"Bev," I began, taking her hand in mine, "let's ball."
"Don't be so sure of yourself," she snapped, "it's not becoming to you."
"Gee, Bev," I said, leaning closer to whisper in her ear, "you sure talk funny for a girl. I hear your mother eats Matzos."
"You bastard," she screamed, "You dirty bastard."
"Come off it, before I expose myself."
She settled down after that. She made no attempt to leave, which is something I've never understood about women.
"Do we have a ball after the insults?" I asked. "This must be leading somewhere."
"Do you think I'm a virgin?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"No, I'm not."
"Well, what happened?" I asked casually. "Did you fall on a picket fence? Or was it horseback riding?"
"No," she returned easily. "It was my Uncle George."
"Come off it, baby. That incest rap is as old as the hills. Did you read all that in My Secret Confession? Or did you make it all up yourself?"
"Expose yourself," she ordered.
CHAPTER ONE
I was in bed with Joanna Nuzzi when I first got the news of Lucy Nye's disappearance. My lips were tightly pressed to Joanna's left thigh when the phone rang, smashing through my obsession with the tiny veins that curled just below the surface of her skin.
"Crap," I thought. But I answered it, muttering an unfriendly hello into the receiver.
It was Mr. Nye, rambling hysterically that Lucia (that's the way he pronounced her name) had been kidnapped.
"She probably just ran away," I commented. Running away was not an uncommon occurrence in Hunter, New York. Teenagers, especially girls, vanished every month, convinced that a new life awaited them in Manhattan or San Francisco.
"My Lucia wouldn't do that!" Mr. Nye maintained nervously. All the parents in Hunter, New York, feigned disbelief at the wandering eyes of their beloved kiddies, unwilling to admit their beloved city was on its way down.
Once, Hunter had been a bustling tourist area, teeming with wealthy summer vacationers. Now clapboard hotels, weather-beaten beyond repair, crumbled from lack of use. The area was still as beautiful as ever, full of wild animals from deer to chipmunk.
"Well, Mr. Nye," I offered graciously, "did the kidnappers contact you yet?"
"No," he admitted, somewhat sheepishly.
"Well, what makes you think it was kidnapping?"
"Because my Lucia wouldn't do anything like that."
Full circle. The conversation had reached something of an impasse. I knew why he was calling me. It was for advice. He knew I was on my summer vacation and that I came from the big city. He, therefore, associated me, in his mind, with big city wiles. Obviously, he really believed his little Lucia had run away, and that I either knew something about it or could find out for him.
"Well, I haven't laid eyes on her, Mr. Nye. If I run into her, I'll call you...."
"You know where she is!" he screamed, angry that he hadn't offered any information.
"Are you accusing me of kidnapping?" I laughed.
The ability of parents to change conversation direction always amused me.
"Don't get so smart, you little half-baked punk," he continued, his voice now an abrasive half-growl.
"Eat shit, sir," I chirped, hanging up on him.
Joanna put my head on her belly and began massaging my temples. I could sense her curiosity.
"Who was that, Billy?" She was struggling to keep her voice absurdly matter-of-fact.
"Nobody." I toyed with her breast, distractedly, waiting for her next question. I knew it would make her happy. Women like that-the little tease that draws the juices out.
"Billy," she murmured, trying to sound coyly jealous, "please ... tell me."
"That was Mr. Nye."
"So? What did he want?"
"He wanted a little pussy. I told him Jo Nuzzi was here and that she'd be happy to take him on for ten bucks."
She couldn't decide if she should smirk or pout. She almost enjoyed sex but any joke about the "sanctity of love" still upset her. I ignored her, and pushed my way down into the softly rising flesh below her navel.
"Tell me what he wanted," she demanded, her voice as cold as a dead fish.
My head was still buried deeply, but I could picture her face. She had eyes and lips that never softened, not even after we balled, when a woman achieves the only true relaxation of her life.
"Don't be a shit," I said, my voice a bit muffled by her curly brown bush.
"You're the one who's a shit," she said, her voice holding a note of pride.
"No, you are." I couldn't back down immediately.
"You!" Did I detect hysteria?
"All right," I agreed, laughing in my most magnanimous fashion. "Lucy split on them. Nye's half-crazy and hysterical and he thinks I know where Lucy is. He wants me to find out where she's gone and all that stuff. Satisfied?"
"Lucy wouldn't run away." Jo was obviously upset by the news. She spoke quietly.
"It's my guess she did." I returned to my nibbling.
"No. Not Lucy. She didn't run away." She sounded sure of herself.
"Would you please move your legs apart? And, for chrissakes, stop chopping down on your final syllables." She did sound as if those last consonants were as secure as her family savings.
"I'm serious, Billy," she protested, her voice rising into that recognizable whine which always signals the end of sex.
"Tell me why," I said, wearily, raising my head and rolling over to face her. It didn't matter now. My body, steadily throbbing a few minutes ago, had respectfully withdrawn into indifference.
"Lucy was looking forward to college. She's just graduated from high school and really wants to go to Clark. She wouldn't leave, Billy. She's just not the type."
I searched my mind for a picture of Lucy. I'd never known her well, but she was an excellent ball, the best I'd run across in the mountains. We'd both been very drunk at the time (this was before I managed to turn the local populace on to the glories of good grass) and we never did get around to really talking to each other. She was going steady (an absurd term, but still in fashion around Hunter) with a grammar school teacher. He was a young guy who courted her with the permission of her parents. I remembered him as something of a liberal who had fought the town elders for the right to include sex education in the schools. It was a battle he not only lost, but which almost cost him his job.
"She probably went and got married to that dummy schoolteacher," I said, yawning.
"She would have told someone if she was eloping. Besides, I saw Roger today. He didn't say anything."
It had become clear that if I was going to get laid that night, I was going to have to solve the mystery, or at least put Joanna's mind to rest by establishing Lucy's whereabouts beyond a shadow of a doubt. I handed her the phone.
"Call up Ding-Dong and ask him where his beloved is staying tonight."
As she dialed, I put my hand over the receiver. "Wait. Let me go into the other room, darling. I don't think I can stand the performance."
I puttered around in the kitchen for awhile, drank some hot tea and had a ten-minute fantasy of Lucy Nye's breasts, small and round. I was licking them and she was whimpering. Passionately, of course.
Actually, I was getting hot again. I might yet extract some pleasure from Joanna's unfriendly body. The sounds of her conversation, growing louder and louder, interfered with my fantasies; so I opened the door and enjoyed the view of Jo's buttocks. Her ass was large, but firm. Twin cheeks curved away from the slope of her spine toward heavy thighs. Those thighs would, undoubtedly, be at home behind a mule-drawn plow.
She was too absorbed in her conversation to notice me creeping up behind her. I crouched quietly behind her big fat ass, my lips only a few inches from her rotund cheeks. I waited, hoping for her buttocks to pull apart. Unfortunately, they never did, being far too large to separate without some effort on her part or mine. She finally hung up, murmuring comforting words to Lucy's boy friend. She bent over to replace the receiver and I popped my tongue into her ass.
"Oh!" She glared at me, speechless. She didn't take my intrusion into that sacred orifice lightly.
"You're really disgusting, Billy. How can you do that?"
Marijuana is a funny drug. It sensitizes you to the point where any rejection is cause for instant paranoia. And behind fear there is inevitably its first cousin, rage.
"You're getting it tonight, bitch, whether you like it or not." My voice was even, but Joanna understood my meaning. She trembled visibly.
"All right," she said. "You can have me."
She dropped on her back and let her thighs drift slightly apart.
"Go ahead," she ordered.
"Open them wider," I said, a hard edge creeping into my voice. She did as she was told. "Further."
She opened up all the way. I stared down. The thought of diving down into that desert made me even more angry.
"Let's try the higher entry," I suggested sarcastically, while I moved up to stand by her head.
I let my limp penis fall onto her lips. "Go ahead, lick it-and watch those teeth."
She opened her mouth and the head disappeared inside.
"What an ugly broad you are," I observed, my voice --edged with venom. "You've got the torso of a refrigerator and your tits are drooping at nineteen. You'll be a disaster area by the time you're thirty, bitch."
I was getting very hard. The rising blood was pulling me up and out of her mouth, so I sat across her chest and fed it to her from that angle.
"That's good. Five years in a Harlem cathouse would do you a lot of good, baby. You might even blossom into a mediocre lay."
My fingers wandered across her bush and I pushed down onto the ragged cleft. I entered her with two fingers and then pushed my hand up hard. Her reaction was instantaneous. She pivoted on my fist, moving her body in a series of half-circles. I knew she was expecting me to pull out of her mouth and drop down, but I was much too excited to worry about her. I held her head as I came in her mouth. She choked becomingly, still playing the part of the used virgin as I thrust until I had nothing more to give.
"You're a bastard," she said as soon as she was free.
"You better shut your mouth now," I warned. She shut up but didn't make an effort to dress and leave. We were in my parent's cabin. They no longer used the place because they vacationed on their yacht, now that my father had hit the big time.
I took her hand, searching her face with understanding eyes. I moved it over her vagina tenderly, placing the fingers on her clitoris.
"Don't be ashamed," I counseled. "Shame never made anyone come. You go ahead. Have your orgasm."
She pulled her hand away, but was charitable. I went down on her. She almost made it, working herself up to a quick series of bumps and grinds as I pushed at her with my tongue. But it was, as usual, no use, and she came down to her normal sense of frustration as soon as I gave my aching jaws a rest.
"I really hate you," she said, lying motionless on the sheets.
"You should wash more often," I observed. I wondered, absently, if she would tell her friends about the blowjob.
I lay quietly beside her, eyes closed. The effort of so many emotions was having an effect on my brain. All I wanted was a few minutes of peace. Joanna, sensing my need for calm, set out immediately to upset it.
"I called Roger Oberman," she began. I didn't respond. She persisted. "Do you want to know what he said?"
"No."
"He's as surprised she's gone as Mr. Nye. In fact," (and this she confided with all the assurance of a schoolteacher) "he's near hysterical himself."
"So what?"
"And," she snorted, "they're organizing a search party for her. They're going to look in the woods."
I hadn't thought of that. There had been some instances where girls had been raped. The whole town was frightened. But that had been several months ago and things were calm now. There was always the possibility of her being hurt and unable to reach help, but I doubted it. Very few of the locals were of so poetic a turn of mind that they'd wander alone in the surrounding forests.
"You should go and offer your help," she clucked.
I looked at her resentfully. I stared for some seconds at her broad jaw with its tight frame of close-cropped hair.
"Everything about you is square," I declared. "You're the ugliest cunt I ever saw."
"If you really thought that," she hypothesized, "you wouldn't be here with me now."
I guess she thought that was pretty damn clever of her.
"Actually," I smiled warmly, "I wouldn't be here, but the last cow I cornered in the pasture kicked me in the knee, and sheep are quite scarce in the Catskill Mountains this time of year."
Lucy Nye's father wasn't exactly happy to see me when I arrived to join the search party. He accepted me because he needed every man he could get. He even swallowed his pride and apologized for yelling over the phone, explaining that he was upset by Lucy's disappearance. He admitted he didn't suspect me of having anything to do with it. After all, I was, he said, well-known to the whole community, having grown up there. Actually, it was probably one of the city people who come up to hunt and fish. City people were notorious in Hunter for the insatiability of their libidos.
I listened patiently, wondering what would happen if they finally caught up with her shacking up with some guy. I enjoyed several brief fantasies of lynchings.
We marched through the underbrush holding flashlights, calling Lucy's name over and over again. We were as persistent as we were dumb. We walked mile after mile, exploring farm buildings that had been abandoned years before. The sun was coming up. The only thing we found was a skunk, who sprayed one unfortunate member of the posse directly in the face, which put him in the hospital for three days.
During the search, I questioned Lucy's friends. I was convinced that someone knew where she was and simply wasn't telling. I was, in fact, unhappy that I wasn't in on the secret. I had a reputation to uphold. I was supposed to be a fast, hip New Yorker. This was true when I was in Hunter, Manhattan being a little tougher to impress. My exclusion naturally upset me and it was only after questioning a dozen kids that I finally understood. Lucy really had vanished and no one knew where she was.
My closest friend in Hunter was Martin Lenmanski, a Polish kid who played a good guitar and fantasized a rock-and-roll life, with groupies clinging to every opening of his body. He was also an especially close friend of Lucy's. He listened to all her adolescent problems without demanding the usual sexual privileges.
"Where is she, Marty?" I half-kidded when we met for a moment on the top of a mountain.
"Gone." He spoke in a half-dazed whisper.
"What does that mean?" I asked, sarcastically.
"I don't know. She's just gone. I can feel it."
After that, the search became meaningless. I felt afraid, as if I'd stumbled onto something more serious than my own adolescent flippancy was ready to handle.
CHAPTER TWO
For the next few days all anybody spoke of was Lucy Nye and her sudden disappearance. Nothing much ever happens in good old Hunter. The opening of a new motel is usually enough to qualify for the year's biggest event. Something like Lucy's disappearance was bound to receive a lot more attention that it deserved.
I tried to keep away from all the discussions of her kidnapping, her rape, her murder, her body buried somewhere in the hills and all the other morbid suppositions. Looking back on the whole scene now, I think I must have been more intrigued than I wanted to admit.
The week following the moonlight search passed interestingly for me. I was trying to make Beverly Peterson, a registered WASP with all pretentions pertaining to such an exalted station. ("I'm just as good as any Rockefeller!") My advances, delivered with all the sophistication I could muster, were getting me nowhere. Yet, I persisted. My dog-like devotion to this worthy cause finally got to the brink.
We'd been walking all afternoon in the woods, pausing to drink from a stream or to watch trout and crayfish that clung to the bottom where the current was slowest. We caught frogs (a sure aphrodisaic, I've since discovered) and shared a picnic lunch. Not even once did she catch me peeking up her dress as she ducked beneath some barbed wire, nor did she spy me staring down her blouse, which was partially opened due to the heat.
At last, exhausted, we came to clearing right next to my cabin. This feat truly demonstrated my superb woodsmanship since we'd started on the opposite side of the mountain.
"Let's go in and get something cold to drink." I suggested this blandly without explaining how we happened to be here. I've learned one thing about seduction. You can't allow yourself to really care because women genuinely love to exercise their cruelty on overeager males.
She looked at me quizzically, but not in the same cow-like manner as so many girls do. I suppose she knew damn well what I was up to but she just nodded and said she was thirsty. There was, after all, no one around, no spies to ruin her reputation in the community. I caught her looking around as she walked into the room.
"Looking for someone?" I asked, smiling prettily at her.
"No one special," she returned evenly. "Just anyone at all." She had great lips, and a crystal clear complexion that smacked of thorough hygienic training. Her eyes, coldly blue, were intelligent and quick to recognize my maneuverings. I liked her especially for her legs. They were long and slim, just the opposite of Joanna's ponderous trunks.
I puttered with bottles and openers, imagining her thighs ending in a quick slash of red, a mound visible without her legs moving apart.
"Here," I said, offering her the bottle instead of bothering with glasses and ice cubes. If she suspected there was something amiss in my manners, she didn't show it. She said nothing, accepting and drinking deeply.
"Bev," I began, taking her hand in mine, "let's ball."
"Don't be so sure of yourself," she snapped, "it's not becoming to you."
"Gee, Bev," I said, leaning closer to whisper in her ear, "you sure talk funny for a girl. I hear your mother's Jewish."
That got to her. She jumped up and swung at me. It was an obvious blow and one which I avoided without undue dignity.
"You shit," she screamed. "You dirty shit."
"Come off it, before I expose myself."
She settled down after that. She made no attempt to leave, which is something I've never understood about women. I wasn't holding her prisoner-if she decided to stick around I had no choice but to see it as an open invitation to screw.
"You're a child," she decided, giggling. You're probably enough of a child to do just that."
"Do we ball after the insults?" I asked. "This must be leading somewhere."
"Do you think I'm a virgin?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"No, I'm not."
"Well, what happened?" I asked casually. Did you fall on a picket fence? Or was it horseback riding?"
"No," she returned easily, "it was my Uncle George."
"Come off it, baby. That incest rap is as old as the hills. Who the fuck needs it?"
"He caught me," she continued, "behind the barn one night when I was fifteen. He was stinking drunk and when he pulled me down I didn't scream because I was scared my parents would hear."
"Did you read all that in My Secret Confession?" I asked. "Or did you make it up all by yourself?"
"Expose yourself," she ordered.
I pulled it out obediently and showed it to her, already erect.
"Not too bad. I wish I had one as big. I'd stick it right up your ass."
"Let's get down to business," I said, taking off the rest of my clothes. She followed the lead, stripping quickly and efficiently. Naked, she was beautiful. Her breasts, the only fault I could make out, were flat and shaped like cylinders, standing straight out from her chest with abnormally large nipples. Her stomach was perfect, running inward to the navel, then pushing out toward her mound. Her legs were all I'd hoped for-long, straight and slim.
"You name it," I suggested.
She went into the bedroom and laid across the mattress, pulling her legs up over her chest. , "Eat me," she ordered.
I belt down to her thighs, sniffing carefully. As I expected, a heavy sweat had collected at the opening of her box (we'd been hiking all day) with the resultant fragrance abundantly evident. Just as I was about to probe between the folds and expose a clitoris I knew would be swollen and red, there came, apropos of any bad novel, a knock at the door.
"This is getting to be ridiculous," I muttered, getting up to pull on my pants. "Wait here and don't make a sound. I'll get rid of whoever it is."
I had every intention of tossing her clothes under the couch before I answered the knock, but the outline of a blue peaked cap through the screen put such thoughts out of my head. I couldn't imagine the police being here for any other reason than marijuana and I expected the inevitable search warrant and arrest.
"Yes?" I called without opening the door, unable to keep the trembling from my voice.
"Open up, we want to ask you a few questions."
I considered making a dash for the bathroom, thinking that I might have enough time to flush my drugs away.
"What do you want to talk to me about?" I asked.
"Just a few questions, son," a softer voice called, "about Lucia Nye."
I let them in with relief, forgetting Beverly's clothes draped over the back of the chair. There were two of them, one in uniform and the other in a dark business suit. They were both about forty, but the detective was graying with dignity; the regular cop was fat and sloppy with small eyes and a mean, thin mouth.
"Well, what can I do for you?" I asked when they were inside.
"We're trying to find Lucia Nye," the detective said, his voice thick as if he'd just suffered a stroke.
"Look, I don't know where she is," I wanted to establish that from the outset.
"Take it easy, son. No one's accusing you of anything. I'm sure you're just as worried as the rest of us. If you could give us any information, no harm would come to you. You have my word on that."
"Look, man," I said, "she just ran away like five or six other chicks this summer. Put up a reward poster in the East Village and hope for the best. That's all you can do."
"We don't think she ran away," the detective slurred. "Why not?"
"Let me ask the questions, all right?" he threatened. "Did she ever talk about mnning away?"
"No, but I wasn't that close to her," I said. "You'll have to ask some of her real good friends."
"We already did," the uniformed cop spoke for the first time, "and nobody knows nuttin." He really did say it that way, and the detective looked at him coldly, obviously warning him to keep his mouth shut.
"Well, I don't know anything about it either."
That ended it, and they were about to leave when the detective turned back and fired a quick question at me. "Do you know a man named Groper? Or The Groper?"
"No," I lied without knowing why. Not only did I lie, but I did it so convincingly that once again they turned to leave. The cop in the brass buttons, unfortunately, spotted Beverly's clothes on the chair and wheeled back to me with a malicious smirk.
"What's this?" he asked. "You married, kid?"
"They're my sister's," I lied obviously.
"Who you kidding?" he returned. "How do I know they don't belong to the Nye girl?"
"What kind of filthy remark is that, you moron?"
I thought he was going to hit me-I know he was going to hit me. He stepped forward with his fist cocked, but the detective stepped between us, pushing him backward toward the door.
"Did you hear what he said to me?" , "Just move it, Reilly," the detective ordered, and they left Beverly and me alone again.
"I think what you said to him was very brave," she said to me when we were again on the bed.
"Not half as courageous as my sticking my face in that stinkpot of yours," I declared.
"I washed while you were talking to them."
I dropped my head down and took a deep breath, finding her clean and free, the dark curls of her thin hair still moist. I dipped down to her vagina and felt her thighs curl lazily around my head. The work of my tongue was slow and easy that night; we seemed to have all the time in the world, and I knew that Beverly was going to make it. As I pressed my forehead harder against her crotch, her response was clear and wild. I felt the walls of her vagina contract and pull against my tongue. Almost in a daze, I pulled myself up until our faces were together, lips exchanging caresses and bodies locked in ecstatic union.
Beverly began to moan something about my sweetness, and I was too excited to respond with customary sarcasm. I kept kissing her, biting her tongue and licking the end of her nose, my hips pushing forward quickly, only to withdraw instantly, then push again. The bedsprings were creaking wildly, the mattress bouncing up and down, but both of us were oblivious to anything but our shared passion. For once in my life, my orgasm was free of the slightest traces of pain and the moans that passed between my lips became a smile that stayed with me long after we had finished.
"That was beautiful," I told her as soon as I caught my breath.
She didn't answer, but lay with her eyelids lightly closed, her breathing slow and even. I nuzzled against her breasts, kissing them until they stood on end, and she moaned softly.
"We're going to do it again, tonight," I whispered directly into her ear. She smiled at that, nodding her head.
"Do not disturb," she said, imitating a sign on a hotel doorknob, "I'm making the whole thing last. I'm remembering everything." She tightened her already closed eyelids, as if forcing the image into her memory. "Where did you learn to fuck like that, you asshole adolescent?"
"Well, it all began when I discovered that the only straight path to a clear complexion was a pair of empty testicles."
She took my sac in her hand and squeezed tentatively. "I think there's still a little moisture left," she speculated, moving for the first time to take my limp, wet prick into her mouth.
"I love to do this," she admitted. "I like it when it's wet. Don't tell anyone."
She licked me into an erection once again. I felt vaguely disassociated as I watched my flesh grow in her mouth. Her face was even more beautiful now that we'd gotten to this point-too beautiful for my own safety.
"Are you trying to make me care about you?" I asked.
"Glug, glug, glug," she returned, her tongue much more concerned with my penis than with her words. "I don't think I like this." That was the last thing I said for awhile. I was about to come and uncertain as to whether I should give her pussy the pleasure of my orgasm. Unfortunately, I hesitated a bit too long, not that it bothered her. She never lost a beat, swallowing my sperm with what could only have been long-practiced precision. When I left the bed, standing next to her, she put her hands down between her legs and began to massage her clitoris.
"Men don't know how to do this," she said. "How could they?"
"Where does it hurt?" I asked, putting my hand down flat along the sharp line of her cleft.
"Push a finger down inside," she requested, her breath getting ragged. "That's nice. Now use the back of your thumb on my clit. Don't be afraid. Push hard."
I did as I was told, watching her closely. She had the look of utmost concentration, as if she was conjuring up an orgasm that had at least as much to do with her head as her body. Her feet were set flat on the bed and she was pushing her crotch up to meet my probing fingers. I slid my free hand across her buttocks, probing down between them for the tight circle of her anus.
"How's that?"
"You've found my weakness," she answered, groaning as I pushed between the grasping ring of muscle to penetrate her bowels. "Is nothing scared?"
Her body began to move in the beginnings of orgasm, slight jerks that had nothing to do with whatever fantasy she was holding in her head. Her cunt grew wetter, the walls of her vagina opening and closing rhythmically. A flush crept over her breasts and belly, pushed up her neck until it seemed as if she had a bad case of hives, an affliction which in no way bothered her, however, for she began to shake like a spastic as I wriggled my fingers, reaching almost to the entrance of her womb.
"Oh, shit, shit," she cried, her voice trailing off into a series of inarticulate sounds as her orgasm built to its peak. I was hard again, something unusual for me, and I withdrew my fingers to plop down on top of her, guiding my penis between her lips and plunging deep inside. It took me exactly two minutes to come since I didn't have any worry about her pleasure, it being enacted before my eyes. She hadn't yet finished as I started my final plunge, and our eyes met as I poured into her, sweat in our brows and hair, looking just as disheveled and happy as we should have been.
"Do you always come like that?" I asked later, while we were enjoying a post-ball cigarette.
"Not always."
"Most of the time?" I persisted. "Very rarely."
"When do you come?"
"All right," she conceded, "only when I screw my uncle. Satisfied?"
"Jesus Christ, you're perverted," I said. "For a second I thought it was something I did."
She seemed honestly hurt by what I said, and that wasn't playing fairly. At that time, I believed that any emotional ties signaled the death throes of pleasure, and I avoided involvement in the name of orgasm.
"It was you," she declared firmly. "You did it."
"Did what?"
She got up and began pulling on "her clothing. "You're a total shit. You're a filthy cocksucker."
I said nothing when she started toward the door although I was scared of losing her, a fear I didn't want to acknowledge. I was determined to let her go without a word, but she turned back to me with her hand on the screen.
"If you don't admit that you care about me, I'll never see you again. If I just wanted to come, I could screw my uncle all the time."
I hesitated for just a moment, long enough to see that she meant it, then gave in. "I care about you, you fucking pig."
She came back and sat beside me on the bed. Neither of us spoke for a long time, for what seemed an hour. We smoked cigarette after cigarette, always about to speak, but never quite getting the words out. I was actively hating her.
Finally, she broke the silence. "What did the cops want?"
It was a good enough excuse. "They were looking for Lucy." Silence again which I broke a few seconds later. "Have you seen Groper?"
"No. I think he left for Jersey City. That's where he's from, isn't it?"
"Yeah. It's funny, his leaving just when Lucy disappeared."
"Billy?" she questioned.
"Yeah."
"Are you going to look for Lucy?"
"I don't know," I answered, my head turned tightly to the floor. "What do you care?"
"I think it's time for me to go."
"Yeah, I think it is," I decided. "Why did you have to blow a good thing? Why couldn't you leave well enough alone? Isn't ecstasy enough for you?"
She said nothing, but headed quickly out the door.
Her triumph having been attained, she had nothing more to accomplish.
"I hope the mosquitoes bite the shit out of you," I yelled after yer. Yet, already, I was thinking of Groper and Lucy Nye, of what possible connection they could have, and of why the police had come running to me.
CHAPTER THREE
This is the point at which definitions are in order. I think all of us know instinctively that we are no longer the same person we were at nineteen, which was my age at the time of Lucy's vanishing, so perhaps these delineations of my character are as much for myself as anyone else.
I was nineteen years, four months and twenty-two days old the evening when Mr. Nye telephoned the news to me. I had graduated Martin Van Buren High School in New York and begun college at C.C.N.Y., a career I was never to be much good at and which I consciously detested even at that time. I was five feet nine inches tall and weighed one hundred and fifty-five pounds. Not exactly powerful, but wiry and a fair basketball player in spite of my height. I also had a black belt in karate, which was not so much due to my fierce personality as to the paranoia of my mother who felt it was better to be tough than kicked around. I'd attended classes since I was eight years old and won my belt through sheer persistence rather than natural inclination. At nineteen, I still didn't know the names of the moves or the purposes of the individual Katas, but I could smash someone in the neck because patient, well-paid instructors had come at me so many times I had learned in self-defense.
I was excessively flip, almost glib, with a quick tongue that belied my age and I considered myself a fair cunt man. My parents had enough money to keep me from the ultimate horror of work, so I made out all right, drifting through the summer searching vaguely for an obsession. Said obsession turned out to be, naturally, Lucy Nye, but that's much later. My face was free of acne and had always been. I had the broad Polish face, obvious enough from my name, Billy Pe-chuski, which spelled it out fairly well. My forehead was narrow and made me (so I thought, anyway) look rather stupid, but my nose and lips were good, each feature well-delineated and unobtrusive. Luckily, my eyes were free of that oriental cast so common to Eastern Europeans. That would have made me ugly, whereas my actual features were pleasant, if slightly dull.
So that's me at nineteen: talkative but not obnoxious, attractive without prettiness, strong but free of excessive muscularity, good with women (young girls, anyway), almost totally committed to grass, and the experience of being high.
Now back to business. I went the next day to find Groper, but he was nowhere to be found. He was sort of a derelict who occasionally peddled pills to the kids in the summer. He'd appeared suddenly in June and become something of a fixture around Hunter, accepted by the cops and the local merchants who pronounced him harmless.
I, and everyone else I knew, also considered him harmless, a drifter just making ends meet. He had a habit of talking about Jersey City as if it was Paradise, a ridiculous idea to anyone who's ever been there. He had only one friend in Hunter, a Negro named Lebon (don't ask me where the name came from) who worked in the car wash on Route 9. It was Lebon I went to for information.
I took several joints with me, intending to get him high before pumping him for information. He was sitting on the lawn behind the high school, when I finally tracked him down and he was smashed on something much stronger than grass. I pegged him as a junkie the minute I saw him puking on the grass, and junkies were not a frequent sight in the Catskills.
"Hi, Lebon," I called, pulling my old Studebaker onto the grass and stepping out. In retrospect it seems absurd my attempting to sound casual. I had never been close to either Groper or to Lebon and coming up to him here, in the back of the school, I must have struck him as somewhat odd.
"The cops already been here, man," he drawled, barely lifting up his head.
"So what?" I persisted.
"You want Groper." He said it flatly, a fact already decided on.
"Yeah," I admitted, sitting down beside him. "I want him."
"Why?" He didn't wait for an answer, but rattled right on. "You a good boy. Why you wanta mess with this shit?"
"What shit, Lebon?" I asked, trying to sound innocent and undoubtedly failing miserably.
"Oh, cut that, man," he drawled, his body beginning to weave in a free-floating figure eight. "You lookin' for Lucy Nye. She gone, man. You forget that girl. You forget her...."
His voice drifted away. Following the typical pattern of the nodding junkie, he'd forgotten the conversation as soon as it had started. I lit up a joint, and smoking it peacefully, waited for him to come down. For two hours I watched the squirrels running across the grass, counted the leaves on the trees, and searched the grass for interesting bugs.
Finally Lebon began to come around. His eyes flickered open and he stared at me for a few seconds and a sudden light flashed into his eyes.
"You want Groper, boy?" he asked. "I take you there."
He heaved himself off the lawn without wiping his chin which was covered with puke and got into my car uninvited. I recall thinking at the time that he must consider me a harmless punk ready to do anything he wanted, a sucker born to be hustled. But I, nonetheless, slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.
"Saugerties, boy," he said.
"Is that where the dope is?" I asked.
"Saugerties," he repeated.
We drove in silence, tracing a course along Route 31 until we hit the Thruway. "Where we going?" I asked. "Just keep on drivin.' "
He was coming around more and more, his eyes growing alert and scanning the road intently.
"Turn here and stop behind those trees," he ordered, bracing himself as I twisted the car onto the sudden dirt road and pulled to a stop. We were in an unused apple orchard, one that hadn't been worked in years, the apples small, thin and wrinkled.
"We got to go on foot from here," he explained, stepping out of the car.
It was at this point that I began to suspect that Groper was really there, hidden in one of the innumerable abandoned shacks that dotted the area. We hiked through the trees, passing along a series of meadows that ran in a circle around whatever mountain we happened to be on.
"He right down there," Lebon said, pointing to a small wood house about two hundred yards below us. "Now we got to be quiet, 'cause he ain't lookin' forward to no visitors," Lebon explained, and we crept through the waist-high grass, keeping our eyes peeled for any movement whatsoever.
When we finally reached the front door, Lebon, completely out of character, produced a small automatic pistol from his pocket, I don't know what make, and kicked in the door, just like a movie. He had a wild gleam in his eyes and it seemed to me that he was more concerned with the joke he was playing on me than with confronting Groper.
Groper was there, standing by a small wood stove with a coffee pot in his hand when we made our spectacular entrance.
"Hey, man," was all he could manage to say, but the terror was in his eyes.
"Sure glad I happened to run into ya," Lebon said casually. "Me and my boy here just was in the neighborhood and decided to stop in for a visit."
"Don't kill him," I said, not too happy to be involved in murder even if I wasn't the killer or the killed.
"Shut up, boy," Lebon said. "Now, Mr. Groper, let's deal with you. You beat me, man. You sold me bad dope and took my money."
"But that was months ago," Groper cried, actually flabbergasted.
"Man, I got to have your ass for that one," Lebon explained. "Ain't no two ways about it. I let something like that go by and everybody thinks I'm easy prey. You understand, don't you boy?"
This last was spoken to me, and I found out something about else at that moment. I didn't give a good goddamn whether he did Groper in or not. I was only interested in my own skin and my own business, for I knew what it was, then.
"Let me ask him some questions first?"
"Go right on," Lebon said generously, as if he was granting the most extravagant of requests. "But don't be too long. I gotta get off again soon."
"Listen, kid," Groper pleaded with me, "you don't wanta get mixed up in something like this at your age. You're a good clean kid with everything to look forward to. Do you know what the cops'll do to ya for this?"
"Where's Lucy Nye?" It was almost fun, a game in which bad playing was tantamount to suicide. I was too excited to even find it ugly.
"I don't know nothin' about that chick," he said, a terror even larger than Lebon looming in his eyes.
"If you don't tell me, I'm gonna let Lebon kill you."
"That's real nice," Lebon said appreciatively. "I dig the way you put that down."
"Lucy's gone, kid," Groper pronounced. "I mean she ain't comin' back. Never."
"Is she dead?"
"Listen," he declared firmly, "no one dragged that broad anywhere. She's right where she wants to be. She ain't dead and she ain't got no chains on herself. But she just ain't comin' back."
"It's no use your talkin" to him, boy," Lebon interrupted. "He got nothin' to say to nobody."
"Don't kill me, Lebon, I can get your money back. Man, I'll give you more than that in dope. I'm into some terrible shit, get wrecked out of your fuckin' mind."
Lebon's face changed for, the first time. He seemed incredibly hungry, a certain tightening of the mouth giving away all his secrets, yet he kept the barrel of the gun pointed directly at the center of Groper's chest. Groper made no attempt to move, not even having put down the coffee pot. There was a period of silence when I felt a rush of returning sanity, like being slapped with ice water when sound asleep. I considered running, stopping Lebon, screaming, falling into a dead faint, anything to be out of this. I suppose everyone has a certain moment in his life when he feels himself transforming potentiality into actuality. This was it for me and I wanted to call it back, to stop and return to my bed with fat Joanna Nuzzi.
Then Lebon fired into Groper's body before I could make anything like a decision. I'd never seen the real thing before, the blood pouring from a damaged artery, the look of intense surprise on the wounded man's face, Groper seemed to be saying, "Look, I'm real. I bleed. I never thought it was true before. I'm going to die."
Lebon fired twice more, each bullet going into Groper's chest. Groper went down on his knees, staring at us like a child caught in a guilty act. Then something went out of his eyes and I knew he was dead. Lebon was laughing softly, chuckling almost.
"Sh-ee-it," he muttered, "that blood sure do look pretty on that white skin. You dead, Mr. Beat Man."
I remember thinking of what we were going to do with the body, assuming in my naivete that lunatics could conceive of two instead of one. I turned to Lebon with a question on my lips, and understood at once what he meant to do. He was about to kill me; he was mad. How could I ever have thought that we were partners? Partners in what? He must have taken me there with no other thought except to kill me and Groper. Already the pistol was swinging from Groper to me, his arm seeming to come in slow motion. When I did strike out at him, waiting paralyzed until it was almost too late, I hit with all the force terror could bring.
I don't think Leban was ready for me. He confused me with the kids around Hunter, considering me physically harmless. As I struck out at his arm, I sent home a quick message of gratitude to my mother's paranoia. I think I caught him on the bicep-it was much too fast to be recorded-and the gun went flying toward the other end of the room. I remember thinking what if I hit him again, I'm going to kill him. Then I flew on top of him, hitting faster than I'd ever been able to do on the training mats of the North American Samurai School. He never hit me, not even once. And when he fell, it was the straight, absolute drop of lost consciousness and the end of life. I kicked him once in the head, a kick that seemed to come from my shoulder, traveling through my trunk. It snapped his neck; I heard the crack very clearly, like a bullwhip, and knowing that he was dead pleased me. I smiled at him and still believing that I would have killed anyone who walked through that door-my mother, my father, the fat grocer who gave me candy, anyone at all.
My head became clear almost as soon as I stopped hitting Lebon. I realized that I was in a shack with two dead men, one of whom I'd personally killed, and that I was there to get information about Lucy's disappearance. I had an object and thus the murders lead toward an end. I admit that my relationship with Lucy was no longer casual, but it was still clear enough for me to act. I hadn't touched anything since coming into the shack simply because I was too paralyzed with fear to move. But this also meant that I'd managed to leave no incriminating fingerprints. My luck was good. Somehow, I had no traces of blood on my clothing except for some small pieces of Lebon's hair in the seam of my shoe. I figured I could get rid of that pretty easily.
All of this flashed through my head as I stood over Lebon's body, grinning like a maniac. I don't know where they came from, or how murder, which would have seemed the most wicked of crimes a few days earlier, made no impression on me, then. I believe that every human carries an instinct for survival, an instinct very rarely exercised in our modern, overprotective society, and I can state with some conviction that standing in a room with two corpses, considering how I was not only going to evade police action, but also profit from death, gave me as satisfying a sense of my own capabilities and manhood as I have ever had.
I wrapped a handkerchief around my fist, finding it in Groper's back pocket, and quickly went through the place. I was in a one-room wooden shack constructed of wide planks, a structure very common to the mountains and very easy to search. Groper, strangely, had nothing in his pockets, not even a wallet. Lebon carried his social security card in an otherwise empty billfold. He had a small bag of dope, probably heroin, though I certainly couldn't afford to check on it, and a long eye-dropper with a hypodermic needle minus syringe, attached to the head with a tight paper collar that kept the homemade affair from drawing air. Other than that, he too was free of accouterments. On the small kitchen table, however, I found something really important. There were two letters, both obviously written by the same hand. They were on light blue, expensive stationery, and the handwriting was small, exquisite and very femine. It looked as if it had been done by the penmanship champion of my grammar school, with letters that curled and twisted across the page.-
They might have been written by a doting aunt or someone's grandmother, but the actual content was completely business-like. The first one was only two lines long.
Re: Our Pigeon:
What's happening, baby? You promised she'd be ready before this.
The second was slightly longer and involved delivery of some "snow" which Groper had expected to receive, obviously, sometime before. There was only one instance that could have been taken as a reference to Lucy. After explaining that things were tight in New York because police were hassling "the people," the correspondent wrote: "Anyway, Groper, what the fuck can you expect? You are not exactly on time with your deliveries either."
The letters were signed "Polly" and contained no return address, but the envelope lying on the floor revealed a postmark that indicated Bayside, L.I. as the point of origin. At that point, I wanted to pull Groper to his feet and find out who Polly was. I entertained a fantasy that he was not dead, and that he would lift his head and whisper the name of my quarry as a last act of atonement.
That didn't happen, of course. He was just as dead as it was possible to be. The blood had long since stopped and was clotting into a brown puddle. I took a final look around the room and found nothing of interest, and walked outside to smoke and think a bit. The mountains were as beautiful as usual, heavy and dark with that summer brooding common to temperate zones. Across from me, on the nearest hill, a single deer grazed on the lush clover. His head seemed permently attached to the earth as he nibbled away at the purple flowers.
I lit a joint and smoked it down to the end. I noticed a bicycle lying against the side of the shack, an English bike with hand brakes, a gear shift and a small, vinyl pouch stuck behind the seat, over the rear fender. I went to it without expecting much, but anxious to be as thorough as possible with my detective work.
I found a letter inside, addressed to Mrs. Polly Satin, 199-019 31st Avenue, Bayside, L.I., N.Y. I think I trembled when I touched it. This find meant that I wasn't through with my search, that I'd come to no dead end, but only a new beginning. It frightened me as much as encouraged my desire. Groper's handwriting was not nearly as pretty as Polly's, consisting of as many printed letters as written ones, but it came to the point very quickly:
I made good and now ifs your turn. Where's my payoff? The cops are looking for me all through the mountains. If they find me before I get the chance to split, I'm not going to take it by myself.
I folded the letter up and slipped it into my back pocket. The address had been memorized as soon as I'd read it, and there was nothing now for me to do except go home.
I was sure no one had been attracted by the shots because people hunted throughout the woods, and rifles were as common as roach sprays in city homes. The hike back filled me with no enthusiasm. I was tired from what was, after all, a trauma that changed my life completely, and I was also quite high. In spite of my lack of desire, I trudged along coming after what seemed hours of sweat, to my car beside the apple trees. No one was around; no one saw me back out onto the highway and turn toward Hunter.
As I drove along, I wondered what I would say to the people in town. I was a killer; I had not only been responsible for a man's death, but I had accomplished it with my hands. What could I say to Joanna Nuzzi or Beverly Peterson? Or to Martin Lemanski? Yet I felt good, I felt very capable, very confident. I had one advantage on everyone who knew of Lucy's sudden departure. No one could connect me with the two murders, not the police, not Mrs. Polly Satin.
I was especially interested in how the police came to connect Groper with Lucy. Some one of Lucy's friends must have known more than he or she was willing to say to me. I passed along a mental list of everyone I'd talked with, eliminating names as I went along, until I finally came to a girl named Beverly Peterson.
Beverly was more intelligent than most of Lucy's friends, and, like Lucy, she had no intention of spending the rest of her life in Hunter. She was hopelessly enchanted with the pseudo-confidence of big city types like myself, who masked their utter terror of anything having to do with Manhattan with a million fast words. She felt (in her blood, as she put it) that New York was at the center of American culture (which it is) and somehow the only proper place to prove one's worth. I regret now, not having explained the truth to them. I should have told all the kids I spoke to in Hunter that a cancer, no matter how much publicity it may get and no matter how bright and exciting its gilding, is never any more than a rotten hunk of meat and poisonous to any who dares to eat.
I never did say anything like that. In fact, I was a walking advertisement for big city life. The failing was a common one. They wanted to believe that paradise lay over the horizon, and I didn't discourage them. After all, if New York was paradise then I was the messenger of the Lord and had to be treated very well.
I thought of all these things as I drove slowly into Hunter, passing the school where I'd picked up Lebon a few hours before. It was already nine o'clock and the sun had dropped down behind Hunter Mountain, the big ski mountain in the area. The first people I saw were the Cogley twins, natives of the mountains of Tennessee and reputed by Joanna to be lesbians. They were very dumb and, in fact, their whole family seemed a bit retarded. Their father supported them with odd jobs and by taking out a hunting license for each member of the family and killing a deer in the name of him, his wife, and his six children. That was the winter's food.
Normally I avoided the girls, having no way to make true contact with them. But I was anxious to speak with someone. Since they were the first to happen along, I pulled alongside and called a quick hello.
"Oh, it's you," Sylvia said. Her sister echoed the sentiment. They knew, naturally, that I disliked them, not being so stupid as to miss very obvious vibrations.
"What are ya doing'?" I asked.
"We're just walkin' home," they answered.
I looked them over. They were heavy, not fat, with thickish limbs and small, square heads. They seemed awfully washed-out to me. Their blond hair and blue eyes were not model-like, but colorless and fishy.
"Upside down," I said, "they all look alike."
"Huh?"
"Want a ride home?"
They hesitated, looking to each other for some sort of an answer to what must have seemed a totally inexplicable question. Finally, unable to come up with a suitable reason for rejection, they climbed in without a word.
The front seat of my car is very narrow, and Sylvia Cogley's thigh was pressed close to mine. I looked into her eyes to see if she was willing to admit the contact and saw that she wasn't. I'd grown terribly horny for some reason and felt ready to spill my seed into anything that walked.
"Did you hear about Lucy?" Rose asked, unable to think of anything more subtle.
"She's probably just shacked up in the woods with some hunter," I answered. They giggled at that one. "Maybe two hunters and their wives."
"Lucy wasn't that way," Rose observed mildly enough.
"Rose," I said, trying to appear sagacious, "they're all like that."
They thought that one was terrific, looking at each other and laughing. I drove toward their shack until I reached my own small cabin.
"How about coming inside and getting high?" I asked.
Everyone in Hunter under twenty-five knew that I smoked grass and most of them had shared the pipe with me at one time or other. The twins had not been among the fortunate, so I was sure they'd take the chance, figuring that strength came in numbers if they had any fear of me at all.
Once inside, I rolled a couple of quick joints, stuffing the paper with some really great bush that I saved for special occasions, such as my first murder.
"Here, try this," I handed them the joints, putting one in my own mouth and lighting everybody up. We puffed in silence for awhile, until we were all good and wrecked.
"That's really great stuff," one of them remarked. I can't be sure which one, because I was too stoned to keep track of them.
"Did ya get real high?" I stared directly into her eyes when I asked the question. It was clear that she was afraid of me and would, since I was too much of a fixture in Hunter to disappear, do just about anything to make me enough of an ally to quiet those terrors.
"Yeah, I'm ... wrecked." She had to search for the word.
I put my arm around her. "The thing I like best about the country," I lied, "is country women." She giggled at that, but made no attempt to push me away.
"You come over here, too," I told the other one, and she came and accepted my other arm.
"Isn't this nice?" I asked.
They answered by nodding their heads and rocking slightly. It was probably the second or third tune they'd ever been high in their lives. They had an overwhelming desire to take some part in a culture that was unutterably alien to them. It seems actually touching when I think about it now, however, right then I thought only of a way to remove them from their panties.
I suddenly squeezed their tits, a quick pinch to sort of test their reactions and my own hope for the future of the evening. They offered no resistance, but then-faces saddened, as if they were willing to pay the price, but regretted my asking payment at all, the payment being only a further proof of their ineligibility.
"Oh, cheer up," I said, "don't mope about it. I'll take you home if you want me to." The great test. I offered them the opportunity to leave and if they refused it, they had only themselves to blame. They didn't move.
"Hey, let me show you something." I reached beneath my bed and pulled out a box of photographs. I had a few Polaroid shots of Joanna, who'd fought like hell when I took them but was as close to coming as she'd ever been right afterward.
"Like these?"
They looked them over carefully, not reacting too much until I assured them that I had no camera handy and wasn't asking them to do the same thing. Then they pored over Joanna's snatch, remarking on the heaviness of her bush which went all the way back past the anus.
"Look at this now." I zipped down my fly and exposed myself. They stared appreciatively. "I didn't get any pictures of myself because the camera didn't have a self-timer, but I figured I'd just show you."
One of them reached over and took my prick in her hand.
"It's bigger than Davy's," she decided. Davy was her older brother and must have been six foot five, a tribute not so much to the gigantism of my penis as to the smallness of his. Nevertheless, I swelled up between her fingers until I thought I was going to come then and there.
"Now you undress," I ordered.
They did as they were told, stripping away quickly to stand naked by the couch. Twins are very strange. Their breasts seemed to hang exactly the same, their stomachs' swell equal in both girls. Even their soft mounds were identically bewhiskered, and their buttocks pushed out to the same round, soft globes.
I trembled as I pressed my body between theirs and felt them running their legs along mine.
"Kiss each other?" It was really a question since I had no idea how brazen they were with their homosexuality, or if Joanna had even been telling the truth and not just reporting some malicious gossip. But they only giggled and immediately embraced, pushing breast to breast as their lips met. I recall thinking that it must be nice to have a sexual partner you could really trust. Their hands ran across each other's flanks, even their lovemaking identical. I knelt down behind one of them, I think it was Rose, and pressed my lips to her buttocks. She pushed back against me, trying to bring pressure against front and rear at the same time.
"Come into the bedroom," I suggested, leading the way. "Now, how shall we do it? Who wants Melvin?" I held my hard penis out to them.
"I'll take it."
"And which one are you?" I asked.
"I'm Sylvia. Rose doesn't like it as much. She likes the mouth way best."
"Well, at least you disagree about something."
I laid down on the sheets and Sylvia sat astride me, pushing my cock up into herself as if it was no more than milking a cow. We had begun to move together and I'd almost forgotten about poor Rose who stood watching all this with hungry eyes. She, on the other hand, had forgotten nothing and swung up across my head, facing her sister, who worked energetically on my cock, and settled down to be licked.
I performed well enough for sister Rose, pursuing the shape of her groin with some dedication. It's too bad that I can't say the same of Sylvia. I was extremely excited by everything that had happened to me that day and proved my new confidence ill-founded by coming about five minutes after contact. It was great for me (since I made no attempt to hold it back), but horrendous for her. She'd just managed to work up a good sweat, and my hurry was obviously disappointing to judge from the look in her eyes.
She proved herself resourceful, though, and got off me to approach her sister. I felt her hand working the same area as my tongue, and I assumed her sister was returning the favor. Neither of them managed to come, but the small peaks they hit were regular and continuous. Later on, I managed to make up for my failure. I did Sylvia twice more before midnight, each time Rose stood by until we were well into our screwing and then sat on the face of whoever happened to be on the bottom. By the time everything was over, and I'd deposited them safely on their doorstep, my penis was finished for the night, aching slightly with a pain that meant a clear complexion in the morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
I woke earlier than usual, my sleep undoubtedly interrupted by dreams of the day before. I was extremely excited, almost hyperactive as I went about fixing breakfast for myself. I wanted everything to happen right away so the mess would come to some sort of conclusion, then and there. Naturally, that wasn't about to happen, but the urge pushed me into planning, something I'm usually reluctant to do.
I was more convinced than ever that Beverly Peterson was more involved in the whole affair than she was willing to let on to me. The easiest course of action would have been to go directly to her and pump her for information, but I was afraid that if she was somehow mixed up in the crime (if there had been any crime) our conversation would go directly to whomever had Lucy Nye. My single advantage over my adversaries (I'd come to tlunk of anyone else involved in the thing as an opponent) was my supposed harmlessness. Certainly, if someone as street-wise as Lebon underestimated me, what would less professional types think?
There were two possibilities open. I could, as I said, go to Beverly, or I could go to the city and look for Polly Satin. The latter course would involve a great deal of time. I would have to make some sort of excuse for leaving, something that wouldn't draw suspicion to me. After all, the cops had been to see me and, for all I knew, were still actively investigating the disappearance. Besides this, it would certainly take some time to get to Polly Satin. She wouldn't just welcome a stranger into her trust, if she was really involved.
I put the decision away for a time and gulped down my breakfast. My mind wandered back to the scene with Lebon and Groper, and I suddenly had my first glimpse of the role of chance in human affairs. Why did Lebon decide to kill Groper just at that time? From the completeness of Groper's disappearance from Hunter, it was obvious that he'd planned very carefully, only to have all his efforts destroyed by the caprice of a madman. I had no doubt that Lebon had murdered Groper for irrational reasons, just as he was planning to kill me without any thought of the consequences.
It was difficult to make any sense out of the scene. Groper was not a drug addict, one look at his arms told that. Lebon, on the other hand, was strung out to the end; his arms revealed thick brown scars that ran along the vein from wrist to shoulder. Yet it was Groper who sold Lebon drugs and paid the price for his occupation. But how did Lebon know where Groper was staying if he wasn't an integral part of their plan? And how did he know about Lucy's never coming back, a fact substantiated by Groper?"
I cleaned off my plate, soaked up the last bits of yolk with a piece of bread, and put the plates into the sink. The physical act of washing dishes seemed to give me some relief from the pressure of my questions. I was beginning to get the feeling that I was completely ignorant, even though the night before I felt confident of solving the mystery within a few days.
I was standing at the sink, the water running over my plate and the greasy frying pan; I was considering my decision to question Beverly or leave for New York when, by chance Beverly opened the screen door and walked inside. As soon as I realized she was there I decided that I mustn't tell her anything and that my only safety was anonymity. I had to be the silly ass from the big city.
"Hi, Bev," I said, turning to the sink in order to compose my face.
"Good morning, Billy. I was hoping to bum some breakfast from you, but I see you've already eaten."
"I couldn't sleep last night, so I got up early." I waited just a second. "But I'll fix you something if you're hungry."
"For a second I thought you were going to play the tough guy."
"Well, you do have to pay me," I said. "You have to let me look up your dress." She started to pull up her skirt, but I stopped her. "That's not what I want. Turn around and pretend to bend over and pick up a bobby-pin."
She did it, and I leaned forward to glimpse the smooth roll of her buttocks beneath white, nylon panties.
"Very good," I congratulated her. "Now, for your breakfast." I rummaged up some eggs and orange juice while she rattled on about town affairs.
"Hear anything more about Lucy?" she asked final-
"Nothing."
We were quiet for a time, until I broke the silence by asking her if she knew Groper. "The police asked me about him when they were here," I explained.
"Well, I didn't actually know him. He wasn't the kind of person I met on a social basis. But I recognized him on the street. He used to sell pills to the kids."
"Yeah, downs mostly."
"Do you use them?" she asked, staring directly into my eyes.
"I've dropped a few in my time, but I didn't really dig the head. I never bought any from Groper, anyway. I'm a grass man. Which reminds me that I haven't had my morning joint yet."
I dished out the eggs and went to roll a couple of joints. As I was doing it, I suddenly felt a tremendous urge to beat the shit out of her. I became convinced that she was responsible for Lucy's disappearance and was here to pump me for information. Maybe she already knew about Groper and Lebon; maybe she'd viewed their bodies in the woods. I was almost ready to kill, but when I turned back to her, she was sitting as innocent as can be, smiling up at me. I was afraid that the whole thing was getting out of hand, that I'd been living too much inside my fantasy.
"Got a match?" I asked, offering her the joint which she quickly lit up, puffing deeply.
"That's real good. But I hear you keep some very special grass around that you only give to little lesbians."
"Is that why you came here this morning?" How did she find out so fast? Needless to say, the Petersons and the Cogleys were not exactly equals in Hunter's social hierarchy.
"I came because I like you," she said simply. She had that sad look on, the one she was so good at
"All right, I'm sorry." No sense in blowing a good lay.
"And I have something to tell you."
"You're going to say that a priest raped you when you were six and you've never recovered from the emotional trauma."
She frowned. "This is serious."
I sat down in a chair and perked my head up, trying to look interested. "Go ahead. I'm ready."
"It's about Lucy." I defhiitely perked up at that opening. "I know something about her disappearance."
"Wait a minute." I intended to establish my lack of interest from the beginning. "You'd better tell it to the police. I don't want to hear about any crimes. My life is difficult enough now."
"I have to tell someone," she wailed.
"I like the ring of that sentence."
She got up to leave, obviously angry, but I held on and managed to quiet her. "Okay," I said, "I want to hear it, but don't tell me anything that'll get me in trouble."
"Lucy ran away from home."
"That's what I thought."
"But she had to do it. Groper kidnapped her and took her to New York."
"But no one's heard from any kidnappers. Why don't they ask for ransom or something?"
"It's not that kind of kidnapping. They got her to go to bed with my father and...."
She began to cry becomingly, acting out her lie with perfect accuracy. li I didn't know that Groper was dead, I would have believed her fully.
"There, mere," I muttered, letting my hand wander across her breasts.
"They took pictures and threatened to let the whole town know if she didn't come and work for them."
"Who's they?"
"I just know that Groper did it. I don't know who was with them. She wouldn't tell me."
"You got all this from Lucy?" I kept wondering why she was telling all this to me. Was she a psychopath? Ji she was acting under orders from someone, why did they want to lie to me? First the police and now Beverly. It made absolutely no sense at all, and I was getting very angry.
"You know you have to tell this to the police," I whispered gently. I was giving her a chance, one she'd better take.
"I can't do that."
"Well, what the fuck do you want me to do?"
"I want you to help me find her."
It was beginning to get scary. Someone wanted me to walk into a trap. "Bev," I said, "I have to get out of here. I can't think here. Let's go for a ride."
It sounded reasonable enough, and she got into the car without protesting. As we drove along, she explained her theories to me. Groper had taken Lucy to Manhattan to work in a brothel, naturally, and we had to find her and convince her to return in spite of the consequences. After all, we couldn't just let a friend of ours die the slow death of a prostitute, could we? Lucy had given Beverly an address that wasn't the one of the whorehouses which I could have used, but Groper's. All we had to do was go down to New York and force him to tell us where he had her hidden. Then we'd break in and free her forever. I felt like puking.
Beverly's conversation served, at least, to pass the tune between Hunter and Saugerties. I kept watching her face for some reaction, to see if she knew where we were going, but she showed nothing, even after we pulled behind the apple trees.
"Where are we going?" she asked innocently.
"I know someone special just up the mountain," I answered, taking her by the hand and effectively stifling further objection. She made no protest all through the walk, and I began to realize that she didn't know that Groper was hidden up here. Who, then, did she get her instructions from?
When we finally reached the shack, I kicked open the door and let her go in first. She screamed once and tried to run past me, but I blocked the way and forced her back inside.
"You wanted to find Groper, didn't you? And look, here's Lebon, too. You should be grateful, you bitch. I thought you were a nice girl. Hey, Groper, where's Lucy? He ain't talkin'. Maybe we should work him over. Whatta ya say, boss?"
Beverly said nothing. She was really caught, completely trapped in her own he.
"I killed Lebon with my bare hands," I said matter-of-factly. "Why don't you tell my why you lied to me?"
"I didn't he."
Beverly was terrified, I had no doubt of that. But I felt her fear was due to her being so unexpectedly caught in her lie. Actually, I was enjoying myself. We were alone in a room with two very stiff, very cold bodies. Groper was particularly gruesome. His eyes were still open and his hand was glued to his chest as if he was still trying to hold his life inside. All around him was a puddle of brown, dry blood with busy ants and flies.
"You know what I'm going to do to you if you don't tell me the truth?" I asked. "After all," (and this was the most fun of all) "they can't hang me twice."
She evidently thought I meant it (right now I'm not sure whether I did or not, although I had every intention of administering a good beating), because she began to shake all over and tears ran down her cheeks.
"I told you the truth. I told you just what Lucy told me. Please don't hit me. Please!"
Naturally, I hit her. I slapped her across the face, not very hard. When she reeled back, exactly as if I'd really belted her, I laughed out loud.
"This is too ridiculous. Let's not play cops and robbers. Just tell me why you lied. Who told you to He, and why me? Why did someone go to all the trouble to lure me into a trap? Tell me, now. I've never been very fond of the detective novel as a genre and I'm afraid that I keep slipping into the gangster adventure form."
I hit her again, this time much harder. Blood spurted from her nose and she put her hand to her face in horror.
"Lebon killed Groper. He brought me here with him yesterday and shot him. Then he tried to shoot me, but I beat him to the punch. The way I see it, your he is the second attempt on my life in two days. You can understand why I have to know why?"
"About two days before Lucy disappeared, she came to me and told me that she'd been sleeping with my father for two months and someone was blackmailing her with pictures."
"What do you mean by someone? I thought you said it was Groper."
"It was. She said it was Groper. Please don't hit me again. You've got me so confused, I don't know what I'm saying."
I'm hip, baby."
"She said they wanted her to become a whore. I swear she said it I asked her why she didn't want to go to the police, and she claimed the scandal would be too much for her mother. Her mother has a heart condition. You know that. You do."
"Okay, just relax," I said. I wanted to believe her and I hated myself for wanting to.
"I asked her if she was going to, and she said she didn't know. Then she just disappeared. When the police came to me, I told them that Lucy mentioned she was having trouble with a man named Groper. I couldn't tell them the whole story. I just couldn't."
"Did you ever ask your father if he was screwing Lucy?"
"I was afraid."
"Did he act scared when he heard she was gone?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know very much," I said. "In the first place, nobody forced Lucy to do anything. Lebon told me that and he had no reason to lie. Do you know why he killed Groper? Because Groper beat him on a heroin deal six months ago. Lebon was crazy. Groper told me she wasn't forced, and he knew he was going to die. He didn't have anything to lose, either. You want to hear something else? I believe them and I don't believe you. Now tell me the truth or I'm going to kill you."
She hung her head and murmured her innocence over and over again.
"Well, there is one way to find out, isn't there? I guess well just have to go and ask your father."
If she jumped at the chance to get out of there, I would have known that she was lying. She didn't, being either too clever, or telling the truth.
"I can't."
"You have to."
I think she got the point. She didn't say anything, didn't even change her position. For the first time, I got the beginnings of an odor from the two bodies.
"Let's go outside. It stinks in here." The view from that particular spot was exceptionally beautiful. Jewitt Mountain glowed across the valley, a thin mist of cloud draped like a blanket across the top. Looking at it, I began to think that all beauty is a trap, a falsification of one's true desires.
"It's too lovely," Beverly said, reading my mind. "It's too lovely for what's happening inside." Then, a moment later, "How could you do it? How could you just kill someone?"
"It wasn't exactly a calculated act"
"Would you really kill me?"
I wasn't feeling very violent at the moment That's what rational conversation does to you. It saps your energies and thwarts instinct. When I came here I was raging at her duplicity. Now I felt as peaceful as the apple orchard far below us.
"We're going to talk to your father," I stated. "We have to find out if Lucy left because he was screwing her."
"All right"
"Listen, if ever I should find out that you were lying to me, I'll kill you."
I didn't really believe her, even at that point, but I simply didn't feel like going through the ritual of murder or torture. My fist no longer felt at home against her cheek, nor did the sight of her face as she watched the two bodies for some sign of life intrigue me. I wanted to get high and I pulled out the inevitable joint, sharing it with her. All of a sudden, I had a partner, and it was a Utile to much to handle.
"What's the address Lucy gave you?"
She rattled off the name of an apartment house on East Sixty-third Street, the Shelton Arms. I had no way of knowing whether the place existed. Lucy had given her no street address, but it meant I'd have two things to do when I hit New York. Certainly, Groper didn't live anywhere on Sixty-third Street. But who did? I'd already made up my mind to confront Mr. Peterson on the following day. When I made my intentions clear, Beverly didn't object I also told her that she'd have to spend the night with me. I didn't want to take a chance on her arranging a story with her father, no matter how slim the chance might be.
"Hey, Bev," I asked, "what kind of noise does a turkey make?"
"I give up." She wasn't really into the joke.
"Gobble, gobble, gobble." I let down my fly and took out my penis, holding it out to her. "Come on, baby. Gobble, gobble, gobble."
CHAPTER FIVE
For the second night in a row, I found myself unable to sleep. Long after Beverly, who faced a terrific ordeal the next day, had fallen asleep, I wandered through the cabin.
Perhaps from a lack of sleep, perhaps just because of strain, I found myself drifting into doubt and fear. I couldn't figure out why I had exposed myself to Beverly when all my instincts told me it was wrong, that I shouldn't trust her, that she was part of the whole conspiracy. Yet, I'd taken her right to the shack and showed her the two dead bodies. If she was in on it, then my one advantage, surprise, was blown for good. Even if she was just a scared girl, victim of some plan of Lucy's, she might go to the police. After all, murder wasn't a common occurrence around Hunter. Beverly, who was just about eighteen, couldn't be expected to absorb what she'd seen without having to tell someone, just as she had to tell me that Lucy was balling her father.
I began to think about the police and what they might do to me if they ever found out what happened in Saugerties. Even if they accepted a plea of self-defense in Lebon's death, I was guilty of failing to report a crime, of concealing evidence in a kidnapping investigation and leaving the scene of a crime. I imagine, though I had no real idea of the true figure, that I might get two or three years in prison for that particular combination of lawlessness. And, when I thought about it carefully, I knew that I didn't have to kill Lebon. Once I knocked the gun from his hand, he was virtually helpless. That I kicked him out of instinct could only count against me. I could almost hear the prosecutor referring to me as "an animal, a beast without control."
The thought of spending five to ten years in a state penitentiary is not a consoling one. I was not and am not a brutal human being; neither am I a criminal in the true sense. I would be lost behind prison walls, and forced to lead the life of a caged animal. That, and homosexuality, which I was not ready to deal with and which would inevitably be forced upon me by my fellow inmates, combined to put me in a sweat.
The worst part of it was that I had done it all to myself by taking Beverly into the mountains. I had become more involved with her as an individual, than with my pursuit of Lucy Nye. That grand obsession I spoke about so glibly had dropped away with the first piece of ass to walk into view. Naturally, my confidence was shaken badly. I'd known enough neurotic people to recognize the instinct for self-destruction when I saw it. I hadn't wanted to believe it present in myself, but it now stood out and slapped me across the face.
I began to think that I didn't want to live. Then I resolved to forget about the whole affair, to leave the East Coast and hope that she kept her mouth shut. I replaced that idea with the thought of killing her and dragging the body up into the mountains. No one would find her for months, if at all, and the killing would never be associated with me. I was just the wise-guy punk from New York, not serious enough as a human being to be considered a suspect in a murder case.
I watched Beverley breathing beneath the sheets. It was a hot, humid night, rare in the mountains, with heavy clouds misting the roads and hills. Beverly tossed in the heat, and her perspiration made the sheet cling. Her body was gentle and curved, soft and yielding as she moaned in the grip of some dream.
In that way I passed the night, pacing the room, darting outside for a quick smoke only to rush back in because I thought I heard her escaping through the window. Toward dawn, while sitting in a chair and repeating my resolve to stay awake and watch over the sleeping girl, I finally drifted off. When I awoke six hours later, I was covered with a wool blanket and Beverly was fixing breakfast. It was the odor of frying bacon that awoke me.
"Welcome to the new day," Beverly called cheerily.
All the suspicion of the night before flooded back. She must have seen it on my face. I could feel my features grow tense.
"Don't," she said. "Don't do that."
She came over and sat beside me, caressing my face. "I could be gone, now," she said. "I could have left before you woke up. I thought about it. I thought about going to the police, but I didn't want to hurt you."
"Why? Do you know what could happen to you for this?"
She ran her fingers over my chest for an answer. "Let's make love. Please?"
I accepted her invitation, my penis already erect. Her hand slipped down to my crotch and caressed my balls and thighs.
"It's your turn to gobble," she declared firmly, pulling up her skirt to show that she hadn't bothered to put on her panties. I ran my fingers over her pubic hair, pulling gently until she cried out in mock pain. Then I pulled her across my face and pushed my tongue up inside her, holding her onto me with my hands on her hips. She had lovely buttocks and I occasionally dipped back to smear the tight nut between them with my spit.
"That's so nice," she said and began to rotate her hips in a tight half-circle, gripping my head with her thighs. With only slight pursuance on my part, she picked up the pace of her roll and began to grind herself into my face, moaning all the while. I began to push harder, biting down hard on her clitoris until she didn't know whether to increase the pressure of her thighs or leap off me in pain. Then her hips began to buck forward with that mechanical precision announcing the onset of orgasm. I felt her fingers in my hair, pulling my head up into her. For moments she kept the top of her body still while jerking the lower half wildly. Then she was still, and I rolled her off me and onto the other side of the bed.
She lay on her side with her back toward me and I pushed high up against her, rubbing my prick between the cheeks of her ass, waiting to see if she'd protest as all of my women had done.
She didn't protest or move, neither stiffening nor encouraging my advances. I held the tip of my penis directly against her anus. Still no effect I pushed in, grunting at the tightness, but piercing an inch or two, enough to know that I'd achieved my objective. Beverly's response was a slow, long sigh of acceptance. She hunched back against me and I put my hands over her breasts, pinching the nipples. Her own hand was between her legs, but she still lay almost motionless, recovering from her just completed orgasm.
"Do you like that?" I asked. My prick was almost squeezed in half by the strength of her tight muscles, but I was in up to the hilt. My balls slapped against her thigh.
"I love you," she said calmly, apropos of nothing. "Don't."
"I love you, Billy."
"Please don't"
She responded by tightening the muscles of her anus, holding me inside her while I laid my hand over hers between her legs, finding she had one finger deeply embedded in her vagina.
"Is there room for company?" I asked, sliding my hand down and pushing the index finger along the already cleared pathway. She groaned once, feeling, I suppose, the terrific pressure of her two stuffed openings. I began to boil up, the shooting pleasures in the base of my penis building up to almost certain orgasm. For her sake (I thought of it in just that way), I slipped out of her anus and pushed between her thighs, embedding my prick in her warm, wet cunt. She shook, just as I was shaking with the joy of it, and we pushed against each other, smooth and sure of our goals, until at last I came inside her.
I lay back on the bed and she turned toward me. I'd left deep red marks on her conical breasts, much deeper than I'd realized when I was squeezing them.
"Christ, look at your tits," I said.
"I thought you were going to break them off." She rubbed herself, easing the blood back to the surfaces of the skin.
"Yeah. They'd look real good over the mantle. Stuffed and painted bright red."
"They're red enough already." She gave them a final squeeze and threw herself down across me. Our lips came together and we kissed for a long time.
"I don't like to kiss for affection," I said, pushing her away.
"I love you."
We smeUed the smoke at the same time. Beverly jumped up, screaming something about the bacon. She dove into the kitchen and returned with a black frying pan which she threw out the door. I went from window to window, but they were already open.
"I was real hungry," I said with a frown. "What kind of woman are you? I guess it's a case of bad training by your mother."
"Stop that."
"Why would your father want to get involved with Lucy Nye?"
She caught her breath sharply, looking at me as if she wanted to discover just what answer would please me.
"He was always involved with other women. Because of my mother. She's frigid."
"But why Lucy? Lucy was just a little girl. Why would your father take a chance with his reputation?"
She didn't answer, holding her chin in her palms and leaning on the table.
"Answer me." I pulled her head up, staring down into her eyes. "I took a big chance yesterday. Prove that I was right?"
"I don't know why. Maybe he doesn't know anything about Lucy. Maybe he never slept with her."
"Tell me everything you know about Lucy," I said. It seemed as good a time to find out as ever. If she was going to lie, I figured that I had her off balance enough for it to show.
"Well, you knew her," she said, by way of beginning.
"Not very well. She already had a boy friend, and I wasn't looking around for any platonic relationships at the time."
"Didn't you make it with her? She told me you did."
"We were both drunk. I got the impression that she was a good-looking girl with hot pants. But that's all I bothered with."
Finally, Beverly looked as if she was going to tell me something instead of evading my questions. "Lucy was very secretive," she said. "She got it from her mother. They never told anyone what was going on. I guess I was as close to her as anyone else. A couple of months ago, she started fighting with her boy friend, about whether they should get married. I know that her excitement about going to college was a lie. She hated school, even though she did well to keep up appearances. She wanted excitement, but she was cold. I always got the impression that she didn't give a damn for anyone and that her life consisted of killing time while she waited for something big to happen. When she came to me and told me about her and my father, she didn't seem nearly as upset as I would have been if I'd been the one sleeping with her father."
"Did she tell you to tell the story to anyone?"
"She said to tell you what had happened."
"Why didn't you tell me before?" I was getting mad again.
"I don't know why. I should have." She started crying and begging me to please leave her alone for awhile. But the last part didn't make sense to me. I went to the telephone and dialed New York City information, asking for the number of the Shelton Arms on East Sixty-third Street, and got it At least the place existed.
"Come on, Bev," I said gently, "we've got to go talk to your old man."
She went with me without protesting. It was a short drive to her house which was on about fifty acres of land next to Scoharie Creek. As we drove up, I saw her father running at us from the house.
"Where have you been?" he yelled at Beverly, grabbing her arm to pull her from the car.
"Haven't you ever knocked off an overnight piece?" I asked from my side of the automobile. That stopped him cold. He looked at me with absolute hatred in his eyes. He knew me too well to suspect that I was being merely defiant "Let's go somewhere and talk," I suggested.
He turned without a word, and we followed him to the rear of the house, sitting down on the lawn chairs that dotted the side of the creek. He was so calm that I expected him to ask me if I'd like a drink.
"So which one of my infidelities did you discover this time?" he asked Beverly. "Oh, yes," he continued, turning to me. "I have not been a faithful husband. My little excursions are local gossip of such long duration they fail to stir interest in any but the most innocent summer visitors."
"Which one do you think we found out about?" I teased.
"There have been so many. You tell me."
"Lucy Nye."
"I never touched her." He-literally jumped off the chair. "Never! Never!"
"She was a nice piece, wasn't she?" It was as if Beverly had disappeared. "Don't be ashamed. I've had her myself."
"You can't threaten me!" he screamed. "Calm down. She told Bev all about it before she left."
"Then she lied."
"I guess we'll have to go to the police." I made motions to get up, but he held me back.
"Wait," he said, which is about what I expected. He hadn't expected us to come here and confront him. Bev hadn't been lying, and Lucy wasn't using Peterson with his knowledge.
"How long were you making it with her?"
"About six months. We only met four or five times. She said she liked older men, and my wife is frigid."
"So I heard. Now tell me why she disappeared."
"I don't know." He seemed honestly surprised that I would ask him such a question. "It was never more than physical between us. I swear it. She never took me into her confidence."
"Then why are you so afraid of the police?"
"Look. Right now, my affairs are only the town joke. People still do business with me. But if it ever came out to where they were ever forced to admit to themselves that I was a hopeless philanderer, everything would stop. I'd have to move. It would destroy Beverly."
"You never cared about me." She was up in arms for the first time.
"Shut up," I said. "I'm not interested in your family squabblings. You see, Mr. Peterson, Lucy told Bev that she was being blackmailed. She said that someone had gotten pictures of you and her together and was going to show them off if she didn't do as she was told."
"I never heard a word about it."
"Is your wife around?"
"Why do you want her?"
"Just to see if perhaps the blackmailer didn't contact her. Maybe she's been paying off for a long time now." '
"I direct the money in this family. It's the only way to keep control."
What he said seemed straightforward enough. Whether it was actually the truth or not, I had no way of knowing. I couldn't check his income to see if he'd payed out or received a large sum recently. I had no information whether he was only a roving husband or was actually into some meatier business. He said that his affair with Lucy had been casual, which didn't make much sense. Lucy had no reputation as an easy lay, and in such a small town, that sort of thing became common knowledge pretty fast. During the time I had her, I'd chalked it up to the effects of alcohol. Now I found out that the steadiest girl in Hunter had been fighting with her fiance and screwing the local cuntman for the last six months. As I said, it didn't make much sense.
"Why would you want to get involved with such a young girl? Do you have any idea what would happen to you if people found out?"
"Actually, it was Lucy who made the first advances. She was swimming in the creek with Beverly one day, and she came up to see me. She asked me if I wanted a little piece. I swear it."
"Ya know," I said, I'm beginning to believe you. We're all very worried about Lucy. I thought she was a real nice girl, but I'm beginning to find out the truth now. I'm kind of sorry to do this to you."
He appeared relieved and actually offered his hand to me, explaining that he understood how bad it looked, but if I only knew his wife, I'd understand. Lucy had seemed like a new beginning to him; she was so young and fresh. I then apologized for keeping his daughter out all night, and he offered us a drink which we accepted. When he went into the house to mix them, I said to Beverly, "Get me invited to dinner."
"All right. Did you finally believe him?"
"Beverly," I began, "how cold is the water in the creek now?"
"Oh, pretty cold. Why?"
"Just think of how cold it was six months ago when they first met. Nobody swims in February in the Cats-kills. The average temperature is somewhere around minus fifteen degrees."
"Then he lied," she said.
"Yes, he lied."
"But why?"
"That's what I want to find out. Do your parents ever go out?"
She hesitated a moment, then got it out. "My father goes out on Tuesday nights to meet whatever mistress he has at the moment."
"Today's Tuesday. What about Mama?"
"Almost never. But she always stays in her room. She pretends to be a recluse, that she's sick."
"Does she listen to what's going on?"
"I think she does, but she doesn't talk about it. Deafness is one of her ailments."
"How old is she?"
"Forty-one."
"You've got one of the sickest families I've ever heard about."
She began to cry for the second time that day. She had the right. My own parents hadn't the imagination for extramarital affairs, nor the bodies, I suppose. I wonder which is worse: parents like Beverly's, or to discover that your mother and father are already dead to any but the most ugly of material possessions. My folks had a rent-controlled apartment in Queens, which they'd decorated in incredibly poor taste. Authentic, simulated antiquing was the order of the day when they shoved money down the throat of every gyp-artist furniture peddler in Manhattan. It seemed inconceivable that anyone would spend fifteen thousand dollars to create a hideous environment, but I lived with the evidence all my life and never once cried.
I waited patiently for her tears to stop. I was supposed to comfort her, to drape my arms across her shoulder and whisper little kisses of consolation into her shell-like ear, but the "I love you" of early afternoon kept me at my distance. .
Finally, she stopped. "Listen, baby," I said, "there's no reason why you should feel responsible for your family. Maybe they should feel reponsible for you. After all, they preceded you, right?"
"I know it."
Mr. Peterson was returning with the drinks by this time. If he noticed his daughter's tears, he said nothing. He was a tall, slim man, about fifty, who kept himself fit by playing indoor tennis at a local arena. That distinguished air of healthy again was all about him, from the tips of his graying hair to the smooth toe of his Italian shoes. I suppose he loved to play the country gentleman; he was very handsome and naturally attractive to the unsophisticated Hunter women.
I looked into his eyes to see if he might possibly go beyond that. But except for proving that nothing can be told from sight alone, I noted only that his eyes were red, and put it down to too much drinking and running around for a middle-aged man.
"Thanks," I said, accepting the drink.
"Billy's staying for dinner, Daddy," Beverly piped up. "Is that all right?"
"Sure. Just the ticket." He put his arm around my shoulder. "I like you, Billy. Beverly, go in and tell the maid to set an extra place."
Beverly ran off to the house, her skirts flying, while Peterson and I looked on appreciatively.
"That girl turned out all right," he said, employing that drinking-buddy tone, "and I thank God she did. She's had a good deal of trouble in her young life. I guess I wasn't the best father."
"You did your best," I consoled half-heartedly.
"Thanks." He hesitated for a moment, as if considering some especially weighty matter. "About last night," he began, "I really don't think Beverly should stay out all night. Why should her life go down the drain? She's still got a chance to make something of herself."
"Sure, man."
He looked me over carefully, trying to figure out just what I was up to. I smiled at him while he studied me, not caring really whether he liked what he saw or not. The rest of the afternoon passed like that. Peterson drank more and more. He kept trying to lure me into conversation, to make me commit myself to something. But, since we never touched on anything having to do with Lucy Nye, I answered his questions as shortly an reasonably as possible, refusing to disagree with anything he said.
About six o'clock, the maid called us to dinner. Beverly told me not to expect her mother, because she never showed up when strangers came to dinner. We ate at a long, mahogany table, and a crystal chandelier with light bulbs that tried and failed to look like candle flames hung oppressively close to the table. There was little conversation and the meal was simple, as if the cook had been deliberately instructed not to go to any extra trouble.
"Well, where are you folks going tonight?" Peterson asked when he'd finished eating.
"We're going to stick around here for awhile," I answered before Bev could open her mouth. I wanted to see if he'd alter his plans especially for me. The mistake he'd made in the date of his first meeting with Lucy could have been an accident, or he may have wanted to make things look better by having the affair shorter than it actually was. If he opted to sit at home and keep an eye on us instead of attending his lover, my suspicions would grow proportionately.
"Well, I'm not going to stay with you stick-in-the-muds. I've got things to take care of in town." He wasn't jumping for the bait, perhaps because he didn't realize any was being extended.
He left immediately after dessert, waving to us, quite drunk. We heard his car start up and the screech of his tires as he turned onto the main road. Then we were alone.
"What do you want to do?" Beverly asked.
"I want to search the place, of course. Isn't that what any good detective would do? Does your father have a den? Someplace where he'd be likely to keep important papers?"
She took me directly to a large room on the first floor. It was fitted out with an expensive walnut desk and not much of anything else. There were file cabinets, unlocked, but they contained only business papers and I couldn't make much out of them, written, as they were, in legal terminology. There were no references whatsoever to the Nye family or to Groper or Lebon. Mostly, Peterson's business concerned real estate dealings in the Hunter-Tannersville area and just at that time he was very involved in efforts to turn the place into a major ski resort.
"Is there anywhere else?" I asked.
"I don't know of any. Wait, there's a safe here...."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"I forgot about it."
I didn't like the sound of it, especially when she walked up to one of several stuffed deer's heads that covered the walls and pushed it aside to reveal a wall safe. I was fiddling with the heads myself at the time, so her memory could have been restored by a fear of my finding it anyway.
I tried the safe and found it was locked. I had no idea what to do. I considered the idea of dynamite, which I had no way of getting and couldn't really use without blowing the house apart anyway.
"I know how to open it," Beverly said out of nowhere.
"Why didn't you say so before?"
"Leave me alone, Billy, I'm trying."
She seemed on the verge of tears again, so I said nothing, only motioned for her to go ahead. She fiddled with it for awhile, as if it was something she'd once learned well and had now almost forgotten.
"I haven't used it in a long time. My father used to let me play with it when I was little. He used to tell me that I should have been a boy because I was so interested in mechanical things."
The safe swung open on silent hinges. Inside I found dozens of photographs, all pornographic. As I went through them, I thought at first that Peterson was just a picture freak. Neither Beverly nor I recognized any of the women. They seemed to be just anonymous photographs of whores.
"Your old man's a real freak," I said. "Uh-oh." I found the Lucy pictures. There she was, in a dozen different poses with Peterson's dong stuck into every orifice of her body. In most of them, she was staring directly into the camera, almost defiantly. Her beautiful body, more lovely than I'd remembered, was draped on top, on the bottom, over and around Peterson's. Just looking made me hungry.
"Now I have to find her," I said. "I have to get into that chick again-when I'm not drunk."
Beverly was staring at the photographs with an open mouth. She was half-way between tears and dumping on my face.
"Nice tits," I said, pointing.
"She's so beautiful."
We went through a few more and came to a very interesting series. These featured Beverly as well as Lucy. They were lying on top of each other in the most usual lesbian relationship-mouth to crotch and both seemed blissfully unaware of the clicking camera.
"Beverly, you didn't tell me."
"I didn't know. I didn't know." She was holding her head in her hands, but her absorption in her own body, obviously writhing beneath the efforts of Lucy's tongue, was complete. She never turned her eyes away from the photos.
"So you like pussy, do you?" I asked. "How about dick?"
"I'm not a lesbian. It was Lucy. She started it that night. I remember. She asked if we could go to my room so we could be alone and when we got there she took off her clothes and started kissing me."
"And you resisted with all your might...."
"I did try to stop her, but then I got excited and I made it with her. It was good, too. But it was only once. We never spoke about it afterward."
I was hard as a rock, but I went through the rest of the pictures, finding nothing very interesting until the last series of six. These featured Lucy Nye and me. They must have been taken on the night we got drunk together. I was inside her and each picture showed roughly the same position, myself on top thrusting up into, her widely-spread legs. Each was taken from a different angle and whoever took them made sure to get Lucy's face in the viewer although my own could be seen in only three of the shots.
"Why were these taken? No one's blackmailing anyone with these. I don't get it."
Beverly just shook her head. "I had no idea," she stated. "Maybe he just likes pictures."
I put all the shots back into the safe. "Bev," I said. "Look what's happening to me."
I put her hand on my penis and she closed her fingers over the long, hard staff. "Let's make it quick," I said. "I don't want to give your old man enough time to set up his Nikon." , I laid her over the desk and lifted her skirt across her hips, pulling down her panties with one quick tug. Her ass and the softness of her pussy were well-exposed in that position. As I slid my prick between her thighs, into her soft wetness of her cunt, I pulled her cheeks apart and thrust a finger into her anus. I could feel the muscles of her vagina tightening around me as soon as I entered her. The photos had gotten her hot, too. The ball was exceptional for both its heat and brevity. When it was over, we went back to work as easily as if we'd stopped for a coffee break. As we went through drawers and cabinets, finding nothing, I contemplated the image of Peterson being confronted with the photos. I didn't really suppose that it would do anything except get Beverly into trouble. Besides, I was beginning to think like a cop. I had no interest in exposing a blackmail ring. What did I care if Peterson had a side business going?
Beverly seemed particularly absorbed in the search, as if she wished to avoid conversation altogether while she thought out some problem. For my own part, I figured we'd found everything we were going to. Then, in the living room, posted near to the door among a series of photographs of Hunter's leading citizens, was a picture of a beautiful woman in her thirties (or so I guessed) with soft, blonde hair and really classic features. Nose, eyes and ears and mouth all were perfectly placed, as if an artist had constructed a model of the American fantasy. The photo was inscribed, "To the Best Lawyer in Hunter, All my love, Polly."
"Who's this?" I asked Beverly.
"Some customer of Daddy's. Why?"
"Well, I know all the rest of the people, but I never saw her before. She's really beautiful."
"She is. Polly lives on Long Island somewhere. She bought a huge chunk of land up here a few years ago and sold it recently."
"Where was it?"
"Direcdy top of Jewitt Mountain. But she never lived there as far as I know. She made a lot of money on the sale."
Jewitt Mountain was the place where Groper was hiding out before Lebon and I found him. Things were beginning to fit into place. I wanted to go back there, but I was afraid that someone must have found them. They probably smelled pretty gamy by now.
"Well, she sure is a beauty. I wish she was still coming up here."
"Billy," Beverly said. "What are you going to do now?"
"I'm going back to New York to check on the Shelton Arms."
"Am I going with you?"
"No."
She stepped away from me, but I don't think the news came as much of a surprise.
"You've got to stay here and cover for me. Tell anyone who asks that you were at my house when my father called and told me that my mother was in the hospital. I left right away, and I won't be back for at least two weeks, maybe more. I'm flying to Bermuda where my parents are staying. Take care."
CHAPTER SIX
The first thing I did upon returning to New York was to check on the home of Polly Satin. Bayside is a large town within the confines of Queens County, lying close to the suburban paradise of Nassau County on Long Island. It was once a fairly wealthy community, but the building boom of the late fifties and early sixties had changed the character of the town a great deal. Now two-family homes, hastily and cheaply constructed, were selling for fifty thousand dollars even though they could not have been worth more than twenty thousand in a town like Hunter, their intrinsic value was so low. Garden apartments, long rows of low, attached brick dwellings, each identical, had sprung up where only a few years before rabbits and pheasant had abounded.
However, there were still some very lovely sections of the town as yet unravaged by the contractors and real estate developers, and it was in one of these unspoiled areas that Polly Satin lived. Her home, a two-story structure, stood on a lot approximately two hundred square feet, which is much larger than most that close to the city, and overlooked Little Neck Bay, another factor to its credit in the land value game played compulsively by suburban residents.
I watched the place for two days without getting even a glimpse of its residents. Delivery boys came with groceries and vegetables and liquor, but not one of the inhabitants ever left the house. I was at the right place, however, because a mailbox announced "Satin" at the head of the long wall that circled through the garden before plunging toward the house itself. The food deliveries especially intrigued me. Everyday the same boy showed up with several large bags of groceries. Judging from my own appetite, I calculated that enough food for ten or twelve people came through the back door each afternoon. The house was certainly big enough to support such a large cast, about fifteen to twenty rooms, I guessed.
The thing I wanted most was to somehow get inside. I had made no attempt to penetrate the armor of the Shelton Arms. Not only was the source of that address suspect in my mind, but it was one of those modern glass structures guarded day and night by a fearsome doorman who insisted on phoning up to the residents to find out just how acceptable the caller was.
No, Satin's home was much more accessible. I could watch it from a nearby park without worry of being spotted either by the Satins or by some enterprising cop who wondered why I was hanging around. Yet I had no way of getting inside. In some ways I am incredibly dim. I'm sure that some good detective would have been inside on the first night, either through some phony pretext or by stealth, but I pictured myself falling from the porch roof while trying to open a window or being picked up by the police for attempting to he my way inside.
It would take someone more devious than I, and I knew just who to approach for advice. Harold Warshaw had been a friend of mine-I shouldn't really say friend because he had no real friends, in the truest sense of the word, having hustled everyone he'd ever been close to. His reputation as a devious character was unparalleled. Not that he'd ever done anything really big. He was much too self-destructive to make any big money. His specialty was cheating stupid, lonely women, but he was incredibly inventive. He once had a bank check for sixteen hundred dollars made out to the New School. The check was very official, with the payee typed in different color inks and the amount printed over raised paper so it could not be altered. How he got it is of small concern. The amazing part is that he actually cashed the thing. How a private citizen with no bank account and no credit could ever cash a corporation check made out to a corporation is beyond me. He never told me how he did it, replying evasively whenever I asked. But I knew, sitting on a grassy hill in Crocheron Park with a joint hanging from my mouth, that if anyone on earth could get me into that house, it was Harold Warshaw.
He greeted me warmly in his Brooklyn apartment, very "How are you, old friend." It always amazed me that he had a strong need for friends, even when he alienated them by hustling them. We lit up a joint, passed it back and forth and talked of nothing in particular. I didn't get to the point until we were good and high.
"Harry," I began, "everyone knows you're a genius. I have a little problem just suited to your talents."
"Go ahead," he smiled. But I could see the gears working. Harry never made a commitment without first weighing the possible consequences on a balance sheet.
"Don't worry, man, this isn't anything you'll have to do and no money's involved. All this is going to take is a little brain work."
"Okay, go ahead and tell me about it. I have to go and cop tonight and I'm kind of in a hurry."
He had a very sharp almost bird-like face. Everything about him revealed a certain anxiety, at once conquered and surrendered to. For instance, he had been living in his apartment for about four months, yet he still hadn't bothered to unpack.
"Suppose there was a house you wanted to get into. You didn't know anything about the layout inside or the people who lived there. As far as you could tell, no one either came in or left, yet food is delivered daily. How would you go about getting in?"
He hesitated a second, pretending to light up a joint again, puffing and holding the smoke deep in his lungs while he thought over the proposition.
"What's in the house?"
It was about what I expected from him.
"There's no money in it."
"Well, why are you so hot to get in there?"
"It's a long story."
This time he stalled by pretending to search out his cigarettes in the kitchen. I listened to him rummage around, cursing his latest girl friend who, it seemed, couldn't keep things straight.
"That fucking cunt," he offered, returning with a crumpled pack. He took a little more time by putting on a record on the stereo. I wish I had a dollar for every time that phonograph was hocked.
"Well?" I said, smiling to hide my impatience.
"I don't know, man. It's really not that easy. I'd have to case the place out. What's the scene? What kind of people are you dealing with? Why did you come to me?"
"All right, one at a time. I don't know what the people are like. There's a woman in there I want to see. Her name's Polly Satin...."
"Polly Satin!" He shook his head in disbelief. "Don't mess around with those people. Polly Satin has her finger in fifty different pies."
"I know she's into scag," I offered back. "She's also very beautiful."
"She's a beauty, all right; her real name's Polly Sa-tinino, and she has an assortment of Mafia types working with her all over the city. If you fuck around with her, you're gonna get yourself killed."
He shook his head again, as if I was some sort of child who had to be helped out. He always had a tremendous air of confidence, despite the fact that he was so thin he habitually wore two sweaters under his shirt to make himself look larger.
"It sounds like you're not going to help me. If you can't think of anything, just tell me and I won't hang you up any more."
"Take it easy, man," he said. "Look, if there's something in it, I want my piece. That's all. Why don't you tell me what's going on? You can't expect me to spend two or three days in Queens for nothing."
He held up his hands as a gesture of ultimate reason. How could I deny such strong truth? And what magnanimity he was showing by even considering the possibility of going out of his way to do mc a favor. That was his game, a role he played with accustomed ease.
So I told him the whole story, omitting any reference to murder. I tried to convey, somehow, my sense of curiosity and obsession. What were the pictures all about? Why did Lucy Nye, who gave off the most stable vibrations, suddenly disappear after an affair with her best friend's father?
"You're crazy," he said after I'd finished.
"Look, man. It doesn't make any difference why I'm doing all this. I'm doing it. I'm committed, you know what I mean? That's it. I thought you could help me if anyone could. I'm not giving up if you turn me down. I'll just go back until I figure out a way to get in." He once again played his stalling game, rolling a joint and commenting on the excellent quality of his grass, which wasn't all that good, but as a businessman he fought for his product.
"What's in it for me?" he asked.
"What are you looking for?"
"Suppose we got into the house and found something valuable. Money or drugs. Suppose I copped it. What would you want?"
"Nothing. I have plenty of money. I don't need Polly Satin's."
He was looking for an excuse for going in with me. He did have imagination and wanted more than anything else to do one act in his life that wasn't only for his personal gain. Yet he had to cover it up, to excuse his altruistic fantasy with another fantasy of personal gain.
It was just at this point, with nothing resolved, that his latest girt friend walked through the door. We heard the scrape of the key and turned abruptly toward her, as if expecting two Mafia gunmen.
"Hiya," she said to us. This one was a real beauty. Incredibly large boobs with no hips and thin, almost stick-like legs. She was heavily made up in an era where no girl wore anything but eyeliner. I suppose she was trying to hide the acne scars on her jawline, but she failed to do anything but call attention to the fact that she wore makeup. She had large, almond-shaped eyes that might have been pretty if they demonstrated anything but cow-like yearning for affection which Harry supplied in large doses, relieving her of the burden of a bank account at the same time.
"This is Myra Cohen," Harry said simply, as if she wasn't worth considering. He warned me with a touch not to talk in front of her.
"Well, I gotta cop," he declared, getting up to leave. "Gotta go take care of business. Wait until I get back. It'll only take a couple of hours. Then we'll get down to business."
His look, as he left, was reassuring, as though we were just about to consummate a lasting deal. This was his special brotherhood look and, although I didn't believe it for a moment, I felt that I needed him.
"Where ya from?" Myra asked after he left, her mouth full of gum.
"Queens," I answered tersely.
"Oh, I'm from Queens, too. Where abouts?"
"Flushing."
"I'm from Forest Hills." She sounded disappointed that I couldn't arrange my place of birth to coincide with her own. "But that's pretty close, isn't it?"
It wouldn't have been difficult to hate her, but to do so would indicate a harder personality than I possessed, a life view as hard as Harry's. She went into the kitchen to change out of her work clothes (she was supporting him, of course) and I didn't pay much attention, rolling another joint from the pile Harry had left by the sofa. I was just about to light it up, when she suddenly appeared alongside me, clad only in a see-through bra and panties.
"Gimme some, too," she giggled.
I handed her the joint without comment. Her breasts were really incredible. They pushed over the edges of the bra, threatening to come out from under it as well. She had no stomach at all and the panties were so tight they outlined her crack with an eye toward detail. Harry knew a piece when he saw it. I wondered what he'd do if I balled her. Probably nothing. His women meant very little to him. They were inevitably given to self-punishment and loved it when he put them down, which was often.
She pulled hard on the joint, stretching her body into the air so as to pull her stomach taut. Almost instinctively, I pushed my lips against her belly, probing her navel.
"Hey," she cried. I still haven't figured out if the cry was one of protest. She had an absurd smile on her face, silly and wet. I imagined kissing that greasy face and shuttered. Her stomach wasn't bad though, taut and muscular.
"Let's see some tit?"
"But what would Harry say?" Her concern was touching, as if he really gave two shits whether she dropped dead. As long as he'd depleted her bank account before the funeral, it would have been quite all right.
"He doesn't have to know about it." The obvious play.
"Well, I don't know...."
She was waiting for me to make the big move, the one that would relieve her of all guilt and probably of all pleasure, too. I got off the sofa and squeezed her tits through the bra. They were very soft, which is about what I expected.
"Oh, don't. All I wanted was a little grass."
I put one hand on her crotch, cupping her soft mound and pushing one finger into her by going around the elastic band of her panties.
"Ooooh, what are you doing?"
"Cut the shit!" I yelled. I know Harry would have played it much easier the first time. He would have indulged each of her fantasies, saving his resentment at having to do so until she was helplessly tied to him as to be really weak. She began to struggle, but I held her tightly.
"Are you gonna rape me?"
"Don't you want me?" I asked, lying as much as I was able.
"Oh, I think you're great," she declared. "But how could I do it to poor Harry?"
"He'll never know. You're so beautiful I just can't keep my hands off you." She giggled at that one. Maybe it was just a little too heavy, but she made no further effort to resist me, surrendering to a mood of quiet acceptance. I was getting very hot. A kind of perverted sexuality that took as its object someone who could never be more than a quick fuck with eyes closed.
"Time to undress," I said cheerily, stripping myself while she did the same. Once I'd gotten fully undressed and my staff was sticking straight out in the light of day, she performed incredibly. She went down on me in a second, really avaricious about possession of my penis. She licked my thighs and testicles until I was sopping wet. Then she took the tip in her mouth, nibbling on it with well-practiced teeth. She took the whole of my prick into her mouth, a feat rarely performed by most girls. I could feel myself pressing against the back of her throat, and finally I forgot what she looked like, how much she and Harry repulsed me. My cock became my whole life, the accumulation of exquisite sensation as she tongued me with abandon.
"Give it to me. Give it to me." I could just barely make out the words, so garbled were they by the organ stuffing her mouth. But I understood the meaning perfectly. I made no further attempt to hold myself back. Within a matter of seconds, I was pouring my come down her throat. I'd spent two days without coming. Now I was making up for it. My orgasm was so intense that it actually hurt. I found myself screaming with the effort. Myra accepted everything I had to offer, swallowing it down without choking.
When I was finally done, I fell back onto the sofa, reaching for enough air to stop the heaving of my chest. Myra stood up, a weird smile on her face, a smile of ultimate achievement with a good deal of the conquerer in it.
"Wasn't that great?" she asked. She still had her panties on, but she quickly removed them and stood before me, legs well apart, hands on her hips. Her breasts fell down almost to her navel, with huge dark nipples at least as big as silver dollars.
"Yeah," I agreed. "That was pretty fuckin' good."
She pushed her cunt closer to me, inviting me to take a bite, which I did, finding an amazingly clean cunt covered by a small, thick bush of hair just above the junction of her thighs and one below. Her lips were totally bald, as if she'd shaved them. Arching backwards, her mound came into clear view. I licked along the cleft, pushing down into her vagina with some difficulty.
"That's it, that's where," she encouraged.
"No. That isn't it," I corrected.
"What?" She seemed afraid that I was going to refuse her. Instead, I sat her down in a chair and put her legs over the arms, kneeling before her. "Isn't that better?" I asked. I put my head between her thighs and sucked wildly on her clit. She didn't disagree, tightening her legs around my head and pulling me deep inside. I sucked her until she couldn't stand it any more. Her body jerked uncontrollably. She muttered wildly, "No, no, no," without easing the pressure holding me down inside. She made it like no one I've ever seen, and as I did her, my admiration for Harry went up about two thousand percent. He sure could pick 'em. All this and money, too.
I think she passed out at one point. I had pulled her up a little higher and licked her anus for the first time when she yelled something indistinguishable and then fell silent. I was so hot myself, I just kept working on her and finally I heard her voice again, urging me on.
When my jaw began to cramp (it'd been aching for about twenty minutes) I moved my face away from her thighs. She saw that I was hard again and pushed me down on the floor, catching my prick between her supple breasts and rubbing hard.
"That must be your specialty," I said.
"Yeah," she giggled. "But don't come. I want you inside me."
I let her work on me for a short while, until the friction of her dry breasts on my dry penis became harsh. "Now's the time," I said.
She seemed to leap astride, pushing my cock up into her body. I closed my eyes and gave myself up to a fantasy of three dozen men and women arranged on a circular stage, each frozen perpetually in that instant before orgasm when the urge to rush ahead is too powerful to resist. She whirled above me, grunting and groaning. My prick was on fire, gripped by her vaginal muscles until I thought she was going to grind me to a pulp. I was slamming into her, punching my crotch into hers though all she did was push back. Her eyes were tightly shut, as if through concentration she could bring on the orgasm she strove for.
"Now!" she screamed.
I held back, not ready to give up my warm place in her. She passed through the first series of contractions without raising anything more than a sweat.
"Okay, if that's the way you want it," she said and began to push at me more savagely, digging into my shoulders with her nails. I pushed her over onto her back and jumped on top of her, lifting her hips until my cock found her anus.
"I guess if I can lick it, I can fuck it." She tightened at first, but soon gave herself up to it. I used my fingers to keep her pussy busy, pinching and tugging at her swollen clitoris until she cried out with pain. She stopped her clawing at that point and began to moan, completely worn out from the screwing. I stroked it easily into her ass, working myself gently toward climax. I had everything left, but she was through for the day, corning back to life when I began to pound it into her.
"Now's the time," I said. I came at that instant, hard and puffing desperately. Myra looked at me with a certain helplessness evident on her face. She accepted me with what can only be termed grace, taking it without resistance though she was tired past the point of caring.
Myra Cohen was one of the best lays I ever experienced. Afterward I actually began to feel some affection for her. She went back to the kitchen to finish her dressing, stopping once at the bathroom to relieve herself of a burden already evident on her buttocks.
"Gee, that was real good, wasn't it?" she asked. "I mean it was great for me. Was it great for you?"
I looked at her like she was a creature from outer space. Didn't she know? "Listen, Myra," I said, "is it that good for you all the time?"
"Yeah," she answered, obviously puzzled.
"Well, it was real nice," I said. Somehow, that bland, anxious personality had returned as soon as she was finished. The change was miraculous and could have been wrought by some supernatural agency. It was spooky, like a sudden rattling in the hall after someone's just died.
"Let's smoke the joint," she suggested, retrieving the grass from where it had fallen prior to our ball.
"We just finished that." It wasn't a very good joke, but still....
"No, I mean this kind of joint," she answered, holding it out to me.
I dressed in silence, wondering just how long I'd have to wait for a notoriously tardy Harry Warshaw. Myra busied herself in the kitchen, doing something that sounded like cleaning up. I settled back with the copy of Paris Review with the T.S. Eliot interview, and awaited the return of the master.
I waited quite a long time. Three hours went by without even a phone call. I felt my anger rise. I tried to hold it down by reminding myself that I knew when he left that he was going to hang me up, but it did no good. I went through the fantasy of beating the shit out of him, one that was common to all who knew him though no one ever did it. I worked the scene over in my mind until I had it down pat. I was going to hit him as soon as he walked through the door, without waiting to hear him bullshit about how he was hung up in a loft where there wasn't any phone.
When he finally did come back, about six hours after he left, I said nothing, accepting his half-hearted apology with resignation. He had two suitcases with him, each filled with about forty pounds of grass, as I made it out. He was moving the whole load in one quick sale to some motorcycle types from the Bronx. But first he opened each package, taking out over two ounces and replacing them with oregano and seeds, then wetting the rest to make up the weight.
"You're really doing that," I said, shaking my head.
"You're fuckin' right I'm doin' it. I'm getting another kilo with something extra for my head."
We tested the grass and found it excellent, smooth and easy on the lungs with a light, very up head that didn't turn into mud after a few hours. We sat in silence, waiting for the Bronxites to show up. Anxiety was thick and sharp at the same time, as it always is before a big sale. It changed the apartment from a friendly place to sit and finally feel secure to a sort of dangerous arena where combat could occur at any moment. We both knew that we could die; it'd happened many times to people we knew well.
We both jumped when the bell rang. It was the people we'd been expecting. Harry only let two of them inside, forcing the others to wait in the car. They made no protest besides the usual declaration of their honesty. The first two were big guys, with cutaway denim jackets and chains hanging around their right shoulders, and big leather belts with studs cut into them. They had brought a suitcase for carrying the stuff out, though Harry had every intention of giving them his.
"Hey, this shit is wet, man," the taller of the two said.
"That's the way I got it," Harry solemnly swore. "I just picked it up a few hours ago."
They argued that when it dried out it would weigh a good deal less than they expected, but Harry stood firm. He got it wet and that's the way he was selling it. They couldn't expect him to take the loss, could they? They'd just have to give their people short counts. Finally, after much hassling in which Harry seemed like a midget next to them, he said to take it or leave it.
"We'll take it," they said together. One of them, the shortish blond with huge weight-lifter muscles, reached into the suitcase and came out with a forty-five automatic pistol. Unfortunately, he was a little too close to me when he did it, and I broke his wrist with a single chop. He screamed in pain and surprise. The other one, much bigger, hesitated, wondering whether to come di-recdy at me or try to grab the gun. Perhaps my smashing his partner shook him up. In any event, he took a little too long. I broke his nose and his jaw with two sharp kicks, and appropriated the gun.
Harry hadn't moved, freezing in his seat the moment the gun came into view. Now, the situation well in hand, his mind snapped shut. He went through their pockets and wrote down their phone numbers and addresses in a small black book.
"This is my bodyguard," he said, indicating me. "I'm sure glad you fellows had a chance to meet him. By the way, I'm sending people after you if you ever show your faces in Brooklyn again."
They both lay quite still on the rug, biting back cries of obvious pain. I'd once suffered an accidental broken nose in a training class, and I knew how the guy felt. At the moment, however, sitting in Harry's living room, I couldn't really muster up any pity for them, who for all I knew, may have been planning to take my life. I put the gun up against the taller one's head, snapping back the hammer.
"I'm gonna kill 'em now," I said. "No sense in waiting for them to come back. Let it be a lesson that we don't fuck around."
"Please don't kill me, please don't!"
It was really fun. I had no intention of shooting off that gun in the house; it would only serve to draw the police on our heads.
"Hey, look at this." Harry, going through their pockets, had found a wad of money. Strangely, it came to just the amount needed to purchase the grass. At first I didn't understand, but Harry explained it to me. They had already collected enough money from various friends to purchase the grass in the regular manner. If they took it from us, however, they'd make about five times as much in profit. The people out in the car probably had no idea what was happening in here, thinking it a regular sale.
"All right," I said, "take the suitcase and get the fuck out of here. If anybody asks what happened, tell them the truth."
Out they went, with us watching through the window until the car pulled away, probably headed for the nearest hospital.
"We should've kept the bread and the grass," Harry said, a pained expression on his face.
"But then we'd have had the whole Bronx on our head. It wouldn't be worth it."
I'd just saved his life, but he made no mention of it, not even offering me a share of the booty which, after all, was due me for my part in the operation. But "thank you" was not even a part of his vocabulary unless uttered in the most insincere circumstances. Nothing came out, but a confirmation of his intention to help me out with Polly Satin. Actually, it was I who made the customary offering of thanks; the grass was really excellent, and we had about a kilo and a half, two ounces of which I took, much to his chagrin, without bothering to ask.
Myra, who'd been in the kitchen peeking out during the little battle, ventured forth, staring at me as if I was the wild man of Borneo.
"Wow! What you did!" She sat down, still staring at me with big eyes. "I never expected anything like that from you."
"It kind of surprised me, too," Harry said.
"That's just what I want it to do with Polly," I explained.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning I was back on the job. Crocheron Park is fairly large and not very frequently used. Converted from the estate of John Golden, it's in an area of Queens generally free from' violence and, because of this, is not very well patrolled by the cops. On its eastern edge is a chain-link fence that separates the park from the spacious residence of Polly Satin. So, about ten-thirty, the earliest I could manage to rouse Harry from his bed, we were in the great outdoors, tossing a softball and watching the house with interest from the safety of one of the numerous ball fields.
It was a nice day, but very hazy in New York, though I suppose in Hunter the sky was clear blue, instead of brown. The contents of two buses had been disgorged into Crocheron's playing fields, all paying members of a local day camp, and the kids ran around screaming and avoiding the efforts of the counselors to organize them. Harry and I just kept slopping the ball around, trying to ignore the younger kids who swarmed all over us.
At 11:30, the daily food delivery was made. A tall sweating blonde kid who seemed to have outgrown his pants, probably one of the poorer Bayside types trying to make summer money from the rich, disappeared up the driveway toward the back of the house. We couldn't see him make the actual delivery, because the door used was out of our sight.
"Is it always the same kid?" Harry asked.
"It has been the last few times, anyway," I said.
"Then that's no good."
Once again the ball went back and forth. After another half hour we became tired. I wanted to call it quits for half an hour or so, so that we could get some lunch, but Harry refused. We gave one of the kids a dollar to go to the nearest delicatessen and bring back sandwiches, but never saw him again.
At 12:45 (Harry kept notes of all that happened) a Western Union delivery boy brought a telegram. This wasn't the first time telegrams had been delivered. This time the delivery boy was not the same as the others, Western Union being a somewhat larger operation than whatever grocery store served the Satin residence.
"We can get to the door easily enough," Harry said. "The problem is that once one of us shows our face, he can't go back. If I pretend to be a delivery boy with some flowers, I can't go back as the gas man reading the meter."
"I know what you mean, but what's the chance of sneaking around at night?"
"Polly Satin is in with the Mafia. I don't know exactly what she does with them, but I wouldn't just want to walk into her house without some idea of what's happening in there."
So we waited. We smoked a lot of grass and got much hungrier. The afternoon wore on with no prospect of a breakthrough. Our biggest thrill was a troop of Girl Scouts who took us for rock V roll musicians. After much fussing, they were shunted off by their den mother (quite a piece herself, incidentally, in a straight sort of way) to the relative safety of a kite flying contest.
"Do you spend a lot of time bored?" I asked Harry, about sundown.
"Yeah. A lot of time."
"And I'm getting goddamn hungry."
"Yeah."
"I think one of us should go for sandwiches before the deli closes."
"I'm too paranoid to stay here by myself," he declared, waving his palm in front of him as a gesture of flat denial. His movements were always very precise, very feminine.
"You go and I'll stay," I suggested.
He didn't exactly go for that, either, but the logic of hunger finally got the better of his sense of panic in strange places and he went off across the park in search of Stanley's Delicatessen.
Immediately after Harry left, a man appeared at Polly's. He arrived in a chauffeur-driven limousine, pulled quickly into the driveway, and parked in front of the garage closest to the house. His chauffeur jumped out and opened the door for him. Just before he entered the house, I caught a glimpse of an auburn-haired woman at the door. Soon he was out of sight; the chauffeur had returned to the driver's seat (out of my line of vision) and everything seemed almost exactly as it had been before he came.
I pointed out the car to Harry as soon as he returned. He nodded silently and said nothing, chewing his sandwich thoughtfully.
"It could be anyone," he decided.
If we'd had contacts with the police department we could have had the number of his plates and found out who he was and what he had to do with the Satins. We were both aware of that at the time and yearned for the fantastic power of modern law enforcement, yet despised it. There were lights all over the house, from the basement to the attic. The place blazed as if it was advertising itself in spite of its secluded appearance during the day. Occasionally, I could see shadows behind the drawn shades, but nothing unusual seemed to be happening.
Then several more cars pulled up, one of them chauffeured, but all Cadillacs and obviously well fitted. In each of these, however, there was more than one person and several held women in rich fur coats.
"It's a whorehouse," I said, probably hoping.
"No, it's a casino," Harry corrected, acting out his own fantasy; he was a compulsive gambler and constantly pissed away his ill-gotten gains at the racetrack.
"But do you think it's being used to make money?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's a meeting place for the family."
"But then why the huge staff? They bring enough food into that place for fifteen people. And enough liquor for a hundred."
"That's true. I think it must be a casino. Did you see the women? It could be a real freak show inside. But the one thing that really worries me is who those people are. I have a feeling that Polly's entertaining her Mafia people in there, and it really wouldn't do to mess with them-it just isn't done. Because they get you; they just get you and that's it. I'd rather have the F.B.I, after me and that's saying a lot."
It was almost a prepared speech. I guessed that he'd been rehearsing it ever since he saw the first car. He lit a cigarette, stalling while he pretended to search for matches.
"Well, listen man," I finally said, "you don't have to go inside. Just give me a good way to get inside. That's all I ever asked in the first place."
"Do a salesman rap, if you just want to get in for a few minutes. If you want more than that, you'll have to break in. Try the windows tonight and if they're open and you can get to them without breaking your neck, go back and do it tomorrow." He didn't even bother rationalizing his copout, suggesting immediately that we had to leave. Since it was my car we were using, I didn't really find that sporting, but I figured I could get him back to Brooklyn with enough time to come back here and test the windows.
He turned out to be a dud as far as helping me inside was concerned, but then again he wasn't doing it for himself so I shouldn't have expected any more.
We made the trip in silence, with Harry complaining intermittently about how terrible his headache was and how he'd missed an important cop because of coming out to Queens. I took it all with good heart, sighing every now and then at the injustice of it all. Even so, by the time I got to Brooklyn I was pretty disgusted with the whole thing. As I pulled away from his house, I noticed a girl in a tight pink dress out of the corner of my eye. I didn't stop or anything, but suddenly I became very interested in getting laid.
My search seemed especially absurd, the realization coming upon me with that sense of desperation that follows several nights without sleep. My parents' apartment in Flushing was vacant, and I hadn't used it yet. There were three perfectly good beds going to waste. The triumph of the night before seemed eons away. What the hell was all this about? I began to see myself as an adolescent Junior G Man with nothing to show for myself except an overdeveloped set of reflexes that I'd learned in spite of myself.
Writing this, it all seems very remote, very much as if the emotion of that time could only be related in this most perfunctory manner. Never recreated. I watched the women of Brooklyn walking toward their homes and lusted after them. Sex was about the most important thing in my life at that time. I decided that I would not go to sleep without getting laid that night and I turned the names over in my head, finally deciding on a girl named Laura who, if she wasn't the most desirable woman in the world, was, undoubtedly, the most available. It was with her that I settled down for the night, firmly resolved never to set foot on any path that led toward Lucy Nye.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke up the next morning with Laura lying next to me. Walking to the toilet, my head still befuddled by the drugs of the night before, I still thought only of getting into Polly Satin's home. I had forgotten my resolve of the previous night and when I remembered it, through the fog of the morning toothbrush, it was already too late. The best I could do was a compromise in which I promised myself that if one attempt failed to get me inside, I would never risk my life by trying again.
In that frame of mind, I prepared myself breakfast, trying not to wake Laura. She woke anyway, instantly complaining of a mythical pain in her chest that had been giving her trouble for the last seven years (she was all of sixteen). I said nothing, only putting in a few more sausages and whipped up an egg in the already prepared batter.
It was already hot, with the humidity up somewhere in the mid-seventies, and not a cloud in the sky. I pictured myself standing in Crocheron Park, with the sweat pouring off my face while I prepared a scheme to gain admittance. No, better to work it out in the apartment. I turned on the air conditioner to super cool and went over a salesman pitch from my high school days.
The salesman is trained to get inside the house. Not until he's safely seated on the sofa, with the housewife's entire attention turned to him does he have any hope of a sale. The most common gimmick is the survey method. The salesman claims to be taking a census of the women in the area to determine if they use the product of his company. Once inside, he makes them some sort of free offer, attaching conditions that make the article prohibitively expensive. For instance, if I was selling encyclopedias, I'd claim to be giving them away in order to promote the company's new product. Then I'd explain that all they had to do was keep it up to date by subscribing to the company's yearbooks and a reference service wherein their children could write to the company and have any question researched and answered within five days. This would only cost them the price of a new encyclopedia. It worked on the "mooches," all those people too poor to just go out and buy something they needed. Especially those who wanted something for nothing.
Now what would I use? A salesman does not just walk into a household with his glib tongue; he needs all kinds of equipment to make the deal seem legitimate, and himself seem like more than just a poor slob hustling on the streets. If I had had any heart for the project I would have spent a few days getting something impressive together. Instead, I grabbed a mail-order advertisement for about fifty magazines, shoved it into an attache case belonging to my father, and got the hell out of the house. With any luck, I could be through with the whole business by two o'clock.
When I got to Satin's I had a few reservations. After all it was the Mafia I was dealing with and everything Harry had said about them was true. If they perceived in me any danger, they'd kill me without a second thought, and I was walking into what was either a gambling casino or a whorehouse. But what the hell, I was anxious to finish the ordeal and so marched resolutely toward the door and knocked on it forcefully.
After a few moments, it swung open and I found myself staring into the face of Lucy Nye.
"Hello, Billy," she said calmly, almost happily, "we've been expecting you ever since we saw you playing ball on the hill three days ago."
I think I was very close to crying. What I actually did was to laugh, hard and loud. The whole scene was terrifically funny. There I was, standing in a suit and tie with my briefcase in hand, talking to the girl I'd killed a man to find.
"I'm so glad he's brave," a smooth, deep, very feminine voice called out from the shadows inside. Then Polly Satin joined Lucy in the doorway. "Won't you please come inside?" she asked.
I went inside. Of course I went inside. My curiosity index shot up fifty points as soon as I laid eyes on Lucy, to say nothing of Polly Satin's sudden appearance.
"My name's Gerald Smythe, and I'm here to sell you the magazine of your dreams. Not only does it read like a whimper from the other end of eternity, but the paper on which it's printed is so soft and absorbent, it can double as a Kotex in case you're caught in a snowstorm with the curse. Now what am I bid for this valuable rag?"
"I knew you'd come," Lucy crowed. "I was just telling Polly about you the other day when we spotted you in the park."
"I'm sure you have a million things to talk about, you two young people," Polly chimed in, "but first let's have some refreshment."
Sure enough, a tall, slim pitcher of lemonade surrounded by crystal goblets was already laid out on a small table in what looked like a receiving parlor just off the main hallway. I took the seat offered me by Polly and waited for something to happen. I figured I could get out anytime I wanted. These two certainly weren't going to stop me. But nothing seemed excessively threatening at the moment. And I sat down to await the answering of all my questions. Then Polly brought forth the grass.
"I hear that you're very fond of marijuana, Mr. Pechuski; try some of this. I believe it will meet with your standards."
It was bright red, not brownish-green, but a brilliant scarlet. If it wasn't just dyed with some sort of food coloring, it was the legendary red grass that all pot-heads talked about and very few had ever seen. I took two puffs before putting down the pipe for good. I was wrecked; not only wrecked but smashed to the point of immobility. It was all I could do to raise the lemonade to my lips. Never had I had anything like it, and I know I never will again. The Mafia controls a great deal of the drug traffic in the States and this was their own private stock.
I kept waiting for the head to abate, but it didn't. Lucy, who'd also smoked, just sat there with a foolish grin on her face, waiting for me to begin the conversation.
"I don't know where to start," I began. "Your splitting really set Hunter on its ass. Nobody believed it."
"Nobody every really bothered to know me," she returned.
"Well, why did you leave?" I asked.
She waved her had around the room, indicating clusters of very old prints, some of them dating back before the Civil War. The draperies were soft, full, and in what most people would call excellent taste. The rugs were lush and the furniture old and well-cared for.
"I don't know. It's a little insipid after a Hunter thunderstorm." I meant what I said, but Lucy gave me a look that clearly indicated I was out of my head or too stoned to know what I was doing. Polly, on the other hand, took up my defense.
"I agree with you completely," she said, touching my arm lightly with her fingertips. "But unfortunately, we all seem to be economically tied to this ugly city. It's really a pity."
"So why did you leave?" I persisted. "You can't convince me it was aesthetics, so don't try...."
"I'm very young, Billy, and I simply couldn't watch myself growing into a Catskill matron. Going to college was no answer. I wanted excitement, to do something really wild. Here I am."
"Which is where?" I asked.
"You are in one of the world's most expensive brothels, Mr. Pechuski," Polly cut in. "How do you like it?"
"I haven't really sampled the merchandise, yet, but if all the girls are as good as Lucy I can understand your attraction."
"Ah, he's gallant, too," Polly decided. "I'm not disappointed with him at all."
At that point I considered mentioning Groper and Lebon and the connection of Polly's place with the Mafia, but thought better of it. That particular organization seemed always to bring gravity to any conversation, and I was too smashed to bring the tone of our exchange into the realm of unpleasantness.
"Well, you sure take a good picture," I said to Lucy. She giggled, not bothering to answer me.
"So you got into Peterson's safe, did you?" Polly said. "You're resourceful on top of everything else. Did you know Mr. Groper, too?"
"Everyone in Hunter knew him. He was a pill dealer, a cheap hoodlum who couldn't make it in New York. At least, that was my estimation of him. What's he got to do with this?"
"He did some work for me occasionally," Polly answered. "I just wondered if you knew him."
"I'd say that I knew him. I could never be friends with a gutter type like that. I'm not fond of tuminals and muscatel."
"How's Beverly?" Lucy asked, changing the subject swiftly.
"She can't be as good as you. Her breasts are absurdly shaped whereas your own, if I remember them, are smooth as glass and round as melons."
They knew that Groper was dead and obviously connected me with it in some way, although I couldn't believe that they actually thought I did it. As it turned out, they knew only that he was dead by Lebon's bullet and were as puzzled as the police by the whole affair.
"Beverly did tell me," I confessed, "that Groper was using some pictures of you to blackmail you into becoming a prostitute. She said that you told her to tell me about it. I really couldn't figure that one out too well."
"Let's just say that I wanted to see you again. Of all the people I knew in Hunter, you were the only one I could conceive of meeting down here. I wanted to bring something of that life with me, and I guess you were it."
"I scolded her severely for such a breach of security," Polly stated.
"What about that address on Sixty-third Street?" I asked. As I asked the question I suddenly realized that the only way I could have known about this place was through Groper. I was sure that Polly and Lucy were also aware of this fact. Of course, I wasn't about to bring the whole subject up.
"If you'd gone there," Lucy said, "I would probably have been there. I don't spend my whole life in Bay-side. That's almost as bad as Hunter."
"Don't you think we should stop all this unpleasantness, Mr. Pechuski?" Polly broke in, still smiling. "I really do feel that it's about time we all went to bed."
Lucy's face lit up at the mention of bed. "Yes," she said, "it's about time all right!"
Polly got up to lead the way without waiting for me to answer. I followed her down a short hallway that led to the back of the house. On my left were the carefully landscaped grounds. To my right was a single door that must have led into a gigantic room, undoubtedly for the entertainment of special clients. We stopped, finally, at a narrow spiral staircase that ran up to the top floor and down to the basement.
"Let's stop downstairs, Lucy," Polly said, pausing at the stairs. "I think we have something that might interest Mr. Pechuski."
Lucy nodded, and we descended without another word. The basement consisted of one large room, one in polished ebony, with doors leading out from it to smaller bedrooms. In the corner of the large room, handcuffed to a large metal supporting beam, was Harry Warshaw. He stood up as we came in, obviously surprised to find me.
"We surprised Mr. Warshaw yesterday," Polly began by way of explanation. "I believe it was about two in the morning. He was testing the windows when our two dogs trapped him. And what do you suppose he was carrying in a green plastic attache case? Burglar tools. Everything from skeleton keys to three-foot bolt cutters. I wonder what he could have been looking for?"
"You got me in here," Harry accused.
"What are you going to do with him?" I asked.
"They're going to kill me," he said, somewhat dramatically.
"Oh, please, Mr. Warshaw, don't be crude. We're going to use you in this evening's entertainment."
"Yeah," Lucy chimed in, "he's very pretty. Pretty enough to make our clients happy."
"What are you going to do, Billy?" Harry looked at me as if a single word could relieve him of his troubles. "Man, you can't leave me here."
"I saved your life, Harry," I said, "but it looks as if I didn't save your ass."
"Beautiful," Lucy whispered.
"Let's go back upstairs now."
Once again Polly led the way. We went up the spiral staircase, not even hesitating on the ground floor. The upstairs was neatly laid out with six or seven small rooms leading off a conventional hallway. The room Polly chose was done in black mirrors; a huge bed standing in the center was the only piece of furniture.
"I want to be very conventional this afternoon," Polly stated firmly, "but if I was in a non-conventional mood, I might use some of this equipment."
She slid back one of the closet doors and showed me a collection of whips, ropes and various leather garments. One vest particularly intrigued me. It was obviously meant for a woman, but the section that fitted over the breasts was cut out at the nipples, just a thin slit through which the tit could be forced only with great pain. Rawhide ties dominated the garment, only a few of which were functional. It was my first contact with the bizarre world of the sadomashochist, an underground movement of some size which is almost totally unknown to the public.
"You wouldn't consider putting that on?" I asked hopefully.
"I can't risk the scars," Polly said. "I have a business to run."
"What about you, Lucy?"
Lucy stepped forward, seeming more than willing to cooperate with my curiosity, but Polly stopped her.
"Not Lucy," she decided on the spot. "I'm keeping Lucy for other things. Perhaps we can satisfy your curiosity by using the device on Mr. Warshaw."
"It doesn't make much difference, anyhow. Let's fuck."
Polly undressed first; her performance was well rehearsed. Standing naked with her hand on her hips, legs well apart, it was obvious that she knew she was beautiful. Her features were perfect, each seemingly created as part of a techician's conception of beauty and then stuck into an even rounded skull. Her body was exactly the same. Her breasts were firm and full, with just the slightest hint of a matronly sag that only increased her desirability by making her seem softer and more womanly. Her pubic hair was almost as light as the hair on her head and carefully groomed so that it fluffed out in even waves.
"Do you understand now?" Lucy asked. "Polly's thirty-nine years old. Remember the women in Hunter? Did you ever see one over thirty-five who wasn't fat and on the way out? I don't have to die with my first kid. Now I know it's possible to live on. It is possible."
Lucy seemed almost to the point of ecstasy. Her eyes were literally rolling in her head, like marbles in a glass ashtray. She knelt before Poly, looking exactly like a Christian worshipping a statue of the Virgin, and began to kiss the older woman's body, sliding her lips over belly and thighs, licking at the soft mound of flesh. Polly looked at me and began to laugh.
"Lucy and I," she said, "have become very close." Then she gasped as Lucy's teeth sank into her thigh.
"Lie down," Lucy begged. "Lie down and let me." She was pushing ineffectively on Polly's abdomen and Polly began to laugh again.
"What about our guest, Lucy dear? You mustn't forget your manners. Youth seems to know no control."
Lucy stripped incredibly fast. She wore nothing beneath her short, plain dress and even that article seemed designed to come off with a shrug of her shoulders.
"Here I am," Lucy cried, turning to me. "What do you think?"
Whereas Polly was fair and blonde, Lucy was dark and almost swarthy. Her breasts were really spectacular, small and conical without a hint of age. They stood out from her chest with sharp, pointy nipples already erect and whereas Polly's bush was smooth and flowing, hers was wild, full, with dark hair growing riotously almost to her navel.
"You're both incredibly beautiful," I said. "I guess it's my turn now." I stripped quickly, but the business inevitably took me a good deal longer than either of them. Karate doesn't make one's muscles huge or exceptionally lovely, but it does serve to draw the skin tight across the body, emphasizing each muscle in a curiously understated way. My cock, naturally, was sticking straight out from my body, but I wanted to hold myself back for a few moments in order to give them a chance to play.
"I'd like another joint," I said.
Polly indicated a small box at the head of the bed which was filled with huge, machine-rolled joints. I lit one up, fumbling in my pockets.
"Go ahead, I'll be along presently," I said graciously.
The girls wasted no time. They stretched out full length on the bed and began kissing, exchanging tongues and spit. Polly's knee went out between Lucy's thighs and Lucy squirmed and twisted her body to bring more pressure on her pussy. Their hands never stopped moving, proceeding over the bulge of the hip and then fanning across the buttocks. Polly slid her finger between Lucy's cheeks and must have lodged it in her anus because Lucy suddenly pushed her body against Polly's and the two of them began to roll on the bed until Polly came out on top, grinding her crotch into Lucy who accepted the buffeting with upward jerks.
For myself, I got higher and higher, smoking almost all of that incredibly powerful joint. After a while, I could no longer concentrate on either the grass or the movement of the flesh on the bed. I forgot Who was on top, who was playing the dominent role, and who was being feminine. Someone's face was down between someone's legs. Everything was wet and coming. Legs flailed in the air and a thin, feminine voice cried out as if in pain.
Then I jumped on top. It was the only thing to do. My cock was burning to be inside something wet and soft and after some desperate stabbing, I found the mark and buried myself in a vagina that accepted it as if it was normally full, and its previous emptiness was an oversight on the part of its master.
We all rolled for a long time, thrusting without an end in sight, merely gorging ourselves on a sensation that covered our whole bodies without being confined to any particular part, either cunt or cock or breast.
"Roll over, roll over," someone was speaking to me. I couldn't quite make out who it was or what she was trying to do with me.
"Roll over, roll over." Was I on my back or my stomach? Wasn't I on top of someone? I felt a hand trying to turn me and gave myself up to it and finished on my back with someone's mouth gobbling desperately on my cock. Another pair of lips was working on my stomach and chest, nibbling at my nipples until I could feel them trying to rise.
"It doesn't work," I cried. "It's not working." Then the sperm began to boil in my testicles. I felt every millimeter of its travel, felt it touch the base of my shaft, as I humped forward, felt it slide along the length of the shaft, hesitating in the tip just an instant, then shoot forward spurt after spurt. I don't know who took it, who was working that part of my body. After it was finished, after every drop was taken and swallowed down, they left my body to work on each other while I slowly recovered some sense of what was happening.
The first thing I saw clearly was Lucy and Polly, each with her mouth to the other's crotch and obviously in a state of orgasm. Their cries, which seemed delightfully feminine, mingled in my ears until I joined them once again though without the sexual excitement of a few moments before. I had drifted far away and now touched their bodies with the abstraction of a research assistant at a really good university.
Lucy was on top, though both were performing exactly the same act in exactly the same way, and I sat astride Lucy, sliding my hand around to come between the intermingling of their breasts, pinching whatever tit I could feel, harder and harder until I was sure it hurt them a good deal. But all I could hear were the sounds of their orgasm, the deep moans, low in the throat, the harsh cry when some particularly high peak was reached.
I slid off the bed and stood at its head where I could slide my penis between Lucy's mouth and Polly's cunt, feeling an instant rise from the wetness and the speed of Lucy's tongue as she tended to both organs. When I was sufficiently hard, I entered Polly. Lucy bent to the fucking with renewed vigor, began sucking on the base of my dick as I pushed in and pulled out, setting up a slow, regular rhythm.
Lucy got up next, her orgasm finished, and started to look for something new to stimulate herself with. She lay on top of Polly with her mouth to that of the older woman, thus presenting me with two pussies and obviously demanding her share of the attention. When I pulled out of Polly I could hear her groan, but fair is fair, and I plunged into Lucy who had a small, tight vagina, very wet and very grasping. She held me tight, using her own fingers to tend Polly who seemed not at all put out, perhaps too far into her heat to realize that Lucy's hand was not my penis stuffed deep inside.
When I pulled out of Lucy, however, the protest was neither short nor easily put aside. She yelled like a wounded bear, screaming for me to put it back.
"Who are you talking to like that?" I asked, my tone more taunting than anything else.
"You cocksucker!" she yelled.
"Polly, you have to teach this girl manners," I said, blasting my way through the tight barrier of her anus.
She screamed once again, then fell silent, only moaning softly. Now Polly began to use her fingers in Lucy's cunt as I stroked my way toward orgasm. I was somewhat afraid that our fun might end on an unpleasant note, but soon both of them began to moan as their orgasms set in. Even as I came, pouring into Lucy's tight ass, they allowed their own ecstatic cries to join mine. Then we lay quietly, watching the tangle of flesh in the mirrors that surrounded us.
"Shall we shower?" Polly asked.
Neither Lucy nor I answered, but Polly led the way without waiting for a response. Just off the room, through a door that I took to be a closet, was a fully equipped bath with a gigantic shower, one of those with nozzles poking out from everywhere.
Polly regulated the water, getting it to be the desired temperature, and we all stepped in together. Touching Lucy's backside, Polly shook her head.
"You're wet down there," she exclaimed, shaking her head. Then she knelt down and placing her lips over the offending portion of Lucy's anatomy, personally attended the cleansing. Lucy made no protest, only closed her eyes and squatted slightly.
When that task was finished, the older woman, acting the part of the mother, soaped me like I was a small child, taking particular care with my penis. All this passed with very few words. We were still recovering, still seeking some non-sexual means of function.
"That was fantastic," Lucy said. "Now you understand?"
"I understand from the first day when your old man called me," I returned. "I said that you had run away. But no one believed me."
"Why not?" she persisted.
"Oh, they gave the usual rap-she was always a good girl. She was looking forward to school. She had a boy friend and she wanted to marry him."
"And yOu believed that? Didn't you know me?"
"We only made it once, Lucy. Let's not be assholes about it. I was drunk at the time, too."
"That's right, Lucy," Polly broke in, "let's not press our guest. Remember what I told you about creating the past instead of remembering it. That's her worst fault, Mr. Pechuski. She has a tendency to fantasize, and it's much too much for me to handle."
She gave Lucy a look that can only be described as motherly. Lucy turned her eyes to the rug exactly like a little girl caught in the cookie jar.
"But the cops are really looking for you," I continued, in spite of Polly. "They came to me and mentioned Groper's name. When the other girls ran away earlier this summer, no one made a fuss. Now all the kids talk about is you."
"Well, it's nice to see that you've made some sort of impression on the country folk," Polly declared. "But now it's time to eat. I'm smashed and hungry, so let's get dry."
It was only then that we stepped from the shower onto the heavy red rug of the bathroom floor. Our conversation had taken place amidst the rush of water and we'd been almost shouting. But Polly was definitely right; we were all hungry.
"Wait here, Billy," Lucy requested when we were once more in the bedroom. "We'll fix something and be right back up."
"I don't think I want to wait here," I declared and my voice, as I spoke the words, was flat and steady.
"Please don't be alarmed, Mr. Pechuski," Polly said, her voice soothing. "Nothing is going to happen. We're not that melodramatic around here. This is a house of pleasure."
I considered pushing my way out then and there, but rejected the idea as too melodramatic, just as Polly had suggested. If they wanted to hold me prisoner, they had obviously taken precautions and wouldn't be prepared to keep me there by themselves. So what the hell-I was smashed and hungry and the bed was comfortable. I'd just as soon wait as fight.
After they left, I did try the door to see if they'd locked it. They hadn't, either wanting me to leave, or not caring much. I was tempted to go outside and explore, but how could I know who I'd be breaking in on? The idea of busting up somebody's fucking didn't appeal to me, so I waited.
Lucy had been found. If her explanation for all the clues she'd left with Beverly (specifically to lure me inside her whorehouse) wasn't too clear, her ease and obvious happiness were more than convincing. I had set out to find the reason for her disappearance and that had been done, at least in the literal sense. She left Hunter to become a very expensive New York prostitute.
So I knew what I came to find out. From now on any further investigation would be beating a dead horse. In retrospect, it seemed like a good trip. I'd learned a good deal about myself, things that I liked. For the first time in my life, I'd set myself a goal and Worked steadily forward until it was accomplished. Of course, everything had been planned by someone else, and I was more a fumbler than a brilliant detective, but the universe, as I'd realized years before, is not nearly so rational as books try to make it. Events appear before us as if by chance alone, and it is only the skill with which we deal with them that determines our fitness for survival. The scene in the shack with Lebon had been a tight, difficult one and if I'd hesitated even a moment, I'd undoubtedly be dead now.
Therefore, I was fit. I was able to pronounce myself a specimen worthy of survival. If someone began to reduce the population to a workable number, I'd be among those whose continued existence would benefit the species. I rolled another joint, my ego bounding happily through meadows of self-love, and smoked it. I didn't finish it, however. The grass was too strong, even for me, committed as I was to the stuff.
Lucy came back, finally. She was alone, and explained that Polly was busy preparing for this evening's entertainment. Two men were coming from Baltimore especially for one of Polly's great events.
"And I have the night off, so we can get back to old times."
She offered me the food, thick pastrami sandwiches on fresh onion bread with hot Chinese mustard. I stuffed it into my mouth, chewing and swallowing frantically. Pot does that to you. Lucy wasn't far behind me, either. We washed down the food with bottles of cream soda.
"It's funny," I said, belching happily, "I expected hummingbird tongue and caviar from Polly."
"No, no, I picked this out myself. Did you want that sort of food?"
"Nope." I belched again.
"I really like you, Billy," she said, preparing, no doubt, for some more solemn declaration.
"Beverly said that, too," I interrupted as fast as I could.
"Don't be so suspicious." Her voice was peevish, like a thwarted child which she was beginning more and more to resemble.
"I think I want to leave now. Thank you very much for a lovely afternoon." For some reason I was getting angry. Post-mortems always bothered me, anyway. I saw no sense in verbalizing what was physically obvious.
"Don't you want to watch what happens tonight?" She walked to one of the squares of black mirror and slid it up so that it disappeared back into the wall. A large screen color television set appeared as if by miracle. It certainly intrigued me.
"You mean we're going to get to see Harry?" I asked.
"Right; we're going to. We're set up for sound, too, so you'll hear every grunt and groan."
"I'll stay." It was too much to turn my back on.
"How many other girls live here?" I asked.
"There are eight girls and four guys, but they live in the next house over. We're attached by a tunnel."
That explained why the house seemed deserted while all that food was brought here every day.
"Now listen to me, Lucy. I hope you're not playing any games with me, because I'm having a groovy time and I don't want to blow it with a bad trip. So why not just tell me if you're going to stop me from leaving."
"Look, man," she said, angry, "nobody's holding you prisoner. Who the fuck do you think you are?"
"All right then, I'm leaving." I felt that I had to test it out and I walked quickly through the door, expecting trouble on the other side, but finding none. Then I continued on downstairs and out the front door. As I started up the driveway toward my car, figuring that I'd . just blown a good scene, I heard Lucy calling to me from the door.
"Come on back," she said, "I know you don't want to go."
I started back instantly. "I had to check it out," I explained.
"You're so suspicious. You'd think that you were some kind of threat to us."
When we were back upstairs sitting on the bed, she let me have what must have been on both their minds.
"He was insane. He took me to that shack of Groper's. Then he told Groper that he was going to kill him because of some beat that happened six months before. He shot him, then tried to turn the gun on me. I got really scared and just sort of did him in by instinct." I thought it best not to mention karate, holding something in reserve, anyway. "I'm sorry if it fucked you people up."
"You did us a favor," she assured me. "Groper and Lebon were loose ends. They had to be tied up by someone. Now it's done and it can never be traced to me."
"I was also a little apprehensive because of the Mafia connections Polly has."
"Oh, you've been looking at too many movies. Who told you that? The people are legitimate now."
"But you were going to kill Groper."
"We weren't going to kill anyone. I just said he was a loose end. And by the way, you don't exactly seem morally upset by his death, and you killed him."
"That's true," I admitted. "I certainly killed a man. But it was Lebon, and he was trying to kill me. That's a little different."
"Ah, let's not fight, Billy. The show'll be on in a few minutes. By the way, what's Beverly like these days? It seems like a hundred years since I've been in Hunter."
"Well," I began, "Bev's a nice girl. Really one of the best fucks in Hunter, which isn't saying too much. But she was good and willing so I can't put her down. It's just when she started on the love bullshit, I got somewhat turned off."
"She was always too emotional. If she had any real strength, she'd have come down here with me."
"Why did you tell her all those lies?" I asked. "That's what I really don't understand."
"Because I was bored, mostly. And then I wanted to see you again. Whether you know it or not, you were a big thing in Hunter. You were the big city boy and we all wanted to impress you with how hip we were. I know it was ridiculous, but up there we didn't have very much to compare ourselves with. I used to read magazine articles about what beautiful things the hippies were doing in New York and I wanted to join them, to be a part of something besides shitty Hunter. I guess you were it."
It was all very flattering, but I couldn't really believe that I was so important to the folks and I told her so.
"Don't put yourself down," she said. "What seems like nothing to you, something like smoking a joint, was everything to us. When the summer people went away, the movie theater closed down. There were no restaurants, not even a crummy bowling alley where we could hang out. The school made us cut our hair and wear long skirts. We even had to do the Pledge of Allegiance bit at assemblies. We wanted something, anything to make us believe that we had something to give to the world. It seems like a million years ago to me now, but it did happen and I was one of the ones who thought that screwing you was the way to a new beginning."
"Thanks," I said. And I meant it, too. In New York I was just another guy walking around on the streets with a few dollars in his pocket. "But why couldn't you people ever see how incredibly beautiful it is up there-those mountains are so beautiful I could hardly stand it."
"Maybe beauty isn't enough. You can only look for so long and then you come back to yourself. I once met a guy from Plymouth, Mass. I asked him about the rock where the Pilgrims landed, and he told me that all the kids used to get drunk on beer and piss on it That's just the way it is."
Suddenly the light over the bed dimmed and the television lit up. Lucy reached back for a joint.
"This is it," Lucy cried. "I love these."
Harry Warshaw was standing in the middle of that gigantic room clad only in a brief, bikini bathing suit. The top, padded heavily to give him the appearance of breasts, looked utterly ridiculous.
"He'd like to take it off, but he's too scared," Lucy explained.
Two men appeared in the picture. They were both large and naked, weight-lifters, probably.
"The tall one is Tom and the other one's Gonzales. They're good workers enjoying a reward."
"Suck me off," Gonzales said. His voice was crisp and clear from the television speakers.
"Go fuck yourself," Harry said, obviously deciding that enough is enough.
"Did you hear what my pal said?" Tom asked.
"I don't care if you kill me. I'm not doing anything."
"Such defiance," Gonzales exclaimed. "Well, don't worry, pretty, because we're not going to kill you."
In the corner of the basement was a tall house plant that looked like a young sapling. Tom went to the plant and broke off two branches, each about three feet long. He whipped them through the air, getting the feel of it, and the whoosh could be plainly heard in the bedroom Lucy and I shared.
"This is pretty good," I said.
"I'm hip."
Harry was obviously afraid, but whether he was more frightened of the sticks or the two cocks is more than I can say. He held off, though, refusing Gonzales' offer of a free male organ. Tom whipped him across the back of the legs and handed one of the branches to Gonzales, who whipped poor Harry again. Now, two red welts were plainly in evidence.
"Come on, boy," Tom coaxed, "discover your true self. Find the real you."
He slashed once again, this time catching Harry across the buttocks and stinging him right through the bikini bottoms. Still Harry refused to cooperate. Then they went to work with real dedication, really smacking the shit out of him. It seemed almost ridiculous, his skinny body against theirs, like an underground movie satirizing sadomasochism. I don't suppose Harry got the joke, though, because he was soon bleeding.
"All right!" he yelled, and there was still something of a snarl in his voice. I've got to give him credit for that much. Gonzales once again held his penis between two fingers, pushing it out at Harry who this time bent forward and touched it with his lips.
"Take the whole fuckin' thing," Gonzales warned. "And watch the teeth."
Harry did as he was told, accepting the still limp penis and taking it deep into his mouth. As it began to grow hard, Tom came up behind Harry and slipped the bikini bottoms down over Harry's legs, lifting his feet to free it from his body completely. He ran his hands up and down Harry's flanks, staring down at the buttocks with obvious relish.
"Polly said he was cherry. Do you think so?" Tom asked.
"Polly never did us wrong yet," Gonzales answered, grunting. "Don't let that dick come out of your mouth when I come," he warned Harry. "Just chug it all down. It's good for you. Pure protein is what I heard."
Harry's sucking had a little more life now. Tom parted his buttocks and took a look inside, exploring with one finger. "Yeah, it's nice and tight," he observed. "A little spit'll do the job real good."
So saying, he spit on his hands, rubbing them together, and coated his dick with the moisture. Then he pushed forward with a little sigh, burying himself in Harry's ass.
Sure enough, Harry Warshaw, who considered himself a cunt man, a hustler of women, was hard as a rock. And all the time he was sucking one man while another cornholed him.
"Jesus, that's fantastic," I said. "Did you know this would happen?"
"Of course," she answered. "If he didn't commit suicide, he'd love it. A lot of women have to be beaten first. It happens all the time."
"Speaking of hard cock," I said, "mine's not doing bad, either." I laid back on the bed, watching the not so involuntary rape of Harry Warshaw while Lucy went down on me, stripping away my pants with practiced ease. She licked me up and down and all around. I felt every thrust of Tom in Harry's ass as she sucked on me. I think that I came with Gonzales because Lucy pulled away from me at the same time he left Harry's mouth.
Tom was still actively engaged with Warshaw's person, however, so that Harry was in no way neglected. Gonsales, looking drunk, staggered behind Tom and began to be very interested in Tom's ass, prodding it and pulling at the cheeks.
For a time, I lost sight of the goings-on downstairs because my eyes were covered by Lucy's belly as she sat across my face.
"It's my turn now," she declared, and, without waiting for me to initiate the contact, began to squirm and slide her crotch across my lips. She went so far as to pull apart the lips of her vagina, bringing the delicate insides to the administration of my tongue. I refused her nothing, covering the entire area from the tip of her cleft to the tight circle of her anus with my saliva. Her writhing picked up in tempo (she, at least, was watching the television), and she began to peak almost as soon as she sat down. Her orgasm was continuous and yet filled with sudden, sharp peaks and deep, strong-thrusting valleys from which she forced her way back up with the muscular strength of her thighs.
The next time I saw daylight, my penis had again grown firm and Lucy was still astride me, a look of utmost desperation on her face. She was obviously trying for something larger than a casual roll in the hay, and she was just as obviously getting it.
Mr. Warshaw wasn't doing too badly, either, although his coming had as much pain as ecstasy to it. He was masturbating in the center of the room while the two weight-lifters looked on, occasionally cheering him toward orgasm. He was crying while he did it, large tears running along the side of his nose. His cock, however, belied the suffering he showed. It was throbbing and actually purple (whether due to the blood below the surface or the vagaries of color television is not clear).
When he came, he screamed and the sound of it, a high unearthly wail as terrible as a death chant, sent Lucy into panicky jerks and jolts. It was as if she was waiting for that signal to begin her own slow dying. I could feel each contraction of the normally smooth vaginal walls and the blood coursed through her body, suffuxing the flesh of her belly and breasts until they were bright scarlet. For a time I thought she was going to pass out before I came, an eventuality I had never had to deal with. But she passed through the peak and came down for a few seconds in which she desperately tried to catch her breath. Then she was off again, this time reaching even higher, a Prometheus in female form, defying god and man in the worship of her own pleasure. Once again I heard her breath catch in her throat and saw her eyes roll back into her head. My own screwing became immaterial, and I tended her by rolling her onto her back and getting on top, throwing her legs across my shoulders and digging to the uttermost depths of her cunt. She began to shout, speaking like a damned soul in the midst of exorcism. The words were unclear and had no meaning. Once or twice she yelled something about her father and cursed him, but her "fucks" and "shits" were so frequent nothing could be taken from it. Then my own orgasm began, and I suppose that my eyes were doing the same thing as hers. I swung upward toward the peak, pounding into her with all my strength. The last thing I felt were fingernails dug into my back and the feel of human teeth closing on my forearm.
I had either passed out, or I've forgotten whatever came after that. I remember sort of waking up (my eyes were open, yet I still say I woke) and finding Lucy lying beneath me with her eyes closed. Her palm was caressing my cheek, and she was calling my name over and over. "Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy...." It was almost a prayer the way she said it. Yet I rolled off the bed without a word and stared into the television screen, feigning interest. It had been so good that I wanted to forget it It frightened me and I became suspicious that something was being taken away from me. Warshaw was dressed in a silk blouse with long puffy sleeves and a miniskirt. Tom was applying face powder to his cheeks with a powder puff. I could almost smell the perfume from the bedroom.
"You can go now," Tom said, finishing the job.
"Isn't he pretty?" Gonazles asked no one in particular. "How do you like the new you?"
Warshaw said nothing, putting up with each new indignity. I lost myself in wondering just how he was going to live with himself now. Would he wear his blouse and skirt proudly? He certainly enjoyed the role. But I really doubted that he'd do more than cast both articles aside the first chance he got. He'd tell no one what he undoubtedly had known long before he came to Polly's; that he was a fag, disguising his lust for cock by hatred and cheating. His proof of manhood was the money he could steal from his friends, when he had them, for friendship passed from his grasp as quickly as his capital at the racetrack. Then he was gone, and I never saw him again.
"What did you think of our entertainment, Mr. Pechuski?" a voice called. It was Polly. She must have just come in because the door was still open.
"I think that if you call me Mr. Pechuski one more time I'm going to break your nose," I answered.
"He's feeling real tough," Lucy observed petulantly. I turned to find that she was sneering at me.
"What's wrong?" I asked her.
"You are, you prick," was all she had to say.
"It's funny how some women really hate a good poking," I returned, speaking to Polly. "I believe that psychiatrists call it frigidity."
"Now stop it, you people," Polly ordered. "Why in God's name would you ruin a magnificent evening?" She acted like she really didn't understand it, and when we thought about it, neither Lucy nor I could find any reason for quarreling.
"Well, I'd better go. It looks like the party's over."
"I want to discuss something with you first," Polly said. "It'll only take a moment." I sat back on the bed and she went on, "The kind of show we put on here tonight is a beautiful thing, the nearest we can come to an art form. We have many very beautiful girls here, but what we lack is a man with a subtle enough imagination to really bring off something spectacular. I think you're the man to do it. I thought so even before I met you. Wait, don't say anything yet." She saw that I was about to refuse out of hand, and held me back so that she could complete her offer. "I want to make films here. Not just trash for the schoolyard circuit, but really good erotic movies that will work through the same kind of underground network that produced Andy Warhol. He started with nothing but see what he is now. I'm offering you the same chance with a lot of money thrown in besides. And I mean tens of thousands of dollars just as a beginning. I'll get you the best technicians in the business."
"Polly," I finally got a chance to break in, "I don't know anything about movies."
"You can pick up the technical stuff easily. I feel that you're someone I can trust"
"Well, m think it over and let you know."
"Will you stay here tonight?" Lucy asked "What?"
"Please do," Polly coaxed. "In the morning well show you some of the pleasures of our other quarters. There are things there you wouldn't believe. I believe it will help you to make up your mind about my proposition."
I agreed to stay, mostly because I was too tired to do anything else. Polly seemed about to propose a little midnight romp, but that too was definitely out. If I'd had the energy to fuck, I would have gone to my own bed. As it was, I tumbled onto Polly's and asked that the lights be turned out, and that I be left undisturbed.
CHAPTER NINE
I slept well that night, better than I had for a long time. Finally, it was all over. There was no longer that pressure to succeed, to follow through no matter what the obstacles. The bed was warm and soft, the temperature kept to a bearable level by air conditioning. I dreamed of Hunter and Lucy. We were in a shack on top of Jewitt Mountain and the sun was setting behind us, throwing a salmon pink mantle over distant Hunter Mountain. We were arguing about why she went to Polly Satin's. She contended that she was in desperate trouble and I kept saying, "Nonsense. You're just another runaway with hot pants. A few months of city life is what you need. That and a good kick in the ass."
As soon as I'd finished she'd begin to protest all over again, explaining that I didn't understand the nature of these people who held her prisoner (all this though the two of us were alone on a Catskill meadow, but that's the way dreams go). If I knew, she declared, I'd be just as frantic as she because my danger was as real as her own.
Just toward morning (in Bayside) we began to make love. She was lying on top of me, kissing me and whispering in my ear. "Save me," she said. "Just save me."
It was on that note that I awoke. The dream had seemed incredibly real to me. I wanted to search her out and make sure everything was all right The momentary relief of realizing it was all a dream passed quickly away, to be replaced by a strong anxiety. Outside the window, the world was a dull, pre-dawn gray. Birds were making a commotion over their young and looking for insects in the dew-moistened grass, while a dog barked from the park, probably let out early for a morning run on its own. To go downstairs and hunt for Lucy was rationally absurd. I didn't know what I'd be walking into. There might have been thirty-five paying Mafia killers or three Senators on vacation with their secretaries. It wasn't my home, and I had no right to disrupt the normal schedule of the household.
I began to wish that I'd gone home the night before. Then it would be all out of my hands. I could go back to Hunter or take the trip to the West Coast that I'd been planing for over a year. Perhaps some sixth sense had held me back the night before. I felt an overwhelming sense of something big having happened while I was asleep.
I went into the bathroom and washed, brushed and dried, trying to work myself out of the mood I was in. But nothing helped. I found myself staring at the bedroom door as if a vampire was about to enter. The feeling was exactly like the fright that comes just before the penultimate horror in one of Hitchcock's movies.
I finally surrendered and put on my clothes. The door was unlocked, and the hall was empty. The only sound I heard as I descended the spiral staircase was the thud of my heels against the carpet. Downstairs, the same dim hallway with its rare, expensive paintings greeted me with mute eloquence. I had no other choice but to open doors at random, praying that I wouldn't make a fool of myself by busting in on some tryst. As I touched the doorknob I imagined myself being laughed at by several naked women who would have no way, wrapped as they were in their own sensual warmth, to know why I was afraid. I had a flash that I mustn't open the door, that to open the door meant the end of myself. Then I pushed it silently forward.
The room was simply constructed, a perfect square dominated by a polished mahogany desk. Seated at the desk, with a pen in her hand, just as if interrupted in the act of completing some piece of delicate correspondence, sat Polly Satin. She was bent slightly forward and though her eyes were turned toward the surface of the desk and her work, she was smiling graciously, as though her lovely smile were directed at someone....In her head, buried to the wood, was a double bladed axe, a short, heavy professional implement.
I screamed once, very loud and very short. My whole body shook. I flashed on her breasts and thighs as I'd seen them just the night before. I had fucked this woman. She was alive. She breathed and pissed and combed her hair late at night after finishing her work. I couldn't accept what I saw and began to call her name over and over. For some reason I had to touch her; I had to feel her flesh once more. She was cold; cold and stiff. As hard now as she'd been yielding before. Dried blood covered her face and breast and still she smiled that happy grin.
I couldn't run, and I couldn't stay. What do you do when you find your lover with an axe buried in her skull, with small gray sections of her brain visible all around the blade? I kept thinking that she had called me Mr. PechusM, and how pretentious that had been of her.
I should have examined the room, run over it for some sort of clue, but I couldn't concentrate. Finally Lucy popped into my head. I ran from room to room, trying to find her, but each room was empty. Its expensive furniture, useless now, something to be impounded by the police. I remembered the tunnel that Lucy spoke about and searched for it until I found it But the other house was exactly the same-empty of any sort of life. Not even a cat to show that people lived there.
I'd left my fingerprints all over everything, and the cops would probably be looking for me. I wanted to go back to Polly, to sit by her with my arms supporting her head until someone came to clear up the mess, but the most elemental sense of survival told me to get the hell out of there. As I closed the door behind me, without a trace of ambition left, I thought that I was already dead, that I could not live again. She had such beautiful breasts. Her body made for balling, to be loved again and again. I could almost taste her kisses, the slightly minty flavor of her breath and the perfume she dabbed on the inside of her thighs. That axe and her smile, they're still with me. I carry them from place to place, when I caress my wife and when I kiss my children coming home from school.
From Bayside to Flushing is about a ten-minute drive. I don't know how I got back. It was as if someone else was driving. I learned just how automatic some habits are. There was a parking space I always used, down below Lawrence Street where the factories were, and I found it open. Then two blocks to the home of my parents where I threw myself down on the couch and refused to think of anything.
CHAPTER TEN
I spent the rest of the summer locked in my bedroom. I smoked an incredible amount of grass, trying to bury myself in daydreams that always returned to the smile of Polly Satin at her writing desk. My parents came back from their trip, but said nothing to me, probably considering my mood nothing more than the depression of ended adolescence. When it became fall and I had made no effort to go to school or get a job, when it became clear that I had no interest in friends or women, they suggested a psychiatrist.
I wanted to tell them that I'd seen three dead people while they were boating in Bermuda, that I'd killed one myself, but there seemed no point in it. When someone called, I refused to go out Soon they stopped calling. Once I even spoke to Harry Warshaw who threatened to kill me. It was only comic relief, the most sardonic of humor for a man who felt himself already dead.
I lost twenty pounds, and I was not fat to begin with. I found hair in my comb when I reluctantly put myself together in the mornings. The weather turned wet and nasty; the radio predicted an epidemic of influenza on the way and urged all citizens to watch for the first signs and go to bed. I never seemed to get out of bed. My room was ten by eight, with a small Sony television that ran from the moment I arose until I decided that sleep was finally possible.
Then it all exploded. One evening my father called me out to the living room. My mother was away with friends for the evening, a weekly bridge game which my father detested. When I walked out to see what he wanted, expecting another lecture on the virtues of analysis, he'd set up his film projector and was about to show something on the wall.
"Sit down, Bill," he said firmly.
Then the projector began to whirr and I watched myself cavorting with Polly and Lucy once again. Everything was there, every grunt and groan of our long, complicated fuck. Then Lucy and I were alone, and I listened to myself admit to lolling a man.
"Well?" my father asked when the film was over.
"Polly Satin's dead." That was all I could think to say.
"I know that." He was angry and getting angrier. "Did you kill her, too?"
Then he looked up into my eyes and saw that I was close to murder, that I could easily kill him on the spot It seemed to make no difference.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean that. The thing with Lebon, it was self-defense, wasn't it...."
"Yes."
"I wanted to run for Congress. You didn't know that."
"No, I didn't," I said. "But that would have made no difference. I'm not happy that your plans were ruined. Tell me how you got this."
"It was sent in the mail with a warning. I was informed to keep out of other people's affairs. 'Stay in your backyard,' I think it said."
"What does that mean?"
"The Hunter ski project."
Suddenly I became very interested. "What about a Hunter ski project? I didn't know anything about it."
"Well," he said, "Hunter's dying as a summer resort area. All the trade's gone to Monticello, so some of the people up there are trying to promote the idea of a ski resort. It would only be three hours out of New York, close enough to lure the poorer ski patrons. I bought a lot of land two years ago, almost all of East Jewitt Mountain, and I'm trying to get some local people up there to use that as the slope. I was going to build a hotel, a first class job, and a chair lift, and for the rest, let some of the others get a foothold on the overflow. They needed New York money."
"So who's trying to stop you? Why is someone trying to stop you?"
"That's what I don't understand. There's no one else with nearly enough capital as far as I know. It's a risky project with a good chance of losing a lot of money."
"Well, what happens to you if the deal doesn't come off?"
"I spent an awful lot of money on land. But I suppose I could get it back if I sold it in small lots. I might even build some A-frame summer houses and make a bit. If they don't mean for me to get out completely."
"Are you going to give in to this?" I couldn't believe that he'd just fall down and surrender.
"You know, I'm getting on. This is Mafia business and it's just a little too tough. I don't want to get involved."
"What do you know about the Mafia?"
"They're everywhere. And very legitimate for the most part. But when things get rough, they can handle that, too."
"You're full of shit!" I yelled. "Oh, man, I know who you are. You knew about Polly and Groper and Lebon. You know too fucking much for an old man. What kind of crap are you into? Why do you want to lie to me? Do you have any idea what Polly looked like? Someone hit her with an axe and she died. An axe! Hunter. That's where it's at. It was a professional axe, a woodsman's axe. Not a city axe. You're a liar, Pop, and you'll never tell me the truth."
"Take it easy, Bill," he protested, "sure I knew Polly. She ran the best whorehouse in the world. You were there once yourself, remember?"
I hesitated, the accusation on my lips, but unspoken. Why waste breath? I wanted to hit him, to get the message of what his lying did to me across as directly as possible. He saw my rage and backed away from it
"Where's Lucy Nye?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"But you know who she is, don't you?"
"I've been a friend of the Nye family for fifteen years."
"What do you know about Groper and Lebon?"
"I know they worked for Polly Satin. She had some kind of smuggling scene going on and she used them to retail drugs upstate. They worked mostly in Albany."
"How do you know all this?"
He didn't answer because the answer would have damned him. I wondered if my mother knew what was going on. Just the thought of having someone like him as a Congressman made me give up all hope for America. And how many others were there? How many others are there right now, half-involved in murder and lies?
"Can't you at least admit what you are?" I asked, shaking my head. "You suck."
"What do you know?" he said. "You're a naive kid. This is what's happening in the world and you better get used to it. This is where the money is, and if you want it you've got to live there. You don't seem to mind spending my ill-gotten gains very much."
"Open the safe, Pop."
"What?"
"The safe behind the painting where you keep your cash. Open it Right now."
He saw that I meant it and --edged toward the drawer of an antique desk where he kept a gun, a souvenir, or so I was told, of his army life.
"If you get any closer to the gun, ni beat the shit out of you. Mama was very wise to train me in the manly art of self-defense. My self is very well defended indeed. I killed Lebon with my bare hands. Remember that"
I wonder now whether I meant what I said. Challenging your father is not an easy thing, but I did it instinctively. Whereas curiosity and a vague sense of a goal was enough to move me before Polly's death, only hatred could stir me now, and I felt it for everybody and everything.
He opened the safe without further protest emptying its contents as if anticipating my requests. I went through them slowly, watching him out of the corner of my eye. There was a bunch of deeds to Hunter land, just as he'd told me, along with seven thousand dollars in cash which I put in my pocket, the money bulging absurdly. Then I found something of special interest: plans for a large motel with a casino at its center. Gambling is illegal in New York State except at racetracks. There was no reason to put a casino in a ski resort.
"What's this?"
"It's a casino."
"For a ski resort?"
"We're working on legislation in the Capitol. It was only tentative."
"And you were going to be a Congressman."
"I couldn't do anything from Washington. Don't be ridiculous. Those plans weren't final."
I changed the subject. "What are you going to tell Mama when she comes home?"
"I'm not going to tell her anything."
"I'm not coming back."
"That's your affair."
"Shell know something happened," I said. "She's not stupid."
He said nothing, apparently not caring. The love between us had run out a long time before.
"I'm going through the desk," I declared, pushing him out of the way. The pistol lay where it usually was. I pushed it aside to discover some old photos of myself as a child, and the usual collection of junk accumulated in an unused desk. I was searching for some reference to Lucy Nye, supposing that my father had had a hand in Polly's death too. But I found nothing of interest.
"Tell me about Lucy," I said.
"I don't know anything about her. She was a nice kid, but I haven't seen her in five years. Why are you so interested in her?"
"That was Lucy in the film. She was the girl with Polly."
"I didn't know that"
"I went to Polly's looking for her." I said nothing for a few minutes, looking calmly through the papers in the desk, the old coloring book and fairy tales. "Do you really expect me to believe that people went to the trouble of getting her all the way to New York just to blackmail you?"
"That wouldn't make much sense. How can you be sure that whoever killed Polly was after the film and had nothing to do with Lucy? I don't know who sent the film to me, but I have an idea that whoever it is, wants to be the first one to ski at Hunter. Maybe it's all Mafia business and Polly was executed for some infraction unrelated to me or you or Lucy Nye."
"With an axe? That's not very professional."
I found some pictures in the drawer, nude shots of my mother when she was very young. My father blushed at their exposure, as if they called up something he'd rather not remember. Maybe it was just my being there and seeing them.
"I was young once," he declared. "You've done it too, I guess."
I wanted to find something devastating. I wanted something to pour from the drawer in the form of a document explaining why I was involved in all that ugliness. I was going to leave the apartment that night, but where would I go? No place seemed compelling enough. But I knew even while I spoke to my father that it would be Hunter, and once again I would be searching for Lucy Nye. I had no reason to find her, nothing to learn except that she had lured me to the city to blackmail my father. It didn't matter. I had nothing better to do in a world where a ski resort was cause enough for murder and seduction. It wasn't only that these people had no love, "no affection for the things around them. Their goals were just as absurd, just as artificial as my decision to follow the trail of Lucy Nye. Death was incidental, like Lebon who was one clue and then proved himself too dangerous.
My father needed money like a bullet in his head, but he pursued his Hunter millions with dedication, even working on the legislature to give him the first gambling house in the state. I knew that if some human sensibilities still worked in his mind, he would instinctively turn away from that horror, that ugliness of Groper, Lebon and Polly Satin. But there was nothing to him, but the will to power, and nothing in me, either, which was capable of loving him.
Nothing very exciting was in the drawer. My father watched me carefully, his eyes very large behind his glasses and I wondered, as I pocketed the gun and moved toward the door, if my eyes would go as I grew older.
"Well, so long, Pop," I said, and slid out the door and pressed the elevator button, half expecting him to come after me. He didn't, and that was all to the good. My car, though unused for a long time, started up on the first try. I slid the gun into the glove compartment and locked it tight, heading for the Triborough Bridge and the New York Thruway.
I passed the familiar landmarks that indicated the stages of my journey-the Bronx, the Tappan Zee Bridge, the toll booth where I picked up a ticket instead of paying every few miles. At the Ramapa Rest Stop, a large cafeteria, I pulled off in search of a cup of coffee, and a few minutes of thought The coffee was easy to find, but thinking was difficult I couldn't seem to seize on an idea that wasn't depressing.
It was drizzling when I came back to the car. At the junction of the rest stop and the thruway, a lone hitchhiker stood, trying somehow to keep dry by hunching his shoulders and doing a litfle dance, his thumb extended hopefully.
I slowed down to pick him up. I made it my business to give rides to those without cars, having suffered from that affliction for many years. The hitchhiker turned out to be someone I knew, a casual friend named Gary Pagano, universally known as Gary the Pagan. His long hair hung down to his shoulders and was generally immaculate, wavy and sinning. Now it had been soaked and hung in thick strings. He wore cutaway denim jacket with the insignia of his motorcycle club on the back: The Youthful Offenders.
"Hey, man," I said, "what happened to the bike?"
"I blew the engine in Woodstock. A total loss. I been tryin' to steal another bike all week. I don't wanta talk about it."
"Where ya goin'?"
"Anywhere."
We rode in silence for a while. Gary had a smooth face with one prominent feature, his straight Italian nose which looked as if it was lifted from a Roman bust. He had a reputation for being mean and very good to have on your side in a fight.
"Hey Billy," he finally opened up. "What the hell happened to you? I haven't seen you in a long time."
"I've been very hung up," I answered.
"What about?"
Anyone else would have shied away from asking such questions, but Gary was nothing if not blunt. If he was anyone else I would never have bothered to answer, probably kicking whoever it was out of the car. But Gary was a special case. He could listen to the most atrocious story without batting an eye and had, indeed, performed acts of such atrocity that my own experience would seem small by comparison.
So I told him the whole story, beginning with Lucy's disappearance and ending with the taking of the gun from my father. By the time I.reached the end of my little saga, I was more depressed than ever. Where the hell was I going?
"Where the hell am I going?" I asked, not expecting an answer.
"You mean you don't know?"
"Don't play with my head, Gary."
"Take it easy, man. Obviously, you're going to do two things. You're going to find Lucy Nye and avenge the murder of Polly Satin. Man, the way you described that bitch, I sure wish I could have had a shot at her. Man. My dick's up now; you got any connections for pussy in that town? What's the name, Hunter?"
He was inviting himself on my trip, and I wasn't sure I wanted him along. So I said nothing in return, driving steadily through the rain. After Exit 14, the distances between the exits grew larger, averaging about fifteen miles. At that time of the year, just after Labor Day and before the first snowfall, the thruway upstate is almost deserted. Every once in a while I'd pass another car, but most of the time it was a straight ride with my mind a million miles away.
"What's wrong?" Gary asked.
"Nothing, man."
"You don't have to bullshit me. I'm no fuckin' asshole." He was getting angry, which took a lot of nerve. "You told me the story. Nobody made you."
"Listen, man," I began, "Polly Satin was a whore, dope pusher, Mafia woman. Now what sense does it make to avenge her for anything?"
"It has to make sense?"
That stopped me. After all, nothing else made any sense either.
"How am I supposed to find Lucy Nye?"
"Ask Beverly's father. He knows."
For someone who just heard the story for the first time, he was pretty good at sizing up the situation. Mr. Peterson seemed to have a finger in every pie, although his precise connection with the whole business was, to say the least, unclear.
"You want in on the whole business?" I asked him, waiting carefully for his reaction.
"Sure, man, I'm just as bored as you are."
"Let me tell you how I want to play it. If you don't care for my methods, I'll drop you off in Woodstock, and we'll forget about each other, all right?"
"Sure, man." He was so sure of himself it was easy to see why he put people on their guard.
"I'm going to play it their way. I want you to push people who won't talk to me. No one knows who you are up there so whatever you do, it'll take time before anyone can find you. I know a place on the mountain where no one ever comes, and we stay there until the job is over."
"Does that mean I don't get no pussy?"
"Yeah, that's a problem."
We rode on for a time, not speaking. Gary was rubbing his crotch which bulged suggestively. It was obvious that he wasn't going to take celibacy too well.
"I'll bring the chicks up to you. Well tell them you're my cousin. But you can't show your face in town."
"Don't bring Beverly. She's tied in somewhere."
"She's a good lay," I said.
"Okay, bring her up. But she doesn't go down again."
"Lemme think about that one?"
"Sure, man."
A half hour later we reached Exit 20 and got off, heading west on 32, then turning into 23A which took us through capital cities as Haines Falls and Veteran before we began to climb the mountains. There was no one on the road, the houses were all dark and seemingly deserted. Summer motels were boarded up for the long winter.
I turned off the road onto a gravel top that went almost straight up to the top of East Jewitt Mountain which my father owned. There was a house on top, lost in the forest. It had neither plumbing nor electricity, but there was a working fireplace for heat and all the wood we could chop.
"Here it is," I said, running for the house to escape the rain. Gary followed a step behind, and we plunged in to find a pile of wood, cut perhaps by a hunter, standing high and dry by the fireplace.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next day rose bright and crisp. The temperature had dropped during the night and the trees and meadows were covered with frost. Unfortunately, we had no food for breakfast, so while Gary set out to get a fire going, I started for the village.
Getson's Supermarket, a tiny grocery store on Hunter's Main Street, was almost empty. Getson pronounced himself happy to see me back in town, cutting the beef and counting out his eggs while I watched the street for women. I felt much better. Somehow, Gary's unconquerable sexuality had stirred me up, and I was looking forward to whatever scene would develop at the cabin.
The kids were all on their way to school, and I felt like a cradle-snatcher as I watched them parade by, their hard, adolescent buttocks high in the air. Then the Cogley twins, looking just as washed out and lifeless as ever, paraded by and my fantasy knew no bounds. They were so personally repulsive, without being truly ugly, they excited me.
"Hi, Rose. Hi, Sylvia," I called, coming out into the street.
"Oh, it's you," they said, having grown very little in the months since our last contact.
"Yup, it's old Bill Pechuski, all right."
"We gotta go to school," Rose said, frowning.
"How old are you two, anyway?" It seemed to me that they had been going to school for a long time.
"Eighteen," Sylvia replied. "We got left back."
At least they weren't afraid. "It's just too bad you have to go. I've got a friend up at the cabin who'd just love to meet you, and I think you'd get a big bang out of meeting him."
They got my meaning easily enough, and went into a huddle, trying to decide if they could get away with playing hooky that day.
"Have you got any pot?" Rose asked finally.
"Of course," I answered without hesitation, though I didn't, and hadn't even thought about grass in a long time.
"Then we'll go."
They got into the car without further hesitation, and I drove back up the mountain as fast as I could without attracting any police comment. When we got to the cabin, Gary was out in front. His face lit up at the sight of the Cogleys. I had been afraid they'd disappoint him, but he was always one for quantity rather than quality.
He tried to embrace Rose as she got out, but she pushed him away. "What about the pot?" she asked.
"Well," I began, rather hopelessly.
"Here ya go, girls," Gary said, offering a joint and coming to my rescue.
"I didn't know you had that," I said.
"Oh, man, when don't I have grass?"
The girls smoked happily, getting stoned very quickly. Gary and I weren't far behind, pulling on joints of our own. Inside the barn was a single bed, and Gary started to pull Rose down on it.
"Wait a minute, Gary. There's something special they do first," I said. "Come on, girls, it's time for the show."
They went to it with quiet enthusiasm, undressing to embrace each other, rubbing their breasts together, teasing each other's pussy with delicate fingertips. Rose pushed Sylvia down on the bed, and pushed her face between the girl's thighs. Sylvia moaned and covered her sister's head with her own legs, rubbing her tits and belly.
Gary couldn't believe what he was seeing. Like everyone else, he believed country girls to be repressed, sexually frightened creatures. In the country, there's nothing else to do but fuck, and these girls were proving that true. They changed positions quickly and expertly, each knowing just how to get the other off. By the time Gary and I had stripped, each had managed to have a small orgasm.
Gary pushed Rose down on the bed and prepared to enter her while I stood watching with Sylvia. Unfortunately for Gary, Rose had other plans about how to ball.
"Don't put it in me," she cried. "I don't like that."
"Well, what the fuck," Gary said, beginning to get angry.
"Let me blow you," Rose suggested. "And you can eat me if you want to." That was fine with Gary. He fastened his mouth to her wet gash as she took his cock into her mouth, squeezing his balls and running a hand across his buttocks. I sat down on a chair and pulled Sylvia onto my lap. As my prick disappeared into her, into the heat and wetness, I realized just how much I'd been torturing myself with my self-imposed retreat. I came in two minutes, happily, but with a touch of regret. Sylvia was the obvious loser in the exchange.
"That's no good," she yelled. "Rose, come and fix me up."
Rose wasted no time in leaving Gary and coming to Sylvia, her first love in life. I surrendered my chair to her, who sat with her legs wide apart while Rose sucked out my sperm, bringing Sylvia to a quick, ferocious climax that prepared the way for Gary, who made sure he had the one who liked to fuck. He pulled Sylvia onto the bed and shoved it in, banging away like a madman while Rose went down on me with her never-tiring mouth.
We took turns, Rose and I, leaping at each other until she began to hit her peak. She forgot about me then, and concentrated on the sensations I was causing her. I drank the minute quantity of her orgasm, taking each drop on my tongue and swallowing it slowly, like it was the most aged and delicate of Spanish wines, while she twisted and squirmed. Then we watched Gary and Sylvia who were both coming madly. My own prick hadn't been satisfied by the expert tickling of Rose's tongue, so I squeezed in beside Gary and Sylvia. , Finding a way to Sylvia's anus, I pierced her with my wet cock. She accepted the burden gracefully, too lost in her own coming to worry much over the pain of it. Gary's hand, in its wandering, found my staff as it plunged into Sylvia's ass and gave it a good-natured squeeze. It stirred me up and I managed to come even before the two of them had finished their exchange.
Then we all lay silently, exhausted, though we'd only been at it for twenty minutes, so hot had we been before we started. I'd come twice, a mute acknowledgment of my previous sexual confusion. Gary was smiling and happy. He'd probably figured that nothing was going to happen, that he'd be stuck in a Hunter cabin with no outlet for his ever-hot prick. What had happened was not only more than he'd expected, but as much as he'd ever had, though certainly not more. An orgy on his first day, undoubtedly more than he ever expected from the country town of Hunter, was enough, I was sure, to keep him happy.
We made breakfast and shared it with the Cogleys who stuffed the food into their mouths with the heady abandon of kids who'd never been trained to stifle their feelings. They were still naked and made no attempt to hide their tiny, delicate breasts or brash red mounds.
"Let me have a suck on those titties?" I asked Rose. She gave them to me without pausing, and I nibbled on the firm white flesh and the more sensitive pink nipples until they stood out happily, bouncy and cheery. I pinched them, gently at first, and then harder, until she moaned and fell into my arms, squeezing my cock to get me hard. She actually pulled me inside her, stretching out on the floor to receive me.
I held nothing back, sinking to the hilt. I felt my balls slapping against her upraised ass, touching the still wet hole that oozed droplets of my sperm. Rose was the one who didn't like being fucked, who preferred the oral forms of sex, but this time she made no protest, heated to the point of combustion by the morning's activities. I stroked her hard buttocks, shoved a finger into her while Sylvia, with her thighs around Gary's head, called her encouragement
"Isn't it nice, Rosie," she cried. "I knew you could get to like it. I knew you could."
Rose said nothing, twisting on the fulcrum of my prick, biting on my throat like a vampire. I thought she was going to fly into pieces, but only her pussy broke, seeming to split open as wave after wave of heavy mucous eased the passage of my prick, greased the long tube of her vagina. She came so heavily I couldn't believe it, but her reluctance had the same effect as my two months in my parents' apartment. And I was the lucky recipient of all that stored-up heat. When I came, even though my sperm shot out of me, it was nothing to her. She continued her delirious groaning and twisted her body like she could never give up the rod that pierced her.
I gave up my place to Gary, who entered her quickly, crying, "It's just like having a virgin."
Rose took his length and pulled on his buttocks to drive him in deeper. I tended Sylvia's extended pussy, licking over her clit and cleft while she wriggled like a happy little girl, enjoying her sister's heat almost as much as Gary, who plunged in and pulled out, acceding to Rose's demands with enthusiasm.
Then Gary came, and still Rose wasn't happy. She called to her sister who knelt down between her legs and put in two fingers cautiously. Rose showed no objection and Sylvia twined her body around so that her own pussy was poised over Rose's face. Then she dropped it down and both of them were happily absorbed in self-worship.
Gary and I smoked some grass and counted the orgasms that went before us. Rose and her sister seemed unaware that we were even there. For forty-five minutes they went at it without letting up. No part of either body from toe to ear seemed without its assigned movement. The perspiration that built up on their bodies made them shine with slippery lust and we both knew that they might as well have been in the room by themselves for all our presence meant to them.
"Don't you think that's sweet?" Gary asked.
The girls made no response, only burrowing down deeper.
"It's pretty interesting," I answered. "I don't think I've ever seen such dedication."
"Maybe we should join them." His penis was erect once again, and he held it out toward the two on the bed as if they must suddenly jump up, forget what they were doing, and leap toward the offered bit of flesh. Naturally, they didn't make a move, not even noticing him or his offering. They continued to work on each other, their groans and sudden heaves growing still wilder.
"I'd offer it to you," he said, "but I hear you don't go that route."
"That's right."
"Too bad."
"Well," I suggested with a wave of my hand, "why not just jump on top. I'm sure they won't object."
Gary, realizing the ultimate necessity of relieving the tension in his testicles, did just what I said. He flattened himself on top of the two girls, and introduced his cock to the mouth, pussy and anus below. Something (it was impossible for me to see just what was happening in that welter of flesh) obviously took hold of him, because he groaned once and began to stroke away. With his face at the other end poised over the buttocks of one of the twins, he watched the avid tonguing for a few seconds, then lowered his face between the shining cheeks and began to offer a little oral satisfaction of his own.
I watched all this from the bed, very stoned and not at all anxious to join the fun. Amazing as it seems, I was fighting the onset of another round of depression. I felt the same lethargy coming back on me, as if I was still in my parents' apartment with the television blasting and the image of Polly Satin's split skull foremost in my mind. Yet I didn't-couldn't-allow the emotion to come on because incapacitation was its only reward. So I studied the writhing figures on the bed. But I felt no urge to slide myself down onto the layers of pleasure.
One by one, the players dropped out. Rose wriggled out from underneath the others and fell to the floor, leaving Gary with an aching rod which he masturbated fiercely, his eyes shut tight until at last he, too, had emptied himself of seed and desire. Then he was still. No sound but the sound of heavy breathing, of sweat-soaked skin sliding, of legs and arms trying to find comfortable positions.
"We gotta go home soon," Sylvia declared, lying on her back with thighs well apart.
"Yeah, we better go," Rose confirmed. "But it was real good, wasn't it?" She was looking at Gary, but he said nothing, perhaps not even hearing the question, or thinking it was meant for someone else.
"Yeah, we gotta go," Sylvia repeated.
I taxied them down the mountain and dropped them off in front of the school. It was about noon and there were kids playing in the same area where I'd found a scagged out Lebon months before. I found myself looking for Beverly, although I knew she'd graduated the year before. I felt much older than nineteen, older by far than the children who played there, although only one year before I'd been throwing balls around in front of a similar building in Manhattan.
"It's a drag," I told Gary upon returning. "I feel like a Martian."
"Eat it, man," he answered uncharitably. "What a great morning. I feel tremendous. This country air and country cunt ... Lead me to the Mafia and let me kick some ass. Holy shit, do I feel the power coming on. Where's Billy Graham?"
I looked at him and realized how right he was by any other standards than my own. I was free of so many things now. My parents were in New York and neither knew nor cared what I was doing. I had absolutely no responsibilities that weren't self-imposed, and there were precious few of them. There was good grass and the kind of pussy that is both satisfying and undemanding. What was I complaining about?
"Well," Gary observed, "it's about time we went and found ourselves a killer. What's the first step?"
"We've certainly blown our hiding place."
"You think those two bitches are mixed up in this?"
"No, but they'll rap about the long hair up in the woods, and you won't be anonymous any more."
"Who can they talk to?"
"I don't know. But anyone might be involved in all this. Maybe their father is the axeman we're looking for. I can't tell."
"Well," he observed, "I'm sure they're not gonna tell their father they spent the day screwing in the woods."
"Maybe not," I said, "but there's no way to be certain that you haven't been found out. Suppose you had to go down and work on someone: how could we be sure the Cogley's wouldn't see you?"
"Who gives a shit? What we need is a plan and some lunch."
We got a fire going quickly and slapped the chopped meat into acceptable patties, improvising a grill from a few old strands of barbed wire. Gary went off to fetch water from a nearby stream about a quarter of a mile away and I sat poking the meat with a long hunting knife I'd had from camping days.
"Hello, Billy." The voice was painfully familiar, and I turned to find Beverly standing just behind me.
"Where's your axe?" I asked.
"What?"
"How did you know I was here?" This was the most important question.
"Getson told me he'd seen you this morning, so I came up looking." She reached out to kiss me, flouncing her skirt so I caught a glimpse of her panties underneath.
"You're lying, Beverly. You couldn't know I'd be up here. There's no way."
She stopped short with her lips pursed, looking like a fish that found air where there should have been water. Then she switched to a quick pout, still trying to look sexy. Actually, the bulge of her hips against the cotton dress was lovely, but the Cogleys had fortified me for the onslaught.
"Some of the kids saw your car come up the road. Why are you so suspicious?"
Lucy had said the same thing to me the night before Polly's murder. If I had acted on my suspicions then, I would have been free of the whole thing. Naturally, she was lying. No one had seen me take the turnoff, the area being virtually deserted, and besides, everyone was in school.
"Strip, Beverly. I haven't seen you in a long time."
She did what I told her, slipping hurriedly out of blouse and skirt, bra and panties. It was chilly on top of the mountain, and she leaned down toward me for a warming squeeze. I aided her by grabbing her left nipple and pinching it as hard as I could.
"Oh, my God!" she screamed. "Why did you do that? You hurt me. Oh, there's blood."
"Don't worry. They were funny-looking, anyway."
"I'm leaving right now." She started to gather up her clothing.
"No, you're not You're staying."
She dropped everything and stared at me, trying to give herself an air of sad misunderstanding. "What's happened to you? You've changed so much."
"Since when did you go in for mountain climbing? You didn't come up in a car. Who brought you? Is your father hiding in the trees with his axe? You'd better tell me, Beverly."
She looked pretty funny standing there naked, her red mound bulging forward just as if we were about to enter into a passionate embrace. Our exchange was passionate, but not likely to involve the use of that ridiculous pussy. I saw Gary watching from the woods behind her.
"Is there someone out there in the woods waiting to get me!" I yelled, hoping that Gary could hear me from where he was hiding. He disappeared while she was making sounds of denial.
"Jesus, you got fumy tits," I said.
Her face reddened and I thought for an instant that I was about to get the traditional slap in the face (an act which would have cost poor Beverly dearly) but she suddenly smiled.
"Yeah," she said, "they are pretty funny-looking. But they're very sensitive. They like to be licked." She rubbed the sore one and smiled at me as if we were at last about to reach the point for which she'd come here. I could see Gary again, he was about fifty yards away, standing behind a rock and shrugging his shoulders. I waved him in to the cabin.
When she saw him, she tried to grab her clothes and cover her body, but I prevented her by throwing all her clothes into the fire, and she had to content herself with her hands.
"Gary, this is Beverly. Beverly, may I present Gary the Pagan."
"How do you do, miss," Gary said. "Please don't be alarmed. I'm as much of a prisoner as yourself."
"What's he doing here?" Beverly demanded.
"Can't I bring my friends up to visit?" I asked. "Anyone out there, Gary?"
"There's a car parked about half a mile down the road. I didn't get close enough to really see anything, but I'm pretty sure someone's inside."
"Who's in the car, Beverly?"
"Nobody. I just left it down there because the road's so bad. I thought I'd surprise you."
"Want me to go down and take a look?" Gary offered.
"No. I'll go. Maybe FH know who it is. Watch Beverly, and if she tries anything at all, just kick the shit out of her."
I disappeared into the woods, heading east. From that side of the road, I could approach the car from above and stood a better chance of not being spotted. I tried to gauge half a mile without ever coming into view of the road. The woods had been thinned out by early forest and were easy to walk, no thick undergrowth to cling to the legs. I tried to be as quiet as possible as I moved toward the road.
I recognized the car as soon as I saw it; a 1969 black Oldsmobile, with red interior and a black vinyl top. At the wheel, staring intently up the road, was my father, his face florid and impatient. I stifled an urge to confront him and crept back into the woods.
"Let's go. We're moving," I told Gary and Beverly. We scooped up our few things and began to walk into the forest. "We'll get the car later." She stopped shivering as soon as the exercise heated her up. She tried to ask me questions, but I ignored her and pushed forward through the pines, letting them snap back against her naked skin.
It was a beautiful autumn day, the sun bright in a deep blue sky. The change of color had been going on for almost a month and most of the leaves had already fallen. The few that remained were red and orange and gold, just enough to relieve the sense of sparseness that dominated the forest in the winter.
We walked down the far slope of the mountain, skirting several farms. I was heading for a cabin on Hunter Mountain, one I knew to be deserted except in the warmest summer months and during the hunting season in late November. It had a good stone fireplace inside and was far from the nearest house, almost completely-hidden by a stand of Douglas firs. It would serve as temporary protection.
"It's too bad about the car," Gary said. "I'm not much for walking."
"You'll get used to it You'll even like it after awhile. How about you, Bev, do you like walking in the woods?"
"Not like this, I don't. These branches are cutting me to pieces."
"Why not ask Gary to let you borrow some of his? He's a gentleman."
"No," Gary said, "we had a long talk while you were gone, and she decided that she didn't like me very much. I even showed her my cock, but that only turned her off more. What do you do with a girl like that?"
"Whatever you want to do. Beverly's going to be staying with us for awhile."
"You're crazy," Beverly said. "My father'll have a search party out looking for me before dark. Do you know what he'll do to you when he finds you? My father's an important man around here."
"But of course, he has no idea that you're rurining around with my old man," I said. "Where does he think you are? Wasn't it Columbia? Isn't that the college you're supposed to be attending? Or do you think the gentleman in the car is going to inform the police that he brought a nineteen-year-old girl into the mountains and she disappeared on him?"
After that she kept her mouth shut, probably preparing answers for the questions I was going to ask as soon as we reached our destination. Then she thought of something more convincing.
"Old man Getson saw me this morning. And he told me that you were in town. They'll put it all together and come looking for you."
"Well, they won't find me on Jewitt Mountain, that's for sure. And they won't find you if I bury your body under one of these rock walls."
"You're joking," she cried. "You aren't going to kill me."
"He never jokes," Gary broke in. "He's a tough kid, all right. Never jokes at all. I remember one time in the upper Adirondacks when he tortured a whole family and finally dumped the bodies, suitably weighted down, of course, into a reservoir."
"I don't believe it," she said. Her hair was totally disarranged, her skin welted and scratched from the branches. Her left breast was swollen from the pinch I'd given it and now it looked even more ridiculous than before.
"Jesus, Bev, you look awful," I said. "You should take better care of yourself if you want to get a husband. I'm surprised that anyone goes out with you the way you look."
After that we walked in virtual silence. Gary was smiling and seemed happy with the state of affairs. I wondered what he'd do if he had to kill someone. He had quite a reputation as a bar fighter and street fighter, but cold murder is a different proposition. In any event, he seemed unconcerned with the problem, affecting his usual air of sublime superiority, as if our problems on earth were much too small to be anything but amusing.
We made a detour to avoid a farmhouse, walking through a meadow covered with cow shit. She began to curse us in a low, monotonous voice, having finally accepted the role of the prisoner and realized her danger. I knew at the time that I might kill, I might be forced to destroy her if she was too deeply involved in the death of Polly Satin. Several theories had begun to evolve in my head.
Lucy became more and more suspect as things went along. Her involvement with Beverly's father was strange and unexplained. Then too, even if she was not exceptionally bright, she came from one of the better families in Hunter and like Beverly, considered herself a step or two above the usual run of farmer types encountered in these woods. Just to go and be a whore would not be enough for her. She would have to be the madame or somehow in charge to be really satisfied, and the Mafia would not allow such a large role to a non-Italian.
Of course, I could easily have been wrong. Maybe she was just stupid enough to think with her twat, and her disappearance after Polly's death was part of a Mafia evacuation plan. It was impossible to know. Yet, the picture sent to my father had Lucy as the person to whom I confessed the killing of Lebon. And the reason for her leaving Hunter were pictures of herself with Peterson. To my mind, the most likely reason for Polly's murder, if it had anything at all to do with me, was the possession of those pictures and the battle for the Hunter ski resort.
I eliminated my father as the murderer, simply because he was the victim of the blackmail. The only reason he might have had for killing Polly was the acquisition of the film. He was being forced out of the mountains, but why was he following me? What did he want to learn from my activities?
Somewhere there might be a killer I knew nothing about; someone who was desperately trying to gain a foothold in the Hunter project, who owned a piece of land and wanted that particular tract developed instead of the one my father owned. There were so many things I didn't know, and I was counting on Beverly to enlighten me, one way or another.
"Well, here we are," I said after a particularly steep climb over shale which crumbled and slid out from under our feet. Bevery was weary past the point of caring and collapsed on the dirty mattress of the day bed. Gary and I set about collecting wood and getting a fire going. The clouds were passing rapidly overhead, and the wind that moved them was stiff and cold. The temperature would drop down into the thirties that night, cold enough to freeze Beverly.
"Christ," Gary said, 'I'm getting hungry again. I can't believe it."
"It's that good fresh air," I answered. "Keeps you fit and active."
Beverly moved off the bed and squatted in front of the fire, holding out her hands to the growing warmth. I saw Gary looking her over speculatively, and I pushed him away.
"Later," I promised. "After we get some questions answered first. Beverly, do you want to tell me the whole story from the beginning, or shall I put it to you question by question?"
"There's nothing to tell."
"How long have you known my father?"
Gary's interest perked up at that, and he stopped fiddling with the grass to sit down beside us.
"I've known him all my life."
"How long have you been fucking him?"
"I never slept with him in my life."
"What were you doing with him today?"
"I'm not answering any more of your stupid questions."
I took her hand and pressed it against the hot andiron. Just for a second, but she screamed anyway. "What were you doing with my father today?"
She began to sob hysterically, and Gary pulled me away to the door.
"Listen," he whispered. "We can break this whole thing if we handle it right. See, whenever the cops bust you and they want questions answered, one cop comes on real mean just like you're doing. But the other one comes on nice. He tries to help the prisoner, to stop the mean one from mistreating him. It's disorienting. See, the prisoner doesn't know who to hate."
He looked at me expectantly, as if the method was self-evident, which it wasn't. I turned and went back to Beverly; Gary could try his theory if he wanted to, because I could always beat it out of her anyway. She was still crying softly and holding her hand to her mouth.
"What were you doing with my father today?" I asked again, my tone without real expression. She didn't answer, and I repeated myself. Still nothing. I slapped her back hand across the face, and she sprawled on the floor.
"Take it easy," Gary said, his hand on my shoulder. "Don't get carried away."
"Listen, Gary, this bitch is mixed up in murder, and if she won't tell me, she's gonna be made to tell me."
"Cool off, man. You've got a bad head on. Why don't you go out for a smoke?"
He offered me a joint and I took it, feigning reluctance, and walked through the door. It was already late afternoon as I stood listening to their conversation inside.
"He's really a wild man," Gary laughed. "Here, have a smoke."
"Thanks," she said after a moment's hesitation. "Why is he doing this to me?"
"Well, you know how it is when a man's obsessed.
Sometimes there's no sense of proportion to his behavior. There's something Billy feels he has to do and just the thought of failure makes him paranoid. I mean, he'll kill. He has, already."
There was a long pause, and I watched two deer casually feeding on the side of the hill. They seemed unconcerned with the affairs of men, even though their literal existence came about through the protection of Albany lawmakers.
"Why don't you just tell him the truth?" Gary asked. "Are you afraid of someone else?"
"But I am telling the truth."
"Ah, Beverly," his voice was full of kindness. "That's so obviously a lie that it enrages a man just to hear it. What were you doing with Billy's old man?"
"I was looking for him." Another long pause. Then, "Billy had some sort of fight with his father, and his father wanted to persuade him to come back home. It's really that simple."
"But what were you doing with Mr. Pechuski? Why you instead of his mother? Why did he wait in the car instead of confronting his son?"
"He was frightened of Billy. He said that Billy tried to kill him, and he thought that since Billy and I were friends, I could talk to Billy better than he could. That's all."
"But how did he know that you and Billy were close? Where were you that he could lay his hands on you so easy?"
"I go to school in New York. Columbia. I've known Mr. Pechuski since I was five years old. He's an old friend of my family, so it was only natural that I look him up in the city. When I asked about Billy, he told me the whole story. Everything. How Billy got involved in a killing, and how he was being blackmailed. He said he only wanted Billy back before something happened to him, and asked me to help look."
"How did he know Billy was in Hunter?"
"He said that Billy always came to Hunter when he was in trouble. It was his refuge away from the world. Getson confirmed it and we just started looking. Mr. Pechuski suggested we try the mountain. I walked up and there you were, almost waiting for me."
At that point I walked back inside. Naturally, she was lying, because I knew instinctively that she was screwing my old man. Peter Pechuski was not a man to spread his life so casually to acquaintances. There, Beverly was not a casual acquaintance. Bev was pretty stupid, too stupid, I thought, to be a business partner. But she knew more than she was telling.
I pointed to her crotch as she sat on the floor. "That's your connection with my old man, isn't it?"
She started to deny it, and I got ready to slug her.
"All right, yes." It made her angry to admit it. "He's very good and undemanding. He gives me money and buys me clothes sometimes, and I really like him."
"Your father has enough money for ten of you," I said.
"Sure he does, but he never gets off a nickel. He's a real prick. How am I supposed to live on fifty dollars a month in New York? I can't even buy a pair of shoes."
"So you decided to fuck my father for a fee."
"That's not true. It began by accident when I really did just go over for a visit. Your father is one of the best men I've ever known, and you're not half the man he is."
Gary began to laugh hysterically. Watching him, I became angry. I suppose that if I'd been able to maintain any distance at all, I'd have seen the humor in her remarks. She was really precious. But I was much too enraged to sit still for such idiocy.
"Let's go," I said, pointing toward the door.
"Where are you taking me?"
Gary had stopped laughing and become interested again. He sat up and stared at me quizzically.
"Outside, Beverly. And do it right now."
She came quickly and once the cold air hit her, began immediately to shiver and complain. I didn't bother to answer questions or acknowledge her protestations of innocence. I marched her down to a nearby stream and told her to sit down in it.
"I can't sit in this. I'll freeze. I told you everything already."
I hit her in the face and she fell backward, landing on the wet, rounded stones of the stream with a crunch.
"Trying to clean the pussy first?" Gary asked. "I didn't know you were so fastidious."
The water was incredibly cold, but it ran too fast to freeze, even during the coldest months. Beverly was rapidly losing color, and the slight shivering had turned to spasms that shook her body. I grabbed her by the hair and pushed her face beneath the water for a few seconds, then pulled her out of the water and threw her on the ground.
"Are you through bullshitting?" I asked.
"Why don't you take it easy?" Gary said.
"Listen, motherfucker, I'm not here for laughs. You fuck with me, and I'll do you too."
I could feel his eyes checking me out, trying to determine just how rough I was and just what I might be able to do to him. I had never had a reputation as a fighter, had never fought in gangs or bars. But I was almost psychotic at that point and thus doubly dangerous. As to my fighting ability, Gary knew I had killed a man with my hands. I had told him so.
For thirty seconds we stared at each other. Then I caught a hold on reality and began to apologize to him. I tried to explain the sight of Polly Satin with an axe in her skull, and what it had done to me.
"Don't forget, Gary," I said, "you're the one who gave me this direction, and I'm following it through to the end. I don't believe that she's been telling the whole truth. Sure, she came up here with my father, but we knew that before she told us. But he didn't come here to make things right between us. He's my old man and I'd stake my soul on the fact that he doesn't give two shits whether I live or die. If he's looking for me, it's because he hopes to gain some advantage, some money advantage, from it. Now I don't quite know what he's looking for. That's what she's going to tell me if I have to pull her legs off.
"See, when I got into Polly's house in Bayside, I was suspicious at first, but then I let all my paranoia get away from me. I started to think about what a great scene I stumbled onto and how really creative the people I was with were. The next morning I found Polly with her brains on the table. I can't let up, man. I'm grateful that you're here and that you helped me find out what I have to do. But now I'm doing it, and I'm not turning aside."
He looked at me for a moment, and then offered me his palm which I slapped gladly.
"Okay, man," he said, "no more fun. All work. How do I get mixed up with you serious types, anyway?"
We turned back to Beverly together. She was huddled in a fetal position on the cold ground.
"Wanta get warm?" I asked.
She nodded her head, seeing that Gary and I were both united in our determination.
"Are you ready for the truth? I know it's a big step, but are you ready?"
She nodded once more, and I picked her up and carried her to the house, laying her down before the fire. Without speaking, I opened a can of soup and put it in the coals to heat. I wrapped her in one of the sleeping bags and sat down beside her.
"Let's go," I said.
"Your father wanted to be a Congressman very much. He was also very active in the Hunter ski project. He wanted to put a casino in the mountains, very quiet and very exclusive. He knew all the police in the area and wasn't very worried about them. But he needed the ski front to really make it work in the eyes of the locals. Then he got that film of you and Lucy. He thinks it has to do with Hunter and not with the political thing, but he can't be sure. But if he doesn't run for Congress, there's nothing they can do to him with the film. If they send copies out, he'll disown you as the black sheep of the family, probably send you to Europe on a pension. The big thing is that he doesn't know where the film came from. Polly Satin obviously had the film taken, but he thinks it might have been stolen by whoever killed her."
"Who else was interested in Hunter?" It was an obvious question to ask.
"The Mafia, for one. They're moving in on a lot of upstate businesses. Very little police prosecution. But there were two other groups interested. I don't know who they were."
"Don't start that again unless you want to go for another swim."
She started crying and moaning about how she was telling the truth. She said, "Please," about fifteen times in as many seconds. I looked at Gary and he shrugged his shoulders.
"Let's take a walk outside," he suggested, and we went out together, leaving her to huddle before the fire and nurse her wounds.
"I think she's telling the truth," Gary said.
"Maybe, but I already knew everything she told me. I ought to kill her just for failing to enlighten me."
He laughed and offered me a freshly rolled joint, which I took, lighting it and trying to puff away my anxiety.
"I'm sorry about before," I said. "Me, too. Let's forget it."
The clouds had come in to completely surround the mountains. The sun, behind them, lit their faces where it was strong enough to fight its way through, but for the most part there was only dark roiling mist. It was late afternoon, about an hour before sunset and the temperature was already in the forties and evidently heading much lower than that. I expected the first snowfall of the year.
"What about my car?" I asked Gary.
"I think you better forget about it for the time being," he said.
"We're going to need something to get around in. We can't walk everywhere."
"Leave it to me." He began to walk rapidly down the mountain, not along the road where walking is easy, but cutting through the forest. When he was out of sight, I went back inside.
The soup was boiling. I poured it into an old jar I found on one of the shelves and gave it to Beverly, who sipped it carefully. One of her eyes was swollen where I had hit her, and she had a huge blister on her right hand. I took a jar of vaseline and some bandages out of my bedroll and began to work on her. If she was grateful she said nothing.
"I hope you're telling me everything, Beverly. Because if I find out you've been lying, I'll kill you without a second thought."
"I was in love with you," she said, "when you were here in the summer. I really loved you."
"Is that why you fuck my father? Is it me by proxy?"
"I don't ask you who you go to bed with. I'm not married. Your father is a good lay and he takes care of me. He told me those things like any man tells his troubles to a woman he's sleeping with."
I stared at her, trying to gain some sort of reasonable perspective. It didn't come. All I could see was the possibility that she was a liar.
"Why was my father looking for me?"
"He wanted to find out who sent him the film." Then it began to snap into place. My father knew Polly Satin and like almost any other really successful businessman, probably had Mafia connections. If it turned out that the film was from some other source, he might be able to use those connections to put the pressure on. He might even be able to make a deal and get at least a piece of the Hunter action.
I told her my suspicions and she confirmed them as best she could. My father suspected that some "punk" (that's his word), a rank amateur in the blackmailing business was trying to get him. He wanted only to find out who it was so he could decide whether to fight or run.
The bandaging was all finished and she had eaten her soup. We were alone in front of the fire. I fed it huge logs until it blazed up, throwing some light on the darkness of a snowy night. Beverly was nude beneath the blanket, and I began to remember how good we had been together. I was physically tired from the Cog-leys and all the hiking we'd done, and my suspicion index was down to near zero. I wanted to fuck, to have one more ball before going to bed, but I rather doubted that she would be into it and rape seemed very unprofessional.
"Feel better?" I asked.
She nodded her head without meeting my eyes.
"You shouldn't have lied to me. None of this would have been necessary if you hadn't lied."
"But I was telling the truth," she insisted. "Your father told me that he wanted to make everything right between the two of you and that's the main reason he came up here. Maybe he was lying, but I didn't know it. How could I know? I just wanted to see you again."
She started to sob and turned her face away from me, down into the softness of the blanket that held her. To tell the truth, I was a little sorry for what had happened now that it was all over. I recalled Lucy's analysis of Beverly. She, too, had considered Bev to be lacking in imagination, to be too stupid to be involved in anything larger than the emotion of the moment. Perhaps she was just a super victim, used by Lucy, my father, her father, and me. It was certainly possible.
"Take it easy, Beverly. It's all over now," I said, trying to comfort her.
"Is it?" she asked through tears. "What are you going to do with me?"
"Kill you, of course. But it'll be painless and quick so don't worry too much about it."
"Are you really going to kill me?" Her eyes were side with surprise.
"No, Beverly. I'm not going to kill you unless I find out what you've been saying is a lie. But you'll have to stay with us awhile."
We were interrupted by the unmistakable roar of a motorcycle heading straight for the cabin. I ran outside to find Gary the Pagan flying over the hills, dashing across the meadow-using everything but the road to get to the house. He pulled up with a quick rear-wheel slide and exhibited his machine proudly.
"How do you like it?" he asked.
"Where'd you get this?"
"I stole it, of course."
"In Hunter? We'll be spotted right away."
"I stole it in Saugerties. By the thruway. First I copped your father's car. It was parked in front of this diner, and I got it real easy. Then I drove toward the thruway until I spotted the bike. By the way, your old man looks real worried."
"He probably found the car and figured we've got Beverly."
"Undoubtedly."
Beverly appeared in the doorway holding the blanket over her, and I could almost feel Gary licking his lips.
"You're really beautiful," he said to her. "Do you know that?"
She looked at him bewildered for a moment, then smiled. "Thank you."
"Do you think you could do me a favor?" Gary asked. "I'm just a poor country boy a long way from home, and I haven't had a woman in five years. How about dropping the blanket?"
"But I'd get cold," she protested.
"Not for long."
She looked at me, and I shrugged my shoulders. "Do whatever you want." I found it hard to believe that after what she'd been through, she could seriously be interested in getting laid, but she let the blanket fall, giving me a triumphant look, and stood naked with her absurd little breasts sticking out.
"Care to join us?" Gary asked.
"I've got something else to do in town. You two have a nice time."
I jumped on the bike and kicked it over. It was a Honda 350, light enough to be used on trails by a good rider. I preferred the roads and went down the mountain in second gear. I headed straight for the Hunter-Tannersville Diner where my father had last been seen. Sure enough, he was standing outside, looking around as if he hoped his car would miraculously appear. I was sure he wouldn't want to call in the police.
I cruised by, but he obviously didn't recognize me. The second time around, I stopped the bike just behind him. He turned and saw me, jumping away at the recognition.
"Hiya, Daddy," I called warmly.
"Where's Beverly?" he asked.
"Ah, don't panic. She's all right."
"She'd better be." He pulled out a pistol and put it against my chest. "I want her, and I want her right now."
"Eat shit, pop." I really didn't figure he had enough heart to shoot me right in front of the diner. The police station was right across the street with both policemen right inside.
"I'm not fooling," he said.
"That's why I'm taking the gun away from you." I reached out and took it by the barrel. For a second I thought he was really going to do it, the hatred in his eyes was so blatant. But good sense finally prevailed, and he only tried to pull it back. I had to slap his face for him before he let go. When I finally had it, the second piece I'd taken off him, he seemed to go to pieces.
"Stop blubbering," I said. "I'm taking you back to Beverly just like you asked me to. Be nice to her, because she's had a rough day."
I offered him the back of the bike. He hesitated only long enough for me to raise my fist, then got on. We tore up through the back roads, leaving a long trail of dust. It had begun to snow, big wet flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground. The ride was freezing cold, but it pulled my head back together. Except for a physical tiredness, I felt mentally refreshed and alert.
I came in without knocking, figuring that the motorcycle noise was enough to warn the combatants in the cabin. Beverly was lying on top of the sleeping bag, nude, of course, with her legs far apart. She was sound asleep, and only the moisture on the inside of her thighs gave any indication of exertion. Gary, smart as ever, came in behind us, making sure that I was in charge before showing himself.
"Here ya go, Gary," I said, flipping him the gun, a small automatic. "Now we're both armed."
"Gee thanks. I've always wanted one of these."
"You sit over there, Pop. And be a good boy or else I'll have to be bad."
It was getting interesting. I don't think I was really ready to beat up on my father, no matter how great my obsession. There was something so sordid in the idea, that I had already decided to let Gary do it.
He did as I told him, though, making no effort to upset me and without any fear in his actions. I recognized something about him as he sat down-he was not a coward. A trifle clumsy, perhaps, but willing to face his adversaries.
"Now that you've found me," I said, "what do you want?"
"I want nothing from you."
"Have I spoiled all your plans, Daddy? I'm sorry. But I couldn't have done it to a nastier guy. How'd you manage to collect yourself so fast? You were crying in your beard a few minutes ago."
"You won't do anything to me," he maintained.
"Not if you tell me what I want to know. Now who are the other people interested in the Hunter ski resorts?"
"Pete Armond and Estella Parkins."
"So quick? He must be lying," Gary said.
"I don't think so. I think he wants me to find out who's blackmailing him."
"That's right," my father said. "I want you to find out. I hoped you'd already found out, but I gave you too much credit."
"Now, now. Don't be hasty. Tell me about Armond and Parkins."
"Armond is a farmer with a lot of land. At least there's a lot of land in the Armond family. They've been here for generations. Between Pete and his relatives, they control seven thousand acres on Smooth Top Mountain. Somehow, they heard about the ski business and they wanted in on the action. They're strictly small timers. Don't even know about the casino. But Parkins is another matter. She's got lots of land and plenty of dough. For about fifteen years now, she's leased land for several family whorehouses and a bookie parlor for whatever local trade is around. The Mafia, Polly Satin, actually, wanted to take her in as a partner, but she turned Polly down cold. See, she didn't seem to care what anyone else did, she was going ahead with plans to make a chair lift, and a big motel. She figured that the gambling would have to come to her if she built first, and since she already had the land, she was way ahead of the field. But she got hung up with raising enough capital for the building. The family cut off her payments, and she had to go to the banks for cash. That took time and meanwhile I was horning in on both of them. I had the land, too. Polly didn't like it, but she knew that whoever built first, she'd get her piece because nobody pushes the family around."
He paused for breath, and I stood back with admiration for the rapidity of his delivery. He must have had the whole thing rehearsed.
"So I guess you figure it's Stella who's holding the film," I said.
"Either Stella or the family. If it's the family, I can't do anything about it. If it's Stella, I'd wipe her right off the face of the earth."
"Now, tell me why you're here again."
"I want you to find out for me."
"Why should I help you?"
"I just gave you Stella's name. You'd have been lost without it. Favor for favor."
I said nothing, turned to Gary with a smile on my face. He was sitting next to Beverly, holding her hand in his and seeming not to pay any attention to the conversation. He smiled back at me and shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly I remembered the Cogley twins and began to laugh. The whole thing was so incredibly bizarre.
"Well, will you help me?" my father asked.
"Maybe," I said. "Just one other thing. I want you to tell Beverly what you really think of her. And if you lie there's no chance that I'll help you out."
He swallowed once, undoubtedly thinking of all the fun he'd lose by his answer. But money prevailed in the end, and he admitted that she was just a poor dumb country girl he was porking on Wednesday afternoons, on his lunch hour, no less. Bev took the lesson without wincing, and began to understand just why I was so suspicious of everything and everyone. I let the old man ramble on for awhile. Then I dismissed him. I told him not to come back unless he had something useful for me. I reminded him that if he was in any way connected with Polly's death, I'd kill him.
Then he left, and I went to bed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I slept beside Beverly and Gary that night. It grew very cold out (I wonder how my father managed to walk all the way into town) and toward morning the snow was falling very fast. Every few hours one of us would get up and feed the fire and then stumble back and fall asleep.
Yet everything was beautiful by dawn. We woke up and cooked breakfast, just a few scrambled eggs and some coffee. Huddling by a fire on a cold morning with the steam rising from old, cracked cups is as good a feeling as anything this sorry culture has to offer. Beverly cooked without a word, chastised, but not resentful, as if her eyes had been opened for the first time in her life and the resulting freedom was worth the humiliation of a memory of ignorance.
"Tell me about Stella Parkins, Bev?" Gary asked, reading my mind.
"She's been in these mountains a long time. She has few friends. My father was one of them. She used to hold me when I was little, feed me cookies, tell me to behave and that sort of thing."
"Could you get to her now?" I asked.
"I could visit her, I suppose."
"Tell me about her house."
"She's got a big old farmhouse, completely modernized. It's one of those places that started out as a five roomer and kept having porches and wings added."
"Has it got a back door?"
"Yeah. And an outside entrance into the cellar. She doesn't keep any servants or dogs, either. She's kind of strange. I think she sits around all day and counts her money."
"If you went to visit her, where would the two of you sit?"
"There's a glassed-in sun porch that we always went to. It picks up a lot of sun in the winter."
"Draw me a picture of the house."
As she sketched it out, I motioned for Gary to take a walk. It was really much too cold to be sending someone out of the house, but he went without complaining even with a smile. Beverly didn't look up from her drawing until she was finished, and when she handed it to me, realized that Gary was gone. She came to me at once.
It's strange to watch a girl walk around naked for a day, never even wanting to touch her, and then all of a sudden find her in your arms. I'd been seeing her belly and the smooth circle of her ass as only flesh on an opponent I somehow had to break. Suddenly it was sexual, and I was squeezing those cheeks, running my finger along the crack and further down to the soft, downy lips of her vagina.
She stood almost stiffly, waiting for desire to take her, for my hands to poke the cold ashes to life. I took her nipple in my mouth, the same one I'd ripped the day before, and it grew beneath my tongue, forcing its sharp tip into my cheeks. Her stomach trembled, the muscles gave a slight jerk, and she collapsed against me. There was something I wanted to say to her, but I couldn't get it out. My penis was stiff and pushing against my pants and her fingers took the shaft and held it, held it without movement, as if she no longer knew her directions and must wait for my instruction.
I pushed her down against the sleeping bags, right in front of the fire, and licked her belly with my tongue. As I moved lower and lower, working toward the softness of her sex, she pushed harder and harder against me, arching her hips up to meet the fall of my mouth. I didn't have to bother with pulling her legs apart. They were already spread as I got there, and her pussy was wet and waiting.
Almost at once she began to grind against me. Low moans issued forth without my actively calling them. There was a great deal of pain mixed in with the pleasure of my touching. I felt it in the jerkiness of her motion, in the way she squinted her eyes as if she was having trouble in seeing where all this was coming from.
Then I lifted my face to hers and kissed her, long and deep. As tenderly as I could.
"I'm sorry I hurt you," I said.
She stared into my eyes, looking for the truth. "Are you?" she asked. "Are you sorry?"
"Yes, I'm sorry."
She put her arms around the back of my head and pulled me tight against her. I felt a wetness on her cheeks that could only be tears. Then my trousers were off, faster than I could believe, and through an agency outside my comprehension. I still don't know who it was who removed them, but we were coupled, locked together at both ends, our bodies moving in a single motion, a rhythm both complex and comprehended.
And there was fire to all this. It was not the sterility of straight emotion. There were thighs that gripped tight, enough to cut off the flow of blood and each time I plunged into her and heard her bottom thump through the blankets on the wood floor, my own pleasure rose in my testicles until I felt something close to joy-
My lips never left hers even at the peak of intensity. The movement of my tongue within her mouth was never casual or automatic. There was deep exploration, not of the surface but of the depths. I was too lost within the whole to even know if she came with me. Her body moved very quickly, her breasts were hard and pushed against my chest. When I was through, after the last drop had been surrendered, she pushed me on my back and licked my body free of all semen, of all sweat. Not compulsively, not even quicky. Her movements were slow and deliberate, and she repeated over and over again that she loved me, that she wanted me completely.
I saw my sperm on her thighs, my seed shining on the tender lips of her pussy. She finally came down to rest her head on my chest, kissing my nipples.
"Be happy," I said. "I want you to be happy."
She was unable to meet my eyes though her head made tentative rising motions. I felt her hand slip into mine. I understood the fear which paralyzed her and which had held me in a tight prison for so long. For a long moment I wished fervently that Polly Satin might be irrevocably lost to me, that I could forget her face and her body. Then the image of the axe-of the murderer as he must have looked standing with the weapon raised above his head-came rushing back. It blotted out Beverly's face and soft hair, the luxuriant softness between her thighs.
"I have to do something. Do you know why?"
"Yes," she said. "I know why. It's not good. You won't recover."
"Will you help me?"
"Yes." Her voice was low and sad, husky without sexuality.
Gary appeared at the door stamping his feet up and down. "Its motherfucking cold out there, baby. I thought I was a friend. You wouldn't leave a friend out in the snow, would you?"
He went directly to the fire without waiting for my answer, which would have been an invitation to go directly to the fire and begin to warm his hands over the flames.
"How bad is the snow?"
"Bad."
"Can we use the bike?"
"It ain't gonna be easy, but with me as the pilot we can fly anywhere. Where we going, by the way? To this Parkins dame?"
"That's it." '
"I get the feeling we're closing in fast."
"Me, too. It's almost finished. Man, I hope I never see this town again. I'm going to the Coast for a long vacation after this is done. I hear the grass is plentiful and cheap."
"Yeah," Gary said, a wistful smile lighting up his face. "Sixty, seventy dollars a kilo. The best shit in the States, too. You know how much money you could make just by bringing it into New York? I stayed alive for three years making that scene. Until I got busted."
"How many times have you been in jail?" Beverly asked.
"Just once, honey. Six months. I'm not too excited at the thought of it happening again."
"Let's get down to business," I suggested. They came together and looked up at me as if expecting the plan of action to roll smoothly off my tongue. But I fooled them, although the plan was actually there.
"Any suggestions?" I asked.
"We go into Parkins' house and look around. Maybe work the bitch over. You know, pull out her fingernails while we pour red ants into her pussy. Something original and interesting. We wrap barbed wire, rusty, of course, around a broom handle and cornhole the filthy murderess."
"You smoked, didn't you, Gary?" I asked and he smiled back his answer. "I think we can afford to be less crude until we have some positive indication of guilt. Beverly's going to help us."
"Welcome to the Avenger's Club," Gary offered his hand, which Beverly took with a smile, as if her membership was worth the price of reluctance, even of pain.
"Why am I in Hunter instead of at school?" she asked.
"Because you're pregnant, naturally, and you desperately need someone to talk to, someone you can trust. You're terribly frightened of your parents. Friends recommend the abortion routine, but you're a simple country lass and cannot take the life of a human being. How could you have come to such straits? Please help, dear Stella. I have no one else to turn to.
Help me in the memory of all those home baked cookies and cherry pies, and in the holy name of milk and summer sandwiches and grubby scraped knees. Who could resist such an appeal? Then you maneuver her into the sun porch and keep her there while Gary and I tiptoe down into the basement, sneak up the stairs and find the proof of her shattering guilt."
"Bravo!" Beverly cried. "A tour de force."
"Not bad, friend," Gary chimed in. "But do you really think a woman could have used an axe? It's not a feminine weapon."
"No, it isn't," I admitted, "but country women are strong types, and it's just the thing to draw suspicion away. Besides, it's all we have right now, so we may as well follow the road and see what happens. Hey, Beverly, is Stella good-looking?"
"I guess so. She's pretty old."
"Oh, I like 'em old," Gary said. "Old and ripe."
We were all in good spirits, incredibly good, considering the events of the previous day. Comradeship is a guaranteed cure for melancholy, probably the only infallible remedy. We felt as if we were marching off to battle the forces of evil, and each of us believed, in his or her heart, that our troops would emerge victorious.
I watched Gary start up the bike and drive slowly off with Beverly clinging to his back. The snow was five or six inches deep, difficult to drive in even when alone. But the main roads would already be clear, and there would be a path cut by the time Gary came back to pick me up. Bev waved to me once, almost upsetting the bike, and I smiled encouragement at her.
It was incredibly cold, and I was poorly dressed. But what cannot be cured? If nothing came of today's investigation, I had made up my mind to stop in a clothing store and get myself prepared for a long winter. I rolled the usual morning joint, lit it and sat back to relax. The first taste of grass in the morning is one of the solid pleasures of my life. It was, and is now. The first puff sends the smoker flying. I watched the dark woods with their sudden accumulation of white glitter, looked for deer or rabbit out browsing. I gathered wood for the fire and banked the coals neatly.
Gary seemed to be taking a long time, and just as I began to worry that he'd been busted on that hot bike with Beverly clinging to him and an ounce of grass in his pocket, I heard the friendly roar of the exhausts as he slowly made his way up the side of the mountain. His smile as he approached the cabin signalled the accomplishment of his mission.
"All done," he said.
"Good. Now let's put a few refinements in our plan. I'm going to go into the house alone. You wait in the woods. Take a sleeping bag so that you won't be unbearably cold."
I handed him the gun I'd taken from my father and pocketed my own. For the first time, I became really cognizant of the danger involved in hunting a murderer. Somehow the thought of ending my sleuthing career with an axe in my brain was singularly discomforting.
"Wow," Gary sighed, looking happily at the gun in his palm. "Do you think I'll get to shoot someone?"
"With a little luck," I answered, hopping on the back of the bike and waiting for him to get over his infatuation with his weapon. He jumped onto the front, kicked it over and made his way down the mountain, following the single track he'd made coming and going. The wind shot through my body instantly and it must have been ten times worse for him up front. But there were no complaints from either of us.
Stella Parkins made her home in the valley, in a large house shielded from her neighbors by a small stand of pines. It was warmer down there. The feel of so many people squeezed into such a small area when they could have had all the freedom of the mountains gave one the impression of warmth, of fires in the oven with cookies baking for the kids when school was out.
We parked the bike a slight distance away from the house itself and walked up. There were very few people about, only a few cars passed now and then without giving us a second glance. About five hundred yards from the building we took a quick detour into the trees and crept silently forward, feeling like seasoned veterans.
When we got within a hundred yards, I saw two figures on a glassed-in sun porch, talking excitedly. One of them, probably Beverly, was waving her arms and seemed on the point of hysteria.
"I want you to wait here," I told Gary. "Watch out for anyone coming in. I'll get out as fast as I can."
I headed for the cellar door at the corner of the house furthest from me, dashing between the pines, crouching in shadows and waiting for some sort of response from the universe at large. To tell the truth, I still had doubts about Beverly. For all I knew, she could be setting me up at this very moment.
The cellar was open but there were no lights inside. I lifted the door and winced at the shriek of metal hinges, but evidently no one heard me and I crept down the stairs, shutting the door behind me. Instantly, I was in total darkness. Not even a single beam filtered through the musty, concrete room I was in. I lit a match and gazed around, expecting to find and finding several almost burnt out candles kept here in case of electrical failure common during the winter months when the snow lay on the exposed wires. I lit one and examined the cellar.
Like most of the old homes in the area, it consisted of a concrete floor, stacked rock foundation and huge oil furnaces which insured a dependable heat supply in case one happened to be snowed in for a week or two. In addition to this, Stella had had the good fortune to include several cedar storage closets and a gigantic deep freeze in a small room that ran under one of the numerous additions to her home.
The closets, which I rummaged, looking for papers she might have stored there for safe keeping, contained a remarkable assortment of old-fashioned clothing, as if the residents of the house hadn't bothered to throw anything out for centuries. Beautiful hats and coats that would have been instant hippie treasures if offered for sale in Manhattan, hung, unused and unwanted relics of miserly instinct.
I examined the rest of the cellar quite thoroughly, but found nothing in any of the corners. Basements weren't usually places where things were stored in Hunter; they were incredibly damp, cold and musty and without heat except for what the furnace happened to lose through poor insulation. I sat on the freezer gazing at the stairway that led into the main body of the house and tried to summon up some reserve of courage. Walking into a strange house during the daytime, with the mistress up and around, isn't as simple as it sounds. The fear of being apprehended is much larger than it should be, out of all proportion to the penalty of capture. Yet there they were, those creaky wooden stairs and the unknown rooms, all well-lit, beyond them.
So instead of going right up, I looked around for something else in the basement. I went through the rooms again, finding only what I had already discovered, coming finally back to the stairwell. For some reason, perhaps only trying to delay my entrance, I opened the freezer. It seemed highly un-likely that I'd find proof of Estelle's relationship with Polly Satin inside. I expected a side of beef all neatly cut out and prepared for winter. I found, instead, Lucy Nye', hard as a rock, with a neat puncture wound that ran directly through her right breast, down into her heart.
She was smiling in death; perhaps her features had been deliberately arranged, and she was very naked and very cold. Somehow, it didn't frighten me as much as finding Polly. I seemed to have a talent for discovering death. Yet I dropped the freezer top, and it slammed shut with a horrifying crunch of grasping latches. For several seconds, I stood on the spot, waiting for Lucy's murderer to come down the stairs, gun in hand. I went so far as to draw my own piece in expectation. But nothing happened, and I was forced to consider a plan of action, despite my revulsion (not horror, that was lost to me after Polly).
It seemed obvious to me that Stella Parkins had to die, that she must pay for the two killings according to the code I'd made for myself. But simply walking upstairs and blowing her brains out would not serve. In the first place, I owed Gary some sort of role in the final disposition of our mission. And in the second place, I didn't know whether or not Beverly had been seen coming there. I knew for sure that I wanted it all done smoothly, without hesitation and without getting caught. The police already had my fingerprints from Polly's Bayside home. Of course, they had no record of me with which to match them up, and even so, they were only one set of prints among many they'd undoubtedly found in the place.
But if they found mine in both places, they'd hunt me to the ends of the earth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the end, I sneaked back out of the cellar and had Gary drive me back to the cabin. I didn't say anything to him, letting him go back to wait for Beverly without a word. I sat around thinking about Lucy and her body, as we watched the Harry Warshaw rape, but I couldn't summon up any grief. People seemed to die for no real reason at all, and if that was the way of the world, there was no sense in grieving over it.
I was fully aware of the irrationality of my mission, that I'd created it without morality as something serving only its own needs. But there it was, palpable and full of dedication. I would kill Stella Parkins after questioning her as to accomplices and leave New York for a time, drifting out over the continent to find what was to be found.
I coudn't even summon up rage or righteousness. I was without emotion at all, as if I'd just reached the end of a long journey and, though my destination was important and probably fulfilling, the trip had taken much out of me and I needed a few days of recovery before I could begin to see things in a clear light.
I heard the sound of the cycle, and saw Gary approaching with Beverly's long hair flowing behind her as they drove slowly up the hill. The snow had been plowed while we were gone, but the surface was still slippery and Gary took his time, approaching without greeting me, as if he knew already that my news was serious.
"Well, what happened?" he asked, laying the bike on its side.
"I found Lucy."
"Is she all right?" Beverly asked, failing to see the truth in my face.
"She's cool. I found her in the deep freeze downstairs. Someone stuck her in the chest with a knitting needle."
"She's dead?" Beverly was now entering the same horror I'd gone through after finding Polly. She held herself and moaned, shaking her head in disbelief.
"Don't fall apart now. Wait until everything's over. They'll be plenty of time then."
Gary began to make a fire, something I should have done as soon as I returned. He piled small dry twigs and put a match to them, getting a small flame and adding larger and larger pieces of wood until the room began to warm slightly.
"When are we going back?" he asked.
"Tonight."
I put my arm around Beverly, trying to comfort her, although my mind could only hold one idea and that involved Stella Parkins and no one else.
"Tell me about Stella," I said.
Her voice shook as she began, but soon quieted down as her story continued. "She was very solicitous. She told me not to worry about my parents or anyone else. She said that I should have an abortion because it would be the best thing for me. Better to have one large trauma than to carry that pain with me for the rest of my life. She wanted to know who the father was, but I wouldn't tell her, and she gave me coffee and cake."
"But how did you leave? That's what's important."
"I told her that I had to go, that I needed to be alone to think about it. I thanked her. I told her that she'd saved me."
"But did you say you'd come back?"
"She made me promise to get in touch with her soon, to tell her what I was going to do; she seemed so nice, like she really wanted to help."
"She probably did." Gary sounded surprised that Beverly would even question Stella's sincerity.
"But she's a murderer," Beverly cried.
"Murderers have feelings, too," Gary actually laughed. "Man, I've seen a lot of dead people. I've seen kids like you beat to a pulp by police. I've hit people with baseball bats for no other reason than one of them smiled at some girl who was screwing a friend of mine. Man, I've seen a lot of dead people."
Beverly looked at him as if he was of another species altogether, and Gary missed nothing of her meaning. He smiled up at her and explained certain facets of American culture with patience.
"See, honey, where I grew up, kicking ass was never questioned. A little kid doesn't have the kind of world view whereby he can question the Tightness or wrongness of the universe presented to him. The block on which he plays, the school he goes to-they're the whole thing to him. If he sees someone beating up on someone else, he not only assumes it's right to do it, but he supposes that everyone else does exactly the same thing. The first time I came to a peaceful little town where the kids went to hops and hunted Easter eggs, I couldn't believe it. It didn't seem real. In fact it probably seemed just as foreign as what I'm telling you now. See, Stella Parkins is doing just what I did, only I did it out on the street, and she does it in the safe shadow of her deep freeze. Do you get it now?"
She nodded. I was still holding her, and I felt her fingers tightening on my back, gripping me for support. It was much too hard for her.
"I think we need some dinner," I said.
"Stopped on the way up," Gary answered, pulling a huge steak and several cans of chile from his jacket. "You should have grabbed something out of the freezer while you had the chance."
"Cool it, man. That's enough." I began to laugh in spite of myself. Bev sensed our ease and went to open the cans while she tried to improvise some sort of grill for the fire. We finally settled for several sticks thrust through the beef and just hung them over the flames until the outside was charred. The chile took longer than the steak and we ate both with our fingers, Beverly squatting in a pair of my trousers which were snug enough on her hips not to look too ridiculous and forced the food into her mouth.
Afterwards, we went outside and washed ourselves with snow, coming back inside to wait for dark and evolve some sort of plan. The fire was hot, coals glowing in a deep bed of heat, and our stomachs were full. Between Gary and me, there passed an understanding that Beverly refused to recognize. We both knew where we were and what were about to do and it neither frightened nor revolted us. Bev's fear would pass in time. There was nothing we could do for it without taking it into ourselves.
"Beverly goes in first, I guess," Gary began.
"If she'll do it." I looked over at her and saw the hesitation, the fear of getting even more involved, but she said she would do it. All she had to do was get the door open. Then she could neither help nor hurt us.
"We can't just call the police?" Beverly asked, but her voice expressed the hopelessness she felt at the idea.
"No cops," Gary explained. "Never the cops." We started back down the mountain about six o'clock, as soon as it was dark. The sky was overcast and it was cold enough for more snow. Gary went first with her, leaving her in a grove of trees while he came back for me. Nobody was around. The threat of snow was great enough to keep everyone indoors until the sky had a chance to clear. We approached the house silently, creeping onto the porch to stand at either side of the door while Bev rang the bell. A curtain was pushed aside and whoever it was recognized her and started to open the door.
Gary was quicker than I. He stepped out and gave the door a kick, sending it flying back into the astonished face of Stella Parkins.
My first impression of Stella was of her lying flat on her back, skirts high around her thighs, crotch plainly visible, with blood pouring from her nose. She began to scream, but cut it off when she saw me. She knew who I was and connected me with my father. Obviously, revenge had come to her home.
"Get inside," I said, the gun in my hand, and pointed at her skull.
The dining room had only two windows and the shades were drawn very tight. We stayed there, invisible from the outside. Stella was about forty-five, very well preserved as they say, with dark dyed hair and still firm legs, though her breasts obviously sagged. Her face was full and square, with large teeth evident in a small thin mouth.
"What do you want?" she asked bravely.
"I want to look in your freezer. The one in the basement."
She shut up at that, knowing her own doom, I suppose. I watched her for a few moments, trying to read the evidence of a killer on her face, but there was nothing there. She looked like any other middle-aged woman trying to keep herself together.
"You lost, Stella. You lost." Still she said nothing, waiting quietly for me to do whatever I was going to do.
"Who killed Polly Satin?" I asked. "Did you do it by yourself?"
"I didn't kill anyone," she answered. "Then who killed them?" Again she said nothing.
"If you don't tell me in the next five seconds, I'm going to shoot you." I pulled a towel over the gun to muffle the blast and began to count. "One. Two. Three. Four. Five."
Then I shot her, simply and decisively. The bullet hit her in the chest, and she flew back off the chair to lie in a crumpled heap on the floor. I was careful not to touch anything. I took her wrist and felt for a pulse.
There was none, and the blood that welled from her chest showed no sign of stopping.
"It's time to go," I said.
"Not just yet."
I turned toward the kitchen to find Beverly's father standing with a shotgun. It was pointing directly at me. "Put your gun on the floor," he said calmly. I dropped it instantly. For the first time I was afraid. Somehow, I'd never realized fully that I might be killed, too, that there was someone else with the ability to play the same role I was playing.
"You want to know who killed Polly Satin? I did. I killed Lucy, too, though Miss Parkins was kind enough to set it up. It's really very simple, and you've probably guessed it already. I'm rich, and I want to be richer. Now is there anything wrong with that? Lucy was too emotional. She liked Polly. Can you imagine liking a Mafia brothel-keeper? I play that film of you and Lucy every night. It's wonderful, isn't it? The photography is exquisite. Polly had excellent taste. When she did something, she did it well."
"Daddy, put the gun down. Please put it down." Bev was looking directly into his eyes.
"You're even stupider than Lucy, do you know that?" He relaxed for a moment and let the barrel of the shotgun drift toward the floor. Gary was quick, incredibly quick. In an instant, he had my father's gun against the side of Peterson's head and the shotgun out of his hands.
I went berserk. For ten minutes I ripped Stella Parkins' dining room apart. Peterson was very dead when I was finished. His chest was caved in and the ribs driven back through the organs underneath. I lost sight of everyone else in the room as I did it, breaking the table and the chairs, one by one, over Peterson's body. When I turned back, Gary was laughing.
"You're going to have quite a time getting your prints off that wood, you know."
Suddenly the door opened, and two tall, heavy men, well dressed in black cashmere overcoats that clung to them smoothly, walked quietly inside.
"How's it going, Gary?" one of them asked.
"Billy did all the work for us," Gary answered.
"He's really a handy guy to have around."
"Who are these guys?" I asked stupidly.
"They're in the family. Pagano, remember? Pm Italian, so it all makes good sense. By the way, the motorcycle's not stolen. I'm leaving the registration so you'll have a way to get out of here tonight. Don't forget to polish the furniture now."
He walked up to Beverly and gave her a quick hug and kiss. "Don't be afraid, Bev," he whispered. "If you use this right, you'll be free." v
"By the way, he said to me, "if you happen to run into your father, tell him to get in touch with us. Now that the opposition has been eliminated, I'm sure we can work something out together. Take care, brother."
Then he was out the door. I began to wipe the furniture free of prints. I was numb, as was Beverly, but she stayed with me, not moving an inch. She was obviously ready to stick around for a long time. When I'd finished, we went quickly outside. The sky had cleared. It wasn't going to snow after all. We got on the bike and headed along Route 23 for the New York State Thru-way.
We stopped several times in upstate New York, whenever it got too cold for me to continue driving, but once we hit the Bronx I knew I had to keep going. I never got to Manhattan. I detoured over the George Washington Bridge and headed south through New Jersey. I had money with me, the bundle I'd taken from my father. The gun I'd thrown away in Kingston. We were looking for someplace just a little warmer.
