, Mr. Jones."
Half afraid of her in her moment of passion, I leaned forward and planted a kiss on one nipple.
Her rapture was like nothing I had ever heard escape from a woman's lips. It came from deep inside her like a cry from the soul.
She caught hold of the back of my head with both hands.
"Sucky, daddy, suck; momma's coming!"
The scent of fresh crushed leaves exuded from her person as she slid to the floor, her head finding a rest place against my leg. Her hand reached for my fly. I was hooked. The need for release was urgent.
"I'm hooked on you, Al. I need you now like a junkie needs his powder."
"I was thinking the same thing," I panted. "I'll give you the needle now. The show can go to hell."
"I knew I'd get you in the end." She stood up and stepped to the cot, still hanging on to my sex handle. I followed.
She was flopped and spread before I could shed my threads. I climbed on while still removing the shirt.
"Come up here, honey." She pulled Long John toward her open mouth.
"What's wrong with the bush for a starter?" I asked. "It's more my meat."
"You know what they say in Paris: one in the mouth's worth two in the bush," she said.
"I didn't know they said that before ... I do now." I breathed as her tongue began to work over the tip. I didn't dare sit down and bust the balloons so I kneeled on jelly legs while she slurped the spermy slime. It was sickening, fascinating, irresistible. I exploded in a sea of purple patterns and exhausting ecstasy. Her hands came up to my chest, pushed against me.
"Hold it! You almost fell forward off the cot."
"Thanks. I think I'll take a breather now."
"Oh no you don't. Big momma didn't get her kicks yet."
"She won't till I recuperate."
"Just lie down and let me give you my recuperation special."
"Nothin' works but time and rest."
"You know what the salesmen say: to sell yourself you have to get a foot in the door."
"It'd ruin a good pair of shoes in my door."
"Well, it better not ruin a good pair of fingers. My back door revitalizer is for your benefit."
"Salesmen always say that."
She rolled off the cot and pulled me down, spread my legs like a virgin for the sacrifice, kneeled at the end of the cot and grabbed limp larry so he couldn't get away. I would have watched but I'd learned to get my rest when I could, even when last year's sex goddess is playing tiddly winks with my testicles.
"Don't leave when I knock," she said from between my legs.
"I couldn't if I wanted to."
She proved me wrong. I tensed when she tickled my ass with a wet finger. I jerked when she rammed it home.
"No one has ever left with the goods while I had 'em by the handle." Big tits laughed and squeezed my prick to emphasize her little joke.
The finger inside me had begun to rub the base of my cock while the hand pumped it and a forefinger tickled the tip. She should have been a whore. She sure knew the business. Maybe she was a whore ... just didn't take money outright.
"Talk to me, baby," she whispered in a husky voice. I could feel the hot breath on my rod. It was followed by a rough, rasping wipe of her tongue up the length and over the top like a good soldier of her era. Only the crazy ones go over the top nowadays. She was definitely crazy, crazy about it, and dragging me along with her. I didn't offer resistance.
"Cut the oral introductions, the show must go on." I stood up and pulled her up on the cot.
"My, my, such haste. And haste makes waste."
"You can talk all you want but don't hold up the schedule. I have to please Billy too and he requires more than just a hard dick."
She lay back with knees up and spread. The big, red slit was juicy and waiting. I wondered if I could fill it with an arm let alone a mere cock. But like they say in Vietnam, "fuck it," and so I did. I learned a lot in Viet. One thing was never to pass up the lousy ones. That's all there were. So I fall into a public slop bucket. So what? It's hot slop and made by an experienced cook.
I shoved into her and felt those experienced muscles start to work. They tightened and released while she bucked and rocked her hips under me, arched and worked out her orgasm. It took awhile. She whispered four letter words into my ear and urged me to rape her, to loose my savagery. Nothing less would satisfy her. She'd lost the taste for tame sex years ago.
"Pump it to me, Al, make it hurt."
I rammed my cock into her fur-lined fox hole hard and deep. Juice was dribbling down my sack and her crack, making a slurping sound around my stump. Her rhythmic rocking changed to an urgent jerking, her hands gripped the cheeks of my ass and she tried to impale herself with my cock. Her cunt was tight but slippery now, her legs locked around my best efforts and I lunged and stabbed into the slime till she lay back twitching and groaning out her pleasure. She was a canyon of flabby flesh now. I knew I'd never get my rocks off.
"Roll over," I directed her, much as I hated to. I would have taken another pussy, even the cleaning woman, but none walked in the door. I raised and she rolled. I pushed the slippery staff into the valley between her cheeks. It slid directly into the tight anus and I pumped on it, felt the joy of tightness for the first time that day, rammed against the soft buffer of her rounded cheeks. What an ass! She should cut it off and sell it.
"I'd do anything for you, Al."
"You are."
"I'll see you after the show."
"Forget it," I gasped as I banged out my load into her backside. "I don't think well at moments like this." I lay exhausted a moment on her back, my cock still throbbing between those firm mounds of flesh.
I pulled out, went to the towel rack and took one to wipe myself clean with. I looked at my watch. I'd make it but without any rehearsal.
She got to her feet like a lumbering cow then traipsed across the room. It looked out of place, like something on a Sears display.
Enclosing her breasts in a flimsy transparency, she smiled in my direction. "You mustn't allow Billy's fits of temper to change your judgment of him. He's a right guy, there's not a square bone under his hide."
"You trying to tell me that the battle cries you two had are so much theatrics?"
She gave me a dramatic undertook that spelled a little theatre scene, nudging herself toward me with strident steps. "This is show business, Mr. Jones. Remember? We're scarecrows, bit of unreality the morons graft into their natures for the real thing. Billy fires me every day of the week in stream-lined speech...."
Acres of human experience passed before my eyes. It was Street Scene all over again, the great Greek Drama of reality, the flesh ballad with all the pennants flying.
"O.K., I'm ready for the strait jacket. Lace me in-"
"Don't be so tense, Mr. Jones. You're not on stage with a small piece of humanity to mock."
There were strange tears in her eyes and I knew she was with me like a proud steamer pulling into a South Sea harbor with her theatrical body still throbbing.
I turned to the makeup table, its many lights reaching for new horizons of mind and body.
She was no longer a honky-tonk whore in my mind, a small island of lust that memory would shatter into a million pieces during the next tour of sexual reality.
Imaginary horns sounded in my inner ear across the mundane desert of unspoken words.
She kissed me on the cheek much as my mother would have done, that kind of womanhood, bereft of electrodes.
Life was a melody without solution, I told myself as I glanced at my image in the mirror. Cole Porter saying his times tables, that's what we really are.
She vanished like a thing released from a sling and an explosion occurred within me. Were all our worldly needs compelled by a sexual urge? Were our lives compressed into such a narrow confinement?
I studied the door through which she had escaped as though it was a destiny through which I must someday pass.
I talked down to my audience, allowed them a true glimpse of themselves. My tongue was like a knife blade as it cut away at their egos.
Just before I went on stage, Billy checked me out with a few low blow utterances that he shot straight from the hip. "Don't ham it up, Jones. There's a lot of high ranking dough in my kind of off-beat audience. They want their comedy well roasted, mature. Mix a little of the political scene in your gags, characterize a few celebrities, make it pure Park Avenue with a little Brooklyn mixed in. Get what I mean?"
He leaned into his words like a boxer in the clinches, his face a few fractions of an inch away from mine.
I was getting cross-eyed, he was that close to me. It gave me a feeling that he had little faith in my talent and that I would queer his clientele.
I backed away from him, nodding acknowledgment of his remarks, but he elbowed me into a corner. His garlic breath would have killed a horse, it was that strong.
He stood in the wings soaking up the palatable juices of talent. From time to time I would glance in his direction to find his face unemotional, as hard as steel.
The audience was just as silent. It appeared that I was gearing my stuff too introspectively, to far above their heads. Oh, hell, I told myself, maybe I'm ahead of my time. The whole range of comedy stems from many centuries of human behavior. The trick is to establish a style, a delivery of words plus personality that can be identified, send out a message that ignites a spark and keeps it burning.
I was in the midst of improvisation when it happened. I thought the house would come down around my ears. I was boiling away at the present administration, toying with its inabilities, explaining that the old German army could have solved the Vietnam situation in a matter of weeks. The impetus toward reality was keen-edged, hewn from personal experience. Actually, what I had to say was a spell-binding message of bungling in Washington.
A roar of laughter came spontaneously on the heels of each word. Nothing I said was adulterated, toned down.
I had them with me at last. It was a desperate battle at first, a struggle for $200.00 a week. I had to deliver.
When I walked off stage, Billy remained where he stood, his face a blank.
I brushed beyond him, heading in the direction of my dressing room.
The ovation of applause and cheers continued as I was half way up the stairs when he called to me.
"Jones! I'd like a word with you."
Here it comes, I told myself, feeling as if I was riding an aquaplane in the middle of the Atlantic.
I turned and retraced my steps, finally coming face to face with him.
"I take it back-," he said with his face awash in tears.
"You mean?"
"Yeah, Jones, you've got what it takes. You're commercial, a talent."
I felt like a small boy before an English teacher, finding it difficult to know what to do with my arms and legs.
"Let's go up to your dressing room for a talk. I'd like to map out your program for the future."
"Suits me," I avowed in exultation, turning toward the stairs.
"There are thousands of punk ham slingers who are really steamfitters by nature. They've got a notion in the back of their heads that they can project a new image. Actually, they steal a little Jack Benny here, a little Gleason there and come on stage sounding like yesterday's kosher goods. I take it all back, all comedians don't have to be Jewish."
He grasped me by the shoulder and extended his hand. "Stick with me kid, I'll never let you down."
We climbed the remaining stairs and stood facing one another like blood brothers.
I opened my dressing room door and flicked the light switch on before entering the room.
Adversity should be my middle name. Al Adversity Jones!
She lay on the cot in the brief garments in which I had last seen her. There was a knife sticking out of her chest and she was a very dead Ella.
Billy stopped short of the door and emitted a gasp. "Oh God!"
CHAPTER FOUR
Even in death Ella was a specimen of beauty lewd women would ever hope to attain. Even if she had had a mannish haircut, she would be as feminine, as daintily laced together as a fine fan.
I would have liked to have had an affair with her. I felt sure it would have been a crowning point of all short lived experiences. But with Ella beneath me in the wild wilderness of sex, that would have been the last word.
It was strange that I should have had such thoughts as I stood there looking at the butcher knife stuck into her. Stranger still that when I shook off the reverie I discovered that Billy was gone.
In that moment I wrote my success off as so much excess baggage. The murder of Billy Bloom's girl Friday would hit the headlines and Al Jones would be so much forgotten history buried away in a one inch ad on the theatrical page of some five cent rag.
The past, before I was called up to become a soldier boy in the Vietnam crisis, shot into reality before my eyes. Frisco, the home often associated with flower people. I hadn't been thought good enough for the Hundry "I." My appearance relegated me more to the maharaja crowd, the crowd of intellectuals who rejected the association and all it stood for. .
I specialized in brash wit, facetious chatter that sends ears on end. It was a fad amongst my clan to imitate the Cary Grants, the idols of Americana who brought home big bucks for the motion picture producers. That wasn't my cup of tea. My chief meat was the political stage, where tall talking artists humidified the mind with their particular brand of well known garbage.
I was on my way to the big time, big enough that a Hollywood agent had flown all the way from Flickerville for my signature on the dotted line.
Just like Billy Bloom said, there are thousands of comics in America, but they're all repair jobs, just as there are thousands of neophyte writers, laboring under the allusion that they are Harold Robbins. Talent is born in a person, lies deep in the entrails.
Billy entered the room with a dark skinned guy who had law written all over his face. He had a body on him like a middle aged heavy weight, all of it muscle. They moved toward me like visions out of a fantasy book, I never heard a footstep. It was as if I was encased in a glass tube and nothing could penetrate my skull.
My palate went dry and my speech seemed to become shackled by an inability to understand death. One minute we are here, the next, gone to a voyage toward dust.
The dark guy who had to be Italian, walked over for a long look at Ella. Billy stopped short of him, wheeled in my direction.
"Anything happen while I was gone?"
I shook my head.
He waved a hand before my eyes to ascertain if I was still amongst the living. "You with us, Jones."
I managed to project, "Nothing happened."
Italy started toward me. "This is inspector Kelly, Al."
Kelly? The flavoring that goes into the admixture of the races certainly was out to prove you can't tell a guy's nationality by looking at him.
"I understand this is your dressing room, Jones," the man of law began.
"I took it over today-"
"Mr. Bloom tells me you both walked in here and found the deceased." His eyes did a little exercise from the corpse then back to me. "Did you leave this room or did anyone enter it when Bloom left to put through a call to Police Headquarters?"
My answer was blunt, "No."
"Did Miss Palmer come up here before you went on stage this evening?"
Billy turned his intelligent lamps on me and I glanced away. Parasitical worms of fear began to eat away at the edges of my mind.
I hesitated too long. Kelly cocked his head a little to one side as he seemed to sniff out a weakness in my character. "She visited you, didn't she, Jones?"
"Only to wish me luck."
"I understand your relationship with Ella Palmer was quite cordial-."
I first gave Billy a look of contempt then tied down my angry sails and lit into Kelly. "Look, cut out the incrimination horseplay-."
"I'm not accusing you of a thing, Jones. I'm just after the facts-nothing but the facts." He took a long deep breath. Tension was building up in him. "When you left to go on stage was Miss Palmer still in this room?"
"No!" I shot back, a little more edge in my voice.
"Do you know if anyone saw her leave?"
"Hell no-"
Bloom joined the verbal mayhem at this juncture. "I'll ask around, Inspector. Ella was my choreographer. Her girls are doing one of her creative dance routines right now."
"In the meantime-" Kelly began.
I checkmated him with, "Why don't you ask Bloom about the row he had with Ella over the differences in the price tag he purchased us at-." To hell with fame, I told myself. Bloom was out to hang any guy's hide if it would clear him and his establishment. He had a reputation to keep-I was just a beginner, a tall-talking neophyte.
"What in the hell kind of a gag is this, Jones?" Billy Bloom flamed on all burners. "You trying to hang suspicion on me?"
I whirled in his direction, facing him squarely. "I'm not a member of the buttercup family, Bloom. How would Kelly get the idea I was playing house with Ella unless you told him?" I turned to the man of law and released both barrels, "Ain't that right, Inspector?"
Bloom jumped back as if he had touched a hot oven and Kelly emitted a faint laugh for my camp. Illuminating oil lit up his lamp-like-eyes. "Is what he says correct, Mr. Bloom?"
"Aw, he's all wet. Ella and me were always clashing. It's part of the behavior pattern of show business. Nerves, pure nerves, that's all. I was always firing her-or she was walking out on me. Ask any of the group, they'll tell you the same story."
A little round-shouldered guy, replete with the professional filibuster stance of a socially secure field-marshal, entered the room and went immediately to the deceased after a nod from Kelly.
"The coroner's report will fix the time of death." There was something in Kelly's countenance, something beyond the way he said the words that gave me the impression he was withholding something. It was hidden in his face yet half revealed-like an invisible ink impression that becomes indistinct on second glance.
"That'll be all for the moment, gentlemen."
Bloom drew a deep influx of air into his lungs then directed a series of infuriated words at me. "What in the hell are you trying to prove? You sized Ella up as a mattress job and now you're trying to run me in on a murder trip to the big house-."
Kelly was already out of earshot at the far end of the room. I glanced at his back before mixing anger with Billy. "How do you figure that?"
He pointed a theatrical finger at me, "Judas! That's what you are."
I pushed him with a friendly shove toward the door which he obviously misconstrued for an aggressive move on my part. He shot an awkward fist toward my face and I ducked. "Knock it off, Billy. You're pumping air when it comes to sending roundhouse punches at me."
He lowered his eyes then turned in the direction of the stairs.
Dreamboat herself, Mona Lane stood resolutely at the bottom of the stairs. Billy passed her by as if she was a poltergeist.
Her hand touched mine in a meaningful act of persuasion. "I'd like to have a word with you."
I shrugged and nodded in Billy's direction. "The leader calls," I replied sarcastically.
Billy slowed his walk, turned toward us. "You coming, Jones?"
"In a minute," I pounded out, a lot of my true personality springing into the words.
Something in the tone of what I said, rather than the meaning implied caused him to look introspectively in my direction and mumble something inarticulate, something alien. He moved from the framework of the backstage.
Her tone was confidential, in trenched in uncomfortable, crowded words. "You know about the old man, don't you?"
I looked at her as though she was three foot tall and my words flew back at her from a dry throat, "Look, I don't know anyone but you and Bloom around this place. Strictly introduction stuff. I met you on the way up to my dressing room earlier this evening-."
A look of yesterday's thoughts inked up her eyes with protest that leaked into her voice, "I'm trying to help you. Don't you remember the old man who asked Ella for money?"
I reddened. "Yeah, a regular fast touch artist if I ever saw one. What's the relationship?"
"Ella's father-."
Her bulbous breasts seemed ready to burst the thin layer of cloth that encased them. This protrusion of warm flesh distracted me for a moment, making her words seem of secondary importance. There was a faint smell of natural perfume coming from her person. It gave me the impression, the instinctive feeling that she was pure upstate, better class Americana. Even though she looked the part there wasn't a promiscuous passion in her body.
"Ella's old man, huh? So what?"
Her glance took in the far end of the sound stage where a couple twinkle-toes were rehearsing a sexy dance routine. I looked in this direction and a whole acre of solid ass in skin-tight tights wiggled in momentary action. Then this superbly calculated action ended in a sexless series of knee-bend exercises.
"We can't talk this out-here. Why not come to my place in a half hour?"
Something was hidden behind her smile, something that spelled a muted reminder of what I already surmised lay behind the faded edges of Billy's personality. The guy was some kind of strange, submerged being who would crush anyone who stood in his way.
"O.K. sweetheart, but I'm not off the hook this minute. There's a slender chance that I might get away for a couple hours, and if I do-?"
"6482 8th Avenue-" she breathed out, her words conveying a hint of music in their hushed tone.
CHAPTER FIVE
My instincts were correct about Mona Lane. Her name might have sounded like a plush pseudonym created by some gifted press agent, but her apartment was a far cry from some of the seedy dwellings usually inhabited by fledgling gals who wished success on that strip of asphalt known as Broadway.
Many a Hollywood star would have turned green with envy at what I saw. There wasn't a cheap piece of furnishing in the spacious living room that could easily have been construed as a young ball room.
She looked like a slim instrument of love as she stood poised before me, an overpowering expression of question marks stamped in her deep-blue eyes. The very freshness of her being, her superb attractiveness spelled success. The controlled rhythm of her hips as she moved toward the back of the room and settled her scented bottom on a high stool that addressed a brief cocktail cabinet caused me to gulp down a shady thought or two germinated from my sex department.
"You got an angel backing you for the big time or something?"
Her lower lip came into play and she washed it with a hasty tongue of denial. Her voice was filled with back-bristling sounds, "We Americans are always looking into the other fellow's cubicles for new delectables-."
"I wouldn't exactly call this place a cubicle-."
She stormed back in true school-girlish style, "I hate a father's millions, they get into the way of me, my progress as an individual, a person."
She extended a long, thin, expensive glass of mysterious liquid in my direction.
"That's the wrong kind of hate, it's misplaced. A girl with your kind of thoughts could end up murdered in. this money-hungry profession of make-believe."
I took a long, trusting swig from the fifty dollar glass. It tasted like the chemistry that made up her being. I told myself it would be difficult to get away from Mona Lane once she set a trap for you.
She -eyed me in a kind of foreign, unAmerican way. Not the affected glance of someone recently returned from Europe, but a piercing, all-searching, ogling inspection of person that was striving to find truth.
"Like it?" She questioned, nodding toward the drink.
"Good," I managed with a small burst of pleasure.
In an undramatic gesture of sweeping pleasure that filled her being, she reached out and engulfed my head in both of her hands and kissed me with sustained longing.
"What's that for?" I shot back with furrowed puzzlement. "I'm not here for a gab-fest on your father's ability to make money and your ambitions to become another Garbo."
The warmth drained from her being and the mind that created it dulled. "I just wanted to be friendly-."
I mocked her status, her social status. "All you dames are alike. You don't owe patriotism to any man. Each guy's cock is better than the last."
She blinked a couple times on this dialogue as I handed her an empty glass.
"Fill it up again."
Her hands moved trembling toward the means of admixture, her eyes settling finally on my own. "I've never laid in a bed with a man. Strange as it might seem, that's the truth."
I fished around in my mind for words to answer her but they were all half-asleep. They were passe, full-skirted utterance of the generation in which I had matured, completely alien to her way of thinking.
Her chest did a little dance as she turned to face me, waiting for me to say something. The intimidating silence was broken when she slashed through it with, "Billy Bloom tried to seduce me-he's an animal-"
Seduce? The very mention of the word brought a smile to my lips. I tried to make my words sound casual. "We're all animals, sweetheart-some a little more than others. One of these days you'll make your contribution to the human race with a half dozen brats. You can't fight nature. So, why try to make a special demon out of Billy Bloom."
A coldness seeped into her voice. She became pure ice water. "I thought you were a different type person-."
"What in the hell are you trying to pull?" I said, knifing away at the words. "Look, sister, you're in the wrong profession. Who the hell ever heard of a sexless actress, much less a dancer. You've got the body of a golden goddess and that's why Bloom hired you. Life's not a flawless period of good, it's dirty water all the way up to your lovely ass-."
I placed my empty glass on the counter and reached for her, yanking her to her feet. Bewilderment shot into her face and she pounded away at my chest with small fists. Her compact little body tensed as I drew her head upward, the finely shaped lips drawn tight. I didn't have an ace in my pocket, the cards were stacked against me, so what the hell. Someone stuck a knife in Ella Palmer and I was deep in the soup.
I crashed my lips down on her. Murmuring anger boiled in her throat. As I held the back of her head firmly with one hand, I allowed the other to play searchingly down her body, finally settling on her buttocks. Her thighs stiffened as she moved closer in a little convulsive grind. Obviously, some kind of chemical change was taking place. Some exciting, secret experience was causing her to brush with longing against my leg.
I dug determined fingers into her round bottom and she groaned. She relaxed-seemed to be entrusting herself to me. She was much like a girl who was thrashing about in an angry sea without a life preserver.
She opened her eyes and measured me across the universe of sight and sound.
A flow of loose hair settled in a slow cascade across one of her eyes and she nudged it away with a toss of her head. The glaze of passion, the same desperate expression of desire I had seen in a hundred girls' eyes, settled in hers.
As I slipped my hand away from the back of her head, she caught it in her own, kissed it, touching each finger with her lips.
I was aroused. All the cunts I had ever laid were debased compared to this girl-woman. The whole instinctive riddle of flesh, of getting hot and growing cold had nothing to do with her. She was one of those one-man creatures mothers like to see their sons marry.
But the price tag? The family pressures that obviously lay behind the facade that stood in all directions about me, what about those apples?
I was a poor guy looking for a nest egg, one I could create on my own. The kind of substantial realization of a man doing something with his mind in a clever way.
What in the hell kind of thoughts were these with an armful of hot girl who wished to explore the wilderness of sex for the first time?
I began to laugh, the kind of self-ridicule a guy feels about his inhibitions from time to time. Maturity? Unquestionably. A guy goes through the theatrical judo of sex at least fifty times before he settles down with some near rhinoceros with whom he takes an oath of allegiance, until death do we parti That's a dutiful measure of months and years in which a man explores few crops of females springing up all about him. That's one hell of a long time.
She was thrusting against me, slashing away like an unleashed animal, just aware of her maturity.
In perfect control, I pushed her away. "What is it you wish to tell me?"
She stood there, shaking all over, striving to retain some semblance of an upstate New York girl of high society.
Her lips parted in amazement. "You mean-you mean, you can throw me aside like that-after what we've just done?"
There was a frantic cry, a deep down painful cry in her voice.
"We haven't done a damn thing," I announced, lying in my teeth. I was out to prove a biological point to myself, and this was the time for it.
She walked to the center of the room like an actress in a great Broadway hit and folded her arms akimbo. "Why don't you prove that I'm a woman?"
I didn't answer her at first. I merely reached over the bar and found a bottle to my satisfaction and fed it man-size into my drained glass. "What's there to prove? You're either a woman or you like girls."
I turned on her as if she were a specimen in a laboratory test tube. "Well?"
She raced trembling hands to her face, concealing it. She sank to the floor as if she were pure shadow, not a bone in her lovely body. "You don't understand-"
Her words were more introspective than I could ever imagine. They were only meant for her ears, a diary speech, pure Spencerian in their concept.
What in the hell kind of people did Billy Bloom hire?
Ella knew all the stops along the way, at least fifty wise-guy conversationalists had directed her toward their beds. It was another way of telling the world that a woman of talent could place a high price tag on her body. A thousand stage and screen actresses had settled up the balances of weight and measures before her and came out shining in Broadway lights, but Ella had something else predestined for her in the bonepile of humanity. Someone had stuck a knife into her while I was on stage, mocking the humanities.
Private school, the better establishments for rich girls, those factories that turn out stamped examples of "the best female of our generation" lay almost lifeless before me.
I pitted my own personality against hers. This was a new age, one of revolt. There were no more tomorrows, the bomb lay in the balance sheet of all the tomorrows. Why sex? Why the twisted, fermenting wonderment of carefully fabricated speech in order to entice one another.
The age of status flesh was over. The eyes of tomorrow were turned inward, they were forever seeking the harvest of truth. Woman was woman, man was man, there was no secret amongst them. All the smuggled tendencies of sexual denial were commonplace. If a man desired a man, he told his female mate so. If a woman was half gay, jaded, she expounded the subject forthright.
The immaturity of the scene, the fervent need of sexual appeasement was a new kind of vice for me. It was like looking into the cloistered mind of God.
Whores are a dime a dozen, most women are whores. Purchased security is whoredome.
I approached her; stood motionless above her prone form. Climates of emotion raced in and out of my body.
"You gonna lie there all day?"
She shook childlike shoulders, burying her head in shallow arms.
"Let's go to bed!" I demanded.
A climactic change settled into the form. Bones suddenly erected it from the floor.
She sat with a toss of cloud-like hair like a patient awaiting a doctor. "I'm ready."
She rose from the floor in an explosive tide of desire. "This way."
CHAPTER SIX
There's no substitute for reality, especially in matters of sex. A guy goes around with a lot of subtropical notions about well-carved female creatures from first manhood until the day his sexual urge runs dry. From there on out, he becomes a full-fledged Christian and all the Cleopatras he punctured in the past suddenly become comic fantasies.
Exploding one's emotions into a woman is like carving your initials in heaven. Strange fruit is always the best. Your ears fold back and your eyes sweep across the universe for one sudden burst of eternity and you cry out, "Baby, I'm coming!"
Virgins like Mona Lane must be mastered like young colts. The smooth young flesh of them can become a roaring sea of inflamed emotion if they are stored by proper method. Not the kind of hasty, dog-eared, stevedore antics the stilted lovers of poverty-row dish out, but the cool finagling of a master who gets his fancy work in the proper places where they gather the greatest moss. The fakir can conjure up bags of spiritual tricks like the priest, and the sketchwork of divinity they etch on the mind remains there until the testicles begin to send out messages to the brain and old man Devil takes over the reins.
Virgins are usually pure exoskeleton. They have done a few years of mental crocheting about a man's penis as a kind of polka dance to reality. They have pictured in their mind's eye the incision of a man's organ into their being as a kind of skilled and devilish operation that is alien to their being.
It's a fractious period they will one day face, a moment or two when they will hear their mother's voice cry out, "Don't let him do it!"
I sensed that Mona was proof-reading me to the core when we entered her bedroom. There was that look on her face, the same kind of built-in fortification a guy gets to know if he's been around broads long enough.
Her mouth was bone dry, all the moisture of her being had been drained dry from her lips. "Promise you won't hurt me?"
Her fore-front reared up at me, the nipples of her huge breasts hungered in their tautness. I leaned forward allowing the full pressure of my body to lend an involuntary emphasis to my intention. She instinctively encompassed my waist with trembling arms.
We sat motionless on the edge of the bed, her heavy breathing in my ear.
Finally, I introduced an amusing note into the dramatics, "What happened to all your bravery?"
She tightened her grip on my arm, her eyes turned strangely inward. "Maybe if we do it standing up-maybe it will be less dangerous....
I burst out laughing again. "That's a lost exercise, the way the American boys used to frolic with the English girls during World War II. They still ended up with their ovens creating babies."
She slid away from me, giving me a disdainful look. "You make everything sound so cheap. You really do."
Her breasts swayed a little during this action. The full wealth of them would have had my teeth chattering if I had not had better control of myself. I was counting mental fences all the way.
In wild abandon I provided her with the square root of sex, "Look, I'm not some kind of an electric drill you can turn off and on at a moment's decision. I'm fresh like you, baby. I've bedded down with a few marvels in my time, and known a few detours along the way. So if you want to trust my judgment in these matters, let's hop to it!"
"You make it sound like a game," she managed to spit from parched lips.
I gathered her into my arms like a small child and when I looked at her I. ie again new depth of emotion had replaced the indecision of seconds before.
She blinked at heavens beyond me then -eyed me with a degree of fear as a new wave of passionate thought crossed her mind. "Why don't you kiss me down there. It's clean, I always keep it clean."
"You mean you want me to dive in the muff?"
She nodded then withdrew from me as if I was some tormenter who could read her most intimate thoughts. "You've got a dirty mind."
"Have I really? Look, is this going to degenerate into some kind of contest or other?"
I reached for her and she sidled further away.
"Are you going to play harder to get? Look, I've got the law at my back and this is no moment to sit and pamper an obstinate virgin."
She burst into childish tears, her hands concealing her face.
I got to my feet and dropped my hands, slid my shorts from my hide. My penis was fully resolved for war. I stood before her.
She lowered her arms and stared at my erection. "It's so big, so unlike you."
I didn't say a word. She reached out and with quivering hands directed my manhood toward her mouth.
I clutched her head with both hands. If instinct caused her to play the safe side of sex-that's the way the dice of fortune would have to fall.
I inched toward her as her eyes turned inward and her lips tensed about my organ. She bit the end of my sex and I tensed. Her full lower hp slid upward along the length of my erection and eased the prodding stiffness toward her throat. This gal knew her oats, there was no other word for her thirsting after my flesh.
Her head began to move jerkily back and forth in a tight little swinging motion and the sensation that began to boil in me burst like a thousand tempests in my loins.
Her hands gently cupped my testicles and drew them back toward my anus. "Oh-wonderful," she managed in a slight, strange voice, filled with an ecstatic delight.
Her warm, smooth tongue was thrilling my penis as it worked with feverish hunger.
I was approaching a climax and didn't want it to happen that way. I didn't want to burst forth into her mouth. There had to be something more, something to complete my pleasure.
I applied pressure to her head, forcing her to surrender my manhood. She clamped her teeth into hard flesh and I shouted in pain. "Cut that out!"
She was squirming now, the pent up emotion m her could not be shut off.
"Coming, I'm coming," she cried out in muffled tones. The words sounded as if they were spoken oeneath a pillow.
She stiffened then her body twitched and writhed. The fierce burning at the end of my penis as it struck the back of her throat told me there was no turning back. It would have to be this way.
Her tongue began its secret, instinctive mission again, and I moved closer to the chasm. I thrust the full length of my hardness into her and when I looked down her face was concealed in a forest of blonde hair.
I knew that strange slipping away feeling, that pulsating expansion of what must have been widening her mouth. It would happen any second now. I was climbing the last few feet of that height beyond all heights.
My legs were trembling, ready to give way as I ground into her mouth.
The hot splash of liquid sped from me in bursts and she reached out and down, grasping me firmly by rigid buttocks as my seed spent itself.
I was breathing heavily like a guy at the end of round ten. My heart was in my mouth.
She drew back her head and released my penis. It looked like a great red log that had been half consumed by fire.
She fell back across the bed, hiding her face with trembling hands. "I was bad, I did something dirty-!"
She was crying the dreadful cry of conscience. I fell across the bed beside her and thrust my hands between her thighs. Moisture met my finger tips and she wound her legs around my arms, pulling up tight. "No, no, I won't let you do it."
I yanked my arms away as she strove to get to her feet. She beat against my chest with small fists.
I struck her squarely across the face and she grew still, her shoulders hunched forward like a bird that had just had its wings clipped.
I felt myself growing hard again. It's always that way when a guy fights to possess something new. It's part of the mystery of life. She didn't say another word. I had cut away the threads of her defense when I struck her. All the desire to hang on to her virginity had been short-circuited. I reached down and with a firm grasp, yanked her panties from her. Her eyes were fixed on my penis as if she was in a trance. I pushed slowly into her and felt the flesh of her vagina grip me with a possessiveness known only to itself. She was tight and with timid upward thrusts and extended thighs she accepted me. Slowly, ever so slowly I sank deeper into her with short rhythmic thrusts, gaining great leverage as I sank my knees into the mattress. She moved her head from side to side, her mouth agape, her face contorted with passion. She began to move with me, affecting my stroking motion with wild abandon. Her tongue shot out as if it was still licking my penis, it pistoning movements intensified my passion. She wrapped her arms about my neck and forced my head toward her tongue, then licked my face. In a series of lunging movements she shot her sperm. The walls of her vagina opened and I sank to the full depth of her.
Little incoherent words escaped from her like potent forecasts of things to come.
"Tell me your peter belongs to me and no other girl? Tell me!"
"It's all yours forever," I gasped.
"Forever and forever?"
"That's a long time, baby, but I'll try to do my best."
Her breasts were swaying with the tide of our unrelenting desire. She swung her soft, full fleshed thighs upward and around me, pumping her nest back and forth to meet the added emphasis of my own striking stride.
"I'm coming again," she shrilled as she dug fingernails into my back. "Come with me, honey!"
The bed began to rock with our intense motion. Her hands moved wildly over my person, finally settling on my buttocks. They toyed with the rigid roundness of each cheek. Then, with a persistence brought on by intense desire, I felt a small finger nudge playfully at my anus. Its moistness gave way and accepted the finger.
I felt my penis stretch to greater length.
"Now, now," she screamed, "come with me now!"
A dam burst loose within her causing her eyes to roll back in her head. Simultaneously I discharged my seed in her as she buried her finger to its depth.
We lay stark still, bathed in one another's sweat, striving to catch our breath. We had climbed back to earth from a million miles in space.
Something that happens to a lot of girls in experiences like these happened to Mona Lane. She was radiant like a landscape after a spring shower.
"Know something-?" she whispered.
"Like what?"
"Like maybe you and I were meant for one another."
"I've been reading the same sheet of music."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mona finally got around to telling me about Ella Palmer's old man. She had been standing in the wings while I was swinging through the pastures of my act. Seems the old guy followed Ella up the flight of stairs to my dressing room. Moments later she heard their voices raised in heated argument. This contention was cut off abruptly as Ella's old man came running down the stairs, muttering to himself.
Mona said he was up tight and she followed him as he left the place through the stage door. When she turned in the direction of the wings again, Billy Bloom stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking upward.
It all sounded like a cock-and-bull story, straight from a ham-slingers version of a ten cent thriller movie. But I wanted a gal like Mona in my deck of cards. Anyone who could cool it like she did in bed had to be a winner.
Virgin? Right down to the certified blood stains. I gave her a quick education on the facts of sexual life while she looked on like some glorious herbaceous plant in full bloom.
She never batted an eyelash but gathered her thoughts in some secret corner of her mind, looking at me as if I was a tin god straight from the junk yard of humanity.
What I had to tell her was old hat, a thumb worn text of elemental hygiene. But what I most suspected I didn't tell her. I had been through a hell of a lot of sexual wars in my time, and I could pretty well size up a broad. For my money, there was no other way of getting around the diagnosis, Mona was a nymphomaniac.
Some fast-trotting gals can have two or three climaxes in a single session with a hot male, but Mona was new to the sexual trade, and if I had gone the full route with her, she would have broken the record in the climax department.
Not that I wasn't close to becoming a mammoth in my sexual endurance, but when it came right down to catching spirited upheavals, Mona would have me crying for mercy.
I hailed a taxi and got down to Billy Bloom's five minutes before stage appearance. Stage? That's an awkward word for the improvised funny-farm Billy passed off as an outlet for talent. He was trying to boot me in the can for Ella's murder and I was thirsting for his hide in an alley rumble. Turmoil, that's all life had been for me. The rise and fall of the microscopic analysis of urine. A license to practice hate.
I examined Billy's office as I entered the joint. It was vacant. I moved like a guy on tall stilts; the place was alien to me.
I just couldn't validate the place in my mind. For one, why had Inspector Kelly left me off the handle? Was he playing odds against the possibility that I would trip the hammer of justice and come up guilty of the crime? If this was his route of investigation, he was an egg-head of the lowest water.
The world is made up of egg-heads, every guy's got his own private mental pagoda from which he views humanity. The Joe Pyne Show imputes this fact. The American magic of superior human intelligence is a farce.
A new face, something that glittered with Hollywood commercialism, stood beside Billy. She was sewed up in a brief athletic affair that showed off her architecture to the Nth degree. She was tall and willowy with plenty of sap in her veins.
Billy met my eyes with cheer in his own. The buyer in his blood was vat-dyed in his expression. "Jones! Just the man I want to see."
He took me like a piece of furniture by the arm and directed me toward the girl. "I want my stars to get to know one another. Jones, meet my latest discovery, Vale Cloud."
She gave me one of those underlooks which are commonplace amongst the second-best variety of hams along the paved alleys of the asphalt jungle.
"Pleasure," she said, bathing the word in affected Little Theatre British.
"Same here," I intoned.
Billy's kisser beamed as bright as a silver dollar, all the impetuous nonsense of his true nature was buried in three feet of amiability. "Vale's my new whipping girl-she's got a long list of choreography credits to her name." He turned to the female statue and planted a fatherly kiss on her cheek. "Tell him a few of the novelties you created."
She nudged him aside and came toward me. "Don't I know you from somewhere? Didn't you do a comedy act at the Magic Eye in Frisco?" She clicked her fingers together, blinking up a cosmic storm from her memory pits. Then, an astonished glow took possession of her beautiful features. "Say, you're not the Al Jones, are you?"
"That was a long time ago in fantasy land, pre-Vietnam days. I've been a soldier boy since then."
She clasped me by the hand with deep affection, or was it pure showmanship. There was a lot of phony in this broad. "That wasn't any skin off your teeth, Al. No sir. True talent's always there."
She turned her undertook on Billy whose eyes never missed a wrinkle in the entire scene. "You've got a million dollars worth of talent in this man, Mr. Bloom."
Bloom's chest went out about three feet, his cash register brain was clicking away at the dollar signs.
"Yeah, Al's number one man around here these days. He don't know it, but one of the top drawer agents caught his show yesterday and he has contract signing in his eyes." He examined his wrist watch and whirled in my direction. "What in the hell's the matter with you, Jones? You got half a minute stage time and not an ounce of grease paint on your kisser."
He gave me a polite shove toward my entrance and I felt refurbished with Vale's praise. A whole regiment of criticism could be covered away by a few off-hand remarks from someone who appreciated your talent.
The tinpan alley orchestra sounded like a burlesque group, hitting a foul note here and there, just for sheer lip practice.
The spotlight found me in an Orpheus state of mind and I ran through some ancient Greek poetry after the fashion of Gleason. All the horse laughs in the world greeted my ears.
I had them by the vertebrae. A laugh is a laugh, no matter the implication. Mandolins were playing in my mind.
The morbid American snicker of self satisfaction soon came into being when I took on the role of President Johnson.
I gave a limey version of what was wrong with America and thought the roof of the theatre would fall on my head.
I saw a fleet of Cadillacs in my garage area; the limelight of personality had been turned on.
Then I saw him, old gun-shoes himself, Inspector Kelly. He looked like one of Capone's ace henchmen, seated out there amongst all the expensive jewelry. He had the look on his kisser of a guy who was juggling a lot of thoughts around in his cranial canyons. All of them were dark thoughts from where I stood.
He didn't have a thing on me. I was in the clear all the way. He might try to burst a few clouds in my face, but that would end up pure epilogue.
I drew my act to a close and headed off stage.
Cheers of "More! More!" went up in the house, and when I called for a curtain call, Kelly laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
"I'd like a couple words with you, Jones." He was eagle-eyes as usual and as dead-pan as an undertaker.
"Go take a bow or two, I'll wait," he hastened. "I'll wait."
"To hell with the calls. What's on your mind?"
He faced me squarely like a great hunk of beaver board. "I think we have the character who killed Ella Palmer."
"So?"
"I said, I think-I'm not sure."
He was painting an illusory picture with emotionless words, sharp teeth in each one of them.
"Look, Kelly, climb off my back, will ya? Either book me or leave me alone."
"I've been doing a fast check on you, your army record-all the way back to those Frisco days when you were rubbing dirt in a lot of peoples' faces."
I was getting steamed up real fast. "Honest dirt, honest all the way!"
"No hard feelings, Jones. You're clean. Only-."
He hesitated, taking a long inward look. His lower hp then jutted forward as his eyes narrowed. "Mind telling me where you're staying? I might want to get in touch.."
"I'll give you a jingle right after I rent a room."
Just over his shoulder I caught Mon's sexy image sidling in my direction.
"See that you do," Kelly said without further rhubarb. He turned on his heels and headed toward Bloom's office.
Before Mona could get a word out, Vale Cloud appeared out of nowhere and planted more than a sisterly kiss on my lips. She drew up tight and leaned into me with everything she had. "Al! You were wonderful, simply wonderful. I don't know when I laughed so hard."
She turned her back to Mona and when I had a chance to catch my breath, Mona's eyes had turned to daggers. She just stood there ready to blow a fuse any minute.
"Thanks, Vale," I managed to say, as she turned her underlook on Mona and darted off.
"Who's she?" Mona exploded.
"Your new boss in the dance department. Vale Cloud."
"Well, she doesn't waste any time turning on the heat, does she."
I weighed my words before speaking. "Just show biz-nothing more."
She climbed all over me with possessiveness. "She looks like a cheap bean-pole to me. Everything is false about her-right down to the glued-on eyelashes."
I was getting a secret kick out of the private tirade. She was soaking up a lot of jealousy in short order.
Then, as an afterthought, her eyes took on additional flame. "My boss? Did you say, my boss?"
"That's how Billy Bloom's got her scheduled."
She addressed her ire in the direction of Bloom's office. "Why that double dealing fat slob." She whirled at me. "He promised that I would be next in line-." She took a few steps in the direction of Bloom's office then stopped short. "You're staying with me-aren't you?"
"You mean-we're going steady?"
"That and-" She crossed the few feet that separated us and whispered, "A sleep-in from here on out."
Her intimate, recently educated mouth was full of suggestions.
"For a week or so, yes."
True hurt found her features. "If it's money you're worried about forget it. I could buy this place if you wanted it, Al."
"Say, I must have really been hot stuff-." I gave her a meaningful wink. "O.K., we'll give it a try."
The hurt was washed away and a glowing smile took its place. "You'll never get away from me, darling. I'll keep you happy forever."
This gal was out for blood, and I didn't like it. I'm a loner by nature. Once a woman gets her clutches on you, it's a guillotine every time you smile at another hank of hair.
"That man I saw you conversing with-wasn't he the police?"
"Kelly-" I nodded, passing the name over lightly.
"Did you tell him what I told you?" she said in a halting drift of measured words.
"No. He thinks he has Ella Palmer's murderer-but he's not sure."
Something entered her eyes that made my heart skip a beat. "Did he-did he mention any names?"
I laughed the question off with a hit of characteristic whimsy all my own. "Kelly? That guy's character is soaked in concrete, he doesn't give an inch."
She sucked in a deep breath of nervous air and averted perplexed eyes. "What's going to happen to you, my darling? They can't-they simply can't take you away from me."
She toyed with my arm like a small child, her fingers racing in a current of emotion from my elbow to my wrist where they held on for all their might.
She looked as if she was about to have a climax on the spot. Her eyes turned inward with the strange look they took on earlier.
I brought her back to sudden reality just as Bloom appeared around the corner, headed in my direction. A small, expensively clad guy who looked like a Hollywood producer, glided along beside him.
"Don't worry about me, baby, We'll get down to more facts of life tonight. In the meantime, here comes Bloom."
The smile came away from her lips. For a brief second she uttered something inarticulate beneath her breath and walked away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The familiar handshake the little guy gave me indicated dollar signs. Before he spoke I read in his eyes the publicity layout he had planned for me. This guy just had to be the agent Bloom spoke about.
There was fanfare in my ears and while his handshake was one of those loose-knit affairs, my hourglass into the future was spilling a lot of sand.
"Jones! Glad to meet you. I'm Sol Stone. I handle all the top acts in the country. You ready to sign with me?"
I fell into character. "What's the percentages?"
With a bit of horseplay, Stone turned to Bloom. "This guy one of us?"
Bloom acquired a businesslike attitude. "He ain't got a nickel, so talk low and loud."
The scent of a million sweats and grease paint assailed my nostrils. Something in Stone's personality brought it about. He reeked show business. "Let's have a private talk, Jones. Where's your dressing room?"
I nodded in the direction of the flight of stairs.
"All right with you, Bloom?" he questioned.
"Sure-sure. You two have your private talk, I'll get together with Al later."
We went to my room. Sol planted himself on the middle of the couch. "What's your agreement with Billy?"
"Two hundred a week."
"Contract?"
"No. But I have an idea-he'll want in on wherever I go from here."
He nodded. "Can you blame him? Billy's got a small chunk of a lot of people on Broadway and Hollywood. It's a kind of sixth sense. He can smell real talent a block away." He brushed his coat sleeve with a rapid palm. "Two hundred fish a week, huh?"
He got up and turned toward the open dressing room door, looking down the flight of stairs. "How'd you like to take over top billing at a supper club uptown?"
I didn't bite easy. I sat staring into the makeup mirror as he turned and stood a pace away.
"What kind of dough are you talking about?"
"Five bills."
I held on to myself, then got to my feet. "Paint me a picture, Stone. What'll it be, six months of gravy then out to pasture on Broadway's no man's land?"
"All my people are working. I cover more ground than MCA. Check my record. What's more, you come out looking big at this first assignment and Hollywood will be your next stop."
He was the kind of guy you could never disbelieve. He walked around with contracts in every pocket.
"When do I start?"
"Next Monday. Is it a deal?"
"Lemme think it over."
He extracted a card and shoved it in my hand. "I'll give you until tomorrow. Put through a call to my office about three-thirty."
He started through the doorway and was half way down the flight of stairs when I called to him. "What's the name of the Supper Club?"
"Jack Lambert's."
"Five bills," I said to myself, feeling like a big drunk coming on. I had to have a change of scene. I gave the room a quick check and imagined I saw Ella stretched out on the cot with a knife stuck in her. Yeah, I just had to gather dirt under my feet. There was no other way out.
"What was that all about?" came a voice from the doorway. Mona stood there like a mother hen.
A toothsome grin spread over her upstate New York features.
I made my answer short and sweet. "Look, Mona, I don't like anyone keeping tabs on me. I'm old enough to get around on my own."
The irate retort struck her between the eyes. "Is that any way to talk to a girl who loves you?"
Indefinite wrinkles of apology crossed my forehead. "Sorry I shot off the handle, but I'm all up tight. The law's still not too sure that I didn't kill-."
She came toward me, taking me into her arms. "What's that got to do with Sol Stone paying you a visit?"
She backed away and I handed her a foolish grin. "Nothing, really. He wants to sign me to a contract."
She encased me in those lovely arms of hers again. "You-you accepted, of course?"
"I want to think about it-just a little. I still feel like a comic in overalls, clumsy to the teeth."
I told her all the facts in short story form.
"Jack Lambert's is just a short stopover to Hollywood." She took a long, deep look within herself. "But what will happen to poor little me?"
Her chest took on extra measurements as she backed away again and her fingers fixed a stray lock of hair back into place.
"You're the best friend I've got, Mona."
"Friend?" She germinated in a new burst of anger. "I like that! You're the first man I ever had an affair with and you call me friend."
She was close to rage. She struck me impulsively on the cheek, a kind of natural reaction to justify her recently lost virginity.
I grabbed her wrists and drew her toward me. "If we're going to be lovers, let's play it my way. This is a great big world and there's a lot of side shows. Now let's get to your side of the story. Did you have a go around with Bloom over his hiring Vale Cloud?"
She kicked the floor like she was destroying a vermin. "I quit!"
I released my hold on her and in a voice filled with passion while her right hand moved playfully toward my fly, she mouthed, "Oh, darling, you've just got to leave this place."
She was exercising me like a veteran and I was beginning to get an erection. "Let's save all the fun for tonight, Mona."
She started toward the door. "So, until tonight?"
A little confused I went to her. "So Billy shot you down. What are you going to do now?"
"Help groom you to become the biggest item in a movie magazine. One look at you and mother will unleash a four million dollar bank account in any direction I choose."
I leafed through my mind for something appropriate to say but words failed me.
She did a little fox trot down the steel stairs and vanished. Next stop? Bloom's office, of course.
He faced me with a solemn stare as if he was about to engage in mental labors. "Well, Jones, what have you decided to do?"
I sank into a chair. "There's a couple matters I'll have to settle before I can give Sol my answer. This murder business is still hanging over my head-"
He waved his hand before his face in an act to dismiss the thought from my mind. "Forget it. Kelly's got his man, Ella's old sop-head father." He drew in a deep breath of air. "What else is bothering you?"
"Mona-."
The mere mention of the name caused him to leap up and turn on me savagely. "That cunt's blacklisted in my book."
"Why?"
"She can't dance, she can't act, she's nothing from the word go! All she knows how to do is blow a guy!"
His words were crude but straight from the hip. "Blow a guy?"
He sank back into his chair, picked up a cigar, stuck it between his teeth. "Ask any of the stage hands, they'll tell you."
A kind of mental-deficiency overtook me.
"She's keeping that thing between her legs on ice until the right guy comes along. What's more, I just fired her." He mumbled something inarticulate to himself as the cigar moved loosely in his mouth.
"I don't tumble easily, Jones. She can buy her way with a lot of half-baked producers along Broadway, but not with Billy Bloom."
Impotent bitterness subsided to a mere drizzle as he faced me with something close to a smile. "She's not your kind, kid. Get wise to yourself. Some of them lay, some like to blow. If you sign with Sid you can have a dozen of each type whenever the mood seems right."
"That's kind of strange talk coming from a producer who is about to turn me over to the agency wolves."
He got a great belly-laugh out of this. "Oh, I see, you mean Jack Lambert. Don't let that bother you." His eyes narrowed and he leaned across his desk, drumming on it. "Who in the hell do you think Jack Lambert is?" He withdrew his right arm and pounded himself solidly on the chest. "ME! It's a kind of Jewish sideshow trick to make the gentiles believe that the world is not controlled by my people. We're not asleep, Jones, not by a long shot!"
"Do you own Sol, too?"
"That's a dirty question. What right you got asking a question like that, Jones?"
"All the right in the world! I want to know who's paying my checks before I get involved in what sounds like some kind of syndicate."
He lowered his eyes to the desk top and addressed it. "What are you worrying about? You'll be getting 500 dollars a week starting Monday. That ain't hay."
My words were clipped. "I still got to think about it."
He was storming again. "Look, I'm being honest with you 500 is a hell of a lot more than 200. It all comes out of the same pocket. What's the beef?"
"How do you figure in Sol's contract-you get a cut?"
He withdrew the cigar and held it out before him like a statesman about to deliver a message to the world. "You sign that contract and I own you. Does that answer your question?"
"Perfectly. One thing more-"
"Fire away!"
"Is there really a Jack Lambert?"
"What's the matter, aren't you up on the times? Lambert was top contender for the heavyweight championship of the world a couple years ago-."
"The only sport I'm familiar with is bed warming."
He cocked his head a little to one side and kindled up a fiery passage for me. "Like maybe what will happen if you don't give that Mona dame the brush."
He withdrew the cigar and studied it closely. "If you're not thinking in terms of money, there's a lot of other comics ready to kick you aside."
He was edging for the kill. "It's a deal at six hundred a week."
He frowned and looked as if he had just been awakened from a deep sleep. "You'd be making more than Lambert-an' that ain't right. Who says you're that good. There's a hell of a lot of difference from being a wiseacre down here in the sticks than up in the heart of town. It's five hundred or the deal is closed."
I turned in the direction of the door.
"Hold it a minute!"
"You say something?"
The cigar was stuck in his mouth again. "O.K., six hundred. But, you better be tops!"
CHAPTER NINE
I got to Mona Lane's plush apartment around ten-thirty. I was carrying half a load of booze and felt as if I was walking on an expensive cloud.
She swaggered toward me with those nifty knockers of hers sticking out from beneath some skimpy transparent stuff that added to their dimensions. The skin-tight gold pants she had on looked as if they had been dipped in a solution of liquid gold dust. As she approached, the outline of her sex organ puffed out.
She pressed her pelvis against my instrument of love and with a little swaying motion drew her arms around my waist. I searched her eyes as the thickness of her voice told me the whole story. She had probably been recapitulating the jaded affair we had had until she had worked herself into near frenzy.
"You're an hour late," she murmured.
I reached down and grasped her by both cheeks. Pure gold flesh swayed beneath my grasp. Her slender arms drew tighter.
"I stopped by a hole in the wall on fifty-second street and had a coupla quick ones."
My words sounded threadbare and her buttocks contracted into sudden hardness as she drove her nest of heavenly torment more meaningfully against my prod.
"That was being silly. Now admit it. I have more refreshments here than in many a local bar."
I recalled Billy Bloom's words, 'blow job' and a little of the passion she was building up caused my peter to grow slightly limp.
She sensed this. "Something wrong?"
"No," I lied.
A dark shadow came into her eyes. She struggled with her words. "It was like a century-waiting for you. I just can't get enough of you."
I wanted to call her what I thought she was-a spoiled millionaire's daughter who surmised her lust could engulf three or more animals in a single night; and I had six hundred dollars a week waiting for me come Monday, but I made up my mind to go along with her playtime antics.
"There really is something wrong. You were hard a second ago-and now it's gone to sleep."
She sharpened the powerful drive of her pelvis in undulating strides as she fairly crashed against me. "You know I want to go all the way with you. You know-"
Her excitement was filled with stark necessity; she was cruising in a mid-stream of passion that had to have appeasement.
I erased Bloom's words from my mind. Removing my hands from the highly accelerated area of her being, I placed them behind her head and drew it toward my lips as I craned my neck.
She met my lips with an open mouth of lustful torment. Her tongue shot forth in exploration, forcing my lips apart. Like some strange all-knowing being it inhabited my mouth in rapid strikes and withdrawals of graduated emphasis that caused my manhood to rise, my limbs to shake.
A whistle escaped from her lips. "Wow, that's more like it."
There was no doubt about it, she had paved the way for a greater session than we had previously had.
She suddenly stopped short and released her hold on me, backing away slowly. Her eyes were directed on my fly. She pointed to it in mock testimony, "Look, he's just about ready to spit at me."
I reached for her but she escaped me and finally settled before that area of the room appointed for alcoholic refurbishments and struck a bartender's stance before it.
"What'll it be, buster?"
I could have laid a ghost that minute, I was so worked up.
Strange how women can tease a guy to an erection and walk away from him and ask for an ice cream cone. All the stanzas of Dante through the rivers of fire never disclosed this strange biological fact.
From one unmanageable lust I turned to another. "Double Scotch," I demanded in a voice filled with disappointment.
She was quick on the uptake. "Don't fret, honey. We've got all night I really want you. Your superbly perfect manhood has been a childhood dream of mine."
She half turned to remove a bottle from its appointed placement on a long series of well supplied shelves and unscrewed the cap from its neck. "Call your pleasure?"
Her slim fingers tightened around the bottle's neck as golden liquid ran from it into a glass. I watched with a wisdom created by long years of drinking.
Half way to the top of the glass I called out, "That's enough for a starter."
She wriggled her ass at me as I drew the glass to my lips. "Do you like my outfit?"
"Baby, you're the greatest."
I had no sooner taken a first sip of straight Scotch when she thundered herself against me. "I'm so hot for you I don't know what I'm doing. Am I being a bad girl?"
The words leaked out before I could contain them. "According to Billy Bloom, you've been hot for a lot of guys!"
It was like hitting her on the chin for the big count-that's how my words struck her.
Her features hardened until they seemed somewhat out of shape. "Do you believe him?"
"Not really, no." A twinge of fear shot through my loins. This gal could get overwrought, unstrung at the drop of a hat. There must have been a lot of Irish in her-that's the only kind of girl who could run the full gamut of emotions in twenty seconds without batting an eye.
She stood there shaking all over, tears of rage running freely down her cheeks. "You shouldn't have said that, Al. You know you shouldn't have!"
In that instant she whirled about behind her and grabbed hold of a bottle by the neck. She turned on me, swinging like a home-run pro.
I faded into the woodwork as best I could. "Hold it, don't take your spite out on me!"
There was murder in her eyes, the kind of overpowering, glazed look a pot-smoker gets when he's high on the stuff.
Before she could inflict a degree of close death on me, I struck her with a merciless slap that could have knocked her cold if my hand was balled up into a fist. Her face went lopsided for a second under the force and pain inflicted by the blow. A short, small cry, more animal than human, took on shrill overtones.
I was quaking in my boots. This gal was ready for the funny farm. I had to quiet her down. I'm no judo expert, but a lot of muscle action comes instinctively to me when I'm cornered.
Before she knew what was happening, the bottle flew in one direction and she was being propelled in another. I directed her faltering steps with a persuasive hand that clutched the nape of her neck and headed for what was most likely the bathroom.
It was, and like the rest of the place, the hot and cold faucets were of the solid gold variety. I turned the one marked C on full force. She was kicking away at my shins like a trip-hammer as I forced her head down into the shallow well of the sink where water cascaded toward the drain.
Her lovely hairdo flattened against her scalp and the full roundness of her skull came into view.
She clawed wildly about in search of me, but I managed to stand far enough away from her and still retain my hold on her without coming in contact with those sharp fingernails.
"Enough," she cried out, in fear for life.
"You sure? Are you going to quiet down and act like a sane person?"
She nodded and I released my hold on her.
She raised her head slowly from the sink, water dripping from her disheveled hair down her face. "You-you're trying to kill me." She backed away to the far corner of the room.
"What?" I shouted. "You're nuts-nutty as a fruitcake." I stood there shaking my head then walked out into the living room. I drooped like a kid who had just had a flogging by his old man out in the woodshed.
I walked over to the bar and pulled out a stool. I examined my hands. They shook like I was about to go into delirium tremens.
I got up and retrieved the bottle from the floor.
I was half way back to the cushioned luxury when, from the corner of my eye, the distressed wreckage of Mona appeared in the bathroom doorway. She just stood there with a vacant stare. I didn't pay any attention to her, but continued toward the stool. Once seated, I filled a shot glass with dream juice and downed it. I was waiting for a powerful explosion to go off. Any minute now the fuse of her emotions would be re-ignited.
, "Al," she called from across the room. The dispute of moments ago had been wrung dry from her voice and something close to tenderness had taken its place.
"Al," a lake of emotion sang out.
"Yeah?"
A lugubrious outcry of tenseness ate at her vitas as she fairly lunged in my direction. She fell at my feet, her hands clutching blindly at my legs. "I don't get that way too often-It's just that I've always been good."
My tone was flat. "Mind if I give you a bit of sound advice. You're lugging a lot of emotional weight around that should be explored by some Fifth Avenue specialist. Baby, I've seen a few females go unhinged in my time, but you win all the goodies in the repertory."
Her hands froze in their upward exploration. "You mean you think I'm going crazy?"
Her head spiraled then settled as she directed meaningful eyes on mine. For a split second I read murder in them and Ella Palmer's image focused sharply in my mind. "What do you think?"
She lowered her eyes and stared at the floor, allowing her hands to remove themselves from my person like dead things. "I'm sane, Al; you've got to believe I'm sane."
The enigma that was Mona, the ferocious Frankenstein that possessed her whenever she was placed on the chopping block was not sane. There was only one thing for me to do-turn off the hots I had for her.
She was nude from the waist up and her aggressive breasts were food enough for a hundred unstable guys.
She got to her feet when the obvious fog had lifted from her tormented mind.
I was ready to down a second shot when she reached down between my legs with fetching fingers singling out my limp manhood. "I love you, Al. You've just got to know that I'm not cheap. Tell me you know I'm not-"
I downed the second shot as she reached for the bottle.
"I've got to move along, Mona. Billy's beating drumfire in my direction."
"To hell with Billy! I can buy and sell him and his trained seals of evildoers." She filled her glass. I had a feeling she was strung together with fine piano wire and that any moment some of them would give way to pressure. "You don't have to work another day as long as you live, darling."
"I'd rather work," I replied as she unzipped my fly, allowing her fingers to seek beyond the opening in my shorts. Once at their destination, she withdrew my penis with a startled moan. "Let's get drunk," she cried. "Let's get drunk and play farmyard."
With one hand on my person and the other delivering a shot glass to her mouth, I sat bolt upright like a guy in a lion's den.
She placed her empty glass on the counter, bent down and took my penis into her mouth.
I had had enough. There was no telling what frame of mind would develop in her makeup of odd tricks. To my amazement, she anticipated my reaction.
As I strove to get to my feet, she clamped her teeth into the hardened flesh. I tensed in sudden agony, slumping back on the stool.
What the hell, I told myself, this was a free ride on the grotesque ferris-wheel of life-let her have her way.
Old man Lucifer must have whispered in her ear as she lubricated my organ with mouthing moisture. The slipperyness, oiliness and smooth whispering sounds of educated lips of flesh was a tonality of sudden storm that could not be stopped.
I rubbed my hands gently up and down her face, keeping rhythm with her sucking and slurping. I was hot to trot now and I wanted my meat without teeth.
"Down on the floor, that's what it's carpeted for."
She nodded her head, leaned back with my rod still in her mouth and her teeth in it. She wasn't taking any chances on losing what she considered her own piece of meat.
"I couldn't leave now if I wanted to and I don't."
I slipped a hand down between her legs, over the blonde bush and the moist slit. It was soft, warm, ready. I inserted a finger, rubbed it up and down her labia, gave it a short, quick thrust and buried it to the hilt. Her mouth opened in a gasp of pleasure/surprise and I withdrew my cock, lay on her full length and probed the tight twat.
Her still open mouth came up for me. She was a weird chick with plenty of hang-ups. One of them was that she needed her mouth full all the time. She was a girl made to satisfy two men at a time.
She licked my face, my chin, my ears before I finally stopped it with my own mouth, inserted my tongue and let her suck on that. Her hard little body was in constant motion under me. She was all squirm, the kind you don't want to fight.
She spread her legs way out, lifted her knees and I felt her heels on my kidneys. She was trying to roll up under me, push her insatiable slit up to me, expose it for massaging. I plunged into it, shoved without worrying about hurting her. She would like it, like anything that happened to her cunt in the form of sensations. She was a glutton for punishment there. She met me lunge for lunge. My hips came down and her pussy came up, her legs locked on my back, pulled me into her, jerked at me hungrily.
As her orgasm approached her movements became more mindless, insistent, animal-like. Her abdomen was a constant ripple of motion under me, undulating as she forced her hips up and retreated, up and back. Her eyes were closed and she was in a little world of her own as she worked out her climax around my organ.
"Oh, Al ... fuck me ... fuck me ... fuck me fuck me...." Her words came out in a strained tone, in rhythm with her body.
She was juicy; we sounded like a squeegy as we slid together and parted. My cock was deep in her when I felt her first tremors followed immediately by an increased pace of her bucking, an increasing violence to all her movements.
"I'm coming," she said in a low voice, a gasp.
"I'm coming I'm coming." Her voice rose to a scream in my ear.
The heavy panting that accompanied her movements would have equaled an out-of-shape wrestler at the climax of his bout. The hot blasts of air came with groans and mumbled words.
I kept up a steady pumping into her groin, increasing my own rhythm to keep pace with hers; she had a quick trigger and, I was afraid, an everready one that would have one orgasm follow another, long after who ever was in the saddle had blown his guts and taken a dive.
She was violent in the throes of the orgasm, alternately stamped her feet on the floor and wrapped them around my back.
"Come with me, Al ... shoot it all in me ... I want it all ... want all of you ... OH! ... I'M COMINGGGG...." she screamed. Her whole body tensed, wrapped around mine, enveloped me, arms, legs, feet, hands, mouth; she held me in flesh wraps as only her cunt moved against me. She was rigid with ecstasy. Her cunt worked in fever heat against the object she held to her. It was a machine all by itself, humping, squeezing, milking me and massaging itself. She was about to explode.
"AAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH...."
Her body uncoiled as the orgasm was loosed; her arms dropped to the floor, her legs unwrapped, braced under her as she arched under me.
"Pump me, Al, pump me," she begged.
I was. My own love juices were flowing and my movements were intense, hard. I rammed my cock deep into her meat, thrust it to the root where our pelvic bones crashed together and prevented my going deeper.
Tremblings of urgent warning came up from my ass, caused my movements to become jerky and wild. I thrust my hips hard into her hairy crotch as the first hot spurt flushed out her insides. Each ecstatic pump made my head reel and my hot staff contract at the base. When the last of my sperm was out I held my cock deep in her, felt the throbbing of it and the twitches of her cunt as it tightened around me.
"Oh, Al, Al, let's rest and do it again."
"It'd take more than rest," I said.
"I'll bring it to life," she whispered.
"With your teeth?"
"I won't use my teeth this time, I promise."
She was already thinking about it, already hot for it, wanted the fullness in her mouth again and it hadn't been a minute since her orgasm.
She was a pit of lust ... a bottomless pit.
She was ugly, alien, her face a riddle of evil. I had to get away or she would dedicate herself to devouring me.
I somehow managed to get to trembling feet, zipping up my pants as I did so. The world seems to be rotating at a critical moral angle these days. The great red shadow of Russia is slowly engulfing the earth, sowing the seeds of unrest amongst the races and they are being drained of hope for a better America. A comedian can no longer relate his message without dialogue compounded with filth. There's a high market for the telling of filth. A guy would starve to death if he resorted to straight lines-lines of comedy that were acceptable twenty, thirty years ago.
These thoughts voyaged through my mind as I pulled up my zipper. If I stuck around her any longer I would become as sick as she was. I had to get out and breathe fresh air or what was left of it after the smog, the New York City smog had taken over.
Like an inescapable fate she summoned herself before the entranceway, leaning back in a coy attitude against the doorframe. "You can't leave me, Al."
"I'm sorry, Mona; but that's the way it'll have to be."
A spirit of utter dejection settled in her face, as if she had just been kicked in the teeth by a horse. She didn't have to say a word, it was all there in her face, the desperate desire to belong to something, to matter.
I pushed her gently aside and flung the door open. My mind was punctured through and through with a million holes. There wasn't anything I could say.
CHAPTER TEN
There was no doubt about it, Inspector Kelly was playing hide-and-seek for the true murderer of Ella Palmer. It would take a pretty desperate father to kill a daughter for booze money. The odds were stacked in that direction. Mona? She was tailored her murder. Billy? He was a kind of halfwit genius of cunning whose mind was honeycombed with a dozen eerie recesses where manslaughter might easily enter the picture. But great gobs of money would have to be tied up in the package of human affairs.
It was much too early to speculate on all the ramifications of the case. Billy's latest addition to his ensemble of quaking second-raters, Vale Cloud, was too far out on the perimeters of the case in question to count. Or was she? The rank and file of Broadway is filled to the core with mystery. Each guy will kill his brother for a healthy bit of dialogue in a winner play. Billy's joint spelled pay-dirt and Vale could have ransacked her brain for a way of eliminating Ella from her post once and for all.
The whole picture was out of focus, even down to Sol Stone who was one of Billy's ace puppets. He was an extravagantly dressed ten-percent viper in Billy's commando operation to overtake the entertainment field.
Producer or actor, we're all the same. You don't go into this business unless you get blood on your manly hands. You've got to chop a lot of heads off if you ever expect to get to the top.
I went back to Billy's and headed for the big star on Vale Cloud's door. Soft sounds of music emanated from beyond it. Cheap hi-fi sounds rendering a cheaper popular melody.
"Who's there?"
"Mr. Al Jones."
A rampage of muffled sounds ensued as a slice of pale light etched its way across the door's quick opening. She stood there with half a pound of cold cream on her face.
"Honey, come in."
I slid beyond the aperture in an apathetic mood. "You alone?"
"Just me and a beaten up record player. "A motherly sound of distress escaped her lips. "Honey, you're down in the dumps. What's wrong."
"Too much cheap booze, it always sends my thought in the wrong direction."
She shook her head at this remark, transplanting a wistful grin to her lips. "It's more than that. You had a word or two with Mona?"
"You know Mona?"
"In a kind of stumbling acquaintance way. She's a kind of willowy mist in the astral heavens."
"Meaning?"
"Want me to speak the truth?"
"Spill it."
She directed a positive, outstretched thumb toward the floor. "Plenty for dough but no talent."
I looked around for a bottle. The room looked like the Sahara desert.
"I know that look," she sang out from a deep sea of emotion, reaching into some shadowy depth behind the machine that was belching forth fractured sounds, producing a bottle of Vodka. "Will this do?"
"Like a lifebelt on a stale Sunday."
A couple of glasses materialized from the dark corner and she filled them. "Talk up, Al. I'm a glad listener."
I accepted the drink. "Like, I'm mister nobody this minute. The baritone has gone out of my voice."
She read the meaning of my words beyond the poetry contained in them. "You mean she does that to you-robs you of your sense of manhood."
"How'd you put it a second ago, 'she's a kind of willowy mist in the astral heavens?'" I shook my head. "No. She's standing knee deep in the filth and slim of this rotten world."
My words caused her to blink. "You mean she's one of those people whose libido is in a constant salacious state?"
She applied a towel to her face, first directing it to the comer of her sensuous mouth then up one side of her countenance and down the other. Her true character came into plain view. She was somebody else, an intelligent human being at least ten years older than I had realized. Heavy stage makeup hides a lot of shadows. There was a lot of honest frankness in the woman who now stood before me, removing an empty glass from my hand.
As she walked away from me the silken transparency of the thin robe she wore revealed long shapely legs that were designed by an inspired creator. Her hips were fully rounded and her select buttocks talked to me as she moved.
This is true woman, I told myself as she glided back toward me with a fresh drink.
She had obviously been weighing my words as I accepted the drink. "Don't mess up your career with a lot of strange women, Al. You're not green behind the ears. You know the score." She settled back in a good imitation of what resembled a comfortable chair. "I kid a lot of producers into believing I have talent coming out of my ears, but it's not the real thing. I steal a little successful personality here and there and come on looking like fifty people at once. With you," she hesitated, conjuring her thought, "it's all meat, straight to the bone." She looked me straight in the eye. "So?"
She had sized me up like a boy scout lost in a strange woods. "Thanks, Vale. Thanks a million."
I was more than half drunk and a little sleepy.
"I'm glad you see the light. Too many people in our business are on a constant Mexican hay-ride."
The robe slid from her knee and a portion of suggestive knee and thigh came into view.
She detected the instinctive meaning gone into glance and gave a friendly chuckle. "I see that you still have some manhood left in you."
The way she said the words was filled with sunshine. She didn't cover up.
I took a sip from the glass and realized there wasn't room enough for more in my being. I had had enough. I just continued to sit there as I felt my energy being drained from me.
I was drunk as a skunk and a little sick inside. Too much had happened. Too many things would not fall easily into place. There was more to the puzzle of life than I had guessed. There was a hell of a lot of good people in God's strange barnyard.
She seemed to be floating on a cloud and I shook my head to clear the picture.
She nodded in the direction of a cot, somewhat like the one I had in my room. "Why don't you stretch out and sleep it off. There's nothing like a clear head to help face reality."
I wanted to say something original, something in the language of today, but I knew my thick tongue would be incapable of fashioning the words.
I just nodded as she reached for my shoulder blades and guided me to my feet.
I rocked back and forth like a guy in a rough sea. Step after step was like walking on eggs.
"You're loaded," was the last thing I heard her say.
A thousand sky-rockets exploded before my closed eyes, then darkness slowly inked out the booze fumes that had taken possession of my brain and I was fast asleep.
Vale's ass loomed up out of nowhere in my dream state. It seemed to speak to me in a foreign tongue. Two large eyes grew out of the midst of each rounded cheek. Suddenly, out of some undisclosed mist, Mona materialized. With fang like teeth she bit into the soft ass-creature, causing blood to ooze then gush from the creature as the eyes turned inward in pain.
"Stop it! Stop it!" I shouted, slowly forcing my way back to consciousness. Up through subterraneous depths, amid a myriad of agony, I opened my eyes. precise, rhythmic mouthings. The back of that Someone was working away on my peter in someone's head was turned toward me. A full flow of blonde hair hung loosely before the person's features as she engaged in the riddle of her emotions.
My male apparatus was as hard as newly turned steel.
I cried out sleepily, "What in the hell's going on?"
A voice riddled with passion slurred back at me, "Quiet. You're only dreaming."
Some dream, I told myself. Mona must have found out where her favorite meat was hiding out and decided to engage in an after dinner snack.
My rifle barrel was telegraphing a lot of private conversation to my brain. What someone was doing to me was in the style of Mona, but I couldn't be sure.
All the colors of the rainbow were coming into view as she intensified lips and tongue at pulsating intervals, seconds apart. It was like some intricate, secret ritual which had been perfected after long years of practice.
I was beyond caring who the artist might be. It was perfectly obvious she was intent on fulfilling a desire, and I was just as intent on obliging her in every possible way.
Suddenly, as if in the midst of some heated instinct, I felt myself being devoured. A climactic tide of yearning quaked at my anus. I intensified my reactions by grasping her tightly behind her head, rotating it rapidly to add more emphasis to the passion that was boiling in me.
I marked the moment in the back of my mind. Right after the next second or two I would burst forth-one fraction of a second or two.
Teeth clamped downward as I thrust upward and all the images of lust that had voiced their way into my mind, shouted in unison as I reached a climax.
It was as if my body was being stuffed through a narrow hole much too small for the hulk of me. Nevertheless, I passed through.
I felt myself being surrendered. The malfeasant finally turned to face me. It was Vale Cloud.
Talk about a contradiction in what I assumed was her true character. This gal made Mona look like a neophyte, a fledgling. This gal had graduated to the Beethoven school of love-making. She was a perfectionist.
I lay back, convalescing from the experience. Her cheeks were flushed. A riddle of mingled emotions were beclouded in her eyes. She trembled like a leaf in a gale.
"I believe in you, Al. Forgive the embarrassing coincidence. Life is a figment of imagination, and you've just had a visit to the moon."
"What time is it?" That's all the strength and reason I had left in me to question.
She examined her wrist watch. "Ten-thirty, Sunday morning."
"You mean I slept through the night?" I made a motion to get to my feet and she restrained me as she pushed me back on the cot.
Rising, she revealed the full nakedness of her body. Sex in every inch of her cried out to my spent being. "Like what you see?"
She engaged in a few theatrical postures before me, stuff that she had obvious practiced before a mirror. She looked like something that a man should devour once a week in order to retain his youth. Every inch of her was tall perfection.
"I like," I replied, still a little breathless.
"We have the whole day in which to be together." Her voice had a secret ring to it, as if she was dispensing a coded message. If she was Mona, any minute the tables would turn and she would riddle me with a sudden burst of madness.
"It'll be my last day at this campsite. I'm folding my tent flaps and will open at Jack Lambert's tomorrow night."
Her eyes turned inward for a short reflective moment. "That's big sugar country-Broadway stuff." Excitement ran through the words like a bar of melodious music. She came at me with hero-worship in her eyes. "I'm simply shell-shocked with amazement, Al."
I wasn't in the kissing mood. I turned my face away as she faced me with sudden alarm. "What's wrong, Al?"
"I feel like a junk-heap, a distinguished moron." I faced her squarely as she fashioned stage-struck, love-lit eyes on me. "You know that Lambert's is just another Bill Bloom enterprise, don't you?"
She handed me an offbeat nod, one of those, "so what" nods. "It's a step ahead. So what? It's better than standing still, isn't it?"
She rendered a couple of spins before me, straight from the Beethoven era. I reached out for her, taking her into my arms. Our minds became twins.
"A guy can never pocket all his dreams, Al. Life's a flea circus at best. Roll with the punches and never let the nice people get at your chin."
There were honest tears in her eye. All the metal was being slowly drained from her personality. "Few of us ever become kings and queens in the grand sideshow of apes. We're only platform speakers. With you it's different, Al. With you-."
Wheels were spinning around in my head, finally slowing to the mental pace of my present ability to reason. "How'd you like to come along with me, with my act."
"You mean-you want to introduce me as a female straight man?"
"Hell no. You can continue to instruct the flatfooted cortege of the machinery of dance. But, I'd like to have you on the scene."
Tears were cascading down her cheeks in a young river flow. The choice and mixture of my words had struck home. She was my woman from that moment forward.
"Do you think you can talk Billy into the idea?"
"Either he agrees to the move or I won't sign with his trouble-shooter, Sol Stone. It's as easy as that."
She wrapped herself about me, blasting away at my manhood like it was New Year's Eve. "You're the only man I can ever love, Al. Let me demonstrate to you, let me show it all to you."
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. You just weakened it."
She laughed.
"I'm hot now, dripping hot, Al. If you don't do something to me I'll have to do it to myself." Her voice was pleading with me, begging.
"For you, Vale, I'll do what I can. Are you clean?"
"Yes. Why?"
"When my dick's soft my tongue's hard." She kissed me. "Just a minute, Al."
I watched her walk across the room to the sink for a wash cloth, put it under the water for a minute, lifted her left leg and placed the foot on the sink and began to wipe out the crotch, rub it and the cleft of her ass. It was an odd sight, upside down from behind of a woman cleaning herself, something they usually reserve for private moments of pleasure. She dropped the cloth in the sink, walked back to me.
"How will it be?" she asked.
"Kneel down on the cot for 'sixty-nine.' Don't work me over. I'm just going to give you your kicks. Afterward we'll go ninety-nine."
"That's for married people," she said with a hint of suggestion in her voice.
"That's for a man and a woman," I retorted.
"I'm sorry, Al. I was just being cute."
She climbed on the cot, her broad, white cheeks, wrinkled anus and hair-covered snatch hovering over me.
"Lower the bridge," I said.
She rested her head on my abdomen, her hair tickling my belly and crotch. She kissed my navel and sent tingles of warm desire into my guts. The heavy, white bottom descended on me. I wrapped my arms around it, ran my hands over the bulbous, smooth surface of her butt, tickled the wrinkled anus with my fingers and made her wriggle the flesh-mass. Pubic hair tickled across my face as the lips of her red cunt descended on my lips, mashed on my lips till I pushed her up with my hands.
"Not so heavy or you'll smother your benefactor."
She kissed my belly in reply and held her crotch more lightly on my face. The smell was gone if it had been there before. The washing had done the trick. She was clean enough to eat. I stuck out my tongue and licked her slit from top to bottom. She wriggled and pressed against me. I bit the labia and she raised up with a soft moan. I licked again, pushing deeper and deeper with each tongue stroke. Each stroke made her lift slightly, a pleasure too good to bear. I worked the left side first and then the right, sucked the labia out into small sheets of loose skin, let them hang dripping on my chin and worked down to the bottom of her cunt, over the tightly stretched skin and the sensitive area between cunt and anus and ran my tongue over the wrinkles. I had a hard-on now and would have eaten anything she had. The disgusting excitement of eating her would cause me to blow my rocks. I didn't care. Let lust control me for a few sensual minutes. The tickling sensation made her squirm and she rubbed her wet crotch all over my face, ground out her desire on my mug. It was delicious. I left my tongue out and she moved her butt in a small circular motion over it, coating it with a flat tasting scum that increased my hunger for her.
I held her still with my hands and worked at her clit with my tongue, running it from top down into the slit and back again till I couldn't control her movements and I let her work out her climax over me as best she could. My tired tongue couldn't keep up with her anymore. She used my nose as a pleasure probe to massage her cunt on till I pushed her off for a breath of air.
"Switch." I gasped through scum incrusted lips.
"Not yet," she gasped, "I'm coming."
Her crotch was still jerking and hunching rhythmically over my face though I held it off. If I let it down it would devour me like a machine. I slapped her hard on the left cheek and she rolled off with a groan on the floor. Her chest was heaving with passionate desire and her voice was strained with urgency. "Hurry."
I sat up and motioned her to the cot. She sprang for it like a bitch in heat ... which is what she was. I flopped on top of her and shoved in my cast-iron cock, ready for the kill. She started bucking under me immediately. I matched her thrust for buck till I tamed her and her orgasmic juice was all over the cot between her legs. I was still pumping against her hairy cunt. She clung to me while I wrung every last drop out of her.
"Al, you know hew to make me go, how to make me explode. Move in here with me, I want you all the time."
I was still humping, my belly slapping against hers with a sweaty plop, plop, plop. Her talk was just dimly penetrating the surging tide of riotous joy that was coming over me in a wave of warmth.
"Hang on, honey, I'm coming with you again," Vale whispered. "I'm gonna blow twice ... feel the juice in my honey pot?"
"Unnh," I grunted. No real good statement came to mind. My head was buried in her shoulder by her ear, the smell of sweat and make up and perfume confused my senses, clogged them with smells. I licked her skin and she shivered under me.
Her hot cunt was looser, more slippery after her orgasm. I rammed my dick into it anyway. Hot cream was coursing up through my guts and into my cock. I held back, tensed, jerked, exploded and shot a shower of burning stars and hot passion against the bottom of her stomach. I felt her heart pounding against the tip of my staff and tried to shove it up into her throat from the bottom. The geyser of sperm still pulsed and spurted into her warm folds of tissue, her cavern of pleasure. I held her tight, grasped her shoulders and pulled myself hard up into her, pulsed out the last of my juice and lay limp and heavy on her big breasts. They were pillows under a tired man and I floated in a heaven of release on them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sol Stone had a thick-soled look on his face when I entered his plush office. It was a pocket-sized affair with pictures of Noel Coward and Cole Porter hanging lifelike from linen walls. A regular lineage of the better theatrical families on both sides of the seas. I took one look at Coward and recalled dialogue of pure music. Porter would have been better off having been born in England where the taste buds of true talent find lasting flavor.
We Americans are can goods merchants, a university of maladjustment in search of the "wise men" who predicted the birth of a new prophet. Everything is felonious right down to the last television commercial. Fact has lost its identity.
Good is bad, right wrong.
Sol smiled up through a sunny Jewish sky and I heard cash-registers ringing in my imagination.
"Al Jones, good to see you," he said in businesslike tones.
I withdrew my hand from his tight grasp, "Wait a minute before you soak me down with lather praise. I might become your boy-but there's something to be added."
"Such as?" His face lost some of its assurance.
"I want Vale Cloud to join me."
A sickly-sweet voice parted check-book lips. "That cunt is a stunt-rider in the profession. She's tight-rope walking until Billy can find a replacement for her."
He lowered his head like a man who had just received a death notice from someone close to him. "Al, please, don't let me get the wrong idea about you. I thought you were a man of intelligence."
"Intelligence?" I weighed the word like it was sitting on the top of my head. "It has to be fed the right kind of economic food-along with emotional fuel, my friend. Vale's the fuel I need at the moment."
He gave me a nasty look like a displeased father. He was purely pained-right to his skull.
"I thought the kind of intelligent comedy you give out with was an indication that you were a big brain," his words weighed me on the delicate scale of age-old Jewish insight. He was looking down the furrowed tissue of my brain with a pair of eyes that could have seen through brick walls.
"Look, Sol, let's not leap into Old Testament truths any minute. I'm a funny man living in unfunny times. I've got a fair sized appetite for broads and I'm a good judge of booze. If you and Billy will go along with this kind of format, I'll sign."
He ran a slow hand over his chin in a contemplative manner. "I'll have to have a talk with Billy. As you know, he doesn't go for any hanky-panky for the job."
His expression changed as he got to his feet, extending an arm in my direction.
I took his small hand in mine, a child's hand at best. "Billy's all tied up inside with his own emotions, Sol. He's married to his money-women come next."
"Anything wrong with a life like that?"
He slid his hand from mine in the midst of this remark. It was underscored with long years of living amongst the tribes that make up America.
"Not for Billy and men of his ilk, no. It's just that my thinking is more concise-out in the open."
He shot back, "Yeah, I know. Upstate Yale college kid stuff. They never knew what it was like to be brought up in Russia like Billy was. His old man was killed by their hatred of the Jews. Know anything about that kind of living, Al?"
"My parents were a product of the Depression.
Their lives were tragic. They ate dog food, fed it to my young lips until I began to bark. Actually, when you come to think of it, America was a kind of grand boy scout camp in search of a leader in those days. Russia or America, each is a revised version of hypocritical good and evil."
Something in what I said, or the way I said it, caused him to beam all over like a sun-cured pumpkin.
He grasped me by the arm as he passed from behind his desk. "Know something, Al?"
"I'm listening."
"You think like a Jew-"
"What does that make me?"
He drew his lips together then planted a couple fingers before them, conveying a kiss in my direction. "You're one of us, Al. Billy said so from the beginning."
He nodded for me to follow him out of the office into a smaller cubicle where a tiny girl with a pronounced Jewish nose sat behind an electric typewriter, a contract form already placed in the machine. She gave me a knowing smile and directed studious eyes on Sol. "I'm ready, Mr. Stone."
I had the immediate impression that she had heard every word that had been uttered in his office.
Sole first scowled in my direction, then with hands clasped behind his back, he strode with assured steps up one side of the two-by-four room, down the other.
"Take it down in shorthand, Nan. Take it down!"
She reached for a pencil like a zombi. "I'm ready."
He laced a series of ungrammatical words together in an affected voice as the benumbed secretary directed introspective eyes at the ceiling. Then, in a flash, her pencil sped across the page as if she was recording a message from another world.
A lot of Hebrew strategy was later translated to a contract which the girl typed out under a conflict of emotions that came and left her face. It was if she was a musician thumping out a medley on an old upright piano.
She finally removed the sheet of paper from the machine. Sol yanked it from her grasp, clearing his throat. He nodded once or twice, sucking in his breath with satisfaction. "Good."
He turned toward the door, elbowing me ahead. "Come on, Al and I'll introduce you to Jack Lambert."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jack Lambert was a bull moose, the toughest looking cookie I had come face to face with in many a year. He had a hand on him like a Smithfield ham and when he smiled a couple areas of gold teeth came into view. This guy just had to be Frankenstein's brother. I stood waiting for mottled speech to escape from his lips.
That's where he handed me a high ball way out in center field. Pure Harvard culture sang from the man in a deep basso. I couldn't believe my ears.
"So, I take it, this is Al Jones the show-stopper."
Sol fenced for words, leveling eyes from one end of the luxurious dining room to the other. "Billy around?"
The walls of the room were papered in an assortment of tropical fish. Massive chandeliers hung suspended at alternate spaces from one another. It was a room where a lot of dough was poured in its perfecting, a regular plush establishment.
Lambert directed a thumb at the far end of the room as he faced Sol. "Billy's in the office. Let's go in."
We passed through a doorway and came face to face with Billy. He sat behind a Parlia mental type desk and looked like a member of the House of Lords.
"I take it you signed, Al."
"Yeah," Sol ascertained, "six hundred a week. Correct?"
"Correct," Billy elected, extending an arm in the direction of the document. "Lemme take a look."
Sol drew himself up to his full height, a compulsive nervous twitch at the corners of his mouth caused Billy to suspect something was wrong. "You change something in the agreement I wrote up for Al?"
The little agent twisted his head in my direction then glanced back at his boss. "I added something-. Look Billy, don't fly off the handle. Al wants Vale Cloud to-"
"Lemme see that agreement!" Bloom thundered, fairly leaping across the desk for the sheet of paper.
The room was as silent as a tomb. Finally Bloom looked up with unyielding eyes and shook his head at me. "No go, Jones. What's more, who in the hell do you think you are-making demands like this?"
He tossed the contract aside in disgust. "I'm running this show, understand?"
From my point of view he was throwing a lot of subsoil in my face, just to show his authority. I didn't say a word. He finally turned his rage on Sol. "Maybe you should become a tailor again. Call yourself a theatrical agent? Nuts." He thrust his arm in white heat toward the contract then flung it at Sol's feet. "Go wipe your ass with that thing!"
"You want I should change it?" Sol murmured like a frightened child."
Billy sat slumped behind his desk, his eyes turned inward.
Something of the viper entered Jack Lambert's voice, "Want me to throw the pair of 'em out on their ears?"
Slow wheels were turning just behind Billy's eyes, any minute he would come to a decision.
"What's with you and Vale Cloud, Jones? She hasn't been on the job twenty-four hours and I think you've been digging her. Correct?"
"She talks a lot of sense-I like her."
Billy broke into laughter. "She talks a lot of sense! Hear that Lambert?" His head swivelled back to me. "That's a funny line-real funny-you should doll it up with a lot of sex and add it to your act." His voice lowered to a whisper, "Only, I don't buy it. I pull the strings in this organization, Jones. Did you hear what I said?"
"I heard."
"Repeat to me what I just said, Jones!"
I was about ready to let him have a straight shot right between the eyes.
Lambert stuck an elbow into my side, frowning down at me. "Better do as Mr. Bloom says."
The heat was on and I didn't give a damn. Six hundred clams a week is a lot of dough to throw to the winds, but I was never one to kow-tow to any joker. "If I'm good enough for you to dish out six hundred dollars a week,-then maybe some other outfit will get the same idea."
"Oh? That how you got it figured, soldier boy? You're really a comic." He leaned his elbows on the desk and glared up at me. "Do you know I would have you blacklisted in a couple hours?"
"For what? For being honest in a dishonest world?"
"Cut the double talk! You calling me dishonest? Didn't I lay my cards on the table? Only, you're a wise guy. You're not dry behind the ears yet-and you think you can walk in an' draw up any kind of contract you have in mind. Well, buster, you can't! I'm the law around here and I pull ALL the strings."
"Take it easy, Billy," Sol soothed in a cooing voice. "The guy's human. So what if he wants to dip his spoon in some choice stuff? If he can pack this place with people you'll never have to cry again."
The ice-berg thawed a little then froze again. "Sol!"
"Yes, boss."
"Fire Vale Cloud!"
Billy was playing it by instinct and he had come up with a solution. He climbed up out of his chair and came around the desk, facing me. "If you want Vale Cloud, you'll have to pay for her out of your own pocket."
I faced him squarely. "You know, the older I get, the more I realize that Shakespeare wasn't just talking through his hat."
This statement rocked him back on his heels. He thumped me on the chest with the ball of his fist. "You speaking of a pound of flesh? Remember one thing, bright boy, we Jews wrap it in choice paper these days and sell it to the Indians."
The knife-blade left his eyes and he was smiling, just like nothing had happened. "Come on, Al. I'll buy you a drink."
"Hold it," I yelled. "What in the hell have you got against Vale Cloud?"
He placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder. "Six hundred dollars a week worth. Does that add up in your keen mind."
He was blowing his top again. He could be heard three blocks away. "I don't want no ham-bone broad mixing with talent-the kind of talent you got."
He directed soulful eyes at the ceiling and with arms extended above his head he exhaled, "Let no more be said. You got the original contract, Sol?"
The sawed-off agent raced a nervous hand inside his jacket pocket, extracting a fold of paper. "Here it is, Boss."
Billy nudged me from the room. "Come on, you can sign this over a couple drinks."
We cozied up to a plush bar that resembled a nocturnal study for a wealthy alcoholic. He was calm as a Palm Beach sea in the heart of summer.
A little Japanese bundle of heaven appeared as if from nowhere and settled herself behind the bar before us. She looked as if any moment she would burst into song.
"What's your poison, Al," Billy questioned.
I was a million miles off, wondering what Vale would have to say when she was handed her walking papers. The strange malady of human events had to have a leveling off somewhere on the balancing sheet of retribution.
He gave me a playful push and I settled back to the present. "What'll you have?"
"Double scotch, straight."
"Same here," Billy told the Oriental.
He gave me another affectionate shove then tweaked the lobe of my ear. "Come on, kid. I've got big plans ahead for you. There's a lot of green stuff ahead for both of us. I know the ropes. Just settle back and listen to Uncle Bloom."
Delicate fingers placed drinks before us and the essence of loganberry filled the air.
"A lot of artists are like diesel locomotives, Al. They race into the big time and something happens to them. They run out of juice. Why? Some money-hungry broad gets into the way of their thinking. It's just the same in the prize ring. A guy gets punchy if he's not careful."
He lifted his glass to pursed lips and winked. "Roll with the punches, Al. Don't ever let them send you to the big count."
I slid the contract toward me, and with pen in hand, raced through my signature.
"See how easy it is-just like water rolling off a duck's back."
I was just about to tear into his ego when someone slid on the stool beside me. Without turning to see who it was, I saw the red dye of happiness leave Billy's face, his eyes turn reflectively inward. "What brings you around these parts, Kelly?"
I caught my breath and turned to face the Inspector. His eyes locked on mine like he was reading the logbook of a ship in distress. "I understand you spent last night at Billy's Place."
"My joint's closed on Sunday-," Billy interjected with a growl.
"That could be, but this guy and someone by the name of Vale Cloud got cozy in her dressing room last night."
"Get off my back, Kelly, will ya!" I punched out.
"I'm going to hold right on to your back all the way down to headquarters!" He grasped me by the arm. "Come on."
"What's the charge?" I stammered, every nerve in my body jockeying to attention.
"Murder!"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The monstrous stone complex of a city jail is hardly a place for a man to reflect on the future. The busy human ants on the outside world continue to move like a cloud throughout the concrete arteries to stop from time to time to urinate against the industry blackened walls they created.
Far back in the hide of the land, early American structures still stand to represent a period when man could think. He didn't have a hundred thousand gadgets to confine and benumb his sense of poetry. He didn't have to borrow his next thought patterns from some fact-concocting ad-man who sold his brain to Madison Avenue for twenty thousand fish a year. One grand concubinage, that's what we've finally become. The eagle has taken on the instincts of the condor.
Vale Cloud was somewhere out in space looking for the next life span. Like Ella, she ended up with a knife in her bosom.
The night watchman at Billy's Place spilled the fact to the police and Kelly came running. He had an electric eye for a brain, Kelly. They measured his brain waves in volts.
I don't know the Bible by heart, but what I've read of the Psalms gave me a fair indication that Jesus couldn't pound sense into square holes. You have to have an Italian band out front, plenty of guys dressed in uniforms and some civic servant with a southern accent in order to get a message across. An identifying twang in the voice-a certain rural moronity has to sing out in the voice of the speechmaker or the crowd will go to sleep. They don't dig the scene.
So it was with Kelly. He was a viper, nothing more. He adapted the expert crime detecting shortcuts within his intellectual scope. They are all cut from the identical garment.
I was plucking away at the facts as I sat in my cell when Kelly appeared beyond the bars. The composition that made up the racial structure of his face made me sick just to look at him.
He whispered something inarticulate to an attendant who slid a key into the cell lock and the gate gave off a resounding click.
A look of superiority framed his face as he sat on the cot next to me. "Comfortable?"
I gave him an awkward grin. "Just like back home."
He hesitated as he saw the red flush creep into my face. "Got any ideas who might have killed Vale Cloud-besides yourself?"
I was ready to bend bars like in a Tarzan act. "What in the hell kind of talk is that? If there's a doubt in your mind that I didn't do Vale in, why am I marking time in this can?"
He studied his fingernails. "Quiet down, Jones. We're lighting slow fuses under a couple suspects-"
"What kind of a cock-and-bull story are you trying to hand me? If you're convinced I didn't kill Vale-"
He filled his cheeks with air, letting it slowly escape from pursed lips. "I didn't say you didn't kill her." He underscored his next remark in a low voice, placing emphasis on each word. "Two knife jobs in a row somehow smacks of a single killer." Then swiftly, as if to catch me off guard, "That how it strikes you?"
"You've already got Ella's killer in the cooler-so someone else is knife-happy."
He lowered his head again. "Yeah."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He stuck a cigarette between his lips then lit it. "I just asked you-do you have any ideas who might have killed her?"
"Does the night watchman at Billy's Place sleep on the job?"
"We checked his story; he's on the level ex-cop."
"What's that supposed to add up to?"
"He was there until 8:30 this morning."
"I left at 7:00."
"Where were you before you called on Vale in her dressing room?"
He read the puzzled expression on my face. "It couldn't have been at 6482 8th Avenue, could it have been?"
"It might have been-"
He roared out, "Don't hand me no platform speeches, Jones. You'll be in the hot-seat but good if you don't play square with me."
'O.K. I was there."
"Now you're making sense." He nuzzled his chin with a paw-like hand. "That was Saturday night?"
He got to his feet as though the conversation had ended, taking a last few drags on his cigarette. "How'd you like me to take a chance on you? I've had a talk with the D.A., and he's all for it."
He stood with his back toward me, looking out through the bars.
"Meaning?"
"Help us bring in the murderer of Vaie Cloud." He turned and faced me. As he did so, he reached out and swung the cell gate open.
My temples were pounding. "You mean Mona Lane-"
He took a step in my direction, withdrawing the cigarette from his lips, stamping it out on the floor. "I didn't mention any names, did I?" A thread of friendship filtered through the words. "You pitch on my ball team, Jones, and everything will come out smelling like roses."
The heat began to leave my body-the tepid warmth that closes in on a guy when he's cornered by the strong arm of the law. "Let me hear some more dialogue."
"We've pieced most of the puzzle together, Jones. Bloom's no saint in this futile game called life. He could easily remove any obstacle that strays in his path. His men are loyal to the letter. Sol Stone, Jack Lambert and a couple small fry he employs for muscle jobs every now and then. He's had a lot of actors worked over in the past, but we could never get close enough to the facts to nail him. What kind of a working agreement do you have with him?"
I told him the whole story. What the hell, I was standing on the short end of the stick.
He didn't bat an eyelash as he worked away at another cigarette. "Now tell me what you know about Mona Lane."
"Nothing much, really. She was a virgin until the other night."
He smiled at this remark. "Some virgin."
"You heard some of the gossip concerning her?"
"She's a household topic of conversation around theatre row, Jones."
He took a deep drag on his cig then fought the smoke away from his face with a wave of his hand as he exhaled.
"O.K., Kelly, you're selling me a bill of goods.
Unmarked merchandise, so to speak. I'm the only marked article in the package."
He gave me an underlook that could have meant anything I read into it. Kelly was no fool. He didn't climb to the top of the heap with nothing on the ball.
He walked beyond the cell gate into the corridor. "Come on, Jones. You've spent enough time in the cooler."
We walked side by side down the long hallway. Puzzled faces looked out at us from behind their caged environment. A regular tabloid of distress.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I settled on a stool in a five cent bar and downed a couple quick ones. Kelly had a wild pitch toward home plate in the back of his mind and I was his homing-pigeon. One thing was certain, in the eyes of the law, I was "clean." Kelly must have had a tall talk with the night watchman who saw me leave at 7:00 a.m.-when, as I later recalled Vale and I stood outside the doorway to her dressing room for a last goodbye kiss.
That gave the murderer a half hour, or less to walk away from Vale dead.
I was head and shoulders in speculation when I called out for a last double shot of scotch.
The spirits went down in one short gulp.
I was ready for the big campaign, the master strategist, Kelly, had programmed into my brain. I felt like some kind of machine.
When she opened the door, she looked as if she had just stepped from a rolling surf. She was that out of breath. Every hair was in place, but she was out of breath.
"You sound as if you've just run up a steep hill, Mona. What's the matter?"
She pointed to one of those stationary bicycle machines women purchase to keep their bread-baskets down and their breasts sticking out further.
She came at me with an avalanche of love-sick words. Her tongue was inside my mouth, uttering a brief stanza of suggestiveness before I could get halfway into the room. It was like a scene in "The Return of the Lost Lover," or some such hambone play that didn't last a week on Broadway.
She was dressed for sexual wars in her exercise suit which consisted of little more than nothing. This gal was an epicure with gold-plated ideals. Nuts, yes, but gold-plated.
"Honey, honey, honey," she sang out as she swathed me with kisses, "you're back. This time for good."
She led me to the bar, stepping gleefully behind it. She picked up a half-empty bottle of scotch. "Let's celebrate."
Her voice had a New Year's ring to it as she poured equal portions of the libation into a couple tall glasses then siphoned them with sizzle water.
She -eyed me coyly over the rim of her glass, after she had downed a long drink. She was beginning to get that strange expression on her face, that inflamed look I was more than aware of. "I'm sorry about what happened the other night, lover."
I was feeling no pain. The couple of shots I had had sharpened my taste buds.
I had to go easy, take my time, get her in a proper mood. "Did you take my advice and call a doctor?"
She gave me a frightened look as she banged her glass down on the counter. "There's nothing wrong with me! People-a lot of small minded people get in my way and a curtain of red comes down before my eyes."
"You had better learn how to control that temper of yours before it gets you in trouble."
She lifted her glass to her lips again, concealing a secret thought that came to her lips as she beckoned her tongue in a suggestive manner at me.
"Did you follow me down to Billy's Place Saturday night?"
The truth was written on her face but she said, "You had me so upset I wouldn't have followed you across the room." Her free hand raced out, grasping me by the wrist. "You shouldn't believe what cheap people have to say about me. They're the destroyers, the takers. They never give honestly of themselves."
Perhaps I was too abrupt, too quick with the questions, but, somehow, I had to clear myself with Kelly.
At the moment he and his men were stationed in the next apartment, tuned in on everything that was taking place. Mona's cozy palace of gold-plated bric-a-bracs was bugged to the teeth.
"Just the same, you followed me-didn't you-?"
Guilt leaped into her eyes. "So what if I did." Her voice broke into a scream. "I couldn't stand to lose you."
She leaned far over the bar and planted moist lips on mine. "You took my virginity away Mr. Man, you and you alone."
I was confident that she would spill everything as she settled back on her feet, reaching for my empty glass. Her breasts underwent a tight little exercise as she mixed up another batch of liquid fire.
"So you followed me," I pressed on. "That's right."
She slid my glass toward me. "To Billy's Place?"
She wagged a playful finger close to my face. "Women have lots of secrets they never tell their men."
I had to throw her a couple verbal punches that would set her lopsided mind in action.
"What have you got against Vale Cloud?"
"That whore!" she enraged, her eyes turned strangely inward. "That dirty whore stepped in and took my job away from me."
Now I was cooking with gas. I would strike home through the jealousy routine. "So you saw me enter Billy's Place."
She was downing her drink like water, allowing herself an opportunity to wade through her thoughts. "What is this, some kind of interrogation?"
"No."
"Well, it sounds like it to me."
She was beginning to feel the stuff she was bracing herself with. A gal, unless she's a veteran boozehound, can't down triple shots without getting a buzz on.
"Let's make love-." She was standing beside me, wriggling like a belly-dancer before I could half turn to face her.
Grasping me by the wrists, she yanked me to my feet. "I've got to have that thing between your legs, lover man." She reached down and felt of me. "Oh," she moaned, "it's asleep in its nest."
She giggled while running a playful hand toward the zipper that held my fly in place. With a downward thrust of a practiced hand she opened the case where my manhood lay hidden. Fingering my shorts opening aside, she found what she was looking for.
"Why, he's even long when he's asleep."
She stroked my implement of pleasure, breathing heavily as she did so. "He's beginning to grow in my hand, Al. He's no longer sleepy." The booze was turning her on for a big session. I wasn't in the mood but I would have to force myself to take her.
She directed me toward that woman's forest between her legs, pushing forward. She rolled her hips slightly from side to side in measured cadences, her eyes directed toward our privates. "Let him go inside me, Al. Tell him to go home."
"He says he wants you on the floor," I said.
"Let's go on hands and knees," she suggested. It was a hesitant suggestion. "I want to try it a new way."
"If that's what you want, but the feeling is the same."
"That's what I want," she said breathily. She sank to her knees, looked closely at the head of my prick, kissed it, bit it and made me jerk back. She didn't let go.
"If you run away you won't be in the dog house," she said, still looking at my dick. I think she thought it could talk. She wasn't interested in me at all if she could have a talking dick.
"I'm coming," I said.
"Not yet," she said with alarm...." down on the floor with you."
"Oh, you were just being a funny boy. Come down and make fun with me on the rug."
I joined her on the carpet. It was as soft as her bed. It felt like a mattress stuffed with dollar bills, I told myself. And me, little Al, fucking on money and fucking with it.
"Don't look so serious. When you look that way your mind is a million miles off. I want it here." She patted her mound of pubic hair. "It is there," I lied.
She grabbed my face, pulled it down, into her blonde bush, tried to rub my face in it. It was torture. It smelled foul, of sweat, cunt juice, body odors I hadn't smelled since I got my last piece in a roadside shack in Vietnam. It nearly made me sick. It was rancid, stuffy, stale and dead. I pulled my nose out, anger filled me and my cock was going limp. Desire had passed.
"You'll have to wash it before I eat it."
It snapped her back from her reverie of sensuous delight and expectancy.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot I'd just exercised. Come up here and I'll kiss it all away."
She pulled me to her, met me halfway with her mouth open, hungry. She tried to kiss desire back into me, suck forgiveness out of me at the same time. The kiss didn't do much but the grinding belly against mine did. My staff responded to the pressure of flesh, the warmth and tickle of a close cunt. It rose to the occasion, flushed full and hot.
"Take me from the back," she whispered. I was glad she whispered. I'd just as soon the police didn't get this part. It'd be more laughs in court than my act on stage ... at least to me.
She rolled under me, reached back and took my cock, pulled me toward her passion pit. Her head hung down as she watched the act between her legs, watched my balls dangle and flop.
I probed in the muff. It was dry and a little tight. She reached back, massaged it, spit on her fingers and made it slick with one swipe, grabbed me and guided my dick into the hole. It was warm, tender, tight, waiting. I slid in till my belly pressed against her butt. It was warm, firm flesh. She wriggled it against me. My cock wriggled inside her. I withdrew, slid in, withdrew, stabbed, pulled, pushed, pulled. Her round cheeks began a rocking rotation, up and down in an arc as I plunged in and out. This position was made for sex or vice versa. It worked well. Too bad Vale Cloud wasn't here to enjoy it but she probably had before in her life.
"Al, I like it. Do you think I'm a slut for saying that? But it's true. Don't you like it?"
"What? Sex or the position?"
"Oh, both ... both."
Her head was swaying from side to side like a cow in the field or a bull in the ring. She was an animal, one hundred percent. Her back side was all action, up and down and from side to side. She was milking this for all the pleasure and massage it would give her. It'd have to last. I lunged into her back side with quickening strokes. Plunged, stabbed in and up. The buffer of her ass was easy to ram again, soft, unlike the pelvis bone above every snatch. I pounded against it, absorbed in every hot, wet, pressing sensation of each slide into her vagina when I felt her fingers on my scrotum. I stabbed harder into her as she fondled my sack, tumbled the ball inside, began to squeeze. At first it was a pleasurable sensation. She squeezed harder. Pain replaced the pleasure.
"Let go," I yelled.
"I'm gonna squeeze the love juice out of you."
"You don't have to. You'll get it all in a minute." I panted.
She didn't let go. I reached around, under her, got two handfuls of hanging breast. She got the hint, let go of my sack. I retained the breast. They were a delicious handful. I massaged them as I fucked, pressed them up to her chest, let them hang at full length, rolled them around, pulled them out a little. The motion of her ass became more violent. It raised me off the floor, dropped me as she reared hungrily on my staff. I took hand holds on her hips, pulled myself deep into her, shoved and pulled as she bucked and reared, her belly sucking in and blowing out with the intensity of her ecstasy. She was flowing juices, they were foaming at the base of my cock. Her violence and passion drove me over the edge of my plateau-cliff and I dropped into space, tumbling and swirling in a limbo of exploding warmth and hot juices. I pulled her onto me more violently than I pushed into her. I became aware of slapping sides as my belly pounded her butt. It was a soft receiver for my desires. Exhaustion replaced ecstasy. I let myself roll backward. John Henry slipped out of her with a slurping plop sound.
"Get up, damn you," she ordered. Then her voice changed to a plea. "Al, I could go on, go for more."
"I know you could. Go ahead. There's bound to be some sap walking by on the street. One look at you and he'd be yours."
"Oh, Al. I don't want any sap. I want you. More of you. Please. Come back inside me."
"You a womb or a tomb?"
"Oh, Al. You torment me. What for? Can't you see I need you?"
She turned around to face me, lay on the floor by me, gripped my greasy cock and massaged it, stared at it, tried to impart life and stiffness to it with her will. It was one battle she was going to lose and I didn't even care to watch.
"Talk to me, my little man," she whispered at my prick. It didn't talk back.
She blew on it. The breath cooled the wet surface and it shrank even more. This frustrated her. She pumped it, slid her hand up and down it. The sensations were there but did nothing for my desire. From another girl, like Vale, it might have worked. This one turned me off. She was so demented she thought she could communicate with a cock, a disembodied cock. With all her money she could buy one, a machine.
She raised her head and feasted her love-sick eyes on mine. "I could cut him off and keep him inside me forever."
"That what you did to Vale-cut her off-?"
She struck me squarely across the face with the back of her hand. "You bastard! You dirty, rotten bastard."
I pushed her away, grasping her firmly by the shoulders, shaking her. "Those are strange words coming from an upstate New York broad."
An evil scowl creased the left side of her face, contorting it. "She's your kind-"
The words were not meant to be spoken, they just sped from her lips before she could stop them. I pictured in my mind-eye Kelly's reaction beyond the wall. "She's really not what you think she is, Mona. Vale's got a lot on the ball."
"She had a lot of weight on your balls! Isn't that what you want to say? Isn't it?"
"What do you mean had? Vale's not dead-or is she?"
"I meant-you must have been intimate with your tramp!"
"My tramp? Why I just met her."
"I saw the way she looked at you. She was ready to eat you up."
What she said inspired more confidence in me. "You must have heard us."
I still held her by the shoulders. My eyes burning into hers.
"Heard what?" she fumbled with the words. "Heard what Vale and I were doing in her dressing room."
"I-I didn't go into Billy's Place. I just followed you to the door."
Now for the killing punch, I told myself. "That isn't what the night watchman had to say."
She threw back her head in laughter. "Night watchman, my foot. He never saw me."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There wasn't a doubt left in my mind that Mona had killed Vale Cloud. She was all goofed up inside her head. The disharmony of her brain cells had telegraphed a mixed-up message to her lips. Once the veneer of her personality had been stripped away she was a boiling volcano beneath.
Maybe Kelly had handed me a dish of tripe when he said he had Ella Palmer's murderer. Maybe he was playing for time. Maybe. Cops don't spill their entire hand in the poker game of life.
I was glad that I wasn't soloing my dialogue with Mona. Kelly had built a pipeline into her apartment in the form of a tape-recorder, and if I could get her to spill the facts, I'd be in like Flynn.
"Are you going to make love to me or continue the third degree?" Uncontrollable tears had settled in the corner of her eyes to slowly cascade down her cheeks.
I released my hold on her and she slid forward, burying her face in my chest. "Why must you always upset me? Why must you!"
"Why don't you unburden yourself to me," I shot back. "Something deep down inside is troubling you."
Her hands were playing with me again while she returned to the giggling stage of her private game. She whispered something incoherent against my chest, something off the top of her head, something unresolved in the heat of emotion. It sounded like, "Did she eat you?"
"What did you say?"
The giggle spread to a loud laugh that sounded demented, strange. "Oh, nothing-nothing really."
I wondered if Kelly's machine had caught her words as she began to stroke away with a rapid hand.
I was standing out like a flag pole when she dropped to her knees, going at me with a fury.
Her grunts and groans of extreme pleasure were maniacal to an extreme. She ravished the flesh of me as though it was a choice luxury. "Good, good," she murmured between long sucking spells in extolment.
The boys in the other apartment must have been hanging on to the edges of their chairs in suspense.
"Don't pull back, Al. Let me love you all the way."
I grasped her by the back of the head while increasing my thrust toward it. Her teeth relaxed. A sensation of passing through a world of velvet softness and a flashing void beyond bypassed all reality.
To hell with Kelly, to hell with everything but Mona and what she was doing to me. She was the greatest. She put them all to shame.
The room was beginning to take on different colors, all of them passionate.
Then it happened. The pain was more than I could withstand. She bit down on me with everything in her jaws. Her teeth cut into the flesh.
She applied both suction and teeth to my being. The heat she had generated in my being was ebbing.
I glanced down and saw blood gush from her lips. "What in the hell are you doing?" I shouted in torture.
She was too far gone in lascivious pleasure to have heard what I said.
I applied both palms to the sides of her face, striving to force her to release me. It was to no avail.
"For God's sake, cut it out!"
With a rapier like motion of her head, she allowed her teeth to cut deeper into the hardened tissue of my flesh like razors honed to a fine sharpness.
The holiday was over, this gal was out to do a new kind of murder. She was out to relieve me of my manhood forever!
I struck away at her with all my might. Her head rocked under the impact of each blow. But the crazed ambition that had crossed her mind was resolved to complete a task.
Finally, in desperation I brought both fists down on the back of her neck in a clubbing motion and she drifted lifelessly to the floor.
I was bleeding like a stuck pig as I raced for the bathroom.
"My God," I cried out. "My God!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I woke up in the hospital feeling like a guy who had wrestled with a polar bear.
How I got there and under what circumstance was of small importance to me.
Little by little, small fragments of the situation drifted slowly into place. I had had a vigorous round with a mad broad and was afraid to ask the nurse who entered the room if I still hung in one piece.
A faint, knowing smile was planted on her lips. She seemed to say, "Now that it's gone, you can undergo an operation to change your sex."
I reached down under the blankets for an inspection and felt a heavy layer of bandage. Al, I told myself, you've been had!
She stuck a thermometer in my mouth while eye-balling me. "Sleep well?" I nodded.
"Everything's going to be all right," she said in an authoritative voice.
I gave her a censuring stare as she removed the pencil thin slice of glass from my mouth. She studied it in the mannerism of nurses, puffed out my pillow, left the room.
'Everything is going to be all right?' That utterance could have meant a multitude of things.
I just had to find out how I stood. A man without a penis has more strikes against him than a brass monkey in a shooting gallery.
I withdrew the blanket, giving myself a little pep-talk as I did so. "Don't blow your top before you know all the facts, Al."
I was bandaged up like a character who had taken a cannon ball in the mid-section. Where I used to hang-there was nothing.
"What the hell!" I said aloud. "She got me!"
A vision of Mona, replete with wolf fangs passed before my eyes.
I felt around, inching my fingers up my thighs, depressing the fold of bandage. I was numb down there.
I broke out into a cold sweat. "Nurse! Nurse!" I was weeping inside like a small child. She came in a hurry. "Anything wrong?"
"What did you mean when you said, 'Everything is going to be all right?'"
"Exactly what I meant. You're doing nicely-under the circumstances."
"Circumstances? What circumstances?"
I fairly leaped from the bed and she restrained me with a professional hand.
"Now, now, lie back and relax. Doctor will be along any minute."
I was alone with my frantic thoughts again-thoughts that spread wings like vultures across my mind. This ought to teach you to keep your peter in your pants, Al Jones.
A chunky guy with the look of a medic did a right angle when he entered the room, coming to a standstill at the foot of the bed.
He felt around, removing part of the bandage, his face as expressionless as a Japanese war lord. "Yes, yes," he said to himself as my heart thumped away like a sledge hammer.
"Everything all right, Doc?"
He looked up. "Fine."
"Just how fine, Doc? Look, I've got to know."
He replaced the bandage, forcing a smile to his lips. "What is it you must know?"
"Is-is it still there in one piece?"
His smile broadened. "A little out of shape at the moment, but it's still there." i gave out a sigh of contentment, falling back on the pillow.
I drifted off into a deep sleep. ft was an awful sleep. One of those nightmares people have every so often. I was being chased by Mona. Only she wasn't human. She was a strange bird who flew directly above my head, emitting strange birdlike sounds.
I didn't have a stitch of clothes on.
I ran for all my might, almost out of breath, hardly able to take another leap ahead. In that instant the bird dove and bit into my penis. Twisting my hands about its neck I tried to free myself.
Blood raced from me in a tide. I felt my strength ebbing away.
I felt myself being shaken and I jumped up with a start.
It was the heavily starched nurse. Kelly stood beside her.
"Don't let her bite it off!"
The words roared from me as I looked around for Mona.
Kelly excused the nurse who shut the door behind her.
"You've been having a dream, Jones."
"One hell of a dream."
"You're in the clear-"
I was beginning to feel like a roasted chicken under the blanket, so I removed it.
"You mean-" I hesitated. "How in the hell did I land here?"
"We found you bleeding to death in Miss Lane's bathroom."
"And Mona?"
He shook his head as if the thought of Mona left a bad taste in his mouth. "She's as nutty as a fruitcake. She's down at the psycho ward undergoing treatment."
"Did she confess?"
"Yes."
"She must have entered Billy's Place from the main entrance and hid out:-"
The first sign of heavy foliage out-lined the sides of his face. I knew that he was tired.
"Nuts as she is, she kept calling your name over and over again."
"Did you get everything down on the tape?"
"Just like in a T.V. show; loud and clear."
He gave me a broad smile and his voice t--rimmed down to a whisper. "I guess you don't feel like a comedian any longer."
"Know something, Kelly? There's a hell of a lot of tragedy in comedy."
He thought my words over before speaking. "Exactly what kind of tragedy do you have in mind?"
"The kind a character like me would have if he had to walk around without a cock."
His face grew serious. "Didn't they tell you?"
I felt myself growing tight all over. "Tell metell me what?"
He was smiling again. "She left her teeth marks on you for the rest of your life!"
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That was five years ago. Today i. can look back on the whole crop of circumstances and laugh myself silly. Here in Hollywood, living high amongst the smog-scented clouds with a million dollars a year rolling into my bank account, life paints a pretty rosy picture.
This is especially cruel when it comes to the package of sweetmeats I cozy up to each night. She just comes up to my chest, and that's with high heels. But no gal can bat homers like Fuji.
Fuji? Why she's the Japanese diamond who worked at Jack Lambert's. I had travelled the world of womanhood, and when I finally decided to settle down, it was with Fuji, a Japanese.
They're not much in the breast department, but the rest of their bag of Machiavellian tricks makes up for the loss.
Once I was released from sick bed, I went straight to Billy.
"Want me to see what's left of it, Al?" he joked.
"Cut that out," I challenged. "My contract still good?"
"Just like the day it was written. Feel good enough to face the lights tonight?"
"Why not?"
We were seated at the bar and Fuji stood behind it. Her face was a white mask, an ornamental mask that looked as if it couldn't reveal the slightest semblance of joy or pain.
"Couple shots, Fuji," Bloom ordered.
I watched as she drifted away like a small butterfly down the far end of the bar.
"You like that, don't you?" boss man mocked. "How do you know she's not a blow hard like that Mona character?"
He gave me a playful shot in the arm with the back of his hand. "Just pullin' your leg, Al."
He grew serious. "You've had a close call-both with the law and broads. Now it's time to settle down and work. You've got what it takes and with the right kind of management behind you-we'll all retire before fifty."
The Japanese doll stood like a virgin before us. I leaned forward and whispered in her direction, "Bet you can't smile."
Her slanted eyes darted in Billy's direction. She didn't bat an eye. It was as if she was requesting permission of her superior to grant me my desire.
Billy provided her with a mock smile-one of those Brooklyn smiles that only appears on Jewish faces when money is rolling in.
Fuji faced me squarely. She was beautiful. Each feature seemed to have been chiseled from fine marble. The chin contained just enough jut to certify self assurance. While the eyes bore the inscrutable mark of an oriental, there was great depths beyond them, depths that would take a lifetime to fathom. The hair, the beautiful, glistening blackness of it was worked into a crown like coiffure.
I sat there spellbound with the feeling I was visiting a museum and had happened on a face out of the past that would not release its hold on me.
Slowly, like it was growing like a flower on her face, a smile appeared.
I had heard tales, had even witnessed the fact for myself, that oriental women had the lousiest teeth in the world, but not Fuji. Her lips slid apart. Bright pearls appeared in even rows.
"You gonna drink or continue to star-gaze?" Billy spat out, his glass half way to his mouth.
"Yeah, yeah," I horsed out, jerking my glass to my lips. My eyes never once left hers.
Somewhere in the walls music began to sound, the kind of music poets write fables about. I was ready to become a poet on the spot.
"O.K., Jones, knock it off!" Bloom growled. His bark was loud enough to shake Fuji from her trance-like state. The smile dropped like a curtain from her features. She fairly slid from view, beyond in a wilderness of curtains that stood as a backdrop behind the bar.
My destiny was sealed. I knew it, but didn't say a word to Billy.
I went on that night like Grant took Richmond. Everywhere I looked I seemed to see Fuji. The world had suddenly become Japanese. I wondered if I had made an impression on her. If I had gotten to her as she had hit at my heartstrings.
Sounds corny, but that's the way it was.
I tore the house down, silk hats and all. They wouldn't let me stop. With every trick I had ever learned in the business I pasted them and had to go on with more.
I walked about amongst them, sitting on one guy's knee while kissing his girl Friday. Getting my laughs in where they counted the most.
I finally left the scene, laughing and talking up a storm as I did so. I had given them the lumps they had asked for, fed their souls the truth about themselves that they could not deny in comedy, my kind of comedy.
Funny thing, a comic can paste a guy in the mouth with a remark with a lot of implied innuendo and come away in one piece, but let him try the same stunt on the street and he'll get knocked on his kisser.
I had just got seated in my dressing room when there was a knock on the room.
"Come on in!" I yelled, half turning in the door's direction.
It was Fuji with a silver tray that contained an assortment of alcoholic delights. She hesitated, momentarily projected one of those coaxing far away looks on her face, as if she was viewing a vast horizon somewhere out in the cosmos.
My heart bounced like a rubber ball in my chest.
"Mr. Bloom thought you might like some refreshment," were the first words to come from the small morsel of heaven. The words seem to sing from her as if some strange instrument had just come into being that could talk.
I got to my feet and removed the tray from her, set it down on the corner of my dressing table.
"Come on in. I'd like to talk to you."
She provided me with a nervous smile, glancing back over her shoulder at the door.
"I'm afraid I must leave, Mr. Jones. I am expected back-."
"Nonsense," I countered, grasping her firmly by delicate wrists, drawing her toward me.
"Mr. Jones!" she chortled in a strange way as if she was laughing down her nose at me. "I'm Japanese!"
I laughed right back in her face. "You're the most beautiful bit of harmonious flesh I have ever seen. What's your name?"
"Fuji," she sang out.
I just stood there drinking her in with a new kind of feeling rising in me. It was like the big scene we had had at the bar before I went into my act.
"So you're Japanese. What's that supposed to mean to a man in love?"
Her head cocked a little to one side like an inquisitive bird at the mention of the word love, then she averted her eyes, glancing at the floor.
"Look, Fuji, I'm trying to be fresh. I really meant what I said. You're not married, are you?"
Tension grew in her arms as she strove to free herself. "I am Japanese and I am not married."
I nodded. "That's remarkable. I mean, I would travel around the world and come back satisfied with information like that."
She chuckled in a friendly way as if she didn't have an axe to grind against me. "Fuji feels the same way about you, Mr. Al Jones."
That was five years ago. Fuji and I sit around in the nude and count my money these days. When we tire of that we climb in the sack for a bit of aviation. Flee the earthly scene, so to speak. It's like having an affair with a cloud.
