He liked his women to be eager, so as his hand smoothed hot and firm over her svelte hip, she unsnapped the already decollete neck of her blue sheath and turned her hard, out-thrust breasts to his white shirt with an impulsive motion. Her red lips moved wet and lewd across his cheek until her mouth covered his. He molded and squeezed her shapely buttocks and he gently spanked them, causing them both to moisten with strange pleasure.
The chair creaked slightly as he leaned back to turn her on his lap. Her belly tightened with real emotion when he found she had also discarded her panties.
They clung in passionate, intimately delicious embrace, exhanging probing tongue for roaming fingers and they thrilled to the adolescent fondling as a delight.
"Don't be so rough, "she whispered.
With little effort he stood up with her body in his arms. She freed her pulsating boobs, letting them lie heavily under his ardent lips, gasping in real excitement as his mouth captured and titillated the hard, pink nipples into near bursting.
Then his arm and body moved, and his kisses bounced noisily from the smooth heave of her loins.
PROLOGE-
The snow was falling, the wind was blowing, and the three men and three women were not weathering the storm. They didn't care for the snow or wind or cold weather, for that fact, at all. They preferred the hot weather.
The six of them were all sitting around on the floor in the living room. They were drinking and cussing the weather. They detested being indoors. They were happier when they could have their little get-togethers outdoors at their secluded summer place.
The three men, Joe, Steve and Pete, were all married to the three women-Carrie, Sally and Babs. They got together every Saturday night and said their farewells every Sunday afternoon. Each weekend (during the cold months) they would get together at each other's apartments. This weekend they were having their blast at Joe and Carrie's apartment.
This wasn't a normal get-together, by any means.
First, they would start off their blast by drinking, then by making love to their spouses, later by making love to each other's spouses, and much later by the women making love to the women and the men indulging inversion. This was a sex blast.
Now they were all on their fourth drink and Steve started to kiss his wife Sally. She responded in a split second. Then, he'd start to take off her blouse and skirt. She'd parade around wearing a sheer, nude bra and panties. The other four got excited and started to undress each other. Soon the six of them would be in their birthday suits and they would all lay down on the rug and love their spouses. Husbands kissing wives on their mouths and breasts and all over. Their hands traveled fast up and down the wives bodies. The wives were sighing and giggling and crying for more. Everyone's hands and mouths were busy and they were enjoying every minute of it.
When fulfillment came to them, they would have another drink or two and rest for a while. The men would simply stand up and find a new sex companion. In a matter of minutes, the six of them were paired off and kissing, fondling and caressing each other. Their tongues danced in sheer delight. They writhed and rolled and sweat was falling off of their naked bodies. One woman was whimpering in ecstasy as her companion kissed her intimately. When culmination finally came to the six of them, they would rest up again and have another couple of drinks. Now, the third time around they would change partners again. Steve was making love to Babs now and his warm huge hand was on her massive breasts. He was toying with it and squeezing it, first gently, then furiously. He rolled it around and pinched it. His eager mouth went down to her other breast and bit it. She let out a small cry. He knew she loved it when he bit her there. She went wild. Her hands were all over his body and soon he went wild. He leaped on her and they rolled together and continued until their journey had ended.
In a few minutes, the other four reached fulfillment, too.
The men fixed fresh drinks for themselves and their wives.
Later, the six of them all stood up and danced to the soft music coming from the Hi-Fi. Their nude bodies were pressed tightly together. Suddenly, Carrie wanted to dance with Babs. The women danced together and their breasts were pressing against one another's. Carrie's hands went down to Babs buttocks and squeezed tightly. Swiftly, Babs pulled Carrie as close to her naked body as possible. Their heartbeats became one. In a few minutes, the women stopped dancing and eased down to the floor. In the meantime, the others stopped dancing also and sat down on the floor to watch the show. Babs grabbed Carrie's huge breasts and squeezed them. Her lips mashed together with Carrie's. Their tongues darted in and out of each other's mouths. Suddenly, Bab's mouth went down to Carrie's breast and stayed there for a while. Carrie was busy touching Babs all over and doing very clever things. Babs lowered her mouth and Carrie screamed in ecstasy.
In the meantime, the three men and one woman were getting too excited to just sit there and watch. One man had his mouth on Sally's breast, the other man put his mouth on the free breast and the third man had his mouth on the lower part of her. They were going insane and one by one they all reached fulfillment.
Later, and much exhausted, they sat around and drank. They were too tired for anymore lovemaking. The couples all paired off with their spouses and found a bed. They went to sleep and they all slept like babies.
In the morning, they would get up, one couple at a time, and take a shower together. They would wash one another and love one another right under the running warm water. Then, one couple would finish and the next couple would take over in the shower.
Later, they'd all have tomato juice, black coffee and toast, in the nude. No need for formality with such a crowd.
After breakfast, they would get back down on the floor and one couple (husband and wife) would make love while the other couples watched. Then the second couple would get their turn to exhibit their skills. Finally, the last couple.
When that was over, they would finally get dressed and say good-bye to one another and leave the sex blast until the following weekend.
And this is the way it goes, as I said before, this is not a normal get-together, by no means.
CHAPTER ONE
It was a nasty night out tonight. The rain was falling and Carl Newport was chilled to the bone. He felt miserable. What he wouldn't give to be curled up near a cozy fire on a thick rug with some beautiful woman, at this very minute.
Carl was standing on the porch, now, and he was just about to knock on the front door, when he looked through a window. One lamp flooded the interior of the beach house, sending soft, caressing light down on the two figures stretched belly to belly on a couch.
The two women were naked except for garter belts and nylon stockings. He assumed they were gorgeous women because the shape of smooth legs and round rumps made him think of loveliness....even if what they were doing seemed awful to a man of Carl's masculine inclinations. Their heads were furiously together, kissing in a mixture of red and brunette hair, tumbling fluidly over straining shoulders. His teeth stopped chattering as he gaped hungrily at the more mature of the two bodies, weighing the plump roundness of firm buttocks and delicious thighs.
The redhead suddenly turned the brunette to her back. Her right arm lying across the other female's belly showed tautness and the manner in which her hand moved in rhythmic insistence. Occasionally, a leg twitched or a shoulder moved, but mostly it was the roaming hand that paced the sensual scene. At least, he thought, they were calm about it, and that was more than he was.
Carl stepped back. Still uncertain, he backed down the four steps to the beach. He could no longer see the women. He looked down the beach to where the surf pounded angrily around his disabled boat.
He walked down to the boat. It was waterlogged and sad, three thousand dollars worth of sleek plastic and chrome. The big outboard motor was as dead as a corpse. Another thousand dollars worth of junk. He had no idea where his tackle box and food locker could be in the black expanse of water. But he was safe, which had been a serious doubt for the past four hours. The whining wind had driven him ashore after the big outboard died.
Carl Newport was a reasonably considerate man despite some opinions to the contrary. The Newport Construction Company was a bad competitor, and his men had labeled Carl "The Diver", but every year, the jobs became bigger and the profits greater.
Cold and wet made him impatient. Finally, he raised both big hands to form a megaphone and with all the power of his broad chest, sent out the call.
"Halloo, there."
He took a few steps, stopped and repeated the call. After more slow steps, again the call. He dropped his cupped hands and waited, and in a second, two shapely silhouettes appeared. Then one of them disappeared and returned in a moment, carrying a rain slicker. He started walking slowly and he reached the porch about the same time as the woman in the slicker came out of the door.
"For gosh sake!" she cried. "Hurry up! Are you alone or are there some others?"
"I'm alone. My boat is knocked out on the beach. Sure glad somebody was home!"
The redheaded woman barely looked at him as he stepped up on the porch for the second time. Her hair whipped in the wind and she raised one hand to keep her eyes clear of the wet tresses as she surveyed the beach.
"There's nothing you can do now," she said. "Come in."
The brunette inside opened the door as Carl stepped forward. "Whoo-ee, are you wet!" she gasped. He blinked, aware of what he was doing to the highly polished floor, conscious of his forlorn appearance, but too grateful to worry.
"I wasn't sure I was going to make it," he admitted.
"Get some hot coffee, Sal," the woman in the slicker said. "Go over by the fire. What the heck were you doing out in that, to begin with?"
"Nothing sensible," he answered, then the chill got him. He took a few steps to the fireplace, shivered visibly, then began to ache all over. Then, the redhead, out of her slicker, handed him a glass of liquor. His fingers would barely hold the glass, but he drank it. She swung the bottle up and poured him another drink. He drank that, feeling the raw fire drive down into his belly.
"Get out of those wet clothes," she said, and began unbuttoning his sport shirt. That close, he marveled at the size and greeness of her eyes, the straight line of her nose and the broad frankness of her mouth. Her fingers brushed his thick shoulders as she removed his shirt. The woman unsnapped his belt. He stood like a startled rabbit while she dropped his trousers around his ankles.
The brunette girl, in the loose blouse and the very tight slacks, said, "He's blue!"
"Give me that coffee," the redhead snapped. "Go in and turn on my electric blanket. On the way back, bring me a towel and Ronnie's robe. Hurry up!"
Ronnie's robe was too small, but the coffee was good.
He knew he was getting warm, but it seemed only something skin deep. He let the redhead lead him into a bedroom where she promptly pulled down his shorts and pushed him over on the double bed. She tucked him in. She felt the warmth of the bedcovers, re-adjusted the blanket thermostat, then stepped back to check over her handiwork.
"You'll make it," she said.
It was hours later when he awakened and from the streak of blue sky coming past the heavy drapes, he was sure the storm was over. The room was acutely well-mannered and feminine. The smell of women was only a little less obvious than the smell of money. He tried to recall details of his advent into safety, but they were vague, beginning with the vivid picture of two sets of bare legs intertwined on a couch, and bouncing through his personal discomfort at having been bossed, handled and bedded down like some kid who had fallen in the river.
He sat up and lit a cigarette, surprised that he felt as good as he did. There was sand in the bed from his feet and legs. He smiled, remembering how the redhead had undressed him. Then he sobered. His boat and motor and gear were probably half-buried in the sand and beat to hell. Insurance would replace the iron and plastic, but certainly not in time for him to finish out his vacation fishing. He started to get out of bed when he remembered that he was stark naked and there was nothing in this feminine bedroom to cover his hide. His shorts were even gone.
Muttering, he got out of bed and went into the bathroom adjoining the bedroom. It was feminine, too, but adequate. He found a brand new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and used it. Then he started the water in the shower and stepped in. It helped, but soaping and rinsing revealed some sore muscles, probably, he thought, from the hours of trying to paddle his storm-tossed boat through the waves. It had been close, and he now knew what the newspapers meant when they talked about 'shock and exposure' in describing sea disasters. Then curiosity about the real 'shock' of the previous night took hold. He wrapped the damp towel around his lean hips and walked out of the bedroom.
He heard a human sound from somewhere to his right, and on bare feet, he went through into a large, modern kitchen. The redhead was doing something with coffee and toast. She was wearing a brief sunsuit which seemed to make her voluptuous body even more sensuous than he remembered having seen it once before. He checked every solid, rolling contour, hoping that the shape of any big man under a tightly wrapped bath-towel didn't betray his thoughts.
"Miss, could you spare a cup of coffee for a shipwrecked mariner?" he asked. He knew it surprised her, but there was no panic in the wide open gaze from her idiotically green eyes.
"Yes," she said, then smiled. "You look very healthy this morning. Feeling okay, Mr. Newport?"
"Wonderful-and bare, Miss-?"
"Mrs. Frederick," she answered. Then she pointed to one side of the kitchen where his sport shirt and wash-pants were piled in a neat, freshly pressed condition on an ironing board. His wallet was piled atop the clothes, so the mystery of her knowing his name was solved.
"Thank you!" he said, and reached for his clothes.
"I'll turn my back," she said in a voice that told him she was doing it for his benefit, not hers. He dropped the towel, slipped into his shorts and his trousers. She turned around when his belt buckle raided. "It's too warm for that shirt. Here, have a cup of coffee. I'll fix you some breakfast, too."
"I guess my boat washed back out to see," he said, taking the cup of coffee.
"Oh no. The men loaded it on a trailer this morning and took it into town. Luke said the motor ought to be flushed out and started again as soon as possible."
"That's thoughtful!" he spoke brightly. "But you should have awakened me. I wasn't that bad off."
"Well, I thought about it. But you looked like a little boy sleeping and I didn't have the heart to awaken you. Anyway, a man in my bed is a novelty."
She didn't look at him when she said it, and he wondered if he should let it pass as some private thought she had let slip.
"What time will they return?" he inquired.
"Who knows? It's twenty-five miles to Fort Tempar."
"Twenty-five miles! I was just off the breakwater, two miles, when the storm came up. I really had a ride in the dark!"
"Only an idiot goes out to sea in a twenty-foot boat all alone," she said. "More coffee? My first name is Lee, Carl," she said. "Do you want your eggs and toast now?"
"Thank you. Where was everybody last night when I floated up on the beach? I seem to recall just one other girl. Or was I delirious?"
"Sally Merkson. My husband's secretary," Lee Frederick said. "The rest were in town at a bar. My husband, Luke, Joannie and Steve Dolphi, and Don Hugh-son, who is supposed to be Sally's boyfriend. At least, my husband pays him a good salary to escort her on these weekends. Nice crowd."
He thought about it. "I get the slight impression you're trying to tell me something. Do you think I should know?"
"Well, she said they are coming back very soon, and frankly, we can be quite a shock to green troops. First, they'll be half drunk. This will give the men an excuse to talk dirty and manhandle the women. It will give the women an excuse not to mind the dirty talk and the handling. It can get pretty rough by three in the afternoon."
"I'm a big man," he told her. He tried to align her words and her looks with what he had seen on the couch the night before. His blood raced with the realization that he hadn't beached at just any place. From the moment he'd stepped up on the front porch, surprise had followed surprise.
He started to eat the scrambled eggs and toast. She refilled his coffee cup, then sat down across from him while he finished the food. She made no attempt to cover her fabulous cleavage with folded arms. Her words about the change in weather, the condition of his boat, and the trouble they had getting the semi-cruiser onto the trailer, called for no replies. Then he recalled having seen no reason for Luke Frederick to have a big boat trailer. He asked about it.
"Our boat is propped on blocks out back," she said. "None of this crowd boats or fishes or swims. Except me. Mostly, we just drink and fool around. We come here on Friday nights and stay until Sunday evening."
"I see," Carl prevaricated.
She took the dishes out to the sink. He sat and looked at her back. The sunsuit was very short, cutting high across the rounds of her bottom. Her waist was small. The side-bulge of her breasts showed at each edge of her chest. Without the memory of what he'd seen her doing with the brunette, he would have gotten up and stood close behind her. He knew exactly where he'd put his hands and exactly what he'd say to her to let this calm, green-eyed temptress know how her words and actions aroused him.
But he didn't move nor speak, because once before in his life, he'd tried his masculine charm on a lesbian and the humiliation they were capable of dealing out to a half-passionate man was not an experience he cared to experience again.
"I think I'll go down on the beach and see if any of my gear washed up," he said, getting to his feet.
She turned around and looked squarely into his eyes.
"That's a good idea," she said, as if she wanted to get rid of him.
He'd found one kapok cushion and the handle half of his broken paddle when the sound of a car turned his head back toward the house. At that point, Highway Two was a mile from the beach, and he could see the top half of a station wagon as it bumped along the dirt road. The station wagon pulled into one of the garage stalls. As he picked up his cushion and started up the beach, a woman in red tights with bouncing brunette hair came out of the garage and ran down the steps to the level of the house. Carl thought it was Sal Merkson. Then a man and a woman appeared, and behind them was another man. They seemed angry. The second woman was plump and had blonde, hair. At the last step, she stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. The two men left her to her own problems and went on into the back of the house.
Perhaps, Carl thought, one of them was sober enough to drive him back to Fort Tempar and his hotel room. As he went up the front steps, the memory of what he'd seen the first time he'd climbed these steps, made his nerves tingle. They were all in the living room, and he knew his entry had shut several excited mouths. All of them looked at him antagonistically, except Lee. She stood with her hands on her hips as if she had been listening and disapproving.
"Carl, meet the gang," she said. "This is my husband, Luke. Sal, you've met. This is Joannie Dolphi and her husband, Steve. Then, there's always Don Hughson."
Luke Frederick was perhaps thirty-seven, dark and wearing the look of money. His hand in Carl's was professionally firm. Joannie Dolphi was younger than her dyed hair and was just chubby enough to be sexy in slacks and a blouse. Steve Dolphi looked like a man, but at the moment, fear showed on his face, making it pale against the black of his eyes and redness of his hard mouth. Don Hughson was young and attractive. He didn't offer to shake hands and when he said, "How do you do?" Carl was sure.
"Want to thank you all for getting my boat out of the sand and taking it into town," Carl said. "Damned nice of you."
"Yes. Well, it seemed the best thing to do," Luke answered. "It's going to need a few days in the repair shop."
"Broke your shaft," Don Hughson added. "The boat's a mess, but it isn't hurt," Steve Dolphi commented.
"Shut up!" Joannie Dolphi shouted and her shrill voice lashed out like a whip. "Oh, shut up about the boat!"
Carl looked at Lee because he knew her best. She looked back with something like 'dammit' in her eyes. "Carl, we've a private sort of thing. Will you excuse us a few minutes?"
"Of course. I'll go check the beach again."
"Why?" Steve Dolphi asked. "There's nothing we can do about him now. Anyway, I have a hunch-are you the Carl Newport of the Newport Construction Company in California?"
"Yes," Carl admitted, suddenly cautious.
"He's a brain," Dolphi told the others. "And a man who knows how to do things. Maybe he can help us."
"Nobody can help us," Sally Merkson said. "We're all going to die in the gas chamber!"
Carl looked at her exciting body, clad from throat to toe in the black leotard. The red belt around her waist was exactly the same shade as her mouth. Her breasts were long and conical, pushing the knit material out dramatically. But the sex was hidden by the despair of her voice and the way she slumped in a chair.
"There's been an accident," Lee added quickly. "Do you want him to know, or don't you?" she asked the others. "Steve?"
Steve looked at Luke Frederick, who looked at the floor. It was obvious to Carl that whatever had happened, it had cast a sobering effect over the liquor-smelling gang. Frederick looked at everyone but his wife. They were all looking at him, and Carl had the feeling it was a problem of Frederick's making.
"I can't think," Frederick admitted.
"Newport, can we count on your discretion?" Dolphi asked.
"Short of grand larceny and murder," Carl laughed.
"My god," Joannie Dolphi cried. "You see?"
He had the feeling he should walk out and down the beach and the twenty-five miles back to Fort Tempar. Something had happened and from their actions, it revolved around death. They were looking at him again, and it was as if he were responsible for their trouble. "I'll go," he murmured.
"Wait, Carl," Lee put her hand on his arm as she spoke. "It's too late. It's nothing we can hide, anyway."
"We've got to hide it!" Luke Frederick yelled. "It was an accident. But it will ruin me! Ruin us all."
"You. Your damned boat," Hughson said to Carl. "If it hadn't been for you and your boat, this would never have happened!"
"Just what did happen?" Lee asked of her husband.
"Accident. I swear it was an accident. She didn't have to be so snippy! She went crazy! Oh god!"
"You tell us, Steve," Lee said.
Steve Dolphi looked sideways at Frederick. "We had a few drinks at the ANCHOR'S LODGE," he said. "That was before we took your boat to the shop, Newport. Why don't you take our station wagon and drive into town and see what you want done with your boat and the motor? After all, we didn't want to spend your mon-ey."
Carl thought about his rig. He was aware that everyone was looking at him, but he thought it might be because they had some private thing to talk about. He nodded enthusiastically.
"That's nice of you. I've my own car in Fort Tempar. And some clothes in a hotel. I want you to know how grateful I am for your consideration. I am getting a little tired of walking around barefooted!"
"Always glad to help," Frederick said.
"You're welcome to come back, anytime," Lee said.
"Thank you," he told her. "I'll have your car sent back."
"Leave it in town at the Mobil station," Dolphi said. "We'll drivein this evening in another car and bring it back. No problem at all."
"Where is my rig?" he inquired.
"The Timer Boat Shop," Dolphi said quickly. "They were a bit busy and I parked it in their boatyard. No doubt they've flushed the motor by now."
"Good. And thank you for the loan of the car." He knew something was wrong with them, but he was neither a petty man nor a paddler. His own problems were none that couldn't be solved with intelligence and money, both of which he had. The turn of events seemed to nullify any idea he may have had that sex was here for the taking. As he said a last goodbye, he was aware of the quiet speculation they all afforded him, but it didn't matter. He went to the back door and Lee Frederick was the only one who followed him.
"You were pretty great," he said. "Thanks for everything."
"It might have been nice-if you could have stayed longer," she said quietly. "Anyway, good luck, Carl Newport."
"Is there," he said. "Is there anything I could do to help? I owe you all something."
She looked up and many things flashed from her eyes. Then she lowered her head. He was about to speak again when she stepped back into the house and closed the door. He let the shape of her burn out of his mind, then went up to the garage where the station wagon was parked.
He put on his sport shirt and got into the big automobile.
CHAPTER TWO
Carl lit up a cigarette and started the engine of the station wagon. He drove the twenty-five miles into Fort Tempar. His mind was busy going over the past several hours, and the strange people he had met.
It might take a day, or perhaps two, to set his fishing rig right; and the acquisition of new tackle and sundrious gear would be no problem. Vacation time was precious to Carl. His business was a very demanding thing, and when he could escape the world of blueprints and steel, he had to make the most of it. He could think of nothing wrong with a chance to spend his vacation on the now placid ocean with Lee Frederick, but there was her husband, and there remained the vivid picture of her lying on the couch, making passionate love to the spindle-legged Sal Merkson.
At the outskirts of town, a big neon sign announced "THE ANCHOR'S LODGE." It was natural, he thought, that the heavy drinking crowd should pick the bar closest to the beach house. There were a few cars in the parking lot, and one police car. Back of the bar, a double row of big house trailers lay like a hedgerow in front of a residential district. He drove on, assuming the boat shop would likewise be the first marine shop he came to.
Then he saw the boat shop. It was on the right hand side of the street, and there was a big lot filled with used boats and some new ones, spreading across the street frontage. He drove down to the corner and parked the station wagon at the curb. He got out of the car and saw his boat on the lot, beside the driveway leading back to the building which served as a store and supply house. There were three men standing close to the boat. He thought nothing about this, and started up the driveway. Two uniformed policemen came out of the cluster of boats and walked toward him. The three men by his boat also headed toward him. Still not conscious of himself as the focal point of their interest, he walked on. Then one of the policemen pulled his gun and aimed it squarely at Carl's belly.
"Stop right there, pal," the officer demanded.
"You Carl Newport?" the other officer asked.
"Yes. What's up?" he asked, not raising his hands.
"You're under arrest. Suspicion of murder. Put your hands up and don't move!"
"What the heck are you talking about?" he gasped.
One of the approaching men stepped faster. "Mr. Newport, you had better come with us. And I might warn you that anything you say may be used as evidence. I'm Detective Brian of the Fort Tempar police department. We want to ask you some questions. I'm sorry. We'll have to handcuff you."
"You must be crazy!" Carl snapped.
"That is your boat?"
"Yes!"
"And you just drove up in that station wagon?"
"You were looking right at me!"
"Yes," Brian agreed. "Well, come along, then."
Carl held out his hands as the cop produced the cuffs. His brain went off vacation instantly, and he began to add up the strange turn of events of the past couple of hours. Like some beach bum, he let them lead him down to the station wagon. The terse words and muttered instructions among the policemen meant little, except that he was certain they were all crazy. Until the detective opened the tailgate of the station wagon.
There was a big, shapeless lump under a plaid blanket. The big, shapeless lump turned out to be a half-naked woman, and even Carl could tell she was deader than his vacation. The detective looked and Carl looked, and the other policeman looked. The corpse was that of a woman, probably thirty-eight or forty. She was neither pretty nor even attractive. She wore only a blouse and two badly snagged stockings. Her stringy brown hair was false, as attested to by the patches of graying hair not subject to a hairdresser's care. The detective dropped the blanket and turned to Carl.
"Would you like to tell us all about it, Mr. Newport?"
"I never saw her before in my life!" Carl blurted.
"No. Well, come along and tell us about it."
After a few hours, the detectives began to lose, their combined tempers. Carl had lost his, regained it, lost it again, and was now in some control of his fury. He knew they would have preferred to rough him up a little, but their phone call to the local hotel; and the one to California, had established that they weren't dealing with a itinerant fisherman, and in fact, not even an average citizen. None of this had altered their insistence that he had raped and murdered a woman named Sandra Ferguson, a town character most of them had known for fifteen years or more.
They accused him of having picked her up the day before, taken her with him on the boat, violated her and beat her to death and subsequently beached his damaged boat in the storm. From there on, their case was based upon the statements made by Luke Frederick, Steve Dolphi and Don Hughson, verified by one Sally Merkson and Mrs. Steve Dolphi.
Their affidavits stated that they had awakened that morning while he was sleeping and had decided to take his damaged boat and motor to town before the salt water and sand had a chance to ruin his expensive gear. This they had done, and with no interest in what the boat contained. They had then gotten back into their car and headed for the beach house. Half way there, one of the women had noticed the manner in which the blanket was lumped and spread in the back of the big car. Their shock and surprise led to a typically citizen-type reaction. The woman was obviously dead, obviously raped and a stranger to them all.
They had then decided to have the murderer drive the evidence back to town while they called the police. The police had searched the boat, and a worn shirt, a torn bra, and two saltwater soaked shoes had been found in Carl's boat. Also, liquor bottles and Sandra Ferguson's drenched purse.
They went over and over the story, stopping every sentence or so to pound uselessly at Carl's silence. The day wore on, and from time to time, now and irrelevent facts were added as police officers entered, whispered and left the room where Carl sat in silence.
They told him how stupid he'd been to sneak out of the beach house and move Sandra Ferguson's body from the boat to the station wagon. They told him only a stupid man would have brought her ashore in the first place. They told him that even a liquor-soaked sex fiend would have had enough brains to throw her clothes over the side rather than to have left them in the boat. By five in the afternoon, he decided to wait a little longer.
For fifteen years, he had paid Edward Totten in excess of fifteen thousand dollars a year to keep the Newport Construction Company legal and out of trouble. Through a dozen court fights Totten had fought the battle and always won. And always, his warning to Carl had been to build buildings, dig holes and erect bridges, but leave the talking to an attorney. So Carl sat and remained silent, his mind ticking off the miles he knew Totten would be making on his way to Fort Tempar. And one tiny corner of his brain was thinking about Lee Frederick, and the horrible group she had so aptly termed, "Nice crowd!"
He was in a state of shock as well as confusion. This is some mess, he thought, some mess!
Edward Totten said, "There's no such thing as bail for first degree murder, Carl."
"I didn't murder the old goat!" Carl said. "I never saw her before that cop raised the blanket."
"You say. I say. Five people say the body was in the car when they drove into town and back. Her clothes and junk were found in your boat, soaked with salt water and messed up. The corner says she was raped and beaten half to death and died some time early this morning form ribs piercing her lungs, causing her to bleed fatally. There are drag marks and footprints from the place where your boat was beached to the garage. I saw them. I also talked to the five people."
"Six," Carl corrected him. "What did Mrs. Frederick say?"
"The redheaded babe?" Totten asked. "Not much. She said it was possible that you could have gotten out of bed and moved the body without anyone knowing you'd left the house. She also said you were tired and ill and in a trance when you staggered into the house last night. The brunette agreed you were rummy, Carl. She said you never flicked an eyelash when the two of them undressed you and put you to bed. Can't say I'd have objected, either!"
"Have you told the police what I told you? I mean, what really happened to me? I don't know what happened to the dead woman. All I know is that they came back from town scared. They talked about possible execution or whether or not I should be let in on something."
"They admitted that the beach buddies were scared and confused at first. Incidentally, that crowd on Fredericks, Dolphis and Hughson are not bums. Among them, they add up to a cool million in assets. Fort Tempar has considered them desirable beach dwellers for nearly three years. They stand tall in the witness box, Carl."
"Oh, goddammit, Totten! This is absurd! You know I never killed anyone!"
"Absurd it is, nothing it is not."
"What about the woman, Sandra Ferguson? Surely, someone must have seen her after I left the dock yesterday at sunup."
"I checked the dock, the bars and some people-observers. No one recalls having seen her yesterday, and few would have paid any attention to her if they had. Knowing you, the looks of the dead woman alone would convince me you wouldn't let her in the woodshed, let alone your fancy boat. But disregarding a happy fact or two which may show up at the inquest, tomorrow morning, I'd bet you go to trial for second degree murder, maybe first. I think I can get you free, but you're going to make me rich in the process!"
"Use your stupid head!"
"I will. You use yours, Carl. There's nothing wrong with the policemen in this town. They have a murder on their hands and some very good circumstantial evidence. That evidence and five people standing as one with their finger pointed at you, makes the law happy. Murders aren't plentiful in this town and the newspapers are carrying it on page one. You and Sandra Ferguson and the beach buddies are famous. Carl, but none of you are as famous as the Fort Tempar police department. The District Attorney has already promised a quick conviction for the accused. Accused. That's you, Carl."
"Who the hell's side are you on?" Carl shouted.
"Yours, Carl, and you know I always win." Edward Totten smacked his lips. "I think I'll go out and ask that redhead some more questions."
Carl had some questions to ask Lee Frederick himself, so in the morning, when they took him out to the Frederick house to reenact the drag and lift for the coroner's jury, he unloaded from the police car at forty-five miles an hour, handcuffs and all. He hit the ground in a tight ball and was through rolling before the driver could come to a stop. As he sat in a painful daze, he heard the following police car crash into the suddenly stopped automobile. Hard. He hoped no one was hurt, but at the moment, his sleepless night and in-borne anger made him care only a little bit.
Carl Newport scuttled through a culvert and cat-footed it down the rocky creek. They had given him back his shoes so he went like a scared rat. His cuffed hands didn't help, but he held them bunched at his belly and ran. The cries and shouting faded as he reached the channel cut in the sand by the winter runoff. He heard a gun fire three times, but there was no hum of bullets, no whistling ricochet. He thought they were shooting up into the rocky gorge, not down.
The beach was shallow. There was no place to hide.
And he didn't want to be caught. He ran down the beach until footprints left by beach walkers ran out. With forty feet to the water remaining, he lay down on the sand and began to roll toward the water.
Arms outstretched above his head, he propelled himself with leg kicks and elbow bumps. He left a trail, but it was an odd, inhuman trail, and would not excite anyone looking for the footprints of a running man. Going into water deep enough to let him bring his arms down and curl up his thick legs, he looked back. The surf was breaking softly over the marks in the wet sand. One, two, three breakers and the signs of his rolling, bumping body were eradicated. Slowly, his head barely above the water, he pushed out into the deeper water.
Four men appeared at the edge of the tundra, two on each side of the creek channel. Floating with only his face above water during the intake of breath, he kicked himself out further. The four men split forces and two went north and two went south. By then, Carl began to think about himself.
The waters along the coast at that point were treacherous, cold and subject to fierce undertow. Wearing trousers, shoes and a shirt, with his hands cuffed in front of him and his body already bruised from his jump for freedom, he had only one thing in his favor. The urge for survival poured warmth and strength into his body and he knew he was going to make it.
Within an hour, the urge for survival was worn thin. Tired, cold, he floated gently with the lazy ocean current. A few brief cramps coiled first one leg and then the other, demanding his best control to keep from surrendering to panic. He was carefully measuring his ability to reach the beach a full three-quarters of a mile away, when he found the kelp bed, floating indolently nowhere, its slimy tentacles and slippery pods resembling no haven. But it was a haven, affording Carl the barest help in keeping afloat, and providing cover when the helicopter came over, slow, noisy and manned by sharp-eyed Coat Guardsmen.
For endless time, he wallowed in the mass of kelp, resting, regaining his strength if not his warmth, and going under the thick seaweed when the helicopter buzzed overhead. He could not see the beach, but he knew it was being patrolled by frustrated policemen. No doubt the wilderness was being combed. The whole countryside was searching for Carl Newport.
His watch lived up to its guarantee and remained faithful. By three in the afternoon, the helicopter went back to its base. Carl floated, first on his back, then on his belly, trying to salvage some of the sun's warmth. About four-thirty, the wind began to rise, and the water roughed up. When he could see the beach, he gave up, because it was apparent his hunters had marched on.
It took all of his meager strength to kick himself to where he could touch bottom. The sea nearly got him because he hadn't the strength to fight the breakers. Rolled, tired and sick with salt water, he crawled up on the wet sand. He rested until it worried him, then again, he rolled, but up the beach this time. He crawled into a wind-washed hollow at the base of the cutback and stayed there, exhausted.
Twice in forty-eight hours, the sea had nearly finished him. With no humor, he decided the sea had failed because he was born to hand. It didn't take long before he fell asleep. He fell into a deep sleep and was dead to the world.
CHAPTER THREE
Sally Merkson was pretty enough, all right, in the passion department. She was plainly a hot, horny creature. She couldn't get enough and, if necessary, she could, and did, indulge in masturbatory releases. There are people like that, male and female.
She took advantage of every conceivable beauty aid to maintain her look of twenty-four, even when she was thirty. She looked thin because her hips flared broadly from a wasp waist, and because her rather small rib-cage supported long, conical boobs with thick under rolls far beyond the logic suggested by her slim arms and slender legs. As befitted the moods of her current lover, she could be kittenish as a child, as brazen as a tramp, or as perverse as a Lesbian page out of Sapho.
Years of 'career' sex had taken her through four employers up to Luke Frederick. In the interim, she had given birth to two children whom her mother took care of, been involved in one divorce action, and made one short trip to the hospital to rid herself of the tiresome burden of avoiding pregnancies. She alone knew the balance of her private bank account, and the men she served didn't care because all of them had or had had, fortunes to make her earnings look inadequate.
But this was the first time in her career she had been involved with murder, and it upset her. No matter what the rest of them called it, now that the first pressure was worn off, it had been murder. And to satisfy a whim of Luke Frederick, philosophized, any man or woman you chanced to meet might be a murderer, or a thief.
But in this case, she knew Don Hughson, effeminate, homosexual wastrel, was a murderer by his own words. Further, and this was the point of pinch, he had preceeded his murder with rape, brutality and defilation. All of this in one blinding episode lasting barely forty-five minutes. All of this from a man who avowed complete contempt for the feminine charms of a woman, who went wild for males, little boys and prissy, primping 'brothers' at the drop of a hat.
She had lived with Hughson for eight months, sharing adjoining bedrooms, meals, the works. They had lived together as man and wife, with considerably more affection for each other than most married people, barring one arrangement. They had never made love, in any manner, shape or form. Once, or twice, she had deliberately tried him with her naked body. He had laughed and sent her out of his room. She had always thought she knew him intimately, but somewhere in their association, she had missed some tiny facet of his personality. This tiny facet could turn Don Hughson into a brutal rapist, a raging killer, fag or no.
Raped, she decided, she could not be. Murder she feared with a natural desire to live. But mutilation was a terrible thing to Sally, who loved her face and her body and the symbol of desirable female they represented. In the past two weeks, she had contemplated complete and sudden escape from the strange young man and her stranger friends. A couple of things stopped this inclination. One was the quiet but deadly threat of Luke Frederick made to them all, but specifically to maintain what he called 'status quo', she found herself living in the same apartment with the murderer. At first, Luke had been content for her to simply be seen with Don Hughson. Then, as she moved closer to Luke and the weekends at the beach house and sundry spas became nearly ritual with the three couples, Luke had decided it would be best if she moved in with the paid man to cement beyond a doubt the obvious, if false relationship between them. So eight months previously, she had dutifully moved into the apartment with Don, and the illusion was supposed to be complete.
Now she looked across the living room at the slender homosexual and wondered if they had fooled anyone. Some of Don's normal gaiety and wit had returned since the police had primed the newspaper pumps with the theory that Carol Newport had probably died in the ocean attempting to escape. The unholy six, as Sal privately labeled them, had been scared from the moment word of Newport's escape came to them. But as the first day stretched into three, then to six, and now into two weeks, with no sign nor word of the fugitive, breath came easier to them all. In fact, another weekend was planned at the Sunnyside Valley home the Frederick's maintained, which was the first general indication that things were back to normal.
Back to normal except for one thing, she thought. Murder is bad, but it was only fatal to one person at a time. The course of her life had twined in and about the legal fringes for years and she took advantage of a good thing and worried about the legality of it later. If one didn't know for sure, she to Sally Merkson. The other was the badly defined affection Sal felt for Don. As if he were a little boy who desperately needed a mother. So, while she was scared, she was also curious. She felt the urge to help him, without knowing where he needed help. Maybe it was hidden incest on his part. Probably a possibility of his wanting to sexually use a sister or mother-or an uncle-it was his dark secret. She confused intuition with understanding, and more than ever before, she felt he needed the love of a woman, and without much struggle, she rumbled neatly into her own trap. And that is the life of Sally Merkson to date.
* * *
The rest of the office crew had left so Sal knew what was coming when Luke pulled her down on his lap.
She was fond of Luke because he was successful, handsome and a satisfactory lover. But he liked his woman to be eager, so as his hand smoothed hot and firm over her svelte hip, she unsnapped the already decollete neck of her blue sheath and turned her hard, out-thrust breasts to his white shirt with an impulsive motion. Her red lips moved wet and lewd across his cheek until her mouth covered his. He molded and squeezed her shapely buttocks and he gently spanked them, causing them both to moisten with strange pleasure. She let murmurs escape through her lips and into his mouth, then drove them into his throat with her darting tongue. The big chair creaked slightly as he leaned back to turn her on his lap. Her belly tightened with real emotion when he found she had also discarded her panties.
They clung in passionate, intimately delicious embrace, exchanging probing tongue for roaming fingers and they thrilled to the adolescent fondling as a delight, not a promise. She was definitely his, as were the fifty trucks, the shops, the warehouse and the three floors of office space. She liked to be his, but for the first time, she felt some little reservation, and she channeled it into something purely physical.
"Don't be so rough," she whispered. "And I'll bet you didn't wash after coming up from the old shop!"
"Yes, I did, doll," he laughed. "I'm rough because you drive me crazy, dolly."
"How crazy?" she badgered him.
He did a hard, cruel thing with his hand and she gasped, then he was gentle and she kissed him savagely.
With little effort he stood up with her body in his arms. He looked soft because, being the boss had covered the trucker's muscles earned in a moving van. Dissipation marred his features, but less now that he was excited by the woman in his grasp. He was, Sal decided, one hell of a man, but he could never recall how cold the leather couch was to the bareness of her bottom.
She never knew just what was in his mind; his kisses dominated her now and she let his lips rove and nibble at her throat and shoulders until she was sure. She put one hand behind his straining neck and with the other, she freed her pulsating boobs, letting them lie heavily under his ardent lips, gasping in real excitement as his mouth captured and titillated the hard, pink nipples into near bursting. Her skirt, now drawn high a-round her waist, let her belly and thighs feel the crisp whiteness of his shirt sleeves. Then his arm and body moved, and his kisses bounced noisily from the smooth heave of her loins.
She settled her hips ecstatically, her hands still translating his desire as she caressed the back of his neck. He had not wanted her in this way for many days, and she knew it mean some inner conflict needed selfish, sensual outlet. She didn't care. Her passion throbbed and made her hips move with just the tiniest amount of wanton rotation. She felt his lips teasing her, demanding that she increase the eager gyrations. He kissed her white inner thighs, moving his head, letting his kisses fall where they would.
Then his lust finished his patience and as his hot mouth found its velvet goal, she turned her head against the couch back and thought of Lee. After a moment, she gave in to the excruciating ecstasy. The sound of his breath, wet and tense was impossible to pace because hers came so much faster than his, although his was a prominant gush of volcanic juices which almost caused her to faint at the sensation.
"You okay?" Luke asked as she slid into the exquisitely upholstered booth.
"Of course," Sal laughed back at him. "You're not that good!"
"I'm good and hungry," he said, sliding in beside her.
They ordered drinks. Calm beyond good reason, she looked at him with some question in her eyes. He was calm too, which surprised her because his strange love-making seldom satiated him to calmness. Invariably, it simply postponed his passion. No she doubted that he would care, later.
"Have the police heard anything?" she asked, sipping her Manhattan before and after the question.
"Nothing they've told me. I had lunch with Detective Brian yesterday. He was checking Newport's offices again."
"For what? Luke, you've got to tell me!"
He was silent then spoke. "They don't think he's dead, I mean. They think there is a fifty-fifty chance he escaped. The trackers and the dogs made pretty sure he didn't go up the mountain. They followed his scent down the creek and lost it at the edge of the beach. They never picked it up again, so they figured he took to the ocean. Oldtimers in that area were sure no man could live for long in the open sea. Particularly a man who was probably busted up by that stupid jump out of a speeding police car. The currents there are bad, as we know from the few times Lee tried to swim off our beach. Up to a couple of days ago, the police were ninety-nine percent sure he drowned, handcuffs and all."
Sal tried to swallow the terror arising in her throat. "What-what made them change their odds?" she stammered.
"A nosey newspaperman." he replied. "They were desperately trying to find something to keep the story alive." Luke Frederick signalled for another drink. "If Newport is alive, they'll get him. None of us are dead yet. He's a big burly moose and well known in California. I go along with Brian-if he's alive, the rat is probably halfway to the Islands! Or Mexico."
"Luke, I'm scared!"
"Don't be. We're all going down to Sunny side tomorrow and well have a blast. Don't say anything to Hughson. Or anyone else."
"What if he comes after us?"
"Dolphi and I both have gun permits. I assure you that Wilful Carl is meat, just like anyone else. Bullets don't know who is a hero and who isn't. Drink up, I'm hungry."
They ordered, ate, and left in an hour
* * *
It took three days for Carl to finally reach California. There, under cover of night, he had simply broken a window into his office, opened his safe and removed thirty hundred dollars, left a note where his secretary would find it and left. Stumbled out was more like it. For days he had fought bruises, seawater, exposure and a terrific case of nerves. He had eaten very little, hardly slept at all. Slowed to a crawl, it took him four hours to get to town and into a cheep hotel. With his belly full of chicken, potatoes and coffee, he tumbled into bed and slept twenty-four hours without an awakening.
He roused with his mind in a fog, burning with a fever he'd had for years. He was dirty and unshaven, and his clothes were filthy. His wrists were still sore from the brutal manner in which he had rid himself of the handcuffs. The first little town south of Fort Tempar had a welding shop. The pickup truck parked in back had a complete acetylene unit securely locked to the body bolts. Huddled under a tarp, with fingers from an asbestos glove threaded between the cuff and his wrist, he'd managed to burn the tempered steel in two. But he'd also burned his skin.
The fever gave him diarrhea, and this kept him in bed a few more days. He would have starved to death except for the maid who found him the second morning. Between delirium and need, he recalled giving her four small bills and sending her out for good. He also had Little memories about her sympathetic voice and her strong hands. On the fourth morning, he was awake when she opened the door with her key. He felt weak, but he was once more alert.
"Well, man, I was ready to bury you!" she laughed. "How you feel?"
"Pretty good. I guess I must have been pretty sick, wasn't I?"
She was homely except for her big eyes and laughing mouth, and the memories she'd left with Carl. Her uniform had once been white, but like her shoes, it had seen better times. She stood at the side of his bed and looked down at him as if he were her own private he-doll.
"Some sick," she agreed. "The manager wanted to call an am'blance. I tol' the no good rat to mind his own business, long as you had money to pay. Which you have."
He looked down at his bare chest and heavy arms. The red rings around his wrist were pretty obvious, and he had no doubt his picture had been in the newspapers. She had not tried to undress him, but she had taken his shirt, removed by Carl the first night, and hung it up after washing and ironing it. It was an expensive shirt.
"I owe you a lot," he remarked. "You could get into trouble."
She smiled, easing the thickness of her features. "Since you come here, I dug up all the old newspapers and I read the story over a few times. Then I looked at you lyin' there sick and fightin' the pain. Like I tol' that shifless woman downstairs-Tammy, you mind your own business."
It all came back to Carl and he said something he had been dying to say since the Fort Tempar police had closed in on him at the boatyard.
"On my mother's grave, I didn't do it!"
"You rest, dearie," the big woman said. "Tammy taken care of you!"
In the dark of that night, Tammy Grader came for him in a beat-up Dodge. It coughed and jerked and wheezed, but it held together long enough to get them to a small, battered house on Western Avenue. He was shamed that he could smell the district; trash, musty houss and humanity tinted the heavy summer air. But by the time the old car pulled into the driveway, he had wrapped the odor around himself like armorplate.
"Your house?" he asked as they got out of the car.
I "Fifteen years ago I bought it. Changed me fifteen million beds and washed me fifteen million toilets jus' for this little old cabin. It's clean, chum, and you welcome. Onliest other people here is my two gran' young-uns, Jimmy and Lean. Sometimes their mom comes, but that's usually on a Tuesday. Go ahead on in."
Jimmy was about eleven and Lean was a bit older.
They were expecting him, and their welcome was shy and mumbled. Jimmy was thin and his pants were gathered around his waist in great bunches. His hands were long and bony, but he shook hands firmly and with great haste. Lean had a smile like her grandmother's. She also had some high school poise.
"Sophomore," Tammy said. "Fresh, too. Got to primp an' paint and' straighten her hair, she do."
"Get good grades?" he just asked for something to say.
"Who needs them to make beds?" she asked with a look at her grandmother. Tammy swung at her, but the girl laughed and ran out of the room. Her brother nodded and followed.
"Younguns learn too fast," she decided. "Come along now, an' I'll show you where to sleep."
It was a small wall-papered room with dime-store perfume bottles and a plastic set of toilet articles. The hairbrush was worn, and many teeth were out of the comb.
"Like I said," Tammy explained. "Patti don't hardly come home any more. An' she don't need this here room to borry fifteen dollars from her mom. You jus' make yourself at home, chum. The bathroom is jus' down the hall."
"Carl," he said.
"Sho', Carl."
"Carl. With money to pay his way." She nodded and said, "Jus' expenses."
"We'll see," he promised himself.
When she left him, he removed his clothes and sneaked down to the bathroom in his shorts. He took a bath in the old tub, and found a razor and some blades in the medicine cabinet. After shaving, he washed out his shorts in the basin and headed back to his room with a towel wrapped .around his waist. Then he crawled into the clean, crisp bed and switched off the lights, ready to do some thinking. The hot bath and the soft bed betrayed him. Half-way through his plans to rehabilitate his person before attacking his predicament, he fell sound asleep.
Once more, he awakened to find a face looking down at him. Only it wasn't Tammy. This woman was young, boldly sensual, her eyes wide, her over-red mouth opened in surprise. The overhead light was on, casting yellow light down on the partially straightened hair. It cast highlights off of the up push of high breasts and lush hip curves, both tightly fitted into a cheap blue dress.
"Well, what do we have here?" she asked, but softly. "Look what ma got for little old Patti and it ain't even my birthday."
He sat up in bed, then remembered he was naked and rearranged the sheet. He blinked and felt a slight embarrassment as the tall, shapely girl backed off and tipped her head to one side as if she were appraising the merchandise.
"I'm sorry," he apologized. "Your mother said you never used this room anymore. I'm going to-board and room here for a couple of days. If you'll hand my trousers to me and turn around, I'll go to sleep on the sofa in the living room so you can have your own bed. Okay?"
She laughed. "Imagine me running a man out of my bed!" Then she sobered swiftly. "I needed a few of my dresses. Maybe I'd better stay, though," she said without warmth. "That dopey ma of mine can get herself in more hot water!"
"How can your mother get into trouble?" he asked warily.
"Come off it pal. I read the newspapers between fun. You're Newport, the rape-killer they're looking for, aren't you?"
"Maybe I'd better go," he said, poising to jump her if she screamed or panicked.
"You stay in the sack, pal. I'll sleep on the sofa." Her grimness relaxed slightly. "Don't worry, I'm not going to blow the whistle on you, baby. I'm not much for rapers, but then, I never knew one with as much money as the papers say you've got! Maybe ma isn't so dumb, after all."
"Aren't you a little worried-with me in the house?"
She snorted through her short, pert nose. "You didn't do it or ma wouldn't let you on the property! I never fooled her one time in twenty-eight years, so I don't think you could manage it. Sweet dreams, man. See you in the morning."
She turned out the light and left the room without another word. He listed, but not even a board creaked. The scent of her cheap perfume lingered in the room, and he thought about the pure animal of her as she had stood, baiting him with her sidewalk shrewdness. Her looks and her speech, coupled with the hints Tammy had dropped all went together. While the old woman changed beds and washed out lavatories to support herself and her grandchildren, the wild looking Patti walked the streets and did so badly she had to borrow fifteen dollars on Tuesdays.
His own trouble seemed less acute as he though about the tiny world he had stumbled into. He flopped back on Parti's bed, but didn't fall asleep very quickly this, time. He tossed and turned, then, got up to grab a smoke. Later, much later, sleep finally came to him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lee Frederick was a woman of twenty-eight years of age. She had dreams of one day finding the right man, getting married and settling down in a little cape cod with a white picket fence around it. Born in a sophisticated home, schooled in blase girl's schools, and graduated back into the swirl of upper middle class, she had never really outlined her specifications for happiness. Luke Frederick had come on full blast and they had spent one mad night in his apartment, then gone to Reno for the fast wedding routine. There had been a high point or tow, then the pattern of their life became insipid. She and Luke sailed over hurdles in blithe agreement, and there had been some high ones to hurdle. So high that this last one involving the awful incident at Fort Tempar seemed only one more of many unpleasant turns in the road.
The bond between Lee and her husband was not sex. For that matter, neither was it love, in the usual sense of the word. They remained as a unit because of the Frederick image; a self-made man rising himself to the top in a tough and competive world, accompanied by a beautiful and understanding spouse. Privately, they had a different image of themselves, and Lee was not as unhappy with this second image as she was unhappy with her own ability to find happiness in it.
Within a year of their marriage, she had become aware of her husband's weakness for impromptu sex. He could roll out of bed after a long, ecstatic weekend with her, go out for some smokes, walking with a hump in his back, and go completely insane about the girl in the cigarette stand. By the same token, he could walk past the chorus line in a night club and never pinch a buttocks, but he might throw a fit over the hatcheck girl. From swift off-the cuff-liaisons, he seemed to get some excitement no amount of his wife's attentions could induce. Lee held the line on her own inclinations until she became aware that their social crowd considered wife-swapping a favorite pastime. Once she and Luke faced each other with the facts of their mutual infidelity, the lid was off.
It took Lee three years to weary of sexual license. There were some high points because in a long line of males, some were more accomplished than others. Some had superior equipment, others had lewd brains, and not a few new tricks. It got to the point where she and Luke were exchanging their 'educations' and laughing over each other's latest accomplishments. Still they clung to the mockery of being husband and wife, and in some respects, they became closer than mere sexual fidelity could have made them.
Then, at a luncheon with three of her best women friends, Lee had offered to accompany one of them to a woman doctor for an afternoon apointment. Except for girl-play in the exclusive school dormitories, Lee had never been very interested in messing with another woman. She might not have been tempted with Stella Tall-couch, either, but the 'doctor' was not only an accomplished lesbian, but she had an office filled with exotic instruments and erotic shapes of dubiously medial devices. The afternoon had been only a frantic adventure into regular practices and pure sensation. But the intimate, deeply erotic episode took Lee over another hurdle; she learned to like the idea of sex with another female.
Constantly the agressor in subsequent affairs, Lee liked the thing she thought, and rejoiced in the power of her hands and lips and vibrant body. She understood some of her husband's sporadic lusts when the same lusts took hold of her. It made her rage inwardly with eagerness and illicit passion to turn an unsuspecting female at a casual party into a whimpering, orgasmically debilitated wreck. It thrilled Lee to think of the after effects, the srange barrier she had erected between a pouting wife and a confused husband.
It had done one more thing, and she was a little happy about that. Gradually, their friends began to drift away, unless the wife enjoyed Lee's kind of love. She understood the silence that always greeted her appearance in a powder room or luncheon. She was known as a seeker and the few women who sought her for affection and something more than an episode in the afternoon, soon learned their emotional attachment was unwanted.
Luke learned of her lesbian ways from a woman who told him he was not as good a lover as his wife was. He came home in a quiet mood and without warnings, turned on his charm and his passion. By three in the morning, he was exhausted and baffled, and Lee laughed at him out of pure happiness. For a week, she thrilled in her husband's arms, and it was almost like a second honeymoon. She teased him about what he thought he was trying to prove, and refused to let him rest unless he fell sound asleep in pure weakness. Finally business forced him to put his trousers back on and go to work.
Nothing changed, so the Fredericks simply accept this new passion of Lee's. But the die was cast, and the rest of their crowd did not accept Lee's thirst for female lovemaking. It was then that the slim and clever Sally Merkson entered the picture. Shortly after Sal appeared, Luke's attitude toward many things changed. The slender brunette secretary did what no other of his passing fancies had been able to do-command repeat performances. Lee had no way of knowing whether it was Sal's idea or Luke's, but suddenly Don Hughson was in the picture, escorting Sal in public, only to relenquish her to Luke when the four of them were together. Stella Tall-couch, the hot-blooded girl who had first introduced Lee to woman-love, married Steve Dolphi, and miraculously, the couple became intimates within a few weeks.
* * *
Lee contemplated the resumption of the crass weekend routine with something akin to illness. As the hostess, she would be expected to do her share of the work. This she didn't mind too much, because it gave her a reason not to get looped and sit around with the others. Now she checked the cabinets and the refrigerator, making a long list of the things they'd need to last the weekend in the summerhouse. Joannie was washing the dishes and ridding them of months of dust. Her plump body did nothing for Lee, regardless of the fact that they traded emotion and caresses every now and then.
"How can you stand that stupid Don Hughson?" Joannie asked.
"I don't. Sal stands him," Lee answered through her surprise. "And Luke is stuck with him now."
"This is going to be a gay weekend, all right," Joannie muttered. "Who is going to the store?"
Lee stepped in the kitchen door and looked out into combination dinette and living room. Sal was making the men a third drink. Or maybe a fourth. There was no laughter. Steve Dolphi was talking in serious tones to Luke. Don sat alone, separated from the others by many things, not the least of which was his usual lack of compatibility with the net purpose of these weekends. His strange sexual inclinations made him the strange man, and Lee had never made up her mind to the question of how often, if at all, her husband or Steve played with the homosexual. It was, she knew, a very hetro-sexual group, except for Don Hughson.
"Here's the things we need. Somebody better go to the store or all well eat tonight is dry bread and apples," Lee said, laying the list on the end table. "Fix me one, too, Sal. This is the saddest crowd I ever saw!"
"It will liven up," Luke promised, letting his charm show. "Come on-who's going to come along to help with the groceries?"
Don stayed. It was almost as if he'd announced he was scared to expose himself to a reoccurence of the insanity he had let loose a couple of weeks ago. Lee went into the bedroom and changed her clothes. Sunny-side always chilled her in Summer; the wind blowing made her choose a green jersey turtle neck sweater and skin tight white capris. When she came back into the living room, Don was having another drink. He smiled at her, but it was forced.
"Haven't seen much of you these past few days," he said. His eyes scanned her voluptuous shape with a tinge of admiration and a tinge of envy. "That's a nice outfit, dear."
"Thanks, doll," she said without feeling. "You look a bit squeeky around the edges. Worried, I suppose?"
He looked at her. "Why should I be worried? It was an accident, and anyway, they think Newport did it. For that matter, honey, we're all in it aren't we?"
"Why don't you get some sense and leave the country until they catch him?" Lee asked. "And when they do, and they find out he didn't do it, you'll have a head start on the law."
She watched the red flush of fear crawl up his neck. Gay and lively, he was handsome. Scared, he looked like a sick youngster, his lips drawn with no strength, his eyes wide and hurt.
"Luke says I don't dare leave," he finally spoke. "It would look suspicious."
She laughed. "Suspicious? What are you going to look like in death row in San Quentin? Suspicious from whom? If I were you, I'd go while the going it good."
He gaped at her in disbelief. She let him fry. They had never been friends, never been more than polite to each other. She watched his imagination recolor his face. The twitch of his nerves showed at fingers and feet. About die time she thought he was seeing himself being strapped into the chair, she leaned forward.
"Go while you can, Don," she said. "Go on."
"Oh, Lee, why are you upsetting me so!" he asked. "You know I can't help-things! I'd go in a minute if I could! But you know I don't have any money and I'm scared."
"Don, I'll get you thrity thousand dollars," she said levelly. "I'll send you ten thousand dollars a year for three years, anywhere you choose to live-outside of the United States. On one condition."
With the poise of a frightened cat, he leaned forward, spilling his drink. It was obvious that was not the first time he had thought of running, but it was also obvious that this was the first time any real hope had been extended to him.
"What condition, Lee?" he asked. "What?"
"Take Sal with you," she said coldly.
His gasp told how far away his mind had been. "Sally?"
She nodded. "Sally."
"I thought you and Sal were-. Lee, she wouldn't go across the street with me and you know it!"
"You've lived with her for eight months. You know her weaknesses, besides my husband! I don't care why she goes with you, I just insist that she goes! You think about it, honey."
A small look of craftiness came over his face. "Suppose I tell her of the offer you just made?" he suggested.
"She's run into jealous wives before. You'd make more trouble for me by telling Luke I propositioned you. But, no matter how I look at it, what I have to tell beats the hell out of the best story you can dream up. You just think about it for a few days, doll. They haven't caught Carl Newport yet."
He downed his drink and looked at the floor. "Women are such bitches," he murmured. "Just bitches," he murmured. "Just bitches!" Then he got up and refilled his glass, not once, but three times, or so.
* * *
Lee was feeling the liquor around 6 P.M. The stereo blared, laughter over unfunny jokes sounded often and was slow to cease. Booze was their knife for servering the ties and dissolving decorum. When Don went in and exchanged his clothes for some of Sal's, appearing in a tight shirt and a sweater with one of her brassieres badly padded to imitate the manner in which she filled them so adequately, the mood was set. Steve chased him in mock excitement. In turn, Joannie feigned to be jealous and Luke let go of Sal to comfort Joannie with kisses and caressses.
Lee and Sal promptly wailed and moaned over their desertion and began to dance together. It was as if each had an act to perform in the sensual ballet, but under the laughter and by-play, hands were deliberate, kisses lasted longer than comedy, and their play-acting became a bit vicious. Joannie ceased to be a plump broad with pouting lips and the three men tumbled her, laughing at the way she objected everything they did, making a physical struggle out of imagined affronts and amusing herself and the men with flashing expose of her body.
Knowing what was coming Lee played with Sal only in a half-promising way. Dancing, they rubbed tummies and teased each other with their hands and breasts. Sal, as the bartender of the group, kept the glasses filled. When she returned to Lee, dancing or flopping on the sofa within a kiss and fingertip reach, they said little things to remind each other of their love affair.
It had taken Lee a few months to break down Sal's natural wariness. No matter their unspoken understanding, Luke's wife and Luke's mistress were on opposite sides of the emotional fence. It had been necessary first for Lee to make a friend out of Sal. After that, there had been a time of thought sharing, a time during which they talked of Luke, and of themselves, and gradually, of other love affairs. Because their existence was so highly-flavored with sophisticated sex attitudes, the conversation became personal, and the first time Lee laid hands on Sal had been a casual, laughing thing. From then, the trip into pure uninhibited physical passion had been fast.
By plan and intent, Lee played it cool. Once or twice a week, she swallowed her hatred and became a sweet, passionate lover. Sometimes their lovemaking was purely mental, calculated to make Sally Merkson relax her conscious resistence to an emotional entanglement with her lover's wife. At other times, Lee poured it on, and little by little, she had nibbled away at Luke's mastery of the slender sexbomb. Up to a couple of weeks ago, the plan had been going strong with slow, unrhythmic tempo. Lee noticed that instead of being sought, Sal was beginning to seek.
Now Lee welcomed the breakup of the party. Sexually aroused and emotionally flying, the six of them piled into the Dolphi car and headed for their favorite bars. Not for more liquor, though they'd have more, but to let their sensuality expend, to tablehop and flirt and search for green pastures. Even Don Hughson would have his chance; he could spot a susceptible man for his brand of lovemaking clear across a half-dark saloon. Up to a couple of weeks ago, Lee had joined this pattern of lasciviousness with reasonable enthusiasm.
There was excitement in strange people, fast talk and the occasional physical satiation that came with unfettered lovemaking. There had been times when men wanted to cling to a parking lot romance, women wanted to emotionally entangle themselves with misunderstood husbands, or whatever story Luke and Steve felt disposed to dispense. But invariably, it died with the coming of Monday, and the six of them would rejoin and wait for the next weekend.
They spread quickly this night, Lee noticed, as if in some desperation to separate themselves from reality. She watched Luke and Steve go to work on a pair of bar-hoppers, and she never did see where Joannie disappeared so fast.
"This isn't much fun," Lee said to Sal. "I've had enough to drink. Want to go out-to the car?"
She glanced around the bar, and Lee let her hand move against Sal's hip. Wordlessly, they slipped out of the booth, leaving their coats, drinks and change from Luke's ten dollar bill to reserve the booth for the eventual rejoining. Outside the building, Sal shivered and Lee put her arm around the brunette's willing shoulders. They walked slowly out through the parked cars and climbed into the back seat of the Dolphi's Lincoln. Automatically, Sal curled herself up in the circle of Lee's right arm. The shudder of the slim body told Lee many things. Sal lit them both a cigarette.-"It was a mistake, wasn't it?" Sal asked, exhaling heavily.
"I tried to tell Luke," she admitted. "He said we'd all feel better for a big weekend. I only agreed because I wanted you, sweetheart."
Sal turned her face up, a strained, pale oval in the night. Their lips met in the special, open moistness of passionate exchange. Tongues met, pressed, then fluttered in darting tittillation. Lee used the exciting moment to draw Sal's blouse up so she could unsnap the tight bra at the back.
"I could have met you for lunch last week," Sal whispered. "I thought about you. But Luke was so darned jumpy!"
"Did he tell you Newport isn't dead? I mean, the police think he's alive."
Sal nodded. Lee could feel her quivering and her arm closed firmly around the taut body, barely softened by the bulge and contour of delectable charms. "I'm scared, Lee," she said.
"Does Don know?" Lee asked.
"I don't think so. Luke said not to tell him. The poor dear! I feel sorry for him, darling. He's so alone and pitiful!"
"He ought to leave the country," Lee suggested. "I know he hasn't much money, but we could help him. Newport brought Don some time by escaping, but someday they'll catch Newport, and not a thing will have changed."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, Joannie and Don, maybe you and me, too. Luke might hold up on the witness stand. Steve has nerve, too. But you know very well, either Joannie nor Don could ever stick to their stories if a smart defense lawyer started to badger them! And Newport has a smart lawyer, believe me. I've heard of Edward Totten before."
"We ought to be doing something, shouldn't we?"
"Yes! Even the fact that I never even saw the dead woman doesn't completely excuse me. We're all accessories to a murder!"
"Don says it was an accident-he went kind of insane!"
"So we all went insane and protected an insane pervert."
She felt Sal begin to cry. Gently, Lee let her hands soothe and pet the distracted Sal. For a moment, Lee forgot the long range plans, the underlying reason for her attentions. The thrill of creating a blubbering, fear-stricken woman from a self-confident, professional sex-bomb, brought odd emotions building up in Lee. Drunk with sensual power, she put her moist, open lips to Sal's cheek, and her kisses were more than comforting.
Gradually, she pressed Sal back in the seat and her hands freed from the warm, pulsating shapes of her breasts. Lee's lips found and caressed the quickly hardened tips of the fabulous shapes. Her hands found the zipper of Sal's capris. She pulled them down a little, far enough to let her fingers find the delightful contours and sensitive responses she sought. It took a few minutes for the fear to relax and the eagerness to throb.
Lee asked for nothing. She lay heavily on Sal, feeling each rising urge, each spasmodic twitch of passion her caresses elicited. Her kisses absorbed the whimpers of pure ecstasy as Sal dropped into excruciating sensation. The manipulations became firm and insistant, as if Lee were translating what she did into what she wanted-their embrace, tribadic and Sapphic.
Being a woman, she knew precisely what Sal wanted, what she needed to make ever twist and urge a complete sensation.
For a moment, Lee was lost in her own wild excitement, then she recalled that the body she caressed belonged to Sally Merkson. Suddenly, at a moment when her senses told her Sal could stand no more, Lee sat upright.
She cried out.
"What-what's the matter?" Sal quavered.
"Someone. A man. At the car window! I'm sure!"
It was a lie, but Lee played it well. Sal struggled to a sitting position, her hands busy adjusting her dissheveled clothing, her lips working with the shock of firght and interrupted passion. In mock fright, Lee looked through each of the car windows, twisting her body as if someone were always behind her. The hand she left on Sal's shoulder felt the oncoming spasm. Abruptly, Sal was violently sick and Lee was very sure her husband's lover would have gladly taken a plane to Rio if there had been one handy. , Lee felt proud of herself now. She left Sal in the lurch, at the exact time Sal was to reach fulfillment.
CHAPTER FIVE
Carl Newport felt as though he was living a nightmare. He was a fugitive from the law and he felt trapped, hurt and confused.
Somewhere among these conditions existed fury that people whom he had considered to be of the same social and economic level as his own had destroyed his life. At least, temporarily, because he wasn't through.
He woke up on Tuesday morning with his usual feeling of strength and vitality, the last vertige of the minor fever attack completely vanished. Lying in the soft bed, with the loud wallpaper all around him and some slight sounds penetrating the old walls, he tried to think about what came next. Next was a strange word, because he didn't know what had gone before.
He had not killed the dowdy Sandra Ferguson, but he didn't know who had killed her. That several people had lied and signed their names to the lies was obvious, but the truth was not, past the assumption the real killer, or killers, had set him up as the patsy.
Then he heard the high voice of Lean and he got out of bed and got dressed. The bundle of money wrapped in brown paper was lying on the chair just as he had placed it the night before. He made sure he had at least four hundred dollars in his walletless pocket and the rest he rewrapped and put up on a shelf in the closet. Then he left the bedroom.
Tammy was trying to get her grandchildren dressed, fed and off to school. Mostly it was a matter of words overlying a steadily progressive action which ended exactly at ten minutes to nine. Through it all, Patti sat in a chair at one end of the kitchen table, sipping coffee in silence. She looked different to Carl in the light of morning. Her half-straight hair was tied down in an unflattering pompadour with a ribbon. She had put on lipstick which gave her face some accent. It was only when she smiled at Carl over some remark her mother or her children made that personality erupted pleasantly. The faded wrapper she wore showed rounded shoulders and fleshy breasts, and he decided her hands were fascinating in their length and agility. The silence following the departure of the children was deafening.
"Whooee," Tammy shouted. "Show-offs!"
"How you, Mister Carl?" the old woman asked gently.
"Like real fine. I'm sorry I cheated your daughter out of her bed. I offered to sleep on the sofa."
"She wasn't due until tonight," Tammy said, looking at her daughter with obvious distaste. "She used to sleeping where the body falls, anyway. No-account woman."
It shocked Carl, caused no response from Patti and seemed to require no explanation from Tammy. It was like the just-completed struggle with the children; frank words, calculated to sustain an attitude but not to precipitate a trade of blows. He sipped the coffee Tammy poured for him.
"Do you want eggs, Mister Carl?" she asked. He nodded.
"I'll fix them, ma," Pattie spoke for the first time. "You go ahead on and get ready for work."
Tammy seemed to consider this, then she waddled out of the kitchen. Hardly down the hall, her deep voice raised in song, and it was a happy hymn, a thousand miles removed from the brutal frankness she had showered on Patti.
"I could fix my own," he said to the woman. "Did you get any sleep on the sofa?"
"Sure. It ain't the bed, it's the conscience that keeps people awake. How'd you sleep?"
"Like an infant," he said, smiling at her easily.
"You hungry yet?"
"No. The coffee is all I need for now."
He didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. Within a few minutes, Tammy came in, her uniform partially hidden by a coat. She looked at Carl, then at Patti.
"I got to leave now. They's food in the refrigerator and some canned things in the cupboard. You be all right?"
"Fine," he said. "Don't worry. I've a lot of thinking to do and I'll make out okay."
"Patti, you going?" Tammy asked.
"I don't know," the daughter admitted. "Maybe not?"
Tammy was silent for a moment, then she looked back at Carl. "She my kin. I can't make her leave my house."
"Why should she leave?" he inquired.
"She's miserable, that's why. Well, I got to go. Them younguns will be home right nigh 3:30. I be back at 5:30. Ya'll take care, now."
Carl sat and listened while the old Dodge coughed and groaned into life. He saw the car go backwards by the kitchen window, Tammy's head turned on her thick shoulders, her jaw set grimly as she aimed the old car toward the street. He was a bit uncomfortable. He could also feel her sex, like an exotic threat, a deep underlying current he could not understand. Then he decided it was die same peculiar sensation he had felt at the beach house. He had never been able to forget the scene in the living room of the Frederick house the night the sea had cast him up on the beach.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, suddenly.
He sighed. "Well, I don't really know. But maybe after breakfast, I'll give you some money and send you shopping. I need a razor, a change of clothes. That sound feasible?"
"Maybe I don't want to do anything for you, pal."
"Yes, you do," he said confidently. "You're just as curious about me as I am about you. Anyway, we seem to be stuck with each other, and your mother is stuck with us both."
She smiled. It broadened and spread until her white teeth were a brilliant slash. Her nose wrinkled in glee, and the lights in her eyes were like electric flashes.
"You a democratic son-of-a-bitch aren't you?" she laughed.
"Diplomatic," he corrected her. "I'm wanted for murder or had you forgotten all about that?"
* * *
By one o'clock Patti returned with her arms full of bundles. The light in her eyes was a new one. So were her shoes new, the single unplanned expenditure her personal yearning could not avoid. It was, Carl decided, a new experience for her to spend two hundred dollars all at one time. It didn't matter to him that her taste in shirts and slacks and shoes were slightly poor. The main thing was that he have clothes, and the toliet articles he needed to keep his face shaved, his teeth clean and his hair in place. Miraculously, the shoes fitted him.
"You did fine, Patti," he said smiling at her gently.
She kicked her long tapered leg out and tipped her foot to display the new pumps. Spent ten dollars for me."
He shook his head. "You shouldn't have," he said seriously. "It is not possible in this day and age to buy a good shoe for ten dollars. You should stay above fifteen dollars . Remember that next time."
"Go first class or go back to the jungle, huh?" she snapped at him.
"Help me take the pins out of these shirts and stop trying to strat a fight. I have enough trouble without arguing with you. I spotted some wine in your mother's cupboard. Do you suppose she'd mind if we had some?"
She got up. She looked down at her new shoes and as her eyes came up the length of her, she let her hands smooth up her thighs to her slim waist. Her self-appraisal finished with a lift of her chin that an arch into her back. He looked at her boldly, and the sex-thing buzzed in his spine. She went to the cupboard and got down the wine and two glasses. The trip back to the table was three seconds of raw, rolling sensualism. She had turned into a female animal without warning.
"You want to drink with me, Carl?" she asked.
"Why not? I live in your house, and I sleep in your bed, I depend upon you and your mother. Actually, I'm a very hard-working, hard-drinking business man and I never went back on a friend in my life. How come you want to be something special?"
"Man, pour the wine," she murmured with a lilt.
He smiled. "Forget it, Patti. While you were gone, I started thinking. I take it you're a member of the unemployed. I'm about to offer you a job. Working.
For money. Interested?"
She handed him the glass of wine. "What I got to do?" she asked.
"Just like you are told."
"Last man who put me to work too my money," she compalined. "And slapped me around on Sunday nights."
"Why don't you wise up?" he said. "You can have Sunday nights off on this job."
"What I got to do?" she asked, her face devoid of challenge.
He sipped the wine. "Buy some scotch the next time you go shopping," he replied. "Other than that, nothing, until I decide what I'm going to do about getting myself out of this mess. Right now, I'm going to change my clothes."
Later, they talked. He found himself telling the girl exactly what had happened at Fort Tempar without interjecting any of his suspicions. Other than having given the story to Edward Totten, it was the first time that he had had occasion to put the entire story into a chronological form. At the end of the story, a sense of the ridiculous struck him. He smiled wryly at Patti.
"Furthermore, I've lost my reputation as a ladies man by being accused of raping and murdering a woman who looked like she had been shook out of an old Indian blanket!"
"You real fussy about your women, huh?"
He met her eyes. "What are you trying to say?"
"My mother thinks I'm a dirty tramp. I was just curious about how you think."
"A man has a right to think his own way. And it's really none of your damned business. You've challenged just about everything I've said ever since you came home last night. I wouldn't dare tell you what I think because you'd start a fight over it, one way or another. Your profession is your own business, and I'm not responsible for your soul. Damn it, Patti, will you get off my back?"
She blinked and he thought she was going to cry. After a moment, she looked up at him again. "I think-about me all the time," she admitted.
"Well, start thinking about me for a change. I got a murder charge to dump! Do you know how to drive a car?"
"Yes. I've even got a driver's license."
"Tomorrow, you go to a used car lot and buy a car. Buy me a hat, too. Size seven and a half. Nothing with feathers, either! I suppose I ought to dye my hair, too."
She giggled. "Use ma's. She real gray without the dye. It'll make you look different, all right."
"You'll have to do the driving," he said. "I haven't got my license, and I wouldn't dare use it if I did.
She leaned back in her chair and pushed her breasts up. She laughed. "Reckon I should have a uniform?"
"No. But you can wear a dress with a higher neck so I don't get pinched for my chauffeur's cleavage!"
She pouted. "That little old cleavage has saved me from a couple of pinches," she told him.
He looked at his watch and discovered Jimmy and Lean would be home in about twenty minutes. He looked at Pattie and she was waiting.
"How come everything we talk about you get around to making sex talk out of?" he asked.
"It's the onliest thing I got," she said calmly. She smiled and left the room.
* * *
Later on, in bed, Carl settled himself comfortably, trying to adjust his mind to the evening of laughter and loud talk and completely uninhibited conversation. He heard the door open and his first thought was of Patti. When the light switch went on, he was relieved to see Tammy, her nightgown and robe bulging with round shapes, her eyes worried and her mouth expressive with slackness.
"Mister Carl?" she said, standing by the door. "What is it, Tammy?" he asked softly. "Come on in."
"I'm in," she apologized. "I got to talk."
"So talk, Tammy."
She came over and stood by the bed. He pointed and she sat down, her weight sagging the old bed. She looked at the door and then back to Carl.
"I done it so I got to live with it," she said. "All day I worried about you and Patti. She no good, Master Carl."
"Just Carl," he told her.
"You ain't gonna change people, Mister Carl. Like my Patti. She laying out there on that sofa, plannin' and schemin' how she gonna get your money, how she gonna be a female fatallie, and mebbe she goin' to get her a new man. I ain't tellin' you what to do and what not, Mister Carl, but I'll tell you she got a mean heart. You don't kinda come out like she thinks, and she not goin' to give up. She'll get her name in the paper if she turns you in, and this somethin' a gal like her thinks about."
"She is your daughter," he replied.
"Every woman is somebody's daughter," she said.
"Maybe I'd better go," he suggested. "It isn't fair to burden you with my trouble."
"You go, an' I ain't proved nothin' to myself."
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, forgetting Fort Tempar. "You know of something?"
"No. All I got is thinkn' pain."
"Tammy, I've never been in so much trouble before in my life. But that doesn't mean I'm a complete fool, as a fugitive, nor as a man. Don't worry about me and Patti. I'm just as new an experience for her as she is for me. And in a jam, I can run, just as I did befor. How are the children reacting to me?"
"They fine. I raised them."
"You raised Patti too."
"She was good till she married a no-good man!"
"If she was ever good, she is still good."
She stood up and adjusted her robe around her with something like satisfaction. "Should'a been a preacher, Mister Carl. You got a way with words."
When she was gone, he lay quietly, contemplating the pleasant picture of tying up six people and smashing them with his big fists in systematic progression until they told him what they had done to Sandra Ferguson. An hour or so later, he fell sound asleep.
* * *
The following morning, she wanted to take him for a ride. Carl stood at the little kitchen window and looked out at the old Ford Patti had purchased with five hundred dollars. It was ten years old and the wax job alone was holding it together. In his ears was her excited story of getting the price reduced a hundred dollars because she'd let the big fat salesman pat and fondle her buttocks.
"Just purrs along," she said. "There's only one patch on the driver's side. The rest of the upholstery is good. You got to slam the other door pretty hard, but that's your side, and you're big and strong," she reminded him.
His head began to function in high gear. He turned around and put his arm over her shoulders without realizing what he did. "Tonight," he said. "Tonight, we're going out and do some looking around. Six people are five too many. Everybody's afraid-I'd be if I were one of the six. One person talks and they are all in hot water, clear up to here."
He made the under-nose slicing motion and his hand bumped Patti's right cheek. Only then did he realize she was snuggled under his left arm, looking up at him blankly. Then he smelled her, woman and cheap perfume, and she was warm against him. That close, he saw how her hair was, and how the tiny wrinkles around her eyes made her skin look unnaturally thin, while the open contours of her nose made her nostrils look thick. Her heavy lips, reddened and out-turned, were alien, and she had nothing beautiful to boast of. But she was warm and the shape of her below the tucked-back chin was very female.
Fort Tempar seemed a thousand miles away. He wondered if kissing her would be different than kissing other girls he had known.
"I'm sorry, Patti," he said, letting his arm slide off her shoulders. "It was something I did without think-tog."
"You almost kissed me," she murmured. He nodded. "Slap my face," he said. "I had it in my mind."
She didn't move. "Slap my face," she told him. "I have something else in mind!"
He walked. He went to the door and turned down the hall. He went into the bedroom he had begun to think of as his. He closed the door behind him and fell on the bed. That he had been beaten by a woman, made a sexual slave, perverted submission, harrassed by the cheapest kind of an unthinking prostitute made him crawl with self-disgust. That he had taken advantage of a situation wherein he held all the trump cards hurt him even more. That he had wanted to do everything he shouldn't have wanted to do was the real accusation. He succumbed to guilt, cursing his near fall into satiation, not of sexual desire, but of pure curiosity.
Fleeting visions, of smooth skin, of twisting flesh went through his brain. He saw a head, with open mouth and bulging eyes, tipped back, rolling from side to side, pleading with him to fill and slap her, or give her something she could not expect.
It was only a fleeting thought, but it brought him bolt upright on the bed, his nostrils flared with emotion. He was sitting that way when Patti opened the door and walked in. She closed the door and began to unsnap the back of her dress. It popped open with the pressure of he boobs and the heave of her belly. He stared in abject fascination as she pulled the dress down and kicked it aside. He watched her unsnap her bra and let free the jouncing, out-thrust shapes of her boobs, black tipped and pulsing. Her body was nearly perfect, and as she pulled down her white lace panties, the flare of her hips and the neatly tucked abdomen promising many things seemed more desirable than anything he had ever seen.
"You want sex, baby, you better make up your mind to produce," Pattie said.
Carl produced. Until he was nearly out of his mind with striving to quiet the lithe, whip-crazy body.
Boy, she was real good in the sack, he thought.
It was afternoon and Carl was still in bed. He was trying not to think of anything in particular, and he was succeeding. He knew she was next to him but he made no effort to touch her. Then, he heard Patti laugh softly.
"You're quite a man," she said, in her deep southern accent, when he turned his head. "I was just thinking. Men and women are different. You been wanting me, or some woman for a long time. I got hot in fifteen seconds. In the end we came out even. You hungry? We didn't have any lunch."
"Not very hungry," he answered, letting his eyes sweep down her intimacies.
"You want to go again?" she asked brightly
"Not possible."
She sat up and made a great smacking kiss shape with her mouth. "I can get it up if you can keep it up," she promised.
"Forget it! Anyway, this wasn't part of the job I offered."
She shook her shoulders and watched her boobs jelly to and fro. After that, she did mad things with her stomach muscles. It was pure sex, but he had a feeling it had nothing to do with him. After a moment, she turned her lithe back to him. The flare of her hips and the deep press of her high bottom were almost enough to start him again. He watched her put on her clothes, and some of the twisting, bending and tucking he was sure she did for his benefit.
"Where are we going tonight?" she asked him. "I want to see where some poeple live," he answered. "Should I get you a gun?"
"A gun? What for? I'm not going to shoot anybody."
She shrugged. "With you, Carly, how a girl know what you got in mind?"
In a minute she was gone and he continued laying in bed for a while longer.
CHAPTER SIX
He married for financial gain like so many others. Not for love or devotion. Not because her womanhood made him lust for her sexual embraces. He married Stella Tallcouch because she had enough money to help get the brokerage office going. Emotionally, he had about the same feeling for her he had for a slut. He knew she was an incurable nympho, with varied tastes and not much ability with any of them. If she had any class, it was because she had money and could afford to dress well and travel in the best circles.
Watching her get ready for bed, with the miserable weekend at Sunnyside behind them, he had a fast image of her plump body, kicked and broken, sexually abused and polluted, lying in the morgue at Fort Tempar instead of the unfortunate old goat who had made Don Hughson go crazy.
Joannie had gained twenty-five pounds since their marriage, three years previously. Twelve pounds of breasts and and thirteen pounds of bottom. No, he thought, save one pound for the pulpiness of her cheeks and the pads under her black eyes. Melon-breasted, slim-waisted and rear-ended like a Turkish harem girl. Her dyed blonde hair was shapeless and too tightly curled. And it certainly didn't match the big bush of belly fur shadowing the undercurve of her beer pot.
Luckily for her, he knew, stags in bars didn't much care what a woman looked like if she said yes fast enough. This Joannie could do, and did, with great regularity. At least four or five times in Sunnyside. Steve didn't mind. He'd knocked himself off a redhead; who wasn't much to look at but had some technique. But mostly, it had been a pretty sad weekend.
"Did you talk to Luke?" she asked, rolling her big bottom into her bed.
"Yes, I talked to Luke," he grunted.
"I mean, about Fort Tempar."
"What's to say? When they catch Newport, they'll try him and that's the end of it. "Steve set the alarm for six o'clock. "Turn out the damned light. I've got a day tomorrow."
She reached out and snapped off the lamp on the bed-stand between their beds. Almost instantly , the telephone rang. He struggled to a sitting position, turned the light on again, and picked up the extension phone.
"Steve Dolphi," he announced.
As he listened, he looked at the clock on the wall across the room. It was nearly 11 P.M. The voice was strange, and he was a man used to identifying voices over a telephone. He glanced at Joannie. She was sitting up, her huge breasts mushed out over her belly, her face a study in fat worry.
"I'm sorry, Detective Clark, was it? I don't remember you in Fort Tempar. Is Brian there?"
"No," the voice on the other end of the line said. "I'm doing some checking on the affidavits you and your friends gave us. There is a point or two we'd like clarification on. That's all."
"What points?" Steve asked, his mind racing with wariness.
The circumstance of your not having investigated the body, or at least the shape under the blanket, on your way to town. And we want to be certain no one perhaps did discover the body, but was either too shocked or too scared to mention it."
Steve thought a moment. "I don't think I want to discuss it over the telephone," he said.
"Oh?" came the hard voice. "Don't you think it is better to have all these points ironed out before Newport's defense attorney starts badgering and hammering at you on the witness stand?"
He felt himself go pale. He hung up the telephone without replying. Badgering and hammering. Immediately he dialed the operator, then hung the telephone up again before she could answer.
"Who was it?" his wife asked. "Carl Newport," he replied.
* * *
The few things Lee had brought back from Sunnyside she left in the kitchen for the maid to take care of the next morning. She was exhausted, but she had some strange flame burning in her that refused to let her sag She could hear her husband cussing at something in his bedroom. He had been cussing most of the day, and he had driven home like a hotrod kid. He had seemed almost glad to drop Sal and Don at their apartment door.
Lee combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. She hiked her capris a notch up, making sure the crotch fitted close, and that there were no wrinkles across her hips. There was no possible way to improve the set of her big pushy breasts in the jersey shirt. Before going into her husband's room, she stopped at a hall closet and put on a pair of four-and-a-half inch pumps.
"What is the matter, doll?" she asked, entering his room as he fussed with the buttons on his sport shirt.
He remained silent.
He stood like a ready-to-charge bull. She could hear the angry breath whistling through his nostrils. She turned away and began to open his overnight case. She heard him cuss again as he cleaned out his slack's pockets and dropped change all over the floor. Methodically, she turned around and picked up the change. He stomped off into the bathroom-. She heard the medicine cabinet slam-. She unpacked his clothes and put most of them into the dirty clothes hamper. Teeth brushed, he came back into the room and opened his belt buckle.
"Don't be so mad," Lee said. "It was supposed to be a happy weekend. Didn't you have any fun?"
"Fun? With Sal puking and crying around like a sick kid? And that goddamned Don, quivering and shaking all over the place? Who can have any fun with Joannie or Steve? I had about as much fun as a trip to the barber shop."
"You used to think I was fun," Lee said softly. "I might still be-once in a while, Lukey."
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. She was ready, her back arched just enough to throw her hips into a mare-stance, her breasts up and out, and her ankles crossed in the best tradition of a top model.
"I thought you were hooked for woman?" he reminded her.
"No matter what," she said, "I've never stopped loving you for a minute. Even when I knew what you were doing with every woman you took a fancy to. I even think you still love me, Luke."
"Love," he said, turning away to fiddle with his wrist-watch. "That's kind of an old-fashioned word, isn't it?"
"Do you love Sal?" she asked.
"Of course not! Don't be silly!"
"Why not?"
He looked at her in amazement. "She's a screwing bum, that's why!"
"You haven't slept with me since she took the job as your secretary," she reminded him. "And I've known all along-"
He sat down on the bed, his brow furrowed. He looked at his wife as if she were a stranger. In turn, she looked back at him, trying to recall him as he had been when they married. It wasn't all his fault. Nor hers. It was a thing, a growth, fertilized by money and some people and some mutual feeling of emptiness. She didn't think it could be cured by what she had burning in her mind, but she had won some little battle because of the furrow on his forehead.
"We aren't very nice people, are we?" he asked her.
"It isn't that," she decided. "We just don't know what we want. Or if we do, we're ashamed to speak up."
"Speak up," he shouted, now.
"If I did, would it have any effect, say, tomorrow afternoon when Sal tries to make up for her puking and crying in Sunny side?"
"Come here."
She walked the few steps to his knees. Her husband put his hands on her hips and shook her slowly, as if to be sure she was real. Then he ducked his head and kissed her right hand, then her left. Suddenly he laughed, and it was a merry, self-indulgent laughter that surprised Lee.
"What's so funny about us?" she asked. "Or maybe you think I'm a comic character?"
He pulled her down into his arms and she let him. He kissed her lips, her cheeks and her lips again.
"My mom fought with my dad, and she conned him off of cigarettes, threw away his old, beloved clothes, and generally raised hell with the old man. But he died believing she loved him because she was never unfaithful to him. You and me," he said, "we've done everything in the book with everyone we met. Sure I bang Sal! I've banged a dozen others since we got married. Don't tell me you haven't taken on some men, either, and I even know a woman or two you've made out with. But doll, I've never stopped loving you. I just stopped sleeping with you!"
She hung on with one arm. With the free hand she unzipped her capris. Then she did her best to roll them down, without squirming herself out of his embrace. Her lips went to his with an eagerness she had been dreaming of for many months. She saw how the furrow of annoyance left his forehead and as he fell back on the bed, she observed the pressure of his excitement under the curve of her hip. She rolled, not content with being there, determined to be as aggressive as she knew Sal would have been.
He discovered her boobs and the shape of her bottom and the heat of her as if she were a stranger. Nearly delirious with love and excitement, she tore at his shorts, reaching and finding the husband she had almost lost. Again their kiss pressed and caressed, and she was cautious not to let her eager tongue remind him of other things. The kiss was all she needed, and her brain reeled with the success of her conquest.
"Luke, oh Luke," she whimpered. "It has been so long!"
"Too long honey! I'd almost forgotten what a wonderful girl I married!"
"Roll me over, Luke! Fill me with love, tear me with everything you've got. It's mine, Luke, not Sal's, not anybody's! Mine, Luke, for god's sake, give it back to me!"
"Poor doll," he murmured. "I'm sorry, darling. Sorry!"
She wanted to scream, she wanted to die, and she wanted to spit in Sal's face. Her body seemed to melt and reshape itself under his taut, demanding body. She hoped she wouldn't scream when it came, and she didn't. The breath went out of her as her husband came back to her, and she relaxed, except for certain muscles and all the nerves of her body. The shrill of the telephone distracted them. It froze Luke, and it made the blood chill in Lee's pulsating body. It screeched again, and again. Luke's lips formed silent curses against her cheek.
"Answer it," Lee pleaded. "Get rid of it, Luke!"
He rolled, parting them, breaking the wonderful meshing of love in love. His hand went out to the bedside phone and he put the receiver to his ear.
"Who? What the hell is the matter with you, Steve? At this-hour!"
Lee tried not to let go of the wonderful moment, but the look on her husband's face and the instantaneous way his passion shrunk scared her into a sitting position.
"Did he say-who it was?" he demanded of the phone. "Then, what the hell makes you so sure?"
He nodded to himself, as if certain things agreed with the way his mind worked. Finally, he looked around at Lee then away again. "Steve, go back to bed. You're spooky. And anyway, suppose it was him. He's a dead man if he shows his face! Forget it. He's just playing games. If there's one man in the world without a leg to stand on, it's Carl Newport!"
"Carl Newport?" Lee repeated as her husband hung up the phone.
"Steve is an old woman," Luke decided.
She got up and went into her own bedroom. Jayne Mansfield couldn't have removed the new furrow on Luke Frederick's forehead.
* * *
"Sure purrs nice," Patti said, half way back over the bridge. "Sure rides good."
"The damned transmission could fall out any minute," Carl laughed.
"We drove awful far just to make one phone call," she said.
"What do you care?"
"I don't care. I'm trying to make sense out of it!"
He looked at her. Without being smart nor sophisticated, she was the most unusual woman he had ever known. The past week had been confusing in many ways, but never dull. And it had cured him of some deep-dyed romanticism, just as it had taught him something about sex. Like now. She wanted to know why they had driven twenty-five miles so he could make one telephone call. She saw to it that he was fed when Tammy was working, and she took care of his laundry and all the other things he wasn't aware of as things needing constant attention. One moment, he felt like a big thing that needed taking care of, the next, he wasn't sure she knew he was living.
"Three or four times she had tossed her breasts up high and waited untd he smiled. Promptly, she had taken him to bed where they would unite, male-female, in hot, wet, thrilling orgasm, and left him limp and exhausted and drained of his masculinity. After the mad heat, she would put on her clothes and go down to the grocery store to buy the latest paper, just to see if there was any new news about Carl Newport.
But there was a side effect or two. Tammy had quit down-grading her daughter. The children were beginning to look at Patti with new eyes. They asked her once in a while, for the answers to questions not irrevocably in Tammy's domain. And though his advent into Tammy's house seemed to be bringing her family closer together, it was splitting Carl's life in two, again.
There hadn't been much of his life left after Fort Tempar. But what was left; he found going in two directions. He had the burning bitterness against the people and the circumstances that had made him a "wanted man." He had the increasing affection he had learned to nurture in the dingy house amid people who measured him day by day, not by the past or the future.
He was certain he was going to win against the impersonal enemies who had tried to smash his lile tor their own reasons. By the same token, he was aware that the day he went back to being Carl Newport, of the Newport Construction Company, he was going to lose something else.
"Sure purrs nice," she said for the twentieth time.
"Ought to last at least another three days, if the paint doesn't crack," he agreed. "Real economical, too. Gets at least fifteen miles to a gasoline company. The pistons fight to see which hole they go up. Good car, all right."
"You feeling pretty good, aren't you, Carl?" she inquired.
He thought about that. "To tell you the truth, yes!"
Her laughter was high and genuine. "I'm helping?"
He thought about that, too. "Not much. You burn the food and spill the coffee in the saucer. Same thing every day."
"You get used to it," she advised him. "How come you ain't never married, Carl?"
"That was our exit," she said as the highway flashed by.
"I feel pretty good, too," she said. "And she's purring so nice. She's like me, Carl. She's anight cat and don't like the sun. Little old ride to Salem and back won't hurt, will it?"
"I can stand it a heck of a lot better than this tub of bolts can."
"Anyway, I got a problem."
"Join my club."
She shook her head and he wished he could see her face in better light. He was so used to her, accustomed to her hair, and to the coarseness of her nose and mouth.
"Carl, what's going to happen when you get out of trouble? I mean, what am I gonna do?"
"I hadn't thought about it."
"Well, it ain't your never-mind," she admitted. "You and me ain't nothing, Carl. I know that. This don't bother me none at all. But going back to tramping with bucks and winos and free tricks with bartenders for house privileges is not going to be fun, anymore."
"Was it ever?" he asked.
She nodded. "Sometimes I had fun."
"Tammy and the kids, huh?"
"It won't be easy," she said.
"Get a job."
"Go on. Talk like a dam' pusher."
"Go on. Act lazy. Patti, I can't solve the world's problems. Hell, I can't even solve my own! All I can say, and I'm in a hell of position to prove it, is that good things happen to you as well as bad. Your mother first, then you, were good things that happened to me after a lot of bad! Don't jump off the deep end just yet, huh?"
She swung the old car up the exit and wheeled over the highway into Salem. It was dark there, and the car did purr. One headlight was a bit askew, but it didn't matter to Patti.
It was nearly midnight when they finally reached home. She parked the car to one side of the garage so Tammy could get out in the morning. He opened the back door and they tiptoed into the stillness. He went into her room which was now his, and she went down the hall to the bathroom. Later, when he heard, or rather felt the weight of her going back into the living room, he went to the bathroom.
Back in his room, he took off his clothes in the dark. Part of his mind was on the imagined effects of his telephone call to Steve Dolphi. He had no real plan, but now one was forming. "Fright! It must live with them, as it had lived with him. They were, by Lee Frederick's own admission, a disolute lot. In the six of them, there would be a weakling, and he meant to find that weakling.
He sat down on the bed and knew instantly she was there. His hand went back to confirm the sag in the bed and she was there, all right. In the dark, he was once more surprised by the coolness of her body. And the smoothness. Turning he stretched out beside her and his lips brushed the hair above her left ear.
"Idiot," he breathed. "Your mother will kiss you. You know this bed squeaks and the whole darn house shakes!"
"Nothing will squeak or shake unless you get the itch," she whispered.
Then she turned her head and her lips. They were firm and moist and nibbling, creeping down his jaw to the strain of his neck muscles. Down and down, and she moved as her body twisted to keep her lips on his chest and belly. It was a slow, devastating journey, hot and roving and moist, and it was not a mystery to him. He was conscious of her hands smoothing his muscular hips. He felt her breasts dragging over his skin. For only a moment longer, he worried about Tammy and the children, then his passion swelled, blocking out every thought but one.
The bed didn't squeak and the house didn't shake, but he quivered from head to toe at the excruciating ecstasy of her kisses. His left hand wandered down, looking for her head, to pet, or perhaps only to let her feel his fingertips on her smooth cheeks. In the dark, her hand caught his and her long, strong fingers twined in his, holding his hand. She was completely his mistress.
At the end, he thought he heard her crying, but the pulse in his brain made such a racket in his ears he couldn't be sure. The flame burned and burned and he felt it. Exhausted by the heat, he discovered she had let go of his hand. She had let go of him, and when he stretched out his hand, she was gone. He heard a click as she closed the door.
He was a bit confused by her sudden departure. He was too exhausted to give it any more thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sal was feeling quite contented now. If Luke had been the least bit optimistic, the least bit sympathetic during the day, she might have changed the way she thought about the future. But he had been unfriendly and she was certain he had deliberately double-talked her when she had expressed the fears generated by the weekend at Sunnyside.
To her knowledge, sex had solved every problem she'd had since she was sixteen. That she had made her body lusts pay off in large hunks had been due strictly to her uncanny sense of timing. By banking all of her money she could leave her long list of lovers, she had a sizeable chunk of money. Luke had been generous, too, and easy to tap. But she saw the end of her soft berth coming up, and her instinct for flight was like a super-jolt of electricity, crowding hard against her reluctance.
She was unwilling because her affair with Luke was a happy one. Always before, she had been the other woman, meeting her lover in secret places, feeding them love and using her shadowy, elusive presence as a hidden flame for the hungry mouth. With him, it had been different. From the very first, she had been obviously his office lover and apparently with his wife's approval. Little by little, she had grown to appreciate and enjoy the luxury of his life. She loved the summer houses, and she loved the privilege of his position. It seemed to her that this affair was the best of all. She had acquired a taste for unique position she held in the close-knit circle of Luke's friends.
At first, she hadn't cared much for the sight of Don Hughson, but by the time Luke got around to suggesting she move in with Don, she had learned to tolerate the sad homosexual. In himself, Don was exactly what Luke thought him to be: a nice harmless man, for the single purpose of keeping the newspapers and less charitable friends from talking too much. Her original suspicion that perhaps Don was a stool pigeon for Luke vanished, at least for the most part. Her native shrewdness had prevented Sal from confiding in Don too often, and not at all when the platonic relationship she had for Lee Frederick developed into something more personal.
But Sal even liked the little thrill of fooling Luke with his own wife, and she was beginning to think about Lee an awful lot now. Once Sal believed she had known all there was to know about sex, Lee had taught her something new. And while it was true that Sal used her sex as an economic commodity, she liked sex from the way the word looked in print to the odd and wonderful extremes lust could produce in sophisticated forms.
So she was not anxious to run, but there seemed no other way. She didn't need to count her money. She knew exactly what she was worth. She knew how to pack and how to get to the airport. She also knew the kind of a note she'd leave for Luke. It would guarantee his acceptance of her goodbye, and she would put a lipsticked imprint on it to show him how awful she felt about leaving.
The thing she didn't count on was the sad look of Don Hughson when she entered their apartment that evening. He was sitting in an easy chair, but he wasn't reading one of his books that he normally bought. His blue shirt was open at the collar and his sleeves were half-rolled to his elbows. On the table by the chair were cups, four of them, the number of times he'd been to the kitchen for coffee. The ashtray was overloaded and Sal knew he'd been in the apartment most of the day.
"What's with you, doll?" she asked, taking off her suit jacket. "Been in all day?"
Don nodded. "Doing some thinking. Good day?"
She walked over and turned her back to him. "If you're going to talk like a husband, unzip me like one! The place smells awful!"
He unzipped her dress, then sat back in the chair. Sal pulled her dress down and let it drop to the floor. For the hundredth time, she watched to see if his eyes sparked at the sight of her long, jutting breasts in the sheer bra. He looked, but there was no spark. And when she picked up the dress and went to her room, she gave her bottom a tiny extra rotation, counting on the black panties to add to the effect.
"Pour me a drink, doll," she called from her room. In a second, she had removed the bra and panties. In the mirror, she checked the way she looked, knowing very well how men, most men, reacted to her body. She was nearly model-thin, all except the unbelievable thrust of her big boobs and the high tight rounds of her buttocks. Once a man had told her she was just a frame, walking around to carry her boobs and her butt. She was white and pink and bouncy, and as usual, she was not quite able to understand Don Hughson's indifference to her beauty. She put on a lounging suit, made of material normally used to overlay a taffeta skirt.
He was sitting in the chair again. Her drink was on the coffee table. Sal picked it up and then came across and sat herself down on his lap. Closeup, he was handsome. She tucked one arm around his neck and kissed him quickly.
"Sad, doll?" she asked.
"I could kill myself," he answered. "Maybe I should!"
"Doll," she murmured. "I wish I could help you."
She felt his hand on her slim back. "Maybe you can," he said softly. "I-I don't know what to say, but I have to say it! Sal, you won't laugh at me?"
"Of course not! Please tell me, doll!"
"First, I want to tell you that if it were possible for me to really love a woman, it would be you, Sally. It isn't only that you're beautiful, its that you're the only woman I ever felt I knew, other than my mother. And not even counting her, you're the only woman I ever felt really understood me. Okay?"
"Okay."
"That woman in Fort Tempar," he said. "She was awful! You know how she teased me. Her language and all. A real animal, actually. I only went with her because the others dared me to. When we got down there in the bushes by the rocks, I didn't know what to do. That is, I knew what to do, but I didn't want to do it! Then she pulled up her skirt and kind of-hunched at me!"
Sal put her cheek to his and held his trembling shoulders tightly. "Easy, doll. Let it come out easy."
"I went crazy, I know it! I can hardly remember. But there I was, rolling around on her fat belly, and she was laughing and trying to help me and I didn't need any help! I don't know whether or not I liked it, but I did it, and when that was over, she was still laughing at me. "That's when I blacked out. I swear, Sally, I blacked out. All I could hear was that terrible laughter. It seemed to me she was all the women I've ever known who laughed at me for being gay. All I could do was hit and hit her, but I didn't mean to kill her! I swear, she was alive when she tumbled back off that little cliff!"
Sal set her drink on the table and though she was on his lap, she held him as if he were on hers. Everything was over except this, she thought. Luke would find a new woman. Lee would go on putting her hands on strange women. The police would hunt for Carl Newport and the world would read about what the outcome would be, but there was no one to help this sad, confused man. Except Sally Merkson, who hadn't really loved anyone in all of her life.
"Go on, doll. Tell me what's upsetting you. Tell me everything. I'll never laugh at you-I never have, have I?"
"No. My, oh, no," he whimpered. "I guess I love you-no, not like a mother, maybe not like a man. I just love you."
She laughed and it was not a derisive laugh. "Doll, let me tell you something about me. I tried you several times. I really try you every day-like now. Every time I try you, I lose, but I don't blame you, and I don't blame me. Luke threw us together. At first, I don't think either of us cared. All Luke wanted was some kind of protection for himself. It doesn't matter why. What happened afterwards was our own affair. Tell me what's upsetting you? Do you want to go to bed with me, honey?"
He shook his head. "No, I don't think so, even though I do! Do you understand what I mean? I'd like to be one thing or another to you, but I'm afraid to be a man and I'm afraid to not try. Then this awful thing happened in Fort Tempar!"
"Did it have anything to do with me? I mean, did you maybe see my face in place of hers? Were you thinking of me?!!"
He shook his head again. "No. No! I'm sorry, Sal. I didn't mean to bother you with my problems."
"Slow down, now, and see if you can put it into words."
He was quiet for a minute, during which she did not release her arms from his quivering shoulders. He tipped his head back and took a deep breath.
"I've got to go, Sal. I've got to pack up and leave-before they catch Carl Newport, before there's any chance for the police to question me again. I know, we all agreed to tell the same story and we signed those affidavits in front of a notary. But that isn't like being on a witness stand with a district attorney and a defense attorney badgering us with questions. Confusing us, getting us deeper and deeper into trouble. I couldn't take it. I 'm going.. I've a little money. I'm leaving. Maybe South America, maybe Europe. I don't know where, but I've got to go."
"Go on!" Sal demanded.
"Anyone can run away. It isn't running away from the police that I mind. It's running away-from you!"
"Are you sure I'd mind, if you left?"
"I'm sure you wouldn't mind! Living in the same apartment with a man who hasn't the nerve nor the manhood to put a hand on your gorgeous body. I'm sure you hate me!"
"I don't hate you," she said honestly. "Not at all."
"No. I suppose you do understand, at that. But I'd hate to run away, knowing a little of it was fear of you! In my own world, I can do the things I desire with men, and I don't have to face anybody, or even myself. I suppose what I'm really trying to say is that if I run away, from the police and you, I'll never again find a woman who will give me a chance to become a man again! Is that crazy?"
"Are you asking me to give up Luke and all of this to go with you?" she asked.
"That's absurd! Give up Luke for me?"
"You know-I don't really love Luke, don't you?"
"I guessed it. But even without love-his money and his world. And he is some man, isn't he?"
"I've known better. And worse."
"That's what scares me, I guess. I'd be ashamed to try to make love to you, then have you laugh at me because I didn't come up to your qualifications as a man!"
She laughed and shook him. "Dopey!" she exclaimed, then became serious. "Don, you say you want to love me but you don't. You love me, but not die way most people spell the world. I understand that. In the same way, I think I love you. I don't want to marry you, and I don't think you're my dream man. But seeing you like this hurts me! I'd do almost anything in the world to help you-I mean, really help you!"
"You're wonderful," he murmured.
"I know you can love a woman-the Fort Tempar thing proved that, even if I'd ever doubted it. So it must be something, some way you think, that makes you what you are. Don, do you think we could try to find out why you have to go crazy and kill a woman to make love to her?"
"I killed her afterward," he said.
"But you had it in your mind, first, didn't you?"
"Maybe I did. I don't remember. But how could I ever think that way about you, Sal?"
"Maybe there's another way to think." She hesitated. "If I told you that all this talk, this sharing of confidences has made me-want to love you, what would you think?"
"I'd be afraid!"
"Of what?"
"Of not being able to do anything-of what you would think."
"How long has it been since you tried, and failed?" she asked. "I mean who was the woman and all of that?"
"Five or six years ago. I met her in a bar. I got a little excited. She was such a doll! Anyway, she didn't know I was gay. I just wanted to be with her. When I failed, she laughed at me. I never had the nerve to try again."
Sal slid off his lap and picked up her drink. "You see," she said, standing in her nearly nude condition in front of him. "You've won half the battle already! I know you're gay. I know you don't think you can love me, and I'm not laughing. But I know you want to-and I want to, honey! My sweet, isn't it worth a try?" 'What if I fad?"
She laughed softly. "Honey, I'm a whore," she said coldly. "No matter what, I'm a whore, or I wouldn't go to bed with Luke for the pretty things he can give me. And Luke isn't the first! I've put up with spankings, tongue baths, rubber spints and more than once, I've had to work on an old goat for three hours before his ailing heart pumped enough blood to fill a thimble! That means I not only know some things about a man's anatomy, but I can face facts. And we know the facts, honey. I'm in big favor of giving it a try!"
He looked up at her in surprise. "Why are you willing to do so much for me?" he asked.
"Never question a hotblooded woman's motives, honey. You can be sure it isn't money, in your case."
"I've got thirty thousand dollars!" he said in self-defense. "My goodness, you're beautiful, Sally!"
* * *
If there hadn't been so much at stake, it would have been funny to Don Hughson. He had never taken any credit for being ambitious, nor for being intellignet. But he did take credit for being self-sufficient and half-wise. His self-sufficiency had told him to grab Lee's offer before the roof caved in on him for his fury at Fort Tempar. His half-wise self had told him a long time ago that he was getting under Sally Merkson's skin. As he had gotten under some other women's skins, the terrible old woman on the beach, for instance.
Then there were the women who didn't understand that a homosexual was a person apart from those their mother and father insisted made up the human race, in his attitude toward women, and toward men. Everyone wanted to help him. He had given up arguing the point many years ago; but he had not given up his attitude.
As far as he was concerned, women were two-legged depositories for male rods to impregnate with aggravation and shameful lust. It started where most men thought the thrills began and ran right up through their bodies to the top of their conceited heads. Their sex apparatus was inadequate and it smelled. They all had the attributes of a cow, without the decency to grow a tail to cover up their awful underbodies. Topping this was a false face with a disconnected set of desires labeled brain Sober, they were catty and mean. Drunk, they were foolish and obnoxious. In love, they were frantic. Like Sal, who if she wasn't already in love with him, was now convincing herself she should be.
He stood with the practiced look of surprise on his face and let her undress him. He feigned some embarrassment when she lowered his trousers and shorts, and he looked down at her bobbing head as she sighed over his masculinity. She was twitching her body and murmuring soft words and generally working herself into a frenzy. She responded a little because of her nerves, and she stood erect, to take off her sex suit as if she had discovered a new continent. He obliged her with chddish words of wonder and appreciation.
"Don't you like me? I mean, the way I am, honey," she asked. She flopped her huge breasts and twisted herself to show him the muscular control she had over the rounds of her bottom. As she pivoted and whirled, he smiled at her sdly imitation of a professional stripper with nothing left to strip. She put her hands behind his neck and bumped him furiously. "There! I knew you weren't that far gone, doll!"
"Oh, Sal, you're so good to me!" he replied, with more enthusiasm than he felt. He let her push him back on the bed, and her naked, bulging flesh rolled over him, pushing and molding with lewd intent. Then she moved away, all except her head. She kissed his mouth, gently at first, then violently, and he knew how to kiss back. He tasted her lipstick and being that close, he could see the beginning crow's feet at the corners of her eyes and the carefully made up pores around the base of her nose. He put one hand to her back because he thought she expected some response.
"Don, honey," she whispered. "Just talk to me. Tell me anything you think. About women, about yourself, about me. What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you see a naked woman?"
"He didn't want to say the four letter word. "Well, it is kind of like a bad dream," he answered. "You know, looking through a cupboard and not being able to reach all the delicious things on the shelf. I look at a woman, you, maybe. She is just beautiful. Her eyes are deep and understanding, her lips are warm and moist. I see her shape, the lift and fullness of her breasts and the fabulous shape of her body. Then like a dream, I can't reach all the wonderful things about her. Only it is real, and I can't talk to her and I can't make love to her because everything is just out of reach!"
She took his hand and put it to the massive bag of pink-tipped mush. "See, I'm not out of reach, honey."
"Not like that," he sighed painfully. "It's like I'm two people. One of me had arms and legs and lips and all of the rest. The real me is suspended in the air looking on. When I try to connect the two people everything turns to helplessness."
He thought that was pretty good, but her next question surprised him. "Men, doll. What do you think about when you see a man you like?"
"I think, he's like me. We are not mankind. No one expects the two of us to do anything. We meet on equal terms, with no ridiculous man-woman contest, no past and no future. Together, we understand and enjoy each other, but in parting, we take nothing away. Iarting robs me of nothing. Knowing this, I'm not scared to meet another man."
She kissed him. "The sex thing, honey," she asked softly, "what do you do?"
"Please, Sal," he pleaded. 'Tell me!"
In great distress, he named off in guarded words the things all the books said he and another man should do together. It intrigued her, and he pretended to sulk.
"What's best, honey?" she asked. "I mean, do you enjoy doing it, or having it done?"
"Oh dear," he breathed. "Oh, Sal, don't torture me so! It isn't really that it is doing or having done. It's that we can help each other! That's the great feeling."
She was, he thought, so concerned with her own emotions she could recognize true philosophy from pure malarkey. She raised and came over his chest intently.
"Honey, please, help me! she whispered. "Look," she demanded, rolling to one hip. "I can't populate the world. All I need is help, and release from the fire you make burn in me! I'm not a woman. I'm a thing! I'm just like you. I need your understanding. And I want to help you! Try, honey, try!"
"I will. Oh, Sal, sweetheart. I will, I will!"
Their bodies pressed together, their lips mashed and parted and he thought she was going to strangle him with her tongue. He debated the degree of resistance, but the passage of time and vision of thirty thousand dollars made him impatient. He let go, and the squeals of pleasure from Sal were nauseating. He enjoyed the circus more than he did the ministrations. Her hands and lips were roaming, and because no matter what he thought, physically, he had been completely heterosexual for most of his life. It wasn't a question of letting her lead him. She was so excited she forgot everything but her lust for the wonder her words and actions had created from his lisdess body.
Then the sheer physical reaction became enjoyable and he began to exert himself. The body in his suddenly animated hands was just that, a shape to arrange so he could continue the sensation and increase the desire her lips and hands had begun. He found her dramatically aware of her passion even if her cry of surrender hadn't told him. He held her tight and closed his eyes, his lean body whipping, building the ecstasy as he had done so many times before but with a different kind of partner. But it was sensation, acute, breathtaking and totally devoid of affection. He knew when he hurt her, and he didn't care. Her whimpers of pain made him think of the woman at Fort Tempar and this put new fury in his lunging. He went through the barrier of expectancy, not like a lover, not like a lost soul introduced to the wonders of a woman, but like an animal trying to finish its life in one final brain-bursting orgasm.
Suspended in feeling, exhilirated with brute triumph, he waited, eyes closed, muscles taut. He was waiting for her to laugh, or say something wrong.
"What a fool I've been!" she whispered, closing her arms around his back. "Oh, my darling!"
He relaxed, his mind back on the track. He'd throttle her later, when he had the thirty thousand and they were lost somewhere across the other side of the world.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carl was sure now, as he walked out of the public telephone booth. It was not Steve Dolphi who masterminded the unholy six. Luke Frederick had reacted with sudden shrewdness, with deliberate intentions of furthering the short conversation, even to the point of making some kind of deal. It meant, as Carl thought about it, that Dolphi had confided in Frederick after it had been determined there was no Detective Clark on the Fort Tempar police force.
Luke Frederick had called him Newport after the exchange of words. Carl crawled back into the beat-up Ford, settling into the seat beside Patti with a feeling of unguaranteed safety. All of a sudden, he was no longer the hunted, but the hunter. They couldn't help but be worried. He tried to visualize himself in their position, but it was hard. His life had been made up of figures and steel and cement. He had lived by blueprints and sets of specifications with men and money in the balance. He had been a hard competitor but an honest one, and subtrifuge was not part of his makeup. It didn't seem possible to Carl that six people could get together and frame an innocent man into the death chamber. But if such a gang existed, then he was sure they were weak and stupid and scared. And the longer fear lived with them, the weaker they would become. Out of weakness and fear, one of them would do a silly thing. In the corner of his mind, he hoped it would not be Lee Frederick, whom he could not forget.
"Where we go now, Carl?" Patti asked, tapping the throttle of her beloved car.
"Do you remember the big house out on the Avenues? The one we thought was deserted? We go out Geary to about, oh' Twentieth, I guess."
"Fourth house from the corner," she remembered.
"That's the one. Think you can find it?"
"Yes!"
She did. He had her park a block away. Then he got out of the car and walked down the street until he was directly in front of the Frederick house. There was a light in what appeared to be the living room of the house, and a light in one of the upper rooms. He looked through the darkness and the walls and saw Lee Frederick, her body a rolling challenge, her bright eyes searching for something. He recalled the wistful, but blase manner of her speech, as she tried to tell him of the nest of sensual abandonment he had been tossed into. He recalled his first reactions. He still could not erase the impression that she was a hot-blooded woman, filled with promise and yearning, discontented with her life and willing to tell a perfect stranger enough to get his sympathy.
According to what he had learned at the police station, she too, had signed an affidavit, but for some unaccountable reason, he discredited what he knew.
It wasn't entirely romanticism with Carl. He still had the memories of her visiting his bedside that first night, checking him for comfort and well being. He had the image in his mind of the masterful manner of her having taken care of his chilled body. He recalled her strong hands and commanding tones as she removed his wet clothing and ordered him to bed. With all of her beauty, she had been a real woman, alive to his distress, sympathetic to the extent of being arbitrary in her desire to help him. This type of a woman, he could not relate to the cold-blooded frame her spouse and friends had foisted upon the amazed police the following day.
He looked back at the old car where Patti sat and shivered. She would wait a hundred years. He looked back at the very expensive house. At that moment, the double garage doors opened. He watched Luke Frederick get into the big car parked under the lowgrade light in the garage and back the nearly new Lincoln out into the street. A moment later, the garage light went out. He watched the car drive off. The lights were still on in the house. Without knowing why, he walked across the street, and up the five steps to the front door. He could not see into the living room. For a moment, he didn't know what he wanted to do. Then he rang the bell.
He had played it by ear since the moment he had jumped out of the police car. Now he waited. The light above his head went on. Then the door opened. Lee Frederick stood there, her robe clutched at her waist with one hand her other poised on the edge of the door. She was just as beautiful as he remembered her.
"Yes?" she asked.
"Oh. It's you' Mr. Newhort," she said quietly. "Somehow I thought you'd called from a long way off."
"Never very far," he said, trying to match her calm. "What do you want?"
"First, to see you again to be sure I remembered you correctly. After that, I don't know for sure."
"My husband has gone to Fort Tempar. I'm alone."
"That didn't worry you before," he reminded her.
"I didn't know you were a murderer and rapist then!"
"Do you think I am now?"
"Well," she observed levelly. "I didn't do it!"
"I wanted to talk to you. May I come in?"
She moved back immediately and he went in, closing the door behind him. Dressed in neat slacks, a good sport shirt and sport jacket, he knew his appearance was strange to her. She looked him up and down.
"I didn't remember you being so big'" she said.
"Afraid, are you?"
"You know I'm not. Want a drink?"
"Thanks, no. I don't dare stay very long' of course. I just wanted to ask you why they did it-why you helped them."
"A good wife is loyal to her husband' isn't she?"
"A good wife doesn't lie on a sofa, half-naked and make love to another woman, either!"
Lee gasped and thought the worry did something extra beautiful to her bright green eyes. "How did you?"
He looked around the beautiful room, then turned and sat down on a leather chair. He looked up at her speculatively.
"I went up on the porch first,' ' he said. "I was about to knock. Then I saw you and the other woman. Sal, wasn't it?-on the sofa. I was embarrassed to say the least, but I was sick and cold and I had to get help. So I went down to the beach and yelled before I came back. It seemed like the-right thing to do."
"Are you sure you saw what you think you saw?"
He nodded. "Doll, if it's one thing I do know, it's how a woman is made, and what makes them tick! I know what I saw."
She turned away and he watched the fluid movement of her voluptuous body, only now it was stiff and she sat down on a chair with something less than grace.
"Why are you telling me all this?"
"Because I'll have to tell the story on the witness stand when they catch me. They will, you know. It's only a matter of time. The police aren't that stupid."
"You-you'd testify to what you think you saw?"
"That's more honest than testifying to what your husband told you happened! He's lying, you know."
She smiled at him with something like compassion. "My husband knows I'm a lesbian," she said coldly.
"With his pet secretary?"
"Please go!"
Startled, he wondered what had happened to the fascination he had expended around the memory of Lee Frederick. It wasn't her confession of sexual deviation, because he didn't believe it. But now he had done the same thing to her he had done to Dolphi and her husband; dropped the hint that would lead to secret terror every hour from threat to trial date.
"I just wanted you to be-warned," he said, standing up. "You were nice to me. Awfully nice, Lee. I'll be sorry to hurt you. But I'll be fighting for my life. That makes all the difference. I just wish I knew what actually happened-and why you and your husband and your friends framed me with whatever did happen!"
She turned her head and met his eyes. "You don't know what really happened?"
"How the heck would I know? Does anyone, but the man-or woman-who killed that old woman?"
"That's right. You couldn't know, could you?"
"No more than you knew. .You were with me all the way!"
"If I decide to tell you what happened, what would you do?"
"Go to the police, naturally."
She laughed. She came over to him and put a soft warm palm on each side of his face. "Poor Carl! Of course, that's the answer. The truth! It's so simple no one thought of it!"
He looked down at her beauty, and the overpowering sexuality of her voice and the odor and shape of her made him heady. He put his hands to her waist' and the beautiful body quivered at his touch. She moved herself closer and as if directed by signs, they exchanged a light, understanding kiss, with just enough pressure between their lips for each to sense the promise of the other. He could feel her eyes, searching his face, his hair' he had never been made love to in such a soft, gentle fashion and only the thin barrier of his own predicament him refrain from crushing the stunning, radiant Lee into his arms. Now she smiled.
"Carl' come sit down with me. I'm going to tell you exactly what happened!"
* * *
If it was a trap, he was ready to risk it. And when he sat down, she did not sit down. She pivoted and sighed and he was holding her in his arms, the fabulous length of her body stretched out on the sofa, her shoulders cradled in his right arm. The silken robe had slipped some, but not enough to make her surrender a vulgar thing. He fought the urge to put his hand under the cloth and put his fingers around the solid, out-thrust of her breasts. For a moment, she closed her eyes, and he wondered if she had thought as much about him as he had thought about her. It seemed so.
"Carl, I've hated every minute of it all," she remarked, "don't speak, don't get me confused. Let me tell it the way they told it to me.-After you drove into town-and what has happened since! That's the most important, Carl. You say we lied. Only one of us lied, Carl, and maybe, none lied'"
* * *
He thought he knew what she was going to say because he had given the possibility a ten percent chance, but he listened.
"I told you how they-how we all drank too much. The night you were washed up on the beach, Sal was half-sick. She didn't want to go into town drinking so she stayed with me. I never did like those bar-hopping tours. Well, they came back at midnight, all hopped up, as usual. I thought they were going to wake you up with their laughing and talking, but you were out cold. Anyway, Sal and I told them about you and your boat. I made strong coffee and it helped. What I'm trying to say is that there was nothing wrong that night. Nothing had happened.
"In the morning, Luke decided to take your boat in town, just as I said. The others were all hung over, and they looked forward to going back into town and getting a couple of shots to straighten out. Yes, there was liquor in the house, but Luke kept working them until they had your boat loaded on the trailer, so the trip to town was welcome. You were still sound asleep."
"I was tucked in so nicely," he said, smiling at her.
"Off they went. Even Sal. Well, they stopped for an hour in the ANCHOR and when they left, they were all feeling a lot better. They took your boat to the shop and headed back. It was then that Joannie discovered the body in the back of the station wagon. Luke was driving and he said he darned near ran off the road."
"Go on," Carl told her.
Lee put a finger under his chin as if struggling to align her mind. "They were afraid, of course. I mean, after all, a dead woman! And she was so homely. Luke said they pulled off the road and talked themselves into a frenzy. They had all been so drunk the night before they didn't know what they were doing-or had done! The men aren't very careful about who they take on when they get drunk and happy, you know. But nobody admitted ever having seen the woman before. I guess they all thought it was one of them, but no one knew for sure."
"So they decided to hang it on me!" Carl snapped.
She shook her head. "Not then. All they knew was that they had a corpse in the back of the station wagon. Carl you'd have to know us all real well to understand the fear. I'll tell you the facts, however. Sally Merkson has been sleeping with my husband for months. Joannie Dolphi is a lesbian, and Steve Dolphi only married her for her money. He sleeps with anything having any resemblance to a female! Don Hughson is a half-homosexual. I told you what I am, and with all these things in their minds, they were afraid. My husband is a successful businessman, and so is Steve Dolphi. You can't blame them for wanting to protect themselves!"
"So they decided to hang it on me," he remarked.
"No! After you left, they sat down to think some more and because they knew the body hadn't been in the car the night before, they actually believed you'd done it. So Luke called the police and they were there, waiting for you. You know the rest."
"Not quite," he countered. "Why did they sign those affidavits? I mean, all those little 'to the best of my knowledge' things about my having been able to hide the corpse in the car in the early morning, and how willing I was to drive the body away? Lee, you knew it was all a lie! I wouldn't have minded them, but you! I just couldn't believe it!"
"Luke," she said. "And there was so much at stake."
"Then you don't really know who did it?" he inquired.
She sat up, a new look of concern on her face. "No, Carl. If one of them did it, they told the rest. Now, we think maybe there was someone else! Someone none of us knew about. That beach is full of parked cars with couples. The Ferguson woman was a barfly known to everyone in town! She could have gone down to the beach with any one of a dozen men!"
"Who raped her, threw her clothes into my boat and dragged her up to your husband's station wagon," Carl said out loud. "Why haven't you people told this to the police?"
"Those affidavitts," she replied. "Oh, Carl, no one is perfect! And just because you're strong and not scared, that doesn't mean everybody is. Silly people do silly things. Now that we realize how wrong we could have been, we're all sorry! But we were afraid. We still are!"
"Lee, would you be scared to tell the whole truth, as you know it, on the witness stand?"
"Not now, Carl. I'll never be scared again!" She leaned forward and kissed him. Her lips nibbled at his, and she held the pressure until she ran out of breath. "What are you going to do?"
"Get out of here now. You're another man's wife, and I happen to believe in these things. Then I'm going to contact my attorney and tell him what you've told me. Hell arrange to have me go back to Fort Tempar and face the thing. If you will tell a straight story, so will the others. It may not turn me free immediately, but it will start the police looking for the real killer. Lee, I don't know how to thank you-or what to say!"
"After it's over, Carl?"
"Do you love your husband, Lee?"
"I hate him! I hate the life I have with him! Oh, Carl, I'm not really a lesbian! It's just that I was lonely and Sal and I, well, we understand each other. We were once in love with the same man. That's about all I can say."
"When it's all over, we'll see, then," he said. "I've got to go. There's so much to do."
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"My lawyer," he said. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known. I've never stopped thinking about you since you pulled me in out of the storm. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Carl," she answered in a soft whisper. Goodbye."
* * *
Women were great actors but very poor liars, he decided. And as to ad-libbing murder theories, they were inadequate. He walked down the street to the old car. Patti was turned in the seat, her head on her arm, sound asleep. Carl could not help drawing a brutal comparison between Lee Frederick and Patti, who's last name he had never bothered to remember.
"Hey," he called gently. "Let's roll!"
"Man, you talk too much and too long! You see her?"
"Yes. I sure did. Let's go before the police come racing down the street."
Patti turned the key and the starter ground. And ground. "Sweet car," she pleaded. "Start for mama. Get those little old pistons popping! Come on!"
It responded. She pounded the accelerator enthusiastically and put the car in drive. "She call the police?"
Within seconds after I left the house, I'd say." He giggled, thinking about the sputtering Edward Totten and what he'd say to the squad of policemen who would be on his back as soon as they could get the wheels in motion. Then he lost his humor as he realized what had happened to the image of Lee Frederick, carried in the back of his head since the stormy night.
But she had unwittingly told him something. They were afraid. He still didn't know what had happened, nor which one of them had actually done it. But there had been some truth to her description of the individual sexual tastes of the men. If Luke Frederick was sleeping with Sal Merkson, and Don Hughson was a homosexual, then the finger pointed at Stever Dolphi, the rambling stud with the lesbian wife.
"You thinking mean things, ain't you, Carl?"
"Mean things?"
"You had a thing for her, didn't you?"
"I wanted to see her again," he admitted. "We going home, now?"
"I never thought about it that way, but I guess you're right."
So on they went. The car brought them safely back home.
CHAPTER NINE
Lee just finished making two telephone calls. One call would put the police onto the little attorney Carl Newport hired, the other would tell her husband about the surprise visit the moment he reached the police station in Fort Tempar. But there was still one more call to make, and to Lee it was the most important call of all. She started to dial the number, then, suddenly changed her mind. She went into her bedroom and put on street clothes. Within fifteen minutes of the decision to go personally, she was on her way to the apartment where Don Hughson and Sally Markson lived.
As she parked in front of the expensive apartment, an old wound opened up. The apartment and Don's salary and the cost of Sal nicked a fat thousand dollars a week out of Luke's income. Not that it shorted Lee, but it represented a fantastic price to pay for the sexual services of a whore. A whore who he had said he did not love. Lee's jealousy was a strange mixture of pride and fury. She was proud of her beautiful body and angry that it had never made her husband a slave to her. As he had drifted, he did not care if she drifted. She had not even the satisfaction of being an abused spouse.
She walked to the elevator and punched the fourth floor button. On the door to the apartment she sought was a neatly typewritten placard: "Mr. and Mrs. Don Hughson." Lee snorted and rang the bell.
When Don opened the door, she pushed on in. He was a mess and half naked. His shorts were pink. She had never known before he had hair on his belly.
"Is Sal here?" she asked, snubbing her cigarette out in the closest ashtray.
"In her room, Lee. What's wrong?"
"Trouble, honey, and lots of it," she replied. "Carl Newport came to our house tonight!"
"C-Carl Newport?" Don gasped, his dark eyes opening wide.
"He's found out something. He said he was going to turn himself in and stand trial. He's certain he can clear himself, now, and he hinted that he knew who had really raped and killed that old woman! You're in trouble, Don!"
"Oh, no!" he breathed.
"You ready to take my offer?"
He glanced at the hall door, and Lee saw him bite his upper lip. He looked at his watch. Lee already knew it was nearly three in the morning. When he looked back at her, there was a new light in his eyes.
"Where's the money?" he asked.
"At my house. I'll give it to you when you get therewith Sal in a cab with you."
He shook his head. "I'll have to drive," he said.
"Well leave town in my car, then catch a plane where we know the airport isn't being watched. Where's Luke?"
"Left for Fort Tempar. He can't get back before tomorrow morning, late. Have you talked to Sal?"
He seemed to have regained his composure. "Yes.
She's ready to go with me. It's all over and she know it, too."
"Any idea where you're headed?" she asked.
"I wouldn't even tell you that-until I get there," he said. "But it will be far away, I know that much."
"Okay. How long will it take you to get to my house?"
"A couple of hours. We have packing to do."
There were more questions she wanted to ask, but he didn't want to talk. For a moment, thinking about his words, she wondered if she'd spent thirty thousand dollars for nothing. But being 'all over' and getting rid of Sal were two different things. And Lee was beginning to develop a taste for intrigue. There was one more plan in her mind.
"I'll wait up for you. Both of you," she murmured.
* * *
Don fixed two drinks-one for himself and one for Sal, and walked to the bathroom. From the medicine cabinet, he took a powerful sleeping tablet which he crushed in his fingers and powdered into Sal's drink. With a drink in each hand, he went back into Sal's bedroom.
The room was filled with cigarette smoke. The bed-stand was Uttered with empty glasses, loaded ashtrays. There was wadded tissues all over the floor. Sal was drunk. Her naked body showed red welts from his fingers. The tips of her breasts were swollen beyond passion. They seemed ready to burst with anger over the abuse his mouth and not-gentle teeth had furnished. But she was smiling.
"Wasn't that Lee's voice I heard?"
"Yeah," Don said, setting the hopped-up drink on the night stand. He picked up her nearly finished Scotch and poured it over his own. "Carl Newport showed up at her house tonight. Luke's gone to the police. They think they know where Carl is headed. I guess they'll find him!"
Sal blanched, her body turning white as did her face. She struggled to one elbow. "My god, Don! He's supposed to be dead! Carl Newport!"
"I've got to get out of town," he said, very quietly. "Tonight. Are you coming with me, darling?"
She tried to think through the past hours of drunken orgy and he could see she wasn't thinking the way he wanted her to think. But he waited because with women, you never knew how their idiotic minds worked, he thought.
"Where are you going?" she asked presently.
"Maybe England. Somewhere they can't reach me. Please, honey, say you'll go with me!"
"England. You mean, hiding from the police? Just running all the time? Oh, Don, honey. I can't. My god. I'd be afraid every time I saw a uniform. Oh, there must be a better way! Anyway, I'd have to do so many things before-It's impossible!" She looked away, her eyes filled with confusion.
He picked up the fresh drink and thrust it into her hand. "I guess it was too much to ask," he said, taking a long slug of his own drink. "I didn't think you really cared about me. You're like all the rest. I'm not really a man, so I don't really count!"
In obvious distress, she put the glass to her lips and gulped the double shot, plug seasoning, in one swallow. Her body twisted and she put the glass down. Her slim hands went out to Don, and she pressed her head against his chest.
"No, honey. It isn't that," she said, drunkenly. "But I'm a hothouse flower, and you know it. I'd never last, running and running. I like pretty things, beautiful things and security. I'd just make you miserable. You're a man, honey, because you've proved it again and again!" She giggled. "And again!"
"Will you think about me when I'm gone?"
She let her hands slide limply from his shoulders and her head dropped to his lap. But there was no caress forthcoming. He stroked her head and she closed her eyes. The Scotch would get her in another minute, and the sleeping pill would hold for at least six hours.
"Sal?" he called.
"Huhh?"
"You feel okay?"
She didn't answer. He threw her to one side and went to his own room. Packing was quick and easy because he had mentally rehearsed it for days. He shaved and dressed. Then, he went back into Sal's room. She lay just as he had left her. He went through her dresser, packing her jewels and a couple of hundred dollars he found under her lingerie. Some of the latter he hurled into a small overnight bag he found in the closet. He didn't know what a woman needed to travel, but it didn't bother him much . He didn't think she was going to travel far.
He found a sheath dress in her closet and put it on her. She smelled of Scotch and sex and he debated strangling her on the spot. Finally, he had a presentable looking body on the bed. A body that sat up in the front seat of his car was worth thirty thousand dollars to Lee Frederick.
He carried his luggage and her to the basement garage. At 5 A.M., no one was about. Don piled the luggage in the back seat of his Mustang. Then he went up for Sal.
Looking down at her on the bed, he had the instinct to do some mean thing to the voluptuous body. A hothouse flower, she had said, who liked beautiful things and nothing but security. The refusal he didn't mind. The spirit of its offering was just one more faggot on the fire of his inborn hate of women. Then, he picked her up and managed to get her body over his shoulder. His right hand picked up the glass which had contained the drugged liquor.
Down in the garage, he laid her into the front, paying no attention to the way her ankle twisted, nor to the bump her head made against the seat back. He buckled the safety belt around her slim waist. Don wiped his finger prints from the glass and broke it in the trash can.
Within a minute of driving toward the Frederick house his mind began to probe the future, immediate and distant. He wondered if Lee really had thirty thousand dollars in her house, and if so, how much more?
* * *
Lee did not question the reckless exuberation she felt. It was working out, and she drove home fast, whipping into her garage with juvende speed and the short scream of rubber on cement. She slammed the car door and went into the house, her breath raising and bouncing her big boobs in irregular pattern. The taste of victory was in her mouth when she entered her bedroom. A surprise was there in the form of a plump, laughing nymph, sitting up naked on her bed.
"Joannie!" she shouted.
"Hi, pet," the bulb-breasted woman said. "I got lonesome. Steve went to Fort Tempar with Luke, so I thought I'd come over and make love with you. It's been a long time, pet, and I've missed you!"
"Your car?"
"I took a taxi. Where have you been at this hour? Out hunting some woman with more hair on her upper lip than she has on-"
"Joannie!" Lee shouted.
"I'm sorry. I know you don't like dirty talk, pet. Come on to bed, now. I've got a head of steam built up just thinking about you. I've been here over an hour, you know. You shouldn't leave your door unlocked. You could get raped, you know!"
Lee looked at her watch. A couple of hours, he had said. Maybe a little bit longer, because it had been obvious he had been drinking, and probably Sal hadn't been too sober. A couple of hours to either get rid of Joannie, or put her to sleep. Lee's blood suddenly raced. The tension of the past days had left her raw and hungry and restless. Luke and Steve wouldn't be back from Fort Tempar until noon. A couple of hours of Joannie might do her a lot of good. Anyway, Don could be handled in the living room, or in the garage. He'd be nervous and full of fear. All he'd want was his money and she was sure Sal would not want to linger for a lot of sentimental goodbyes no one really meant.
Lee ran both hands up under her thick red hair and her body did a small, lascivious rotation at Joannie. The motion made her nerves quicken and she elaborated on the sensation. Her big boobs rolled, and the tips hardened swiftly, responding to the rub of her bra cups. She smiled sensuously as Joannie slid out of bed, her nude body quivering with aroused passion.
She came to Lee with a peculiar whipping movement that tossed her breasts straight out and up so they flopped with a lewd smack-smack. Her eager hands found the zipper of Lee's dress and the cloth fell away from the undulating shape. Then the bra and for a moment, the two stood breast to breast, mouths agape with ecstasy over the promise of moments to come. They knew how to excite each other, and they spared no movements, no touch.
Joannie pulled down Lee's lace panties, managing to bare the continually rolling flare and the delicacies ol the woman's underbody without interrupting the rhythm of Lee's dance. For a moment, they stood in mutual motion, then their bodies melted together and they moved in reciprocating caress.
"You bitch!" Joannie panted. "I'm going to tear you apart. I'm going to love you until-"
"Joannie!" Lee pleaded again.
But there was no stopping the excited Joannie. Her hands squeezed and pulled at Lee, her lips spewed vile and obscene words, each a caress in the manner of her loving. She said awful things, suggesting the complete mutilation of Lee's lovely body, total destruction of her sexual delights and mental explosion at each interval of cruelty. Through it all, they urged and caressed each other, hands, breasts and bellies, with a certain instinctive passion they both understood.
Despite her beauty, her height and her usual aggressiveness, Lee let the plump woman press and guide her. When they went to the bed in a heap of tangled arms and legs, the mutual mauling changed to a nearly epileptic enfoldment. Lips to lips, they quivered together, each endearments. Her tongue blocked the sound, and she drove Lee to the edge of lust with the deep, darting caress.
They were not in love, so there was little affection in the manner of their loving. Lee forgot a lot of things as her emotions burst into the arms of Joannie Dolphi. The feel of flesh in her palms, the hat of breast tips and folded, secret places, released the burning anxieties.
She began to cry and gasp with mounting sensation. Suddenly, the plump woman became strong, and Lee felt her body gripped and scizzored, held in an animal grasp. They both strained and their movements froze.
"Goddammit," Joannie cried, after a moment. "I'd forgotten how good you were, pet."
"How good we were," Lee corrected her. "Now, kiss me."
* * *
Any other time, Lee would have let the exquisite sensations flood and reflood her body; the plateau of passion created by their first violent caresses needed only little, gently things to keep them exhilirated. But time was going by, faster than it should have. There was forty-five minutes she could count on, and no woman, nor any pair of women could exhaust Joannie Dolphi in forty-five minutes.
With Joannie, it was always pure carnality, without finesse. It seemed as if her body was one boiling cauldron of lust, and the terrible heat escaped through the words and curses she used to urge Lee on. With cries of perverted ecstasy, she begged to be hurt and when raw, inflamed tissues seemed to throb with pain, she insisted on further irritation. In this wild doing, Lee found pleasure only when the accumulation of hurts and twists caused Joannie to cry out in momentarily released passion.
Sweat moistened their bodies. Lee's fingers ached wearily from probing, massaging and parting. Her lips and mouth seemed raw from endless kisses and the things she had learned to do with throbbing points and quivering velvet shapes. Tender swollen places developed on them both, and gradually, exhaustion slowed them to idle teasing kisses and short swift flurries of intense attack.
"Oh, pet, I needed this," Lee breathed against the mauled shape of Joannie's breasts. "These past weeks have been awful!"
"An awful bore!" Joannie laughed, holding Lee against her soft belly. "Men can do the stupidest things. Think they'll ever catch Carl Newport?"
"I don't know whether or not we want him caught," Lee replied. "It would be better if it just went on forever. Kind of an unsolved crime. Gee, I'm tried. Shall we try to get some sleep? We can shower in the morning."
"I love your smell, pet,' 'Joannie whispered, rubbing her lips to the hollow of Lee's neck. "Okay, I guess I can sleep."
But they walked and laughed and fooled with each other, and Lee felt each tick of the clock as it counted time. When she felt that any moment would bring Don and Sal to the door, she decided to just leave Joannie in bed and take a chance on her not being too curious. Eventually, Joannie and all the others would know Don and Sal had left, but it would be smarter to let them get completely away before anyone became alarmed.
So with this decision, Lee waited, but the sound at the door was not the one she expected to hear. It started with a police siren, and ended with the screech of rubber on pavement. Lee jumped from bed.
"It's the police!" she exclaimed, turning on the bed-lamp.
"Next door, maybe?"
"No. No! They are here!" she exclaimed as the front door buzzed. "Stay in bed. "I'll see what's up."
"Maybe they caught Carl Newport?"
"Maybe," Lee replied, not sure of what she hoped it was.
The two officers were very polite and they didn't miss giving Lee all the male attention two pairs of eyes could give. She sat on the edge of the couch, her robe pulled around her lush, passion debilitated curves. After she told them her husband had gone to Fort Tempar with a friend, she asked her first question.
"What really is wrong?"
"Nothing, Mrs. Frederick. Headquarters had an anonymous phone call saying that Carl Newport would visit his lawyer some time tonight. That was four hours ago, and he didn't show up. But we think it is wise to check out all the principals involved in case it was not just a crank trying to cause trouble. We know he is in the area because of the calls your husband and Mr. Dolphi have received. Or, if he isn't, someone who is seems to be trying to cause trouble."
"Cause trouble?"
He shrugged. "We're not familiar with the case. Headquarters gave us this call over the radio. We are just checking to see if you've heard or seen anything out of the ordinary."
"Nothing," she answered.
The policemen got up, reluctantly, and when she stood up, they again went to work on her with male approval in their inspection. "Well, keep your door locked, Mrs. Frederick, and call us if the slightest disturbance occurs. We'll be patrolling the nieghborhood until seven, and the car that relieves us will be advised to check on this street every few minutes. There's probably no danger, but Newport is a killer, and we don't want to take any chances. Goodnight!"
"You are very kind," she told them as she let them out the door. "I feel so safe knowing you are both watching me."
"When they were gone, she turned out the light and stood at the front window, looking out. The police car was still there. The interior light was on. One policeman was making notes, and the other was talking into the radio. Then the interior light went out and the car moved down the street.
She went back into the bedroom. Joannie was sitting up in bed, smoking. Lee knew she had been listening at the door. She also knew Carl hadn't done what he'd told her he'd do. Or what might be worse, he may not have believed her at all.
"Why didn't you invite them in for the blast?" Joannie asked.
Lee checked her watch. "Policemen so early in the morning, I don't need," she laughed weakly. "Move over. I'm exhausted. "Are you afraid?"
"Not really," Lee pervaricated.
She rolled over and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
Don Hughson spotted the police car pulling away from Lee's house. He was furious at first. He realized then that none of the things Lee Frederick wanted could be furthered by having the police meet him. She had no way of knowing Sal was drugged or that he had plans for the future slightly different than anyone realized. He drove on slowly, trying to think. Regardless of why the police were at the Frederick house, he didn't dare drive up with a half-dead woman in his car. He looked over at Sal. She had doubled forward, held in the seat by the belt, but not supported. Her arms hung limply to the car floor. Her face and breasts banged softly on her legs.
It was undoubtedly trouble over Carl Newport. He felt like crying. It seemed to him that everyone in the world had joined together to frustrate and upset him. Right at the moment when he had believed he was ready to leave it all behind and start over again, the police car had interferred. He had to see Lee, had to get that money. He turned the car around and headed back. When he passed the house again, it was completely dark. Then he saw the open garage doors, with Lee's car park-ed there. With Luke gone to Fort Tempar, one parking place was empty.
He drove down the street, turned around, then came back, watching his rearview mirror, scanning each side-street for signs of the police. At the right moment, he. started the swing into the Frederick driveway, and at that moment, the headlights of a car came around the next corner. He rectified his turn and went on down the street. He met and passed the police car.
He checked the time, and saw it was 10 after five, and in an hour or less, it would be daylight. In two or three hours, he'd have a screaming, clawing Sal on his hands. Unless she was in familiar surroundings when she came to. He straightened her up in the seat. He thought about taking her back to their apartment and putting her to bed. He could explain her general mess by telling her they'd gotten real drunk, which she would believe.
But he didn't have that much time. If Carl Newport was getting close enough to keep the police on watch, then the end was very near. Very near for Don Hugh-son, too, unless he could get to Lee and the thirty thousand dollars she'd promised him.
Then he stepped on the gas and headed for the house at Sunnyside. He could make it in a little over an hour and a half. Regardless of the fact that it belonged to the Fredericks, chances were good that no matter what happened to Carl Newport, Lee or Luke, no one would think of looking for himself and Sal in the Sunnyside house. There were trees and a garage. By being cautious, he could sneak the car into the garage, carry Sal into the house and keep her quiet until he could get in touch with Lee.
What he needed now was some time, and a place to put Sal. If he couldn't talk her into being quiet and doing as he ordered, then he'd use other methods. A little thrill of anticipation went through him as he thought of 'other methods.' Then he quieted his brain and drove fast and hard.
* * *
After the children and Tammy had left, Patti went out for the morning papers. There was only a small pickup article in the papers, but the Times Examiner had a long column on the fourth page about the Newport case. They had no actual proof that he was alive, but the list of telephone calls and police surmissions seemed to indicate he was.
But there was no mention of his visit to Lee. Knowing her to be the source of the anonymous telephone call that had contacted the police and got Edward Totten out of bed early in the morning, Carl wondered what her game really was. One thing was sure. He'd built a hot fire under them all.
"Now what?" Patti asked when he leaned back in the chair and smiled.
"We let 'em stew," he said. "I think I know who did kill that woman, but I can't prove it. Yet!"
"Which one?" she asked.
"Dolphi. While she was lying to me last night, she also gave me some information. Her husband is hooked on his secretary. The other one, Don, is a homosexual. She said Dolphi goes for anything. Young, old, nice, not so nice. It would take a man like that to have given the dead woman a tumble."
"I'll bet you're wrong," Patti replied.
"Oh?"
"Oh. I bet on the queer," she remarked, sipping her coffee.
"That's kind of backwards, isn't it? She was raped, too, you know. Why Don?"
"They got all kinds of odd brains," she told him. "Most of them got a thing going about women. Sometimes they're just envious, sometimes they actually hate them. But they got a female mind and male equipment, so they get real confused. Now and then, one of 'em will take a notion to make a woman, so that's how I know."
"Continue," Carl told her, sensing that she wanted to say more.
"If one of them gets over with you, he gets sore and wants to cry or hit you or something. If he doesn't get over, he feels better. Kind of justified for being something, if he can't be a man. It's the ones that can give it to you good you got to watch."
"But Lee said Dolphi would go for any female regardless of her looks. He sounds like my man, I'd say."
"Uh-uh. His kind don't care enough to love up a broad," Patti said. "He going for kicks. The papers said she was really beaten up. This got to be a man with odd brains. I bet on the queer, Carly."
"And I never gave him a thought," he admitted. If what she suspected were true, then it gave the whole thing a new aspect. It meant that Lee and her husband and the Dolphi's were doing a cover-up, probably to save themselves from many unpleasant reverberations, not the least of which would be a thorough story in the newspapers. And nothing they had done since the incident could possibly decrease their vulnerability.
"If you're right, we've one more phone call to make tonight," he said. "You know a lot about men, don't you, Patti?"
"Some men. Not men like you," she answered.
"You handle me rather well, most of the time."
"You are easy to please," she said, stretching herself back in her chair so the weight of her breasts pushed her dress out tight. It was a new dress, bought with money he had given her above the weekly 'salary' he had promised. The pink linen made her look prettier than she was. She hadn't been able to resist the smart lines and brilliant color.
"It's a pretty dress," he said.
"I thought you needed something to perk you up," she said. "Fits good though, don't it?"
"Sure does," he said, getting up from the table to sidetrack the sudden flare-up in his blood. While he hadn't gotten around to analyzing his relationship with Patti, he had accepted it. She was keeping it level. And she never asked him for anything. Not one sweet word, not one affectionate moment had passed between them.
She made his coffee and washed his clothes and went to bed with exactly the same noncommittal attitude.
Even when his passion turned her into a writhing whimpering animal, which was every time, she never used an endearing term.
He admitted to himself that had it not been that way he would have never stayed on. And he felt that she had been and was yet, poised for flight if their strange relationship seemed to be getting out of hand. It could happen, he knew. It was already out of hand. Thrown together for nearly twenty-four hours a day, they had developed an understanding about most things that were talked about. He admitted to himself that he had never been so charmed with a female body as he was of hers.
His one claim to safety was the fact that in his planning, he pictured himself back at the engineering office, returned to his life as head of the Newport Construction Company, climbing the ladder of success once more, without Patti's image in the dream. He thought often about what she would do when it was over, and he counted it as one of his responsibilities. The couple of times she had driven him by the current job his company was working on, Patti had been very quiet. He knew she was aware of her absence in his thoughts of the future as it was represented in steel and concrete. She also knew of his interest in her children, who by now had warmed up to Carl with no reservations. They had kept the secret of his presence in their home. Jimmy beat him at cards and Lean scolded him for not learning to play her guitar better. Sometimes he helped them with their homework, but mostly, they helped him more than he helped them.
Now, sitting in the living room, his leg thrown over the arm of the old chair, he thought about what Patti had said about homosexuals, and the difference it might make in the way he had planned to torment the six people. He no longer had any reservations about Lee Frederick. So much white skin and so much loveliness wasted around such a cold heart. His own thoughts made him nervous so he went back into the kitchen. Patti was sitting just as he had left her, a few minutes earlier.
"You nervous, man," she told him.
"Too much coffee," he laughed. "Is there any more?"
She stood up and smoothed her dress down over her high hips. "You go in the room," she said. "I'll bring some in to you."
* * *
Lee hung up the telephone, her face drawn and white, the blood of fright pounding deep in her body. She was tired and mentally dulled by the night of lovemaking with Joannie, and it took her a moment to realize what Don had threatened over the phone. She could hear Luke in the bathroom, showering after his long trip to Fort Tempar and back. Long and unfruitful, if his sullen mood and noncommittal attitude could be trusted.
The list of errors she had made seemed endless. It had been wrong to try her sex on Sal in an effort to make her give up Luke. It had been wrong to show Carl Newport a soft side at the beach house. It had been wrong to proposition the weak and vicious Don, and it had been a very big wrong to try setting Carl up last night. And then her urgent pressure on Don topped the list of mistakes she had made. For a moment, she balanced the thought of letting Don kill Sal as he had threatened to do if she didn't bring the money to Sunnyside.
She contemplated one more anonymous telephone call. Let the police break into the Sunnyside house and find Don, standing over a dead, or nearly dead Sally Merkson. The nearly dead idea scared her. Luke would rush to Sal's assistance with all the power and money at his command.
Scared of making one more mistake, Lee met her husband as he came out of the bathroom. "That was Don on the telephone," she said. "He's going to murder Sal unless we bring him thirty thousand dollars by 12:20."
"What the hell are you talking about?" he shouted, half into his shorts. "I'll go over and smack him silly!"
"You don't understand, Luke! He means it! He's in Sunnyside. He got scared last night and decided to run for it. Oh, what a horrible mess we're all in!"
"Now just a damned minute! I know what kind of a mess we are in. I've been knocking my brains out keeping us out of it! Start at the beginning on this thing. Has he hurt Sal?"
She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at her very handsome husband, his face now distorted with hard, determined lines and a grim pallor of rage.
"Luke, a lot if it is my fault. But I love you so, and I was jealous. You and Sal-then all this trouble."
"You'd better start making sense," he warned her.
"I told Don the police were getting close to him," she said. "I tried to scare him. Then I offered to give him thirty thousand dollars if he'd go away, to another country. The only condition I made was that he take Sal with him. I couldn't help it, Luke! I-I despise her so for what she's done to us!"
Luke knelt at her knee and held her arms in brutal fingers. "You made Don Hughson a deal like that, knowing he is a killer? Knowing the man can go out of his mind and kill a woman? I thought you were smarter that that, honey!"
She looked into his eyes. "I don't know what he can do," she said quietly. "I wasn't there, remember? All I know is that you pay him to front for your dirty tramp of a secretary. That's all I know! I hate her and I hate him, and if he goes to the chair for killing her, I'll never cry a single tear. Oh, Luke, what am I saying!"
"Depends upon which side of your lying mouth you're talking out of!" he shouted. He let go of her left arm and his fingers tore her robe apart, baring her body to the waist. "Whose teethmarks, honey? Who chewed 'em until they look like that? You claw your own belly like that?"
He hurled her back on the bed and finished ripping the robe from her body. His eyes smashed down on her abused flesh, and a snort of disgust left his flared nostrils. "You set a madman after Sal, then spend the night making love with Joannie Dolphi! You frame Sal for love of me, you say, then celebrate by letting a lesbian cut you up like this! What the hell kind of a thing are you?"
"Oh Luke, please try to understand!"
"I understand!" he screamed. "Now, put on some clothes. We're going to Sunnyside. I'll take care of it from here on!"
"Shall I get the money?" she asked, struggling to her feet. "I have it here."
"Leave it here," he shouted. "We aren't going to need it!"
* * *
There was a plentiful supply of food and liquor and smokes. The house was secluded, and the neighborhood was blase. Don Hughson began to feel better. From being a hunted, frightened man, he had turned into the master of the hounds. He recalled the terror in Lee's voice, and he was certain she'd bring the money before 12:20. She had the stomach for intrigue, but not for murder. Standing in front of the fireplace, he sipped his drink and looked at his reflection in the mantle mirror. For the first time in his life, Don Hughson liked what he saw.
He had been in mental and emotional retreat all of his life. He had lost every battle, and in defeat, had looked for secret ways of justifying his existence. His intelligence and education and background had contributed nothing to his attitude toward life. The big problem had been people. As a thin, shy boy of thirteen, he had not belonged to the neighborhood gang. They teased him and said mean things and defeated his best attempts at being one of them. In high school, the girls had petted him and teased and gone out with other boys. He made excellent grades and by the time he left home for college, he was confused and afraid and very lonely.
He had slipped into homosexuality with another college fellow out of mere curiosity and male need. But this too, had been in the nature of retreat. They had brought their disappointments and loneliness to each, other, and had found excitement and physical comfort in experiment. They had formulated some lewd likes and many academic dislikes. From then on, Don had used his homosexuality as a retreat from things that were painful.
He had never been 'in love' with another man because he had become used to not giving, and to fall in love with anyone meant opening a door to new disappointments and frustrations.
When Luke Frederick had cast him in the role of foil for his affair with Sal, a new feeling had entwined itself about the uncertainties in his mind. She had been the first woman, except for his mother, he had ever known beyond the conversation stage. Thrown immediately into intimate contact with her, and later with Lee and Joannie Dolphi, he had known a little feeling of belonging, only to have his obvious sexual leanings betray him back into loneliness. They tolerated him, but ignored him emotionally.
Like an animal, he thought. They exchanged exciting words, did careless sexy things, and sometimes made love in front of him as if he were an animal lying on the floor. In this new torment, he hated women and began to lose faith with men. He had been in deepest retreat the morning Luke had stopped to give Sandra Ferguson a ride on her way to her usual morning drinks. They had seen her several times in their bar-hopping ventures, and she had spotted Don Hughson immediately.
The few drinks they'd had at the ANCHOR'S LODGE had made the others quick to urge the foul-mouthed woman into more than teasing. He recalled the way his belly had crawled when she hauled up her dress and bared her flabby thighs to him, her free hand trying hard to generate some lust in his body. The offer by Luke to buy her all the drinks she could drink if she would 'work Don over' had been the point of decision. When Luke turned off the highway and ran down the dirt road to the beach, the die was cast.
It had been then that Don had lost his will to resist, replacing it with a need to hurt. He recalled having followed Sandra Ferguson down a path to a little flat, just at the edge of the cutback dropping down to the sandy beach. Twenty-five feet from the station wagon, but within clear view, the woman had waved back to the laughing, appreciative watchers in the car and removed her dress. Furious, excited and filled with a desire he had never experienced before, he had obliged the others with cooperation even Sandra Ferguson had not counted upon.
Too late, they had discovered that what they thought to be a lewd, extremely entertaining show was really a death scene. The kick and throw of the woman's arms and legs was not passion, but pain and fright from his hands around her throat. Even as his lust spewed into her ugly body, her senses blacked out. Before they could get out of the car and rush to the low flat, he had mutd-ated the body with his hands over to the edge of the cut-bank. As Luke grabbed him, Don had given the body a last shove, and the woman tumbled over the cliff.
Even after they had dragged the body up to the wagon, even during the barrage of words and questions and the cries of horror and fright, Don had sat in the car, not saying a word and trembling. He had let them decide what to do and say. Nothing mattered to him except the strange inner feeling of being free, of drifting into a new world of exhilaration and ecstasy.
There had been moments in the following days, but inside, he had a new feeling, a new desire. He had been scared to test this desire until Lee's words the previous night had made the decision for him. He had found a new medicine for frustration and its name and violence.
* * *
Edward Totten sat in his swivel chair, his face exposing none of the turmoil in his mind. He intertwined fingers over his paunch, as if to hold in the excitement. His eyes were on the center of telephones on his desk. He had been watching the phones for many days. Finally, he. heaved a deep sigh.
"Call me, Carl," he said to the phone. "Call me, for gosh sake! How can you get so ridiculous after all these years!"
The telephone rang. He jumped and his hand was like lightening on the phone. "Yes? Yes? Totten here?"
But it wasn't Carl. He listened to the words. Then the voice stopped and he looked at his watch.
"They may be going to Sunnyside and they may not, Roger. I've given up trying to guess what that gang is going to do. You're sure the man and the girl are still in the house? Okay, then something has happened to shake them up. Has Joe called in on the Dolphi's?"
He listened. "Okay," he said. "The fat one spent the night with the redhead. That figures. Dolphi got home late, and so did Frederick. Now Frederick and his wife are heading south at seventy-five miles an hours, but Dolphi hasn't moved a muscle. It is something between the four of them," he repeated. "Keep Joe on the Dolphi's, you stay on the communications, and I'll go to Sunnyside. Call FLY RIGHT and have that seaplane ready at the yacht club pier in fifteen minutes. There'll be two of us," he said. "Certainly I'm taking Art along. One of them is a killer or had you forgotten? And I'm an ever-lovin' lawyer, not a fightin' meat-head!"
For a few seconds, he sat motionless, considering his lot. It was a hell of a thing when a corporation lawyer had to do police work. But the police wanted Carl Newport, and until they had him, they consistently rebuked at the suggestion that Carl wasn't their man. Someone had to catch Carl.
He got up and left the office. At the desk where his secretary sat, he stopped. "I'm going to Sunnyside," he announced. "I don't know when I'll get back. Stay by that phone. If Carl calls, ask him where he is, tell him where I am, and see if you can get him pinned down. I'll contact you through Roger, Understand?"
"Yes, Mr. Totten," she replied without smiling.
"Nuts," he grunted and waddled out of the office. What a life, he thought. What a way to make a living!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Carl was lying on his double bed in the nude. He had a big smile on his face as he looked sideways at Patti, who was just as naked as he. He was looking at her big breasts and her flat stomach. Then she rolled over onto her stomach. Her bare back was beautifully rippled with smooth muscles, terminating in the sharp arch that swelled up swiftly into the twin rounds of her naked bottom.
"I was just thinking," he murmured. "Yeah," she said through the muffle of the pillow she was hugging.
"Not that. I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I should contact my lawyer. Maybe he's found out something I haven't. I had a little hope of finding out the truth, but since she gave me all that double-talk, I haven't got an idea about what to do."
She raised up on her elbows, her long breasts barely clearing the rumpled sheet. He wanted to reach out and touch the breasts but they had an unspoken rule about playing with each other. He had handled her furiously and delightfully, as she had fondled him, but it was to help each other, not to express affection. Even this tossing about, naked on the same bed, was unusual for them. It seemed very important to keep their repeated intimacies on a very impersonal basis.
"You gettin' tired of some things, ain't you?" she inquired.
"Don't go female on me," he answered. "You know it can't last, Patti. I've a big business to attend to. I've got friends and a way of life and the future. Responsibilities."
"And women, lots of 'em, huh?"
"A few. Do I strike you as a retiring young bachelor?"
"So call your darn lawyer," she said.
"Let's get dressed and get out of here," he said, sitting up suddenly. "Leave a note so the kids and Tammy won't worry."
"They ain't ever been so unworried in their life," she laughed, rolling her fabulous body away from him. He watched her get to her feet. She put her long hands to the small of her back and stretched. He nearly gave up his good intentions. His addiction to this female drug disturbed him. It was time to do something about it, while something could be done about it.
Later, they both climbed into the battered Ford. Across the bridge, she swung the car around onto Jones Street, headed south. He got out of the car and walked to a public telephone booth. She'd cruise around the block until he was again standing on the curb.
He dialed Totten's number, knowing the voluptuous Marlene would answer. For a moment, the sound of her familiar, "Mr. Totten's office "made him nostalgic.
"Carl Newport," he said.
"Where are you?"
"In a phone booth. How's your weight?"
"Forty-C. He's in Sunnyside hunting. Where are you? Hell kill me if you don't tell me where he can contact you. Please!"
"Anything new?"
"Yes! Please!"
"What's he hunting in Sunnyside?"
"A very mean animal. Shall I tell him you're coming?"
"Should I go?"
"Can you make it there in a couple of hours?"
"Fine. See you in jad," he laughed and hung up.
* * *
Don heard the car drive up in the driveway. He got to the door in ime to see Lee slide out of the car. Then he saw Luke, and there was no doubt he was in a hurry, and he was furious. Neither one of them carried anything that could contain thirty thousand dollars. Don cursed to himself, and Luke was only ten yards from the door. He went back Into the kitchen and pulled out a carving knife from the wooden holder over the built-in meat block. As Luke came up the steps, Don backed tightly against the wall beside the door.
Luke's key rattled once in the lock, then he burst into the kitchen as Don swung the knife. Luke kept right on going and Don held onto the knife handle. Then, suddenly, Luke fell over backwards, leaving the knife in Don's suddenly bloodstained hand. He was standing that way, the knife out thrust when Lee ran into the kitchen. She saw her husband laying on the floor, the blood spurting through his hands clasped tight to his body.
"Luke! What happened? Oh, my gosh!"
Don kicked the door shut. "You scheming tramp," he shouted. "You and your big mouth got your husband killed! What did you have to bring him for? All you had to do was bring the money!"
She backed against the wall, her body trembling with shock and fear. Don drank in the terror of her with avid thrill. This cold woman with the red hair and charging breasts, this bloodless body with the angel's form, was scared of him, he thought. Scared of Don Hughson whom nobody cared about. He moved forward, holding the bloody knife.
"Did you bring the money?" he shouted.
"My god, Don, don't!" she pleaded. "I couldn't-he wouldn't let me! No, honey! It's at the house. I swear it! Oh, you've got to believe me!"
"See if he's dead," Don told her, caught between the urge to plunge the knife into her and the desperate need for the money. He watched Lee fall to her knees beside her husband. Her hands fluttered under his coat, pressed his face, then withdrew as if he were not. She knelt there, motionless, her ead bowed, her body trembling visibly. But not from grief, Don knew. From fear. He fought the urge to knock her over on her husband's body, pull her clothes off and have her sexually. This was a new sensation and he stood for a few moments tasting the exuberance it brought.
"He's dead," he said finally. "Go into the living room."
She struggled to her feet and went through the door, barely maintaining her feet until she reached a chair. She collapsed, her face buried in her hands. He kicked the door to the kitchen and it closed off the corpse.
"The money," he said coldly. "You said it was at your house. Where at the house?"
"In my bedroom. In the top drawer," she gasped. I wanted to bring it! He said no. He was going to take care of everything, Don. I swear, I never meant to cheat you."
"My god," she whispered. "You thought that? They were looking for Newport! Don, for god's sake, please believe me! You must!"
She dropped her head back into her palms. He looked down at her, counting time, miles and probabilities. He picked up the liquor bottle he'd been drinking out of for the past few hours.
"I believe you," he said, and broke the bottle on the back of her head.
* * *
"You dumb cluck," Edward shouted, gripping Carl's hand in his hand. "Marlene told you? I don't know what I'm doing!"
"Hunting, she said," Carl laughed. "Hunting what?"
"Who knows? The queer brought Frederick's chick here early today. Drunk as hell, Ken reported. Then, a few hours ago, Frederick and his wife came out here. I've had a man following them for a week. They got here about a half hour ago. I flew down. Brought a muscle man to help Ken if we had trouble. Nothing we could see from where we were watching seemed out of the ordinary. Marlene contacted my radioman, and we were told you were heading this way. So we came to get you. I didn't know you had a car, and a-chauffeur."
"Be careful, pal," Carl said softly.
"Aw, Carl!"
Carl introduced Patti but he didn't explain. It was decided that either Ken or Art should take her to a hotel while Carl and Edward and one of the agency men went back to watch the Frederick house and its occupants. This, Patti objected to.
"You kidding, men," she said. "Take you a couple of hours to find a place that'll let me in the door. Anyway, if something's going to happen, I got some right to see the action. Plus the fact it ain't every girl who gets four men in one bunch. Carl, I got to go with you!"
"Okay," he said flatly. "You go with me."
They parked the old car and went back in the agency man's car. There was so little for either Edward or Carl to explain that they had driven for five mdes to Sunnyside in partial silence. Or, Carl decided, the silence was due to the fact that sandwiched between Edward and himself, Patti displayed the first possessiveness he had ever noticed. Her hand on his knee and the pressure of her shoulder was more than the broad seat of the car demanded.
They parked on a service road above the Frederick house. In the approaching dusk, the back of the house was visible. There was no light in the house from the position of their inspection. One of the agency men had a pair of binoculars, but nothing he could see changed the general condition.
"It would help d we knew what we were looking for," Carl admitted. "Maybe it's just another blast. They blast often."
"No," Edward said. "This was a hurry-up get together. Art, is the Mustang still in the garage?"
"What Mustang?" Art asked. "The garage is empty."
"The queer took off!" Edward exclaimed.
"Maybe they ran out of booze while you were down meeting me?" Carl suggested. "Although Patti thinks the queer is our boy."
"I bet he is," she agreed.
"That's what my secretary thinks!" Edward stated.
"You stay away from that one, Carl," Patti warned him. "Why don't I go down and ring on the bell? I'm a party maid looking for the Smith house 'cause they got a party goin' for out-of-town guests. Mebbe I can see in the door."
"She's got something there," Totten agreed.
"Except she doesn't look like a maid," Carl said.
"Yes I do, Carl. You just don't see too good."
* * *
She had to walk three blocks because of the way the streets were laid out. It was going to be dark before long. Carl tried to justify the inner tension he felt, but gave up, deciding it was due to having seen his friend once more, plus the fact of his coming out of hiding.
"What made you think this was important enough to come down and see for yourself?" Carl asked Totten.
"Several things," Edward answered. "First, I've been constantly aware of the danger to you. They shoot murder suspects who don't stop when they are told! Another thing was that some one of the six people knows who really killed Sandra Ferguson. Maybe they all know who did it. The next thing is the amount of fuss you stirred up with your calls. They, reported them, and the Fort Tempar police told my man up there. I've had a man up there right along, hoping he'd find something that would tie the six to her death. In the last couple days, the furor has speeded up, but good! So I think they are at the breaking point, Carl. All we ever need to clear you one good, clean bit of evidence, pointing to some one other than Carl Newport. At this moment, no one of these people is even a suspect, according to the authorities."
"There she is," Carl said as Patti sauntered up the walk toward the Frederick back door.
"Where'd you get her?" Edward asked, his eyes beaded on the scene below.
He didn't answer. He watched her ring the bell. If she was nervous, it didn't show. Even at that distance, her easily poised body was distinctively sensual. Three more times she rang the bell. Then she turned around on the steps and made a 'no answer' gesture. Carl let his breath out. Then he sucked it in again. She had boldly seized the knob. A second later she had stepped inside. Carl opened the car door and went to the edge of the street, looking down for a way to the Frederick house if he wanted to go in a hurry.
A few seconds later, seconds that sauntered by like a lazy whore, Carl aged considerably. Hardly able to restrain himself, he waited. Then Patti stumbled back out on the steps. He could tell something was wrong by the way she collapsed to a seat on the step. Her two arms waved 'come on', then she buried her face in her hands. Fast as he was, the two agency men were right at his side as he ran down the bank, went through a hedge and streaked for the down-slope of the Frederick back yard. The two agency men went around Patti, but Carl reached down and caught her by the arms, lifting her to wobbly legs. Her eyes were nearly popped out of her head.
"You all right, Patti?" he asked.
"Oh," she gasped. "You better kiss me, Carl, 'cause I'm scared more than I'll ever be again!"
* * *
Luke Frederick was dead and the bloody knife on the kitchen table told how. Carl went on, hearing the voices and cries from an inner room. When he got to the bedroom, the scene was appalling. Lee Frederick and Sally Merkson were stark naked and tied together. The agency men were swearing and fumbling to release the furious knots. Finally one of them remembered his pocket knife.
Carl was sure they were both dead, but the moment the gag was cut from Sal's mouth, her shriek of fright split the air. Carl tugged at the gag in Lee's mouth. Both bodies were covered with bruises, as if someone had beaten them.
"Art, go up and telephone Roger. Alert the police for Don Hughson, driving a Mustang, red, license MAA 224!" came Edward's voice from behind Carl. "Murder, mayhem, and rank insanity! There's a phone here. I'll get the local police on it. Move!"
Lee opened her eyes as Carl turned her on the bed beside the crying Sal. He put the bedspread over both of them, and looked up at the other agency man. He was white as a sheet, standing as if he wanted to be sick on the floor."
"Lee? Who did it?" Carl asked, extra loud as if to penetrate the haze over her eyes.
"Don," she murmured. "Gone to my house-the money. Is Luke dead?"
"Yes. Are you hurt?"
"My head," she mumbled, and blacked out again. Edward was back, and he lifted Carl away and spun him toward the door. "Get out of here," he snapped.
"Take your woman and beat it! The police will be here in three minutes. Call the office every hour on the hour till I tell you to come in! We made it, Carl, but I want you strictly in the clear before I turn you in!"
"You sure that's the right thing to do?"
Edward grabbed him by the lapels, his face beaming, but very stern. "From here on, I'm boss. Don't think, don't act. Just get out of here and leave the rest to me! Go, Carl!"
He went, reluctantly. At the door, he gathered Patti from her limp lean against the door casing. He half-carried, half-dragged her around to the front of the house and out into the street. There wasn't time to think about how they were going to get back to the old Ford parked five mdes away. He heard the on-coming police sirens. They tensed him, but they made Patti come to life.
"The police!" she murmured. "We got to get you lost!"
"There's time," he told her. "They aren't looking for me-anymore!"
It was dark now, and the street lights flickered through the trees guiding them only a little bit. He knew the general layout of Sunnyside, but he felt they were at least five blocks from a thoroughfare where a cab might be found. They were six blocks from the thoroughfare, and six more into the center of the resort town and a cab stand.
"Were they dead, Carl?" she whispered the question in his ear.
"No. Both of them were okay," he answered, qualifying his reply with: "They weren't dead, anyway."
They rode in silence, and in a few minutes, the cab left them off at the parking lot by the municipal pier. No one paid any attention to them as they walked to the car. At the door, she hesitated.
"I'm all upset, Carl. You'd better drive," she said.
"Okay. You've got a free ride coming, believe me!"
* * *
"I don't know what happened," he told her as they drove easily along. "Frederick is dead. Stabbed to death. The two women had been beaten and tied up. Tied up so if either of them started to struggle, she'd have strangled the other. Lee Frederick came to, long enough to say something about money. Said Dod Hughson had done it and that he had gone back to her house. That is all. Edward threw me out, then. Said he'd tell me when to turn myself in, but there were some things to clear up first."
"It's over, then," she remarked, with none of the exuberance he felt.
"Yes, but I didn't want Luke Frederick to get killed to bring the end," he said.
"I wasn't talking about that," she murmured.
"I know what you were talking about," he told her.
They rode without speaking for quite some time. He wanted to think about all the things that had happened and what their happening meant to him. In a day or two, his attorney would give him the word. Then he could go back to his life. He thought about the welcome his office and construction crew would give him. He thought of the sixty people to his own apartment, wearing his own expensive clothes, and drinking his own liquor. There would be reporters from every news service in the country, and a thousand parties and well-wishers. It might be a bore, but Carl was willing to put up with it because it would be a symbol of freedom.
The highway was covered with State Patrol cars, but they ignored the old Ford. They were looking for a Mustang, Carl mused, driven by a man gone insane.
"Tired?" he asked Patti when he turned off the highway and swung on Twentieth. "Well be home in twenty minutes."
"I'll be home," she amended it. "Ma will be glad."
"Think the kids can keep their mouth shut, even when there's no secret to keep?"
"You don't want anybody to know-you been living with poor people," she decided. "They won't tell on you, Carl."
He hit the brakes and wheeled the car off the road into a broad open place in front of a brightly lit something. He turned in the seat and leaned toward Patti, his eyes boring into hers.
"Will you marry me?" he asked intensely.
"Course not!" she said. "I'm very poor and come from a slum section and ain't had no education, and I'm a whore."
"Who is ashamed of living with poor people?"
"But you knew I'd say no!" she wailed. "No man knows a goddamned thing about women! You are a woman, aren't you?"
"Carl," she protested.
"Dumb broad," he laughed. "Up until a certain warrant is destroyed, I'm a fugitive from justice. There is a serious charge for harboring a wanted criminal, which Tammy and your children and you, Patti, are guilty of. Even if the law took certain things into consideration, the press and the newsreels could chop you all up in a couple of days. You'd make some quick money selling the story of how 'we covered for a wanted killer', and they'd spread your lives on paper until you wanted to die! Well, I didn't come home with your mother that day with the purpose of ruining her life, nor yours, nor the children. I've always known I was going to be cleared, and I've thought a lot about things. You trusted me once. How about one more time?"
She laughed. "What if I'd have said yes?"
"I'd have kicked your bottom all the way to a Justice of the Peace," he told her. "Every step of the way!"
"We got something, though, haven't we, Carl?"
He nodded. "I wish I could name it, but I can't seem to. Anyway, I'm going to miss it."
"I could come to see you once in a while," she replied.
"Then we'd lose what we have, Patti," he told her.
She looked out of the car window then turned her head to look out the rear glass. He reached out and was about to start the car when she put her hand on his arm.
"Carl?"
"Yes?"
"This motel," she said softly. "They'll let me in."
He looked at the motel. By now, the newspapers were probably on the street and the radio would be full of the massacre at Sunnyside. Edward would be hammering at the Fort Tempar police, and it might all be over in twenty-four hours. He started the car and wheeled it slowly toward the sign proclaiming "office.'.
* * *
He was only slightly dismayed by the fact that Patti knew where the light switches were. He stood inside the motel room door and watched her check the towels in the bathroom. She put a dime in the pay-radio. He walked across to her and stood with his thighs against her buttocks. His erection burned and bumped against her full buttock cheeks, then forced between the hot globes. She worked them back against his aggressive excitement. She turned her head slightly, and tuned in her favorite station.
She straightened up and turned around. She put her arms around his neck and banged herself up to him violently.
"This ain't like ever before, is it, Carl?"
"I guess not," he said, and their lips met. It was strange, and unpleasant, then very good, and he lost some of his confidence in himself, and her. He let her do what she wanted to do with her lips and tongue. He didn't think of her as a whore who had probably done this very thing, in this very room, more than once before. He only knew that if this had happened a couple of weeks ago, he would have run with fright.
After some argument, he managed to talk to motel manager into locating two chicken dinners and a bottle. When it came, Carl was stretched out on the bed, his body relaxed from a hot shower. Patti, wearing panties and her bra, met the waiter with a toothy smile and an over-tip. After they finished eating, they had a drink, and he was back on the bed, his eyes closed, his body pleasantly drugged by weariness and food, his mind racing toward some undefined finish line. Patti turned out the light and lay down beside him. From the light switch to bed, she had shed her garments. He could feel her softness against him, and her warmth came at him in a comforting flood, as her hot sheath enveloped his lance in a wet, thrilling motion which made him lose his control in a short time, and he fired a salvo of spasmodic release which pulsated deep into her. Somewhere in the rolling dream-world between consciousness and sleep, he heard a low, gentle voice say, "Goodnight, Carl." He meant to answer Patti, but he put it off a few seconds too long.
An eight o'clock ray of sunlight slashed through the worn drapes and awakened him. For a moment, he thought he was back in Tammy's house. He turned his head and it came back to him swiftly. Only it didn't seem real because Patti was not there. He sat in up bed, blinking with confusion. Her clothes were gone, too. He rolled out of bed and parted the curtain at the front window. The Ford was gone.
After a few minutes, he saw the note on the table. "Dear Carl," it read. "We'll send your things to the lawyers office. Go home, please. That's what I did."
He picked up the telephone, asked for an outside line and dialed a cab. Whil he sat on the edge of the bed to wait for the cab, he decided the photographers would make him look like a bum in his unpressed clothes and unshaven chin. But there were some things in this world no man could help.
Carl didn't really feel upset because Patti had left him. He knew he didn't love her. She was there with him in his time of need. He depended on her but never really loved her. He also knew she would never change. She was a whore and she would always be one. Marriage just wasn't in the cards for her.
Yet, he would never forget her and how she helped him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The meeting of the Board of Directors was finally over. Carl Newport sat at the head of the long mahogany table, his shirt sleeved arms stretched out in front of him, his back bowed with this last burden after a month of hectic details. He had a smile and a nod for Hollister, Jerome and Swanson, as they congratulated him on their way out. Congratulations because the Newport Construction Company had made money and progress regardless of the fact that it had had no boss for these past weeks.
Carl looked at Edward Totten, sweaty in his rumpled white shirt, the stub of his fifth cigar tight in his mouth. The man across from Totten put away the briefcase containing the company account. He opened a brown manila folder and looked at Carl.
"I wanted to talk to you about some things in your personal account, Mr. Newport," he remarked.
"Can't it wait until Monday?" Carl asked shortly.
"It will only take a minute, and I'd like to close out this month's books."
"Okay-shoot."
"These," the man said, pulling out several cancelled checks. "I don't know how to enter them. This thousand dollars check to the Oakdale Secretarial School. Is it an expense or a donation?"
"Net loss," Edward murmured. "He's putting a friend through business school. Typing and office work."
"Well, with a few details, we might make that deductible. "
"Forget it," Carl said. "Net loss, like Edward says." The man sighed. "This one. For deposit to a T. Grader account.
"Net loss," Edward said again. "Bonus for a housekeeper Carl used to have."
"Well, here's three made out to-"
"Net loss," Edward repeated.
The man looked at Carl, accepted his nod, then folded up his accounts. "Well, that's fine. As long as they are not reoccuring, I'll just enter these as expenses."
"What makes you think they won't reoccur?" Carl asked.
"Yes. Well, it won't matter. I'll handle them," the accountant promised. "Good night, Mr. Newport. We're happy to have you back. Congratulations."
"Thanks," Carl replied sincerely.
When he left, Edward Totten shifted in his chair. "How far are you going with this?" he asked.
"As far as they went with me," Carl answered. "Which was all the way. Any objections worth mentioning?"
"Not from me," Edward agreed. "Anyway, it's your money."
"Yes, it is my money, all right," murmured Carl.
Edward stood up and shook Carl's hand and left.
Carl was alone, now, and his thoughts wandered back to Patti. He was so close to being her husband and now he was thankful she had the decency to walk out.
He tucked her away in a corner of his mind and would, from time-to-time, think of her and what was.
