enovel Sin Drunk John Dexter [Future Story Codes]

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Sin Drunk ....(102k)    by John Dexter

SIN MERCHANT!

Virile, husky, bearded Pierre Drysdale knocked the society dames for a loop-first with his stud-charm, then with his pitch for the exclusive services of Pierre, the lust-famous interior decorator. And by the time Pierre was looking sinfully into their passion-sick eyes, the idle ladies of Society Row were only too willing to sign anything-including their bodies-for Pierre's wanton services. But it wasn't until Gloria, the harlot society columnist, organized his sin-racket on a systematic basis-in exchange for a sample of the Pierre technique-that he went into high passion gear. And then it was a round of passion-hungry women like redheaded Harriet, who thought she could wear out any man under the sun-or any place she trapped him with her body-or Claudia, the party tramp who didn't wear much but did any thing ... or Katherine, the society marriage-go-round wanton with her paid lover and her dreams of a devoted husband who could give her lusts their respectability she wanted ... and still offer her the lusts she needed. It was a great life for a sin-minded stud like Pierre, it was the greatest, and it would go on and on as long as tie didn't sin-weakenl

CHAPTER ONE

The sun shining through the blinds was the first thing that annoyed me after the phone had awakened me at six in the morning. It was like a goddamn nightmare. Anybody who rings me at that hour is an automatic pain in the rear, be he friend or foe, or just plain yutz. I had rolled home at four and only by employing all of my will power had I managed to take my clothes off before falling into the stupor of sleep. Relentlessly, the phone kept ringing. The ringing vibrated around in my head and I fell out of bed, awake now and stole another look at the alarm dock. Damn! This was an idiot. Who else would call at six o'clock when most of the world is in a semi-comatose condition. So drained of strength was I, that I barely managed to stagger to the clamoring phone.

"Okay," I said and cursed a little as I lifted the mouthpiece. "All right! What the hell do you want?" A hushed female's voice said, "What?"

"Yeah, what, what! What's on your mind?" At six in the morning, if I've been aroused from sleep, I'm not especially partial in my abruptness toward either male or female.

"Mr. Drysdale?" the voice said, "That's me. Yeah, that's me." The choice giggled. "It sounds like you all right. You sound exactly as I imagined you would."

"Interesting. Now who are you?"

"I'm Gloria. I'm a friend of Harriet's."

"Who Harriet? What?"

"Harriet," the voice said-as though, how could you possibly not know Harriet? "Harriet?"

"Yes, Harriet Shaft. You know!"

Of course I knew. I knew, the entire United States Marine Corps knew, and twenty-three per cent of the infantry knew. General de Gaulle knew, so did his general staff. Everybody knew. Like the advertisement of the woman who touched up her hair, does she or doesn't she? Like this one does, but like for everybody. I know about this because, while I'm not everybody, at least I'm somebody. Anybody is somebody, if you've already got the idea that I'm a guy with an overextended ego. This I haven't got.

Harriet Shaft I knew because I had once done her apartment. In the doing of her apartment, she had done me, and naturally, since I'm a human being, I had done her right back. This all sounds a little confusing until I tell you that I'm an interior decorator. See? Now it's all clear. Harriet had called one day and had expressed an intense desire for a change. The walls no longer suited her, the carpet was nothing. "It was," she said, "Oh, I really don't know. It was a nondescript shade of absolute nothingness. You do know what I mean, Mr. Drysdale?"

Of course I knew. It was my business to know, "Ah yes, I understand perfectly." Actually what I understood best of all was that Harriet Shaft was a member of the upper twenty. Not the four hundred, but the twenty. There's a vast difference. Harriet Shaft had made a career out of getting married. Nothing unusual in this when you consider that getting married is the dream of every red-blooded American female. But with Harriet Shaft, getting married became a way of life that was to be changed every two years or thereabouts. So far the record totalled seven or eight. Since Harriet had started the marriage bit when she was about sixteen, that made her about thirty. None of the husband lasted, because Harriet had seen to it that they didn't because of her inexhaustible sexual appetite.

A man could dry out like that.

All seven of them did.

Hence the Marine Corps, and General de Gaulle's staff when she had visited France one summer. It was rumored in the Basque country that the entire staff collapsed, which is one hell of a thing. Harriet was bored to death of her duplex when she called me.

"The ceilings are white," she said. "Can you imagine? White ceilings. I can't stand them. The previous owner had absolutely no imagination, no nerve. Obviously the previous owner was a person who lacked the strength of his convictions. Wishy-washy type of person. Can't stand people like that. Perhaps you can suggest something about the ceilings before you look the place over."

"Fuchsia, madam. I'm pushing fuchsia this season. It is the thing, really."

"Really? Oh, how positively thrilling."

"Yes," I said. When you've got something like forty million dollars in the bank, like Harriet Shaft, fuchsia ceilings are positively thrilling. It figures. We had made an appointment that very same evening and I had called upon her with my sketch pad, my measuring devices and my swatches. They were all delivered by my man, Jonathan, who arrives an hour before I do with three valises appropriately padlocked and the announcement that his master, or words to that effect, will show in about an hour. Resplendant in striped pants and tails Jonathan blows and the scene is set for my arrival.

Enter the interior decorator, six-foot-four wide of shoulder, narrow of flank, half sneakers on the feet, a beret upon the head, a cool, filthy sweat shirt and equally filthy frame of hot beard.

"Oh my God!" screamed Harriet Shaft when she had first seen me. Marine who had fought tanks barehanded, the twenty-three per cent of the infantry and General de Gaulle's staff, were immediately forgotten. She looked right into my front window. "Mr. Drysdale-you are Mr. Drysdale?"

I sighed. "But of course madam." Exasperation was dearly marked upon my face. How was it possible for anyone not to know who I was? Pulling myself up to my full height, "You must be Harriet Shaft." I kissed her hand. "Pierre Drysdale."

"Pierre!" Her hand flew to her breasts, which immediately caught my eye, because I hadn't let go of her hand after I kissed it

"Pierre!"

Within eleven seconds her breast was in my eye. Now this is a record. And I don't give a goddamn-I claim it. After all-eleven seconds! What the hell do you want?

I got my eye out of there, not that it was bad there, but only because getting yanked that way can upset a man's equilibrium.

"Crazy," I said.

"I'm glad you came," she said. "I've heard so much about you. You're the man with unconventional ideas. You did Sloan Marlboro's place out in the Hamptons. A dream, an absolute dream. She said that you took care of her rather well. You're a big, lean one aren't you? Prematurely gray. How old are you Mr. Drysdale? I hope you don't mind my asking. These are things I like to know about the people who work for met You have the discernable composure of a man who knows he's very good at his work. Naturally, I'm envious."

"Thirty-five."

"That's good," She mused and she mulled. "Pierre, I want you to do this place in me." Both hands opened and rested on her breasts. "I want you to capture the spirit of me."

Imagination springs eternal. I had an immediate mental picture of a ceiling painted solely of women's breasts of all lands; creamy white breasts, breasts in American Indian red, Klondike gold and Persian blue and with an optic centered on each breast, matching as it were. A subconscious spur to latent exhibitionism. "Yes, I can see it now. I look at you and I can see the streets of Alexandria. I can see the coal coming to the surface from a black mine shaft and bringing forth the cold hard warmness of the earth. In Alexandria I can smell the smells of mankind, of unwashed Arab women. The earthiness of them, that's what there is about you. The earthiness, the strength of all women wrapped up in your being. We'll do this thing in fuchsia, striking shades, and we'll have a whipper carpet throughout, a combination of coquette, pouf and cloud nine in a mixture of dynel and acrilan fibers. Thick, thick, so that you're instincts never have to be checked."

Harriet Shaft was a beautiful woman with a beautiful bust development, red hair and lovely legs. And Harriet Shaft reputedly had forty million dollars in the bank. I was angling for the job of doing her place and Harriet had gained the reputation during her various brief marriage excursions, of being an unorthodox personage.

With Glitchik Kahna, the Syrian oil millionaire, she had once startled lower Paris, by appearing in the nude upon her balcony at the Ritz and had thrown flowers to the waiting, milling hordes below. When the Kahna had rushed to her side protestingly, she had sidestepped and Glitchik Kahna had gone over the rail, shrieking all the way down from the third floor. A red, white and blue striped canvas awning broke his fall, fortunately. However, the Kahna slipped through and flattened four Parisiennes who were seeking shelter from the rain, which is something I neglected to tell you before. It was drizzling.

Sounds exciting? Well it was exciting. The canvas awning parted and from down below, the milling hordes saw Harriet Shaft laughing hysterically with her head back and her fine breasts uplifted and gleaming in the rain. Glitchik Kahna was immediately rushed to hospital, or to the hospital, with Klaxon siren blasting away. It was discovered that he had suffered nothing more than a sprained back, a few torn playtza tendons and that was all there was to it As soon as Glitchik Kahna's playtza condition was alleviated, the Kahna wanted out. Enough of this jazz, he probably figured. The hell with Harriet Shaft. A man could get killed married to her.

The four Frenchmen who had been flattened by the Kahna wanted in. They all sued. I don't know how the suits turned out, but that wasn't too important. What is, is that Harriet was an eccentric. With forty million clams, who's eccentric? Exactly. If you want to stand up on a balcony overlooking the milling horde, then who's to stop you? So you stand up there with glistening droplets of rain trickling down your breasts and you say, "Up yours."

"Up yours," said by itself doesn't mean anything especially startling. But when it's said to you by somebody who has forty Big Ones laying around then that becomes another horse. So all you can do is to stand around like the milling horde and keep your hands at your side. And you shrug. What else? What can you do? So up yours, and let it be noted that credit is hereby given to the original source.

So enough of this. By now you've probably realized why I handled Harriet Shaft in this slightly unorthodox manner. When you meet the first cuckoo in spring, you've got to be another cuckoo-otherwise what good is it? You'll never get an audience otherwise. So on with it.

"You have a valentine face and the clean healthy glow of you must be manifest in these surroundings," I said.

Harriet Shaft was gorgeous and from her gorgeous mouth Harriet said quietly, "Constipation can be a problem for doctors. Constipation can even be a tremendous problem for decorators."

"Whoever heard of a constipated doctor?" Nevertheless I got her message. Perhaps I had gone too far.

It was a blow delivered to the lowest part of my ego, but there was hope still. If a woman speaks to you this way, then anything is possible. At least she's aware of you.

So it's like she's up on the balcony again and she's giving me the up business. But there are the forty Big Ones, if you know what I'm talking about. And the duplex, the way I see it, has got something like fifteen rooms and the only ideas I've thought about are the multi-colored breasts on one ceiling. That alone is good for two thousand, just for the ceilings. So I smile at Harriet and do not say, "Nay," but, "Yea." For here there are figs and dates and grape juice and out yonder in the street there is only the stench of Alexandria. So who needs that stench?

I glanced at Harriet, employing my best grin. All right, all was not lost yet. "Yes, I've heard of constipated doctors. They're all friends of mine."

"Exactly," she said.

"Exactly," I said.

We were stalemated, right there-

I started in a new direction. "What do you have in mind?"

"I'm not quite sure. Do you always wear that dirty sweatshirt?" This was said with a disdainful expression on her face.

She was scratching in close.

"Only when I work."

"And when you don't work?"

Here it was. This was the thin line. One way or the other boy, but move. It hadn't gone right. It looked as though I was going to blow the big one. Fifteen rooms, with the possibility of wall-to-wall burlap drapes, of furniture, rugs, painting, the whole deal, all wrapped up in whether or not she takes a liking to you. This and nothing else. Decorators, there's a million of them. All you've got to do is buy a book and you're a decorator. It was touch and go. I went.

"I don't wear any clothes when I'm not working."

She hadn't expected that. "Really? Well!" Her jutting breasts rose. "That's interesting."

Chalk up ten points. "I suggest that the ceiling be red in the guest room."

"That's good." Harriet moved up to where her jotting breasts were an inch away from my chest. "And then?"

"And then," her breasts were resting on my chest And then-who the hell knows,-and then. "Mirrors," I said. "Who knows, perfume atomizers in the beds."

"What's the difference?" she said. The breasts were beginning to bore holes in my chest. "I know what you've done. Your work is good. I'm completely in your hands. After all I know what you did to Sloan Marlboro. That's enough for me. It's enough for any gal."

Her firm breasts were no longer digging into my chest, instead her hips had thrust forward and she leaned against me without any other part of her body touching me. I put my hands on her upper back and pulled the softness of her jutting breasts in against me.

Her hands slid under the sweatshirt and then up to my chest. "You're lean and hard."

"Naturally Harriet."

"What will we do about the furniture?"

My hand slid to the full taut surface of her breast and I felt her shudder. "Well throw it the hell out," I said. "What else?"

"No, I've got a summer home. We'll ship it there."

I squeezed the hardened awareness of her breasts and I felt her nipples stiffen.

"You know," she said. "This dress has buttons in front that open and there's a side zipper over my hips that opens with the least amount of effort."

My free hand slid around her back and dropped to her buttocks. "I hadn't noticed." I stroked her buttocks and then bunched the material of her dress in my hand and pulled it upward and the dress was suddenly over her hips. I slid my hand to the silken panties she was wearing and got in under the elastic and caressed the smooth flesh of her beautifully-formed, ample rear.

I took my hands out when she started to move rhythmically against me. The nostrils of her nose quivered as she came in close against me and felt what she had aroused in me.

She pulled away and I slapped her rump, not gently. "Here's where you stay. Right here, where I can feel you."

"I was telling you about buttons and zippers and simple mechanical things like that. They're really not too complicated, if you want to try your hand at it."

I already was, but I stopped and opened the buttons of her dress. Harriet Shaft's reputation had indeed been earned. Harriet had an appetite for virile young men. While T no longer qualify as being young, Harriet was definitely proving that I was virile.

I slipped my hand in under her brassiere and cupped her breast. Harriet was not impervious to my manipulation. Her nipple came alive between my thumb and forefinger. Harriet hadn't waited until I reached down and unzipped her zipper over her hip. Harriet Shaft did the little chore herself. She wriggled her arms a little and the thin blue material of her dress slid down over her shoulders and came to rest on her hips She wore only brassiere and panties of which I had already divested her, and when the dress slid from her waist and crumpled around her dainty ankles, she stepped out of it and stood before me without her panties and only her ripe, full breasts covered by her brassiere.

"You are a beautiful female, Harriet."

"Tell me more. I want to hear. Thare's nothing modest about a woman who stands before you half-naked, Mr. Drysdale."

"Mister? And you without your panties?"

She stood with her legs a foot apart and her bands on her hips. "I feel perfectly natural and at ease with you."

"But you call me Mr. Drysdale?"

Green eyes twinkled at me. "It's your name."

"My name."

"Yes, Pierre. Whenever I hear that name, all I want to do is laugh. Please forgive me."

I took a good look at the beautifully-formed thighs and at the tiny, rounded, concave surface of her lower belly. I would have forgiven her anything. I would have forgiven her if she hadn't brushed her teeth and judging by their glistening appearance, she had. "All right," I said. "Pierre breaks you up. It's the lucky Pierre bit. All the jokes about Pierre flying airplanes and shooting down Fokkers."

She giggled and then broke into hearty laughter.

"Yes, all those Fokkers. He shot them all down."

What the hell? I had heard that bit before. It had happened to me before. But was that to stand in my way? The hell it was. "Harriet," I said. "Take your brassiere off. Either you're naked or you're half-naked. I don't like to do things in halfway measures."

Her hand went around behind her and she undid the catch. That was one moment. The next, the full rich globes of her breasts were bouncing freely with their new-found freedom.

She straightened, seeming to grow taller. Her large green eyes stared at me for what seemed a long time. Slowly, she said, "Well Pierre," and there wasn't any laughter now. "What are you waiting for?" It was breathless and there was a hot, tight smile upon her mouth.

I caught her in my arms and pulled the hot nakedness of her body to me.

"Wait baby," she said. "Don't rush me."

And then I had the long length of her pressing into me. The satin smoothness of her thighs were between my legs and I caught the small of her back and stepped in so that her pelvis tilted forward to me.

"You excite me. I think it was what Sloan told me about you. That you make love with such reckless abandon, that really made me call you up."

Who the hell knows what she was talking about Right now there was a line of stimulation that ran up my body. And this one, who's been married so many times that she no longer knows the difference as to when she's in bed with a guy, or watching the late show, for all the effect he has on her, is giving me the cold, clinical approach. She's asking me about my reckless abandon, whatever the hell she means by that.

Harriet moved with a deceptive simplicity, with a precision of movement from her compact hips, and with a rhythm that was sheer spontaneity. Harriet Shaft had had all the practice necessary. It was rumored that all her husbands had made it with her.

I kissed her neck, I kissed her mouth. We stepped cm the black lace panties where she had dropped them on the floor.

"There's nobody home."

"That's good," I said.

"You could leave your trousers here."

"Right here in the living room?"

"Yes. You said that you didn't wear any clothes at all when you weren't working."

"That's true." I obliged.

Harriet put her hands flat on her twenty-three, somewhere between her size thirty-eight breasts and her thirty-six hips and said, "Jockey shorts? Who wears jockey shorts?"

I shrugged. What are you going to do? "It's the only vice I've got. I've got this passion for jockey shorts. If they bother you, my pleasure." I got rid of the jockey shorts with one fast movement.

Harriet whistled slowly-that was Harriet's reaction.

"You know what I'm thinking, Harriet?"

"Haven't the slightest idea. I know what I'm thinking." She whistled again.

"Take it easy," I said. "You'll create some kind of a draft, around here."

"I know what you're thinking," she said. Her eyes hadn't left my draft area. "That we walk to my bedroom," Harriet said.

"Well, you're not exactly putting your finger on it, but it's close enough."

"I can put my finger on whatever you're thinking." And she did.

That was how we walked to her bedroom, that was how I managed to decorate Harriet Shaft's duplex apartment. The job from beginning to end lasted all of three months. There was much work to be done.

We hung burlap in the study and tore that down and replaced it with linen drapes. The walk were painted and papered where appropriate. There were rooms that were done in pink and scarlet red, and Persian blue and emerald green. There were rooms done in bronze. There was a new hi-fi that had to be selected. There was one room that called for a higher ceiling. I stood there in my dirty sweat shirt and said that the ceiling must be raised. I had a crew of Norwegian carpenters I had hired for any necessary alterations. The job was approaching its finish. This would be a major catastrophe.

"Raise the ceiling?" the Norwegian carpenters asked incredulously.

"Yes, remove the goddamn thing, and let the beams show for about two days. I want Miss Shaft to see the ceiling studs."

"Those aren't studs."

"Whatever the hell they are. Let her see them for a while. After three days, put another ceiling back on."

One carpenter turned to another carpenter. "You know what he means?"

Wise eyes looked out from behind glasses. "Sure I know what he means. He wants an exposed ceiling for about three days. It's the latest thing. Don't ever question what a man wants. If a man wants an exposed ceiling, then that's what you give him. You don't fool around. It's really a very simple thing and it has a logical explanation: obviously Pierre has a woman who doesn't know what she wants. Somehow, she isn't satisfied with her ceiling."

"Yeah, that happens sometimes. Lots of times."

"Right?"

"Right. So what can you do with a woman like this?"

"Ah, I see-you take down the old ceiling and you put up a new one."

"Damn right. It's like ... er ... uh ... it's like buying a hat. Same idea-you put a new ceiling on and then you paint it wierd like."

"That'll do it all the time. All right, what are we waiting for men?"

Down came the ceiling. Time was short and the dough wasn't. We put the ceiling back. Everything takes time.

In the interest of my job I had moved into Harriet Shaft's apartment. There were many things to be done. The carpenters, the painters, the rug installers-all needed supervision. The new furniture arrived, the delivery men needed supervision. Drapery hardware went up on the ceilings and drapes were suspended there from. It was gay and scintillating as all hell, and Harriet was paying the tab. I had exchanged the drabness of my Chelsea apartment for the lush, cool, comfortable confines of Harriet's place. The rugs were thick, the figs and pomegranates were plentiful. Harriet usually slept until noon and then disappeared.

"Ta, ta-to the beauty salon," she said and zipped past me.

"To, ta," I replied. "Take your time."

The three Norwegian carpenters managed to drive nails into everything while she was still around. Banisters were taken down and nailed up again. They had gotten into the spirit of things. It was January, construction work was at a standstill. These guys were getting a check every week. If I had asked them to move the apartment out into the street, they would have gladly complied with my request After the ceiling bit they were ready for anything. They'd wait until Harriet was safely ensconced in a cab and on her way to the beauty workshop and then there'd be a two hour watch maintained and divided equally between Sorensin, Bjell-and, and Brishng, who was also a Norwegian. Large quantities of beer, smoked hams, sardines and shrimps were consumed by all hands. Afternoons, I slept.

Occasionally Bjelland, who was an eager-beaver type, would pick up his hammer and drive a few nails into the wall and wake me.

"Knock it off," I shouted angrily.

From the window where the watch was maintained and from one of the thick rugs where somebody reclined, there ensued crude, rude cries of protestation.

"Stop that you stupid jerk."

"You crazy Bjelland, don't you know that boss is sleeping?"

Mumbled apologies were heard. "It lost my head," Bjelland, said.

And so,-back to sleep.

I stirred, realigned my position in bed, and slept. The afternoons passed pleasantly enough, until Harriet's cab dropped her off downstairs.

"Man your battle stations, barracuda approaching at forty knots," was the alert from the window.

Hammers reappeared in busy hands. Nails were driven and pounded. I jumped out of the bed and into my shoes and leaped into the fray.

Bjelland, Sorensin, and Brishng pounded their hammers in furious crescendo when Harriet entered.

At night, and I mean all through the night, I pounded Harriet. What the hell-a guy has to make a buck! Right? That's the way I figured it too.

Harriet didn't know when to quit. The trouble was that she started and never quit. We lived in beautiful, bountiful bliss right through the night. I took vitamin pills. One-a-day pills. I took five of those each morning. I had sirloin steaks with eggs, sunny-side-up, on top and followed that with a gallon of enriched milk, mixed with six heaping tablespoons of wheat germ.

I lost weight at the rate of seven pounds a week. At the end of two months I was down to a hundred and fifty pounds, there were bags under my eyes and they looked like two cigarette holes burned in a blanket. Sunken cheeks, jumpy, twitching hands and nervous tics are the rewards.

Such are the occupational hazards of bounders and rounders and pounders.

I had heard that Harriet could do that to a man. But let's face it: breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, just let me at it, man. Just let me rip off those drawers baby and we'll make it together. Okay, so you make it, and mind you, and mark this, Harriet Shaft is something to make it with. So what have we? Harriet, who is, willing, ready and able-which is an understatement. Harriet is a willing partner, on the rugs, in the bathroom, where she suddenly appears while I'm shaving, on the stairs leading to the second floor of her duplex, with one leg hanging over the banister, yet.

I'm looking for something in the clothes closet one morning, before Bjelland and company arrives, and all of a sudden she's there. She giggles. "I've never tried it in the closet."

How many people have? All right. So I figure. I'D take a whack at it. I'm right in the middle when all of a sudden camphor balls and camphor crystals come flying down from overhead. You can imagine what sheer delight this can be. A shower of camphor crystals floated downward with the grace of a swan and lit upon the objects of the moment's passion. Were we taken by surprise? Surely.

Harriet let out a beautifully enunciated screech and did a complete turnabout. Her movements were no longer earthy, but astro. They were not of this planet.

No longer were we sympatico. Camphor flakes and camphor balls in the guise and appearance of hailstones and snowflakes had ended it all. You haven't lived until camphor balk come into our life. But take my word for it, you can do without it very nicely. It's a struggle-but if you try, you can do without it.

So what's the upshot of this little episode? I'm knocked out of action for a while. A guy in a drug store tells me that tannic acid is good for something like this. A doctor tells me that ice cold milk of magnesia mixed in equal quantity with ice cold mineral oil will help if applied in a loose compress.

Nothing helps. He's obviously one of the constipated doctors that Harriet has told me about. Nothing helps.

Harriet got into bed and didn't get out again for four days. "I'm ruined," she said. "You've ruined me."

"But the camphor...." I started to say.

"Shut up and get out," she said. "There's a check for you on the dresser."

I limped out. The check was generous, but I left with a heavy heart and I had my doubts that I'd ever he the same again.

And that was how I did Harriet Shaft's apartment and that was how Harriet did me, which brings me to the present, where some gal named Gloria, who says she's a friend of Harriet's is on the phone and it's six o'clock in the morning.

Her voice interrupted my lengthy thoughts. "Are you still there?"

"Yeah, still here."

"I've been ringing Harriet's apartment and she doesn't answer. Do you know where I can find her?"

"Are you kidding? This some kind of a joke? If it is, you can go...."

"Hold it," the voice said. "Harriet gave me your number when I told her that I had to do my place. She doesn't answer and it's six o'clock in the morning and my plane just got in and I had counted on staying with Harriet. I had your number so I took the liberty of calling you, on the chance that you might be able to offer some helpful advice. So kindly change your tone. Please."

"Where are you?"

"At the airport."

"Do you have my address?"

"Yes, but why?"

"Take a cab. I'll leave the front door open for you. Don't ring the bell. Just walk in. I'll set up a folding bed for you."

"What makes you think that I'll come to your apartment?"

"It's six o'clock in the morning. All I want to do is sleep. I get horny about twelve o'clock in the afternoon. So that gives you about five and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep."

Silence on the other end.

"Hey-you there?"

"Yes."

"Well then, hop a cab-I'm going back to sleep.

So long," I said, and hung up.

I had a lousy taste back of my teeth, so I brushed them and peeled an orange, cut it into quarters and ate it while ruminating all the while. The poor kid out at the airport really had sounded as though she didn't know where to turn.

Well, I had done what any good boy scout would have done under the circumstances. I had offered her a place to lay her head, whatever the hell that means. She had said that Harriet Shaft was a friend of hers. That meant something. Fast gals usually run with fast gals. So I took it to mean something. That in itself wasn't all that prompted me to offer her a place to sleep. She had said something about having her place done. If her lace was anything at all like Harriet's, then there was a proper buck to be made.

I opened the folding cot in the living room and unlatched the door. The way I saw it, one more job like Harriet Shaft's and I could take it easy for the rest of the year. Basically, I'm a guy who doesn't like to work too hard. You can't blame me for it. If I can make the same dollar by doing a few jobs a year instead of breaking my well known, then I'm for that. There are places to see and there are sunny dimes where the fair maidens are waiting. If I am going to pass away the time, then that's the way I want to spend it. Maybe the gal would hop a cab and come over and maybe she wouldn't.

These ratiocinations occupied me while I brushed my teeth again and climbed back into bed, where all tationating ceased and sleep took over.

CHAPTER TWO

She did, hop a cab, and she did come over to my place. She was asleep in the living room when I got out of bed and headed for the John at eleven. I took a good look and decided that John could wait, so could Harry and Pete and Irving.

Gloria was asleep on the folding bed that I keep around in case company drops in unexpectedly. She stopped me cold. She stopped me abruptly, in my tracks.

Obviously she hadn't thought that she would need clothes for sleeping, like nightgowns, pajamas and things of that sort. She slept in the raw and on her stomach. Not that I hadn't provided her with a blanket. There was a blanket that I had left on the bed in the event that she showed up. The blanket lay in crumpled disarray at the foot of the bed where she had probably kicked it off.

So it's like "this: my day hasn't even started; I haven't had a chance to brush my teeth and visit the john; I haven't had a chance to make myself some coffee and oatmeal and already there are disturbing distractions in my life.

There's a naked behind staring at me, pink-complected it is, and I stare right back. There are beautiful, voluptuous thighs that join this pleasing rump. There is a soft, feminine back and long, black hair falls softly over a shoulder.

The ripe warmth of her buttocks greet me and I am spellbound. I don't know whether to go to the john or go to bed. If I walk past her, however gently, the odds are that I'll wake her up.

Immediately, we're off on the wrong foot First off, she's likely to come out with some remark like, "You fiend, you were staring at my behind while I was asleep and defenseless, and last-but-not-least, while my back was turned." Right off I'd be suspected of peeping tommery or trespassing upon the privacy of a sleeping gal's bottom.

I took another look at the sleeping rounded beauty of her buttocks. Damn! I noticed that she had a small beauty mark upon one cheek. Well, that was nice, I thought.

The hell with this noise. I was getting nowhere fast. I wasn't getting to the John, which had become a vital matter now.

Nor was I getting anywhere with the sleeping behind. You'll have to excuse my referring to her that way because that was all I could see. I would have liked to have seen more, but those are the breaks. I had the sneakiest suspicion that she wasn't any beauty. Anybody who was blessed with two mounds of white, creamy pulchritude of the caliber and magnificence of these lustrous buttocks was, in truth, not entitled to a pretty face.

Her lovely pink bottom beckoned to me. I could have sworn it.

I'm sick, sick, sick.

I pushed her behind out of my mind and sneaked past without waking her. Everything was fine in the John. I brushed my teeth, I went so far as to trim my beard with a cuticle scissors that I found in the medical cabinet I stalled. I killed time. I sang a few bars of "I took my gkl to the engine house, the engines all around OS . .

I made considerable noise. Enough to wake any sleeping beauty with a bare bottom. I hacked, in my usual morning cigarette bass and I scratched myself under the arms and took a few deep breasts of air. I was set. The morning was no longer a problem. I was ready to do battle with the world.

I yodeled, not loud enough to disturb the neighbors, but certainly with enough power to awaken Miss Dimpled Buttocks who had greeted me first thing this morning. I went through a few bars of. "I love life and I want to live," and then I went back out into the living room, to the domain of the sleeping buttocks.

The top of her head was the first thing I spied and then the incline of her back to her narrow waist, easily encircled by the span of my hand, I thought.

And there they were again. Those disturbing buttocks.

I like things orderly in my apartment. They upset me.

Somehow they seemed incongruous, just being there. They bothered me. You know the way mountains bother certain kinds of guys, and so right away these guys are climbing them. Not that I really wanted to climb up on her buttocks, like those mountains climbers.

The simile is poor, I have to admit. But the similarity nevertheless existed in a vague way. The buttocks offered a challenge.

I told you-I'm sick.

So don't get excited.

The plan I had was merely to cover them with the blanket. They'd be out of harm's way. That's all there is to it, men. Nonsense, you say.

The hell with you, I say. I tell you that was what I had in mind.

When you have to cover a sleeping female's behind, you've got to be extremely careful. There are many pitfalls, but I haven't got time to go into those right now. I'll give you an idea, however. If you drop the blanket down quickly, a draft may ensue. A chill is enough to wake any sleeping behind. Gentle care must be exercised. No draft.

I walked on panther's feet, which is a hell of a trick unless you've got a cooperative panther. Most panthers won't stand still for that kind of jazz however.

On with it.

I approached her sleeping form. Gingerly, I lifted the blanket between thumb and forefinger. Taking care, I dropped it upon the treasures of her behind, two beautifully-carved chunks of marble which were, in reality, her rather good-sized behind.

"There," I said, in primitive abandon. The deed was done, and successfully. That was that I thought.

Not the sleeping behind. The nomenclature remains thus because up to now, that is all I have seen.

There is a tremendous howl. A scream is what it Rally is.

So if it's a scream, why the hell don't you call it a scream?

All right, it's a scream. But I mean a scream that's enough to waken the entire building.

"You, you ... What are you trying to do? You're trying to uncover me. Help I" she shouts like there isn't anybody around to hear her, and then lets out another shreik. "You ... Rasputin."

Ah, that's it. She's spotted my decorator's beard. "Shhhhh ... I...."

"Shh, nothing! You were trying to take my blanket off."

"The hell I was."

"You were, you were."

It's not the most brilliant conversation, but anything is better than her screaming.

She's attractive, even while on the point of hysteria. Her face is flushed a delicate pink. "liar," she screams.

"Please," I object

"Don't come near me." Her hand flies to her throat. Suddenly, the answer comes to me. I'll prove it. She takes deep breath, another ear-splitting scream is in the works.

"Hold it-I can prove it"

She was disappointed, but her curiosity got the best of her. The air she had taken into her lungs preparatory to the scream exhaled forth.

"You've got a beauty mark," I cried triumphantly. "You've got a beauty mark on your can."

It didn't quite dawn on her. At first I thought she was getting ready to let another one of those ear-splitting blasts loose.

"How could I know that you've got a beauty mark there unless I've already seen it." This seemingly unimportant piece of information had accomplished the seemingly impossible. I convinced her that I had already seen her rear and that I wasn't attempting to take a gander.

She cleared her throat and grinned at me, the crisis was past. No longer was I Jack the Ripper. Suddenly she looked at me and she must have realized that here was a normal human being, like all other guys. A normal man who believes in pursuing ladies in the acceptable fashions and ways. Here was a man who believed in flush toilets.

"I'm Gloria Keller." She sat up with the blanket around her neck.

"Pierre," I said. "Pierre Drysdale."

Laughter gathered at her eyes. "Pierre," she shrieked joyously, her arms out-thrust with simple trust. "I love that name."

She lost her head. She lost her blanket. But she found it quickly enough when the realization of what had taken place hit her.

But not until I had spotted her snowy-white breasts. I forgot about her behind immediately. Her behind paled by comparison. There just wasn't any. Erect pink nipples crowned the full richness of her smooth, creamy-white mounds.

"Watch it," I said. "Take care. Watch what the hell you're doing." Already my breakfast was ruined. Oatmeal and coffee was what I had planned. What could follow breasts like these?

She bent forward, chuckling throatily. "Sorry." A flush, the color of a peach settled in her cheeks. She sighed heavily. "We seem to be having trouble this morning." She paused and then she said, "I'm sorry."

"I'm not," I said. The hell with all this noise. I wasn't. The truth was that I was glad. What a sight before breakfast!

She shook her head, her dark hair flowing like a stream of black crude oil in the morning light filtering into the room. The blanket stayed up around the graceful line of her neck and didn't do anything to conceal the taut, heavy breasts rising gently on her slow breath.

"Gloria," I said, and grinned to keep it light. "I wouldn't be telling you the truth if I didn't tell you that you have the loveliest set of...."

"That's enough," she said interrupting whatever I had in mind. Nevertheless, she smiled. "You're really sweet-I can tell." She smiled, teeth gleaming white. "What gives with the beard, Pierre?"

Which only proves a point, for what it's worth. Tell a female that she's got a nice set of anything and she's your friend. You never insult them that way.

"It's business."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It helps. It's a part of the bit. It doesn't always work, but it suggests a certain strength of individuality. I find that many women want help in deciding feelings and mood in decorating. The beard helps, and the fact that I wear good clothes when the occasion demands it-and sweatshirts when they're called for-is all part of the illusion I have to create."

"There's nothing of an illusion about that beard. It looked as though it's an itchy thing. It looks real to me. Ugh!"

I hadn't spoken to her for more than ten minutes. Thus far I had already seen her behind and her breasts. She had already dismissed this from her mind, but I hadn't dismissed it from mine. I hadn't had any breakfast; no orange juice, no coffee, no oatmeal. I feel lousy and this broad is picking on my beard. "I like it. It's mine. It's my property."

"Well I don't."

I balled my fist. I'd like to give her a belt in the chops. Nothing would have given me more pleasure.

"I deal with decor and the harmony of colors. I deal with women who want raspberry red, and gashght green and eggplant purple. I talk about a yellow jonquil. I set moods with colors and effects. Plain talk, the beard is for effect. When a guy who's six-foot-four and beshrubbed, tells a prospective client, 'Madam, when I look at you I see Clematis. I can feel it Madam, you are Clematis.' it shakes her. Of course, I look at her with hot eyes and twitch my beard. She doesn't want to admit that she doesn't know what the hell Clematis is, but it sounds fairly obscene and she's fascinated by the possibility that perhaps it is. So what with the twitching beard and the hot eyes, you've got a chance. At least she's ready to consider giving you the job. Clematis! Wow!"

"It doesn't interest me in the least, I'd like a shower."

I pointed in the right direction. "Help yourself. Towels and soap-it's all there. I'll have breakfast ready when you come out-wait a minute!" I found an old bathrobe for her. "Use this."

"Thanks. That's the only thing I forgot to bring with me. I've got a little overnight bag that just isn't big enough for bathrobes."

"Take your shower. I'll wait for you."

CHAPTER THREE

She came to the breakfast table about fifteen minutes later, my bathrobe over her shoulders and draped around her as shapelessly as an Indian squaw. Gloria Keller was tall for a girl, about five-eight or nine in her stocking feet. She came into the kitchen barefooted. Her hair had been freshly combed and set off the beautiful oval-shaped contour of her face. Wide, lustrous eyes stared at me mischievously and then looked toward the stove.

"That's a little more like it," she said. "What?"

"Bacon and eggs cooking, coffee perking. That's more like the way I'm prepared to start the day."

We sat and we ate. Over coffee she told me that she had met Harriet Shaft in Paris. She had been there when Harriet had neatly sidestepped and the Kahna had gone over the balcony. Gloria had been employed by one of the press services at the time and her assignment had been to interview Harriet. Harriet was news. All Paris was agog over the antics of the crazy American millionairess. It had created something of a stir back home too.

"When we both got back to the States, after Harriet had gotten rid of Glitchik Kahna,-it was another one of her fast divorces-I met her again. We got to be real good friends. Harriet is really a swell person. I guess you already know that," she said.

"She's a doll."

She grinned suddenly. "Harriet told me that you had some trouble with camphor baus."

"Nuts to camphor balls," I said. "I don't ever want to hear about camphor balls again."

"Go easy there. I don't like men who are vulgar."

"What's vulgar about camphor balk?"

"Well, I guess nothing, but it's just the way you say it. Somehow it makes it sound worse than it really is. I guess."

I guess, I guess. She sounded so innocent, so naive, that for a minute I thought I was going to throw up. Here's a tomato who calls me at six o'clock in the morning and tells me that she's a friend of Harriet's, which immediately makes her available in my book. Any friend of Harriet's has got to be something for the boys. Otherwise Harriet doesn't have any use for her, I figure. I take a closer look at her and she suddenly pulls the bathrobe tighter around her neck as though I'm trying to take a peak at what's forbidden to peek at.

Still, I remain the gentleman. After all, she's told me that Harriet recommended me. That's worth something in dollars and cents. Unfortunately, that is the stuff that pays the rent. Therefore, I'm polite again, and I push whatever thoughts I have concerning what she's hiding under the bathrobe from my mind. "More coffee?" I smiled graciously in my best breakfast manner.

Gloria smiled in like manner. "Harriet says that you're something in the hay. Is that really true?"

A chunk of stale bread lodged in my throat and I coughed for a full minute trying to regain my composure. What gives with her? If I as much as look at her, she acts as though I'm ready to jump on her and with her next breath she tells me that Harriet says I'm a good man in the sack.

"How come?" I said.

"How come what?"

"How come you want to know a thing like that?" That's how come, how come."

"Oh, that-I guess it's my natural curiosity. There isn't a woman alive who isn't interested in some man who's supposed to be extraordinary in bed."

"Harriet said that?"

"That she did," smiling.

My chest expanded. This was more like it: tell a man that he's great in bed and his day is made. I smirked triumphantly. "Well I wouldn't go so far as to say that."

"You're being modest."

"All right baby. I'll admit that I'm the greatest. So where do we go from here?"

She drew a deep breath and her breasts rose under my robe and it parted a little, revealing the deep cleft between the golden mounds of her breasts.

She caught me looking and made no effort to cover them. "Do they give you pleasure. I mean just looking at them."

She had me. I had to admit that they did, give me pleasure that is. "They sure as hell do." Well that was it. That was the end of the decorating job. But she was the kind of female who made you think of things other than decorating her apartment. Unless it was with her. "Yeah," I said. "I enjoy looking at them. And where do we go from here?"

"You said that before, but I chose to ignore it. If you insist on an answer...."

"I don't insist on an answer unless it's favorable."

"It's not in the slightest. Nothing could be further from what I have in mind."

"Ah, but you have something in mind."

"That I have. I've got a business proposition in mind. I do the society column for the Gazette. My column is syndicated; it's read by many influential people. Harriet told me the way you operate. You do the complete set-up, everything; rugs, furniture, wallpaper, painting, rebuilding, drapes the whole bit. Correct?"

"Correct."

"That sometimes runs into a nice bundle." I nodded. Her deal was already apparent. I let her go on.

"Percentage."

"How much?"

"Twenty."

"Of my profit, not of the complete job-otherwise it doesn't work out. And for which you do what?"

"I mention you in my column. I give you free publicity. That's worth a fortune. Guys like Cassini and Lowey are constantly in the news. It doesn't hurt them any."

"On the contrary."

"You'll make lots of dough. But there's one thing that you'll have to understand right from the beginning. You'll be working for me."

"How did you come to that conclusion?"

"I'll steer the highest echelons of society right into your lap. Before we're through you'll be in a different income category. For this small accomplishment, you work for me. Make up your mind now. Otherwise we drop it here."

Naturally I did exactly what she expected me to do. I nodded and listened. I wasn't doing too badly getting the occasional jobs that fell my way, but she was talking of something that smacked of the big money.

"You interested?" Gloria asked.

"Very much."

"That's good. I thought that you would be. Actually the main reason that I called you this morning at six was that I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you and talk to you. As I've already said, Harriet mentioned your prowess in bed. That may come in handy."

I laughed. "You mean I'll be mixing a little pleasure with my business."

She shook her head slowly. "Your business may be somebody's pleasure. Some of these gals who will take you on, will expect to be romanced as part of the deal."

I studied her. "You mean that I'll be expected to get into the sack with every dame I work for?" It wasn't that I object to the idea, but somehow it seemed too good to be true. Nobody likes it better than I do, so that posed no problem.

"Does the prospect of something like that bother you?"

I shook my head waiting for her to go on.

"Good, because the possibility of that taking place is very strong. You'll be publicized as a chaser. Your name will be linked with Hollywood starlets you'll never get to see. Naturally any mention of their name will be appreciated by them so there isn't any problem there. And it'll be gently dropped that you're a virile type who makes the fair sex swoon whenever you give them the business. There will be little hints in my column, like; Who was the gentleman decorator who made his hasty departure from the bedroom of a well-known society matron when whatever they were doing was interrupted by her husband-P-S. The gentleman sports a beard and answers to the name of Pierre. Your identity will be known within days."

I thought about it "Yeah," I said. "It sounds as though it has possibilities. It sounds good."

She offered her hand to me across the table, and I noticed that the robe had fallen almost completely away from the full, rich globes of her pouting breasts. There was nothing subtle about her actions now. The soft, up-thrusting qualities of the curve of her breasts caught my eye and held it. I took my mind off them long enough to shake her hand.

"All right. It's a deal then," she said.

I offered her a cigarette. If she was on the make I'd find out quickly enough. There wasn't any sense in rushing things. Whatever was due to happen would take its natural course.

She let her eyes wander toward the living room. "Who are they-the girls on the pictures. You've got the walls plastered with them."

"Friends of mine."

"They're all beautiful girls."

"They've got to be."

"Who are they?"

"Call girls, television actresses, bit players, some small night club vocalists. They are my friends of the evening. I call them the night people."

"Night people," she laughed throatily. "What are night people supposed to be?"

She wrote a column and she knew damn well what I meant when I referred to night people. I played it her way. She wanted an answer to her question and since she had plans for me that sounded good, I went right along with it. Perhaps she wanted conversation. I didn't want to antagonize her, not for a minute.

"They're not housewives, they're not girls who make their living working behind a counter somewhere. Those are the daytime people. The girls on the pictures are the night time people. Their sleeping habits are different."

"Their sleeping habits are different? Their sleeping hours are different; they go to bed when other people are getting up."

"That's right."

"That isn't all you want. You meant by then-sleeping habits that they sleep around a little more freely."

"Well, we didn't try to hide that fact, did we? T did say call girls."

She looked at me strangely. "Your friends are whores, then. Your friends sleep around."

I knew her then. She was getting some kind of charge by talking about it, by talking about the erotic sexual lives of others. I had seen and experienced that type of thing before. There were degrees of course. Some girls could stimulate themselves almost completely, taking vicarious thrills in delving into the sexual behavior of others. It really wasn't too uncommon. It's easy enough to think of the neighbor who gossips constantly about who is playing around with whom. "As I was saying, it's all a matter of degree. I don't refer to my friends as anything but my friends. I never label them."

"How charming," she said caustically.

I was ruining her game. Her annoyance showed on her face. She was a little bit of a witch. But that's the way it goes.

"Do you have to resort to call girls, Mr. Drysdale? Can't you manage to get what you want without paying for it? Perhaps I over-estimated you."

She was giving me a needle. She was a witch and she was a witch with sharp teeth. I had the distinct feeling that if I'd allow it, she'd not only gnaw on my leg, she'd chew it completely off. "Do you know anything about call girls?"

"I know some of them personally. It's possible that you'll get to decorate some of their apartments through me. But that wasn't what I asked you before."

"No, it wasn't, was it? Like so. It's paid for and it's delivered. When I'm finished. I'm done with it. I can take it or leave it. All I have to do is walk away from it when it's all over and forget it if it isn't any good. If I like it, then there's the phone-all it takes to call."

"What about your personal feelings. Doesn't it disgust you?"

"Hell no."

"I mean the fact that the girls aren't experiencing anything at all while it's going on."

"You know this for a fact?"

"That I do. I told you that I knew quite a few of them. We talk between us as girl-to-girl sometimes."

"Girl-to-girl?"

"Yes."

"Or maybe girl-tomboy?"

"You've got a fresh mouth."

"You've thought of it, haven't you?"

She flushed. "We weren't talking about me. We were talking about you."

"That's right, we were talking about call girls. For instance, they never take it upon themselves to dig into a man's bones the way you are at this moment."

"That's a hell of a thing to say to a woman, that girl-to-boy thing. I can answer it, though. I don't think you expect me to. It doesn't apply to me. I'm a gal whose tastes run strictly to men." She looked at me and got up. "Let's sit in the living room. I can't stand sitting around in the kitchen when there are a stack of dishes with food on them on the table."

I followed her into the living room where she sat on the couch opposite me.

She smiled and crossed her legs. Cute. She was getting cute. She crossed her legs and the white flesh of her long, sleek thigh broke into view and stayed that way. She made no effort to cover it. This gal was on the make.

She put her hands behind her head and with her fingers did something to the ends of her hair that was supposed to mean something both of us understood. We did. She was playing a game and she sat on the couch with a smug look upon her face like she had four aces in her hand and she could call the shots anyway she wanted.

I called her bluff. "My robe looks crummy on you," I said. "Why don't you take it off."

Her eyes widened. "Just like that?"

"Yeah," I said. "Take it off right now and weH both go at it."

Her face whitened, and she gasped and was on her feet. She took a step toward me, her mouth was half open as though she wanted to say something, and then after about ten seconds, she said, "Why are you talking to me that way?"

The robe she was wearing had parted on top and the taut fullness of her golden breasts lay exposed almost completely. The robe barely covered her nipples.

"Come here, you witch," I said slowly, but clearly, as though I meant it and mean it I did.

"You've got no right to speak to me this way." Her voice was a hoarse protest. "You're pushing me too hard for your own good."

I got up out of the chair I was sitting in and pointed a finger at the floor. "Here. Right here. Here's where I want you."

"Drop dead," she said.

I took my pajama top off and dropped it to the floor and then unbuttoned the bottoms and let them fall.

I watched her closely. I have always noticed that the eyes of a female who knows that she is about to have love made to her invariably stray and remain fixed upon the object of her love.

"You wouldn't. What am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to scream?"

"Not unless you want to. Here." I said. "I told you that I wanted you here."

"No," she said and with one deft movement dropped the robe completely away from her body. She let it fall to the floor.

Her breasts were high and firm and the nipples were large and pointed. The nipples were shaped in a curious way so that they were almost miniatures of the breasts they rested on. Her belly was hard and flat and her legs were long and slim, blending into the creamy-white softness of her thighs. Gloria Keller was beautifully proportioned and for a moment I stared at her, aware of the breath-taking picture she presented to me. Her arms were rounded and her breasts were so completely full that the valley between them was deep with the promise of her warmth.

Beneath her belly there was the soft roundness of her lower belly, merging into complete femininity where her legs joined her body. Her hands joined, shielding her loveliness from me and it seemed incongruous for a split second.

"Come to me," she whispered huskily.

I began to move toward her and her eyes were wild, running over my body and she stood still, transfixed.

She was shaking and I didn't know if it was with fright or with the passion or the uncertainty of the thing.

I moved toward her and without putting my hands on her, without allowing any part of my body to touch her, kissed her mouth.

She began nibbling on my tongue the moment our mouths made contact, and then her tongue began slipping into my mouth with quick, rapid thrusts and I answered.

And then she was in my arms.

She caught my hand and pulled it to her breast. It was firm and the nipple was as hard as a diamond. Her breast trembled violently beneath my hand and I caught her crimson nipple between my thumb and forefinger and pulled on it gently and then twisted it.

She gasped sharply as I touched some hitherto un-awakened source of her passion. Gloria was breathing hard now, and I felt the heat of her breath against my face.

Slowly she moved in against me and then we stood only an inch apart below our waists.

We were both playing a game, an unbearably sensitive game, that ended when I grabbed both her breasts ruthlessly in my hands and squeezed them until she rocked her body with the ecstasy of it.

She forgot the teasing game she was playing the moment her lower body brushed against me making contact with me, and tingling, delicious sensations ran down my legs.

She jumped backward, as though I had touched her with a hot poker. Her eyes were half-closed and then I could no longer be denied what she had been keeping from me, I reached behind her slowly and caught her buttocks in my hand. Gloria trembled wildly as I pulled her in to me.

We caught a little of each other to each other. "Don't, ... please don't, ... not yet ... I'm too warm for that...." I heard her say, and I thought that I hadn't heard her correctly.

I ignored her and began to pull her toward me, and she suddenly had her hands on my chest. "Please ... please try to understand. I'm too eager for what yon want now. I won't be able to control myself."

It was the first time that I had ever heard a female say it that way. From the outset she was a torrid well of heat. She knew enough of herself, of her body, to realize that it would end for her before it had hardly begun. It showed good sense. Gloria smiled at me with a hot, tight smile around her mouth.

"I asked you before," she said, "if you liked my breasts. I'd like you to kiss them I'd like you to eat them-that's how hot you make me."

I watched her face, but only or a moment. I was aware of the beauty of her nakedness. I was suddenly aware of the full, rich swelling globes and of the remarkable fullness and creamy texture of them.

She was a gorgeous thing to behold. I had seen my share of naked women. Seeing a woman's nude body in itself is something that is singular-but seeing a woman before you, who is beautifully put together and from whose mouth comes the words. "I'd like you to eat them," referring to her breasts, "and that's how hot you make me," had an effect upon me that made me grab the warm softness of her body close to me I caught her face to mine and she giggled when the roughness of my beard brushed against her neck.

Her soft long thighs rested against my legs and I felt her lower body as a spur to my masculinity.

Gloria's month lifted up to me and I lowered my head and spotted the sensual quality of her mouth which opened invitingly for me.

I kissed her and her tongue darted into my mouth quickly and the warm breath came from her with ragged gasping sounds. The fingertips of her hands rested on my neck and then traced gentle lines over the back of my head.

Her tongue had become a liquid rapier that plunged and darted into my mouth. Gloria was no longer still and controlled, instead she moved her body so that her nakedness was a writhing mass of movement against my hardened body. She pulled her mouth away and I heard her moan quietly. Her eyes were completely closed now, suggesting a waiting attitude.

There was much I wanted to do to the warm, pink body. She stood before me and I saw the rapid rise of her breasts and her harsh breathing and her lower stomach quivering in an absolute manifestation of feminine desire.

She said nothing and her hands pulled gently at my head, making her wish as clear to me as she could without uttering a word. And I felt the guiding pressure of her hands bringing my head down to her breast.

I caught the shuddering, golden nakedness of her breast, and with my mouth slowly kissed the underside, lifting the fullness of her swollen mound. Then I slid my hand upward to the rich full heaviness and squeezed the nipple, kneading it lightly. I tugged at it gently and was rewarded with a sharp withdrawn gasp.

"Kiss, it, kiss it," she whispered hoarsely. Her hand had moved to her breast and she pushed the soft roundness of it toward me by encircling it with her clenching hand, pushed the jutting ruby nipple toward me, toward my mouth.

I caught it, encircling it completely and felt her tremble beneath the rapid manipulation of my tongue. Her hands had become wild, uncontrolled things that slid over my body and came to rest on my buttocks.

"Stay close to me Pierre ... I want you in close to me," she whispered.

I slid my hand down between us, sliding it quickly down over her body and touched her belly, stroking it gently and as I caressed the silkiness of her skin, I felt her shudder. Then I ran my hand over her lower stomach, over the lovely roundness of it and I felt her fall limp in my grasp. She relaxed and the tenseness that I had felt in her seemed to disappear almost completely.

"Your beard is like wool against my body," she said and she tried to move her breast away from my mouth. "Please, please stop-I can't stand the way it feels. It gives me goose pimples."

Her eyes were closed completely and her lips were parted. Glancing upward from her breasts, her hair looked disheveled about her head. She was the lovely picture of all women to me then, as lovely as a woman can be to a man, as lovely as a woman can be who offers herself to a man without restraint and with the absolute sexual being of herself.

Her waist was narrow and supple in my hands and I placed the tips of my fingers on her buttocks. It was the first time that I had touched her there. The buttocks were soft in my grasp and suddenly they stiffened, growing hard as she tensed her muscles and her buttocks moved and jumped in my hand.

I pulled her to me roughly, drawing her in to me, and felt her quiver as we drew closer together. With incredible skill she began to move her body artfully, first in against me with quick little gentle movements, and then she pulled away from me. Each time she came to me the warm cavern of her body brushed against me tantalizingly. The desire, and the red hot passion that I had felt before paled into insignificance beside what she was evoking from me now.

There was a resiliance that she had and a method of adjusting herself to me, that was absolute delight. My hand strayed to her breast again and I felt the tightening of her nipple, tingling under my touch.

Her hot breath blew against my neck. Her body had become a shuddering, writhing pit of desire.

I caressed the pink roundness of her buttocks and pulled her in tight against me.

The softness of her femininity encompassed me and held me and held me tight. As we made contact, she made a sharp, hissing sound and she drew air quickly into her lungs and her eyes opened wide. The flush on her face grew darker.

"Stop that Pierre-kiss me, baby-I can't stand what you're doing. You'll have to stop or else...." she started to say. "My breasts-you're neglecting my breasts."

Nothing could have given me greater pleasure. No, there was something eke. But she was obviously a gal who liked plenty of preparatory work before she was completely ready. I was eager to comply with her wish. Nothing stood in my way.

Her nipples found their way into my mouth effortlessly and I caught the hot, eager tips of her breasts between my lips. I brought both my hands to her breasts and compressed them toward each other.

"What are you trying to do? You are hurting them."

Both jutting nipples were only five or six inches apart, directly before my eyes.

I kissed one nipple and it grew mokt with the pleasure she felt and I exerted more pressure on her breasts.

She suddenly knew what I had in mind and her eyes were bright with the thought of it and then she placed both hands at the sides of her voluptuous breasts and squeezed them together, so that the nipples were only an inch or two apart.

Her breasts were almost as hard as her nipples new and shaping my mouth, I caught both nipples in my mouth simultaneously, and my tongue darted over the rubbery-hard surface of one jutting erect nipple and then the other.

She gasped with the sheer, ecstatic agony of it and she held her hands tightly on her breasts, holding them so tightly that the white marks of her fingers were visible-Gloria moved her body sinuously against me, molding herself completely to me. And yet, even then I knew that we were not completely as one.

She moved against me with a tight hotness that conrracted and relaxed in the convex contour of her loiwer abdomen.

I kept running my tongue over her nipples and as the stimulation mounted for her, her naked ripe breasts shook and trembled. She threw her head back and stood with her legs apart on the floor.

Her breasts as the source of her emotion knew no bounds and she began to move her hips in a wave-like motion.

"Pierre," she said in a whisper. "What are you doing to me? You're driving me wild. I love what you're doing to them," she said offering more of her passion-awakened breasts to me. "You're teasing me, honey. You're teasing me and you've got me in such a state that anything can happen. You'd better stop what you're doing."

It was the third time that she'd managed to make me quit. The reason was obvious. She couldn't take any more without the possibility of it all ending suddenly and without any chance of her holding the floodgates of her feminine passion back.

Reluctantly, I drew my mouth away from her awakened, warm, satiny globes and placed my hands on the supple, graceful waist again.

She tried something then and she was partially successful. She brought the lower part of her body toward me quickly and grabbed at me, and caught part of me. But I wasn't quite ready for what she had in mind, not right then I wasn't.

Her eyes seemed glazed and a nervous little smile trembled on her lips. "You're not afraid of ... of...."

"No baby. But I go when I'm ready, and in my own way."

I reached in back of her and caught the soft, swelling mound of a pink buttock in each hand and caressed the soft, aroused flesh.

She began to undulate her body, there wasn't any holding her now.

She wasn't to be denied, not now.

We had gone too far for any holding back. Whatever she wanted from me, I wanted from her and with equal fervor.

I caught the lower part of her buttocks in my hand and then took one hand away from the lovely mound and smacked it resoundingly.

She gasped with the intense pain of it and said nothing.

I knew then, at that moment, that she was mine, that there was nothing that I couldn't ask of her, that there was nothing that I couldn't take from her.

I lifted her then, slowly, effortlessly, my hands lifted under the pink loveliness of her buttocks and her legs were no longer touching the ground. She wrapped her legs around me so that her heels dug into the calves of my legs.

Her breath ran hot against the side of my face, and then when she began to move her body, grinding it circularly, there was a moment, when contact, like static electricity, ran through us both. She uttered a small scream, suppressing it only slightly. I felt her hands clutching at me, digging into my arms and then reaching down over my stomach.

I was fully aware of her now, of her slim waist arid of the swollen hardness of her up-thrust, crimson-tipped breasts that brushed against my chest. The softness of her, the sensuality of her mouth and the brightness of her eyes were all reminders of her being there, and of the tumultuous realization of knowing what was taking place.

Suspended the way she was, she still managed to move her body and to undulate the warmness of her hips over closer.

It happened then and I didn't know exactly how it took place. One minute she was bouncing herself all over my stomach, with her hands around the back of my neck, partially supporting herself and the next instant her wildly gyrating body hit solidly.

But I mean solidly.

That ended it. I don't mean what was taking place, but I mean the wild gyrations and the undulating of her body.

We were held to each other by ourselves and nothing else.

In one wild movement we had unleashed each other. It happened, and when it did, it was as though the claims of her body exploded into the vibrant femaleness that I knew she owned.

I felt the awakening at the base of her stomach and she clutched me in her woman's grasp and her body flexed against mine.

She held on to me with a desparation that was born of her want and her body acted of its own accord now, moving in spasmodic, jerky movements that she could no longer control.

I have to admit that her unrestrained efforts were taking their toll upon my control. I tried to take my mind off what she was doing, to think of other things of a more mundane nature. It was deliberate on my part, of course.

The little extra that she aroused in me was something that would only make It end that much sooner for me. That was something I wanted to avoid.

It wasn't going to be easy, not with the moist warmness she had brought forth of herself. I tried keeping her still for a moment and with the unerring instinctive, intuitive femaleness of her, she knew and grinned at me. "Warm?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah,"

"Yon going to keep me suspended here all day? It's good," she commented quietly. "But there are other places that are better, like beds, like couches, like floors if need be."

"Need be, you bet," I said. "Like my bed?"

"I like it fine. Put me down. I'm in no rush for this thing." She giggled. "If you were to walk me across the room this way I'd never make it to your bed. You?"

"Me too." I set her down and we walked to the bedroom like two assassins who were ready to vent their passion, like murder, on each other.

And that was how it was when we got into my bed.

With incredible skill she managed to move her body with a deftness that could only come from the love of what she was doing. I had long since discovered that a woman who enjoys herself throughly in her passion was an animate thing that was pure frenzy and sheer delight.

There was a warm, aphrodisiac scent to her body that brought my mind to an awareness of her-everything that wasn't directly of her left me. I was no longer conscious of the bedroom and of the four walls and of the bed we were in; my mind was full only of her, of the warmness of her and of the red-hot nakedness of her. This was the beauty I found in women. I found the beauty of them in their pink legs. I found the beauty of Gloria when she was on her back and waiting for me.

There was a slow exhalation of pleasure that came from deep in her throat, and from deep in her I felt her take hold. She accepted me to herself with a demanding brutality. She brought me to the female loveliness of her body.

And then her heels dug into the mattress and she braced to meet my onslaught with a yielding softness of her lower stomach and of the warm, slim thighs that encompassed, that took, that held, that held and then yielded.

There wasn't any more holding back now. Nor was there any attempt to slow the action between us. It was a contest now.

She accepted, she took and then in an effort to completely satiate her wild demands, took still more.

I cupped her breasts once more and she redoubled her writhing action under me, raising herself to a fever pitch.

She raised her mouth to be kissed and her mouth opened wide for me and her tongue darted into my mouth.

The tips of our tongues brushed and then-symbolic of the final act between us-we continued to explore each other. The rhythm of our encounter increased until I sensed that her breath had suddenly become much more rapid.

"Don't stop what you're going," she said in a soft, low whisper.

I had one hand under her squirming pink buttocks now and the other hand caressed the soft creaminess of her erect, quivering nipple. Her legs were no longer anchored to the bed with her heels as she had been when we started. Now her legs were completely free and she threw them from one side of the bed to the other. She moved her body with a fierce, relentless, driving force that knew the aching urge of her desire.

I took my mouth from hers and kissed her ear, nibbling on it and heard her gasp sharply and then she was making little frantic sibilant sounds. She moved her face next to my ear and whispered something so quietly that I almost missed what she said.

"Say those things to me. Say them and stay close to me while you're saying them." It was a plea.

"What things?" For the moment I didn't know what the devil she was talking about. She changed that state of not comprehending for me quickly.

"You said something to me before we started.""

"I said a lot of things to you."

"You called me a witch. Did you mean it?"

Did I mean it? What the hell was the play now? And then the thought of what she had asked dawned upon me with crystal clarity. I knew-I knew what she wanted. There had been other times when I had run into this type of things and I knew that she wouldn't get complete satisfaction unless I responded to what she had buried in her mind, "I meant it," I said.

It was what she was waiting for.

"You did something to me when you spoke to me that way. You know what you said. When you called me a witch. Tell me. Talk to me that way. It gets me excited. It does thing to me that nothing else does."

I thought I was going crazy for a minute and then I knew exactly what she wanted. In order for her to have full completion she needed me to serve a double function. The sex between us wasn't enough for her. She demanded more than that. I didn't disappoint her. I called her every name there was.

It had its desired effect for her. It didn't give me any charge one way or the other. However sex was a dual thing and seeing her become progressively more excited as I spoke to her-by her physical indications of a deep-seated passion that she would only know with my help-had its effect on me too.

I cursed her and with it she became entirely different. Her arms were tight and her mouth was a hot pit of her passion. She came alive differently then, suddenly vibrant and vivid.

There are rules when it comes to sex and each of us follows his own set. Hers were a set of rules that called for her being debased before she could enjoy the freedom of her sex. That was her affair-I didn't follow her set of rules, but I knew that they were necessary things to her pleasure.

Strangely enough I found that her deep sensuality had an effect upon me that was stimulating. There was passion wrapped up in her thighs and in the warmness of her heavy, swollen breasts that could only be quelled with my help.

I heard the deepness of her breathing and then I knew that the desired effect for her was close.

I didn't realize how close. It hit her suddenly, without warning it seemed and she rocked spasmodically with the fire within her and her legs were twisting wild things that flung themselves all over the bed Her nails raked deeply on my back and the bite of her awakened passion was there.

She held on to me hard and hungrily and then when she was at her peak and fully involved with what was taking place within her body, she moaned softly and arched her back so that the full extent of her want was immersed within her.

This was the time of her strength and of the warmness of her. This was the time that she was the true woman, stripped of her daily frustrations and denials. This was the time she became herself.

It became the time for me too, with her round buttocks bouncing on the mattress and her breath hard and short.

This became the time for me when the liquid fire in her body became velvet soft and caressed me. It was the time of the anvil ringing in my ear and the warmth of the female was mine.

And I heard myself saying, "Now baby. Now!"

And her exultant woman's voice saying, "Yes, yes, yes."

I stopped, and staring at her saw the beads of perspiration at her temples.

She lay perfectly still and I saw the awareness in her eyes. It seemed that I had seen her face all the while and I saw her mouth move and the words come out. There was a filament that lit in her eyes and the glow flickered.

"Oh brother," she managed to say. "Where have they been keeping you?"

It was said completely without reservation. It was said as a commentary. It really wasn't a question at all; it was a flat statement.

There was a rich deep satisfaction within me. I'm no different from any other guy-I liked being told that she had enjoyed what she had just undergone.

Ego, the id-without it we're dead.

With a sinuous movement she rubbed her lower body against me. Her knowing eyes fastened on mine. "You are for me," she said quietly. She laughed softly, deep in her throat, and I was reminded again of her femininity.

She reached out a forefinger and scratched a line down my back. "Harriet knew what she was talking about. Boy-did she!"

I was curious. We all are, especially when it concerns us, especially-when it concerns what we do in bed. It was good for the morale. There's nothing like having something that's good for the morale. This is a degree of normality, this morale business.

"How did you and Harriet get together?"

This she asks me while she's flat on her back, and outside for all it matters, snow and hail could be falling from the sky. Hurricanes are possibly blowing.

My point is merely that she's on her back and we're still as one and she's asking me about her girl friend, Harriet Shaft. Strange are the ways of women.

"Listen witch, behave."

She looked up at me quickly, unbelievingly. She hadn't expected that. She flushed an angry red. "That isn't necessary."

"Right! Neither is your asking me about Harriet."

"Curiosity. Natural curiosity."

"Modern women. Their strengths and their weaknesses."

"Modern nothing. Since the beginning of time. There never was-wait a minute. Don't you think that it would be an idea for you to get off."

"You mean you want me to remove my body?"

"Yes, from me."

"A thousand apologies."

"Spoken like Pierre."

"Thank you." I got off.

Her eyes fixed on me and she laughed. "You've got something."

"I don't know what you're referring to-but continue."

She shook her head. "You've got a talent" "Thank you, ma'am."

"But it wasn't necessary to continue with it after."

"You mean after we had finished with it."

"Exactly. Like you calling me what you did."

"You were prying. Harriet is Harriet-if you'll excuse the stupid sound of it. Harriet isn't Lucille It also means that Harriet isn't you. There's a difference between you."

"Yes?" Her face changed. Interest replaced anger. "How?"

"There's a difference between women in bed. I don't subscribe to that old nonsense about turning them all upside down and they're all the same. Maybe for a guy who doesn't have any upside downing to do. But when the situation arises, there's a difference." I left it at that.

"Tell me," she persisted.

"You won't like it."

"I don't have to like everything I hear."

"There's nothing as disoriented as a woman out of bed who craves to be in bed."

Sexual curiosity turned to annoyance. "You're trying to tell me that we're all mixed up, that we really don't know what we're doing unless we're in bed."

"With a male naturally. I must qualify. It's the natural function of women."

"A stupid, typically male, superior attitude if I've ever heard one."

"I don't believe you've heard it too often. You compete with males every day of your life. Somewhere along the line you've gathered the belief; you feel that you have to be the aggressor. You hammer the poor slob until he doesn't know what the hell he's breaking his back for. And then you grant him the favor. You understand that I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm talking about women in our present-day society."

"Of course I understand that. And what makes you think that you qualify as an expert?"

"Statistics. Divorces, broken marriages, cheating husbands and cheating wives-they all bear me out."

"And this you blame on the woman. Why not? It's easy-she's been a natural scapegoat for man since the beginning. I could expect that from you."

"There's a barrier that she sets up. What does the poor slob want? He wants warmth and love and to feel that he's still a man."

"Well, who's taken it away from him?"

"His wife, who sits on her fat rear and rations out love almost as a reward. She doles it out She performs her wifely duty."

"And what about the man? Where is his? What does it consist of?"

"It's a material thing, like the race with the neighbors. The neighbors have bought a new car.

They've done their kitchen. The whole bit. She runs him. She runs her old man until he looks elsewhere; not because he really wants to, but because he doesn't want to run any more. That's why guys see prostitutes."

She was annoyed. Tell a woman why guys see prostitutes and her faith in herself is shattered. Or better still, she doesn't really believe him. How could she believe it without lessening the image she has planted in her mind of herself, the beautiful image of homemaker? She can do no wrong.

"You hate women. It's obvious."

"That's an old crock! I love women, their gentleness, when they get around to thinking about it. And I really love them for themselves."

"You put me in the general category. That's why you called me a witch."

"It's an identification problem. She has trouble identifying with the world. With all the competition she gives the males, she also loses sight and perspective toward her role in the life of a man. I'm only helping her identify. So you have to be told what you are."

Her voice was suddenly angry. "You are beginning to rub me the wrong way."

"Help yourself, you're entitled to that. Anything you like."

"I don't like any more of you. That you can be sure of." I was.

"I'd like to get dressed," she said.

"Of course." I stayed in the bedroom while she returned to the living room. It didn't take her more than five minutes and she was back, clothed completely.

She watched me intently. "I'll be in touch with you." Fresh lipstick crimsoned her mouth.

"Our deal still on?" I had thought it was a gone goose. She was a gal who liked her sex, but she wanted it her way. Somewhere along the line she had gathered that her role in life was to dominate the play. Well that was all right for her. For her-not for me.

"You'll be hearing from me within a few days. I've already got some ideas on how to make you famous."

I stuck my hands behind my head and grinned. "Great."

"You are about the most conceited male that I've ever run across and totally without justification, I might add."

"You might," I said.

"What did Harriet ever see in you?"

"It was my beard."

"Ugh! That ugly thing! I can't stand men who walk around as though they were beatniks. Grown men."

"Harriet Shaft saw the same thing in me that you saw."

It shook her for a minute. She was remembering and her next word to me was something that she had to think about.

She laughed then and walked toward me and sat down on the bed next to me. "I really don't know why I put up with you."

"You hardly know me and you're asking me why you put up with me. Hell woman, that should be obvious."

She put her cool hands on my chest. "Sex doesn't make any sense."

"What does?"

"You're getting philosophical as all hell."

"My dear girl."

"Don't 'dear girl' me. I hate that expression," I grinned first to soften it. "All right witch, when you look at me, you see one thing."

She squealed with laughter. "I see more than one thing."

I had never looked at it that way. But why not?

"You're a louse," Gloria said, and then she kissed the side of my face. "Damn, I'll have to apply fresh lipstick now."

"Stick around. You're not going anywhere that's more important than this place." I patted the mattress next to me.

Her eyes opened wide. "I believe you mean it."

"Look for yourself."

"I will not," she said indignantly. "I have to run. I've got an appointment. I'll be in touch with you."

"Right. You said that before."

"What about all those pictures on the wall? Oh, never mind. Pierre, if I catch any other woman up here

"You're a doll," I said. "But what gives with you? What's this nonsense about other women?"

On the bed I spread my arms wide. "Phallic worship-that's what it is. Nothing else."

She spun, and then walking from my bedroom, with her firm rump bouncing neatly, the way firm rumps should, turned her head over her shoulder and grinned, "Louse."

I heard the door close after hex.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gloria Keeler having departed on her business, whatever it happened to be, I lay around for half an hour recuperating, or trying to. Let's face it-that's what it was. After a half hour period, during which time I felt my battery recharged sufficiently to face the world, I was like a new man. I sprang from my bed with renewed vigor and made a mad dash into the shower. I showered, threw a pair of pants on and headed back into the kitchen for a second breakfast. I got the coffee started and I checked for the time. It was twelve o'clock; as they say, it was late in the day.

There was a T-bone steak in the refrigerator that looked delicious. The food cabinet held a can of Irish sliced potatoes. Onions were in the vegetable bin. I got the potatoes and onions frying in a skillet and I shoved the steak under the broiler when they were almost half done. I had half a grapefruit and the steak was ready. I pounced on the food. You take a guy who lives alone and has a strange dame awaken him first thing in the morning and she manages to give him a workout, well then it figures that he has got to work up a decent appetite.

Why a guy who likes to pack away a steak first thing in the morning is looked upon as some kind of a nut is beyond me. Some guys like to eat kippurs; I like steak. So do me something I polished it off and had four slices of white bread soaked in catsup to kind of help it along. The Irish potatoes and fried onions were great. The coffee was black. Three cups worth made me feel like a new man.

I lit a black, stinking rope of a cigar, stuck my feet up on one of the kitchen chairs and puffed blue, fragrant smoke all over the room. I rested, I relaxed, it was enough. Outside in the world, guys were looking to make fast bucks, guys were crowding around lunch counters waiting to be served. Not here. Here I ate steak. I sent a circle of blue smoke upward to the ceiling and permitted myself the luxury of a satisfied smile and trailing smoke went back into the bedroom.

The spiced, warm scent of her was still there. A cigarette butt with her lipstick stood out in a trayful of butts. My hands held the memory of her waist and her breasts and the curve of calf and the swell of her buttocks. Ah, the hell with that. A man could occupy all his time with that sort of jazz.

I got dressed in a dark blue pin-striped suit, an azure soft-collared shirt and a slim navy tie. Some hair tonic gave my hair luster and running a comb through my beard finished me off. Earlier in the morning I had thought that the beard was going to finish me with Gloria. But such are the hazards of a beard.

A beard is a peculiar thing and sometimes affects women in peculiar ways. Comments at random from women as to their feelings and emotions to beards: ugh; it tickles; it's disgusting; it itches; it scratches; what are you trying to hide; stop, you're irritating mel; it makes you look distinguished; you look like a filthy bum.

All right, some dame tells you that you look like a bum and there are times when you find this annoying. But it's part of the game. I've found that when it comes to decorating, a certain air of confusion and disorganization is necessary. I don't mean that when you go out on a measuring or decorating job that you have to hold your head with both hands and exclaim, "Horrible, horrible," and tear the lady's drapes and ceiling rod down. It doesn't have to go quite that far. Nevertheless, a touch of the kook is almost always appreciated by the ladies. They all want to be bold, as evidenced by kooky hats, kooky styles over the ears, like the balloon dress, the zeppelin, the bouffant, and various other styles, all designed to make the fair sex look slightly out of whack.

She wants to be bold, so designers make her bold. You never heard of a designer making a woman look plain. They make her ravishing, they make her outstanding and resplendant in the ultimate of kookery. She loves it, she eats it up. When her skirts are long, the styles make them short and vice versa. It's all part of the pattern. So is the beard.

I dwell upon this at length because a beard needs considerable dwelling upon. The beard immediately makes a woman think of a guy who is a little kooky. With this in mind, she feels that here is a man who isn't afraid of suggesting anything that's a little nutty. Naturally, you understand. She secretly craves to be a little nutty, so when a decorator arrives at her house, carrying nothing but six-foot-four inches of himself upon his sneakered feet and wearing the shrubbery upon his face, she figures-kid, he's here.

With this kind of an advantage, you rip drapes off walls, you hang sour-smelling burlap in living rooms, you play the part. To be a successful decorator, a man must be an imposter-which is my point in a round about fashion.

I finished dressing and got out of the apartment. It took me fifteen minutes to catch a hack and I directed him to my place of business, which consists of a show room atop a factory loft in a building on Twenty-third Street.

There are two rooms. An eight-by-ten waiting room that has a beat-up couch and a wall lamp. There is also a water cooler. Various certificates from nonexistents schools of design in Switzerland and Bessarabia decorate the walls. There is also a room that passes for my showroom, my workroom and my office. Jonathan Lux, my devoted helper and my most capable-as well as my only-employee, greeted me.

"Good morning, Boss Pierre."

This is a little private joke we have between us, the Boss Pierre bit. I had come into the office one morning after having landed a five thousand dollar decorating job the night previous, and when Jonathan Lux had said, "Good morning Pierre," I had immediately reprimanded him for his familiarity.

"I don't think that you should call me Pierre," I had said, still full of the flush of last night's job. "After all, you work for me."

Jonathan had grunted, with his head on the side, studying me as though I was some kind of a nut and had said, "But of course, Pierre. What shall I call you? How about Sir Pierre of the rectangular table, the one with the broken leg?"

"You don't have to get touchy Jonathan. It's a legitimate request."

Jonathan had said gravely, "If it's all right with you I prefer to call you Boss Pierre."

Nothing sobers a man like ridicule. Jonathan had me. All I wanted then was a graceful retreat. I said, "That's fine Jonathan." He had won his battle and I thought that after a few weeks there would be no more of it. That was three years ago. The 'Boss Pierre' bit continued and there wasn't a damn thing that I could do about it. To tell you the absolute truth, I got kind of used to it after a while in fact, I kind of like the idea.

Jonathan Lux was a top man in the field of interior decorating, and he had the faculty of running a five hundred dollar job up into something that was more near a thousand without too much trouble. Nothing against the law here; this they allowed.

Jonathan at one time had been a con man and the law hadn't allowed. Jonathan had set up a non-existent business on paper, and had sold many worthless shares to many people who had visions of getting rich rather quickly. The business was called Compression Cesspools. He had sold the idea to some investment bankers and there was an underwriting to the tune of three hundred thousand dollars. The business had folded less than two months later, which wasn't anything of a surprise to Jonathan, since the address of the business was an empty factory building that was staffed by two confederates, not of the South either. They took off immediately following the word. The word consisted of Jonathan saying, "Get the hell lost, boys."

The boys did.

Jonathan didn't, not fast enough. There was an entire deal with the District Attorney and Jonathan was sent up for five years. Fraud, swindling-they threw the book at him. It might not have been so bad if Jonar-than had returned some of the money, but this was a physical impossibility in light of his two accomplices, who had departed hastily with the lion's share of it-There was only enough left for Jonathan to hire a fast shuffling lawyer. The lawyer was supposed to have an in with the District Attorney, the judge and various alderman. Everything was supposed to have been set up. There was one fly in the ointment. The judge had purchased five thousand shares of Compression Cesspool at the opening price of three dollars, after having been assured by the broker, who knew not of these underhanded machinations, that Compression Cesspool was bound to go over the top. It was going to hit twenty-five before the week was over. It was going to go off like a rocket. It went off like a rocket, but the type that doesn't leave the ground. It exploded.

So did the judge when he heard that Jonathan Lux, the founder of the ill-fated venture was to appear before him. Jonathan was an expert in his field, which was swindling.

The judge was an expert in his, which was administering justice. The thought that he had been swindled out of fifteen thousand dollars by the man who was to appear before him, made the judge rub his hands in anticipation. The judge had investigated thoroughly before he made his purchase of the shares. The necessary recommendations had jelled. The firm showed a substantial healthy statement and a bank balance of over a hundred grand. The judge had fallen prey to a sharp con game. It had happened. The judge was no different than anybody else. There was a chance to make a fast buck and he had jumped at the chance-nothing dishonest about that. When it came to the idea of making a fast legitimate buck, the judge was as vulnerable as the next man. The Judge had been took.

The case was heard before him and he sat up on the bench as stony-faced a bilked individual as was ever seen in the county. The defense was heard and then the District Attorney and then after that the judge was heard. The judge had practically told the jury to come in with a verdict of guilty. After all, the Judge had justification going for him. If nothing else, he had that-he no longer had his fifteen grand.

The defense council screamed. He objected.

The judge screamed louder. He objected to the defense council objecting.

The Judge screamed, "Five years."

Jonathan Lux screamed, "Five years?"

It was the least the Judge could do. In fact, it was the maximum.

Jonathan had come out of prison a changed man.

In prison he had met all the cruds. It had taken him almost a year to get rid of the stench. He had it. And so, Jonathan had learned a trade and the trade was interior decorating, and because Jonathan had a competent mind, he had become good at it. Eventually he had answered an ad that I had inserted in the papers. His background as far as I was concerned, counted in no way against him. He married a childhood sweetheart and was a family man with all the resultant responsibilities.

Jonathan Lux was an asset to my business. Enough for Jonathan.

The day had passed quietly. There were a few calls to make to workshops and fabric houses and some sketches that had to be drawn up, that Jonathan attended to and before I knew it, it was four-thirty.

It was time to get out of there. Those are my hours, start anytime and get out at four-thirty. It's the only way to do it. I washed my hands at a little sink tucked away in the corner and the phone rang.

I said, "Hello. Pierre Drysdale speaking."

"Pierre? Oh you darling. I'm so glad that you're still there. This is Harriet Shaft, How are you dear?"

"Fine, and you?"

"Just wonderful." There was a pause, "I trust you're fully recovered from you-know-what."

"What?"

"From the camphor balls and flakes, you silly."

"Everything is in great shape." There was a gasp and a giggle on the other end. "I'll bet it is."

There you go-Harriet was at it again. Nevertheless, she hadn't called me to inquire about my camphor balls. This was obvious. I'm a man who likes to know what people have on their minds, so I asked.

"How come you called me, Harriet? What's up?"

"Don't you know? It's all over town. I'm having a little shindig over at my place. I'd love to have you darling. I'm having oodles of people, very interesting types."

"How come you call me?" After the way she had given me the heave-ho, it was a natural question asked involuntarily and regretted almost as soon as I had asked it.

"How come you call me?-what the hell is that supposed to be? You're quaint."

Oh, great-she was breaking my chops.

"Gloria Keller is over at my place and she says that you and she were discussing doing some kind of business deal or other. What she told me sounds fascinating. I really called you upon her insistence. She said you'd understand. So be a dear boy and do hurry over. It starts about nine o'clock."

A phony-sounding broad of the first magnitude But what are you going to do? She had said Gloria Keller. She had mentioned the magic name. Gloria could open a thousand doors to decorating for me. I was practically on my way. "Swell, I'll see you there."

"Wait don't hang up yet. I'm not quite through. This is a masquerade party. Try to wear a costume and if you haven't got one, then get one. The rules are that no one is to be admitted unless they are masked."

Absently, I said, "Sounds charming." In reality it didn't sound charming at all. Usually I find masquerade parties give me a tremendous pain. Everybody is trying to out-do everybody else. Guys and gals come disguised as decks of cards, chimney pots, space rockets, and inevitably there's a female with a pillow strapped upon her backside and around her neck a placard that reads, Ready for Freddy. You walk in on this type of clever thing on a full stomach and you're ready to vomit. Masquerade parties and myself don't get along too well.

"Hello, hello," Harriet said. "Are you still there?"

I thought of Gloria and her syndicated column that was ready to start plugging. "Of course I'm here darling. And I'm listening too."

Jonathan said, "Good night, Boss Pierrre," over his shoulder on his way out.

"Good night," I said to Jonathan.

Harriet said, "Good night," and hung up.

I shrugged, "Well, why not?"

CHAPTER FIVE

It was after five when I checked my wrist watch, decided that I was long overdue leaving, and I did. I found a saloon about two blocks away and had a Scotch on the rocks and looked at myself in the mirror behind the bar. Mirrors behind bars bug me. Sooner or later, you have a mirror in front of you and you find yourself looking into it. So you see a guy with almost black hair, a little gray at the temples and sporting a beard. So what? This is expected. Everybody who looks into a mirror sees himself. But the next thing you know you find other faces in the mirror peering out, at you. Usually there's a guy who grins. He's sitting down about ten feet from you and as soon as he spots the beard he smiles in a toothy, superior fashion.

There aren't any rules against smiling so you ignore him. You can't go around asking every guy who grins at you, "What the hell are you laughing at?" Sooner or later some guy who's been sitting on his fat behind at the bar for four hours says to you, "You stupid jerk." Then the fisticuffs commence. The hell with it.

The hell with the bleeding noses and split lips, and much pushing and shoving by the bartender. Who needs it? So in order to avoid this type of jazz, I look up at the ceiling, like I'm doing now. It's not a bad-looking ceiling. I find that the guy who built it has made the ceiling of wood. It has squares of wood about two feet wide and they are parqueted. It's a very unusual type of thing. So I turn my head and look the ceiling over very thoroughly.

The bartender, a burly man with a pair of blacksmith's hands got interested in what I'm looking at and I sense that he's looking up at the ceiling too.

"Aah," I say.

Three souses at the bar forsake their drinks momentarily and look skyward. I look around a little more and my neck is beginning to get a little stiff. I'm forced to look into the mirror.

She's there. Who's she? I don't know; I've never seen her before. All of a sudden, there is her face in the mirror and she's grinning at me. She's got a blonde head and I see that her arms are bare. I look into the mirror and grin back, but not before I see that she is seated about five seats away from me and not before I see that she is obviously alone. There is only her drink in front of her on the bar and nothing on either side of her. If I ever have the good fortune to take this kind of babe into a bar, a babe like this one with deep breasts and the tawny blonde hair that falls in neat waves and wears a green dress with a plunging neckline, then I don't take any chances. I sit next to her and usually at the end of the bar, so that there isn't any chance of another guy taking the seat next to her. I never take chances. From this I figure that she's alone. All this time I'm doing all this thinking, she keeps smiling at me. I look at her in the mirror and smile back. I'm a very sociable-type guy.

Then she does something that frowns me a little, I've been getting interested in what I see of her in the mirror. She's got tiny ears, sleek against her head, a little bit of a button-type nose and she has dark brown eyes. I like dark brown eyes with blonde hair. I don't care if it's natural or artificial. I like that combination.

From her ears, giant green earings hang. There was a bold smear of lipstick across her mouth-a beautiful girl.

She suddenly winked at me in the mirror and then made a gesture that threw me completely. There aren't many gestures that will. This one did.

She held her hand before her chest and then she took her forefinger and made jabbing motions upward.

It was like in a foreign movie where the heroine is giving the villain a piece of advice.

I don't need a babe to give me this advice, therefore it came as no surprise for me when I responded in like kind. First off, I have to admit that I'm a gentle-man. I placed my hand on my chest and bowed deeply, acknowledging her message. And then I returned her message. Perhaps a little more emphatically, perhaps a touch more dramatically, my finger is larger. Nevertheless, I grinned at her and then repeated her gesture. It was sort of an "in spades" bit. If you know what I'm talking about, and I know damn well that you do.

Her face dropped, her mouth dropped and it cut her to the quick. It rumbled her nimbler. "How dare you," she said. "Did you see? Oh, that nasty man. Oh, did you see what he did?"

Three guys wearing natural-shoulder suits, all tailored beautifully, came running at me from left, center and right field. They abandoned their drinks and sprang to the defense of fair damsel.

"What did this crud do?" said one of the advertising types, referring to me and speaking to her. He hadn't seen what I done, but he sure as hell was going to find out.

"He made a nasty gesture," she said.

"He made a nasty gesture?" He turned to me. "What are you. a wise guy?"

"Well, no-I don't think so."

"Then what the hell's the idea of making dirty gestures to the lady? I know all about guys like you. You can't keep your filthy thoughts to yourself."

The burly figure of the bartender suddenly joined the party from the other side of the bar. "What's the trouble boys? We don't want any trouble, so don't anybody get excited."

"No trouble," I said. "In fact, I was just leaving."

"He made a disgusting gesture," said the blonde.

"You did that?" said the bartender, shaking his head disapprovingly. "What was it? Don't get excited lady," he said, looking at the blonde. He glanced at me threateningly. "I don't let anybody get away with that kind of stuff around here," he said sharply.

"You're right," I said.

The bartender leaned forward toward the blonde and managed to collect a delightful view of her cleavage, which happened to be considerable. With sparse hair falling over his eyes and with a jaw like the bumper of a truck, the bartender said, "What did he do?"

I could swear that he didn't give a damn one way or another, but he was asking strictly out of curiosity. The son was just plain nosey.

"Well, if you've got to know, then that's all there is to it. I did this." And I proceeded to point my finger skyward and jabbed it into the air about five times.

One of the guys who had come running before said, "Why you dirty...."

"Hold it, before you say the wrong thing. Ask the girl."

"Ask her what?" He stuck his face in mine. "Ask her what? She's already told us that you did it"

"She did it first."

There was a stunned silence. They hadn't counted on this. I had taken away all the fun they figured they were going to have by bouncing hard fists against my head.

Incredulously, the bartender leaned forward and treated himself to another glimpse of her wonderful cleavage. He poked his finger into the air, and said, "You did that?"

"Yes, I did."

"See that men? Back under your rocks."

"Oh, I'd like to belt this guy anyway," said one of the heroes.

"Did you do it?" I said to the blonde.

"Yes, but you knew what I meant. When you did it, it was different. I meant the ceiling. I saw you looking up there."

"Yeah, that's right. I always look up at the ceiling."

"When I did it I meant the ceiling."

"Naturally, so did l."

"You didn't."

"I don't know what you've got in your mind. I never know what people are thinking. But I meant the ceiling too."

"You see," said the bartender. "All he meant was the ceiling. Gentlemen, please return to your seats." He let his breath out slowly as though a crisis was past and walked away shaking his head and jabbing his finger skyward and glancing at the ceiling.

There wasn't a doubt in my mind that he thought we were both full of bull. I watched him for a little while without looking at the blonde. I sensed that she was looking in my direction out of the corner of her eye. I didn't give her the satisfaction of glancing at her. Not then that is.

I dropped some loose change on the bar and walked to the door.

I spun at the door. "Gentlemen." It wasn't necessary. They had been watching me all the way. "Gentlemen," I said. "Up your ceilings."

The three would-be heroes, the bartender and the blonde, all jabbed forefingers as I left. I wasn't sure, but I could have sworn that the blonde was grinning.

Outside, I waited for a cab and thought about the blonde back in the bar. What a shame-that was a nice-looking girl. There was a girl who might have possibilities. But the finger had done the damage and spoiled everything. One of New York's midget cabs finally stopped for me.

I gave him Harriet's number on Central Park South and settled back and bumped along on square wheels and with a rattling sound that came from the trunk. "What's the noise back there?"

"This car's been in an accident yesterday. The garage hasn't had a chance to do anything about it. Annoying ain't it? I got to listen to that rattle for twelve hours. Is it bothering you Mister?"

He had made his point. He wanted his goddamn noise to bother me. It was giving him secret pleasure. After listening to the miserable banging of the loose trunk for twelve solid hours, what the hell was any discomfort for this fares whose rides lasted about fifteen minutes.

I sat back and closed my eyes and pretended not to hear the clatter. He dropped me in front of Harriet's place and I said, "Hold it."

"Yeah?" His voice clearly told me that he thought that I was ready to give him some kind of a hard time. Cab drivers have that type of tone when they say 'yeah,' as a question.

"I need a costume."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I need a costume and a mask." I had completely forgotten.

"Look Mister. I need this cab. I need this cab to make a buck, to feed my hungry mouth and the hungry mouth of my wife and my five kids, who have also got hungry mouths. If you need a costume and a mask, that's okay. Whatever you like is okay. The tab is ninety-five cents. So if you pay me the tab everything'll be okay. Okay?"

"Not okay."

"Look, mister." Threateningly.

"Find me an outfit that sells costumes and masks."

"Oh. You want me to take you."

"Yes, take me at once."

"Let me see." He scratched his ear, a sign of concentrated thought. "There's only one place. It'll take us fifteen minutes."

That figured. Wherever you go takes fifteen minutes in New York. Crosstown, uptown, downtown-wherever you are and no matter where you start from, as long as you are in Manhattan, that's what it takes. Distance and lights have nothing to do with it. This time is controlled strictly by the cabbies.

"All right," I said. "And then I want to come back here."

"That'll take another fifteen minutes."

"Right. Proceed under a full head of steam."

We shot downtown for the designated time and he dropped me in front of a beat-up looking place that had a sign over its door denoting that the occupant of said place of business was in the theatrical costume business.

The driver turned and grinned triumphantly. "I knew he'd still be open."

"Wait."

"Yes sir."

I got a Roman suit of armor, one of those outfits that Caesar's Legions wore. There were sandals and leather straps that went over my legs, there was a glistening helmet with a few dents in it where some wise guy had whacked the former renter of this outfit over the head.

"What about this?" I said pointing to the battered helmet.

"It's authentic ain't it? Ain't it authentic? Admit it."

"Well, it looks as though somebody who was wearing this got bashed over the head."

"Exactly. I'm telling you this is the only way I rent stuff today. People like it to look genuine. You see this dent? This one here. A work of art,"

"All right. Give it to me. I'll take it"

"You get a spear with this outfit."

"I don't need a spear. How about a mask?"

"The mask is nothing. I'll give you a mask. But the spear, you should have a spear."

"All right." So now I've got a spear, which I need like I need a carbuncle on my neck. But this guy sounds so convincing that he's got me believing that the outfit isn't complete unless I carry the spear.

I changed clothes in his dressing room and attired as one of Caesar's poured legions strode forth with my short pants and my vest-or whatever the hell they call it-of mail.

"Very good. Very authentic"

"Where's the mask?"

"Here's the spear."

"All right,-so now I'm taking the goddamn spear. So where's the mask?"

"Here, here-don't get excited," he said, reaching into a box. "Here's a black mask. A Ku Kluxer mask, only black, like John Boles used to ride camels, that guy-"

"Is this the only mask you have?" It looked like a hangman's mask.

"Yeah. Take the spear."

I put the mask over my head and then put the helmet over it.

A Roman Legion with a mask. I never heard of snch a thing. Who are you supposed to be hiding from? I let him talk. What was the sense in answering him?

"Well anyway, when you see Caesar, give him a hail. Give him my regards."

"I'll do that," I said and strode forth unto the battleground of New York.

My cab driver sprang from his parked vehicle and opened the door for me. "Neat man. That's a real neat costume."

I got in and then the spear took a little manipulating and that was finally gotten into the cab and propped catty corner. We were off. A couple of times when we stopped for lights, people in other cabs and pedestrians peered curiously. Exactly fifteen minutes later I was back at Harriet's building.

CHAPTER SIX

I leaned on the buzzer outside of her apartment. I leaned for almost a minute and when nobody opened the door, I went in.

A blast of noise, an aggregate sound of a band, and many voices and the aroma of at least fifty women wearing fifty different perfumes blasted out at me. Most of the women wore half-masks that were trimmed with rhinestones. The men were masked. Harriet's rule, you know. Some guys were dressed like Tarzan and some more guys were dressed like rockets and spacemen and there were a few gals who were dressed like Salome, where she danced and where she got her veils.

I stood like a mope with my spear in my hand and my damn-dented helmet on my head, and my black hangman's mask covering my face.

The place was seething with shapely girls, mostly in the Salome type of costume. There were buttocks and breasts in every direction. It was great. I wandered around Harriet's apartment practically smothered by the aroma of about fifty half-naked girls, all wearing perfume. Some of them wore brassieres that were supposed to represent the times of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Well, if the gals really looked that way, the Pharaohs must have had it made. There was the sound of much laughter everywhere. I walked from room to room and everywhere the congenial sound of laughter and the steady slurping sound of booze being drunk too quickly greeted me.

The band was a ten-piece outfit. The piano player was so drank that he had all he could do to keep from falling off the seat. It didn't seem to bother his playing any though. Occasionally he'd lean way back and catch himself at the last second when it seemed that he was about to fall over backward on his head. In no way did it impair the rhythm of the band or his style. People were dancing closely everywhere. If they could have, they would have danced on the ceiling.

From somewhere nearby came the sound of a giggling, feminine voice saying, "Stop that, you fresh. Ha, ha ... stop that, you fresh. Ha, ha ... stop that, you fresh. Take your hand away from there, you fresh ... Harry, you son of a witch ... I know it's you behind that mask! You've been trying to do that for years. Wait until I tell your wife, Edith ... Harry I"

"Eeeow! You're not Harry. I know you're not Harry."

They were behind a door or wall or something and any problems they were having were theirs. The hell with them. I started looking for some of the Salome gals, any one would do. I was ready. I saw no sign of Harriet or Gloria. I'd have a hell of a time recognizing them so I didn't even try. The masks and all those breasts were too much. My head was spinning under the helmet.

There was much to be said for Harriet when she ran a party. This was the first one that I had attended. This was a party! I discounted the time I had shacked up with her. That was a party too, but of another sort. I mean, like, this was a party. Harriet had trays set up all over the place with drinks already poured and iced. There wasn't any nonsense of butlers and maids walking around and getting in your way while they were carrying trays of booze. All you had to do was reach out in any direction and you had to place your hand on a drink. You could do the same thing if you were in the mood for breasts, or legs, or buttocks, or what-have-you.

I'd had about eight drinks by this time and I didn't exactly know who or what I was looking for. I was looking for a little bit of what-have-you. That was it. But where do you go about getting it? Whatever the hell what-have-you is.

Suddenly, what-have-you was there. Ah, the hell with that-anyway, there she was.

She wore black patent-leather pumps with spiked heels and her shapely legs were sheathed in black nylon and held up by black garters, bedecked and bejeweled, and which in turn were fastened to a garter-belt that hung down from her panties. The panties were red and so brief that she would have been better off if she hadn't worn any at all. I'm sure you agree. Anybody in his right mind has got to agree.

Anyway, she wore these skimpy, red, sheer panties.

And that was it. She wore nothing else. There was her belly, rounded beautifully, and the soft circle of shadow around her navel. You see I'm not kidding. But that wasn't all.-hell no!

Her skin above her panties was a pale, lustrous, glossy satin that was almost white in the creamy beauty of its femininity. Her hips were full and tapered into a narrow waist that I felt would just fit my hands.

This was all lovely: her hips, her beautifully-shaped, warm thighs and her long legs. She was a leggy doll. Wonderful attributes, all these things.

But it was her breasts that caught my eyes. They were high and up thrusting and capped with lovely American-Beauty-Rose colored nipples.

I laughed nervously and said, "Aagh!"

Who can describe these breasts? Looking at them hi profile, they jutted forward a distance of four inches without the slightest sag. With one look she had made pimples out of the breasts of the remaining women in the entire country. A man could cut his teeth on breasts like these. He could rest his head on these breasts and know that his pillow was better than the softest white, imported goose down pillow.

Immediately, these over-sized heavy, shuddering mounds of flawless sensuality were a challenge. These lovely mounds of milky white flesh were almost too much.

I said, "Yeeow," and forgetting for the minute that I had a spear in my hand, raised it joyfully, like a toast to the richness and magnificence of these breasts before me. The point of the spear went into the ceiling and lodged there. It hung, quivering.

Me too.

Some chunks of plaster came falling down, but this didn't disturb any of the guests. Everybody was too far gone for that.

But not the gal with enormous breasts. She had spotted the still-quivering spear and she placed her hands on her hips and began to laugh. She threw her head back and really bellowed.

There I was without my spear and there she was without her brassiere. We were evenly matched. I don't know what she was supposed to represent. After all, this was a masquerade party. The only thing that she had disguised was her face. But for the rest of her, there was nothing disguised about that. This was pure woman. Perhaps she had come to the party as a woman in the flesh. An appropriate title for her, I thought.

She slapped her thigh and threw her head back again and she laughed as though she could kill herself laughing. It's one thing when a woman throws her head back and laughs when she's fully clothed, but when a woman does that when she's half-naked and laughs so hard that she rocks with it, then that's another story. Any woman who does a thing like that rates a lot of attention. T was willing to give it to her. So were all the male guests in the room. I could understand that very easily.

Gelatudinously, these warm, creamy, white, giant-sized breasts shook and quivered with her laughter.

This had caused quite a bit of commotion. Guys were pointing and saying, "Hey, look at that." They were all wearing masks, but under the masks their mouths had dropped.

Long blonde hair jiggled around her shoulders.

I abandoned my spear and walked to her quickly, before the rest of the guys in the room could recover their sense. And there she was. I was tempted to reach out and kind of brush the beautiful jutting nipple of one of her breasts to kind of find out for myself whether or not she was real.

She was. "Don't," she said.

Ah, she was a mind reader as well as being a bare-breasted female. She was warm and alive, smiling. "You mustn't touch them," she said. "Little boys can burn their fingers that way." she slapped my outstretched hand gently. "Naughty, naughty."

What the hell-was she kidding? "I'm no little boy and furthermore, who the hell cares if I burn my fingers? I'm a big boy and I can prove it to you."

"I'll bet you can. Say how tall are you anyway?"

"Why ma'm, I'm six feet four in my bare-breasted feet. Oops, I didn't mean to say that. I mean in my bare feet. Hah! That's more like it."

"I don't know who you are," she said. "But I think I'm going to like you."

I took a long, lingering look at her firmly-rounded breasts. "Ah well. You think you're going to like me. I know I'm going to like you."

"That's the difference between us," she said.

She had me. But I wasn't to be stymied now. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk."

"That sounds interesting. Where shall we go?"

"Another room. There are fifteen of them yon know."

"No,-as a matter-of-fact, I didn't know. But lead on. After all, I am your slave girl."

I put my arm around her slim waist and we got out of there. She was tall and erect of carriage. The top of her head came up to the bridge of my nose. Her long blonde hair fell over her shoulders. Her lips were scarlet and generous. Her face was oval, and high cheek bones lent an interesting touch. This was an interesting female. We walked through three different rooms with her banging on my arm and causing great interest wherever we went. Guys would spring up as soon as we walked into wherever they happened to be. There were joyful cries of, "What the hell? Hey Spencer, on the double. Hey Spencer, take a look at this. Wow!"

We didn't stay around long enough for Spencer to come out.

I said, "Ignore that uncouth individual."

She didn't say anything, not with her lips. Her body spoke for her and the warm breast that was pressed against my arm pressed still harder. That little bit of pressure told me many things that would probably never manage to get said between us. It told me enough.

I tried another door and the room wasn't occupied. It was obviously a maid's room, her uniform hung over a twin bed and I stopped.

She laughed. "I suppose this is where we do our talking. We are going to talk, aren't we?"

"Yes, of course we're going to talk. Well talk about everything that's worth talking about."

"I'll bet."

I said, "Well just shut the door after us so that nobody interrupts us and we'll have privacy."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

Coyness at this stage of the game? Impossible when the lady stands inches away from you and the tips of her breasts are practically grazing my chest.

She reached for my beard suddenly and I knew exactly what she had in mind. It had happened to me before. I had had the dubious pleasure of having some female tug at it and then squeal, "It's real, it's real."

Try to imagine someone grabbing a handful of hair on your head and yanking at it full strength. That's mild by comparison.

I got out of the blonde's way before she had a chance to get a hold on my beard. "Watch it kid," I said. "What you see is the real thing. What you see is attached to my face. That's part of me. All you have to do is ask."

"Your beard interests me. I find it fascinating. I guess you've heard that before. What really fascinates me about it is something that's so silly, it's hardly worth repeating. There was this man I ran into, an odd-ball in a restaurant. I guess you don't want to hear about it."

I said, "Mmmm," suddenly serious. "I'd like to hear about it," because I was sure that I knew who the oddball was I had felt something about her from the very beginning, as though I had seen her before. But how was I to know that this was the very same blonde I'd seen in the bar before I came up here, the one who had gotten highly insulted when I had given her the finger bite. She had meant the ceiling and I had meant whatever she was willing to let it mean to her. Now she sees a guy who's dressed like an ancient Roman and there's a very strong possibility that we're going to wind up in the hay. That's the way I see it as of this moment. This is no shy, coy thing who stands before me with the loveliness of her breasts revealed. Hell no!

But the finger stands in my way. There isn't a doubt that through some strange quirk of fate this is the same tomato who had given me the cold eye back at the bar. There wasn't any love lost between us after she had decided that I wasn't referring to the ceiling.

I said, "I've got just the thing for you. A little drink. How would you like that?" Anything to get her mind off the odd-ball she was thinking of now. "I have been thinking how nice it would be to have a drink. I have been thinking of warm places like Turkish baths, and the Sahara Desert and things like that and I have decided that what I really need is a drink. How about you?"

"Yes, that would be nice. I've been thinking of warm places and things too, now that you mention it. Yes, please do."

"What do you like to drink?"

"Oh, I'm not particular. Just bring in one of those trays that Harriet has set up around the apartment."

"Right," I said. Make yourself at home. I'll be right back." I hadn't thought that the drinks would be necessary the way things were going, but when she mentioned the episode in the bar, she proved me wrong. I closed the door after me and sprinted through three different rooms looking for a full tray, and upsetting six or seven people who had decided that the bedrooms they were in were their own.

A female shrieked in one of them, "Cover me, Stanley-there's somebody here. There's a stranger here. There's a stranger here." I took a fast look and decided that here was a perceptive female. There were three other couples, who occupied different parts of the rugs and the bed, and all of them needed covering. When Harriet Shaft threw a party, she really threw one, there wasn't any fooling around. I finally found a tray that was full. There were about twenty poured straight shots, a bucket of ice and a bottle of club on it. T lifted the tray and walked back to the bedroom where I hoped the blonde still waited. The thought suddenly occurred to me that there was a good possibility that she would be gone when I returned.

She was there, as big as life itself and as lovely.

She was in the bed, completely relaxed, with her hands clasped behind her head and her legs crossed delicately in front of her and extended.

Her ripe heavy breasts rose and fell gently with her slow, even breathing.

I set the tray down and whistled softly. "You are without a doubt the most beautiful creature that I have ever seen in that bed."

She smiled, teeth gleaming white. "You're sweet. Come here and let me take off your mask."

Oh boy! "I can't. I'm not really supposed to be here. My identity must remain a secret."

"You're kidding."

"No, my dear. I am really Prince Serg-oop, I almost spilled the beans."

She laughed. "You're full of it, but if that's the way you want it, okay. I had thought," she said slowly and distinctly, "that if you wanted to take yours off, I'd be more than willing to do the same."

I said, "You mean, let me see yours and I'll show you mine?"

"Yes."

It sounded wonderful. But the trouble was, if she ever got a look at my face I didn't know what might happen. "Have a drink," I said, and gave her one, and sat down on the bed next to her when she patted a little patch of mattres with her hand

"Come sit next to me," she said.

The thought was mine as well. I sat and I looked and I admired.

She bent forward and chuckled heartily. "I suppose that you're going to wear that stupid mask all night? Who are you?"

"Rock Hudson."

She finished her drink and she just looked at me for a minute or so. Finally, I said, "Another?"

"Yes. Let's have just one more apiece. I want to be able to to know what I'm doing."

I leaned toward her than, ignoring her request for the drink and slowly reached for the white mound of her breast.

I said, "I know what I'm doing."

The white skin of her breast was warm under my fingers and she jumped a little when I touched her, even though I knew that she was ready for my touch.

She started to say something else then, but I didn't know what it was, because at that moment my lips stopped whatever she had intended to say and she didn't try to say it again.

Her tongue was alive and the instant my lips brushed against her mouth I felt her thrust it against my teeth and then my mouth opened and she darted her tongue into my mouth with the speed of an electric jigsaw.

Our mouths parted and her lips touched my shoulder and then my neck. The scent of her long blonde hair was in my nostrils and the thought that I wanted to say her name and couldn't because it had never been told to me, crossed my mind and was dismissed as promptly as my lips found the warm skin of her vibrant breasts.

I ran my tongue over the underside of her breasts and then up and over the rounded upper portion. She twisted her body suddenly, thrusting toward me, her meaning obvious to me and I ran a flicking tongue over the surface of her nipples and felt them stiffen kronediately.

Her breasts were meant to be kissed. I reached a hand in behind her and felt the soft, smooth skin of her upper back and ran my hand up and down.

She lifted her stomach and let it rub, with a soft, sensual motion against me.

I caressed the firm swollen fullness of her breasts and then when she least expected it, caught the nipples between my thumb and forefingers and tugged at them gently. It had an instantaneous effect on her. She tore the mask away from her face and said, "The damn thing gets in my way shifting the way it does."

It was her. It was the girl I had seen in the bar.

I caught each breast in my hands and circling them, lifted them toward me.

Her eyes smoldered and her arms reached for me and she circled them round my head.

"Kiss them ... kiss them," she whispered feverishly, and she placed her hands under her breasts and lifted them forward toward me so the nipples stood erect and jutting, expectantly.

And as I began to kiss her body hungrily, she lay flat on her back, her rounded, soft arms gracefully at her sides, and as the stimulation mounted for her she became wild in her passion. Her body writhed and she began to undulate her belly and her hips.

I placed my hand there and it was a fresh spur to what she had experienced previously. Her large brown eyes were thrusting toward me.

I had never had a woman in bed whose breasts were the equivalent of these. These were large and despite their size, stood straight out as though there were muscles within their confines that I had aroused to rigidity.

Her body wasn't to be denied any longer and she molded the long length of herself against me so that the warmness she felt merged and blended with the equal heat that I felt within me.

She moved herself subtly at first, the muscles of her lower abdomen contracting and then relaxing. And then suddenly the brown eyes that had looked at me with wide-eyed alertness were no longer that way. Now they had changed, so that they were half-asleep and stuporous.

A nervous little smile trembled around her mouth, as though she was no longer quite as sure of herself as she had been. She looked at me as though she was getting her nerve up for something. "My breasts," she whispered quietly. "If you don't kiss them, you'll drive me crazy."

I kissed the ruby nipple of one passion-swollen breast and fingered the other. Then I let my hand slide down to her stomach. Slowly, imperceptibly, I thought. That was what I thought.

Her lower body trembled violently as I approached her navel, and then I reached still lower, considerably lower, and placed my hand on the rounded contours of her thighs, caressing them. I felt her legs bracing apart and her heels dug into the mattress.

She moaned softly and her legs flew wildly and unrestrained in a delightful surrender to her feminine instincts.

When she began to move her belly and hips in that grinding motion she had, I reached for her garter-belt and inadvertantly snapped it in my haste to rip it off. The elastic stretched and snapped back against the pink skin of her thighs and left a red welt. She let out a soft whispering moan of sheer delight and squirmed, "Oh, that felt good," she said almost inaudibly.

But not quite: I had heard her. It had happened to me before. The pain had given her a measure of pleasure. There were degrees of pain that were necessary to some women in order for them to receive complete sexual satisfaction. It doesn't always have to go to the point where the woman is actually screaming for mercy or any of that nonsense. But psychologically, there is a hidden desire of the female to know that she has been mastered, to know that her man has the ruthlessness to crack her and dominate her while she is in bed with him. This is the way it was with her.

All these thoughts had gone through my mind as she lay under me.

Making love to a woman is a complex thing and takes all the understanding the male can muster. But concentrating on a woman's body and on what excites a woman to her greatest pitch of sexual excitation is a rewarding thing. Rewarding, in that the man sees the woman as she really is, revealed to him in the depths of her desire, and this is the way I wanted her to be now. Now that she had shown me her hand.

This is worth seeing. This is worth experiencing. There is no middle ground involved here. It manifests itself in the absolute love a woman has for a man occasionally, or the hatred she feels for him-both of these are extremes. The intentness of her features, the appearance of her-the alert scrutiny told me that was what she wanted.

I had to be sure, and I lowered my mouth to the round warmness of her belly and of her navel and ran my tongue around its perimeter.

She squirmed, and from where I was, I could hear her breathing suddenly harsh and ragged. I slid my hand to the elastic band that held her red silk panties around her waist and snapped it. I didn't snap it gently the way I had stretched the elastic on her garter belt. I pulled the elastic six or seven inches away from her body and released it.

It hit with a sharp impact.

She gasped involuntarily and said absolutely nothing. Then I knew. She lay perfectly still now, her arms out at her sides as though she was waiting for me to take the next step.

I slid my hand under her panties and skinned them off with one fast motion that was accomplished easily enough when she raised her hips. She kicked the scarlet panties away from her and sent them flying off the bed.

I ran my tongue around her navel and kissed a soft furrow to her lower belly and then I became aware of her face as I glanced upward at her.

Her eyes were closed completely and her mouth was open. Her pink tongue ran restlessly over the surface of her lips, and her face had taken on a dark red, flushed color.

She had lifted her legs from the prone position they had assumed and her knees were lifted and apart and open.

Her hips were completely white and the lustrous skin shone with a satiny glitter.

I stroked her stomach and then the soft flared hips and then when she lifted her middle body I knew that she wanted me to put my hands on her buttocks. When I caught her buttocks in my hands and squeezed them brutally, with the strength of my fingers digging into her pink flesh. She shuddered and I knew that I had been right about her.

A tremor passed through her body and spread through her, so that she squirmed and writhed with an uncontrolled abandonment.

And then my hands lifted her to me and our bodies met and brushed against each other lightly, but it was like currents of electricity that washed over us.

With a sharp strangled gasp, she tried to move away from me, but it was too late then. We had gone too far for that now. Some women are strange. You can see them building right along with you sometimes and at the last minute, when you figure that all holds are down and there is only clear sailing ahead, they manage to put a token show of resistance. This is a conditioned reflex and nothing more. Somewhere in their past they have been told that the show of modesty is important, and therefore expected. It didn't fool me.

"Stop it ... stop," she said, and she tried to make herself rigid and unyielding to my touch. She managed to put her hands in front of her and then viciously scratched at my chest.

She tore the skin. That tore it.

It was part of the game that she was playing. But that wasn't the way I wanted to play. Her nearness and the softness of her belly, and the deep creamy richness of her bursting breasts had already ended that for me. Hell no, I wasn't in any mood to play her game. If I was going to play any games they were going to be on my terms.

She had pulled her body away from me and when I tried pulling her in again, she clawed her fingers as though she was about to scratch my chest again.

The hell with that, that wasn't going to happen. I was damn sure of it.

She broke through my thoughts. "Did you think that you were going to overpower me with your masculinity or some such nonsense? Did you think that you were going to have your way completely when we got into bed?"

There was a throbbing sensation in my loins now that deafened whatever she was saying. There was only one thing in my mind now. And that was the thought of her nude body laying under me and of the flushed look upon her face that belied what she was saying.

I ripped at one of her buttocks as though I were trying to rip it away from her body and placed my other hand on her lower belly.

She jumped as though I had stuck her with a pin. "Stop that," she gasped. "I'm only human." She felt my arms. "You've got muscles all over the place, I can feel them when you brush against me. With, the strength you've got you could take it away from me if you had the guts." She smirked, "But you haven't got the guts. You haven't even got the nerve to take your mask off. You're strictly a no guts guy."

She was baiting me. She wanted to be taken against what she thought were her real wishes. She wanted to be moved violently, without her having any say in the matter. She wanted to be made love to and whatever was done to her would be all right once her stubborn resistance was overcome. Perhaps she wasn't aware of it herself. All that occupied her mind now was the attempt to make her male partner her adversary. It had become a contest for her.

In all contests, somebody has to win. I sure as hell didn't want to lose this one.

And then suddenly, without warning, she was pushing against my chest. She was trying to get out from under. Perhaps the moment I had given her to think was enough for her to have made her change hex mind about the whole thing.

"You're not going to," she said evenly. "Get off."

I placed my hand against her face then gently, and pushed her head down on the pillow again. There was something that I wanted here. She had made damn sure of that. Now that she had received her vicarious thrill by arousing me, she no longer wanted to go through with it.

She reached a clawing hand for my face and that was when I cracked her across the face. Sharp enough to make her cry out, "You son of a witch."

That wasn't enough for me, not then, and with one quick movement I ripped the hangman's mask off my head.

If she was angry before, that emotion was mild to what she felt when she saw my face.

"You! You're the nut with the ceiling. Get off! Get off, you son of a witch, before I tear the eyes out of your head." She was livid.

"Sure," I said, and she was up almost immediately.

She sat up in the bed. "I thought that there was something familiar about you." She grinned. "So it's you. Well, buster, all you're going to do is look, like the rest of them. As far as you're concerned, you're strictly a man who is on the outside. And that's the way it's going to stay. So eat your heart out."

I flicked my finger against her ripe oversized breast.

She flinched. "Go to hell. That's the way it is."

She was a tough dame, one of Harriet's friends, and I didn't even know her name. That made us even I suppose. I doubted that she knew who I was either.

I reached for her then and placed one arm around her waist and pulled her to me. She was as limp as a wet rag and as uncooperative. It was like touching a mass of wet cement.

And then I changed that in a hurry. She had told me something about herself earlier, when she had reacted the way she did when the elastic had snapped against her flesh.

"I'm going to give you the spanking you deserve," I said quietly.

"You're kidding," and even as she said it her expression told me that she didn't believe that for a minute. She knew I meant what I had said.

"You wouldn't dare." Her eyes widened uncertainly and the flush on her face deepened. "You wouldn't dare."

I caught her and pulled her toward me, and then I had her squirming, fighting for dear life, her body an over me. It wasn't going to be an easy thing. She fought me with all the strength she had and yet from the beginning I knew that she wasn't fighting to get away from me. That much I knew. I managed to get her across my lap and her breasts burrowed into my thighs and flattened. When I tried to bring her buttocks nearer to me she tried biting me.

I pushed her head away and with one fast slap of my hand across her buttocks, changed all that. I hit her so hard across her rear, she gasped, and then changed completely for me.

She spun her head toward me. Her eyes were open wide and her mouth was set over clenched teeth.

I brought my hand down again and her face seemed to twist with agony of her desire and then suddenly she seemed to succumb to her own urge for passion.

She stopped fighting me.

There was a red welt across her buttocks where my hand had spanked her. And then, without my saying anything or in any way denoting what I wanted, she knew.

She kissed me then, and I felt the warmness of her Bps upon me. Feeling the way I did, I knew that this was something that wasn't going to keep up for any length of time or I was finished.

I'm not the kind of guy who has to smack a gal around before he manages to get her into the hay. That doesn't give me any special kind of a charge. What did in this case was that she wanted me to. That made it different. Knowing that what I did to her made her sexually excited, had its effects on me too. The throbbing I had felt in my loins increased, the heavy pulse I had felt there quickened and told me that the blonde was going to end it for me before it had really begun and that wasn't for me. I pulled her head away gently and turned her over on her back.

"Kiss them," she said. "Kiss them before you do anything else to me."

Holding my hands under the small of her back I placed my lips upon her jutting nipples and the aureole that surrounded them, with their lighter cast, and kissed them until they were as hard as diamonds. Her breath was hot and rasping with the wildness and pure passion she felt then. What has passed for passion before, was nothing compared to this. And this is the way it is with passion and emotions.

I felt the harness of my thigh brush up against the softness of her leg, against the silken white skin that beckoned and no longer offered resistance to me, and then she was reaching for me.

It was really the first time that she had placed her hands on my body that way. I jumped almost a foot with the softness of her hand, and she held me that way, not guiding, not pulling, but perfectly content to let things remain the way they were.

But that was the hell of it. Things no longer remained they way they were. Her hand held me and the moistness of what I had felt passed on to her.

She grinned a sweet feminine smile and a knowing look flicked across her face. "You're really ready, aren't you? Well save it for a while, friend."

There's something about the way a woman says something like that, that only has meaning when it's said by a woman who know that she is going to be loved. There is a certain nuance that accompanies this phrase and always it does something to me. It's as though I've found something that I've been lacking for years, and after the long search, it's in my arms.

There's a tingle that races over your body when that happens. It can happen to any guy at any given moment. And that's exactly what I mean when the time is for giving and taking, and that's what the whole bit is about.

She was about to give.

And I was about to take.

There's a certain beauty in this, that I find lively and rewarding. These are the moments for me when the richness of our bodies are to be savored and tasted and these are the moments that she was waiting for too. Her flushed, smiling face told me that.

A woman's body isn't something that's made exclusively for the dumping of male passion. The ability for the female to adjust and react to the male is a wondrous thing and indeed is wasted upon many a male.

Let it be said here and now. It is not wasted on Pierre.

The lovemaking wherein the sexes are joined is as intricate and imaginative as the mind allows.

And what a female sets out to do with her body is something that she has or doesn't have. And what she achieves and what she feels she achieves are two different things. They are separate and apart. The talent and the effort aren't to be confused.

Naturally, it works the same way for the male. It takes two to tango. It takes two to make love. There are many interesting uses of the body and a number of intricate movements are involved. This is the treatment we give each other when we make love.

For the female the body has to come to its own terms. The blonde beneath me evidently had at some time in the past come to a full understanding of hers.

She tensed herself, bracing her feet apart, stripped herself of any inhibitions and she composed her body to accommodate me and in the doing accommodated herself.

I felt her lay under me and she began to undulate her belly and her hips in a rolling, gentle, but firm motion.

Her eyes were closed now and the tip of her tongue wet her lips.

We touched then and I remained thus.

"Don't tease me. Please don't tease me now."

I didn't. Honest emotion was in her voice and T was not the one to ignore the excitement for which there is no relief except through each other.

We became one with the impact of a bullet slamming home into the chamber.

I heard her stifle a cry and the concentrated rapt pleasure of the depth of her desire echoed in that little gasp.

In that moment, when the bedroom walls were no longer sheets of plaster, but seemed to be a shimmering, wavering, cloud-like mass, I became intensely aware of her and of the blonde silken hair at the nape of her neck. Everything about her was warm and honey-gold with the candid face of her naked desire.

It all focused for me then and I felt her body come alive to my efforts and with it came the realization that here beneath me was the body of woman all encompassing. It was self-contained in its passion and in its deftness, and the insurmountable barrier of inhibitions had come crashing down long ago.

She was a creature of sheer delight to me. She was the being who with one upward thrust of her body, showed me that the outward structure of convention and all its taboos had long since departed with the gentle movements of ourselves.

I felt the movements of her legs and her thighs, moving relentlessly with the passion in which she had become caught up, and the warm roundness and the pit of her vibrant feverish desire like a warm, bursting flood that had overflowed the banks of restraint.

The whole room belonged to her. There was the scent of her in my nostrils and the salt taste of her ear lobes in my month, and there was the intake and the recoil between us and that set us apart from anything else on this earth.

This is the way it is with me when I am immersed deeply in the body of a woman's willing ardor.

Her trembling fingers rested on my shoulders and with it she knew as I did that she had found a match for the. torrid desire that she felt.

It had become a raging fire for us now, started and consumed with the tactics of her heaving belly and breasts. It had turned into a contest of pure staying power.

She was endless and her threshing legs gave mute testimony to the struggle she felt and to which I had become an equal partner.

The quick intake of breath from her suddenly brought all the plans I had to prolong this ecstatic mingling of our senses to a shuddering, spasmodic ending. Into those too-few seconds we poured the relentless throbbing agony of ourselves-into the release of our spontaneous communication with each other.

It was something for me that rocked the walls and in the magnificence of her wild, frantic body I found the release and complete end to my desire.

We lay eye to eye for a long time and I felt her slowly come back to receding normalcy, our bodies touching and the fine beads of sweat that lay upon our bodies were still warm with what had transpired.

And I thought, indeed, this is the beginning and it is the end as well.

She looked up at me and said, "I'm alive now. I need nothing else."

I explored her eyes, languorous in their contentment now, and her mouth with my lips. She shook her head in a gesture altogether feminine and her long blonde hair caressed my face as it fell about her smooth, naked shoulders.

I felt in that moment that I had possessed her completely.

With the next breath she took she said with a simplicity that is only born of being openly loved for the passion and want of sex itself, that her name was Claude Fontaine.

"Pierre Drysdale," I said from my perch.

The enormity of our introduction, after we had already been introduced to the sexual knowledge of each other, hit home to both of us with a spontaneous impact that brought laughter to tears for her, and got me off my lofty perch with the convulsive laughter that it evoked from me as well.

She rolled over on her side and shrieked, "Pierre," and tears of laughter coursed the lovely oval of her face.

As for me I didn't quite see what the hell was so funny.

But looking at her genuine laughter was infectious and I found myself laughing as hard as she, and I reaffirmed my belief that laughter and sex are closely intermingled.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Claudia Fontaine hailed from Davenport, Iowa and was twenty-four years old. She had been married when she was seventeen. It had lasted a year and ended with an annulment when she found that the boy of her choice was too interested in other women.

It had ended, and she had looked around and convinced herself that life in Davenport was not for her. Claudia had come to New York and after working behind the counter at an all-night drug store for six months had finally managed to land a job dancing at a twist bistro. Her job was supposed to be dancing with the customers.

The customers were more interested in mauling her than they were in dancing, and when she had complained to the owner, his answer had been, "Just be nice to the customers. You ain't getting a hundred dollars a week just to dance, you know."

She hadn't known, and when the mauling had continued, accompanied by a hundred propositions, she had finally accepted.

"I was being squeezed then, not only by the customers, but by the simple fact that I was running out of cash quickly. I had to have new dresses and the cost of maintaining an apartment, not in a slum area, in New York City, was much more than I was making, despite the extra twenty dollars I made in tips. You sure you want to hear this?"

"Not unless you want to tell me about it"

"Do me a favor?"

"Sure."

"Get my clothes. They're in Harriet's bedroom. They're neatly stacked on a chair. They're mine."

I returned with them a few minutes later and she started telling me about herself again.

"First, let me tell you that I wasn't hired to accompany you or any other male to the bedroom?"

"Oh? Then what brought it about?"

"I'm a big girl. I just felt like it It happens that way sometimes."

"You said you were hired. To do what?"

"To enliven things. That's the way Harriet put it to me. Harriet hired me herself. She has a knack of finding out about people. She found that I was right for what he wanted. I guess she wanted to hire me for the shock value I'd bring to her party when I walked through the apartment loaded with people while I wasn't wearing a brassiere. That was her idea."

"It worked. I saw about fifteen guys who didn't believe their eyes."

"She paid me two hundred dollars for that little trick. She didn't tell me about getting into bed with anybody. That was strictly my idea. I saw you and that ridiculous spear and you gave me a laugh. I wasn't with anybody and I just felt like it It's as simple as that About my seeing you in that bar, that's where I work. I take my calls there. It's my headquarters."

"Are you a call girl?"

"My, aren't we direct and to the point?"

"No, I didn't mean it the way it probably sounded. I don't care if you are or aren't. Being a call girl, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't have much to do with morality or immorality."

"That's a nice generous attitude." There was a touch of annoyance in her tone, I thought. Not much, but enough to let me know I hadn't said the right thing.

"If I've offended you I'm sorry." There wasn't any other way out. "It's just that when you said you took your calls there that I thought that perhaps you were a call girl."

"It's because we wound up in bed, isn't it?"

"No! That isn't it at all. I've already told you. You said that you hung around the bar and that you took your calls there. You have to admit it does sound as though you just might possibly be in the game."

"All right, I admit it," she said bluntly enough to make me realize that she wasn't admitting anything of the kind.

"You're the biggest liar I've met in four days, and I've met most of them. I don't think that you make your living visiting strange hotel rooms and still stranger men. Think about it for a minute. The first time I see you, you haven't got anything over those rather substantial breasts of yours. Correct?"

"As correct as can be." She grinned. "Substantial-hmmm, I've never had then referred to that way."

"And then the next thing you know, we're in the sack-it seems just like that."

"There wasn't any seeming about it all. That was the way it happened. So far so good."

"Indeed it was."

"I can't stand men who make jokes afterward. There's something boorish about it."

"I agree with that. Right is right. But what tops it is your telling me that you hang around the bar, that it's practically your headquarters, and that you get your calls there. Naturally my mind isn't the purest."

"Naturally."

I ignored that. "I assumed immediately that that was how you made your dollar. Remember, you had already told me that you worked in that twist dance joint and that hundreds of propositions fell your way."

"Don't tell me you're a cop. Not with that beard, not with all that foliage."

"No, I do interiors."

"This I already know."

"I'm an interior decorator."

"Oh!"

"Yeah, 'oh.' Your tale seemed to follow the prevailing pattern of young hopefuls who come to the city and when things get a little rougher than they bargained for, resort to the rougher life of the call girl. If I was hasty in my conclusions, please excuse it as the result of an unthinking mind."

"Spoken bravely and charming. I'm an actress."

"I see."

"You don't see at all. I've landed a few bit parts here and there and sleeping around doesn't further my career any. All it does is spread the word that I like to sleep around and that I'm available. My agent decided that what I needed was a little publicity, and when my agent found out that Harriet Shaft was throwing a little party, suggested to Harriet that she hire me for the night and give the party some kind of shock value."

"By walking around with nothing on top?"

"True."

"I have to admit it shocked hell out of me. I'm not used to that type of jazz. Who is?"

"Exactly-and now that it's over and now that the guests have something to talk, about, I'm through for the evening. I'm going home."

"What did your agent expect to accomplish for you. Did he think that there would be newspaper photographers hanging all over the joint waiting to snap your picture?"

"First of all, he's a she."

"You mean he's queer?"

He grinned. "No, I mean that she is a she, all two hundred pounds of her. Five-feet-four and with a chest expansion bigger than mine. She knows Gloria Keller. Gloria is going to mention it in her column tomorrow."

It set the clock in my head going. Gloria Keller, the chick who had insisted I come to this party. In the rooms outside, I heard the sound of many voices subconsciously, and consciously I remembered that I hadn't as much as said 'hello' to her all evening I'll admit that I had spent my time in a much more interesting way, but that wasn't what had brought me here. Gloria Keller was.

"May I have your number?" I asked.

"You'd have a hell of a time not taking it. I would have seen to that."

"A possessive woman if I ever heard one."

"Exactly." She wrote it on a match book cover and then tore the matchbook in half and said. "Where's your wallet?"

When I handed it to her she placed the half of the cover with her number inside. Matchbook covers aren't worth a damn for addresses. Most of the time you find that you throw them out without realizing that you may have a number on it.

She began to dress langourously, and yawned. "I'm half asleep. I always feel this way when it's over." She slid a black sheath dress over her head and straightened it round her hips and then did something with her hair while she looked at me, and we were both supposed to know what that meant.

"Will you call me?" she said.

"Tomorrow."

"That's good. I went to bed with you because I was lonely. Do you believe that?"

"Gals have gotten into bed with guys for reasons only half as good. It happens sometimes."

"I like you Mister Beard. Tell me."

"You want to know why I wear it?" She nodded.

I said, "A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt. It is an epigamic adornment designed to win mates. It is a confidant nonconforming that is usually associated with the most virile of pursuits."

"Aha. women."

"Aha, not women at all. I keep it because I think k helps my business. Does it bother you?"

"No. But I truthfully say it was the first time I've had a bearded man make love to me."

"Aha! And?"

She walked to the door and turned. "It was the greatest. Once I got over the tickling effect, it was the greatest. I got with it. Call me tomorrow."

I nodded and watched her leave.

When I rejoined the party three minutes later, she had already gone. Most of the guests had unmasked. A small army of caterers arrived with enough lobster and stuffed shrimp to feed an army. They brought it in on buffet wagons and departed. When I had finally managed to get near enough to the food to make a place for myself, Gloria Keller suddenly appeared at my side.

"You all through?"

I stabbed a fork into a succulent hunk of lobster floating around in some kind of wine sauce. "Through nothing, I haven't started. This stuff looks delicious."

"I wasn't talking about food."

"No?"

"You know damn well what I was talking about. I meant are you through with that amazon beauty. She of the large bosom."

"She was rather well-endowed."

"All in all, she seems to fit into the role of exhibitionist rather well, don't you think?"

"Meeeow," I said.

"Catty nothing," she retorted. "Her agent told me she was a pretty girl. I guess she is in a sort of hard-faced way. But I never suspected, I didn't have the vaguest idea that she was built the way she is. There's something almost indecent about a woman who has that much."

I said blandly, "Do you really think so?"

"Oh, shut up and wipe her lipstick from your mouth. You look silly. There isn't a person here who doesn't know what the two of you were doing in there. In fact I almost barged in on you when I thought that you'd be ready for each other."

"That would have been a brutal invasion of my privacy. That wouldn't have been nice of you." I found her hand and kissed the palm. "Darling, my thoughts were of you. all evening. Even when the going on was going on."

She pulled her hand away suddenly and a bit of a smile played with her mouth. "You," she said, "are a louse. You're a likable louse, however and that's in your favor. Did you really find those enormous breasts of hers-did you find them attractive? I should think that a man would find the udder of a cow more interesting than breasts that are that size."

"I can't understand why you are giving me the needle."

"Can't you? Well, I didn't ask you to this party for that type of thing. That's all. You're here for business reasons only and the sooner we get that straightened out between us the happier everybody is going to be. When anybody works for me, they do exactly as I want them to do or else they don't work for me. When you work for me Pierre, I own you."

"An acquistive, witch," I said distinctly.

She brushed it off without as much as a frown.

"Any way you want to put it."

I stayed deadpan and polite, just a cleanly tended, bearded youth, being polite to his benefactor "Okay," I said. I had made a deal with her and that's the way it was going to be.

"That's better."

That bothered me too.

"Don't take your eyes off me, but I want you to take a look at the pretty chestnut-haired lady sitting at the end of the blue couch. Inconspicuously, if you please."

That bothered me too. This was a domineering witch. She was destroying my faith in myself.

"Of course," I said grinning, and then took her into my arms and danced to the rhythm of the band which was right in the middle of a fox-trot. We danced over to the redhead.

"That," said Gloria, "Is Katherine Barnes."

Katherine Barnes was about thirty-five and had a petitieness that suggested twenty-five. Small women occasionally get away with that. She sat at the end of the couch and standing at her side with a studied effort of lovingness upon his face, stood a handsome guy, who measured about six-two and had a crew-cut and a silken scarf tucked into his open shirt He stood straight-backed, and he held an old fashioned glass in his hand. He reminded me of a whiskey advertisement the discriminating drinker and all that type of rot

"Well-kept woman," I said.

"The man with her, you mean,"

"Well-kept man?"

She nodded. "On and off for the last year. She Tikes them that way: young, virile, and handsome. She is five times a divorcee."

I took another look. Expensive jewelry glittered around her neck.

"She's got millions. That interesting?" "Yes. Anybody with that kind of dough is interesting. They can lock themselves in a room and not be seen for twenty years, but the mere fact that they're in that room is interesting. People are naturally curious about the rich."

"She was born rich. Her daddy owned a large chunk of railroad stock when railroad stock meant something. That was a long time ago. She's attended the best schools on the continent." Gloria laughed. "Can you imagine? They had her major in Latin. Her English is clear and fastidious. You'll hardly be able to match her there, and there's a little trace of Altanta and North Carolina, where she grew up. You listening, Mr. Drysdale?"

"Of course." The band stopped and Gloria led me to a part of the room away from Katherine Barnes. She maneuvered us into a corner.

"Get us a drink, Pierre. Make mine Scotch on the rocks."

I got us both drinks and we talked some more. I found out many interesting facts about Katherine Barnes. She had had affairs with men all over the world. She was a sucker for a man. She had kept men while she had been married to each of her husbands.

She was a lonely girl.

I nodded. The world was a lonely place. She was a charming conversationalist. She was beautiful; she was young for a girl with all those millions. I learned these things from Gloria within five minutes.

I got Gloria another drink. Gloria could drink like a fish. I quit; I had had enough. "All right Gloria. I've listened to your briefing on Katherine Barnes. It almost sounds like a battle plan."

"It is."

"War-it sounds as though we're going to declare war on Katherine Barnes."

I didn't like the cold, calculating way Gloria looked at me before she said, "I'm going to make you a millionaire as a result of this little war." She gave me a sardonic smile. "There are always the spoils in wars. That's why people have them. There's one difference here, however, in this war nobody has to get themselves killed. Are you interested in becoming a millionaire?"

"It's a hell of a question. Who isn't? Show me somebody who isn't and I'll show you some kind of a nut." There was a light touch to the way she had posed the question and yet I knew that Gloria was deadly serious. "I'm interested," I said. "With all due respect, how do you happen to know all these things about Katherine Barnes?" I expected her answer to be, "Because I'm a gossip columnist," or words to that effect. They weren't.

"I've been studying her for the last six months. I've watched her as closely as I would an investment that had all of my money tied up. I've watched and studied her all by myself. There isn't another soul who know's about it except you."

"That's good. But what exactly does that make me?"

"It makes you kind of flip for a guy who stands to make millions."

I kept my mouth shut. I had already said too much, obviously.

"It also makes you," she continued, "part of my investment. My time, my effort, my research, that's all money." Unexpectedly, she said, "Do you have a coat or something?"

"No."

"Let's go to my place."

I took her elbow and started to guide her to the door. We said nothing on the elevator going down. A

" til uniformed doorman got the door for us and hailed a cab. I slipped him half a bean and we were on our way to her apartment, which was on the seventeenth floor of a new building that overlooked the East River, in the Sixties. I figured the rent at about four and a half, and that was judging it conservatively, I thought, after I got a good look at the place. Walnut paneling, furniture built into the walls, Persian rugs, a cocktail bar and a fireplace that worked. So what, all fireplaces work. But this one was faced and mantled in delicious marble. There's a difference. There was insulated glass doors that led to her balcony overlooking the river. It was the kind of a place a guy could get comfortable in, like taking off his shoes and stretching out before that marble fireplace.

"You like it." She had been watching me.

"It's a nice set up. You've got quite a pad here."

"Make yourself at home Pierre. Make yourself comfortable." She pointed to the bar. "Help yourself. I'm going to get out of these shoes and get into something more comfortable."

This was it. I was sure of it. This was the bit where she disappears into the bedroom and returns with a diaphanous negligee and wearing nothing underneath but the skin she's covered with. I grinned encouragingly.

"I've got a damn girdle on that's been killing me all night."

"A girdle?" I protested. "What are you doing with a girdle? You don't need any girdle. Not with that," I said.

"Don't tell me I don't need any girdle," she mimicked. "I feel better when I wear one. I walk straighter and I don't shake all over the lot."

"There's nothing wrong with that. A little shaking is good. It never hurt anything. I like a woman who shakes a little. I don't mean that guys have to turn around and look after her when she walks on the street, as though they've never seen anything like it. I don't mean that kind of shaking. But when a woman takes a fast step I like to know that her can moves with her. I like to know that her can is part of her."

"How quaintly you put it," she said drily. "But I am not interested in your views. Make yourself comfortable," she said over her shoulder as she walked into her bedroom.

The bar had a built-in refrigerator, about three foot square. I helped myself to some ice cubes and poured myself a highball, walked back across the room that must have been thirty feet and plopped myself down on a couch that ran almost twenty feet and was covered in green felt. I dropped my shoes on the rug and relaxed.

Gloria, minus her girdle now, and comfortably dressed, made her appearance. She didn't wear any beautiful negligee, nor did she wear any housecoat that would part invitingly where the cleavage of her breasts lay. Not Gloria.

She wore faded denim dungarees, and white half-sneakers and a black, loose-fitting sweater that was about three sizes too large for her. Her hair was tied up in some kind of pony-tail arrangement. She was as cute as a split-level suburban housewife with all the trimmings; chrome-plated convertible and station wagon in the garage, pink flaming lipstick applied, just-so passion upstairs in the bedroom, and the washing machine and dryer in the basement.

All she needed was some metal hair rollers stuffed with green tissue paper in her hair, and the picture would have been complete.

"You look terrific," I said. "Where do you get your perfume?"

"You don't like it I can tell that"

"That's perceptive of you. No, I have to admit it.

I don't like it."

"I don't give a hoot in hell, one way or another, how you feel about it. There's something that we had better square away right now. I am not one of your playmates who is ready to be worked on when you have the urge."

This from Gloria Keller, who had managed to drop into my apartment, and before the morning was over had introduced me to the rich sunshine of her body in the morning's light. This from Gloria.

I had already worked a full day. I had spent most of the evening in the sack with Claudia at a party. I suddenly realized that I was tired. Evenings seem long when you've been drinking and you're tired. When I'm tired I lose my patience. Gloria was the wrong gal to lose your patience with, I smiled. I hadn't forgotten her plans. I hadn't forgotten mine either, but the trouble with me was that when it came to women I always had a hard time knowing when to lay off. If a gal needed telling, my big mouth was sure to tell her. This isn't always good. Sometimes it can even count against you.

"I'm sorry Gloria," I said, and sounded as though I mean it. Right now Gloria held the top hand. Her proposition, even though I doubted that there was a chance in a thousand that it would come to anything worth while, held possibilities. Gloria had mentioned millions. This is not a casual thing.

She frowned, lost in thought for a few moments. "Okay Pierre forget it" She had shown a willingness to forgive, but nevertheless she had also shown me that she was strictly business. She paced the floor with a swiftness of purpose, nervously running her hands over her hips and finally stopped before where I was sitting on the couch.

"Katherine Barnes is ripe for somebody like you and the time is now. I know it. She's in between busbands, and when a woman like her finds herself in that position, she's miserable. She is at loose ends. She's lonely and at about this time she's beginning to think that the whole world is against her. The fact that she can't hold a man runs through her mind almost all the time."

"You've told me that she was married five times. Breaking up with some of them must have been her idea. It couldn't have been that her husband broke it off in all five cases."

"That's true, but when a woman is alone after she has been married, these thoughts are twisted when she thinks of them. She's not a happy woman. That part should be clear to you. There's a lot of unhappiness that goes with getting married and divorced five times. There are lots of disappointments in that kind of a circus. People are bound to get hurt. So we go on from there. The way I see it the lady needs company now. She's in desperate need of companionship.

"There was a guy hanging around her like a bee hangs around honey. A real pretty type, with blond hair. He's a friend of hers. I spotted that. He's company."

"He's nothing. He's some character she picked up when she was in Europe. He's a pretty boy who makes his living off gals like Katherine Barnes. She picked him up on the French Riviera. The world is his hunting ground. But she know who he is and what she's doing. Perhaps, having a good-looking guy like that hanging around is good for her morale. No matter what the reason, she's aware of what he is. He doesn't get in your way at all."

Gloria was painting a picture and she outlining it first. The plans she had for me were part of the outline. Somewhere along the line she had decided that I was the one for Katherine Barnes. I was supposed to step in and take over and in so doing I was supposed to put myself in the position of latching on to a considerable chunk of Katherine Barnes' money. The hell with it! It stunk of something low, like blackmail or something equally rotten.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her off, but that was a foolish habit of mine, getting into the act again. I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to go on.

"There isn't much that Katherine hasn't done and most of it twice. So getting the two of you started isn't going to be easy. She's had enough guys to know when somebody is trying to con her. So you don't. You play it straight all the way. You don't give her a tumble You play it completely the other way around. You act as though she doesn't exist."

"That part's easy, especially when I don't even know the dame to talk to."

"You will. Harriet is going to see to it that you do Katherine's place. They're good friends, and Harriet can't keep her mouth shut. She'll tell Katherine about the terrific lover you turned out to be and then there's a strong possibility that Katherine will take a shine to you."

"There's also a possibility that she won't. She's already got herself that lover type she's keeping on the hook."

"That's a possibility. But Katherine is a very good-looking woman. She's used to having men fawn all over her. And that's how you play it differently You charm her, but when it comes to recognizing the fact that she's a woman, you forget that completely. You let her know that you're not married. You'll spend a lot of time together while you're decorating her place. She'll see to that, but you ignore the fact that she's a woman. You and I understand each other. Pierre," she said slowly. "Otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you the way I am. You have to understand that I've practically made a study out of you before I selected you for this assignment. I had to be sure of you. I even went as far as to get into bed with you because I had to be sure when the time came for you and Katherine to go into that phase of it, it wouldn't be wasted. You have to have the power of moving a woman."

"You could have asked Harriet Shaft," I said. "She would have given you a first hand report."

"What makes you think she didn't."

This was a hard broad, this Gloria Keller, and the way she was setting me up as some kind of stud-for-hire type was beginning to rub me wrong.

"Harriet told me about you and then I had to fine out of myself. If I didn't, it would have been stupid of me and didn't get where I am by being stupid, have to admit that you were satisfactory."

"Come on now, you know that I was better than satisfactory."

Her face took on a faint flush. She was thinking and remembering at the same time. "What do you want some kind of medal pinned on you for your sexual ability?"

It shook her for a minute, but she regained her composure as though the reminder had never happened

"I can take it or leave it, friend. That's the way it is with a woman sometimes. But it isn't that way with Katherine Barnes. This is something I know. She can't. She's a gal who has to have her loving. She's about the closest thing that I know of to what is commonly termed a compulsive nymphomaniac I can tell you the reason she's been divorced five times. That was all her doing. The poor slobs that she was married to didn't have a chance from the very beginning."

"Poor unfortunate slobs, drying themselves out that way."

"You think I'm kidding, don't you?"

"No, I've run across that type of thing once or twice. It happens. Everything happens. All right so you tell me that she's practically insatiable. What makes you think that I can fill the void in her life. Nobody else has before me. Why me?" I waved my hand. "Okay we assume that the void is filled. Fine. Now everybody is happy."

"Everybody is happy," she said smiling.

"You mentioned something about my making a million dollars. How do we do this little trick?"

"We don't at all. It's you-you marry the girt When she finds out that you're human after all, she packs you out She sends you on your way. There's a million dollar settlement."

"That's great. And where do you fit in? What's your part of this little scheme?"

"You're too suspicious Pierre. You'll be a rich man when it's all over."

"As for you?"

"As for me, I get my usual percentage, exactly what we had agreed upon. Our deal was a kick back of twenty per cent of whatever you made decorating. Getting Katherine to marry you will be a direct result of my efforts. Therefore it follows that whatever you stand to make, I'm entitled to share.

"That makes sense."

"I take it then, that we've got a deal."

It sounded good. There was a million dollars in it for me. A million dollars, less her twenty per cent. Twenty per cent of a million is two hundred grand. That was her share of it And no matter how you say it there's nothing rough about two hundred grand. That's a lot of hay. I could readily understand her interest. I believed that she had checked Katherine Barnes completely. Knowing the type of person Gloria Keller was, I was sure of it What had really convinced me was that she hadn't taken Harriet's word for the bed action between us.

Gloria had to find out for herself. She had to be certain that my bedroom charms would sufficiently impress Katherine to the point where Katherine would think it desirable to have my talents as a permanent part of her bedroom.

So Gloria had found out the hard way, if it can be called that. And, convinced now that I was the logical man for the job, she had gone ahead with her scheme. It was to be said for Gloria that she was thorough. It was also to be said for Gloria that she knew what she was doing in bed. This I do not take lightly.

Gloria Keller in bed, was enough to satisfy any man, but there were other things about her that I remembered too. Gloria got her kicks when I called her every name there was. She needed complete domination by a man to really enjoy herself in bed.

There was the need for her to feel that her sexual partner felt nothing but contempt for her when they were together. I remembered what it had done to her. Somewhere, Gloria had come to believe that all men were brutal.

And having a man curse her lent credence to her belief.

When it happened, and I had gone along with her request, she had changed completely for me. She really hadn't given me cause to suspect frigidity before the name calling had started, but I couldn't help but notice the difference immediately after. A cupcake is delicious, until you've tasted chocolate mousse.

Looking at her now, I knew she hadn't counted on becoming as physically and emotionally involved as she did when we were in the sack. Everything she did, she did with a purpose. Hence the dungarees. Right now, as of this minute, Gloria's mind was full of the thought of making a considerable amount of money. There wasn't going to be any nonsense like sex. Not right now there wasn't. The dungarees gave mute evidence of that.

I was convinced that if she thought it was necessary to come out of her bedroom smelling like an unwashed garbage can, she would have seen to it-if it helped her to carry the picture of being completely unattractive to me. Obviously she thought that the dungarees were enough of a deterrent to any amoral thought I might have.

They were and they weren't. The dungarees by themselves, I have to admit, did nothing for me. Check, the sloppy black sweater and the half sneakers.

But there was one thing she hadn't counted on: the memory of her writhing body completely carried away with the lust of her flesh when last we had managed to make it together. I hadn't forgotten.

She was a curious mixture of precise calculation as she thought of what she had in mind for me and Katherine Barnes. And yet, I had the feeling, and justifiably so, that if we were to get into bed this minute, she'd be completely without restraint and completely her natural self, without thought and reservation of any kind.

Curiosity motivated my getting off the couch and approaching her.

She knew what I had in mind and averted her face when I tried to kiss her and put my arms around her.

She said, "Cut it out. Take your clumsy hands off me." At that moment, she was fully and supremely in command of herself. "Get one thing straight, my bearded friend. I don't give a damn about what you think you can do in bed with any willing woman. Because I'm not willing." With eyes suddenly narrowed, she said, "You don't win any popularity contests with me. I'm not on the make for you or your body. Face it, I haven I got designs on you. I can take it or leave it. That should be clear to you by now."

I looked at her for a while before I said anything. This is just what I need-a dame to tell me off. "It's as clear as crystal rain in the month of May. You don't believe in it, in hanky-panky between the sexes. That's a shame."

"Mail me the crying towel you use." Her tone was not merely one of annoyance, it was almost one of contempt.

I know when I'm not wanted, but Gloria had after all, been a different gal when we had both slipped between the sheets. But such are the ways of women. Good enough! That's the way it was going to be this evening. This much I was already sure of. There are too many guys who knock themselves out swimming against the tide. I had all these thoughts, but said nothing of them to her; instead I casually said, "Okay." I finished my drink and stood up. "I think it's a getting late. I have to go." Gloria had chilled off any thoughts that I might have had about her and in no uncertain manner.

We had had our little talk, she had explained her plan for Katherine Barnes, and I had agreed to the terms. That was all there was to it. That was the prime reason Gloria had asked me down here tonight. After the way she had given me the cold shoulder on anything that was different from business, I was sure of it. And yet, it rankled. Something about the way she had told me to get lost, or about the way she had said I can take it or leave it, had smacked of her delight in rubbing my nose in the dirt. Well, those are the breaks. I started for the door and said, "Good night."

She was looking at me strangely. "It's funny."

"What's funny?"

"Your reactions are as I'd imagined they'd be."

"Reactions to what?"

"I mean, I had thought that you'd really make an effort to seduce me when I told you that I just wasn't interested."

I grinned at her. T was torn between two desires. She had already told me that my attentions weren't altogether welcome. And that was putting it kind of lightly.

Now that T had made up my mind to head for home, she just might have had enough time to think it over and have a change of heart. That's the way it is with a gal sometimes. They say they retain this right.

"Come here," she said smiling at me. She sat down on the couch and patted it at her side. "Come on and sit down. I'll get you a drink."

The tide was turning. I don't know why really, but it had happened. There aren't any totals and balances that you can run on a woman's mind. I told myself that there was probably some kind of mistake. I couldn't have been that far off base less than five minutes ago when she had told me to get lost.

Vividly I remembered her in bed. When you remember a woman this way, there's a picture that goes with it. And the recall of a woman's tody and other reactions when you are making love to her are not vague and indifferent. They-are sharp and clearly in focus.

I sat down next to her on the couch and told myself that there must have been some kind of mistake. She had just finished telling me to go and find myself another partner, like a willing hyena, or some other such animal.

Now she's telling me to kind of stick around. There are only two of us in her apartment and I have fond memories of what had taken place first thing this morning. There's also a strong possibility that she remembers as well and as much as I do.

All right, I've reached the first plateau and Pm ready to go on to better things. "Do you mind if I help myself to another drink?"

"Sit, sit," she said. "Relax, make yourself comfortable. Relax a little. I'll get it for you."

Ah, this was better than I had hoped for. The faded blue jeans she was wearing, no longer bothered me. I wouldn't have cared if she was wearing a canvas tarpaulin. A peculiarity of the male mind. When he suspects that he's going to score with the female of his choice, the kind of clothes she's wearing are suddenly unimportant. Fragrances and the soft delicate tone of her hair, the sweet scent of her skin are all, along these with the female's statement, "Stick around boy, there may be something in it for you."

That's all. All the dough spent on perfumes and girdles and brassieres and dresses and negligees are suddenly insignificant. I am without a doubt a lustful old panther and I don't need all these props to get me in the right frame of mind. Nobody, but nobody, likes it more than I. Maybe as much as some guys, but certainly not more. After all, I don't hold a monopoly on this sort of thing. Not that I would mind, of course. A man would have to be insane to think otherwise.

All I need is some faint reassurance that there's a woman underneath the canvas tarpaulin, and I'm ready. Ready or not, she had prepared my drink and she brought it back to where I was sitting on the couch.

"Take your time, Pierre." Her face had a look of coolness, but I knew there was more warmth to her than what showed on the outside. This one had the feel of banked fires about her.

It was the kind of feel I liked.

"Stick around," she said. "I'm going to wash my hair."

I didn't know exactly what the hell she meant by that. It wasn't what I had expected, but what can you do? Sometimes the invitation is couched differently. I sure as hell wasn't going to say, "Hey, that's not the way you should have said it."

But I did say, "You really going to wash your hair?"

"No, you silly," she said with feminine overtones that told me she was delighted with my question and my naivete. "I really meant to say that I was just going to freshen up."

I didn't exactly see where freshening up had anything to do with washing your hair. But what are you going to do?

I took my shoes off again and had some of my drink. I didn't care if she washed her hair, or the bottoms of her feet for that matter. When I'm up in some chick's apartment and she wants to busy herself with these little chores, I've got all the patience in the world. "Take your time," I said expansively, "I'll be right here when you get back."

"I'll bet you will," she replied, and there was hint of merriment in her eyes.

"Don't worry," I said. "Pierre will be here."

"Proud Pierre."

"That's me baby. Now go wash your hair. Do a good job."

Gloria got to her feet again and took herself out of the room. In about four minutes, she returned. She had, I'm sure, established some kind of quick change record. Gloria was wearing the kind of thing that lovely ladies who are out to entrap and compromise males wear.

It was some kind of lacy, filmy blue nylon garment that while not completely revealing, revealed enough of her to make small explosions go off in my endocrines. Which is really saying a lot.

I got off the couch where I had been lying on my back and tried to put my shoes back on and removed my trousers at the same time. A few more sights like Gloria appearing before me when the orange-tipped nipples of her breasts showed through her negligee, and I wouldn't know what I was doing any more. I would blow up.

She held her garment loosely closed in front of her with her hand. The tops of her plump, firm breasts exposed themselves to my gaze.

"How do you like it?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said, for lack of anything better to say. My mind wasn't functioning too well at that point.

And then she walked slowly toward me and with one cool, casual glance in my direction paraded past me and then strutted back in my direction again.

I noticed that she wore high, black, spiked heels and the gossamer thin cloth of her negligee reached almost to her feet. Her face had the pleasant sulkiness of a sleeping child. But this was no sleeping child.

This was Aphrodite, Circe, Cleopatra. But the hell with that. This was a naked woman underneath the Hollywood garment she wore. I could see that. Hell, I knew she was naked.

I grinned at her with my widest grin and stretched my hands out to her invitingly. I was going to say, "Here I am baby. I'm over here, on this side of the room," when she beat me to it

"Down boy, down," she said.

A rude and thoughtless statement if I've ever heard one. But be that as it may, I sat. After all, what else could I do? But nonetheless, it devested my ego. My ego dropped and went down.

She raised it some in the minute following. Gloria did something to the pink bit of ribbon that held her negligee together at her neck. Her fingers did something to that fragile piece of ribbon and suddenly the bit of ribbon came undone and the transparent blue nylon came off her shoulders and fell to her waist.

It was like a fountain in a square somewhere going up into the air without warning. She held her arms around her waist and kept the gown from falling off her slim waist.

She said, "Stand up and kiss me, you fool."

That was it, that was exactly the way I heard it. I'm not an idiot. I know what I hear when I hear it. I left the couch and ran in her direction. I sprinted right toward her and then when I had almost reached my destination, she pulled a bit that stopped me cold and open mouthed. It was like the picture you imagine of lady spies who are caught in World War One by the enemy. Ysu know the type of thing. Just before the firing squad is ready to blast her, she drops her pants and everybody gets crazy and shoot in the air. Why should they shoot her?

I froze and watched the blue gown fall away from her body.

Gloria looked at me and her eyes were heavy-lidded. She moistened her lips and said, "Pierre."

I looked at the smooth swelling of her breasts and the narrrowness of her waist, and then with one swift outcry, I managed, "Gloria," before I caught her around the waist and pulled her toward me.

I watched her head tilt slowly to one side and her lips parted slowly. The smooth warm lips trembled slightly and I kissed her.

It was like liquid fire. This gal could kiss. Her tongue started to move around inside my mouth with the rapidity of a sewing machine needle. There was the warmth of her I felt against me and the scent of perfume she must have just applied. It rolled over me like an engulfing wave. And then she pulled her face away from mine suddenly and kissed my ear lobe and this was enough to make me jump about six feet into the air. I caught at her buttocks and held her tight. That business of the ear lobes was strictly not for me.

I pressed my lips against her throat and then ran a nibbling line of kisses down her shoulder.

She rested the palms of her hands on the back of my head and said, "Pierre, you're tickling me."

If I was tickling her it was not my intent. But there was that damned business of the beard again. My hand traced a caressing pattern on the swelling soft mounds of her buttocks and then when she started to squirm a little I left that part of her and rested them upon her waist. I ran one hand up her spine and traced another to the creamy globe of her breast.

At close range this way I knew that even the most exacting perfectionist could not have faulted her breasts. There was a warm, sweet texture to them and the nipples were perfect. They were the nipples of a young girl, unwithered, proud and erect.

Damn, it was a pleasure to look at them. I felt the need to get closer to them, and I caught one jutting nipple with my lips and kissed the slightly darker aureole that surrounded it.

Gloria's hand reached for my hand, rested on her waist, and she lifted it to the firm whiteness of her breast and then as I began to caress it, she squeezed my hand, exerting still greater pressure there.

Her breath was hot in my ear and then I always knew that she was crazy. All of a sudden she had a restless tongue. Do you know what that is? Do you have an idea what kind of havoc this can wreak? Suddenly this witch was practically washing the side of my face with her tongue.

I don't mind when a gal has got a moist mouth or when she wants to play French tiding But this bit with the tongue, alive and restless, roaming all over my face, was not for me. My damn beard was getting soaked through.

"Umm, umm," she said, once or twice between darts of her tongue. It was like putting a soaked, fast moving wash cloth against my face.

This is passion?

This is crazy. The only thing T know that's worse than this, is a gal who bites while you're making love to her. You know the type of thing. "Pierre, Pierre, you're driving me wild," and all that type of jazz. So before you know what the hell is happening, you've got a few bites on your neck, and the gal is getting warmer and squirming while she's biting like a vampire. All right, when a thing like that happens you know what to do. You knock her right on her head, that is only survival. If a mosquito bites you, you kill it. That's only common sense.

But this is a different situation completely. Gloria was in my arms and I felt her stomach pulled in and her body thrust forward toward me at exactly the right places. Her sharply swelling thighs were tight against my legs and I felt the red hot thrust of desire for her.

And yet this misery was still licking the side of my face.

I said, "Cut it the hell out."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "Didn't you like that?"

"Not especially."

"It's just that-you won't be angry when I say it, will you?"

"Say it, say it," I said, and placed both my hands upon her taut ripe breasts and began to caress them.

She didn't say anything, and after a while natural curiosity got the better of me. "All right, say it and get it over with."

"It's your beard, Pierre. I get sexually excited when I can wet your beard with my tongue."

A kook, a first class kook. But what can you do? Here I was standing in front of her with a full handful of her breasts in each hand and she tells me that getting my beard wet gets her excited.

Sick, sick, sick. But what can I do? I'd already made captive slaves out of her plump breasts. I don't believe in giving anything up.

I think I shrugged and said. "Help yourself." What the hell harm can there be? My hands dug into her breasts and suddenly her hands were running all over my chest and tracing lines toward my stomach. I felt her shaking.

Her soft figure molded itself to my body and she whispered huskily, "Take your clothes off."

I obliged readily. Gloria's tongue continued its drenching tactics and then suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt the strength of her fingers.

What I mean to say, is that this kid had strong fingers. Now, I was getting the sloppy treatment on the side of the face and I was also getting the strong finger routine.

Naturally I hadn't stopped at her breasts, but there's something a little weird about the whole thing now.

"Darling, it's crazy," she said, and I was beginning to believe that it is.

And then I remembered that she liked to be called wild names, and that's crazy too. It whipped across my mind as fast as her wet tongue was whipped across my beard.

Well, if I was going for it, I might as well go for broke. I cursed her with some choice four-letter words and one ten-letter word and then she gave me a wrench with her strong fingers.

She said levelly, "You give me a pain in the rear."

Just like that, accompanied by the wrench of course.

I said, "What? What was that?"

"You heard me. What did you think? Did you think that I really needed that type of thing to help me?"

"Well no, but I thought-"

"I'll. do the thinking around here." She said this to me with her strong fingers holding me securely in a grip like an eight-inch vise.

I was ready to tell her, "Get lost sweet baby, this is where I came in." But I remembered the grip of steel. A grip like that is almost like a handcuff.

I caught her hand and took it away slowly. There was a little bit of rebellion in her, and then I caught her around the waist, hard, and she felt my aroused body. I felt her shudder for just a second of time when we brushed against each other.

The nonsense was over for her then. As quickly as it started, it stopped. Gloria stepped out of her shoes and stepped upon the arches of my feet. I knew that she was trying to hoist herself up on my body. I dropped both my hands to her buttocks and lifted her gently and her feet dug into the calves of my legs, and then her legs wrapped themselves tightly around me completely, ankle over ankle.

She lowered her body slowly and began to bob with the rhythm of her passionate nature and then her arms caught and held around my neck and I heard her whisper, "Help me Pierre. Please help me, I've never done it this way."

My hands cupped the firmness of her buttocks and I supported her weight and lifted her to the heights and bottomed out with the thrust of our sensual demands upon each other.

It was a completely natural thing for her, as though her body had been made to accommodate me, and she made the necessary adjustments that brought the pitch of excitement still higher for me.

There's a certain excitement that imparts itself to the final act between man and woman. It's as though the one who knows more of a particular facet or act of love derives a certain pleasure out of initiating his inexperienced partner.

Not that Gloria was inexperienced-far from it But as to the specific thing that we were engaged in as of this moment, she was. Her face had taken on a dark flush and a fine film of perspiration had settled in a line on her upper lip.

There was a smile that played with the corners of her mouth and I became aware that her lips curved upward slightly at the ends when she smiled. The femininity of her pounding body demanding and taking from me what she wanted was good, but it had its drawbacks. For one thing, it was almost like a balancing act. We bad to be perfectly attuned to each other's movements.

Holding her thus, I dropped slowly to my knees and took her with me. What we had was good. But it had limited the physical workings between us. I've learned that sexual contact and the concentrated rhythm do not necessarily follow a pattern where the movements of male and female are perfectly in tune to each other.

This sex business isn't a flawless diamond, and no amount of clinkai analysis can create the beauty and firm strength necessary. Making love to a woman is not something that can be planned in advance, giving painstaking attention to every minute detail of her response. The only result achieved thereby is a mechanical one. This isn't my idea of what it has to be like.

The only thing I was completely sure of was that she was on her back on the soft rug underneath us and that she was under me, Gloria reponded to me at first with emotions that were both tender and sexual. She ran her hands through my hair. She kissed my neck and said, "Stay with me. Stay with me all the way."

We met gently at first, and then because I don't really get any kick out of doing what is expected from me. I drove the aroused passion to her brutally and heard her gasp underneath the fervor and sharpness of it.

It hadn't started that way. It had begun with her setting the pace and from it I derived no satisfaction. We were out of tune in relation to each other and with it I felt her slowly come round to the bruising demanding thing I wanted from her.

She hadn't fooled me by her last minute display of leading.

That wasn't for me. She had wanted to gratify herself with complete control. It's an impossibility. To do this I would have had to gear myself to every movement of her sexual behavior.

There isn't any perfect formula to follow as far as I'm concerned, and when the rising tautening thrust of desire I felt for her manifest itself, I knew that her writhing, arching body beneath me on the rug was going to end it for me unless I put her out of my mind completely. It's easier said than done.

She wasn't trying to set the pace between us now. That nonsense was past and when I heard her breath quicken I knew that she had found a greater satisfaction out of adjusting her body and her rhythm to mine, than she had when she tried to lead.

She moved with a slight attempt at control and that was what there was about her that held me back.

It changed almost imperceptibly for her, Gloria's eyes reflected the awakening to my aroused virility and it was a persuasion that she couldn't resist.

She had been trying all this time. She had been trying to hold herself apart from it, but suddenly she no longer could. And Gloria joined in the tumultuous reality of our sexual act and devices.

She came vibrantly alive within seconds and entered into the world of sensation and ecstatic response.

And in the violence of our greed for each other's flesh, she reacted with a compulsive set of movements that had nothing to do with and were totally apart from what she had felt up to now. Her body strained and arched deeply and she held her breasts, squeezing them toward me and said in a feminine whisper so small that I could hardly hear. "Kiss them, kiss them."

I did, and she was swept into her own fierce responses with abandon that left her wide-eyed, her eyes bottomless pools of her own want and desire.

The ageless combat between us became a thing of endless beauty. Her hands closed compulsively around my back, gripping the skin, and then she slid her head next to my cheek and her voice was hot in my ear.

"Come on baby, come on." The hot sounding breath of her rasped in my ear. "Wait for me. Wait," she said softly.

She said some other things but they were lost in the thoughts of her passion hardened breasts and of her whipping thighs that slapped against me with rapid sounds.

Her mouth had opened now and her bead hung back and glancing at her I was aware that her eyes had shut tight and she was riding with it all the way. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them at that moment and stared at me.

She ran the pink tip of her tongue nervously over her lips and said matter-of-factly, "You're killing me and I love it," Her voice was slurred and hazy and I couldn't be sure of her exact meaning.

And then I knew, and with the knowledge, the passionate implications of her statement left their mark upon me and she sensed what had happened almost immediately.

I started to say something, and had to cut it short, and looking up at me, she smiled in her knowing way and nodded. I felt her quick withdrawn breath and we rocked to each other with what we had taken from each other.

She trembled spasmodically, shuddering and grinding against me, and it was over.

We lay thus in each other's arms and I felt her draw deep breaths of air into her lungs. She folded her arms across her breasts and smiled up at me. "You don't leave anything for me, do you?"

There was no point in arguing the point. "Would you want it any differently?"

Gloria looked directly at me and said simply, "No." Her hair was disheveled and trailed over the rug. Her warm mouth exhaled the sweetness of her passion and the satiety she had taken from me.

This had been a wild day for me. A woman does not add to the sum of women. There is just so much a person can do it one day. I had run into Claudia back at the party. That should have been enough for me. Hell, she was enough for two guys. I had thought that I had had it for one day.

But Gloria had changed that She had changed it with her creamy white body and her reluctance at first and then with her eager participation. But it hadn't really added anything to the day. The girl at the party had outdone herself, anything that followed her performance was really only an addition. But I had to admit that Gloria bad enhanced my day still further.

Who was to say that making it with one cooperative woman who knew what she was doing was better than making it with two?

Her eyes opened wide just then and they were fhfl of the languorous look that accompanies a woman immediately after she had been loved. "Are you going to stay this way all night?" she said.

There was a long moment before I could obey her. It's a fault I have. I refuse to accept the fact that it's over. I got up slowly and she got to her feet and with one cool, casual glance went into the bathroom. I heard the shower running and after what seemed like a long time, she came out.

She came out of the bathroom naked, the way she had gone in except that she carried a white hand towel in her hand. She stopped before me without a glance in my direction and briskly scrubbed the droplets of water still on her neck.

Bare feet padded across the carpet as she made her way to a closet and carefully laid out fresh clothes. She busied herself with getting dressed, and getting into fresh pink panties and nylon stockings and she jammed her breasts into a sheer black bra.

A glance at my wristwatch told me that it was past three o'clock. "What are you getting dressed for?"

"I've got a column to get out and I don't have as much time as I'd like to get it done in. You didn't forget that I'm a working girl, did you?" She slipped a black jersey dress over her head and straightened her hair. She gave me a half-smile, "Pierre darling, I want you to blow."

"What?"

"Yes, I want you to get out, dear boy, because I have to get to work. And now that I've asked you, what the hell are you waiting for?"

I had the damn craziest feeling that I didn't even know this dame, and not less than ten minutes ago we were pressing her rug flat I looked at her blankly. "Do you mind?" I said. "If I managed to slip my trousers on. I would leave carrying them in my hands, but I have a feeling that the weather outside has changed and I hate to catch a draft. It's not that I care about your neighbors, it's just that the cold wind outside might be kind of uncomfortable, swirling around the way it does at this hour of the night."

"Come on," she said. "I have to get to work."

She was throwing me out with the swift efficiency of a bouncer down on the bowery. I got into my pants and the rest of my clothes and started for the door.

There was the sound of her fingers snapping behind me. "Call me tomorrow at about two in the afternoon. I don't want you to disturb me any earlier. Do you understand that Pierre?"

Her tone and intonation implied that she clearly owned me. Anger washed over me. "On your back baby. You call me when you get up. You've got my number."

I spun and walked out of her apartment without looking back. The day was finished for me. I was suddenly weary. I wasn't in any mood to listen to some dame who had a scheme to make me a rich man. A scheme like this can be touch and go. Everything had to jell.

We had a real healthy relationship going for us. She thought that she owned me because she was going to make me rich. There's something to be said for that. It isn't the first time a guy has tied up in some way with a gal. In some cases the guy winds up marrying the girl. So she thought that she owned me.

That was only half right. The other half said that I owned her. She gave it away every time we managed to make it. This girl was a sucker for me. Her body was a sucker for me. I didn't only think it. I knew it If hex hold over me was strong, then mine was stronger. That was the way it was.

We had a nice healthy relationship going for us. It was great. I was going to be some kind of stud for hire and she was going to grab a chunk of the proceeds.

I got out of there fast. All I wanted to do was get home and get into the sack. Nobody gets as tired as a guy who's been raising hell all night.

I managed to grab a cab after standing on a cold corner for about fifteen minutes and I directed him to my place. I just about made it to my room, yawning all the way.

I undressed and got into the sack and put my head on the pillow and that was it. I went to sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I got up in the morning fettling pretty good. The sun was shining. I got the coffee pot started and got under the shower. When I got out ten minutes later, the fresh aroma of the coffee greeted me pleasantly. I had it black after a tall glass of orange juice. I was ready for anything that would come my way.

I checked in at my office and greeted Jonathan. There was nothing of importance. Jonathan had a few jobs set up for me. They were more tentative than positive. Nevertheless, I went. There was one in The Central Park area another up in Weschester.

Jonathan called the Central Park address and made an appointment for me within the hour, and then called the Weschester number and put her appointment off until tomorrow.

When I arrived at the appointed time, there were three other interior decorators already waiting. They sat in her foyer and held brief cases. Bored expression lay claim to their faces. "Gentlemen," I said.

They regarded me as the competition and eyed me warily. Maybe they weren't used to being called gentlemen. "Gentlemen, good afternoon. Good luck, men." I beat it out of there. There wasn't any point in hanging around. This business of finding three other decorators before you, who have been summoned for the same job, happens quite often and when it occurs I pack out.

It's one thing when one guy tries to do a job for some dame. He's got half a chance. But when there are three other guys who have gotten her more mixed up than she was before, well, the best thing you can do is get out of there. Otherwise you hear things like, "But Mr. So-and-So thinks that wedgewood blue is my color. But I don't agree. I really think I'm more like magenta, don't you think?"

So all right, I'm ready to say that magenta is her, then she brings Mr. Rutherford into the conversation. Obviously, Mr. Rutherford is P.O.'d-Mr. Rutherford has suggested that she is mustard. "You are mustard," he says. "That's all! When I look at you, madam, I see mustard." What are you going to do when guys like these precede you?

"Hello," is what I usually say.

The client peers at me. "Are you one of them?"

It's apparent that she's a little peeved at the guy who told her that she reminds him of mustard. There's nothing quite so rude as a decorator who has a limited amount of hours to achieve some kind of living for himself and knowing that he's struck out with the client, choice words are more apt than not to fall from his lips.

So faced with this jazz, when she asks me if I'm the decorator she called, I say. "No. I understand that you have a leak under your sink. I'm the plumber."

This never sits too well and I'm usually asked to leave politely, like, "Why don't you get the hell out."

Usually, I'm already on my way, and there is only a faint grating sound in my ears. You can't get them all. Nobody bets a thousand. It's part of the job.

I headed back to my office and checked with Jonathan again. Gloria had called and wanted me to call back as soon as I got in. I called the number she had left and recognized Gloria's voice on the other end of the phone. She was all business. She was at the home of Katherine Barnes and Katherine was dying to see me.

Could I please come over right now? There were many things to be discussed about Katherine's home.

I realized, when I listened to Gloria, that Katherine Barnes was right at Gloria's elbow. I said nothing and listened.

Gloria went on. "Pierre, my dear."

Pierre, my dear? She was really playing the part. Last night she told me to get the hell out of her apartment, and now, Pierre, my dear.

I said, "This is Pierre-my-dear. What gives?"

"Mrs. Barnes would like to see you darling. Do you think that you could manage to drop over today, say within the next twenty minutes?"

"I'd say, like within the next hour."

"That will be just darling."

I said, "If you keep that just darling stuff up any longer, I might just possibly get sick right into the phone. How would you like that my darling?"

"Yes," she said, ignoring my threat. "You'll be right over-he'll be right over Katherine; he's on his way-we'll wait for you darling, if you hurry."

I said, "I'll be there in no time."

"Do," she said. For a minute I thought she was going to say, "Do drop dead." Gloria could say that just as easily as not. She had a tongue like a razor. She gave me a, "Ta, ta," and hung up.

Katherine's house was on the north shore of Long Island, about an hour's ride from the city. I caught a cab to where I've got my Austin-Healy garaged and within ten minutes I was on my way. Traffic through the mid town tunnel was light at that hour of the afternoon and I made fairly good time. I got on to the Expressway and barreled along at a steady sixty-five when I left the city limits.

I had to stop for directions when I "got off the expressway. There was a heavily wooded road winding along for a few miles and I went right past a small white sign about one-by-two. that had Barnes, printed on it. I backed up about fifty feet and swung on to the gravel road that led to her place. The house itself wasn't visible from the road. It came up on me suddenly as I was making a turn.

I parked the car in front of a little hut that must have had something like thirty rooms, a square type of building that looked as though it had been designed by a heavy-handed architect some fifty years ago, an Elizabethan house with cavernous rooms. I was impressed. It was a house that could properly be called a manor, if it had been built overlooking a British countryside. It looked slightly out of place here. I climbed some brick stairs and Katherine Barnes herself opened the door for me after I had banged her clapper for a while.

"You must be Pierre."

She wore a white dress with an orange poppy print and had pumps of matching silk on her feet with heels that looked as though they were four inches high. When I had first seen her at Harriet's party, her hair had appeared chestnut, almost an auburn red. Up close, it was much brighter. She looked her thirty years when you stood close to her and took a good look.

She stood about five-foot-two and was as cute as a vanilla cupcake, a cuddly Utile lamb, all soft and downy and with a complexion as fresh and delicate as softly falling snow. She had a round little face, marked somewhat by her previous marriages I supposed, and the slightest hint of a chin that might multiply at some date in the not too distant future.

Her dress was low-cut and for a little woman, she had them. It was the first thing I saw about her that really kept my eyes glued longer than they should have.

I said, "That's me, I'm afraid," offering my hand.

She took it in a little girl's hand and held it firmly.

"I don't think you're afraid of anything Pierre." She smiled. "I don't think so anyway. First impressions you know," her voice lilted.

She took my elbow and led me into the house. It's my business to know about houses. There's a size and a luxury that goes with great wealth. There's a look of well-kept orderliness that goes with the proper maintenance of a structural monster of a house like Katherine's, that denotes big money. Overall it was vast, larger than it had appeared when first viewed from the outside.

"Gloria and Paul Spain are inside-I don't believe you know Paul, do you? He says that he's never met you, but that he's heard a great deal about your work."

"Approvingly, I hope."

She laughed lightly. "You wouldn't be here otherwise. I trust Paul's good judgment. We're having champagne cocktails. I hope you like champagne."

"What a charming idea," I said. Champagne cocktails, what a glorious idea. If she had said that they were having boilermakers that would have been equally delightful. Decorating isn't just taking wall and ceiling measurements, or selecting Persian rugs. Decorating involves the business of making an enormous amount of small talk and the rule of course, is that you never disagree with your clients. Not verbally, of course. You may try to swing them over to your way of thinking, but even that can be treacherous. If you want to inject your ideas, you have to make it appear somehow, that you're merely offering a suggestion and then hope that she follows through.

Katherine opened the door to the living room and Gloria came smiling, hurrying from the other end of the room with a quick embrace and a tiny peck on the cheek.

"How are you darling. You look just wonderful. What did I tell you about his beard, Katherine? If you didn't know who he was, wouldn't you think that he was some kind of beatnik?"

Katherine's china blue eyes took a look and she said, "No."

That made sense. When someone hires a man .to do a job for them, it's almost like buying a new car. Naturally the car they've picked is a good one. To admit otherwise is a loss of esteem or intelligence. Everybody likes their own choice. I wasn't paying too close attention to the guy at the other end of the room, but I saw him approach with hand outstretched and smiling like a toothpaste ad.

"Paul Spain. How an you?"

"Hi."

Paul Spain had blond hair cut in a crew and wore a dark, charcoal suit and a white silk tie. He was about six-foot-two and had the physique of a man who had worked out with weights diligently for years. His nose was perfect, he had a perfect sun-bronzed face, and the sum total of his face was so handsome that he didn't look real. There was nothing soft-looking about him. He looked tough and wiry. Calculating eyes studied me carefully. "Gloria told me all about you." He placed a flat broad hand on my back, "Come on in, Pierre. Let me get you a drink."

He was so smooth, I had the feeling that if yon bumped into him you'd slide off.

He returned with a chilled champagne cocktail for me and we all sat around and talked for a while. They had a head start. I judged that they had been drinking for a few hours. Drinking for a few hours causes people to get careless. It's the time of the tongue loosening and of glances and conversations that sometimes are better left unsaid.

I caught Gloria and the beautiful muscle man casting shy, longing glances at each other. Next to me on the couch, Katherine Barnes didn't seem that observant. If she was, I certainly wasn't aware of it.

The glasses were filled again and I glanced around at the ceiling and at the walls. After all, I was suppose to be here for the specific purpose of decorating Katherine's home.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gloria purse her lips at Paul and blow him a kiss. She breathed deeply, her breasts rising. I don't think that Gloria would have given it a second thought if Paul had asked her to jump between the sheets with him. Knowing what I did of Gloria, I thought I was safe in deducing that Gloria had the trots for him.

Spain could hold his champagne, that much could be said for him. My first impression of him was one of nastiness. I just didn't like him. Perhaps it was the fact that he was always smiling and he was apparently completely at ease, and yet I had the distinct impression that he was watching me as closely as a leopard ready to spring. It was a hell of a thing to feel.

Katherine made small talk in a cuddly voice that matched her cuddly figure and Paul put his head back and laughed like hell at whatever she said. In Rome do as-so I laughed too. Not quite as heartily as Paul perhaps, that takes a lot of practice, but it enabled me to see that he was still watching me.

We went through three large bottles of champagne while I was there. I was beginning to feel it. I had not asked the question I had been thinking about all evening. For a house this size there was a curious lack of servants. There weren't any servants, as a matter-of-fact. I asked about it and it brought large guffaws from everybody. That one broke everybody up.

I was puzzled. But I was also slightly looped. What the hell, if they thought it was funny, then so did I.

Katherine looked at me with mock disdain and from her moist Bps another burst of laughter ensued. "You're precious," she said. "We haven't got any servants here tonight because ... because...."

It was a tremendous funny thing for her to say. It was so mirthful, she couldn't quite finish what she had started to say.

She calmed down eventually and looking at me over the top of her unsteady champagne glass, she said, "We don't have any of those pesty servants around tonight because we all want privacy ... to do ... what we want to do."

To do what? Man, there wasn't going to be any decorating done here tonight. I wasn't sure of what was going to happen here, but discussing drapes and interiors were not going to be the order of the day. Not the types of interiors I'm used to working with anyway.

We all upended our drinks. "Drink up," Said Paul. There was the sound of a champagne bottle cork hitting the ceiling and the foaming liquid gushed forth on the rug. Paul made a half-hearted attempt to grind the champagne that had spilled into the rug. I came to the realization that we were besotted, that all who were gathered here were overwhelmed by spirituous liquor. We were drunk, Gloria was an her feet suddenly with the announcement that she was leaving, she had a column to grind out.

"Must you go?" I said half-heartedly.

"If you have to dear, I guess you have to," Katherine said. Katherine didn't give a damn one way or the other.

"Of course she has to go," said the stalwart Paul. "This," he said, pointing to Gloria, "Is a working girl. In view of her present condition, I'm going to drive her home."

"How you going to do that? Where?" I questioned.

"In my car, you damn fool," Paul said. "Where else?"

"A little uncomfortable there, isn't it?"

"Gloria has been drinking too much and I'm going to drive her home in my ear," thundered Spain. "You know what I mean."

"Easy old boy-I was just trying to make conversation."

He didn't let it end there. "I," he said, pointing an indignant finger at his chest. "I was offering a means of conveyance for Miss KeBer. I was concerned with her well being and her safety, when I said that."

"Said what?"

"That I was going to drive her home."

"That's what I thought you said. No matter how you say it, it still sounds the same to me."

"Come," Paul said, thoroughly aggrieved and taking Gloria's arm. "This man is beginning to annoy me. He has reached the height of stupidity."

I couldn't top that if I tried, so I didn't. "Good night and good luck," I said. Neither Gloria nor Spain bothered to reply.

What had I done? To hell with them. I'm not a champagne drinker and this was the seventh or eighth glass that I had put away, and you know what? It was pretty good stuff.

I reached for the bottle Paul had opened and put a head on Katherine's glass and filled mine to the top. II was delicious, ice cold and sparkling. I felt great

"Let's go upsy-daisy," Katherine said.

I lifted my glass and we both did upsy-daisy. "That's the stuff," I said. "Let's do it again." We did.

"Why are we sitting so far apart," said Katherine, who was sitting a foot away from me on the couch.

"I don't know."

She sat herself down on my lap. "Do you know something, Pierre?" she said thickly. Or maybe my hearing was a little thick at that point. "I'm kind of woozy, Pierre."

Funny her saying that, I was beginning to feel a bit shaky myself. The champagne had a kick like a mule. And then as she pressed the warmness of her ripe, full breasts against my chest, I had the craziest damn sensation that the room was out of whack.

I distinctly remember feeling a growing disbelief in the fact that I had been drinking enough to make me feel that way. And dimly, the room reversed itself, and Katherine was trying to get off my lap, and she did.

At the fringe of vision, I saw her inert figure loom toward me, falling.

The weight of her fell softly upon me, smothering me, and at that moment I went jetting out into space.

I went zooming out into dark nothingness, floating for a moment of time.

Sensation ended like the clank of a security door in any nut house.

CHAPTER NINE

I awakened, as after a long nap. The evening had passed. It was morning now, pale light filtered into the room. There were empty champagne bottles on the floor and on the table. There was a fuzzy taste in my mouth. I must have slept the night on the couch. My head felt as though hammers were pounding on it. That goddamn champagne had hit me like the kick of a horse. Never again with that stuff.

I was out flat on the couch. I propped an elbow and sat up, putting my legs over the couch. I had to stand up and get out of here for some coffee or something. I never made it.

I didn't step on the floor because I was already stepping on something that wasn't part of the floor. I was stepping on Katherine Barnes. I was stepping right on her back.

But she didn't complain, she made no outcry. Katherine Barnes would make no more outcries.

Katherine had a nylon stocking on one leg and another on her neck, knotted tightly at the back of her neck, I took a deep breath and stepped over her, and because I had to be sure, even though I already knew that she was dead, I turned her over. Her eyes were open, bulging out of her face and her blackened tongue hung from her mouth. Katherine wasn't smiling, nor was there a surprised look on her twisted face. She definitely wasn't any advertisement for a beauty parlor. She had been strangled and a look of startled horror had remained with her.

I stood transfixed, looking at her and felt sick. I wiped sweat off my forehead and ran a shaky hand down the side of my face.

I jumped about a foot.

My face was naked, somebody had shaved my beard off completely while I was out. I don't consider myself the smartest guy, but I'm not the dumbest either. Why? The beard didn't come off by itself. This much, even I can figure out.

I heard it then, the sound of somebody approaching, sharp sounds like leather heels on the highly polished hardwood floor of the hall. What prompted me to jump in back of the couch on my knees. I don't know. I didn't stop to question the why. Perhaps the thought that the murderer was returning to the scene of the crime occurred to me. I don't know, I do know that I peered out from behind the couch and waited. The sound of the door handles turning snapped me to rigid attention.

The door opened. It was a little old, kindly-faced lady, carrying a broom and dustpan. She walked quickly into the room, making "tsk, tsk" sounds at the debris of bottles and cigarette ashes. There was a puzzled look upon her kindly face when she spotted Katherine.

And then she went, "Hah, ahah, hah," and took a fast breath into her lungs and let out a scream that put the Bell Song from Lakme to shame. I hadn't been quick enough. I knew that she was going to scream. "Oh my, oh my," she said and some more unintelligible words mixed with more scared screams.

I came out from behind the couch then, and the minute I did I knew that I had done the wrong thing.

That kindly-faced old lady took one look at me springing out from behind the couch and threw her arms skyward, her eyes rolled back and that little old lady fell in a supine heap. It was too late. I walked over to her and felt for her wrist pulse. It seemed to be okay, a little faster than was normal, but I felt that she'd be all right.

Without hesitation then, I got the hell out of there.

I eould have danced all night. I could have called the police. I should have called the police. Who knows? It was for damn sure that I didn't. Another thing I was sure of was that somebody had gone to great pains to remove my beard. Some dirty son had shaved it off. This had been done with previous thought. This, like Katherine's murderer, had been carefully planned. The beard and thus make it appear that I had done it as a murder. This was a fact. This was one of the facts of life with which I was very much concerned.

If somebody had wanted to cast suspicion upon me, there wouldn't have been a better way then shaving my beard and thus make it appear that I had done it as a matter of disguise. And a disguise is what you need when you're on the run. I got into the Healy and tore out of there. I needed time to think. Hell, the more I thought of it, the more I realized that I needed time to escape. I had the Healy barreling along at seventy-five and I cut it back to a safe fifty. Getting stopped by the law now wouldn't do me any good either.

Close to the city, traffic slowed to a standstill. It was stop and go for about five miles. It made me unhappy, but not as unhappy as what I felt over Katherine Barnes.

You can really become quite sad about something like that. Furthermore a situation like this can give you a big pain in your head With the removal of my beard, all signs pointed to somebody trying to put me right in the middle of a giant-sized swindle. Somebody was trying to frame me. There was a parking space in a tow-away zone directly across the street from my apartment and I used it.

Thoughts came whipping across my brain with agonizing awareness of the mess I was in. The police would never buy my version of what happened. The cleaning woman had seen me spring out from behind the couch had seen my face before she had passed out. She'd be great in my defense. What about Gloria and Paul? Yeah, what about them?

They had said good-bye and had shoved off; he was going to drive her home. I racked my feeble mind and came up with nothing on that score. What had happened? They had gone and Katherine was suddenly in my lap and I had filled our champagne glass. We had drunk from them and I had filled them again. Katherine had suddenly complained of being dizzy and she had stood up and fallen down on me just as I had gone out myself.

This much I remembered in the elevator going up to my apartment. Actually, what right did I have to go home? If somebody was trying to frame me for Katherine's murder, there was a definite possibility that the law would be coolly waiting in my apartment. There's something about being in trouble. When you're in trouble you go home. Home for me is my apartment. I slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. Absolute silence greeted me. There weren't any police. Katherine's murderer wasn't anywhere around.

That worry over, I went back to thinking about what had happened. Paid Spain had opened a bottle of champagne. The champagne had foamed over the rug and then Gloria had gotten up and announced that she had to go home and go to work. Gallantly, he had offered to take her home and she had accepted. Then after they had left, I had poured champagne from the bottle that Paul had opened for Katherine and myself. The very same bottle that Paul and Gloria hadn't drunk, from.

They were conspicuous by not having drunk from that bottle because, and it was a because that was a headache, because the bottle had been a giant-sized mickey, chloral hydrate, or what the hell have you.

"The louse," I yelled to nobody in particular. The louse had slipped me a mickey. It was Paul Spain and Gloria, this much I was reasonably sure of. They had slipped me the mickey and it followed that their hands weren't clean concerning Katherine.

They had murdered Katherine Barnes and to make matters worse for me, they had tried to lay in a plant on me. They had knotted a stocking around Katherine's neck and then had shaved me clean, thereby playing me dirty. The dirty louses. There was no point in running. If they had this one figured out, they probably had it planned to the finest detail. Run, and I was dead The beard was wild enough. I'd have a hell of a job explaining that one away to the police. Running wasn't going to work for me. Run and it was an admission of guilt.

The only running I was going to do was to the phone. What motive did I have for killing Katherine? The police, contrary to popular belief, aren't stupid nor are they even slow. Nobody knocks anybody off unless there's a motive. In most cases, that is. Homicidal maniacs were another story. I was going to take my chances and surrender myself to the police and rely on their good judgment.

The phone was in my bedroom and I got there quickly. The quicker the better I thought. On the bed, was my suitcase, closed, just like that. A suitcase on my bed. Great. They were really trying to set me up as their pigeon. First a fast shave after they've given me the mickey and now this, the packed suitcase. I opened it. Whoever had packed the clothes had done a fine job. There was my gray suit and there were socks. I lifted a shirt that had just come back from the laundry neatly wrapped in cellophane and underneath it, looking like the vault at the Chase Manhattan, there were ten bundles of green bills held together by elastic bands.

No longer was this an attempt at a frame. Sometimes you can shake a frame when it doesn't hold up too well. Motive, opportunity, alibi-they all figure in. The cops don't buy a frame as easily as you might believe.

But one element had been added to the stew now. It was a tasty dish; it jelled. They had entered this contest as a no-holds-barred event. They had supplied the motive. Robbery. And in the doing, the finger of guilt for Katherine's murder pointed to me. I ran a quick flip through one of the stack of bills and estimated nine thousand dollars. There were ten bundles of equal thickness. That figured to something like ninety thousand dollars. A lot of dough. Ninety thousand dollars always is.

It's a goodly sum when you haven't got anything or when you have a lot. It figured, then, that they had hit Katherine for a good deal more than ninety thousand if they were willing to spend that amount to throw the guilt my way. This changed things considerably. They had wrapped this up tighter than I had thought.

They had wrapped up and they had thrown away the key.

I had to get out. There wasn't any other way out of this that I could see. Run, man-run. I was going to take money, a considerable amount. There was plenty of it on the bed, but how do you explain ninety thousand if the law picks you up with it on your person. There isn't any explanation that you can offer that makes sense. What do you say? I carry ninety thousand dollars around with me all the time. I don't like to go out without money in my pockets. In a pig's ear you do.

I checked the cash in my wallet, momentarily expecting the police to come bursting through the door. It held my driver's license, automobile registration, some business cards and thirty-five dollars in cash. That would take me as far as Staten Island by fast cab. A tom matchbook cover with a smeared phone number caught my eye and I remembered Claudia. Claudia who was interested in making a buck. Claudia who had walked through Harriet's party as the bare-breasted amazon who had been hired by Harriet for shock value, to provide the guests with something to talk about.

Claudia whose agent had suggested that she could use the publicity and who Gloria had agreed to write up in her column. Claudia who was looking to make a fast buck. It might work and then it might not. It was an idea. But I had to get out of here even while I thought of it. I got my hands on three bundles of dough and jammed them into my pockets and took off. I had to get off the streets. The time spent in calling her would be costly if the police walked in on me. Our man-get out.

I caught the elevator down and stopped it at the second floor and walked the remaining flight to the street level. It would just be my luck to have the elevator open for me and find the cops there. This chance I wasn't going to take. There was nobody in the lobby. I walked out of the building with pounding heart, but outwardly calm, as though nothing had happened. But I knew differently.

There was a bar near where I had parked my car, and outside in the street next to my Healy, a mounted policeman was no longer mounted upon his horse. He was dutifully writing a green ticket for me, the twenty-five dollar kind. I walked right past him into the bar as he stuck it on my windshield wiper and I made my way to the rear of the place, found the phone booth and put through a call to Claudia. I recognized her voice as soon as she said, "Hello." It was ten o'clock in the morning and she sounded half-asleep.

I said, "Pierre Drysdale here."

"Who? Who is this?"

"Pierre Drysdale. We met at Harriet Shaft's party."

There was a silence and then a rather cool voice said, "I think you have the wrong number."

Oh great, I thought. She wasn't having any of that love bit that we had stumbled into at Harriet's party. She was going to pretend that it had never happened, that she hadn't even been there. With a dame like this one, it was very possible.

I said, "Listen." It had to be short and it had to be quick. All I had was her number. I hadn't bothered to take her address. If she hung up on me I was dead. "It's money," I said. "I've got five thousand dollars for you. It's a business deal. You'll have the money today. I have to see you."

"Are you kidding me? It's too early in the morning for people to kid each other." Her voice gave off the slight sound of weakening. "I work late, Pierre. This is like the middle of the night for me."

She had acknowledged knowing me by calling me Pierre. "Get dressed. I'll be right over. And get some coffee on. Where do you live?" She gave me the address and I said, "Ten minutes."

The mounted cop was gone when I got out in the street. I left the car where it was-the first thing the cops would look for, and caught a cab within fifty seconds. She lived in a converted brownstone apartment house on Fifty-Fifth and Ninth. I rang the bell downstairs and she buzzed electrically, opening the hall door.

I walked up three flights of carpeted stairs and I was there. She greeted me in the hall, warily. There was a doubt that showed on her face. I smiled as easily as I could and said, "Good morning," as brightly as I could. As I had suggested, she had dressed. She wore tailored slacks, mahogany moccasins and a tailored white shirt.

She ushered me into her apartment and then walked in after me. She didn't shut the door after her; she didn't trust me.

"The coffee," I said, trying to keep it light. "Where is the coffee?"

"I just put it on. Give it five minutes."

"All right if I sit down?"

"Go ahead."

I sat properly on a battered, leather-covered, high-backed chair that had seen better days. I leaned back, put my hands in back of my head and shut my eyes for a minute. I rolled my tongue around inside my mouth, stalling until I could come up with the right thing to say to her. The tongue felt like a steel wool soap pad.

Now that I was here, I wasn't too sure that I had done the right thing. She had given me a frosty greeting-this I was sure of. I wasn't sure of anything else. Perhaps I should have called Jonathon Lux, but he had already had a brush with the law. I didn't want to put him in a position that was going to jeopardize him. This was it; I had made my move and this was where I was going to try to stay.

I opened my eyes and looked at her closely. She was a good-looking girl, but a good-looking girl who didn't trust me.

"You look as though you had a rough night,"

"Yes," I said. "That's due to someone slipping me a mickey."

"A mickey?" She laughed and set the roof of my head to throbbing. "A mickey," she repeated. "That's great. I haven't heard that expression used in years. You don't mean it?" Her long blonde hair shook with her laughter.

"Do I look as though I don't mean it?"

"No, you're right, you do look as though you've had a mickey. I've never seen anyone who's had a mickey, but if looking at you is any gauge, I can imagine how you feel. You look a little green around the edges."

"Thank you," I said. "You live and you learn."

"Wait a minute," she said and she busied herself in a tiny kitchenette by preparing some frozen orange juice. She handed me a glassful.

"Thank you," I said.

"Anything to help," she said. "What happened to the beard? Where is it?"

I didn't bother to answer that, because I can't stand a wisecracking dame first thing in the morning. It was obvious that she believed my story of her making five thousand dollars as much as she believed that the New York Mets were going to win the pennant in their first year in the league.

"There is steaming hot coffee in the kitchen that you are welcome to have. You are not welcome to try any fast games. This I tell you before we go any further."

I spoke very quietly. The yawning door made me nervous. "I don't care to be overheard. Would you mind shutting the door?"

"I would."

I reached into my pocket and pulled a handful of bills from one of the pockets and put it on a small table, and spread them fan shaped like a card hand. There was three thousand. I reached into my pocket and came up with another two.

"It's yours, whether you accept my proposition or not. Either way, it's yours."

Dark brown eyes looked straight at me, "You in some kind of trouble?"

"Some."

She didn't touch the five thousand and walked to the door, closed it and locked it and then turned to me with a warm grin upon her face. "Let's have our coffee first. Can it wait?"

"It can wait." She had an easy going manner that I found I liked. We drank our coffee at a tiny table and she shot some toast out of the toaster and spread it with peach jam. "No thanks," I said.

"Have some," she said, and because her eyes were as brown as they were and because her face was nice to look at, I did. For no other reason, because the truth was that I wasn't hungry at all. Her place couldn't have been more than a room and a half and she kept it as neat as a pin. White eyelet curtains hung in the kitchen and she had obviously given thought to what she had placed in her apartment.

She offered me a cigarette and lighted one for herself. "Okay, tell me," she said flatly. "What is it all about?" She had the composure of a banker.

"It's about a murder, about Katherine Barne's murder."

That shook her a bit but all she said was, "I've heard of her."

"Shall I go on, or do you want me to go?" I had to know one way or another. Her answer would tell me who I was dealing with.

Claudia nodded.

I started with Gloria, her scheme to take a percentage of whatever jobs she steered my way and how the scheme hadn't been that scheme at all, but instead a scheme to murder Katherine and involve me as her murderer. I told her about everything that had happened at Katherine's house, "You and Gloria?" That was all aha said, but I knew what she was talking about

"Yeah, me and Gloria. We were sleeping together."

"She was sure that she had you tied up that way," she said slowly.

It told me two things. First she understood that Gloria would go to bed with me to dispel any doubts I might have about her. A woman would accept that type of logic. Secondly it told me what I had wanted to know all along, ever since I had come up to see Claudia. It told me that she believed me. At that moment I knew she did. She was on my side. Sink or swim, I had the feeling that she was for me.

"What about the money on the table? Who does that belong to?"

It was a tricky question. If I told her that it belonged to Katherine, there was a chance that she wouldn't believe anything I had told her so far. It had to be whole hog or nothing. I told her about the ninety thousand in my suitcase and that I had taken a substantial part of it in case I had to kind of head for the hills, like leaving the country, but rather quickly and under the cover of darkness.

"I'm glad you told me that the money belonged to Katherine," she said. "We can't touch it. If you spend it, it's the same as stealing it. The law isn't going to accept any other version. The police are probably looking for you right now. The cleaning woman who saw you jump out from behind the couch isn't going to do you any good either."

"No, she isn't."

"What do you want from me?" It was a direct, honest question.

"A day or two. I don't know what I have to do to get out of this. I need a little time to think before I make any moves. I can't think if I've got the police hanging down my back."

"That makes sense. You can stay here. I don't have to go to work until five o'clock. I've got a job selling cigarettes at the Down Beat Club. The apartment is yours. Nobody will bother you. You won't answer the phone?"

"No. There's something you should know," I said. "If I'm found here you can wind up with a fair piece of trouble. Harboring a criminal, aiding and abetting a fugitive-who the hell knows what they can think of?"

"You said you didn't do it."

"That's right."

"Then what are you worrying about?"

There's something about girls out of the midwest, a certain sureness, a certain strength of character. She was a long-legged blonde, who had a reassuring grin upon her face. She'd do me no harm, that much I felt about her. There was nothing delicate about her, and yet, everything smacked of womanliness. Her arms were not thin, her calves and legs were solid. Her figure was proportioned well, square shoulders, and a waist that was neither too small nor was it too large. Her breasts under that man-tailored shirt she was wearing, were as I remembered them when I had seen her at Harriet's party.

She caught me looking at her. "I know you're going to behave," she said evenly. "We can be friends, otherwise well ruin it."

I said, "I can use a friend."

She offered her hand and smiling widely said, "Okay friend. Well keep it that way"

CHAPTER TEN

I was grateful to her and any way she wanted the relationship between us to be, I would respect her wishes. A thing like that is odd. You make it with a female, and then you think you've got it made whenever you want it. But it doesn't always turn out that way. This was one of those times. Perhaps she felt that she needed a friend rather than a lover; there wasn't anything unusual in that. I was going to spend some time in her apartment and her apartment was her home, therefore it figured that I would respect her wishes.

I was sure that she remembered the time we had at Harriet's party. I remembered and so did she.

Anyway, it was obvious to me that she looked with a frigid eye on an emotional involvement while I was at her place. So be it. I knew from the way she acted, that she believed me and that she wasn't going to turn me in. She had offered me her friendship and at a time when I needed it most. She was actually sticking her neck way out for me and I still couldn't believe that she was doing it. She lived alone and she was offering her friendship; perhaps it was due to loneliness or perhaps she liked helping another human in trouble. I wasn't going to question which of these it was. I accepted her help, gratefully and humbly.

She checked her wristwatch and said, "It's ten-thirty. We can catch the news."

I watched her jump out of her chair energetically and stride purposefully across the small room. She took long steps with a casual lack of physical self-consciousness. Claudia was sturdy-framed, long-legged and her face was devoid of artificiality. I approved of her; I liked her. I had good reasons to.

She turned the radio on and waited for the tubes to warm for a minute or so, and then we both heard it. The broadcast could have been beamed directly at me for my benefit. It was direct and to the point, the gist of it being that Katherine Barnes had been murdered and that the police were looking for Pierre Drysdale, who was last seen with her.

An eyewitness had identified the man who had leaped out from behind the couch where Mrs. Barnes was found as Pierre Drysdale. That couldn't have been too hard for the police to do. All they had to do was find a picture of me in my apartment and show it to her and they had positive identification from the cleaning woman. Even more damaging of course, was that she had seen me in what would probably be interpreted as flight. The cleaning woman had told them that the man she had seen was clean shaven.

And then the announcer dropped a small-sized bomb by announcing that Katherine's lawyer had told the police that Mrs. Barnes kept a million dollars in cash in her safe. The safe was open and empty, and the police had discovered some of the money in my apartment.

Well, there it was. I had suspected that the ninety thousand was only a part of the complete picture. Now I knew that it was. Ninety thousand is a big chunk to give away, but when it's part of a million and it enhances your chances to make off with the million, it's not as big as it first sounds. The station announcer came on and cut in on the broadcaster with an advertisement. Claudia shut the set off.

A million bucks-that shook me. I dug in my pocket for a cigarette and sat and thought, and came up with nothing.

Claudia said nothing, for which I was grateful right then.

And then, after what seemed like a long time, I finally untangled my brain and got it to working in a logical fashion. The million was a lot of money. This was a fact. It would take a fact like this to get somebody as important as Gloria Keller into it. The ninety thousand had been left for a purpose. The purpose was undoubtedly to frame me for Katherine's murder. And that, was the action of a couple of fast, shrewd operator. Only a shrewd operator would give up ninety thousand dollars. They'd figure that the police would catch me and find the ninety grand and that they would immediately start pushing for the rest of the money because they'd assume that I had it.

All right, so now I know what they had in mind for me. They had made me a part of their set up. They had made me a patsy, the fall guy. When something like this happens to you, it jolts you. How can a guy who's been around fall into this kind of a swindle? Why me? And then your brain works a little harder and it comes up with different angles and ideas. You, because Gloria has made a study of you and decided that you are a worthwhile risk. To convince you that she is sincere when she tells you about making a million bucks, she gets into bed. What the hell, you're an average, dean-living American boy. You need convincing.

As it is to most American red-blooded males, bed action is the greatest convincer. Okay so she had me convinced. She had offered me a chance to make a million bucks-how much convincing did I need? Now that I look back on it, not much. I think that she could have convinced me without getting into bed. But I guess she figured that anything that contributes to the trap was important. It meant that Paul Spain had known when Gloria had come to my apartment that she was going to succumb easily to my virile appeal. Flatter a man by flattering his virility and hell believe anything. It was as old as Methusela. It wasn't original, but it had worked.

It had basic form but it had a number of holes. I figured that Gloria and Paul were tied into this together. Strangling a woman is more a man's cup of tea. It figured that Spain had done the strangling. Not that a woman wasn't able to. Indeed, a woman was, but less violent methods are usually employed by the fair sex. Poison was more likely. It must have been equally obvious to them that strangulation was a man's method of committing murder. A score for their side.

The device of trying to put myself inside their minds, to think the way they would, worked for me. What else would they think of? They were each other's alibis. He was taking her home He'd swear to it and she'd back him up on it completely. They had me tied up. completely enmeshed in the web. I wasn't under suspicion the way I saw it: I was guilty.

Why not go to the police and let them investigate my side of the story? I could tell them that I had been given a mickey and one had also been dropped into Katherine's champagne. I was pretty sure that the cops would tell me that I was the one who had dropped the mickey. There was a good chance that they'd find traces of the mickey when they performed a post mortem on Katherine. They'd believe that part of it, all right; but in view of the fact that I was already deeply involved, they would think I was merely looking to shift the blame elsewhere.

What else, if I was in Gloria and Paul's position now?

I asked a question and I had an answer. They would stay completely apart now. There was a strong chance that they wouldn't even take the chance of being seen together. It was something they'd have to watch. A cozy little love bungalow shared by Gloria Keller and Paul Spain, Katherine's saddened boy friend, might be an uncomfortable thing to explain away. That discovery by the police might cause great embarrassment. That discovery might cause a small amount of harassment. Harassment means pressure.

It was all on me right now. Now was as good a time as any to get rid of some of it. This thought told me what I was going to do next.

"Self preservation motivates my mind," I said aloud. "Let's get some of the pressure off."

"What?" She looked at me strangely.

"I shall explain. Kindly answer yes or no. Do yon believe that people are more likely to spill the beans when they are rattled?"

"Why, yes."

"Please. No "why, yes.' Just yes."

"Yes, then-I mean, yes."

"Thank you. A favor please. Very important"

She nodded.

"Make a call for me. Call homicide. Not from here." I pointed out the window and then down. "Call from downstairs from a public pay phone."

"What do you want me to say?"

"You get on the phone and tell them that you are calling about the murder of Katherine Barnes. 'Who are you?' the guy is going to say. Tell him that is none of his damn business. Or if you want to give him a little needle, tell him your name is Zelda Schtuhp. An un-likely name, but you've taken him away from the name thing. Now he wants to know what you have to offer about Katherine Barnes. You tell him that Gloria Keller and Paul Spain are making it, they're laying up with each other and they are sleeping on a mattress of one million dollars. That's quite a pad, yon will say. And since Paul is no longer maintaining mine, I think you should know that they have the dough in the city. They haven't had a chance to take it out, but they will. Good-bye now, you say. The guy on the other end will be pressing all kinds of buttons to get other guys to listen in and they will be trying to trace the call.

"Miss Schtuhp, this guy is yelling, by now. Please don't hang up. But you do Zelda. You hang up real quick-like. This entire conversation shouldn't take more than a minute. If it takes any longer, it's no good. I don't want you to get into any trouble. If I make it, the cops will immediately suspect that it's me. It will be a different story with your voice. You talk naturally. Zelda Schtuhp. The police say 'what have we have?' They like to know these things. So what will they do? They will ask. That's how they find out things. They're always asking and when they don't get satisfactory answers from Gloria and Paul, it stands to reason that the police will be perturbed, they will be aggrieved.

"They will want to talk to me, they will want to talk to Zelda Schtuhp. Impossible. We will not be available. They have to ask questions. So it follows that they will engage in long and tedious conversation with Paul and Gloria. Not because they like to, especially."

"No?"

"No. They will do this because this is their job. I shall not accompany you while you make this call, because there is a fair possibility that if a cop sees me he will shoot me through my head. I don't need that."

She frowned at first as though the idea wasn't especially appealing and then her face smiled and brought a little of that midwestern pleasantness into the room. "I see that you're rather unnaturally flip with a possible murder rap hanging over your head."

"That's because I don't have the brains I was born with, but that's neither here nor there. It doesn't really matter. What would be gained by my coming up here wih a face as white as chalk and bursting into your apartment with something like, 'Hide me, hide me,' like I was an Irish revolutionary and the mean old English are downstairs rapping on the door with their clubs. Don't kid yourself for a minute. I'm not happy, about what has taken place. It jolted me, but good. If I didn't think I was in serious trouble, I wouldn't have lifted thirty thousand from what was left on my bed. I took that because I wasn't sure that you would tell me to stick around after hearing what had happened. The odds were against it. That much I knew. If you had told me that you wanted no part of it, then I would have been really scared, not that I'm not frightened. This is important. Do you understand?" She smiled. "Pretty well."

Claudia spoke through her nose a little, but I didn't mind that either. I liked this girl. I wouldn't care if she spoke through her ears. That was how she affected me. You like a dame and she can be knock-kneed or bow-legged or maybe three-foot-three. If you like them you don't see a damn thing.

"When do you want me to call?"

"The sooner the better. The sooner the cops start giving them a rough time, the more I'm going to like it!"

She was watching my face intently and I saw a grin start to grow on her pan.

I looked at her. "So? So what do you find funny?"

"You know, you're not a bad-looking guy now that they've removed your beard."

I said, "So what? I thought the beard gave me a touch of class."

"Maybe you thought the beard gave you a touch of class. It gave me a pain in the...."

I broke in, and raised my hand like a cop stopping traffic. "Enough woman, enough of your churlish insults. Leave and be on your way to the Alexander Graham Bell device."

"I'm on my way," and she was, hips swinging gracefully, hips swaying, everything shaking up a storm. It was those damn pants she was wearing. She turned and faced me from the door. "Take it easy, Zelda Schtuhp is on her way to do damage."

"Do considerable. I shall be here when you return."

"Don't I know it," she said in that easy manner she had of speaking.

She left and I waited. I waited and I smoked. I smoked the joint up blue with smoke. This had been a day that I could have done very easily without. Who needed it? Not me. Not anybody. I was in a jam and I had taken the first step to louse myself still further by not reporting to the police. How could I explain that to them if they managed to get their hands on me? That's right, there wasn't any explanation. The cops don't buy it when guys don't turn themselves in. But I had made my decision. It was mine and I was going to stick to it.

At this point it didn't look good. I had nothing going In my favor except for one small thing. And that one small thing was that I was still out of jail. That was all I had going for me. I needed all the help I could get. And this thought promptly gave me an idea, and made me lift the phone and call my office When you're in a battle, the first thing you should do is find out who your opponents are, and then find out whatever you can about them. To do this you ask around. Jonathan Lux would do the asking for me.

There wasn't much that I could do here in Claudia's apartment. I was finished as far as walking the streets was concerned The cops had my description and the possibility of them spotting me was not to be discounted. Occasionally a sharp-eyed cop comes up with something like that.

Jonathan answered the phone and said. "Good morning, Pierre Drysdale's."

It was a bit of a shock. I had expected that Jonathan was being questioned somewhere. I said, "Good morning," Like with a clothespin on my nose and in a high falsetto. "This is Mrs. Mary Napolitano."

"I'm delighted that you called Mrs. Napilitano. I've got bad news on your drapes, the ones we had chosen for your upstairs guest room. We had discussed the fact that the material had to be shimmery, and cracklingly alive with irridescent color. Well the mill has sent us the swatches and they are dull and lifeless. It just won't do. That's all there is to iL You'll have to wait."

It didn't mean that Mrs. Napolitano would have to wait, it meant that Jonathan had some members of the police department who were listening in on my other phone. Jonathan had married a pretty, dark-haired Italian girl whose maiden name was Mary Napolitano. He had know immediately that I wasn't his wife. It pays to have smart help, is the moral learned here. But enough of the moralizing.

"Damn, damn, damn-I'll go mad unless I have them soon," I screamed, and slammed the receiver down. I doubted that I had fooled the cops. They've heard that bit with the disguised voice before.

There was nothing to do but wait until Claudia came back. She wasn't gone more than ten minutes and I was already beginning to get nervous. Then the sound of the key turning in the lock announced her arrival, at the moment the love of my life. She came in the way she had left, bouncing.

"Hi," she said. "I see you're still here."

"Well?"

"Well what?"

Oh boy, gals can break my chops. "Come on, come on."

"I did it. I called them."

"How'd it go?"

"Exactly the way you told me it would. I'll tell you something if you won't get angry. Promise."

"Tell me."

"I told them something else, besides what you told me to say."

"What, what?"

"I told them I was one of the girls in his joint and that he wasn't going to get away with it."

Aghast, I said, "What joint? You mean a joint? You mean like a cat house kind of joint?"

"Don't look so astonished," she said coolly, "The police were very receptive. They took my word for everything. They kept on saying, 'who is this? Who is calling please?' And then I said, 'this is Zelda Schtuhp.' and that I was a little gal who was selling it down at Paul Spain's joint. They got very attentive and they wanted to know where the place was. They were really interested in the fact that Paul Spain has a joint."

"A procurer-you made him a panderer." I jumped to my feet and said, "That's good. Why the hell didn't I think about something like that myself?"

"Because you needed me to think of it," she said simply, with honest, indulgent, good humor.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I spent the rest of the day just hanging around and staying out of her way. She had some food shopping to do in the afternoon and I busied myself showering and shaving with a razor I found in the bathroom. She came back lugging an armful of groceries and newspapers about three o'clock. Three of the papers had the whole story smack on the front page and two of them had my picture, looking something like a homicidal Rasputin. The picture had been taken on a summer vacartion, by some guests at a hotel where I had been staying. It had been snapped as I was coming out of the swimming pool, dripping wet. My hair was plastered down on top of my head and my soggy beard, I had to admit, did not add to my general appearance. I stared at the picture. The truth was, it looked as though my face might be the face of a homicidal maniac. Under the photograph, the caption read, "Have you seen this man?" There were two column describing what had happened. All alleged of course, but hinting strongly that Pierre Drysdale had murdered Katherine Barnes, had opened her safe and had stolen a million dollars, after doping her champagne. It went on to say that the killer was still at large and was the object of a thirteen state search.

Well, that was it Pierre. The bloodhounds were on your trail. The posse had gathered and there was a chance that some trigger-happy hero might just as well take a shot at you as not. Right now aside from the fact that I hoped that Claudia's call had caused Paul and Gloria some discomfort, that was how it stood. The papers only made the situation blacker than I thought it was.

I read the papers and I grimaced. "It stinks."

"That it does," said Claudia. "What are you going to do?"

"Think."

"Me?"

"No ... me."

"Take all the time you need. I have to go to work and I'm going to get ready now."

"Please don't let me disturb you," I said.

"That's easier said than done. You do that to me. You did when I first saw you."

"A chemical reaction."

"Something like that. I don't know what It is, but you seem to affect me that way."

We brushed against each other accidently as she walked past me on her way to the bedroom, and there was an immediate awareness that sprang up between us. I felt it happen and I sensed it in her.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't had the memory of what she had been like. But that sensational memory stuck in my mind as though it had been pounded there. It hadn't bothered me when I was away from her, but seeing her standing before me now after she had just gotten through telling me how I affected her glands or something, bothered me.

I don't know how it happened. I was not aware that I had placed my hands on her waist and that we were pressed together. It was the damndest thing. I hadn't planned it this way. I had been especially careful after she said she wanted to keep it on a friendly level. Not that this wasn't, but she had made it clear that she didn't want this to happen.

But it was, it was happening right now.

She placed her hands on my shoulders and a faint frown, wrinkled her forehead. She looked right through me with those dark brown eyes of hers. Soft highlights from the afternoon's fading sun, filtered into the room and cast golden highlights on her hair.

"It's like this now, Pierre. Now you know how I feel. Now it's no longer any contest. Now I have to play by the rules of the game. If I hadn't said what was on my mind then it was every guy for himself. The rules are in effect now." She had moved away from me while she spoke.

"When a girl opens her heart to you, that's the way the game has to be played. Because if it isn't, a gal like me winds up with many a bruise." She pressed her lips together and the frown deepened. "I don't want any phony chatter. I don't want to get slugged around, because of the way I feel. There are words you use, like caring and loving, and when you use them you don't take advantage. Not when you know how I feel."

She stood before me and I saw that she wasn't talking merely for effect. What had passed between us had passed. She had made it clear that we were starting from scratch.

The words were strange to me. I hadn't used them before. And this had been a day that I hadn't experienced before. This had been a day of violence and death for me. Instinctively, because death suggests coldness, I reached for the glow of her, for the warmth of her. And I said, "Yes Claudia. It's what I feel too."

She turned her head quickly, in a completely feminine movement, and her golden hair fell wildly around her shoulders. She stepped backward, a step away from me. Her eyes smoldered and she unbuttoned her shirt, and dropped it on a chair. Claudia stood revealed to me. her bra covering the large fullness of the globes of her breasts. Her arms were round and tanned. I had known these breasts; I had known them and I had tasted of her skin.

Her hand slipped behind her back and she unsnapped the catch. Her breasts tumbled forth with their restraining covering gone now, and she stood revealed to me now with the abundance of her love for me.

I saw her like this, with her naked firm breasts high and thrusting and her body seemed to shudder as I stared at the sight of her breasts.

There as a half-smile upon her mouth then and she was woman then, woman offering herself readily and eagerly to man, and timeless in her stripped beauty. She stood thus, revealed to me with her thoughts exposed upon her face in the waking moment of her love. I felt an awe and tenderness for that feeling. I reached for her then and kissed the back of her neck as she rested her head upon my shoulder.

Claudia's arms flew around my neck and she lifted her mouth to be kissed, tenderly at first, and then her mouth was no longer tender, as the turmoil we both felt brought us deeper into the pit of our emotional need for each other.

Her mouth opened to me and I kissed her and her hot little tongue began to thrust almost at once-hesitantly at first, as though I would misinterpret what she had in mind, and then with furious movement.

Her tongue was deep in my mouth and I felt her body move itself sensuously against me. My ready hands were at her hips, unzipping the zipper that held her slacks up. I got them open and she broke away from me to pull them down over her hips and thighs.

White silk panties trimmed with an edge of fine black lace, circled her slender thighs and contrasted sharply with her clean, white, lustrous skin.

She stood with her legs slightly parted and my body moved against the inner roundness of her thighs and I felt them adjust to me. She had taken her hands from behind my back and placed them on the underside of her breasts and lifted them so that their pink nipples jutted toward me.

"Touch them ... touch them ... she said very quietly.

I placed my hands upon them and her hands went up around my head and pulled my head down until her creamy white, round breasts quivered before me.

"Hold me," She said. "Hold me close in your arms!" If I held her any closer there was a good chance that her breasts would come out of the back of my head. "I love you," she said. "All I want to do is love you."

It was great. She put her sizzling mouth against mine and I placed my hands on her waist and then dropped them to her generous rear and caressed her buttocks.

That action was what I remembered. I placed my hands on her rear and caressed her buttocks. That's not complicated. Even I can remember it. And then she started the business of the legs and feet. You haven't lived until you're making love to a dame, you're standing facing each other and all she's got on is a pair of panties. This is it, man. You figure that you're on your way. That's what you figure.

And then the business with the legs and the feet. What do you do when you're in this position and she suddenly lifts a leg and wraps it around you and she falls forward? I mean she falls with all her weight against you. You don't know? I'll tell you.

You fall backward on your head, that's all. It isn't much to go through something like this; yon can't compare it to falling off an eight story building. But good for the back of your head it's not. I saw the ceiling on the way down and I said, "What the hell are you-?" And then I saw her determined face and felt her pushing with the legs she had still anchored to the floor.

I said, "Hey, hey!" That was all I had a chance to get out of my mouth when I hit. I said you couldn't compare it to falling off an eight story building. That's right, it's like from a twelve story building.

I thought I heard her say, "I'll fix you rat," before I bit. But maybe I imagined that. It was like a dream, only it was to real. Kazoom! The floor came up and hit the back of my head, and that was it. I lay supine, prostrate, and stretched on my back. She came down on top of me, about a hundred and thirty pounds of indignant woman.

"How dare you?" she said. "I told you I didn't want any part of it"

I said, "What?" weakly. I didn't even know what she was talking about. "What do you mean? How dare I what? Are you crazy?" The back of my head, where my brain is located, was sending signals and all kinds of messages to me. Like, what gives with this gal who lays upon my crushed head? The back of my head was throbbing something fierce, due to the hardwood flooring. So I can't be blamed if I didn't sound as clear as I should.

"You know what you did," she said accusingly.

"What?" All I can remember is patting her rear lightly and the next thing you know, she's given me the Jujitsu treatment and I'm flat on my back. Who knows? Maybe she's got a sensitive can-anything is possible.

She glared at me from where she was sitting on my stomach "You didn't say it. You said nothing. You said nothing when I told you that I loved you."

There it was. "But I meant to say it. It was on the tip of my tongue."

"Hah! You say that now."

"Yes, and I mean it too." I was carried away. For a minute I thought she was softening, but I was too fast in my judgment

"Liar! Liar! Liar!"

What the hell do I do for this? Am I sick? There's a murder rap hanging over my head and there's a dame sitting on my belly with jutting breasts hanging over my head eclipsing the light, and reminding me that I overlooked telling her that I loved her. I was going to tell her to get lost. Those wonderful breasts filled my vision. "You know I love you," I said. "Of course I love you."

"I don't believe you. You're just out for what you can get." She took a big breath and let it out, raising the creamy mounds of her breasts and raising hell with me. I was getting weaker. When I had started, I had been strong, but now I was getting weaker.

A big fox-eating grin was beginning to settle on my chops and I reached upward.

She slapped both my hands in one swipe and with a wriggle she was gone. Looking upward, my world had been a world of breasts, and now my world was gone. She had gotten off. All I had now were memories and a groggy pain in back of my head. Up to now I had liked everything about her, but now I knew there were other things in the world besides creamy white breast. I was no longer Pierre Drysdale, Decorator-I was a teen-age fool.

She dressed without saying anything to me, and then attired in a black sheath dress and lipstick blazing upon her mouth she said, "Is there anything you need?"

"Do you have any five grain aspirin?"

"Did I hurt you, Pierre?" For a moment I thought that I saw a touch of humanity in those dark brown eyes.

"It was nothing," I said. "I fall on my goddamn head every night. I'm used to it."

"Oh," she said. "They're in the medicine cabinet. Bye-by, dear. I didn't really mean to hurt your head." Without waiting for my reply she was gone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I lay abound foe a while after she was gone wondering why things like this happen to me and then decided the hell with it. I mulled and mused over the sad state of events that had gotten me into this mess. I was beginning to feel a little sorry for myself. Nothing was to be gained from this foolishness. What can you do with this type of thinking? When they stick you in the chair and they're getting ready to burn our rear, what are you supposed to say? "Hey man, give me a break?" The guy who pulled the switch has got a built-in automatic turn-off hearing aid. He's not going to hear me at all. Pierre old man, unless you do something about getting out of this dilemma, you are a gone goose, I thought.

By this time I was finished feeling sorry for myself. Now was the time for action. I called Jonathan at his home. There was a chance that the police might have a tap on his line, but even if they did I wasn't going to be around here long enough for them to trace the call. The phone rang four times and then was picked up. I spoke quickly. "Jonathan?"

"Yes."

"Pierre. What do you know about Paul Spain?"

"Figures. I've made some inquiries and I've been waiting for your call. He's rough. Smooth with the ladies, but rough. A real tough customer. A couple of unsolved crimes in Europe are directly attributable to him He did a stretch for theft. Nothing else that the law has been able to make stick."

"Right," I said and got out of there.

In a cigar store four blocks away. I thumbed through the telephone book and found the name Paul Spain listed with an address on Eighty-Eighth Street. I left and hailed a cab and gave him Spain's address. "Drive slowly, I want to think."

"Think?" His back shrugged. "Think all you like. Who's stopping you?"

He's making a case out of this remark. How can you think when there are guys cutting across your thoughts. "Thanks," I said.

The cab had a bad transmission. It ground whenever he shifted gears. He waved a hand out of the window. "Think, think."

I did. I was practically going into the lion's den, and with what? Bare fists and anger. Not with these do you fight lions. "I need a gun," I said.

Silence from the front seat.

"Do you know where there is a sporting goods store? I need a shotgun. I'm going hunting for a lion."

"Oh! Why didn't you tell me?" Instead relief in his tone. "I know a place."

"Good, get me there at once."

He dropped me off at a hock shop on Eighth Avenue. "Since when do you hunt lions with a shotgun?" he said after I paid him. "I don't know much about hunting lions. I'm a bowler."

"It's the latest thing. You stand a better chance of hitting the target with a shotgun. It's more sporting." The cab took off, with more grinding from the transmission.

From it's weight, the shotgun might have been designed for shooting lions. It was a make I had never heard of and it looked as though the kick would break your shoulder. There's a certain psychology about using a shotgun. At a distance of fifteen or twenty feet the damage resulting from the release of a double-barreled load is fearsome. It's enough to give anybody looking into the dark openings of the barrel a chill. I had them wrap the gun and thus armed caught another cab and went off in the pursuit of a lion called Paul Spain.

I unwrapped the gun, loaded both barrels and then rewrapped it. The cab dropped me at Spain's address fifteen minutes later. Striding manfully into his downstairs hallway I searched a plaque of names and bells for the apartment where Paul Spain, my lion, rested his evil head. There was an intercom speaker over the frame of names, and the door leading to the inner lobby was shut tight, awaiting the buzz from the tenant, to release the latch and allow the intended visitors entrance.

My fingers ran down a row of white buttons until I came to 315-P. Spain, and without further thought, without further consideration, I compulsively, automa-tically, pressed his bell. A goof of the first magnitude.

Simultaneously a voice said, "Hello," and the release buzzer sounded, unlocking the door latch. "Hello," said Paul's voice. Unwittingly I had alerted Spain to the fact that somebody wished to see him. The actions of a yutz, indeed.

I opened the door to the inner lobby and went in and waited five minutes. Occasionally, wrong bells are rung in apartment houses. That was what I wanted him ' to believe.

I caught an Otis elevator upward and got off at floor three. Once more I unwrapped the gun. I walked quietly to the door of apartment 315 and turned the heavy brass knob slowly. He was home if the door was unlocked. There was a greater element of surprise in my springing into the room and catching him unawares. The knob yielded to my twist. I entered quickly. The door practically flung open and I burst into the room, got about three and a half steps in, and the ceiling came bursting down around my ears. I didn't hear shuffling, adjusting feet or whistling air. The gun dropped from my hands and I heard it hit the floor. The roof was spinning, slowly at first and then as I struggled to stay awake, I crumpled and saw the floor loom up before me for a split second and then I saw nothing.

I awoke shortly, with throbbing head and injured pride. I lay exactly where I had fallen, directly in front of the door with my face pressed into the floor. I managed to get up on all fours.

"You're not very bright," said Paul Spain, I whirled. Spain stood with his back to the door, locked now, and in his hands, what looked like two cannons were trained on me. My shotgun, my poor aching head.

"You slob. You miserable slob. What in hell made you think you could come in here and get away with blasting me? What did you expect to do walk in here with this gun and think that you were going to force me. into some kind of confession?"

He nodded slowly. "A sap, but I've got to hand it to you. You've got guts. I knew something was up when I buzzed downstairs and you didn't identify yourself. I was expecting somebody or I wouldn't have pressed the release button as quickly as I did. It was you, you louse," said Paul. "You're the louse who's been giving me a hard time with the cops. That's quite a trick, having Zelda Schtuhp call the cops and tell them I was the one. That was a mean, senseless thing to do." He grinned, white flashing teeth, flashing. "The cops worked me over on that one. Nothing physical of course, but they probably questioned me for three additional hours because of that trick. Who's Zelda Schtuhp?"

"A friend."

"I thought as much."

"You killed her."

Paul nodded and laughed. "She didn't kill herself, that's for sore. I knocked her off. It was touch and go for awhile there. For a time I didn't think that my alibi was going to hold up. And then I got help from an unexpected quarter. The police questioned me and I told them that I had been with Gloria Keller the rest of the evening. I told them that I had gone to her apartment and stayed the night there. I drove her home and when we got there I put a few drops of sleep inducement in her coffee and she went out like a light. Then I went back to Katherine's. You and Katherine were sleeping like babes.

"You unpeeled her stocking and you strangled her with it."

"The man wins a ten cent cigar."

"You mean Gloria wasn't part of this, that she had nothing to do with it? That wasn't the way I had figure it."

"No, it was strictly a solo job. I'm expecting her soon. I thought that was her ringing the bell." He laughed and it sounded like hailstones falling on the a tin roof. "You are going to kill her when she gets here. That is, I am going to commit the foul dead and you are going to be blamed for it. It amounts to the same thing."

"Why?" I kept him talking.

"After I left Gloria something happened that I hadn't counted on. The stuff I put in her coffee made her sick-sick enough to make her heave and sick enough to wake her up. She discovered that I was gone. I had gone back to Katherine's and opened her safe after she was croaked. It was a cinch. It was like a tin box. Then I returned and spent the rest of the night with Gloria. She was sleeping when I got back and I didn't know that she had awakened and found me gone."

"You could have taken the money without killing Katherine."

He nodded. "A good point. But it wouldn't have worked. Katherine knew about my record."

"Safecracking?"

"Yeah. I did a stretch for that once. The cops know it too. I was her boy friend. I would have been the first one they went after. They know my record, but I had you to get them off my back. The police found me at Gloria's apartment in the morning. The maid knew that Gloria and I had been at Katherine's. When they questioned me, I told them that I had been with Gloria all night after I left Katherine with you. And Gloria backed me up. That was all I needed. She is an influential witness-no previous criminal record. Why wouldn't they believe her? They might not believe me but I was sure that they wouldn't doubt her. After all, she'd have to admit that I had spent the night with her. No single woman is going to admit that fact too readily, not unless there was a good reason for it. That was what I had counted on.

We were questioned thoroughly by the cops and then right after they left she told me hat I had been lying and that she knew about it. She told me that she had been sick and knew that I was gone. She's a smart dame, she probably figured it out as the cops came in and started asking questions.

"So for the fact that suspects, you're going to kill her?"

"Not exactly. She doesn't suspect. She knows! She wants one half of the money. That's too big a bite. She's greedy. I don't like greed. The job was all mine. But she's got guts, that much I have to give her. She's trying to shake me down. Then the Zelda Schtuhp thing brought us both down for more interrogation. It was making things uncomfortable for her. She reconsidered. We left the police together and she said that she'd settle for forty per cent She wanted out but she still wanted a healthy slice. She's on her way here now. She thinks I'm going to haggle with her and come up with a figure more like twenty-five per cent. I expect her any minute. I went to great pains and great sacrifice to put you in the position that you find yourself in now, and then like a gift, you come into the picture. I couldn't have planned it better if I had wanted to."

"What about the money you planted in my place?"

"That was a bundle, but not a million. I've got the rest stashed in a locker in Grand Central Station."

"You'll never get away with it," I said and realized that my voice sounded hoarse.

"So far I have. There isn't any other choice open to me. I'll mark myself up, tear my clothes as though there was a struggle for the gun. You're going to get it at close range as though we fought for the gun." He grinned. "I think I will get away with it slob." Then the grin faded. He looked at his wristwatch, "She should be here by now."

"You know there's a good chance that you may have overlooked something."

Shrewd eyes looked at me. He was willing and anxious to listen.

"Did you ever stop to think that this place might be bugged?"

He nodded. "You forget my background. I discovered it as soon as I got home. They had a little mike stuck in the hot air vent. I removed it and called the police, protesting vigorously. Then I spent two hours searching for another bug. That's a little trick they have. They let you find the first one easily, and then confident that there isn't another one, blab the way you're supposed to. I found the second mike. The place is clean now. You can count on me for that," he said confidently.

There was a light knock on the door right next to him, and despite his outward casualness he jumped. "One word of warning from you and you get it right now," he whispered. There was a puzzled look on his face for a second. "The door downstairs must have been unlatched," he said, as though he was talking to himself. "Yes?" he called.

"It's Gloria," said Gloria from behind the door.

I was sweating. I must have sweated half the liquid from my body. I was still on the floor and in about two seconds I was going to witness a murder. The gun was no longer trained on me, but there wasn't a chance in hell that I'd be able to get it away from him, without allowing him the necessary time to bring it back to bear on me. At that range he couldn't miss if he tried. It looked as though the talking time was over. Now was the time for killing. He'd blast her halfway across the hall when she opened the door.

"Come in," he called. He unlocked the door and stepped back about five feet.

That did it. Three things happened almost simultaneously. I yelled, "Watch it, he's got a gun." If I'm stupid enough to press a bell announcing my arrival, it figures that I'm stupid enough to shout a warning. He spun toward me and the double barrels swung at me. And at that exact moment the door burst open. There was nobody in the hall. There was another sound, of glass breaking in the living room. And I heard, "Drop it, police."

Spain didn't drop the gun and aimed it at the direction from which the voice came. There was a cop on the fire escape with a rifle trained on Spain.

They both fired, but the cop managed to pull the trigger a split second before Spain. It was so close that Spain managed to press the trigger. It must have been a reflex action, because the load of shot traveled up and bit the ceiling. A shower of plaster came flying down.

Spain dropped. I think he was dead before he hit the floor.

The cop came into the room, breaking the shards of glass away from the window frame with the butt of the rifle. Three more cops came in through the fire escape. The second one had a walkie-talkie strapped on his hip.

Some more cops came in front the hall, equipped with more walkie-talkies. There must have been eighteen of them altogether, and about five detectives with the tin pinned on their coats.

A guy I took to be in charge said, "All right, you can get up son. I'm Lieutenant Dunn." He was a big man, about fifty-five and bulky. He looked at me from behind a dead cigar. "You almost got it boy." He had alert looking eyes and he must have scaled two-fifty. I was glad to see him. He looked at me and shouted, "Bring her in," as though he had a fifty pound striped bass on the end of his line.

Gloria, escorted by a young cop, entered. This was no striped bass-a shark maybe, but definitely not a bass.

Dunn turned to me and asked, "What happened? Was he waiting for you with the shotgun?"

"No. I came up here with it I just bought it" There was no point in denying that I had.

"Why?"

That was a big why. "Because I wanted to protect myself in case he got violent which he did,"

"I see," said Dunn, "I made the mistake of ringing his bell downstairs and then not answering him when he called down."

"Ah," said Dunn. "I see. You owe this girl your Bfe," he said.

That came as a surprise. "How?" I asked dumbfounded

Dunn explained, "Spain was a cool man, completely in control of himself, but he forgot one thing. When yon rang his bell and you didn't answer him, he must have kept calling down on the intercom. When there wasn't any answer, he became apprehensive. It shook him a little, enough for him to overlook returning the speaker switch to the off position. She overheard everything that was happening up here, downstairs, and then she called us. You're a lucky fellow. We got here in the nick, before you knocked off."

It wasn't a bird, and it wasn't a striped bass. It was something like a shark, that can't be denied. But what it really was, was a fluke.

It was a super fluke. If Spain hadn't forgotten to return the speaker lever to the off position, I would have been kaput, finito Benito. Everything hinges on if's. If my grandmother had wheels she would have been my grandfather. Exactly. There's the proof. If's, that's how guys get caught, on the little things.

Gloria Keller stood frozen, rigid, waiting to hear what I had to say. She had overheard the entire thing and she had saved my life by saving her own. She probably thought that if she didn't, Spain would kill me and then go for her at some future date. A criminal like Spain wasn't going to stand still for her putting the bite on him. And even if he didn't come across with the money, she really couldn't have gone to the police later and denied that she was telling them the truth when she substantiated Spain's alibi without facing a severe rap of withholding evidence. She had bitten off more than she could chew. She wanted out and she had called the police in.

"Lieutenant, I am a happy man because of your prompt arrival. I am also alive. I am grateful."

"You've got a right to be grateful son, but you really should be grateful to the lady here. She told me before we came barging up here that she had passed out cold m the car when Spain was driving her home. She was ashamed to say it for fear that people would think that she was taken advantage of in her helpless state. We knew Spain's record of safecracking. We've suspected him right along. She told us enough of what she had heard before we arrived and we heard the rest, enough to know that he had put you into the frame."

"I was here to interview Paul Spain for my paper, the boy friend of the slain woman and all that." Anxiety had settled in her eyes. Obviously, she had heard it all, and obviously the law hadn't. They must have come in on the very end or they'd be raking her over the coals.

"This was it? Really?" I said. "How lucky for me."

Lieutenant Dunn turned to me. "We knew you were in the clear when we questioned your neighbors and we found that you were seen entering your apartment. After you left the sixty thousand was still there."

"Oh the money," I said.

"You bet your little bottom the money. Sixty thousand dollars worth. I know you ain't that dumb. If you bad a chance to take off with sixty thousand dollars, you would have taken it. You certainly wouldn't leave it in your apartment and then come back for it. You ain't the brightest, but you ain't the dumbest either. Obviously the money had been planted there and yon realized it and left it right there. The rest of it is at Grand Central Station. If you had taken the money left on the bed in your suitcase, there's a good chance that we would have thought it was you all along."

"What about the news broadcasts?"

"We released that information hoping that Spain would get careless. But he didn't. We had to go along with it once we started."

It was over. A cop reported to Lieutenant Dunn and whispered something in his ear. Dunn said, "Good. They've recovered the money at Grand Central. There are a few more questions I'd like to ask both of you," He said. "Nothing urgent, but I want it all down in the record. You'll both have to make a statement. No rush. You can come down anytime today. Just some necessary formalities. I'll be waiting for you. Can we give you a lift back to your place? We're going that way anyway."

Gloria broke in. "I've got my car downstairs. I'll be glad to drive you home Pierre."

Pierre. Well, this was different. "Thanks Lieutenant, I'll hitch a ride with Miss Keller."

"Suit yourself. By the way, where's Zelda Schtuhp?"

"I'm Zelda Schtuhp," I said.

"Don't fool around that way," said Detective Lieutenant Dunn. "We've got enough nuts to put up with without that. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir," I said. Gloria and I left together as some police photographers and technicians were filing into Paul Spain's apartment. We walked in silence to the Otis descending, and she placed her dainty hand in the crook of my elbow while we walked to her car. I opened her door on the driver's side and then got in myself.

We drove exactly three blocks and she said, "There was ninety thousand dollars left in your suitcase. The police said they found sixty. What about the thirty?"

"What about it?"

She drove steadily, with a happy smile upon her face. "Yes," she said sweetly. "In spades," I said.

Efficiently, she pulled the car over to the curb and said, "Get out."

I saluted her open window from the curb and said, "Gezundheit."

"Turn blue," she said and her car ripped off. That reminded me of Claudia Fontaine. I hailed the next passing cab and directed him to Homicide Downtown.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I answered some more questions for the police and spent about two hours explaining why I hadn't turned myself in. Lieutenant Dunn warned me once more about pulling anything like that Zelda Schtuhp thing. "Don't ever do that again, boy."

"Yes sir," I said.

I made some statements and I signed some. I was out and there was a good chance that I might have been in. I was as free as a bird, on a fluke. Life was good, the goose hung high.

Another cab, back to my apartment. I showered, I applied hair tonic to my head and after-shave lotion to my face. I put on a freshly pressed suit and I went out for dinner. It was almost eleven o'clock. I had wild duck and some even wilder rice. I had brandy and black coffee. It was past midnight when I got out of the restaurant. I found a florist and bought two dozen long-stemmed roses and took off for Claudia Fontaine's place.

I let myself in with the key she had given me and I sat and waited. I sat and waited until one o'clock and I fell asleep. She came home at two and awakened me. I hadn't heard her when she came in.

She said, "Get up, you sleepy head."

But that wasn't necessary.

"The roses are lovely," she said, brown eyes sparkling. I looked at her brilliant golden hair and her sweet Bps and I said, "I have an idea."

"Oh good," she said. "I like ideas."

"Before I tell you though did you hear?"

"Yes, I heard it. You are no longer wanted for anything. You're dear. Now what have you to say."

"I'd Tike to take a vacation. I'd like to take a cruise."

"Cruises are nice."

I walked to her, to the perfumed loveliness of her and placed my hands upon her waist. I was close enough to her now to note that she had nothing on underneath that sleeping garment. I kissed her neck and she said, "You devil."

I did some more devilish things to her and suddenly her arms were around my neck.

"About that cruise," I said. "That South Seas, miles of blue ocean and cocoanuts and monkeys and sand. You can have all the sand you want, beaches full of it. How would you like to go with me on a cruise kid?"

Her body was pressed close to mine and I felt her doing things that are not talked about publicly. "I'd like that, but there's something I'd like even better."

This was it, man, bodies pressed against each other, shivering, shuddering, and vibrating. I was in. "What's that baby?"

I felt sudden movement and I felt her leg wrap around me in that jujitsu twist she had, the one that could set me right on my head. "I'd like to go on a honeymoon," Claudia said.

"Sure," I said quickly, and I meant it. I was grinning from ear to ear. The slightest hesitancy and she would have knocked me down right on the back of my head. Once is enough.

There was a look of mischief in her eyes arid suddenly the robe had fallen away from her shoulders and the South Seas came into the room, bringing cocoanuts and all the sandy beaches in the world, and I entered the Garden of Eden.

THE END
Sin Drunk ....(102k)    by John Dexter





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