Archive Note: Efforts have been made to remove any errors in the following text caused by the process of creating this E-book. In the interests of authenticity, the remaining misspellings, whether the result of the author's mistakes or typesetting errors, were left as found in the original pocketbook.
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SIN GAME!
A game that flourishes along gutter road ... the game of blackmail. Joanne plays it to the hilt ... for all the shame money she can extort. One of her victims is Fred Bauman, who had a happy life with Ethel, his wife, until Joanne happened along with all her delights to introduce Fred to degradation. Then Joanne rushed home to Buddy, her dapper boy friend, who shared the joys of her occupation ... along with the profits of sin. Fred becomes so preoccupied with finding the money to silence Joanne's wanton claims that he has no time for Ethel, or for Karen, his teen-age daughter who is starving for attention. Ethel finds her private joy with Charlie, a neighbor, who is only too happy to answer her urgent pleas. But not so Karen, who stumbles from one boy to the next, growing more impatient as each declines the ecstasy she wants to offer ... until the ultimate orgy where the entire neighborhood stood in line ... waiting for Karen....
CHAPTER ONE
Bauman's first really bad mistake was to stop the car and pick up the attractive, breasty chick who wanted to hitch a ride.
It was the sort of thing any man might have done. Bauman told himself. Even a sensible man like Free Bauman, who was thirty-eight years old and more or less loved his wife and didn't usually think about stopping his car to pick up strange women.
But it was a miserably rainy spring night, with distant thunder booming like muffled drums, and the occasional wild crackle of lightning splitting the black sky. Bauman had been working late at the office, which was an accounting firm in midtown Manhattan, and he was heading uptown in his car, figuring to take the
Queensboro Bridge at 59th Street across the river to Queens, where he lived in the middle-class residential district known as Forest Hills.
Ordinarily, Bauman would have driven down 42nd Street and used the Queens Midtown Tunnel, but the tunnel had a toll charge. Bauman had spent a little too much on luch for himself that day-and, being something of a thrifty guy by nature, he was making up the extravagance to himself by going a little out of his way and taking the bridge. You saved a dime here, you saved two bits there-it added up, Bauman liked to think.
The girl was standing in the shadows at the approach to the bridge on 59th Street where Second Avenue crossed it. Bauman saw her standing there, when hi? car was stopped for the traffic light. He gave her the kind of automatic appraisal any man would give. There was nothing wrong with Bauman's hormones. He looked her over, and wondered what she was doing there in the rain, and he couldn't help feeling at least a tinge of attraction toward her.
She was young, and good looking Very good looking. He could see the clean, even lines of her face, and the jutting lines of her figure, her high breasts sticking out in front of her. She was wearing a flimsy plastic raincoat huddled up around herself, but despite it she was getting good and wet in the soaking downpour. The way it looked, she was planning to walk across the bridge into Queens. That was one hell of a walk, even in dry weather.
The idea struck him then.
It was an uncharacteristic idea, maybe, something left over from his early, long-buried Boy Scout days. Be kind to women. Help old ladies across the street. If you see a pretty girl, offer to carry her books to school for her. Be chivalrous.
Was it chivalry that stirred him now?
Or something else, something you didn't get a Boy Scout merit badge for? Some stirring deep in the metabolism, some unvoiced indeterminate hope that by taking a step now, he might get himself involved in an adventure that would brighten an all too monochromed life.
Bauman wasn't sure. Bauman didn't really understand why he did it. Probably, he decided later, it was a mixture of things: partly just a good-natured wish to be helpful, and partly the buried hope that his kindly act would pay a dividend of some sort for him.
Bauman leaned across the front seat and quickly rolled down the window on the right-hand side of the car. A cold April wind whipped in at him and chilly rain sprinkled his face as he peered out.
"Miss?" he called.
She looked up suspiciously. Dark eyes gleamed as she stared at him.
Grinning to show that he meant no harm, that he was no rapist or sadist or kidnapper, Bauman added immediately, "Hi, there. Can I help you out with a lift, maybe? I'm driving across the bridge."
Instantly, the suspicious look on the girl's face vanished, and her eyes lit up. "Oh, would you?" she asked. Her voice was soft and deep and pleasant to hear. "I'm so wet! If you'd just take me across-"
"It would be a pleasure, Miss."
Bauman twisted the door-hantile and shoved the car door open. The girl skittered away from the building against which she had been huddling and stepped lithely into the car, bringing with her a little of the chill of the spring storm. She closed the door behind her and snapped down the thumb-lock. The light turned green.
Bauman started up again and nudged the car forward, onto the bridge approach.
As he drove, Bauman veered his attention away from the slippery roadbed of the bridge long enough to steal a glimpse at her from the corner of his right eye. She was young, all right, twenty-two, or maybe twenty-three at most. Just a kid, Bauman thought from the vantage-point of his own elderly-sounding thirty-eight years. She was just a kid.
A good-looking kid, though. She had brown eyes and brown hair, the latter plastered rather prettily to her forehead. A clear-skinned, alert face, with a pert, saucy nose and full lips. Strong chin. Sharp cheekbones. And what looked like a first-rate pair of breasts pushing the front of her raincoat outward.
Bauman's insides began to churn with strange sensations. He was very much a middle-class married man, and he couldn't remember when the last time was that he had been alone in his car with a strange, attractive single girl. It was a novel situation for him, and a pleasant one.
She was sitting quite close to him, too. He could feel the warmth of her near his side as he drove. He gripped the wheel more tightly than he needed to.
Feeling he ought to say something, he said, "Lousy night, isn't it? Lousy night for girls to be walking along bridges alone."
"I had to," she said simply.
"Oh."
After another moment or two Bauman said, "How far into Queens are you going? I'm heading for Forest Hills myself."
"I'm going all the way out to Jamaica," the girl told him. "If it's okay with you, you can drop me next to the Forest Hills subway stop, and I'll get there the rest of the way myself."
"Sure," Bauman said. "Be glad to."
She said, "What's your name?"
He frowned slightly; something seemed to be a little out of key in what she was saying, but he didn't worry much about it.
Until she moved a little closer to him. Now she was sitting practically jammed up against him, the way the teen-age girls did when their boy friends took them for a drive in their cheap jalopies. Pressed tight. Knee to knee.
"Ah-"
He didn't know what to say in a situation like this. He fell silent.
"Bauman. Fred Bauman."
"My name's Joanne," she said She didn't give the second name. Bauman didn't ask for it.
They were off the bridge now, and driving through the dark, silent streets of Queens. Outside, the rain continued to pour down, keeping the windshield-wipers busy, but within the car everything seemed warm and cozy, a world sealed off from the raw, nasty wetness outside. Like a traveling motel room, Bauman thought suddenly. Bauman felt the first powerful stirrings of a strange desire that shocked and astonished and pleased him all at the same time.
Her hand slipped to his knee. Her touch was like the touch of a branding iron against him. Bauman reacted automatically and unthinkingly. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he brushed her hand off.
"Please," he said.
"What's the matter?" she asked, her voice a soft, sensuous purr. "Don't you like me, Fred?"
His face blazed. He was so stirred up he could hardly see the road. In a voice that sounded strange in his own ears, Bauman blurted, "I-that is-listen, please don't do that."
"Will your wife object? You are married, aren't you?" She was watching him sharply, out of shrewd young brown eyes.
"Yes, I'm married," Bauman told her, a little impatiently. Tension roared through his eardrums.
What sort of girl had he picked up, anyway? He was starting to wonder more and more. Why had he picked her up? What did she want from him? Why was she sitting so close to him now? Bauman was regretting the whole thing now. He wished he had never stopped the car for her. She represented danger, adventure, romance. He was afraid. He wished there was some way of getting her to leave the car, right now, before something unfortunate happened. But he couldn't think of any way to get rid of her.
"I'll bet I can show you some things your wife doesn't know," she said slyly "Don't be afraid of me, Fred. I'm not going to hurt you."
She put her hand back on his knee, her fingertips digging lightly into his kneecap. This time Bauman did not brush the hand away.
She started to move it. Northward up his leg. Inch by inch by inch, until it was practically at the top of his leg. Bauman felt a sizzling sensation all through his body. What if she moved the hand another six inches, he asked himself? What if-
He drove on. He gripped the wheel as though he thought it might break loose and go flying through the roof of the car. He was having a hard time focusing his eyes. The rain-shiny streets seemed to blur and shift before him.
She said, "Why don't you park over there, Fred? Just for a couple of minutes. It's dark there-right next to those trees, over there where I'm pointing. Nobody will see us."
"No," Bauman said.
But he found himself swerving the car toward the dark sidewalk anyway, guiding it into a parking spot under the big trees, heavy with their new spring foliage. "What's happening to me," Bauman wondered. "Why am I doing this," he asked himself-
He pulled up and stopped the car. Joanne reached laughingly across him and yanked back the hand-brake. As she bent forward, Bauman felt the firm hills of her breasts pressing for a moment into his knees.
Then she turned to him and her lips sprang to his like iron springing to a magnet. She clung to him a moment in the front seat of the car, and despite the annoying interference of the steering wheel she moved lightly against him.
Bauman kissed her uncertainly. He wasn't sure how much of a kiss to make it. Passionate? Yes, that seemed to be what she wanted. Her mouth was demanding. He slipped his arms around her body and kissed her the way he had once kissed girls in automobiles on rainy nights long ago, before he had slipped into the routine of marriage and middle-class respectability.
She kissed artfully, provocatively, teasing and tempting. Her lips were tender, and the smell of her cologne in his nostrils was sweet and sensual and provocative. Through his spring jacket and through the plastic of her raincoat Bauman could feel the firmness of her young breasts against his body. His brain was seared by a sudden imaginary vision of what those breasts must look like-high and hard and round, with sharp red tips and a deep, alluring valley. Her lips darted against his; her hands convulsively tightened on his shoulders.
Bauman felt a wild pounding of lust. There was a furious ache within him, everywhere. Thunder in his ears and a different thunder in his brain, and the savage frenzy of lust in his body.
The kiss went on and on. Bauman let his hands work between their bodies, and cupped them over her breasts. Her breasts felt soft. It seemed to him that she must not be wearing a brassiere underneath her blouse and raincoat, but that the round globes of her breasts were naked in there, easy to reach, easy to touch. She-
Then she broke away from him.
Her eyes glinted like beacons in the darkness. Her voice was thick and husky as she said "Okay, Fred. We can drive on now."
"No," Bauman grunted, stunned by the unexpectedness of her words. "No!"
"No?" she repeated. "No, Fred?"
Her eyes danced mockingly before him. Shaken by a desire wilder than any he had felt for many years, Bauman reached out for her, tried to pull her toward him.
He locked his arms around her. He forced her legs.
"Don't hold me like that!" she said, almost whimpering, as she fought to get loose.
"You-damned-tease-" Bauman muttered hoarsely. He was inflamed now not far from being a madman. The interrupted caresses had done their work. He wanted more, now.
He wanted everything.
She fought, but his strength prevailed. Despite her repeated outbursts of "No, no," she gave ground steadily, her resistance weakening, her words lost in sobs. Bauman got her raincoat open Beneath it she wore a coffee-colored blouse and he tried to fumble the buttons open, but they wouldn't cooperate with his tense, trembling fingers, so he simply ripped. Buttons went popping into every corner of his car. The blouse opened.
She was naked underneath it.
Bauman saw her breasts in the faint light. They seemed to gleam with a light of their own. They were everything he had imagined they would be. They were round and firm, high and close together, with small dark nipples that were standing up straight and tall. The fact that her nipples were erect made Bauman all the more excited, spurring him onward. That meant that she wanted him, that her struggle was not really serious.
He got his hands to her bare breasts, enjoying the tips like little pebbles against his palms. His fingers dug at the firm, ripe flesh. Her breasts were hard and soft all at once. They were resilient, not saggy or droopy but taut and firm, and yet at the same time they were soft, wonderfully soft. Bauman heard his own ragged gasping in the car as he grasped her breasts.
Then he let her breasts go and grabbed her knee-He jammed her dress up. She was nude underneath What the hell, didn't she wear underwear? Her eyes ad justed to darkness now, saw the slender columns of her legs and the flat drum of her middle revealed a complete bareness as he got her skirt out of the way. He touched her legs, savoured the cool nudity of them. Then he moved toward her. Even as he drew her to him and positioned her, Bauman's mind kept asking quietly, "Why am I doing this? Have I gone crazy?"
He didn't answer himself. Her body was a lure he could not resist. Bauman pressed himself against her. She was so warm, so soft, so very young, and eager, now. She was eager for him, he realized. He took her.
That wasn't easy maneuvering in the cramped confines of the automobile, but Bauman was carried away by his own wild lusts and hardly stopped to worry about convenience. He moved again and again. To his great jubilation, she had stopped resisting and had begun to cooperate. The movements of his body were met by responses of her own. He was almost brutal in his excitement. She was so warm, so vibrant, so exciting-
He trembled with passion. He heard her gasping against him. He pushed his face against the apples of her bosom, took one breast with his mouth, held it with his lips, played with the nipple.
Ecstasy seared him. In half a dozen blazing, searing sighs, Fred Bauman found the acme of his stolen pleasure.
And now, finally, everything was over. Bauman drew back, awed and shocked at what he had done. In the aftermath, as sanity returned to him, he felt strangely alone, dazed, as bewildered as a man who has for no reason at all pressed the button that detonates all the H-bombs on Earth and who is now waiting for the fiery moment of global destruction to arrive.
After a shaky moment Bauman looked at the girl. He was expectiong to see her bowed in shame and terror, cursing him, sobbing. She wasn't.
She was smiling.
She sat there comfortably, watching him. She was leaning against the window, her blouse still wide open, her breasts still impudently bare, her skirt still pushed up and bunched around her hips to reveal her cool nudity.
She said, "In this state, Mr. Fred Bauman of Forest Hills, Queens, that offense you just committed is known as the crime of rape."
Her voice was under control, as if they had merely been holding hands five minutes before. There was nothing panicky or hysterical about her. She wasn't behaving the way one would expect a rape victim to behave.
She went on, "You must be aware of the act you just committed, Mr. Bauman. You violently compelled me to participate with you What an immoral act, Mr. Bauman! To force yourself upon me-to violate an innocent girl-what a thing to do! Tell me, what would your wife say if she learned you had done an awful thing like that to a young girl like me?"
Bauman swung round in his seat and stared wildly at her. His hands were shaking, and not from desire any more, either. He grabbed the wheel. The note of irony and sarcasm in her voice baffled him as much as anything.
"What are you getting at?" he rasped.
"Money," she told him sweetly. "I want money for keeping quiet about this dastardly deed of rape. You wouldn't want me to go to the police and inform them of your discourteous behavior, would you?"
"You couldn't prove anything."
"My blouse is torn," she said. "All the buttons are off. There are marks of a struggle on me. A medical examination will show that I've been had this evening. It'll be your word against mine, sure, but what of that?"
"I'll tell them that you picked me up. That you provoked me, you put your hand on my leg, you sat close to me, you kissed me-"
"Prove it," she said. "I was going to Queens. You gave me a ride and you stopped the car on the other side of the bridge and raped me. All the evidence will be on my side. And so will the jury. They'll throw the book at you, Mr. Fred Bauman. Maybe you'll be lucky and get off with only a couple of years-but even a short sentence for rape wouldn't do your name much good, would it?"
Horror clutched at Bauman. "What do you want from me?" he asked thickly. "How much?"
"Five thousand dollars," she said. Her voice was completely calm.
"Five thous-"
"You heard it the first time, Mr. Fred Bauman of Forest Hills. Five thousand clams. Cough it up or I'll go to the police."
Dazed Bauman fumbled for words. "I don't have any such amount of money."
"Find it somewhere, then," she told him crisply. "You don't think you can rob me of my virtue and get away, do you?"
"But-but you led me on! You tempted me!"
She smiled. With a cheerful gesture she pulled her skirt down over her knees. Her bare breasts still were on display. She said, "You heard me yelling 'No' when you got serious, didn't you? Did that sound like my willing consent to you?"
Bauman moistened his lips and tried to stay calm. He had to admit to himself that he'd, in fact, forced her, at least technically. But how had he known that this would happen? She had seemed like nothing but an easy-minded tramp who wanted a little quick fun on a rainy night. How could he have possibly known-?
"This is the end of the ride for me," she said. "I'm not going any further with you. Suppose you let me have your business card."
"What for?"
"So I can get in touch with you at your office," she said. "Or would you really prefer to have me telephone you at home to make arrangements for payment?"
Bauman thought of Ethel at home, perhaps picking up the telephone and hearing this girl's voice ask for him. Ethel was so touchy about things; she'd be sure to ask a million questions, and not to believe him even then, no matter what kind of denials he made. Fred Bauman's suddenly shattered world spun in dizzy pieces around him.
The girl was waiting. She sat there with bare red-tipped breasts showing. There was something dream-like about the casual display of her nudity, just as there had been something dream-like about the sizzling, unforgettable moment of passion in which he had taken her.
She had him. He didn't even have room to wiggle.
"Come on," she said. "I don't have all night. Give me your card."
"Here it is," Bauman said in a harsh whisper. He took one of his cards out of his wallet and shoved it at her. She grinned at him and pocketed it.
"Thanks, sucker."
She drew the sides of her blouse together and dosed the raincoat over it. Then she unlocked the door, sprang lightly out, and trotted off into the darkness. In a moment she was out of sight.
Bauman's first thought was for the buttons. That girl's blouse buttons, scattered all over the car. What if F.thel saw them?
He got the flashlight out of the glove compartment and got down on his hands and knees and hunted around for the brown buttons. One, two, three, four-was that all of them, he wondered? He didn't see any others. To hell with the buttons, Bauman thought. Straightening up, Bauman flung the buttons out the window, into the night.
Suddenly he realized that he had very much more . erious problems now than the explaining away of strange buttons on the floor of his car.
The rain was still coming down.
CHAPTER TWO
Quivering a little in the cold rain, Joanne hurried through the quiet streets toward the subway. She grinned as she remembered the sight of the sucker's face as the bite finally sank into him.
"What a dope," she thought. "What a goop!"
She pulled her raincoat close around herself. Glancing down, she eyed the front of her blouse, wondering how much bosom was going to show as she rode in the subway. The idiot had pulled off all her buttons! She hadn't expected that. And she was without a bra, too.
She didn't wear underclothes on expeditions like this. They got in the way at crucial moments. At least once, a promising set-up had been spoiled because she was wearing panties when she shouldn't have been. But she hadn't bargained for losing her buttons. The plastic raincoat didn't hide much. She'd have to keep herself tucked together on the way home, and not let a boob or two go peeping out into view. The last thing she wanted was to get picked up by a cop for indecent exposure or vagrancy or some crazy thing like that.
With luck, she wouldn't. She might draw some stares on the subway, but she figured she could keep things together for a while.
She reached the subway. She dropped a token in the slot. She went out on the platform and waited. It was a pretty lonely platform. She could stand here with her bare boobs hanging out, she thought, and nobody was likely to come along and point a finger. But she kept covered up, all the same. Ten minutes went by, and two or three people appeared and joined her on the platform. Then a train for Manhattan arrived.
Joanne got into the first car and stood by the window looking out. That way she didn't have to worry too much about the parts of her that showed. Her chest ached a little. She hadn't had enough to be fulfilled, of course. Just a couple of minutes of clumsy shoving and mauling. So she was uncomfortable now. Bauman had excited her by necking with her and then by having her, but he hadn't given her satisfaction, and so she was still a little excited.
What the devil, Joanne thought She could stand a little discomfort at that price.
Besides, in half an hour she'd be home, and there'd be someone stopping over to fix her up and give her what she needed most now.
She thought about Fred Bauman as the train zoomed toward the city. The poor twerp. Not a bad-looking guy, really. But he had that worried, harried look that you got when you were married too long. Probably he had a mortgage to wrestle with, and a wife who wanted furs and trips to Europe, and kids who needed ballet lessons and teeth-straightening jobs and eight weeks of camp in the summer-
Well, now Fred Bauman had a new expense on his back. A big one.
Joanne didn't really think she'd collect five thousand dollars from Bauman. That was just a convenient figure to name. Her experience in this sort of thing told her rather that she was more likely to get eleven or twelve hundred dollars or so before the mark rebelled. Still, that was pretty good money. And there were ways of keeping the deal alive. You didn't need to strike many marks a year in order to keep yourself ahead of expenses.
It was a living, Joanne thought.
And fun, besides. In a way.
She grinned at her reflection in the mirror. Then she shivered a little. She was cold in her light clothing, and she missed having underwear on. The train barrellel along. Her breasts ached.
She was twenty-three years old. It had been a pretty busy life for not so very many years of existence, all things considered. She had gone on her own at the age of sixteen, when her mother died. She had already been pretty experienced at that age. Since then she had been mixed up in a variety of enterprises. She had worked for a year as a stripper, and she had worked for eleven months as a dime-a-dance girl in a 48th Street emporium. She had also put in a stint of close to a year as a plain old streetwalking prostitute, which had been the most profitable of all, but she had hated that life too much to continue.
She had had other adventures, too. She had done some Lesbian stuff, and she had been for six months the mistress of a masochist who had to be whipped before he could enjoy the act of love, and she had been for at least one night the mistress of a sadist who preferred to be the whipper and not the whippee. Joanne hadn't cared much for that gig, and she had never gone back.
Now she was in the fake rape business. She was a professional blackmailer. It meant some scenes with strange men, but she didn't mind that-at least, not on an occasional basis. She couldn't stand to peddle herself five times a night, but that was different. Love now was just incidental to the main operation of trapping suckers and making them cough it up.
It was a living, Joanne thought.
A very healthy living-cashwise, at least.
The train pulled into the Times Square Station. Joanne got out and went up the stairs, and then up the next stairs, and up still more stairs, and out into the street. Her breasts, bare beneath the buttonless blouse, jiggled as she hopped up the stairs. She kept her raincoat clutched tight at the bosom for the sake of preserving her modesty. You could get away with a lot in Times Square, but you couldn't walk around with your boobs showing, for sure.
It was still raining. Somehow, here, amid all the gaiety and neon brightness of Times Square, the storm didn't matter so much. You didn't have the forlorn, dark, soaked-to-the-skin feeling that you got from standing around over near the Queensboro Bridge approach, or out in Queens. Here, the life and vigor made the rain seem almost imaginary. People still walked around on 42nd Street, though they walked a little faster than they would have in good weather.
Even so, you could get wet. Plenty wet. Joanne hustled along, up to 45th Street, and turned west. Rain came into the collar of her raincoat and worked its way under her blouse to her nude breasts. She felt cold raindrops crawling along her nipples. She shivered. The sensation wasn't altogether unpleasant, though. Her breasts were bruised and sore from the excitement of the rape, and the cool trickle of rain tended to soothe them.
She crossed Ninth Avenue and went into her building, a ramshackle tenement that had seen better days when Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House. Joanne didn't mind living in a beaten-up old dump, on a fourth-floor walkup. Her mind wasn't attuned to luxury. She didn't need-the way some call girls seemed to need-the $500-a-month apartment near Sutton Place, the fancy dresses, the posh sports car. She was content to take the subway, to live in a $60-a-mouth dive, to wear simple clothing that she could buy in Macy's or Klein's or Alexander's. What was money for? Money, thought Joanne, was for stashing away in the bank, against a time when you weren't pretty enough or alluring enough to earn it in the ways you were accustomed to earning it.
She had a lot of money stashed away, for a girl of twenty-three. Four different bank accounts, including one out in California. She wasn't exactly a rich girl, but she had a nest egg, and the nest egg grew every week by a few dollars. Joanne had seen how a girl could come apart at the seams at forty-five, or forty, or sometimes even thirty-five. It was handy to have something put by.
She let herself into her apartment. Not much of a place, just two rooms.
"Buddy?" she called. "Buddy, you here?"
No answer. Nobody home. Joanne looked at her watch. Past ten o'clock. He was usually here by this time. But maybe he had stopped off somewhere to wait for the rain to stop. He wore expensive suits, and he didn't like to get them rained on.
Closing the door behind her. Joanne walked through the combined living room and kitchen and into her bedroom. She glanced at herself in the mirror, and laughed.
"You look like a wet poodle." she said to herself.
Her hair, usually fluffy, was straight and slicked down and dripping. Her face was wet. She looked like something the cat had dragged in.
She went into the bathroom took her raincoat off, and hung it up over the radiator. The view underneath wasn't much better. Her blouse hung wide open, and the pale curving flesh beneath was damp with the rain that had crept through the raincoat. The blouse was a mess-torn as well as missing buttons-and there were some marks on her flesh where Fred Bauman's lust-panicky hands had grabbed her too hard. Joanne shrugged, took the blouse off, and threw it onto the rag-pile. It wasn't worth repairing. She wriggled out of her wet skirt and draped it over the radiator to dry.
Naked, she confronted herself in the mirror.
The view wasn't bad. She was tall, just a shade over medium height at five feet seven. She had a good bosom, with deep, steep-rising breasts tipped with small reddish-brown nipples rising out of smooth dark aureoles. Below the double thrust of her bosom, Joanne's body was lean and taut until the sudden ripeness of her hips, broad and flaring and sensual. She had good buttocks, she knew, firm and succulent, and her legs had always been first-rate. It was the kind of body that men found attractive, to say the least.
She was built.
Smiling appreciatively at herself she fluffed out her hair and wrung some of the water out of it. The gesture of lifting her arms made her breasts rise all the more steeply, the tips pointing ceilingward. Joanne liked the effect. She spread her hands out over her breasts for a moment, cupping them and squeezing them. Then she began to move the twin mounds of taut flesh in a slow rotary motion, rubbing them against each other.
That sent sensations of excitement through her. She let out her breath in a low hiss, and pressed her knees tight together, and closed her eyes till they were only slits of smoldering lust.
She wanted him. She needed him. Not wild groping in a parked car, but the real thing, loving on the scale that a woman could appreciate.
She would just have to be patient a little while longer, she told herself. Buddy would be here soon.
Buddy would take care of her.
She stepped into the cracked, yellowing shower tub and turned the water on. Warm. The best antidote for the cold shower she had had before, out all evening in a miserable lousy rainstorm, was a hot shower now. The faucet sputtered and reluctantly began to disgorge hot water. Joanne laughed, began to sing.
"I've been working on the railroad, All the live-long day-I've been working on the railroad-"
Her husky voice rang in the small bathroom. As she sang, Joanne soaped herself up. She soaped her breasts, her legs, her buttocks, and rubbed vigorously. She wanted to be fresh and clean and sweet-smelling when Buddy arrived. Nothing but the best for Buddy, she thought.
Hot water pattered against her breasts and waist. She turned her face upward and let the water hit her lips and eyelids. It ran down her body.
"There," she thought. "Now I feel better!"
She stepped out of the shower and towelled herself dry, going at it good and hard, until her flesh gleamed a rosy pink. Her breasts jiggled wildly as she put the towel across her buttocks and yanked it rapidly from side to side. She dried herself off, and then, pink and fresh and well-scrubbed and naked, she stepped out of tie bathroom and went into her living room. A man stood there.
Joanne wasn't surprised. Buddy had a key of his awn, and he came and went as he pleased. Now he stood in the middle of the riving room, a dapper and handsome figure, helping himself to some of her Scotch. As she walked into the room, he smiled at her and looked her over from head to toe, eyeing her naked body appreciatively.
"Hi there, keed," he said. His voice was deep, resonantly virile. "You're a sight for sore eyes in that birthday suit of yours, you know that?"
"You just get here, Buddy?"
"Five seconds ago."
"What took you so long?"
He lifted an eyebrow. "What do you mean, so long? It's only quarter past ten."
"You said you'd be here at quarter of."
"So what's half an hour?" He laughed amiably He was a big man, six feet three, and he dressed with crisp Ivy League elegance. He looked like a stockbroker, like a television executive, like a banker-like anything but the part-time procurer and full-time hoodlur that he was. "How about a kiss hello?" he asked.
"Sure," Joanne said. "Come and get it."
He put the bottle down and walked toward her. His big arms enfolded her. He still had the chill of the rainy outdoors on his clothing, and as his jacket touched the tips of her breasts, Joanne shivered a little. He ran his hands down her bare back to the ripe globes of her buttocks and gripped them firmly as he pulled her close.
His hands were cold too. So was his belt-buckle against her warm flesh. But the moment he put his lips to hers, Joanne felt the climate beginning to change.
She clung to him. He was sure, strong, masterful. No clumsy, uncertain kiss like Fred Bauman's, but a lingering, passionate fiery kiss. She let her breasts crush against his cold lapels. Her nipples grew rigid again and began to ache with need. Her body moved against his, aware of the power of him disguised by the dapper suit. After a moment he let go of her, and she stepped back, a little dizzy, her head pounding. Buddy had always had the power to set her on fire with a single kiss, even a single glance, the way no other man ever had.
A little shakily, Joanne crossed the room and sank down on the old couch. The corrugated upholstery rubbed against the bare skin of her back and buttocks, but she didn't mind that, never had.
"You want a drink?" he asked her.
"As long as you're pouring."
"As long as it's your booze," he said. He poured her a good healthy shot of Scotch, ran some water from the tap into the glass, and brought it over to her. He sat down next to her on the couch. He was still fully dressed, jacket and tie and all, and Joanne was completely naked. She found it exciting to be sitting there naked when he still had all his clothes on. Her body ached with need. But she held herself in check. Let him make the first move, she thought. Right now she needed the Scotch, too. She took a long, deep drink and let out her breath in satisfaction.
"Well?" he said. "How did it go tonight?"
"Good."
"You mean you found someone?"
"I sure did," she said. "I think I shot me a bullseye tonight, Buddy."
He grinned. "No fooling! Do tell!"
"There was this guy in the car at the approach to the 59th Street Bridge," she said. "Name of Fred Bauman. Sort of maybe fortyish. married-looking type. Picked me up, took me over the bridge. He wanted me so bad I could practically hear him saying so. We parked the car and I pawed him a little and then he took me."
"You work the rape routine like I told you?"
Joanne nodded. "What else? I got him all eager, and then I tried to cut him off. Naturally he was like a wild man. Ripped all the buttons off my blouse, the stinker. He took me and then I took him, with the blackmail pitch, right between the eyes."
"What did you ask for?"
"Five."
"C's?"
"You joking? Five g's, Buddy."
"Think you'll get it?"
"Who knows? I'll get something out of him, that I'm sure of. I've got his business card. I'll call him tomorrow and put the needles into him."
Buddy grinned. He moved closer to her on the couch and slipped his arm around her shoulders, passing it all the way around so that his hand came out over her far-side breast. His hand was big, even bigger than her breast, so that he could cup practically the whole fleshy globe. He grasped it gently, then not so gently. Joanne caught her breath as excitement stirred for her.
"You're a smart little cookie," he said.
"Am I?"
"My best pupil. You're an ace, keed."
"I bet you say that to all the girls."
"That's unkind."
"Is it? Who were you with tonight, Buddy?"
"I deny that accusation!" he said with a look of innocence. "I come to you with clean hands!"
"Sure you do," Joanne said. "But you've still got a black heart."
"Come on, come on-"
"I know you're cheating on me," she said, half seriously, half teasingly.
"Me? Why would I do a thing like that?"
"Because you're a wolf, that's why."
"Listen," he said, "I'll prove to you that I haven't been to bed with anybody since I was last with you. Let's go to bed and I'll love you, and you'll see I haven't done any loving all day. Obviously, if I'd loved anybody else today, I'd be too exhausted to be any good for you."
"Obviously," she said with heavy sarcasm, "That's why I've seen you take me three, four times the same night. Because you tire easily."
"Well, can I help it if you're suspicious?" he said. He finished his drink and put the glass down. He waited a moment until Joanne had finished her drink too, and took the glass from her. Then he turned to her. His arms went around her. His lips went to her mouth, and then to each of her breasts in turn, and in a moment she was gasping and panting in ecstasy.
"Come on," she whispered hoarsely.
They ran into the bedroom. She helped him out of his clothing, and he carefully draped everything over a chair. He was so fussy about the creases in his clothes, she thought, as he got out of them.
Then he was naked. His lean, hairy body moved toward hers.
They tumbled down together onto the bed.
Joanne closed her eyes. She gave her lips to him, and he kissed her with a direct, hard, brutal pressure of mouth to mouth. Joanne twisted and gasped and panted.
His hands were roaming her, now. Touching her, exploring her, setting her on fire. Cunning fingertips toying with the soft flesh.
She was wild for him, now.
It didn't take much to excite her. Especially after her escapade in the car. Now she was hungry for him, famished for him. Her body began to tremble and shake.
He reached for her. He pulled her to him. Her arms opened.
He took her.
Joanne gasped in pleasure. That moment was like the sudden crescendo of a symphonic orchestra within her brain, blare of sensation that radiated dazzlingly over her entire being. Her body began to move with his. His hard, flat chest crushed the tender globes of her breasts. She loved that.
He got his hands under her buttocks. Squeezed the firm cheeks. Harder, faster.
Ecstasy blazed for her. Her body pinwheeled and went wild, twisted and flailed. She moved in a wild, crazy dance of passion to the drumbeat of encroaching delight, a savage, fierce melody of ecstasy.
Then the moment of total bliss arrived. Colors blazed behind Joanne's closed eyelids, and skyrocketing passions zoomed over her. Somewhere far away, distantly, she heard the hoarse grunts of his pleasure, and then she knew that he too was experiencing the ecstasy, and she was happy for him but happier for herself, because of the power and drive of what she had experienced.
Afterward, they lay still. Side by side, his arm around her, his body touching hers, his big hand spread out over the hillock of her breast.
Joanne felt content. Fulfilled. Radiant. It was wonderful, she thought, how the right man could light up your entire body, give you thrills far beyond anything you ever dreamed was possible. Joanne had slept with who-knew-how-many hundreds of men in her short life, even some women, too, yet none of them had ever turned her on the way Buddy Castillo did.
Which was why she put up with the things he made her put up with.
Which was why she was willing to give him money.
Which was why she was willing to take almost anything from him-so long as he was coming back, and giving her more of what she craved.
He reached across her for the pack of cigarettes that lay on the nightstand. He took one from the pack and put it in his mouth.
"Light one for me," Joanne said.
"Sure, baby." He took another, touched it to the tip of the first, then popped it between her lips. He squeezed one of her breasts affectionately. Joanne lay back against the pillows, feeling relaxed and happy now. She wondered how Fred Bauman felt about things at this precise moment. Outside, cold rain beat against the dirty window panes.
"So you lined up another sucker today," he said after a while. "Good girl."
"Another day, another dollar."
"Speaking of which, did you collect from your guy Miller today?"
Sid Miller was one of Joanne's other blackmail victims. He had kicked through with plenty so far-and she wasn't through with him yet.
"Yeah," she said. "I collected."
"You cash it?"
"Yep."
Buddy leaned closer to her. He ran his free hand down the length of her body, lingering for a moment over the smoothness of her waist, over the satiny tenderness of her hips. His expert fingers reawakened the slumbering desires in her. Joanne felt passion trembling in her nude form, and she knew that soon he would have her again, and that she would feel new rapture in his arms.
He said, "I need about thirty bucks, baby. Can you spare k?"
"Sure, Buddy."
"I need it tonight."
"The money's in the top dresser-drawer," she told him, as his hands moved in narrowing circles around her slender waist as he moved to kiss her, beginning-the passion-game anew. "You just help yourself, Buddy. You know that you can have anything you want from me. Anything. Anything."
CHAPTER THREE
Numbed by what had happened to him, Bauman pulled the car away from the curb and drove shakily off homeward. Only now, minutes after the girl had left him, Bauman was fully beginning to realize what had actually taken place. Even if he hadn't sensed it earlier, the girl's final words-"Thanks, sucker!" gave the whole show away.
The entire thing had been rigged. Bauman saw it all now. The girl had been waiting there by the bridge approach in the rain-how long? half an hour, maybe?-for a man driving alone to come along in a car and offer to pick her up. Once she was safely inside 'he car, she had made use of a series of skillful questions to find out whether he was married or not, what his name was, where he lived. Meanwhile she had been moving closer and closer to him, exciting him.
Then she had stirred him to action with an intimate caress, a long, lingering kiss-and by refusing at the critical moment to let him consummate his passions, she had cunningly led him on to commit what had actually been an act of rape.
But her attitude was completely business-like right afterward. The rape hadn't shaken her up at all. Forth-rightly, she had asked for money-a tremendous amount of money-and she had taken his business card, so she'd know where to find him and haunt him.
That had all been rigged.
He had been played for a fool.
And it was going to cost him five thousand dollars.
That was the chilling, numbing, jolting, killing fact that hit Bauman like a meat-cleaver in the skull. Five thousand dollars! If he didn't pay, she'd go to the police with her rape story, and who was going to believe his side of it?
He would lose his job, his wife, his home. Everything. He would go to jail.
Thirty-eight years of quiet, law-abiding life, Bauman thought. And everything undone because some shrewd girl with the morals of a snake climbs into your car and uses you as the unknowing, unwitting actor in an unrehearsed little drama of passion.
As he drove, Bauman gripped the cold plastic of the steering wheel tightly with aching fingers. He reviewed the whole scene over and over again in his mind, seeing the white hills of her bare breasts with their rosy tips, the smooth columns of her legs, the taut youthful flatness of her waist, the moist fullness of her lips. He realized now how this had been done to him, how she had led him on, how she had artfully inflamed him into committing this one mad act that marred all the structure of the life that had gone before.
He realized that if he had any brains he would have smelled something peculiar right at the outset. If she was going all the way out to Jamaica-far toward the eastern end of the borough-as she had told him, what in creation was she doing walking across the Queensboro Bridge in the rain? Did she intend to walk the miles and miles to Jamaica? Of course not.
She didn't intend to walk anywhere.
She had just been lying in wait, like a black widow spider crouching and waiting for its prey to come along down the garden path.
Well, he had come along. And now the spider's fangs were hooked deep in his throat.
Keeping his eyes fixed to the road in front of him, he drove slowly home. He got there about twenty minutes to ten. The rain had doubled its intensity, hammering malevolently on the hood of his car. Bauman parked the car outside the apartment building where he lived and went upstairs, to the four-room apartment where he and Ethel had lived for all the seventeen years of their married life.
His hand shook a little as he turned the key and let himself in.
"Fred, that you?" Ethel called.
"Yeah," he said, his voice ragged and hard to keep under control. "It's me."
She was sitting in the living-dining room, wearing an old housecoat, watching television. Ben Casey. She was the world's biggest Ben Casey fan, Bauman sometimes thought. He looked at his wife with new eyes when he came in. She was thirty-six years old. He had never thought of her as being particularly old, but she was middle-aged, almost, from the viewpoint of the girl be had picked up and raped this evening.
It was a little hard for Bauman to remember the slim, passionate nineteen-year-old girl that he had married so long ago. Ethel's hair, once a lovely auburn, was starting to go gray around the edges. She was getting a little plump and the skin around her throat was loosening up a bit. She was still an attractive woman Bauman thought, but he found himself automatically adding the qualification, for her age. Ethel was getting along. The bloom of youth was off her now. She wasn't the teen-ager he had married.
Bauman hadn't really noticed any of these things before. He had simply accepted the little signs of aging as being-part of, well, Ethel. After all, he wasn't the same hotshot he'd been seventeen years ago, either. The years had worn him down just as they ground everyone else between the turning millstones.
Now Bauman found himself comparing his pleasant, plumpish, thirty-sixish wife to that slim, hungry, lean-waisted, taut-breasted girl he had encountered that evening. No matter what that was going to cost him, he thought, it was almost worth it just to have held that girl and squeezed her firm cool breasts and Bauman felt a tingle of shock at what he was thinking. He hung up his damp coat in the hall closet and walked into the living room. It seemed to him that the signs of his guilt gleamed like searchlights all over him. The scarlet letter and so on.
But Ethel looked up from the shimmering screen only for an instant, to smile at him and say, "Did you work hard today, dear?"
"Yeah," Bauman said thickly. "It was a tough day, Ethel. I'm beat."
He dropped down into the soft chair near the window and eased his shoes off. His whole body ached. There was a stiffness and a soreness in his back from the cramped position he had had to take with the girl in his car. He was still aware of some of that pounding, violent moment of passionate action.
He tried to relax.
Five thousand dollars, he thought. That was a pretty damn expensive thrill.
Five thousand dollars! What will I ever do?
That was a good question. But he had no good answers to it.
He sat there limply, staring at the screen without actually making any sense out of the flickering images. The tension didn't ebb from him. It stayed right where it was, a cold lump in his chest.
Ten o'clock came. The program ended, and Ethel's hypnosis broke. She got up, turned the television set off. Her housecoat fell apart a little way as she leaned forward to snap the knob, and as she turned around Bauman saw some of her bosom. She had full, heavy pale breasts. Maybe too much bosom, now. Starting to get a little flabby-just a little. Ethel had always had wonderful breasts, full and firm and round. He would never forget the feeling of pure joy that surged through him the first time he opened her blouse and saw her breasts, white and perfect by moonlight. He had been twenty years old, and the moment he had seen those two snowy hills of flesh, he had known he was going to marry her.
Almost half a lifetime had gone by since then. And now he was an adulterer A rapist. A blackmail victim.
She said, "Should I make a snack for you, Fred?"
"Don't bother. Where's Karen?"
"In her room, doing homework."
"Can't she come out to say hello when her father comes home?"
Ethel shrugged. "She probably didn't hear you come in. You know how it is with high school kids-they're all wrapped up in themselves. Anyhow, she's got studying to do. Midterm exams next week, or something."
"All right," Bauman said. He pulled himself up out of the armchair. "I'll say good night to her myself. I'm going to bed."
"It's only ten o'clock, Fred."
"I can't help that. It was a long, rough day. I'm knocked out. I want to get some sleep."
Five thousand dollars, he thought numbly. Five thousand dollars!
Karen Bauman lay sprawled out across her bed, flat on her stomach, staring at her Spanish textbook and trying to make some sense out of irregular verbs.
She muttered in a low voice:
"Tuve.
"Tuviste.
"Two.
"Tuvimos.
"Tuvisteis-"
It was no use. She couldn't keep them straight in her mind. Karen had the uneasy feeling that she was going to flunk the upcoming exam, and not just flunk it by a couple of points. She was going to bomb.
It scared her. She had always been a good student, an honor-roll student, right at the top of the class. Now she was in real danger of flunking two of her courses, and she wasn't exactly doing well in the other three.
Men, she thought.
Men. That was the whole trouble. That was why she couldn't keep her mind on her schoolwork.
Karen was fifteen years old. She was a short girl, only five feet three, but she doubted that she was going to grow any taller, because her body was already fully developed. She had the lush, ripely mature figure of an adult. Her breasts were heavy but firm, so taut and well-muscled that when she was naked they jutted out straight instead of drooping and dangling the way some big-breasted girls' did. Her hips were broad, her legs solid, her buttocks voluptuously feminine.
And she was still a virgin.
All this voluptuous maturity had come to Karen quite recently. She hadn't even started to develop until she was about thirteen, when some of the other girls she knew had been wearing brassieres for more than a year and a half. Those were the days when she had been a skinny bookworm, making up for the flaws in her figure by academic success.
Then her body had started coming on like gang-busters. She would never forget that dizzy year of growth, that year of seemingly endless change, as her body blossomed and bulged and firmed. It was the springtime of her womanhood, a year of growing pains.
She wasn't growing any more. The violent growth had tapered off. Now she was as she would be in adulthood, full-breasted and full-hipped, a strikingly handsome redhead with a graceful posture, fluid motions, a voluptuous come-hither sort of body. Hers was a body made for love.
But Karen hadn't had any yet. It was all too new, this body of hers. She was too young. She was bursting with new desires, but she felt that she had to move slowly into this strange world of flesh.
She simmered with needs. She could hardly sleep at night, but lay awake, dreaming of what it was like to lie naked with a boy, to want him and to know that he wanted you, to participate with him in the mysterious, delightful adult act of love. In imagination, Karen had been had a thousand times. In actuality, nary a once.
Her schoolwork was suffering. She was confused and troubled by her body's needs, and it was impossible, during this time of torment, for her to concentrate on Spanish irregular verbs. She wanted to do well in school, and go on to college, Radcliffe or Bennington, one of the better schools. But right now college was ages away, and her needs were immediate and insistent.
She lay flopped out on the bed, peering hopelessly at the lists of irregular verbs. Karen was wearing a pair of old pajamas, pajamas left over from her thirteenth year. They were about four sizes too small cm her now, and clung to her body shamelessly, molding the contours of breasts and legs, hips and buttocks. They were filled to seam-splitting abundance. Her mother had told her to give them to the next charity drive, but Karen had refused. She liked to wear them. She liked the feeling of tightness, the almost straitjacket-like snugness of the pajamas. She liked the way they hugged her buttocks and her legs and her aching-nippled breasts. She enjoyed the very discomfort of the tight pajamas.
Her head swam with thoughts of passion. She bit bef Bp, went on muttering Spanish:
"Ponga.
"Pongas.
"Pongamos-"
"Ponga.
There was a knock at the door, breaking the stream of her thoughts.
"Come in," she called.
Her father pushed the door open. Karen flipped over, aware of her undignified buttock-upward position. She felt a little flustered this way, with the heavy apples of her breasts jutting against the taut-stretched fabric of her pajamas so hard that the nipples made an impress in the cloth. Her father seemed a little surprised by her immodest appearance too, because he quickly lifted his glance to her face. "You just get home, Dad?"
"A little while ago. You didn't hear me come in?"
"I've been busy with these irregular verbs. They're driving me batty!"
"I never saw you have so much trouble in school before, Karen."
She shrugged. "I guess it just gets harder as you get older, or something. A person gets to have more problems as he goes along. You know how it is."
Fred Bauman nodded. "Yes," he said. "I know how it is, Karen."
His face looked lined and pale. Karen said, "You aren't sick or something, Dad?"
"Sick?"
"You look kind of worn out."
He smiled faintly. "I worked late tonight. It gets harder as you get older, as you say. I'm tired, that's all. Nothing else. I'm going to sleep. Good night, Karen."
"Good night, Dad."
She got to her feet and padded to the door to kiss him good night, her breasts going bounce-bounce-bounce under the pajamas as she walked across the floor She was very self-conscious about the good night kisses, these days. When she was younger she used to hug him and kiss him on the lips, but Karen felt that it wasn't quite right to do that any more, not with these big breasts of hers sticking out, and now that she was old enough to have men and all....
So she kissed him chastely on the cheek Close up, she could see the strain and worry on his face. She wondered, as he went out of the room, whether some thing special was eating him. It wasn't like him to look so troubled.
The door closed.
Karen flopped down on the bed again, and peered gloomily at the Spanish book After fifteen minutes more, she knew she was going to have to give it up as a bad job, at least for tonight. Her head was swimming. She couldn't concentrate. The most useful thing she could do now was to go to bed.
Besides, there were special attractions offered by going to bed.
Bedtime was the time of day-she most enjoyed, these days.
She cleaned up her schoolbooks, getting everything ready for the morning. Then he ducked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and shine up her face a little. Finally, she returned to the bedroom. She closed the door all the way, so that no sounds would escape her room. She snapped off the light.
She got into bed.
She lay there quietly in the darkness for perhaps five minutes, getting into the mood of things. It was a warm, mild, stickily humid night, and the rain pattering against her window helped to set a properly romantic tone for things. Karen closed her eyes.
She began to imagine.
There was someone climbing up the fire escape outside the building, she told herself, slipping easily into one of her most favorite fantasies. Someone handsome, someone clean-cut and agile. He was about nineteen years old, which made him old enough to have had some experience, but not so old that he was part of the strange, alien, adult world. In her fantasies, Karen had met him that afternoon, had been fascinated by him, had given him her address.
"Come to my bedroom at night," she imagined she had told him. "Climb up the fire escape. I'll leave the window open."
And now he was mounting the iron step, rung by rung. He was up to the fourth floor and crawling along the ledge toward her open window. And now he was swinging himself lightly through the window and into her bedroom. Karen began to stir and twist in the bed.
She let her hand go to her waist and tugged at the snap that held the pants of her pajamas together. It yielded. The pajama bottom popped open. Karen began slowly to push the top of her pajamas up, inch by inch, baring first her waist to the darkness, then the lower curves of her breasts, then the rigid, taut tips, then the entire swelling mounds of her breasts.
She lay there in the blackness feeling cooler air going across her sensitive nipple. Her pajama tops were around her throat now. In her mind's eye she could see the handsome stranger standing by her bed, looking and smiling as he stared at her bare breasts and told her how beautiful they were.
Now he was moving onto the bed.
She smiled. Her breath began to come a little faster. Her nostrils flared, and her breasts rose and fell more rapidly.
She lifted her right hand and poised it in the air.
Then she brought it down.
Gently, slowly, she lowered it until it was at her left breast. She grasped the firm fleshy mound tightly, fingertips digging. She used her wrist to move the breast around, and then she brought her fingers inward until they had found the nub, holding firmly.
She began to gasp and pant.
To her fevered mind, the hand at her breast was the hand of the handsome stranger who had climbed through her window. It was his hand caressing her silken softness, it was his hand toying with the rigid tip, it was his hand cupping and hefting and savoring the full opulence. And now the other hand was there too, at the right breast. She crisscrossed her hands across her chest, taking a handful of flesh with each, pulling her breasts close together. There was a dull ache. She began to twist impatiently as the intensity of her need grew.
If there had been anyone in her bedroom with her, she knew, he would be drawing down her pajama bottoms, laying bare the smooth flesh of her legs. Then he would be stroking her knees, kissing her eager lips, making her ready for the ultimate passion. And then he would take her and she would dissolve in bliss.
But there was really no one there.
So Karen had to do all the work herself.
Slowly, languorously, she let one hand slip from her breasts across the satiny skin of her chest and waist to the pajama bottoms, brushing them away, baring her hips. She continued to envision her imaginary lover-how gentle he would be, yet how insistent.
He was ready now, and so was she.
The last moment of breathless anticipation.
And then-he would take her.
Karen's young body trembled and tingled in ecstasies of passion. She held her own breast and all the while imagined the lean, hard masculine chest pressed to her, taking....
Passion rose for her. This substitute was the best she could manage, under the circumstances, but over the last few months she had come to respond quickly and easily even in this second-best way. Her pulse pounded. Her brain reeled. Wild currents of ecstasy surged over her.
Her entire body began to move. Hips pistoning, her whole being churning and flailing in ever more violent movement. The bedsprings creaked. Could they hear her, in their bedroom down at the far end of the apartment? Most likely they were asleep by now. Karen hardly cared. She had her needs to care for.
She clamped her teeth tight on her lips now. She snorted for breath, rolled her head, squeezed her breast mercilessly. The moment of complete ecstasy was approaching, now. Closer ... closer.
Yes!
Fulfillment surged through her. She shivered and shook and rocked as she was hit by wave after wave of pounding bliss. Which swept over her like the inexorable tides. That went on for a long moment.
And then ended.
Everything was over. Karen was alone, in the strange disappointed solitude that followed the supreme moment. Now was the moment of truth, the moment when all pretense ended, the moment when she realizi that she was still a virgin, just a lonely, curious, eager fifteen-year-old in a darkened bedroom on a rainy night.
Still, even considering all that, she felt pretty good. At least the worst nagging of the inner need was done away with, for a while. Not for another day or two would the urge return to plague her. She had postponed a little of the anguish-until the time when it would be necessary to do this once again.
She was sweating from her exertions. The air blowing through her window cast a chill over her bare breasts, her waist, her legs. She pulled the pajama tops down and tucked them into the bottoms. She fastened the .snap. She pulled the covers up as high as her ears, and settled against the pillow.
Her fantasy was fast fading now. Her mysterious imaginary lover had kissed her tenderly good night, and had slipped out, through the window, down the fire escape and into the darkness outside. She was alone. The fire had been quenched for a while.
She bit her lip in loneliness.
This wasn't a good enough substitute! That was the whole trouble. There were girls in her class who had more, she knew. They didn't have to give themselves pleasure this way. They could do things the right way, in the arms of a boy, doing the forbidden thing that Karen craved so desperately and so eagerly.
She knew the time was coming when her substitute love would no longer satisfy her. That time could not be very far off, either. She was fifteen. Her breasts were full. They ached with need. She wanted to give herself to a boy and find the great jolt of ecstasy that only a true loving could provide.
Soon, she promised herself. Soon.
Very soon.
She closed her eyes. She tried to imagine, for a moment, what that would be like-the real thing. Would that hurt? Make her cry? Would she really enjoy love as much as she hoped she would?
Questions. Too many questions. Life was a mystery. Growing up frightened her.
She pulled the covers even higher. After a while, sleep took her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sid Miller picked up the cognac bottle, scientifically poured an inch and a quarter of cognac into the snifter, and nodded in satisfaction. He put the bottle down, grasped the snifter, cupping it in his hands to warm it and make fumes rise from the cognac.
He walked slowly over to the window and looked out at rainswept New York. It was a good view. His apartment was on the seventeenth floor of a plush new co-op on Central Park South, and from where he stood he could see the long dark strip of the park, stretching for three miles or so in front of him to the remote place where it met the slums up near the edge of Harlem. Lights formed a gay ribbon through the park, marking out the circular roadway that ran around it. To the right, Miller could see the upper-bracket splendor of residential Fifth Avenue. On the left was the slightly seedy but still impressive array of old apartment buildings on Central Park West. From the window, Miller could see billions of dollars of real estate, and the apartments of people who themselves were worth untold millions of dollars.
Somehow, he didn't find that a very cheering thought at this moment. Because he had been a pretty well-heeled man himself, with a six-figure bank account, a safe bulging with stocks and bonds, and a table reserved for him every night at one of New York's most elegant restaurants, not to mention his $5,000 apartment on Central Park South and his glamorous, jewel-bedecked blonde wife.
Well, he still had the apartment. It was mortgaged right up to the hilt, but he still had it.
That was about all he had.
The bank account was a joke. The stocks and bonds had long since been sold. The blonde wife was down in Florida, collecting $1200 a month in alimony from him and spending it on lawyer's fees to make his life even more miserable than it already was. As for the elegant restaurant, he had run up a tab of close to a thousand bucks there, and didn't dare set foot in the place now for fear that they might oh-so-gently hint that they'd like to see some dough out of him.
As if all that weren't bad enough, Miller was a blackmail victim. A sexy, long-stemmed cutie name of Joanne was hitting him up for a hundred bucks a week, and that was really killing him. He was breaking his back to make those payments, digging down deep.
But he couldn't stop. If he ever cut off the blackmail boodle, Joanne would hurt him in the worst way anybody could possibly hurt Sid Miller. She would make him lose the part-time custody of his kids.
Right now, Alice had the three kids six months out of the year, and Miller had them the rest of the time. Alice had tried to get year-round custody, but Miller had fought it and had been able to win. Alice's case was that since he was an adulterer and a general low-life, he had no right to be allowed to raise small kids. Miller's lawyer had built up an elaborate case to prove that, whatever Miller's past sins were, he was a virtuous and law-abiding citizen who deserved the right to bring up his own children. The judge had agreed. Even though the marriage had been dissolved, custody would be divided.
That had been a big victory for Miller.
But what would happen if this Joanne Harris now came forward and said a thing or two to Alice's lawyer? Suppose she said, "I have documentary proof that even while Mrs. Miller's ex-husband was telling the judge how virtuous he was, even while the divorce trial was going on, he was having relations with me practically every night-and he was carrying on in a pretty unnatural way."
What then?
Alice would start a new custody suit. And with Joanne as chief witness, she'd win. Miller would never get to see his kids again.
He had known, at the time that he got himself involved with Joanne, that there was potential danger in it for him. He couldn't help himself. He needed a woman. The tension of the divorce trial was too much for him. Miller couldn't live like a monk while that was going on; his business affairs were collapsing at about the same time, and the double strain was driving driving him crazy.
So he took a mistress-right in the middle of the divorce trial. He picked this Joanne girl up in mid-town Manhattan, and brought her home, and told her what he wanted her to do for him, and she did. And continued for week after week.
Miller hadn't dared to tell his lawyer about Joanne. How could he, when the lawyer was standing up there in court every day bragging about his client's virtue? So now that he was in a mess, he couldn't run and ask his lawyer to get him out of it. This was something of his own doing, and he was stuck with it, and nobody else was going to help him.
If only he hadn't let Joanne in on the truth about his situation, everything still might have worked out all right. But, thinking it was for his own protection, he had told her the truth. Sincerity is always the best policy, so they said.
"Look," he had told her. "I'm mixed up in a tough divorce suit and it could be murder for me if my wife's lawyers found out I'm carrying on with a girl. You've got to be absolutely hush-hush about this. When you come visit me, come up the freight elevator so the doorman won't see you. And don't mention my name to anybody for any reason at all. Okay?"
"Of course," she had said. "I understand."
Sure she understood. She understood terrifically. She hid waited until the divorce trial was over and until the custody decision had been made. Then-while Miller was still way up in the clouds, jubilant because the judge had given him custody half the year-Joanne let him have it. She wanted a hundred bucks a week to keep silent. Otherwise, she'd let Alice's lawyer have the full story, with dates, affidavits, the works.
Her voice had been sweetly matter-of-fact as she dropped her bombshell. Miller had known there was no escaping. The clever little witch!
In the old days, a hundred bucks a week wouldn't have mattered a bit to him. He spent more than that on cognac a week, for himself and his friends. What was a lousy hundred?
Nothing, then. Plenty, now.
Miller was in the real estate business. He was a developer, a builder. His specialty was putting up shopping centers in places like New Jersey and Long Island. He wasn't interested in operating the shopping centers: he just built them, got them rented, and sold them after a year or two. Not much of his own cash needed to be tied up in deals like that. He could get a whopping construction-money mortgage from the banks, because of his past reputation as a successful builder. So he'd erect the shopping center on perhaps fifty thousand bucks of his own money and a million from the bank. Then, after benefiting from juicy depreciation rates for a while, he'd find a syndicate of buyers who'd take the property off his hands for perhaps a quarter of a million more than it had cost him to build it. They assumed the mortgage, of course. He was out, free and clear, with a profit of two hundred g's or more on an investment of fifty grand-and all of it capital gain.
It was an excellent way to make a living-while it lasted.
Inside of eight years, Miller had made himself a millionaire a couple of times over, simply by building and selling shopping centers. Then had come the big stock market crash of 1962. He was on the verge of closing a good transaction when the market blew up. His buyer got cold feet.
Suddenly everybody had cold feet, all at once. Miller was getting margin calls on his own stock speculations, and he needed cash to settle up. Finally he had to dump a shopping center at a loss, simply to keep above water. That had saved him from bankruptcy proceedings, but it had also ruined his credit rating with the banks. He was no longer Sid Miller the Magician. He was just another over-extended speculator.
They began to worry about those big loans. They started to call them in.
Miller had to sell things to satisfy them. One bank simply took possession of a center, eating up an investment of 65,000 of Miller's money. Another bank forced snowballed. He had to get rid of his stocks, his bonds, his private holdings, his savings account-bit by bit, he had to give up everything that could be liquidated, The carnage was just about over, now. Miller was down to rock bottom. He had sold off everything but a few tiny properties, and whatever he had was mortsaged. Right now he was living off money that he had stashed away in a Swiss bank account; each month he withdrew a couple of thousand, and made that do. But it was melting away fast. Joanne's weekly blackmail take didn't improve matters any.
Miller still had hopes of getting started again. All he needed was one banker with faith in him.
He had made the rounds, seeing them all. "Look," he kept saying, "I'm down, but I'm not out. I didn't go into bankruptcy, did I? I met all my obligations one hundred cents on the dollar. Was it my fault that the market crashed just when I was over-extended? If it had crashed in November instead of May, I'd have been home free with millions of dollars in capital. Will you back me on a new project? Will you let me get started again?"
So far he had a lot of sympathy but nothing else. You couldn't build real estate with sympathy. Miller was discovering a bitter fact of financial life: money goes to money. When you're riding high, the bankers flock around to lend you all you need. When you're on the floor, they stomp on you to make it a little worse.
Time was running out. Those Swiss accounts wouldn't last forever. Pretty soon he'd be penniless. Then what? Go to work as a bookkeeper? Find somebody to take him in out of pity at eight grand a year?
Miller shook his head sadly He downed his cognac, peered out gloomily at the rainy city outside.
The doorbell chimed. A delicate, tinkling, moneyed chime. The chime was mortgaged, but at least he could still listen to its soothing sound. He went to the door.
A girl stood there, smiling at him. She was stunning. She was a leggy blonde, close to six feet tall, but delicate and fragile-looking. She was about twenty-one. Her eyes were blue, her eyebrows a thin arch, her nose high-bridged and slender, her lips firm, kissable. She was elegantly dressed in the highest East Side fashion, a slim, soft silk dress showed off the tapering flawlessness of her legs. Magnificent was the only word for her. A real thoroughbred. A girl with class.
"Mr. Jones?" she asked, in a polished, finishing-school voice.
"That's right. Come in."
"I'm Natalie," she said. "My, what a lovely apartment you have!"
"Thanks," Miller said.
He took her coat from her. She was an expensive girl, expensively dressed. Nothing but the best for him, even now. If he was going to go broke, Miller planned to do it in style, he figured.
It was costing him fifty bucks for this girl's services-for about two hours of her time. That was the standard fee. He used a number of different organizations. Having been bitten by the blackmail bug once, he didn't intend to let himself in for more trouble by getting involved on a regular basis with one girl. He never saw the same girl twice. It was too bad, in a way, because a lot of the girls were knockouts that he wouldn't have minded seeing again. On the other hand, this way he got plenty of variety in his life.
Even now, with his back to the wall, Miller couldn't let the girls alone. Once a week-or, when he felt he could splurge, twice a week-he had a girl visit him. She was always an elegant, refined, cultured-looking girl like this Natalie. And she did just what he wanted her to do, because that was how she earned her upper-bracket living.
"Would you care for a drink, Natalie?" Miller asked. "Some cognac?"
"I'd love some," she said.
No sense rushing things. Miller poured drinks, and they sat down genteelly in the living room to sip them and chat a while. She sat on the couch, he on the facing armchair. Everything was done quite respectably. She was expert at small talk; that was one of her skills-in-trade, as much so as bed. A successful call girl had to know how to put the client at ease, how to provide a tone of respectability and propriety for the action. A call girl wasn't just a tramp, after all. You went to bed with a streetwalker in a quick, contemptuous way. A call girl made every trick a work of art.
Miller let about fifteen minutes slip by in relaxed chit-chat. Then he said, "Well, shall we-?"
"Of course," Natalie said.
They got to their feet. Miller liked tall girls. He was a big, rangy man of forty, with dark hair just starting to turn gray, and he had no use for any woman shorter than five feet five. Natalie qualified with inches to spare. She looked so young, he thought. Fresh out of Vassar, probably. But not a novice, by any means.
He got the whip from the closet. It was a flexible length of cane, with a little ivory handle at one end. Miller had paid a hundred and fifty dollars for it in happier days.
Natalie didn't flinch as he got it out. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether she was going to be beaten or going to do the beating, but her professional poise was capable of taking both in stride.
Miller smiled easily and said, giving the whip a few experimental whicks through the air, "You've used one of these before, haven't you?"
"Yes," she said. "Is there anything special you'd like me to do?"
"Just whip me. Until I yell, 'No more.' Then we'll love. I imagine you've had clients of my sort plenty of times."
Her smile was answer enough. She said, "Any preferences about my clothing?"
"Garter-belt and stockings," he said. "Nothing else. Let's get undressed."
He didn't suggest that they go into separate rooms to strip, and so of course she began to peel right before him. Which was what Miller wanted. He undressed himself, keeping an eye on her as she stripped.
Like most girls of her trade, she made a fine art out of the simple act of taking her clothes off. Every motion was calculatedly graceful; every act a luscious one. Off came her blouse, to reveal a lovely yellow bra; off came her skirt, and the yellow half-slip. Her legs were long and shapely, slender and tapering away to tiny ankles. Miller liked his women to have that kind of leg.
The general slenderness of her frame didn't seem to have any harmful effects on the development of her bosom. The yellow bra came away to reveal two full, firm, high-crested breasts, very pale, very round, very good to look at and probably even better to touch. Smiling she artfully rolled her lacy panties down, to show a youthfully lean waist and two sensually globular buttocks.
She was a delectable dish, Miller thought.
She wore nothing now except her garter-belt, cutting deep at the flesh of her hips and upper buttocks, and the sheer nylon stockings that set off the tapering flawlessness of her legs. High spike heels completed the outfit.
Perfect, Miller told himself. Absolutely perfect.
He looked her over. The white round breasts with the rosy nipples; the dark straps of the garter-belt knifing along the pale satin of her legs; the lush opulence of her buttocks; the perfection of her legs. Everything first-rate.
He stood naked before her. His own body was not in its usual trim these days; he was drinking too much, exercising too little. For reasons of economy, he didn't stop in at the steam room of the athletic club any more. So his fortyishness was beginning to show. But only beginning. He was still pretty lean and agile.
"Go ahead," he said. "I'm ready."
She hefted the whip, got the balance of it. Then, smiling serenely, she let him have it across the back. Miller caught his breath with a hiss. The whip stung, but would not break the skin unless the girl gave him a really demonic slash. He found it invigorating rather than painful. He enjoyed getting whipped. It was something like a Finnish sauna to him.
But there was more to it than that, he knew. It wasn't just the sensual feeling of the whip against his skin that turned him on. It was the idea of it all. The idea of a nearly naked girl whipping him strenuously, sweat rolling down, her bare breasts joggling. That was what really excited him.
He wasn't really able to enjoy love without these preliminaries. Oh, he could love the ordinary way, but that was as flat as stale champagne to him. One of the reasons for his divorce was that Alice had refused to play his little game. As a result, he had little interest in sleeping with her, and the marriage had crumbled.
Natalie, though, knew just what to do.
Whick! Whack!
Flick! Flack!
She chased him around the sumptuous apartment. They were both laughing and giggling wildly. She whipped him across the shoulders, and the small of his back, the buttocks and the legs. She let him fed the sting of the whip on his chest, his waist, his arms. He was glowing all over.
And she seemed genuinely to enjoy her work. Her lush body was shining with perspiration. Each stroke of her arm made her bare breasts leap and bobble around in a way that Miller found unutterably attractive. Her lean, nimble body moved agilely, the long legs prancing like a ballerina's in the high heels.
They went on and on. Until finally Miller got to the critical moment where he knew he had to have he!
He stopped being chased, and did the chasing. H turned on her, and as she lifted the whip he lunged an caught her arm.
Laughing insanely, Miller grasped her by ti wrist and forced her arm up, so that the whip pointe toward the ceiling. He got closer to her, so that the naked, sweating bodies all but touched. Another ste and her hard-pointed breast-tips were grazing his skii Another step and her round firm breasts were bein: crushed by his chest.
He put his mouth to hers.
The whip dropped to the carpet. Their bodies locked in a tight embrace. With her heels on, she was just about the same height he was, so that they stood face to face. Her breasts seemed to blaze against his skin. He was aware of the faint roughness of her stockings against his legs. Her mouth was good to kiss.
His arms went around her. His hands pressed the soft flesh of her back, and descended, down the bare middle of her back, over the strap of the garter-belt to the rising, jutting mounds of her buttocks. His fingers pulled her against him.
Slowly he forced her backward, down onto the carpet. They were both gasping with excitement, and, as with all these call girls, he was unable to tell whether or not hers was an act. Did they fake excitement to give the client a good time? If they did, they were awfully good actresses. When a ten-buck tramp went to bed with you, you could bet that she hated every minute and that any enthusiasm she showed was strictly in hopes of landing a tip. Things were different with these girls, Miller thought.
His mouth fastened hungrily to hers, and his hand groped between her firm, high breasts, teasing and caressing. She was gasping, warm and ready to go Of course. Who ever heard of a frigid call girl, anyway?
Miller didn't bother taking off the garter-belt or stockings. He preferred them She was somehow more nude this way than if she were completely naked. He liked the difference in textures between the oh-so-soft skin of her breasts and upper body, and the roughness of her stockinged legs.
Her body went wild for him.
Miller took her.
He took her roughly and savagely, ridding himself at last of all the frustrations and disappointments that this last week had created for him. The girl met his assault with energy and vigor.
Her rhythm was perfect. That was another thing Miller liked about these call girls. With an ordinary, non-professional woman, there were always some awkward moments the first time, as you got attuned. Not with these girls. They had an innate sense of rhythm, it seemed, so that they could glide easily and readily to the gyrations of a passionate embrace.
Miller clung to her. His passions, already wakened to fever pitch by the whipping, soared high and higher with each ecstatic move of his body. The girl raised her arms, locked them about him. She was all softness and warmth and fire; for a moment Miller forgot the troubles crowding in on him.
He caught his breath as a surge of ecstasy ripped him. The girl doubled and redoubled her activities. Miller gripped her, pressed himself against her, and the burst of passionate fulfillment roll over him. At the supreme moment, he heard her gasps of excited satisfaction.
For a long time after that was over, Miller did not move. He enjoyed the warmth of her, the nearness of her, and he kept her body close to his. Then, at last, he got shakily to his feet. He looked at her lush form as she sprawled on the carpet. Extending a hand to her, he helped her to her feet. Her breasts swayed enticingly as she rose.
She smiled at him. It was just the right kind of smile: a grateful smile, the smile of woman well-loved. Did she mean it? Would she remember him tomorrow night? Of course not. But for the moment, at least, she was perfectly in character, playing the role of beloved mistress, not of hired toy.
"There's a bathroom just through there," Miller said. "You can get yourself tidied up."
She thanked him and went out. He eyed her as she left, the trim back, the sensual buttocks framed so perfectly by the garter-belt and the stocking-tops. He began to dress. When she came back, perhaps five minutes later, he was in his clothes.
She looked cool and refreshed in her nudity now. Miller stood to one side, watching in pleasure as she put her clothes back on, her panties, her bra, donning the slip, the skirt, all the rest. In short order she was clad again-once more the sleek elegant girl-around-town, probably with another call or two to make yet this evening before her working night was over. She fluffed her blonde hair into place and she was all set.
Miller showed her to the door. No money changed hands; that was too crass for such an operation. He'd send his check, made out to a dummy account, in the morning. As she left, she smiled warmly at him, took his hand a moment.
"This has been a lovely evening," she said.
"For me too, Natalie. Thanks ever so much for coming over."
"I enjoyed this. I hope I'll be seeing you again."
"Who knows?" Miller said. "Let's hope so."
And then she was gone. He knew he never would see her again, because it had to be that way. Women were dangerous. One blackmailer was enough Natalie would never get a chance to know him well enough to be dangerous to him. For two unforgettable hours she had brightened a dark life, and now she was forever part of a closed chapter.
Miller's gloom returned. He was more relaxed now but hardly happy. He had two big appointments tomorrow. If both of them fell through, he was just about finished-wiped out at the age of forty, with no one willing to help him replenish his capital and start anew.
He poured some more cognac for himself. Then he walked to the wide picture window overlooking the park, and bleakly watched the rain come down.
CHAPTER FIVE
Joanne woke.
She was alone. Buddy had loved her a couple of times, and then he had left, about one in the morning. He rarely spent an entire night with her. There was always a poker game for him somewhere, or a deal to close, some kind of shady business operation having to do with gambling or jukeboxes or vice of some kind.
Joanne didn't mind it when he spent his time at things like that. What hurt her was when he went to his other women. She knew he had them. She tried to be all he would need, but it didn't seem to work. No matter how much time Buddy spent in bed with her, no matter how energetically she gave herself to him, he was always creeping away to love other girls in his spare moments. He was that kind of guy, and there was nothing Joanne could do.
She got out of bed. Naked, she walked to the window and threw open the blinds.
The rain had stopped, some time during the night. Now it was a bright, clear spring morning. The slum street outside seemed freshly washed, almost clean after last night's down-pours. Golden sunlight streamed down now. Joanne stood by the window a long moment, breathing deeply, stretching, filling her lungs with air. The high-tipped spheres of her breasts rose voluptuously as she inhaled. Happily, she put her hands over them, cupped them, squeezed them tight and let out her breath.
She was in a good mood. She had been well loved the night before, she had some money in her purse, and she had a new sucker on the string to take care of today. Fred Bauman. The guy who had been so eager to have her last night, and who was going to start paying through the nose for the privilege as of today.
Joanne went into the bathroom and got under the shower. She turned the water on full force. She loved the feeling of fresh water flowing over her body, over her bare breasts and waist and legs and buttocks. She stood under the shower a long while. Then she got out, towelled herself dry, touched her toes with her fingers twenty times just for the heck of it. Her breasts bobbed and jiggled every time she bent forward.
Yes, she thought. She was in a good mood. An excellent mood. A fine day for blackmail.
She was generally in a good mood these days. It hadn't always been that way, not by any means. It was hard for Joanne to accept the fact now, but only four years ago she had been right on the edge of suicide-not merely contemplating it but actually standing there with the razor blade in her hand.
Of course, things had been a lot different then, she told herself.
She had been nineteen, and already pretty experienced. She was working as a stripper at the time, and she was very much in love with a guy named Mack, who was the bartender at the dub where she peeled every night. Mack was thirty years old, with Latin features and dark curly hair, and Mack was hell on wheels in bed. They had been talking seriously about getting married. At least, Joanne was talking seriously about it. Mack was doing a lot of thoughtful listening, but he wasn't saying much.
Then Joanne discovered that she was expecting.
She was in her third month, so that didn't interfere with her strip routine, except for the minor fact that she felt nauseous as hell just about all the time. However, she knew that in another five or six weeks she'd have to take a leave of absence.
So she went to Mack. "I got great news," she told him. "We're going to be parents."
"You mean you're going to, honey."
"Huh? So are you, Mack!"
"How the hell do I know that? A girl who stands up there every night, before a whole mob of people, how I'm supposed to know that I'm the only one?"
"Mack, no! I swear, you're the only one! There hasn't been anybody else for six months, Mack!"
Mack smiled. "So you want me to marry you, is that the pitch?"
"Well, sure, of course."
Mack smiled, showing his pearly white movie-star teeth. In his deep, romantic baritone voice he said, "Go to hell, Joanne."
The manager of the strip club was even more blunt about it, if possible. The day after Mack broke the news to her about her real status with him, Joanne went to the manager to explain her situation. She informed him that in another few weeks she would have to leave the club. However, she didn't intend to quit permanently. What she wanted was a one-year leave of absence, without pay, of course. Then she would return to the club and go back to stripping. Would he hold a slot open for her until then?
The manager's reply was a simple one:
"You're fired."
That was all there was to it. So there was no room m the operation for Joanne any more. As for the leave of absence, who ever heard of a thing like that? A year from now, if she felt like working again, she was free to come around and ask for a job. If there was a slot open, she'd be hired. If not-well, tough situation, kiddo.
It was a tough situation right now. Joanne was nineteen and alone in the world and practically broke It didn't seem like a very promising outlook. That was when she picked up the razor blade and figured that the simplest thing for her was just to end it all right now. She came within an inch of doing it. and then she put the razor blade down.
She decided to take her chances on an operation.
She had contacts among her fellow strippers who could put her in touch with the right people. The next day, she had a name and she had the price: five hundred bucks.
Joanne's liquid assets amounted to a shade under $150. And every day that she waited longer made things more dangerous. Where was she going to get the money? Borrow it? Don't be silly. Steal it? From where? Earn it? But she had just been fired.
She earned it.
It was the rock bottom moment of her life. She went out on the street. Ten dollars, fifteen, whatever she could get. She wore a blouse that left her breasts practically bare, and she went running up to men on the street, asking them if they wanted a good time. She was insistent about it. Once when another girl tried to cut in on her territory, Joanne knocked her down and kicked her until she agreed to clear out.
It was pure hell. Sick, disgusted by the grimy, foul-smelling men, Joanne drove herself. She found as many as eight customers a night, sometimes. She charged as much as they'd give her, and she gave that all she had, hoping to boost her tips. She half hoped that in all that franticness, she might lose the baby and not need the operation.
No such luck.
After two and a half weeks of full-time effort, Joanne was exhausted and had lost ten pounds, but she had managed to earn close to a thousand dollars. That gave her five hundred bucks for the operation, and some money to live on in the weeks that she was recuperating. So she made her appointment and went to get the problem taken care of.
The doctor's office was in Brooklyn. Of course, the "doctor" wasn't a doctor, at least not any more, and the "office" wasn't an office, but just a loft in a dismal building on the Brooklyn waterfront. There was no nurse, no shining array of surgical implements. The doctor didn't have a white uniform on; he wore old clothes, and dirty clothes at that. He hadn't shaved in a couple of days, and there was a faint smell of alcohol on his breath. Joanne didn't know his name. She never was to find it out.
"You got the fee?" he asked her. "In cash?"
Joanne paid him. He counted the money through, bill by bill, even examining a couple of bills closely as though he thought they were counterfeit. Then he put the money away and said, "Okay, strip. Everything off."
Joanne peeled away her clothes. When she stood naked before him in the drafty room, he pointed to the table and told her to lie down. She did.
So did he.
"Wait a second," Joanne said. "I-"
"You want an operation?" he asked. "Then first you pay the rest of the fee. Come on, baby. You're the prettiest one that's been in here in a long while. I want some fun first."
He meant it. He began to squeeze her breasts. What could she do, report him to the A.M.A.? If he felt like taking advantage of her for his own amusement, she couldn't do a thing except walk out of there, and that wouldn't solve her problem.
She relented. Why not? She had slept with untold dozens of men so that she could afford to come here in the first place. It didn't make sense to turn virtuous now.
That was quick, a short experience of rapid, selfish energy, and after a few minutes that was that. He sent her into an adjoining room to wash herself up while he sterilized the instruments.
The anesthetic consisted of a pill of some kind and a shot of whiskey. It didn't make Joanne unconscious, but it did make her groggy and woozy. She sprawled out on the rough, uncomfortable operating table, and was dimly aware that he was reaching for a scalpel. She felt pain, but not unbearable pain. After a while, that was all over.
There was lots of blood, for weeks afterward. She felt miserable. Finally, worried about herself, she went to a public health clinic, and told a young and good-looking and obviously concerned interne what had happened, and he examined her and told her that she'd be okay, but that she wouldn't ever be a mother.
After that, she tried to find work as a stripper. But the stripper market had gotten very tight, all of a sudden. So Joanne continued as a hooker, right through to her twentieth birthday. Hardly a day went by when she didn't think about killing herself.
But she didn't. And now all that terrible era was years behind her. She had money. She had Buddy. She had her health back. She didn't have to peddle herself to anybody she didn't want to. She had come a long way since that dark time of her life.
And now, she was getting her own back on the world that had been so rough on her back then. Blackmail was a pleasant way of getting even. Let the Sid Millers of the world squirm on the hook, she thought. Let the Fred Baumans fry. Who had come forward to help her, when she needed help the most? Nobody. Nobody. Men had used her, but they hadn't helped her.
Joanne smiled cheerfully.
She went to the telephone, to start making Fred Bauman's life miserable.
Somehow, Bauman had fallen asleep that night. It hadn't been easy. There had been the drumming of the rain outside, and the drumming of fear within himself, and the nearness of Ethel.
Ethel had wanted to love that night. He knew that because she came to bed nude, and she only did that on nights when she wanted him Ordinarily, he was glad to cooperate. But not tonight.
Bauman wasn't sure that he was physically up to loving his wife two hours after Joanne. But he was certain that psychologically he wasn't. He was shaken to the core, and he didn't want to touch Ethel while he still remembered Joanne so clearly. He couldn't. The whole idea made him weak.
So he watched his wife cross the bedroom naked, still a good-looking woman with her big round breasts and her full hips. She was a little too fleshy now, but not really bad. She got into bed next to him. She pressed herself against him, her breasts touching his back. Bauman just lay there.
After a long while Ethel said, "Is there something wrong, Fred?"
"I'm very tired tonight, Ethel. I had a lousy day at the office."
"This night work! It's wearing you out."
"I can't help it. It's income tax time, Ethel. You know that's always the toughest time of the year for an accountant."
She let him be. She hid her disappointment and rolled over and went to sleep. Bauman wasn't so lucky. He lay there, feeling like a hell of a heel for having refused his wife.
There had once been a time in his life when refusing to sleep with Ethel would have been as unimaginable as refusing to accept a million dollars tax free. That had been when he was young and wildly in love. He was twenty, and she was seventeen, and she had been a virgin until one blissful night when he took her, and as she lay gasping and crying her ecstasy in his arms Bauman knew that this was the woman for him.
That had been a long, long time ago.
He had been faithful to her for all the eighteen years since then, and so far as he knew she had been faithful to him, but the spark of passion that had blazed so brightly once now burned rather fitfully. They had grown accustomed to each other. Attractive as she still was, Ethel didn't hold the same magnetism for him as she did when he was a kid, and it seemed to him back then that her legs and her breasts were the most magnetic things in the world.
He still loved her, he thought. But not in the old way. And certainly he hadn't been such a terrific husband tonight, picking up a strange girl and letting himself be pushed into raping her.
Why had he picked up the girl?
Bauman knew why: it was because somewhere in the back of his mind he had halfway been hoping to have an adventure with her.
Well, he had had his adventure. And now he was about to have a different kind of adventure, a less pleasant kind of adventure. A blackmail adventure.
Somehow, finally, he got to sleep. And somehow he woke up the next morning, and he ate a tasteless breakfast and drove back to Manhattan. If he seemed preoccupied, Ethel didn't say anything about it. She was simply taking at face value what he had told her last night: that he was working too hard, that he was tired.
But he was beginning to realize that Ethel never looked too closely at him any more. She took him for granted. Well, Bauman thought, she was going to find out a few things about him that would surprise her, unless he coughed up the five thousand bucks. She was going to look awfully startled when the police came and got him and booked him for a charge of rape.
He settled in at his desk. Somehow, it felt better to be back in the office. The office, at least, was real to him. What had happened last night was more like a wild dream.
Bauman was in the middle of a complicated tax-case preparation, and he was having a tough time with it because the image of the full-breasted brown-haired girl in the rain kept coming between him and the dull figures on the long yellow sheets of paper before him, when the telphone rang.
The time was quarter after eleven in the morning. Bauman's first reaction, as his hand went out automatically to grab the receiver, was puzzlement. The only person who ever called him at the office in the mornings was Ethel. And Ethel always called at twelve noon on the dot, never any earlier.
Who was calling him at quarter after eleven, Bauman wondered?
"Hello?" he said.
"Mr. Bauman?" came a woman's voice. A deep, husky, provocative voice. Her voice.
"Who is this, please?" Bauman asked, fighting hard and not very successfully to keep the quiver of nervousness out of his voice.
"You know damned well who this is, Freddie-boy," she said. "Don't try to play dumb now. It won't get you anywhere, and you ought to know it."
An image blazed into Bauman's mind: the girl named Joanne in his car, leaning against the window, with her blouse open and her skirt pushed up around her hips and her breasts and legs shamelessly naked as she told him how much she was going to blackmail him for. There was a sudden savage pain of terror.
"What do you want with me?" Bauman asked.
He was speaking in a low, conspirational tone of voice. There were other men in the office, and their desks were not very far from his. They were all bent over their own work and probably weren't paying any attention to what he might be saying. But he couldn't be sure of that. In his present jumpy mood, it seemed to him that everyone around him had grown giant ears to listen in.
"You know exactly what I want with you," came the level reply. "Don't waste words. I want five thousand bucks, Freddie-boy. Cash on the barrel, or else I go to the police."
Bauman was bathed in cold sweat. He gripped the receiver tightly. "I told you last night I don't have that kind of money," he said.
She laughed huskily. "Believe me, you aren't going to like it in jail, lover."
Bauman brushed the beads of perspiration out of his eyebrows. He fought desperately to control his panicky emotions. What he wanted to do was hang up the phone and get out of the office and run for it, run to California, run to Brazil, run anywhere where they couldn't find him. But he knew that that was crazy. He had to stay here and face the music. He had a family to think about. He had a job. He had responsibilities.
After a moment of silent lip-chewing he said, "Can't you make it less?"
"Five thousand smackeroonies," she replied evenly. "You wilfully and wantonly assaulted me, buster, and I can make that stick in court."
She had him. Bauman knew that.
He felt like a speared fish, wriggling and writhing on the gaff.
He gave in. In a dead, defeated voice he said, "How long do I have to raise the money?"
"I want it by tomorrow afternoon."
"You might as well ask me to swim to the moon. I can't do it."
"Tough," she said. "If I wait much longer than that I won't have a case. I can't very well yell 'rape' two months after the event and expect it to hold up. You realize that, don't you? So I have to know right away whether you're going to ante the dough or whether I'll have to talk to the cops ... and to your wife."
Bauman was silent again for a minute, groping for the words that might get her off his back. At length he said, "You don't seem to understand that if I could pay you, I would. Anything, just to get rid of your threats, to let me forget the thing that happened last night. But I'm not made out of money. Believe me. Whatever you may think, I can't just pull five grand out of the air. If I took anything like that out of the bank, my wife would want to know all about it. It's a joint account."
"Maybe we can arrange terms," said the girl thoughtfully.
Hope rose in Bauman's chilled heart. "What kind of terms?"
"Listen, can you put your hands on a thousand bucks in a hurry?"
Would she really settle so cheaply? Bauman wondered.
He considered it. "Yes," he said. "I could get a thousand, I imagine. It wouldn't be such an easy thing to manage, but-"
"Good. Here's how well work it. You deliver a thousand dollars to me tomorrow, and then you pay me a hundred bucks a week till the end of the year. Every Wednesday, say. That'll come out to five thousand, just about, and well call it quits."
Bauman, with his accountant's mind, made the automatic computation: it would actually be only $4700 that she'd be extorting from him. There were just thirty-seven weeks left to the year. Very merciful of her. Well, whatever the figure was, he'd be well rid of her at the price, Bauman thought.
"Okay," he said weakly. "I'll do it. Somehow. How do I get the money to you?"
"You mail it, chum. Box 356, Times Square Station, New York 36. Address it to Miss Joanne Harris. That's the name the box is rented under, and it'll get to me. Got that? Box 356."
Bauman jotted it down. "I'll send you the thousand right away."
"You better," she said, and hung up.
Bauman lowered the phone slowly into its cradle. His hands were shaking.
A thousand dollars by tomorrow!
A thousand dollars!
Bauman shook his head. He felt like a dead man. He wondered how he was going to swing it.
CHAPTER SIX
"It was eleven in the morning, a bright, sunny morning, and Ethel Bauman was just about finished with her household chores. There was never much to do. in any case. Make the bed, tidy up Karen's room, whisk around here and there with a dust-mop-that was about it. She did her marketing once a week, and this wasn't marketing day. So she was finished. She had the rest of the day to herself, until it was time to get dinner going. Fine.
She could devote the next five or six hours to cultural pursuits. She could read James Joyce, or she could practice the cello, or she could divert herself with differential calculus, or she could play Beethoven on the hi-fi, or she cold get onto the train and go to the city and visit an art gallery or museum.
Sure, she could.
Except that she didn't know a thing about any of those subjects. She didn't know Beethoven from Bach, didn't know a cello from a mouth organ. Her reading was confined to women's magazines and novels from the lending library. Ethel Bauman was an intellectual lightweight, and she knew it, and she wasn't happy about it.
It was too late to do anything about it, though. When other girls getting out of high school were going on to college, Ethel was meeting Fred Bauman, and sleeping with him, and marrying him. She was engaged at eighteen and married at nineteen, and a mother at twenty-one, and that hadn't left much time for her intellectual development. First she had had to work, when Fred was starting out on his career, and then she had had a baby to bring up, and by the time Karen was old enough to be spending most of the day at school, Ethel didn't know how to develop the intellectual interests that could fill up the empty hours of the day. If she had lived in a house with some land around it, she could use up time puttering around in the garden. But they lived in an apartment house. What could you do in an apartment house?
Ethel was bored.
Every day, between noon and five o'clock, she went half crazy from boredom.
She was bored in other ways, too. Bored with her marriage. Fred was a nice guy, he took care of their needs, he didn't earn any fortune but it was enough to stay ahead of the bill collectors. All the same, she was losing interest in him. Bed-wise, that is. And he seemed to be losing interest in her. He didn't have much desire to sleep with her. When he did, he was mechanical, dull, leaving her feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
Ethel had never slept with any man in her life but Fred Bauman. So she wasn't certain whether there was more to be had out of love than she was getting lately. All she knew was she was enjoying bed a lot less than she remembered enjoying in the old days.
"What is it?" she asked herself. "Am I getting old? Is he?"
They were only in their thirties. That wasn't so old. Ethel didn't feel old. True, she had gained a little weight lately, but she still had her figure, she was still an attractive woman. People saw her and Karen together these days, they thought they were sisters. And they weren't just saying it to be complimentary, Ethel thought.
So what was the trouble?
Last night, for instance. She had wanted Fred to make love to her. She had gone naked into the bed. That was her way of saying, "Let's love." She didn't like to come right out and ask for him-not in words, anyway; but leaving her nightgown off had been a pretty shameless way of telling him what she wanted.
So what had happened?
So nothing.
She had lain there with her bare breasts throbbing with need, with her heart stirred by yearning, and Fred had rolled over and ignored her.
"I'm tired," he had said. "I'm working hard these days, Ethel. It's tax time."
So? So couldn't he spare a little love for his wife, who was still pretty good-looking, and who was bored crazy with her life?
Ethel sighed and shook her head. Then she went into the kitchen to get her private boredom medicine. She kept it in the broom closet, down on the bottom, with the cleaning fluid and the shoe polish and all the other odds and ends. Fred would never dream of looking in there. In all the years of their marriage, he had never once poked his nose into the broom closet.
That was where Ethel kept her vodka.
There was always a quart bottle of good cheap unbranded eighty-proof vodka in there. Ethel bought it by the quart because the bottles lasted longer that way; she bought unbranded vodka because vodka didn't have much taste anyway, so what was the sense of paying extra money for name brands?; she bought eighty-proof vodka because it was cheaper than the hundred-proof kind, but she could get just as drunk on that.
The vodka that she bought cost $3.39 a quart. She saved the money out of her household expense fund. There were ways of cutting corners-buy a slightly cheaper cut of meat, buy in the chain store instead of the little grocery-and every nickel Ethel could put by went into her booze kitty. She bought almost a quart a week. That was a lot of money: better than $150 a year for vodka. And Fred didn't know anything about it. They kept some bottles of other stuff in the house for entertaining, but Ethel never went near that supply during the day.
The vodka helped her get through the day. "It was her one vice. She drank a good deal, and somehow it seemed that she had to drink more and more to achieve the same degree of relaxation Naturally, nobody else knew about her drinking. Not even Karen. Ethel took care to have all her lushing out of the way before Karen came home from school.
Now, she carefully fixed herself a drink. She poured about four ounces of vodka into a water tumbler. She added about two and a half ounces of orange juice. The orange juice gave the drink some flavor. She dropped an ice cube in for refrigeration
She drank.
She didn't gulp. She drank steadily, a sip at a time the glass always moving from the table to her lips, back down to the table again then to her lips. She drank while she read the paper, she drank while she watched the afternoon television programs, she drank while she stood staring out the window with her mind blank. She belted away plenty of the stuff.
Ordinarily, Ethel didn't start drinking this early in the day. She tried to keep away from the vodka until at least noon. At noon each day she called her htis band at his office, and then she fixed a light lunch for herself, and then she poured her first drink. Today, she had more than an hour's head start on herself. But she was still pretty sober when she called her husband.
"Anything new?" he asked, as he always did.
"Not with me," Ethel said.
"Any mafl?"
"Nothing interesting. Will you be working late again tonight?"
"I don't think so. I'll be home for dinner."
"Okay."
That was the extent of their conversation. With that chore out of the way, Ethel was free to drink more liberally. And she did.
Soon she was in a wonderfully relaxed, carefree mood. She didn't feel bored any more. She still felt a little hungry for love, a hangover from last night. The thought struck her that it would be fun to take off her clothes. So she did. She peeled off her house clothes.
She went into the bedroom and stood naked before the full-length mirror in her closet. She looked herself over from head to toe.
Not bad, she thought. Not bad.
Twelve pounds too much flab. She could put her hands on her hips and feel the loose flesh. But her breasts were still good. Turning sideways, she looked at the profile of her buttocks, patted them, grinned as they jiggled. So she had some weight on her. What was wrong with that? A man didn't like his woman to be all bones. It wasn't as if she were fat or sloppy.
But she was going to waste. All this good body, and Fred hardly ever made use of her any more. Once a week, sometimes twice a week-not any more frequently than that.
She wanted a man.
She needed some love.
She cupped her hands over her breasts, letting the tips peep through. Curious chills of excitement ran through her body. She clamped her soft knees together and kneaded the flesh of her breasts.
What if a delivery boy were to come in now? What if the postman came with a special delivery letter? Anybody, ringing the bell-finding her nude, half pickled, keyed up and ready for love-
The thought of sleeping with a man who was not Fred excited her tremendously. She had always been faithful to him. For many years, it simply had not occurred to her to think of going to bed with anybody else. He was her husband, and she had vowed to love, honor, and obey, and that was all there was to it.
But these days, as the needs grew stronger for her, and as Fred's attentions grew less, the thought was coming to her more and more often. Why not? Fred would never have to know. He didn't care about her body any more; why not let some other man try? She was curious. Maybe there were other ways of making love, things Fred never did with her. New thrills, new excitements.
But she held back cautiously. The man she chose as her lover would have to be a stranger, certainly not any of the men they saw socially on a husband-and-wife basis. She didn't want a scandal or any kind of trouble. Just someone who would come to her and make love to her and then go away again without starting trouble.
Ethel, standing naked in front of her mirror, pictured the man who would be her lover. Someone tall and lean and handsome and young. And virile. He'd bowl her over. He'd take her in his arms and drive himself to her, and she'd gasp and twist and shake in ecstasy. It would be her little secret, just as the drinking was her secret now. He would touch her breasts, and make the tips go hard, and pass his hand down the front of her body, and kiss her-
Yes, maybe he'd kiss her. as Fred had never done He would send her over the edge of ecstasy. And she in turn would do the same to him. Fred thought that was disgusting, but Ethel wasn't so sure. There were so many things she and Fred had never done-so many intriguing things she wanted to try.
With somebody. Mister X.
She laughed at her own romantic stupidity. Then she took another look at her naked body, her plump, thirty-six-year-old body, and she began to feel depressed all over again. In another few years she'd be middle-aged. Who would want her then? Who would risk anything to be the lover of a middle-aged married woman? It was now or never. Be unfaithful now, or forget about it. And the more she thought, the more it seemed that such a thing could never happen.
She turned away and covered her body again. Her mood was ruined. She got her glass, poured some more vodka into it, and some orange juice.
She took a sip.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And gradually the long afternoon of loneliness and boredom melted away, the way they all eventually did.
It was quarter to four in the afternoon. Karen's school day was over. Her last class ended at ten minutes to three, but then it was time for extra-curricular activities. Those students who were interested in the recreations the school had to offer stayed around, some of them to work on the school newspaper, some of them to wash test tubes in the biology lab, some of them to sing in the glee club, and so on.
Karen had always been active in the extra-curriculars. Her position as a top student had left her with plenty of free time, since she had never had to muddle over her homework the way the slower students did. This was the first year that she had ever had trouble with her studies, but by now the extra-curricular habit was part of her, so that she still stayed after school even though she ought to be home boning up on her Spanish.
Today's activity was the United Nations Club. It was a club that distributed U.N. leaflets in the school, sponsored fund drives for things like UNESCO, and otherwise furthered the cause of the world organization. It was a good, socially useful activity, the kind of thing that would look worthwhile on a college application.
Karen was co-chairman of the United Nations Club. She shared authority with a boy named Dick Steams, who was one year older than Karen, and two terms ahead of her in school. He was a good-looking boy, serious and scholarly, with a thick mane of brown hair, dark eyes that peered out from behind his glasses, and a clean-cut face. He was going to be a lawyer, and probably he would be a very good one. Karen liked him. He was short, only five feet eight, but she didn't mind that because she was short, too. They had been dating each other since January. He was rather shy, she thought. He had a lot to learn about girls.
He had a perfect opportunity to do some learning today. The United Nations Club was having an executive session, which meant that nobody was there except Karen and Dick, the two chairmen. The meeting room was a cubicle way up on the top floor of the school building, in a wing that was used chiefly for storage. The room was a conference room, meaning that instead of desks and chairs, it had a round table, and several couches. It had a lock on the door, and a shade that could be pulled down.
It was a very private situation indeed.
And there they sat, at quarter past four in the afternoon, the sixteen-year-old boy with the glasses and the sober expression, and the fifteen-year-old girl with tho full breasts, the tight sweater, and the blaze of sensual desire in her heart. There they sat, looking over some press releases for United Nations Week. No teachers present as faculty advisers. No one else on the floor of the building. All, all alone.
And Karen had an idea.
She waited as long as she could, while they went through the formal business of the session. Then, when her patience was just about exhausted, she reached across the table and took Dick's glasses off.
He blinked and squinted at her. "Hey, why did you do that?"
"Because you look cuter without them."
"Aw, come on, Karen, we've got work to do."
"Let it go, huh? It's nice and cozy here Dick.
We don't often get this private."
He looked at her strangely "I guess you aren't in a mood for working."
"I guess I'm not," she said. She turned, giving him her profile view, and took a deep breath that thrust her spectacular bosom out to maximum effect. She heard him give a little sigh of appreciation, and knew that she had scored a point.
On their dates, he was the soul of propriety. But he was warming up. On the last date, he had gone so far as to fondle her breasts-through her clothes, of course. Karen had been yearning for him to go beyond that point, but he hadn't cared to.
Maybe now, though. Here, alone in this locked room where no one could find them.
On that comfortable leather couch. Maybe-maybe they would go all the way! Maybe the moment of which she had dreamed so long was at last at hand! If only she could make him see how much she wanted him. How desperately she craved the experience of love! Didn't he? Most likely he was a virgin too, unless she judged him all wrong. What better opportunity would they ever have?
"Come here," she said huskily. "Let's sit dowoi on the couch for a while."
"Karen-"
"Come here," she said.
As though hypnotized, he followed her. She took him by the wrist, drew him down next to her on the couch.
"The door's locked," she told him, "We're all alone and nobody can disturb us. And I've had enough UN. stuff for a while. I just want to relax." She reached out, ran her hand up his cheek to his earlobe, fondled it a moment. "Come help me relax, Dick. Don't you like me?"
"Of course I do."
"Then come close. Put your arms around me. I won't bite you. I promise."
He grinned, shyly, self-consciously. Then, as though making an effort to enter into the spirit of the moment, as though not wanting to seem a prude and a square in the presence of a willing girl, he slipped one arm around her shoulder. Karen guessed that he would much rather be muddling through United Nations Club business right now. But she didn't think his resistance would last long.
They kissed. His lips met hers, and she kissed him with a fiery passion, pushing her tongue forward, forcing him to respond to her demand. They had kissed that way Saturday night, though he had taken long time to work his way around to a real kiss. Now, Karen's fervor and insistence seemed to be contagious. He met the command of her lips and tongue with a passionate kiss of his own.
Karen's body pounded and churned with lust as his kiss set her ablaze. Yes! That was the way to begin! Now go on from there, she thought.
He did. Without being prompted, he brought his free hand up and let it rest on the jutting globe of her left breast. Karen tingled in satisfaction. She smiled, purred, kissed him more fervently.
His hands roamed over the front of her sweater, gripping the firm globes, squeezing them, waking them. Karen thrilled with delight. She rubbed her cheek against his, nibbled his earlobe, felt a dryness in her throat as the excitement took hold of her.
"Put your hands inside my sweater," she whispered. "Open the bra."
"Karen-"
"Now!" she said sharply.
His face was bright red. But he obeyed. He tugged her sweater up out of her skirt, and ran his hands up, across the smooth bare flesh of her waist, toward the bra. But he didn't seem to know where the catch was. He fumbled around for a moment without getting anywhere.
"In back," she told him. "Silly!"
His hands slid around behind her. Even so, he couldn't manage the complicated catchr of the bra. After another moment, Karen's impatience got the better of her. She slipped one hand up behind herself and un-snapped the bra herself. The cups fell forward, allowing him room to get his hands inside and caress her breasts.
But he hesitated. Karen had to take the lead again. She grasped his hand, pushed it toward her breasts.
"I want you to," she said. "Please!"
His fingers slid into place. Karen nearly went wild. At long last a boy's hands were actually touching her breasts. He was cupping them, his fingertips were digging into the resilient swelling firmness of them. He had found the tips, he was playing with them.
Oh, God, that was good! Oh. yes!
She gasped and sighed. She kissed him again a hard, biting kiss, putting into the kiss all her pent-up desire and lust. She wanted him to push her backward, full length on the couch, shove her skirt up around her hips, pull her panties down, and have her. Right here. Would he?
They were both gasping, now. He didn't want to let go of her breasts, now that he had finally reached that stage. He kept squeezing them, caressing them. Karen twisted restlessly on the couch; She reached out, put her hand on his knee, moved it. He gasped in sudden passion. She let her hand linger. She felt her own cheeks flaming at the shamelessness of what she was doing, but there was no turning back now. That was what she wanted. She wanted him to take her, to go all the way past childish innocence to the forbidden adult game.
But he didn't seem to want to go beyond playing with her breasts. Once again, Karen saw that she would have to take the initiative. If she got herself ready there would be less for him to do, he could more easily be seduced into loving her.
So while he caressed her breasts in a delirium of passion, Karen reached down, found the hem of her skirt, and began to draw it up. Up over her calves, over her knees, past the straps of her garters and the tops of her stockings. He didn't seem to notice. She pulled the skirt up until it was bunched around her hips.
Then she began to take her panties off.
She tugged at them, yanked them down an inch or two. Her heart pounded. Down over the fullness of her hips, down over her navel, over her hips, over her garters, over her stockinged legs. Down and off. The panties dropped to her ankles. She kicked them away somewhere into the middle of the room.
"Go on, Dick-" she said in a strangled voice. "Take me! Now!"
For the first time, he became aware of what she had done. He looked and got the full view: her legs, her bare hips, the straps of her garter-belt, and the nudity between her stocking-tops and her waist. His eyes seemed to bulge. His face was crimson.
Karen shifted her legs, wantonly. She reached for him, tried to pull him closer to her. The throbbing in her heart was agonizing. She was breathless. He just had to help her.
"Dick-please, Dick-"
He leaped back as ttough she had suddenly turned radioactive. Wrenching his hands away from her breasts, pulling them out from under her sweater, he jumped to his feet and stood there, wildly gasping, staring at her. He couldn't seem to take his eyes away from her.
"No," he said. "Karen, this is crazy! What are we doing?"
"I want you to love me, Dick!"
"We mustn't! We're only kids!"
She laughed quotesquely. "Listen to him! You may be a kid, but I'm not! I need you, Dick. And you want me. Come on!"
She would not allow him to leave her tortured by the fit of lust that racked her. She caused a terrible scene, begging him, urging him desperately, and waited for him to step forward and take her. That would be so easy for him. But he didn't.
He staggered back from her, eyes still riveted to her. He shook his head. Sweat was rolling down his face. He was shaking.
"I don't know what's wrong with you, Karen!" he said in a thick voice.
"Nothing!" she cried hysterically. "Absolutely nothing! I'm all right! What's wrong with you?"
"You've gone berserk. You're only fifteen! It isn't right for you to want this yet. Or me. We aren't adults. We-"
"You disgust me," she said suddenly.
"I'm not the only disgusting one," he snapped back at her. "Cover yourself! I don't want to have to look at you!"
"Am I so ugly? You've never seen a woman before, have you? Come on, Dick!"
He shook his head. He seemed terrified of her. "Cover yourself," he said again.
Karen realized that there was no hope. He wasn't going to take the virginity that she hated. Dazedly, she got to her feet. She was crazed with lust, on the edge of collapse. Her brain reeled. She was disheveled, a mess, her bra hanging loose, her skirt around her hips, rumpled and brazen. She stood there, deliberately delaying in covering her nudity. After a moment she reached under her sweater to fasten her bra. She picked up her panties and stepped into them. She let her skirt drop back into place.
She was still disheveled-looking, but at least she was decent now. She was trembling. Her body blazed with unfulfilled lusts.
She walked up to him. The boy stood frozen in his tracks, an expression of wonderment and disbelief and shock on his face.
She spat at him right in the face.
"Chicken!" she cried. "Dirty stinking lousy chicken!"
Karen grabbed her schoolbooks. Then she turned, fiery tears of shame and rage coursing down her cheeks, and unlocked the door and bolted from the room, fleeing wildly down the deserted corridors.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Joanne put down the telephone and smiled a satisfied smile. Bauman had sounded scared, genuinely scared, and she had no doubts but that he would kick in the money she had asked for.
A thousand bucks now-and then a hundred bucks a week for the rest of the year.
Quite a windfall for one itty bitty Utile rape she thought. She'd give some money to Buddy of course-a "loan," they would call it, but they'd both know better. And she'd put some money away in her bank account, and let it pile up more money for her through the wonderful magical device they called compound interest. And she'd squander some, not much, on riotous living.
Oh, yes, it was a good Kfe-now. The old hardships hardly seemed to matter any more to Joanne. The knocks and rebuffs of her adolescence were like memories of bad dreams, products of an uneasy night, vanishing in the bright clear light of morning.
She began to get dressed. It was a beautiful spring day; time to go out and get some fresh air. She and Buddy were having dinner together at six-thirty. Then they were taking in a movie, and afterward she expected that he'd come back to her apartment and make love to her a couple of times. But that gave her the next five or six hours free. A good brisk walk was one way of spending the time. Get out into the sunshine, get some good fresh filthy New York City air into her lungs.
She went downstairs. It was warm, mild, springy. She walked eastward along 45th Street till she came to Eighth Avenue, then turned south. She went past the Greek restaurant where she and Buddy often ate, and waved to the waiter who stood near the door. He waved back and winked. He thought she was a showgirl, and he was always asking, "How's about some free tickets?"
She went on, past some bookstores that made their pile not by selling books, but by peddling in perfect legality the German and Swedish nudist magazines that ran absolutely unretouched photos of German nudists. As always, there was a crowd of men in the stores. Joanne often wondered what would happen if she walked in, picked out a man at random, and offered herself to him.
"Come on," she might say. "Come home and go to bed with me, instead of thumbing through those pictures of naked girls."
Joanne had a pretty good idea what would happen. The man would bolt and run in terror. The sort of guys who crowded the Times Square stores preferred their kicks in the vicarious way. They were safer that way than getting involved with a real live girl, it seemed.
She laughed and walked on. She rounded Eighth Avenue and turned onto 42nd Street, stopping near the corner to buy herself a hot dog. Then, munching the frankfurter, she strolled slowly down 42nd Street, past the myriad movie theaters with their sensational marquees.
She knew that the effect she was causing was pretty sensational itself. She was wearing a turquoise polo shirt that clung voluptuously to the ripe cones of her breasts, and a pair of ruby-colored pedal-pushers which modeled the outlines of her hips, waist and buttocks as snugly as a skin graft. Even on a street that wasn't exactly noted for its sedateness, Joanne was causing a stir. She could practically hear the creaking of vertebrae as men swivelled their heads round to stare at her as she sauntered past.
Good thing I put a bra on this morning, she thought pleasantly. She hadn't bothered with panties, because they would show as a thin line under her tight pedal-pushers. But she knew that if she dispensed with a brassiere, the tips of her breasts would be plainly visible against the taut-stretched fabric of the polo shirt and that would be altogether too provocative for a public street.
She walked up to the corner and stood there, staring up at the shiny Allied Chemical Building and waiting for the light to change.
"Joanne?" a soft voice said.
She turned. And gasped in surprise and pleasure. "Becky!" she cried.
A girl a year or two older than Joanne stood next to her: a tall girl, strapping and full-breasted, with close-cropped red hair, a healthty, vigorous body, a broad grin of pleased surprise.
"I'll be damned," Becky Collins said. "You can meet just about anybody in this city!"
"Especially in Times Square," Joanne said. "God, it's been years, hasn't it?"
"At least four years," Becky said. "Since we worked in that strip shop together."
Joanne nodded. "Four years. It's sometimes been like four centuries. What have you been doing with yourself, Becky?"
"I've been in Vegas, mostly. Showing off my boobs for the tourists. You?"
"Right here in New York, most of the time. I make ends meet."
Becky's face darkened. "I never heard anything from you after your operation."
"It was a success, more or less," Joanne said quietly. "Look, let's go somewhere and talk where it's a little more private."
Becky pointed to the cafe across the street. "How about the Crossroads? Have you had lunch?"
"No."
"Neither have I."
"Let's go, then."
They hurried across. Joanne was still startled by the meeting. When she had been nineteen, and one of the strippers at the club where she had met Mack, Becky had been the star attraction in the show, the long-legged redhead with the giant breasts that all the customers came out to see. Joanne and Becky had become good friends. It was Becky who had loaned Joanne the money to help her keep afloat after losing her job.
Becky and Joanne had also been to bed a few times. Becky was a full-time Lesbian. And Joanne who wasn't necessarily particular about the gender of her bed companions, had willingly succumbed to the big redheaded girl's seductions.
But since she left, Joanne hadn't been in touch with Becky or with anyone else from the strip club-She had been in such a miserable mood that she preferred to keep that whole part of her life a closed chapter. In a way, she was bitter toward Becky because the doctor she had recommended had turned out to be such a heel-though Joanne knew that that really wasn't Becky's fault. She had done her best. Even so, Joanne hadn't wanted to see or talk to any of the people she had known during that era of her life.
Four years later, everything was different. She was far enough removed from that grim period so that she no longer felt as she once had.
Besides, Becky was one hell of an attractive woman. And, Joanne thought, as they sat down at a table in the cafe, that would be an amusing way to spend the afternoon-in bed with Becky Collins, renewing amid acquaintance.
So this is what it's like to be blackmailed, Fred Bauman thought dully. One thousand bucks down and only thirty-seven weeks to pay.
After finishing his conversation with Joanne, he devoted a few moments to working out the arithmetic of his position. It was pretty brutal arithmetic.
Bauman's salary was $9000 a year. Not bad, not good-just average. His take-home pay was in the neighborhood of $140 a week, after state and federal withholding taxes, hospitalization insurance deductions, and things like that. And he was supposed to divert a hundred dollars out of his weekly hundred and forty into the pocket of the enterprising little witch who had lured him into raping her that night in the rain.
That didn't leave much margin. He had managed to save about ten or fifteen dollars a week, out of his hundred-forty. The rest went for rent, food, clothing, household expenses, whatnot. There was money in the savings account, but it was a joint account and he didn't dare touch it Ethel liked to look at the bankbook every now and then. It was supposed to be Karen's college fund, and there were a couple of thousand dollars in it, enough to see him over part of his troubles. But what would he say if Ethel asked him one night, "Why did you take so much money out of the bank?"
No. He couldn't do it that way.
But he told himself that he'd manage it somehow without Ethel's finding out.
The horses, Bauman thought. The nags. They'll do it for me.
Once, long ago, Bauman had been pretty good at playing the horses. It wasn't that he ran with a fast crowd, or that he was a dedicated gambler. But one day a friend had taken him and Ethel out to the track, and Bauman had paid some attention to the way it worked. With his highly-developed accountant's head for arithmetic and percentages, Bauman had taken the races as a challenge.
He worked out a system. He was cautious and methodical about it, and did plenty of paper work. He had never gone for fancy stuff like the daily double, had never bet on a long shot. He left that kind of business to the plungers and the wiseacres and the fools.
Bauman's system involved always backing favorites, and doing it in such a way that he stood to lose almost nothing and gain a little. With his system, he could never be a big winner, but he wouldn't get badly burned, either. Generally, he could go out to the track with $100 and come back with $109. Nothing very spectacular-except that that was a 9% return on his money in a single day. You couldn't do that well in the savings bank.
Of course, Bauman didn't always come out ahead. But over the long run he did. His annual winnings mounted up to fifteen hundred bucks, sometimes two thousand. Then Ethel had asked him to give up the track. "I don't like you spending so much time at that place. It isn't right. Even if you make money out of it, I don't like it. Besides, what if you start to lose all of a sudden?"
They had quarrelled about it for a while-and then Bauman had given up betting, at her insistence, for the sake of preserving family harmony. If it bothered her that much, well, he'd find some other hobby. It was years since he'd last looked at the racing news.
But maybe now he could start again, and pick up the extra cash he would need to pay off the girl. He could find out what the hot horses were, and he could start building up a surplus of cash, without Ethel's ever finding out.
First, though, he needed some money to begin with.
And he needed a thousand bucks to hand over to Joanne right away.
At lunchtime, Bauman left his office and went down to the bank on the corner. He had done business there before, both as a private individual and also respresenting his firm. They knew him and respected him there. There wasn't a reason in the world why they should mistrust him.
Bauman had an interview with Mr. Wilson, the vice-president with whom he had dealt before. Mr. Wilson was plump and pink-faced and very cooperative.
"How can we help you, Mr. Bauman?" he wanted to know.
Bauman told him, trying to look him straight in the eye and maintain a facade of respectability. "I need a general purpose loan," he said. "Fifteen hundred dollars for about six months."
It was easily enough arranged. Fifteen hundred bucks, the only collateral required being his signature-
They weren't afraid of a default. They knew he'd be good for repayment of the loan when the principal fell due in six months' time. They let him have it at six per cent, discounted in advance, of course-one thousand four hundred fifty-five dollars. Bauman knew that his real rate of interest was closer to twelve than six per cent, because of the advance discounting, but he wasn't in a position to haggle. He needed the money, and he needed it fast.
Now he had some.
He had enough now to meet the blackmailer's initial payment, and still have enough left over to see him through a few more weeks' installments to her. He could use some of the money for the horses. If he could make sixty or seventy dollars a week on the nags, he told himself, he'd be able to keep paid up with Joanne, and maybe even put a few dollars aside toward the repayment of the loan. Whatever he couldn't manage to repay when the loan fell due, he'd borrow from another bank, and from another, and another, extending the loans if he had to, until finally he worked his way out of the network of debt.
All he had to do was hit a streak of luck at the races, Bauman told himself, and everything would be okay. A few weeks of winning two or three hundred bucks, and he'd start to gain both on the loan and on the payments to Joanne. And at least this way, borrowing the money from the bank instead of taking it out of the savings account, Ethel would never know a thing about the money. Provided, that was, that he didn't have to pull it from savings anyway when the loan fell due in October. He didn't think he would. He was pretty sure he'd be able to negotiate a new loan, if necessary, with one of the other banks his company did business with.
Bauman had asked the bank to give him the money in the form of a bank check for a thousand dollars, and the rest in cash. The bank check was payable to Fred Bauman. He endorsed the check, slipped it into an envelope, and mailed it to Miss Joanne Harris, Box 356, Times Square Station, New York 36, N. Y. So much for the down payment.
He had better than four hundred fifty dollars in cash. It made a nice thick wad in his wallet. He didn't often carry that kind of money around with him. But, of course, he wasn't going to carry it around for long. If Ethel ever happened to find him with something like four hundred dollars in cash bulging up his wallet, there was sure to be a question-session.
So he went back to the office, not bothering to eat lunch, and put the cash in an envelope. He stowed it away safely in a drawer of his desk at the office, and locked the drawer.
He shook his head sadly. And I was being thrifty by taking the bridge that night instead of the tunnel, Bauman thought bitterly. Just to save on the toll. Big deal. I saved two bits in tolls and I threw away forty-seven hundred dollars. Plus interest.
Bauman started to think about petty economies he could make to ease things up and free more cash for Joanne. Not eating lunch today had saved him some dough, but of course he couldn't make a habit out of that. But instead of spending a dollar and a half for lunch every day, as he usually did, he could eat in the Automat for a dollar or less. He wouldn't starve. And that would save him two-fifty a week and up, ten or twelve dollars a month, right there. He could put that money into the blackmail fund without trouble from Ethel. She'd never be the wiser.
There were other ways he could save, too. He could wear his white shirts three or four days, instead of two. If his collars looked a little seedy, so what? That would cut down Ethel's laundry bills by fifty or seventy-five cents a week, and he could channel that off to the girl who had him by the throat. He could ration himself on cigarettes and liquor and new clothes. He could do lots of things to nick money off his expenses.
By the end of the day, his work was hardly done, but the little adding machine in his accountant's mind had computed that he could manage to save, with careful management perhaps twelve dollars a week out of his pocket-money. That meant he only needed to find eighty-eight dollars a week somewhere, not mentioning the loan due at the bank. Even with luck at the track, he was going to be hard pressed. It was going to be a lousy year, that was for sure.
If I only had taken the tunnel that night, he thought for the millionth time.
It was too late for that now. He was stuck.
As he drove home that night, he took the bridge route again. The quarter toll at the tunnel was an important hunk of cash to him now. He looked to the right at 59th Street to see if the girl were lurking there, waiting for some other sucker.
She wasn't.
She has made her catch for the week, it seemed, and that was enough.
Bauman wondered how many other men in New York were making weekly payments to her because of a moment's lapse. It all seemed unreal to him. But it was no dream. It was very, very real indeed.
Becky Collins said, "Let me take the check, Joanne. I'm loaded with dough."
"Well, if you insist-"
"I do."
"I'll be graceful about it," Joanne said. "Go ahead. It's all yours."
They had had a good substantial lunch, washed down by a couple of bottles apiece of Danish beer. Joanne was in a relaxed good-natured mood now. She had filled Becky in on some of the ups and downs she had had since they had last met, soft-pedaling some of her more garish exploits. She didn't say a word about the blackmail bit, and she went easy on the prostitution angle. But she got the point across, at any rate, that she was in comfortable financial condition now, and not hard pressed any more.
Becky seemed to be doing all right too. She had been pretty well off even back in the strip club days, but, as she put it, "I went out to Vegas and some rich Texans adopted me as their girl-friend."
Joanne had the picture: Becky stark naked in Las Vegas hotel rooms, letting wrinkled-faced, drawling oil millionaires do whatever they wanted to do to her-for a price. A damned good price, if she knew Becky.
And now, weary of the western sun, Becky was back in New York, dressed fit to kill, probably sitting on a hefty pile of stocks and bonds, and looking for new worlds to conquer. Joanne was impressed with the picture. It wasn't exactly the kind of set-up she wanted for herself, but it was a nice deal anyway, and she had to admire Becky's coolness, Becky's savoir-faire, Becky's all-around level-headedness.
They left the restaurant. It was still early in the a fternoon.
"Where are you staying?" Joanne asked. "At the Woodmere. It's only a couple of blocks from here. Want to come up for a while?"
"I'd love to," Joanne said.
She knew exactly what was going to happen if she went to Becky's hotel room. That didn't trouble her at all. It was many months since Joanne had last been to bed with another woman, and she was in the mood for precisely that kind of entertainment now. Besides, Becky was stacked. Joanne with her ambisextrous orientation, was able to appreciate Becky's beauty just as much as any man could.
So they went to Becky's.
They stopped off first in the Woodmere bar. "I want you to try this cocktail that they serve here," Becky said. "It's made with Aquavit and Benedictine and God knows what else, and it's out of the world."
So they had a couple of Woodmere Specials first. They reacted nicely with the beer Joanne had already had. She began to feel pleasantly giddy-not drunk, just a little tipsy.
They went upstairs.
The Woodmere was a good hotel for thrifty types. It didn't quite offer Waldorf-Astoria luxury, but it didn't charge Waldorf-Astoria prices, either, and the rooms were spacious and clean and well furnished. Becky ushered Joanne in and closed the door., Then she spun around and reached for Joanne. A moment later, they were in each other's arms.
"It's been so long," Becky whispered.
"An age and a half."
"I'm so glad I met you today."
They kissed. Hesitantly, at first, almost like two strangers kissing, but after half a second the old warmth and passion came flooding back. Joanne's breasts shoved forward against the firm mounds of Becky's, and her kiss grew warmer and more demanding, and their arms tightened about one another. The kiss was a long and lingering one and when it broke they were both gasping from mounting passion and yearning.
"All this clothing-" Becky gasped.
"Who needs it?"
"Get rid of it!"
They stripped quickly. Joanne, because she was wearing less, was naked first. She yanked her polo shirt off and threw it on a chair, and dropped her pedal-pushers. She .was nude under the pedal-pushers and Becky's eyes brightened at the sight of Joanne's firm legs and bare haunches. Her eyes glistened even more a moment later when Joanne whipped off her bra to reveal the firm white globes of her breasts.
Becky was built to a different scale entirely-much bigger in every direction. Joanne watched her undress, watched her slip out of the tailored suit, watched her divest herself of slip and stockings, then unhook the bra that confined the mammoth globes of her breasts. Joanne had a big, eye-catching bosom, but Becky's were gargantuan, two huge globes nearly the size of basketballs, firm and white and forward-thrusting, tipped with incongruously small dark red nipples.
Becky's figure hadn't suffered any in the four years, Joanne thought. Her breasts hadn't started to droop or hang yet. Those muscles were still doing a tip-top job of supporting her.
Off came Becky's panties, her garter-belt, everything. She stood nude before the equally nude Joanne Her big body was not gross in any way; it was in perfect proportion, with long limbs and a deep chest to balance those huge breasts and heavy buttocks. She was a six-footer, weighing close to one-eighty. A big girl, that was all. Big and healthy-looking, the kind men would pay big money to see in the nude.
"Come here," Becky said.
Joanne went to her. They kissed again, and this time flesh pressed against bare flesh. Joanne stood on tiptoe. Their tongues met. Their waists touched. Their knees were soft and warm.
They kissed tremblingly, moving slightly, slowly. Joanne experienced a thrill of excitement in her breasts.
She ran her hands down the satiny smoothness of Becky's back, down to the lushly abundant ripeness of her buttocks, and grasped the firm flesh. Becky was tanned an olive-brown, all over. No bikini marks across breasts and hips, no white stripes. She had spent plenty of time under the Nevada sun, in the nude, Joanne thought.
They moved toward the bed.
A moment later they were on the bed, hands and arms and lips busy. Becky's knee was touching Joanne's, Becky's hands were on Joanne's breasts. Joanne reached for and found the huge globes of Becky's bosom, and squeezed, and kneaded.
She ducked and dove toward the other end of the bed. A moment later, Joanne was aware of Becky's lips teasing and tantalizing her, kissing her in that special sweet way that only a woman knows. Joanne closed her eyes. She lay back relaxing, ready, welcoming the pleasure. She made hoarse little sounds of delight.
Then, after her brain was starting to reel with pleasure, she scrambled into a different position and tugged Becky down so that they could make each other happy at the same time. Becky was incredibly soft against Joanne's cheeks as she sought her goal.
Then they were both gasping, both panting, both clutching for flesh. Breasts and buttocks, arms and knees, all formed a wild tangle on the bed. Joanne lay back, and Becky's body was good against her. Joanne allowed the big red-haired girl's churning, gyrating body to dominate her own, to lead her toward ecstasy.
They soared upward together toward bliss.
This was altogether different, making love the Lesbian way, from making love with a man. Each way had something to be appreciated and enjoyed. With a man, you had the violence, you had the knowledge of surrender, that he was taking you. You couldn't get that from Lesbian love. But this way had special advantages, too: the softness of female skin, the sensualness of two big breasts against your own, the tenderness of a woman, and the expert caresses that only a woman can give.
Joanne was equally disposed toward both kinds of loving. She took everything in her stride.
Now, gasping in frenzied ecstasy she clung tight to the soft, warm body of Becky Collins, pushing her mouth against Becky's in a passionate kiss, then wrenching her head away so she could draw breath into her lungs through wide-open mouth.
She arched from the mattress. She felt Becky's hands gripping her, digging at the firm flesh.
Ecstasy came in a golden sunburst of pleasure.
The universe pinwheeled wildly. Joanne clung tight, shivered in happiness as Becky's smooth body moved against her own.
Together, they went riding far out on a tide of pure delight.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Another day, another step closer to the grave.
Ethel Bauman was still bored.
The days blurred one into the next. Part of the year there was snow on the ground, and then the leaves began to turn green, and then it was hot, and then the leaves started to drop. She was vaguely aware of the change of the seasons. But not the individual days. They all melted into one unending stream of time. Day after day after day, purposeless, empty, dreary.
It was noon. The sun was shining. The chores were done. How to kill another day? How to use up the empty hours ahead?
The bottle. That was the way. The old joy-juice, what else?
Ethel went to the broom closet. She reached in, grasped the smooth cool vodka bottle, pulled it out, studied it. It was still almost half full. Too bad. If the bottle were almost empty, she'd have an excuse for going out, down to the store, buying a new one. That would provide some excitement to break up the day. But there was still plenty of vodka in the bottle.
A hell of a note, Ethel thought. When a trip to the liquor store becomes a big exciting excursion in your life, something to look forward to.
She poured herself a drink. She added the orange juice. She drank.
She turned on the television set for a while, but there was nothing decent on. Just a baseball game. Who cared about baseball? She didn't. Grown men wearing kid's uniforms, batting a little ball around in the afternoon-and getting paid for it, too. Some of them made a hundred thousand dollars a year for playing baseball, Ethel had heard. A hundred thousand! It took Fred eleven years to make a hundred thousand dollars, and here were men who got that much between March and October every year for doing nothing but hitting a baseball around.
It wasn't fair, Ethel thought.
But nothing ever was fair. She consoled herself with more vodka, and thought about what she could do if her husband made a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Get a house, first. No more living in lousy apartments where you could hear every noise the neighbors made. Get a nice house somewhere out in Jamaica or Great Neck, with a lawn and trees.
Travel. Europe, the Caribbean, Hawaii, all the places she had dreamed of. On their vacations they went to the Adirondacks. Big deal. Once they had gone out to California and Arizona. Big, big deal. What about Paris, Rome, Nice, London, Vienna?
Eat at the fancy restaurants. Ethel had never tasted real caviar in her life. Drink fancy wine. Pheasant, filet mignon, duck in orange sauce.
Oh, you dreamer you!
She poured more vodka into her glass. The stuff was disappearing at a pretty quick rate today. She chuckled. Maybe she'd need to make that trip to the liquor store after all. Another hour or so, at the rate she was guzzling, and the bottle would be empty. But by that time, she reflected, she'd be too potted to go downstairs. It would have meant drinking almost hall a quart of vodka in about two and a half hours. That was pretty good going. She'd be in no shape to go to the store after that.
Ethel laughed. She had some more to drink. The drunker she got, the more keen her thirst was. She got up, waltzed around the apartment, her breasts jiggling under the housecoat and gown that were her only garments.
"Waltz me around again, Tilly-" she sang in a wild, off-key falsetto.
Hey, I'm really getting stoned, she thought. She felt a little frightened. What if Fred called up out of the blue and found her like this? I won't answer the phone, she thought. I'll let him think I'm out shopping. What if Karen came home early from school? What if a friend from the neighborhood dropped in for a visit? What if-
What if the doorbell rang, and it was Mister X, coming to make love to her?
That thought both frightened and excited her all at the same time. She felt so tense that she had to have another drink and she picked up her glass again, and drank its contents rapidly now, not sipping as she usually did, but gulping away. It went down so easily, now. Just as though it was nothing but orange juice.
Ethel began to sweat.
She stood up, peeled off her robe and her nightgown, and hurled them wildly away from her. She looked down at her naked body, at the big sensual breasts, at the slightly too fleshy waist, at the firm legs, the big hips. Desire burned in her. Fred hadn't made love to her last night, either. He was still in a moody, preoccupied frame of mind. She was too inhibited to ask him for love. So she suffered.
She ached for a man.
The vodka helped. But just a little.
She drained her glass and put it down. Her head was swimming. She put her hands over her breasts, cupped them, squeezed them. The tips ached. Her whole being was driven by a frenzy of lust.
She swayed. Suddenly she was terribly dizzy. She took two steps, lost her balance, toppled, fell.
Ker-plunk!
She hit the floor hard. With a real crash. She landed on her hip and left buttock, but the pain went right through to the bone, and she let out a yell of surprise and discomfort as she hit the floor. For a long moment she didn't move, for fear that the floor would sway and writhe beneath her a second time.
It seemed to hold steady. After another moment, she began to pick herself up. Her hip and backside ached, and she figured she'd have a black-and-blue mark there tomorrow. But nothing seemed to be broken. What a flop, though! She was still shaky from it. All of a sudden, her legs had seemed to go out from under her. That had never happened to her before. It was pretty scary.
I must be awfully drunk, Ethel thought.
She told herself that she had better steady herself. The best way she knew of doing that was to have another drink, fast.
So she had another drink. Fast.
She stood in the middle of the living room, hanging on to the back of an armchair, stark naked, very drunk, swaying back and forth. Her head was spinning. Beads of sweat ran down her body, rolling out to the tips of her bare breasts and dropping off into space.
The doorbell was ringing.
Ethel couldn't be sure how long it had been ringing before her ears tuned in on it. All she knew was that it was ringing right now, an insistent nasty buzz. Somebody was out there, she thought.
It's him! Mister X, the lover she had dreamed of for so long!
It had to be. Who else would come out of nowhere in the middle of the day? It was someone sent in answer to her prayers, someone who would take her in his arms and kiss and caress her, and then make love to her as her husband had never done, someone who would show her how to attain the heights of passion. The doorbell went on ringing. "I'm coming!" Ethel yelled.
Stark naked and unsteady on her feet, she began to walk uncertainly toward the door. Her face was flushed and her bare breasts ached with yearning. Sweat rolled in rivers down her excited body.
The doorbell went on ringing. Ethel thought she heard a distant voice, and she thought-she wasn't sure-that the voice was yelling, "Mrs. Bauman, are you all right? Mrs. Bauman?"
"I'm fine," Ethel said.
She threw the door wide open and stood there magnificently, her hands outstretched, her heavy round breasts shaking in feverish agitation.
The day after Bauman had sent the thousand dollars to Joanne, she called him at the office. He winced when he heard her husky, exotic voice whispering to him over his desk telephone.
"I got the dough, sweetheart," she said. "You're a man of your word."
"All right," Bauman said. "Do me a favor, don't call me at the office any more. It's not so private here, you know."
"You want me to call you at home instead, maybe?"
"Don't call me at all. There's no need to call me. I'll pay you."
"You better," she said. "I'm going to be expecting a check for the amount of one hundred bucks the morning of the 16th. That's next Wednesday."
"You'll get it," Bauman said. He bit his lip. Why couldn't she go away and leave him alone? Why did she have to plague him here in his office?
"And I'll be expecting one check every week after that till New Years," she continued.
"Don't worry about me," Bauman grated. "I'll give you your money, you she-devil. You're draining me white, but I'll pay you!"
She ignored the bitterness in his voice. "Aren't you even wondering about this installment-plan business?" she asked.
"What do you mean, wondering?"
She laughed. "Well, don't you see, I'm killing my own case by accepting installments, Freddy. Suppose you decide not to give me another penny, after today's thousand. What can I do? I can't holler rape now-not when you can prove you had paid me a thousand in blackmail already."
"I hadn't thought of that," Bauman admitted. "If you cash that check you don't have much of a claim on me in court, do you?"
"Nope."
"Then why tell me all this?"
"I figured I'd bring it up before you did," she said. "Just in cast you did think of it and tried to freeze the deal. The whole situation is a little different now, but not much. For one thing, you miss a check and I'll yell copper anyway. Maybe the case will get tossed out of court, but you try explaining to you wife that you've been paying me hush-money!"
Bauman winced. "I wouldn't want to have to."
"Besides that, buster, I've got a friend. He's bigger than you are, and he looks out for my interests. You keep paying me or he'll come around to visit you."
"Are you threatening me?"
"Not yet," she said. "Just keep kicking through with your hundred bucks a week, and you'll be okay."
"I told you I'd pay."
"Just make sure you do," she said.
She hung up. Bauman slowly lowered the telephone into its cradle. There was a dull throbbing pain just back of his forehead, and a needle-like sharp stabbing in his stomach. She had him coming and going. There was no escape from her, none at all.
Thousands of people had driven across that bridge that night; only he had bothered to stop and pick her up. Why was he the lucky one?
Let's face it, he told himself sternly: you asked for it. When you picked her up, you wanted something to happen. And something did happen.
And then you got it.
Right where it hurts.
Ethel stood in the doorway, glorying in her nudity. Her cheeks were crimson and she felt wild and dizzy, but she made no effort to hide her bare body.
She tried to focus her eyes.
There was a man standing there. A man who looked familiar. He was gaping at her, his mouth wide as he took in the unexpected sight of her full-bodied, voluptuous bareness.
With a struggle to get her vodka-bleared eyes under control, Ethel recognized him. Mr. Hawkins, the man who had the apartment downstairs. He was a ticket-taker in a Manhattan theater, and he worked evenings, so he was always home this time of day. A handsome man, tall and dignified-looking, maybe forty years old.
He would do, Ethel thought. He would be her Mister X.
"Come on in!" she gaily cried. "Just who I've been waiting for!"
She reached forward, the bare globes of her breasts swaying, and caught him by the wrist. She yanked him into the apartment and closed the door. Then she stood facing him, and as excitement burned away some of the haze of vodka in her brain she was able to see the expression on his face more clearly.
He looked stunned.
But he wasn't hiding his eyes in horror. He was looking right at her, looking her over, getting a good view of breasts and middle and hips and legs.
He said, "I heard a crash-I heard you yell. I was afraid something was wrong."
"Nothing's wrong!" Ethel burbled. "I'm having a party. All by myself. Come joint the party. You want some vodka, maybe?"
"No, I'd better-"
"Don't go away," she said.
She hesitated only a moment. Then she flung herself at him. She threw her arms around him, and grabbed him tight, pulling him against her. She rubbed the passion-swollen tips of her breasts against him. That was good-the fabric against her sensitive skin. She touched him with her hips and knees. She put her lips to his, and kissed him violently, but he didn't respond.
He wrenched his lips away. "Mrs. Bauman-"
"Ethel. Call me Ethel."
"You're drunk."
"I know. Isn't it great?"
"This could cause trouble," he said. "We're both married people."
Ethel let go of him. She stepped back and tried hard to look sober. Her breasts were in agitation, and she knew she was blushing violently. She wasn't in the habit of standing naked before strange men.
She said, "I won't tell anybody if you don't tell anybody. This'll be our little secret."
"Mrs. Bau-"
"The name's Ethel."
"Ethel," he said. "Look, you're a very beautiful woman, but I-"
"Damn you, love me!" she shrieked. "What do I have to do, get down on my knees in front of you? Love me! Right now! I need you!"
She had never said words like those to her own husband, or to any other man in the world. But now, as she stood nude before Charlie Hawkins, the words rame spewing out of her mouth in an uncontrollable flow. She begged him to take her. She trumpeted her need. She hardly felt drunk any more. This was a matter of life and death, this was the craving that could keep her from going buggy with boredom.
Hawkins stared at her with bewilderment written all over his face. Then he said, in a low voice, "I never heard anything like this in my life. You want me to-"
"Come on."
Ethel flung herself at him a second time. She began to claw at his clothes. If she could only get him naked, she thought, he wouldn't hesitate like this. She fumbled with buttons and zippers. For a moment, he tried to push her away. But as he shoved, he happened to put his hand against the ripe lush pinkness of one of her breasts, and what had started as a shove ended as a caress. His fingertips curved around the heavy, taut globe of flesh. At the same moment, Ethel's fingers passed over his clothing. She heard him gasp and snort.
The rest was easy.
In another instant, he was pulling his clothes off. His inhibitions vanished with Ethel's wild assault. She helped him, and soon he was naked except for his socks. Ethel looked him over. He was a bigger man than Fred. And he wanted her very much just now.
They didn't go into the bedroom. For one thing, Ethel was a little queasy about taking him to the bed in which she had spent her whole married life. For another, the bed was made and she didn't feel like mussing it. For a third thing, her passion was so overriding that there was no time to go into any other room.
She pulled him right down to her on the floor, and he had her there.
There was no carpet on the floor. Just bare, cold wood. "It's such a handsome parquet," Fred had said, meaning it would cost a lot of money to carpet it. Now Ethel was aware of the handsome parquet against her back. She didn't mind, not at all.
Charlie Hawkins was against her. He was gasping hoarsely, his face as flushed as hers. His hand grabbed for the big globes of her breasts. His mouth hit hers, and he kissed her, hard.
They didn't waste time. A kind of wild frenzy had come over her, and her keyed-up body, which had been waiting for this moment for eternities, needed no further preliminaries. She was ready. She was as ready as any woman had ever been.
He took her.
He was forceful and Ethel went wild at his assault, and she experienced ecstasy at this moment when her dream came true. This was like losing her virginity, in a way That was a terribly exciting moment for her. She had crossed a border. Until this moment, only her husband had known her. Now she had broken her vows. Now she was free.
Her body, beyond her control, trembled and twisted. A shock of delight went over her. Each moment brought her closer to ecstasy.
He was almost brutal. There seemed to be great strength in him, great endurance. His body worked like a machine, bringing forbidden pleasure to her.
Ethel quivered. Ethel shook.
Ethel exploded with a passion wilder than she had ever experienced before.
Her whole body trembled and went into a convulsion of lust, and she grabbed him tight, her fingers clawing the muscles of his back, and his hands grabbed her buttocks, and he buried his face to the deep hills of her breasts and gasped his pleasure while Ethel found the final peaks of her own.
They were finished. Over and done.
She had sinned, and she had had pleasure from her sin, and now she felt strange and different.
They rested. His hoarse gasping went on for a few minutes. Then he rolled away, and lay by her side. Ethel felt perfectly sober. She knew she had done something wrong, and yet she did not regret having done so, for now her life had a center once again, she had a reason for being alive.
He said, in a strangly deep voice, "This wasn't my idea. Remember that. You practically raped me."
"I know. I don't deny that"
"Why?"
"Because I wanted you," she said. "Do I need any better reason? I'm bored and lonely, and I was drinking to cheer myself up, and I wanted a man. And you rang the doorbell. You were just what I wanted."
He was silent. Ethel got to her feet. She stood naked, looking at him. Her heart still beat thunderously from her ecstasy.
"Do you want a drink now?" she asked.
"I might as well."
She poured vodka for them both. Then she padded back across the room to him and crouched to hand him his drink, her bare breasts dangling forward.
She took a sip of her drink. Then she said, "Isn't it lucky that you work evenings? You're home every day. And so am I. Home and alone and bored. I hope you'll come to visit me more often, Charlie. There are so many things I want to try."
CHAPTER NINE
Sid Miller sat at his handsome limed-oak desk, writing checks. They weren't big checks. He didn't have enough money left for that. They were ordinary garden-variety checks-twenty-five dollars to the telephone company, thirty-five for electricity and gas, the check to his account, to his lawyer, the hundred-dollar blackmail check to Joanne Harris.
They were small bills, at least by the one-time standards of Sid Miller, but they added up. He had better than five hundred dollars worth of bills to pay, and when all the checks had been written, his account balance would be down to a nice round zero, give or take a kopeck or two. That wasn't so good. But he had a check in his wallet for two grand, just received from Switzerland, and when he got that deposited he'd be in better shape-for a while. The Swiss money was just about at its end. Miller had had a rough week financially. He was getting close to rock bottom now, and he would be sunk pretty soon, unless the deal now in the fire came through.
His head ached. His back hurt. He was dog-tired. He had been drinking on and off all day, to ease the deal. There was a girl coming in another fifteen or twenty minutes, and that would help-a little. But not much. Not enough. Miller was in a bad way, and he knew it.
The telephone rang.
He snatched it up frantically on the first ring-an out-of-character gesture for him, because in his more lordly days he had usually let the telephone ring four or five times before deigning to answer.
"Hello?"
"Sid, Harry here."
His lawyer. The man had been working all day on an attempt to revive Miller's career as a real estate operator, by pyramiding a couple of Miller's small properties into a bigger deal that would get him started again.
Miller said, "Well?"
"Not so good, Sid."
Miller kept calm. "How so?"
"They want an escrow before they'll go anywhere," the lawyer said. "I've been hammering away at them all day. They wanted you to put a hundred grand on deposit as a token of good faith. I told them that it was out of the question. I got it down to twenty grand."
Miller closed his eyes. "That's all, huh? Just a twenty grand escrow?"
"How much of it do you have, Sid?"
"Maybe a hundred bucks. If I tear up a couple of these checks I've just written, maybe about two hundred. That's not enough, Harry."
"No. It isn't."
"Can I get financing?" Miller asked.
"On an escrow deal?" the lawyer said. "Be realistic, Sid. Nobody's going to lend you money to help you stake a performance bond. The whole idea of a performance bond is to show that you're solvent. And you aren't solvent."
"No," Miller said. "I'm not. So where do we go from here?"
"I don't know," the lawyer said. "Sell the properties outright and live off the proceeds, I guess."
"And what do I do after that? Eat up the last of my capital and then where am I?"
"I wish I could tell you, Sid."
"Let me tell you, then. I'm nowhere I'm all through. That's where."
"Listen, Sid, maybe I can stop over, we can talk this whole thing through-"
"Never mind," Miller said quietly. "You've done all you can do, Harry. Call it a day. And send me your bill in the morning. I might as well pay you while I've still got a little left. If you wait till the week end you may have to get it from the bankruptcy referee."
"Let me come over and talk to you, Sid."
"What's the use?" Miller asked tiredly. "Thanks for everything, Harry. So long."
He hung up. He hunched himself forward and put his head in his hands.
That was it. The finish, the end. He didn't have any resources left. The money he might have used to start again had drained off in blackmail, in alimony, in lawyer fees, in call girl fees, in everything under the sun. He was just about broke now, and no way to get on his feet.
The door chimed. That lovely, sexy chime. Miller answered it There was a girl there, a girl from the service, a slender, willowy brunette with stunning breasts jutting out against a wine-colored sweater. Miller didn't even bother to be polite with her. There was no airy chit-chat tonight, no pretense of sociability.
"Come on in," he said. "And get your clothes off."
"I'm Nolie," the girl said, looking puzzled by his brusqueness.
"Hello, Nolie. Come on, strip. I don't have all night!"
She smiled uneasily. Obviously she wasn't used to this kind of treatment from her clientele. But, pro that she was, she fell jauntily into the mood. Without protesting or losing any time, she began to get out of her clothes.
Miller watched her. Hungrily.
Off came the sweater and the skirt, the slip, the bra. She had superb breasts, big and white and firm and close together, with small dark nipples rising from their centers. Her body was lean from the chest to the hips, then blossomed out in magnificent hips and legs and buttocks.
"Keep the stockings on," Miller said. "And the garter-belt."
He looked her over. The large, squeezable buttocks, the firm breasts, the gently curving waist, the flaring hips-yes, an absolutely delicious hunk of womanflesh he thought, A girl of about twenty-three, in the prime of her seductiveness, darkly beautiful, with glittering, alert, intelligent eyes-terrific. Utterly terrific.
He got the whip from the closet and handed it to her. Her breasts swayed enticingly as she took it from him. Miller began to undress.
"Hit me," he said, when he was naked. "Good and hard."
She whipped him, as he encouraged her to do. His body tingled with each stroke of the flexible cane; within minutes, he was alive with physical excitement. But tonight he did not care to prolong the preliminaries. Another time, he might enjoy half an hour or so of running around the apartment pursued by the girl with the whip, but tonight he was tense and tight-knit, and he wanted only the release that passion could give him.
"Okay," he said, after a few minutes. "That's enough of that."
The girl smiled and put down the whip. She was panting from her exertions, her breasts gleaming with sweat and rising and falling actively. Her nostrils were wide as she gasped; her small, dark nipples were taut. She was ready.
Miller pointed to the carpet.
"Lie down," he said.
She obliged. He lay down with her. He pressed his body against hers. Almost hysterically, he took one of her breasts to his mouth, kissed it, touched the soft, firm, springy flesh against his lips, enjoying the nipple against his lips. He caressed the breast.
Clawing your way up in life, trying to make something out of yourself. And for what? To get kicked in the teeth eventually, any how. No matter how high you get, Miller thought, there's always somebody waiting to kick you in the teeth.
He felt like crying.
He lifted his head from the girl's breast. She was ready for anything, a nice cooperative girl. He ran his hand across the smooth coolness of her waist, then along her legs, where the silky flesh alternated with the straps of her garters. He touched her soft knees. She give a litle sigh. Good girl, he thought. Put on a show for the customer. Or do you really mean that? Do I turn you on, girlie?
He touched her again. More intimately. She made a gentle purring sound. Miller smiled. He almost felt calm now. He pressed his body against hers. Her arms opened for him. Miller took her.
She was willing and ready. He took her, and she gasped and sighed and trembled and twisted. She wrapped her arms around him, as agilely as a contortionist, locking them around his lower back. He could feel her nails digging him. His body moved, and that was great, and he reached to grab her bare buttocks with his hands.
The flesh was firm and cool and good. He dug his fingers at her flesh.
He was trying to take from her a comfort that mere loving could no longer give him. He was very alone tonight, and no matter how luscious the body he held, that could not help enough. Still, she helped a little.
She was sighing hoarsely. Her fingers were raking his body. Miller put his mouth against her shoulder, nibbled, took a gentle bite. Faster, faster, the dizzy throb of passion over him now. She helped him along. Faster and yet faster she worked, to give him the most intense thrill, and Miller began to snort and gasp in growing ecstasy.
The big moment.
He took his pleasure and his shuddering body shook through a long moment of delight, and he was vaguely aware of her shivering, and acting as though she were really enjoying the moment. Then the tide of pleasure passed over him and was gone. Miller lay exhausted.
He rolled away, after a moment, getting to his feet. She didn't budge at first. She just lay there on the floor, a delectable-looking creature with her pale skin and her dark hair and eyes. Her feet were apart and her breasts were heaving, and her sparkling eyes were smiling at him as though he were the only man in the world capable of making her happy.
Miller felt like hell.
He said, "That was very good, Nolie. Now get up and put your clothes on and go away?"
"I could stay a while."
"Don't bother. I'm in a lousy mood tonight, Nolie. I'm sorry, but that's the way things sometimes go. Ordinarily I'm a little more civil."
"I didn't mind."
"I feel embarrassed for myself," he said. "But I couldn't help that You might as well go."
She smiled and got to her foot. Even now, after he had finished, Miller was able to appreciate the smoothly sensual flow of her body as she stood up, her big breasts swaying like bells, her muscles rippling. She went into the bathroom to tidy herself up, and Miller stared after her, eyeing the firm globes of her buttocks with satisfaction, watching the play of muscles in the two firm cheeks that were so attractively outlined by the upper band of the garter-belt.
While she was gone, Miller walked over to his desk, where the checks he had written earlier were still lying. He studied them for a moment, then picked up the hundred-dollar check to Joanne Harris and ripped it unhesitatingly in half. The blackmailing witch could do without her money this once, Miller thought. He picked up his checkbook and wrote a new check, also for a hundred dollars, and made it payable to "cash."
Nolie came out. Miller watched her graceful motions as she pulled her panties up over the white globes of her buttocks, as she imprisoned the heavy, stunning thrusts of her breasts in her bra, as she slipped her other clothing on. When she was fully dressed and just about ready to leave, he walked over to her.
"Here," he said. "This is for you."
He handed her the check, folded in half. She took it, without unfolding it, looked quickly down at it, then up at him.
"You didn't have to do that," she said.
"I did have to," he told her. "Otherwise I wouldn't have done it. Take it and don't raise a fuss about it, will you? It's the least I can do for you after the way I just treated you."
"I wasn't complaining."
"You should have complained," Miller said. "I used you like an animal. I'm sorry. I feel like a louse for that. The only excuse that I have is that I'm overwrought, and that isn't any excuse. So take the check. Take it and go, Nolie. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about a lot of things."
He was still naked. She stood by the door, fully dressed, and looked at him in an odd way. Then she managed a professional smile and said, "Well, I hope to see you soon. Maybe next time you'll be feeling a little better."
Miller nodded. "So long, Nolie."
She went out. He locked the door of the apartment after her. His head still hurt. His mind blazed with the memory of her, with the image of those long legs, those stunning globular breasts, the picture of her red nipple, the touch of her satiny buttocks against his hands. She had been really a memorable girl, he thought. Too bad he hadn't been in a mood to make the best use of her. Wham, bam thank you, ma'am, and she was gone. With a girl built like that, love-making should have been a slow voyage of exploration.
Too late for that, Miller thought.
Too late for everything.
At least he was calling it quits on a high note bedwise. This Nolie had been a superb dish. Quite a contrast to his first girl, a quarter of a century before. Arlene, that was her name. A fat pig, with ruddy cheeks and boobs like melons and a flabby, thick waist. Miller had had her in a vacant lot one night, down in the weeds and garbage, and that had seemed like the sheerest bliss to him. At fifteen any kind of tramp seems like Helen of Troy.
He shrugged. No use reliving old memories now. He looked at the checks lying on the desk. He looked around the plush apartment. He thought quickly of the good times he had had, and then he thought about how it had felt to go broke.
He walked to the window. He looked out at the dark splendor of Central Park, stretching off for miles to the north. Then he opened the casement. Cool April air blew in. He realized that he was still naked, and he wondered if he ought to put on a robe, at least, before he did it.
He decided not to. He had come into the world naked, and it was appropriate to go out of it that way. Appropriate in more ways than one, because they had all stripped him of his possessions, especially the blackmailer Joanne, and so he couldn't really claim ownership of the clothes on his back. To hell with modesty, Miller thought. When they found what was left of him, they'd throw a blanket over him quickly enough and cloak his nakedness.
He put one leg over the windowsill. He felt very calm, now. He knew that there was no turning back, no imaginable point in staying alive, because he was through, kaput, finished, washed up. If he lived, it would be to spend the rest of his life as a slave to employers and lawyers and blackmailers and grasping wives. Who needed it? Sid Miller didn't.
He put the other leg over the sill, and let himself dive forward like a swimmer leaping into a lake. The night air rushed up around his sweating naked body. He plummeted downward, hundreds of feet, and all the time he fell he waited calmly, knowing that at long last he was going where nobody could make trouble for him any more.
Fred Bauman was having trouble, too. Financial trouble, which was not exactly what he needed most at this particular moment.
His scheme of acquiring Joanne's blackmail money by playing the horses wasn't working out so very well. He didn't have time to go out to the track himself, of course, and so he hunted up his old bookmaker and quietly placed a couple of bets. He had studied the form charts endlessly, and had calculated his system from scratch.
All that happened was that he lost eight dollars. A 3-1 favorite failed even to show, which was something that Bauman's system didn't allow for. Trying to recoup that loss, he tossed another eight away. He was out sixteen, now. He started to squirm.
He studied the charts even more closely. His system produced a winning day: a net take of $1.15. The next day, he dropped $5. Things weren't going properly at all. He began to see that it wasn't going to be so simple to recoup his money this way. His system supposedly protected him against big losses, but at the same time it guaranteed that he'd never make a big winning. And a streak of improbably bad luck could really hurt him, since he was fighting against time. He didn't have all that much money that he could use as his stake for wagering. A hundred bucks a week had to go to Joanne. And he knew he ought to be putting aside at least ten dollars a week toward the ultimate repayment of his bank loan.
The following Tuesday, he stopped off at the bank and bought a hundred-dollar money order. He didn't dare send the girl a check drawn on his own account, because there was always the chance that; Ethel might suddenly decide to go over the checkbook swne Sunday afternoon. That could lead to all kinds of problems. Bauman could see it now: Ethel coming into the living room, checkbook in hand, a mildly puzzled look on her face.
"There's this check made out to a Miss Joanne Harris," she would say mildly. "One hundred dollars. What's it for, Fred?"
Bauman didn't care to risk that. So he sent a money order, even though it was a few cents more expensive than a check, and involved making a special trip to the bank. He mailed the money order off.
One payment down and thirty-six to go.
Strain-lines began to appear in his face as the days crept along. A second week passed, and another hundred dollars in money order went off. Bauman tried to pretend to his business friends, to his wife, to their occasional guests, that everything was all right.
"Sure, I'm a little tired," he said. "The tax season-it was really rough this year. But I'll pick up. Wait till summer."
He started to look worse and worse, though, instead of better and better. People started to tell him so. It was May, now, and the weather was sunny and bright, but he walked around with a shrunken, waxy winter pallor. The head of his firm even suggested that he take a couple of weeks off, with pay, a kind of early vacation.
It was a tempting idea. He could collect his pay and maybe get another job for the two weeks. He'd leave home at the usual time every day, and Ethel would never be the wiser, and at the end of the two weeks he'd have earned an extra hundred fifty bucks or so. But then the summer would come, and Ethel would say, "Where are we going for our vacation this year?" and he'd be in a mess.
He'd have to tell her. "Oh, I took my vacation in the early part of May, didn't you know? I was holding down a temporary job to make a little extra cash so I could pay my blackmail money."
Sure. Great.
So he had to turn the idea of the early vacation down. He just went plugging along. Every Tuesday he mailed off his money order for a hundred smackeroonies.
But it was getting tougher and tougher. Whatever magic touch he had once had with the horses seemed to have disappeared. He had a little luck with the beasts, but not much; so far, through the first couple of weeks, he showed a net loss of forty dollars on his bets. That wasn't helping him very much toward surmounting his deficit.
The trouble was that there was too much at stake. He had his back to the wall, and couldn't let up. In the old days, when he played the horses, he had felt relaxed and confident. He could give his system full rein. But not now. Now that he had to produce, now that it was vital to show a net profit, he was pressing too hard. Fiddling around with his system. Not trusting it. He was going for bigger killings now, in the hopes of reducing his earlier losses--and the overall result that he was adding to his losses instead of decreasing them.
He had started with about four hundred and fifty left over from the bank's loan after paying Joanne her initial thousand dollars. By the end of the third week, that surplus was just about used up. He had sent three hundred dollars to Joanne, with another hundred due to go on the following Tuesday, and he had dropped money on the horses, and he hadn't so far put aside a red cent for amortization of his loan. He was getting into very deep and very hot water now. He would have to start channeling money from other sources.
He squeezed some cash out of his weekly paycheck. Ethel didn't keep such close watch on him, and he was able to slide five or ten dollars out of his take-home without raising a storm at home. He nibbled a little out of his savings account, ten dollars here, fifteen there. The rest came from his lunch money and his cigarette savings and the tunnel tolls that he no longer paid.
Somehow he made the next payment, the fourth. And the fifth. But there was Number Six coming up, and he wasn't sure how he'd manage.
There were thirty-two payments still to go, all told. Each week, Bauman knew, he was going to have to go through the same grim process, scrabbling and scraping around to come up with the necessary C-note. And when October arrived, the bank was going to want fifteen hundred more from him on that loan. Would he be able to refinance it? Would he have to turn to another bank? He didn't know. He saw chaos ahead.
The decision crept up on him slowly. Bauman didn't know when the thought first entered his mind, his dreams, whispered suggestions in his ear as he worked.
The sixth week he put down twenty on a sure thing at five to two. The good odds were tempting. It went against Bauman's system to stake so much money on a single bet, but he had studied his form charts carefully, and despite the relatively long money, he had concluded that the other horses in the race were duds. His nag would walk home easily, and he'd pick up fifty dollars for his twenty, and that would put him a long way back on the road to recovery.
Everything went fine, except that the horse forgot to win. It finished fourth on a muddy track, and Bauman's twenty-spot went down the drain. From that moment on, he knew he was sunk unless he forgot about the race track and took some more positive way of dealing with his blackmail problem.
It was getting tougher and tougher to find the weekly hundred. Before long, he'd be embezzling or holding people up or else coming right out and breaking the truth to Ethel and facing the consequences, which would not be pretty. And the cold suspicion was dawning on Bauman that perhaps his obligation to Joanne would not end with the final payment at the end of the year. Why should she stop there? Perhaps she would go on, bleeding him dry for the rest of his life, extorting new payment after new payment and never being satisfied with what he gave her.
Bauman knew that he would never last out the year this way. If the strain didn't break him, it would be a sheer miracle. He had to do something.
He made up his mind at the end of the sixth week.
He was going to have to kill Joanne Harris.
CHAPTER TEN
Ethel Bauman was getting the adultery habit.
That wasn't really a hard habit to get, once you were in the swing. And Ethel was very much in the swing by now. Weeks had passed since her first wild session of love making with Charlie Hawkins, and what puzzled her now was how she had been able to get along any other way for so long.
They had things down to a routine, by now. Every day, as soon as her husband headed for work and her daughter went off to school, Ethel would throw herself into her household chores with fierce energy, so as to have them out of the way by noon at the latest. Then-maybe three days a week-Hawkins would come to visit her.
That was easy for him. His wife was a schoolteacher and she was away during the day. His kids were away, too. So they were both alone, he one floor below her. Of course, he couldn't come upstairs to make love to her every day. Ethel would have preferred things that way, but she had to recognize that there were certain human limitations on the man. He had to sleep with his wife at least some of the time, or she'd get suspicious.
Week-ends, of course, were out. But that left five days a week. Some weeks, Hawkins came up on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. She timed her trips outdoors, to the market and such, for the days when he wasn't around to give her pleasure.
She felt very strange about her new career as an adulteress. She had lived such a conventional, prosaic life up to now. True, she had lost her virginity before her marriage, but that had been the only daring thing she had ever done in her life. And the man she had lost her virginity to had been the one she ultimately married, so even that hadn't really been particularly wicked.
And now-
Now she had been unfaithful to her husband a tew dozen times. She had learned things about the act of love, and about her own responses, that she had never suspected before. Hawkins was an active, virile man, pretty bored with his wife, who was willing to put all his strength to work to make Ethel happy. So she was blossoming. She was radiant. Five years had dropped off her, it seemed; she had lost a little weight, and she looked fresh and glowing, with that special glow that a woman casts when her physical needs are being taken care of properly.
It was strange. As Ethel glowed ever more radiantly, her husband seemed to be aging in the same proportion. Ethel didn't know what was the matter with him any more. Fred seemed so tired, so discouraged, so elderly all of a sudden. He had lost weight, too, but it didn't look good on him; he had started getting gray very fast; his face was wrinkled and weary. Ethel didn't understand it. He hardly even tried to sleep with her any more. He seemed to have gained fifteen years in the last month and a half.
She wondered about it, sometimes. Maybe he was sick-maybe he had some kind of tumor that was sapping his strength from within. "You ought to see a doctor," she suggested, but he shrugged the suggestion off. Maybe it was nothing but a bad case of overwork, Ethel decided.
She didn't really care too deeply. Right now she was much too wrapped up in herself-in her love affair.
My love affair. The three words made her tingle with excitement. To rise above the drab boredom of daily life, to know thrills and ecstasies-well, sure, that was wicked, but wasn't she entitled to a little wickedness once in her life? She had been good so very long, Besides, she was still young, still passionate, and her husband seemed to have lost all interest in her. It was hardly all her fault if she turned to infidelity, was it? She had to do something to keep from withering away from boredom and frustration.
Charlie Hawkins was the answer.
She waited for him now. It was ten after twelve on a hot May day, a Monday. Ethel had already made her daily telephone call to her husband's office, and had had her usual vague and unsatisfying conversation with him. He didn't have much to say these days.
Ethel was wearing a bathrobe over nothing at all. She liked being naked for Charlie. Her body, alive now with a voluptuous eagerness it had not known for a long time, pulsed with anticipation and yearning. She was aware of the pounding of her heart, the pulsing of the nipples of her breasts. Soon he would be here, she thought. Soon she would run to him, and throw off her robe, and stand nude before him, and-
She busied herself preparing the drinks. Charlie Hawkins liked vodka and orange juice too. He, too appreciated its lack of a telltale flavor.
Ethel wasn't drinking as much now as she had been a few months before. Love, not alcohol, was her favorite boredom remedy these days. Her drinking-with Charlie-was purely sociable, and they generally had just a single drink, maybe two, before they got down to the business of love So she was buying a lot less vodka than before, and drinking a lot less. She felt better for it.
Now she opened a fresh can of orange juice, got everything ready. Her body was tense with need. She hadn't seen him since last Thursday, and since Fred hadn't wanted her all week-end, Ethel was aching with desire. Friday, Saturday, Sunday-this was the fourth day. That was a long time to go without a man, when your needs are awakened this way.
She heard him in the hall. A moment later, the bell rang. Ethel scampered to the door, her breasts bobbing under her loose robe. She opened it, and let him in to the apartment. "Charlie-"
"Hi," he said. "How's my baby?"
"Hungry for you, Charhe."
Hawkins grinned. At the outset of their relationship, he had been hesitant, uncertain, troubled about everything. When they were actually loving, he was self-confident and capable, but the rest of the time he had been worried about the risks they were running and the possible consequences. Now, that was wearing off. They had been getting away with this for six weeks now, and he was beginning to get assured. When he walked into the apartment, it was with a swagger of bold triumph.
Ethel closed the door. Then she went to him. She pushed against him, giving him plenty of action. His arms went around her, his fingers digging at the soft flesh of her shoulders. Their lips met. His kiss grew demanding. Ethel trembled with passion.
She pulled away from him after a moment. "Let's have a drink, huh?" she said.
"Sure thing. God, what a hot day this is! It must be above ninety."
"Make yourself comfortable," Ethel said.
She walked toward the kitchen to get the orange juice out of the refrigerator. Pausing for a moment at she door of the living room, Ethel shrugged her bathrobe off and draped it across the back of the chair. Completely nude now, with her back turned to him, Ethel could feel the tingle of his eyes as they passed down her body toward her buttocks.
When she returned a moment later, carrying the tray with the drinks, Hawkins had undressed, too. Ethel smiled at him. She came toward him, her body eager, her breast-tips going rigid as he looked at her. Even now, weeks after the beginning of their affair, Ethel had never lost that sense of thrill as she stripped for him. She loved to have him look at her. He had a way of caressing her with his eyes alone that practically drove her wild.
"Here," she said, handing him his drink. "Drink hearty."
Hawkins grinned. He reached with one hand to take the glass, and with the other to cup briefly the jutting globe of her left breast. He pinched the lust-rigid nipple playfully, put the glass to his lips, and said, "Cheers." They both drank.
Ethel shook with need. She got her drink down the hatch fast. Hawkins seemed more relaxed. He sat there, as she looked at him.
She moved toward him, putting her empty glass down. Dropping to her knees on the bare floor, she crawled up to him. She gazed with rapture at his face, which glowed with anticipation. She caressed him lightly, teasingly, and taen kissed him, tantalizing.
He sighed deeply. He was impatient, wanting more, but thrilled by her fleeting caress.
She tired of teasing and grew passionate. This was something that disgusted Fred, but Hawkins was different-she knew from his hoarse breathing how much pleasure she was giving him. Her own body tingled ecstatically At times like this, she was aware of the strength of him, in the most direct way. Once, a few weeks ago, she had finished him this way. That had left her unsatisfied, of course, but she had been pleased simply to be able to gratify him. And then, after resting half an hour, he had pleased her the usual way, anyhow.
Now, Ethel paused when she knew that he was growing excited. Her own need was too great today to permit any one-sided pleasures. Breathing hard, Hawkins put down his glass and said, "Now, my turn."
He got down on the floor with her. Ethel lay back, closing her eyes, knowing that delicious sensations of pleasure soon would be hers. She loved Hawkins' hand running over her body, from her breasts to her knees He held her legs a moment, and then Ethel began to gasp in pleasure as his kisses began.
She went wild with ecstasy. He knew how best to thrill her completely, cupping her breasts with gentle hands as he pleased her. Soon, Ethel was shivering with delight.
"Now both of us," Hawkins said.
Thai was something he had shown her last week-a simple and obvious way that they could both offer pleasure at once. She didn't know why that had never occurred to her, except that her mind wasn't really trained for thinking that way yet. But he guided her into position, pressing his hands on her buttocks and swinging her. Her anticipation was so great she could hardly control herself. A moment later, she trembled as he returned to her and busily renewed the pleasure.
For long moments they continued. Her hands touched him tenderly, and he grasped the heavy hills of her breasts. They moved eagerly. Ecstasy rippled through Ethel's entire body, and she trembled, feeling chills of delight.
At last she could wait no longer. "Hurry!" she cried hoarsely. "Now, Charlie! Now!"
They separated hastily, then found one another again. Their mouths met in a frenzied kiss, their hands groped and caught each other, then tore apart as their arms tangled in a tight embrace. Her body was out of control, screaming for him.
He took her.
"Oh, yes!" Ethel half-shrieked. "That's good, that's so good yes, yes!"
He laughed, a deep, booming, confident laugh. He drove her to the heights of passion immediately. Ethel clung to him, reeling dizzily, stunned by the power of the sensations she was experiencing. Had anything ever been like this with Fred? Ever, even in the beginning when she had been young and wonder-smitten by love? She didn't think so. She didn't think anything had ever been so powerful.
Hawkins continued. Her heavy breasts flattened. Her tall nipples drilled like little pebbles. Ethel flung her arms out, then tightened them high around his shoulders. She twined them around him. hammering her nails against the skin of his back.
He worked in a mild rhythmic tattoo. Ethel met him with eager counterassaults of her own. Her whole body shook.
Then the full fury ol her culmination arrived. Higher she soared, higher and yet higher, into wild, unknown regions of ecstasy. Every nerve in her body trembled like a taut bowstring. Her body itself seemed to dissolve and drop away, leaving nothing but pure sensation behind. Her eyes were closed, her arms were locked around Charlie Hawkins' broad back, she was working furiously. She was aware that he had achieved his fulfillment. She experienced the blaze of her own.
Then everything ended.
Slowly, artfully, Hawkins brought her down from the heights of her passion, until they both lay quietly on the floor, breathing hoarsely, their bodies stippled with sweat. His hand rested on her breasts, cupping both the big mounds together. Ethel did not open her eyes. She listened to the fading thunder of her heart.
As always, in the moments after the greatest joy, there came the doubts and the inner questions. She did not voice them Why ruin his pleasure? Why insert a note of uncertainty and fear?
Yet she could not help but feel apprehensive. The very intensity of her ecstasy, the dynamic, triumphant surge of sheer pleasure, had made her feel troubled. For she knew that in this world you never got any pleasure without paying a price. What she was doing was shameless, wicked, immoral. No matter what rationalization she offered, there was no getting away from the fact that Ethel Bauman was breaking her marriage vow. She lay there naked on the floor of her own apartment in wantonness, and she could pretend that she was doing so out of boredom or because her husband was neglecting her, but the fact still remained that she was doing something wrong
She knew she was doing wrong.
And she knew that fate was going to exact a price. It had to. Pleasure wasn't free, Ethel knew.
There was always some sort of price.
It was Monday of the seventh week, and Fred Bauman knew he was near the end of his rope. He couldn't go on paying Joanne Harris her blackmail money mucn longer, and he couldn't afford to let her expose him. The time had come to take the step that he had been planning in a hesitant way for some days now.
He wasn't sure quite how to begin. The first thing he tried was, he knew, doomed to failure, but he tried it anyway-hoping it might work. If some new post office clerk, who didn't know all the rules and regulations, happened to be on duty-
What he did was to telephone the Times Square Station post office and say, "Is it possible for you to give me the home address of somebody who rents one of your post office boxes?"
"I'm sorry, sir, we can't do that," was the firm reply. "It's strictly against our policy to divulge such information to anyone."
Protesting, Bauman said, "It's extremely important that I get in touch face-to-face with a certain boxholder this afternoon. It's a matter of great importance to her. I know it's a little irregular, but couldn't I possibly have her home address?"
It was like arguing with a machine. "I'm afraid not, sir," Bauman was toW. "Boxholders pay for the privilege of privacy, and we cannot release personal information concerning them."
"I see," Bauman said unhappily.
Then came an unexpected statement: "If you wish, sir, you could give me your message and I would phone the person in question-strictly as a favor, you understand. The Post Office Department doesn't prescribe such services. You say it's urgent?"
"Not that urgent," Bauman said. There was no sense sending any messages via a third party. That would only get Joanne scared. He thanked the Post Office man for the offer, and hung up.
So they wouldn't let him have the home address. Well, that wasn't really a surprise, Bauman thought There was another way of making contact with her.
He pondered it all evening. His mood was tense and edgy. It was a direct contrast with Ethel's. She was buoyant and cheerful, whistling and grinning. Bauman didn't understand why his wife was in such a bubbly mood these days. Always waltzing around the apartment, always gay and merry. She had taken off some weigh', too, and she looked livelier and healthier than he could remember her being in ages. What was the story?
He didn't know. Certainly it couldn't be anything he had done, because he knew that during this time of stress he had been little but a grouch. Even when he slept with her, once or twice a week, he didn't sense that she enjoyed him in any way. But the rest of the time she was as happy as a vagabond.
Was she ill, he wondered?
But he doubted that. Maybe it was simply springtime, Bauman thought, that was making Ethel so cheerful all of a sudden. He put the matter out of his mind. He had more serious things to think about.
The next day was Tuesday. At lunchtime, Bauman stopped into the bank and bought his usual hundred-dollar money order. It took his last remaining supply of free cash to do it, but he didn't let that trouble him, because he knew that this was going to be the last one.
He did not put the money order into the mails, as he had done with the previous six. Instead he put it in an envelope, slipped it into his desk drawer, and left it there overnight.
Reaching his office at ten minutes to nine the next day, Bauman took the envelope from his drawer and crossed the room to his superior's desk.
Bauman said, "Tom, I've got to go out on some errands this morning. A little shopping for the home-I'd like to get it done before the afternoon rush starts. I'll put in the time after five o'clock today. Will that be okay with you?"
"Sure, Fred. Anything you like. You know it doesn't matter, as long as the work gets done."
Bauman smiled. "Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that."
He left the office and walked briskly across town to the Times Square post office station. It was a warm morning at the end of May, with a balmy breeze blowing down the crosstown streets.
He reached the post office at quarter after nine. I hope she hasn't been here yet to pick up her mail, Bauman thought anxiously.
Somehow he doubted it. He didn't think Joanne Harris was the type to get up this early in the morning, even for the sake of collecting a hundred dollars.
Strolling into the lobby, Bauman looked around for the rooms of post office boxes. He found them after a moment or two of searching, and casually sauntered toward them, watching for the girl lest she come up on his unawares. He looked up and down the rooms of boxes for the right one. Ah. Number 356. There it was.
Through the smoked glass window of the box, Bauman could see an envelope lying within. Good, he thought. That meant she hadn't been here yet to pick up her mail.
He walked over to the stamp window, keeping an eye on the boxes, and joined the line. He edged up step by step to the counter, continually glancing over his shoulder to make sure he didn't miss the girl.
The clerk had to ask him twice what he wanted, before Bauman realized he was being spoken to. Shamefacedly, he swung around and peered through the window "Uh, give me two five-cent stamps," Bauman blurted.
He put down his dime, took the stamps, jammed them in his pocket. Still no Joanne. Plenty of people were showing up at the boxes to get their morning mail, but nobody that he recognized as the girl. He hoped he would recognize her. After all, he had seen her for only a short time, at night, neatly two months before. Naked he would certainly spot her. The memory of those bare breasts blazed in his brain. But he wasn't so sure about her face. The details of her features were beginning to fade.
He waited. He knew that loitering in the post office all day would simply not be allowed. Sooner or later, some post office guard would decide that he was casing the joint, and would ask him what he wanted. And then Bauman would have to leave.
He also knew that the girl might wait all day before she decided to go down to the post office and pick up her mail. Could he wait here all day for her? That would be abusing the privilege he'd been granted at tie office. They were expecting him to be out an hour or so at most, not the whole day. Besides, she might not even come at all.
Still, he had to find her.
Without taking his eye from the boxes, Bauman went to another stamp window and shuffled along the line until he reached the front.
"Give me an airletter sheet," he said, because it was the first thing that came to his mind.
He paid his eleven cents and got the airletter. Then going to the table that faced the wall in which the postal boxes were mounted, Bauman picked up the cheap ball-point pen that was chained there and started to write a letter, pausing every few moments as if to think of a phrase, but actually simply looking up to see if the girl had arrived. She hadn't. Well, no one would accuse him or loitering, if he seemed to be writing a letter. Nor had he missed her, he knew, because the letter that had been in her box was still there.
Bauman had no idea of what to write, so he slowly and gravely covered the blue airletter sheet with the words, "Having wonderful time, wish you were here," over and over again. By ten o'clock he could no longer stall over the letter any more. He put down the pen, folded the airletter sheet as instructed, and sealed it. Addressing it to Santa Claus, The North Pole, Bauman slowly carried it across the floor and dropped it in the airmail chute.
Ten-fifteen, now.
Bauman went outside and paced up and down in front of the ma'am entrance of the post office. Every few minutes he darted a glance inside to see if she had come in through some other door. The day was getting very hot, now, and Bauman was roasting in his jacket and tie.
Ten-thirty.
Ten-forty-five. They were going to be wondering, at the office, what had happened to him.
At eleven o'clock Bauman went back inside the post office and checked her box. The letter still sat there. He went to the stamp window, and bought a second airletter sheet. It necessary, he was ready to kill the whole day this way.
As he started to go to the writing table, he looked up and saw her-at last.
She was opening Box 356 and reaching in for her mail.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Karen didn't know how much longer she was going to be able to stay sane. The weeks were sliding by. The weather was turning hotter. She was getting closer and closer to final exams, and she knew she was heading for a really catastrophic blow-up in two or three of her. courses. She couldn't help that. She was going out of her mind with the need for a man, and she didn't know what to do about that.
This was a funny business. Karen had always thought that in our society men are forever chasing after women, looking for love, and women are forever fending them off. Not so. At least not where she was concerned. Down on the level of Karen Bauman, age fifteen plus, it worked just the opposite way. She wanted love-and the boys were scared stiff of her.
What was the matter, she wondered?
She wasn't ugly. That she was sure of. She was a provocative girl if she was anything. She didn't have two heads. Her personality didn't repel people.
So why wouldn't anyone sleep with her?
Karen knew the answer to that. It was because she went out with the wrong type of boys. She went out with the nice clean-cut middle-class sixteen-and seventeen-year-old boys who Simply Didn't Do That Sort Of Thing. They were too polite, too well-behaved, to perform a dirty act like that with a girl of their own background.
They were scared, Karen knew.
Scared of getting into trouble, for one thing, because there was a law about going to bed with a girl under the age of eighteen. Scared of other things too though. Scared of maybe having to marry her, which could louse up their own plans for an Ivy League future. Scared of catching something-for how did they know they would not? Mast of all, scared of being shown up like the immature kids they were, kids who didn't have any idea what to do with a girl.
Karen knew where she could go if she wanted an initiation into love. Go across town, into one of the tough sections. All she had to do was stand around for ten minutes wearing a tight sweater, and she'd get picked up and taken care of That was for sure.
But she hesitated.
Now she was the scared one. She was afraid of tough treatment; she was afraid of the whole slum setup. She preferred to get her first loving from a boy in her own background group, somebody she went to school with. But that didn't seem too easy to arrange.
She had tried. She had tried with Dick Stearns, in the most obvious way, and the net result had been that now he shunned her in school as though she were carrying the Black Death. He wouldn't even look at her when they passed in the halls, and he would have resigned from the United Nations Club except that Karen's academic difficulties had forced her to drop out instead.
Naturally, she wasn't dating him any more. But it was just as bad with the boys that she did date. Karen would ever so discreetly let them know that she could be had, but either they didn't get the message or else they chose to ignore the message.
All her passionate wriggling, all her gasping and sighing, all her lustful kisses, all her little hints, failed to produce the desired effect. Karen was chaste but not chased. What did you have to do, she wondered, to get made in this world?
She knew the answer: you had to grow up. A fifteen-year-old who didn't live in the slums simply didn't have the opportunities of immorality that a more ragged girl did. She was bound by the rules of her own society, and she would just have to wait until she was a few years older and a different set of rules applied to her. A time would come when it would he unfashionable for a girl in Karen's group to be a virgin-but right now, virginity was in and sin was oat.
Karen didn't know how she could manage to hold out until she was eighteen or thereabouts. But, as things turned out, she didn't have to wait after all.
It happened about quarter to five on a Wednesday afternoon in May. Karen had stayed late at. school, not to serve in one of the extra-curricular clubs, but for the more humiliating purpose of attending an after-hours cram course in Spanish held for the benefit of flunking students. Now she was on her way home. She had to walk four blocks from the school to the bus stop.
As it happened, the route she travelled took her a safely middle-class neighborhood. But just to the south was a broiling, roistering slum zone, which luckily had r. high school all its own.
Karen stared into the run-down area as she skirted along the north edge of a slum district. The school itself, and the homes of everyone who went to it, lay in it. Out there, she knew, a girl stopped being a virgin when she was eleven or twelve, and usually had had many men by the time she was fifteen. Karen wasn't all that eager to find out about love. But she envied the slum people the freedom of morality that they had. That was about all you could envy them for, after all.
She was still a block from the bus stop when the boy came up to her.
It was hard to tell his age. He was small and thin and wiry, and stood no more than inch or two taller than Karen. From his height and from the slightness of his build, he might have been fourteen. But his face was no fourteen year-old face; his eyes were cold and bard, his lips thin and predatory, his forehead creased with lines. It was the face of somebody who knew what hunger was and how it felt to have rainwater dripping through the ceiling onto your bed. His face was smudged and his dirty white T-shirt was torn in a couple of places. He was sweaty.
He crossed Karen's path and said, "Hello, good-lookin'."
"Hello."
"Where you goin'?"
"Home," she said. Her heart picked up a beat or two. He was blocking her.
"Let's go take a little walk," he suggested.
"Where to?"
"You come visit me."
Karen shook her head. "Some other time," she said, and started to walk around him. He promised adventure and mystery-but also danger. She wasn't all that sure she wanted the kind of adventure he offered.
But she didn't have any choice. She took two steps, and then he moved against her. His face was inches from hers. He reached into his pocket and came up with something, holding it between them, not far from the rising thrust of Karen's breasts. Karen saw what it was. It was a switchblade knife. His finger was on the button.
He said in a low, ugly voice, "You raise a squawk and I gonna cut you good Come on with me and make like you want to."
Karen's pulse raced. "What are you going to do?" she asked.
"You'll find out when soon enough," he told her.
"Come on and keep quiet."
He slipped his arm through hers, and they walked off-crossing the street that divided one neighborhood from the other. It all seemed somehow dream-like to Karen, that she should be kidnapped on the public street in broad daylight by this dirty little slum boy. She was afraid-and yet intrigued at the same time. Maybe the thing for which she had been searching so hard had found her, she thought, when she wasn't even looking.
He was very close to her. One of her breasts was pressing his side. The contact excited her. They walked a block and a halt, until they were on a street of old, dilapidated apartment houses.
"In here," he said.
He guided her into the basement door of one of the houses. Karen felt herself moving through a dark passageway, then through an inner courtyard, finally into another passage with what were probably storage rooms opening off it. He opened a door.
"Look what I got," he announced.
By the dim light, Karen saw five or six boys, ranging in age, she guessed, from about thirteen to sixteen. They were sitting around on the floor in a dismal, cob-webbed room. The strong smell of beer was in the room. The boy who had brought her pushed her in.
He closed the door. And locked it.
He turned to her and said, "It won't do you any good to yell down here. But just in case, one peep out of you and I'll knock all your teeth right down your throat"
"Hey, looka the boobs!" somebody said in a high, piping voice.
"Get her shirt off!" said somebody else. "Give her some beer first."
Karen began to feel frightened. There were too many of them, and this place was too sinister. She wouldn't have minded one of them, losing the virginity that plagued her so much, and going home at last released from the demon of her innocence. But half a dozen of them, in this steamy, foul-looking basement room-
"Here," one of them muttered. "Have some beer, sister."
He thrust a can almost into her mouth. Karen took it-her hand was shaking, she realized-and drank it down. She didn't like beer much. The first taste was bitter, and made her want to gag. But it was cool, and she was thirsty and afraid, and drinking the beer calmed her. She swallowed gulp after gulp.
Then she looked around. "What's going on here?"
"We gonna have some fun," they told her. "Take your clothes off!"
"Sure," Karen said. "Be glad to."
They looked startled at that. Obviously they were expecting her to put up a tough resistance. They were all ready to jump her and hold her down. But they were in for a surprise, Karen thought. She grinned at chem.
Then she began to unbutton her blouse. They were awed. She opened it, button by button, and took it off and carefully draped it over her schoolhooks on the floor to keep it from getting dirty. She stood there facing them in her bra and skirt, and said, 'You want more? Let's have more beer."
"Give her a beer, Joey," someone said.
She took the can and put it to her lips. The beer gave her courage. She drained the can as though it contained ice-water. Funny how beer began to taste better after the first few sips, she thought. She felt woozy and excited. This was one fantasy she had never had, but she had the feeling she was going to enjoy this-if she didn't panic.
Karen tossed the empty can to one of her audience.
Then she unhooked the bra and peeled it off.
She heard them gasp in pleasure as she bared her breasts, letting them see the two big, firm, red-tipped mounds Did the slum girls they made have breasts rise that. Karen wondered? The skinny, badly-proportioned girls with the poor diets?
Her breasts ached. The tips seemed to blaze. The idea of baring them like this to half a dozen boys at once made her feel almost dizzy.
"More beer," she said.
Another can was produced. Karen was still thirsty, but she was closer to her capacity than she thought, because after only a few sips she realized that she had had enough beer. The first two cans had gone to her head. She felt very dizzy all of a sudden.
"Take it off, take it off!" they were yelling.
Karen took it off.
She gave them a free show that was most likely infinitely more than they had been expecting. Down came her skirt, and then off went her half-slip, and her panties, and her socks, and that was all. She was completely naked in front of them. She stood there, letting their hard, beady eyes stalk the sloping contours of her breasts and the firm flesh of her legs and the lushness of her waist and hips and the firm globes of her buttocks, and she knew that this was the time, that something was going to happen right here and now in the weirdest of all possible ways, that the drive of her flesh was finally going to be satisfied.
"M right," she said. "Who's first?"
They looked at each other in complete bewilderment. Then the kid who had brought Karen here stepped forward and eyed her arrogantly, his nostrils flaring in lust as he looked her over.
"Me," he said.
She looked at the cold stone floor. "Get me something to lie on," she commanded.
He turned, snapped his fingers. "Get your shirts off, guys! She wants a mattress!"
They hopped to. In a moment, a pile of T-shirts lay spread out cn the floor. It wasn't much, Karen thought, but it would keep her from getting dirty or chilled. She moved forward. She lay down.
She felt like a sleepwalker. Could this really be happening, she wondered, as she lay there feeling the cold stone through the shirts against her bare buttocks? Her soft hard-tipped breasts rose in excitement. The tough-looking kid was standing beside her, all but drooling.
Now for the first tune Karen felt real terror. There he was, ready to take her, and suddenly the almost dream-like nature of her acceptance gave way to panic. She didn't want to do this, not here in this strange filthy place, not with that lean boy, not with a crowd of others looking on. She had never meant things to be like this. This was going to hurt, this was going to be agony. Who had ever dreamed boys were so big? How could he possibly-?
She struggled, but it was too late. He held her with a grasp of iron. She was caught, she could not free her limbs to fight him. His hands gripped the fleshy part of her arms. His sweaty T-shirt was against her bare breasts. She was trapped by him, and there was no escape.
"No," she whimpered. "No!"
"This is a hell of a time to change your mind, sister," he said thinly.
Then his body moved. And Karen was terrified. Was loving supposed to be like this? She gasped in pain. He was brutal, and her outraged body sent silent screams of pain through her mind. She closed her eyes and sobbed. He was her first lover, he was hurting her, he was-
He had.
The last painful rush. Stunned, unbelieving, Karen knew what had happened, knew that she had been transformed into a woman in that last violent moment.
She was a virgin no longer.
"Damn," he was muttering. "She never had anybody before! Can you beat that?"
"How about that?" a voice said.
Karen's mind swirled and whirled. He was working, in ceaseless energetic motion, and she experienced the strange new sensations. There was pain-oh, God, was there pain!-but along with the blaze of agony there began to come a different feeling, a thrill of excitement, a sensation of gratification, js nerves that had never been used before came into play.
This was no feverish fantasy of a lonely girl's bedroom now. This was the real thing.
Passion rose for her. She forgot the pain. She was aware only of the ecstasy. She began to gasp in wild excitement. She was vaguely aware that the boy was gasping, too, making hoarse animal-like sounds, faster and faster, and suddenly his hands grabbed for her breasts and held them tight, painfully tight, and he surged and shuddered, and she knew that, while she was still ascending, he had reached the peak of ecstasy.
And then he was moving away from her.
"No," she murmured dreamily. "Don't go-don't leave me-"
She tried to hold him back. How could he go away from her just when she was at the highest moment of ecstasy? But he did, and for a terrible moment Karen was alone and chilled, and then a new one was with her, dropping to touch her nakedness with his strong hands, and she sighed thankfully and grasped him and continued her soaring arc toward bliss.
That went on and on.
Karen had no idea who was which. She went into a kind of fever of lust, lying there in a half-conscious state, sweat-dappled and busy, and boy after boy took her and moved away, giving his place to the next, and probably taking another turn later on. She did not know, and she wanted to try hundreds of boys tonight, the whole city if she could.
Her body was blazing. There was still some pain, and she knew that. She knew, too, that hours must be passing, that it might be eight, or nine, or even ten o'clock, that they were worrying about her at home, that she was late for dinner. Somehow that didn't matter either.
She let them continue.
Endlessly.
She was lost in a frenzy of lust. Her mind, hazy with an overdose of passion, did not stop to make rational decisions. She lay there, ignoring all sanity. She suspected that there were more than the original six of them by now. They must be bringing the whole neighborhood in, she thought. Brothers and cousins and uncles and all the rest. Everybody take a free turn.
And then, abruptly, there came an interruption.
Karen was the last to react. She was deep in her hypnosis of passion, in seemingly perpetual desire, and there was somebody working right along with her, and then he was no longer there. Karen waited, naked and eager for the next one, but the next did not come. She heard sounds as of people leaving the room in a hurry. What was happening?
A flashlight blared in her face.
"Come on, girlie, open your eyes," a harsh voice said.
She blinked. "I can't-the light-"
The light winked out. Karen opened her eyes. A policeman stood near her. He looked young and handsome, his stubble-chinned face somber.
"Are you next?" Karen asked.
"Not quite," he said. He was staring at her nakedness. Suddenly Karen felt pain. Her body was afire. Her breasts were aching.
"Get up," the policeman said. "The party's all over, girlie."
She tried to sit up, but she was dizzy, and she had to steady herself. She half-sat a moment, then tried to get up the rest of the way. She couldn't. The muscles of her legs were cramped. She was stiff and sore.
"What time is it?" she asked blurrily.
"Half past eleven," he said. "You had quite a party, huh, girlie? How old are you?"
"F-fifteen."
The cop gaped. "God," he said. He grabbed her by the arm. "Get up, will you?"
"I-I can't. I'm hurt and sore-"
"You ought to be. Everybody in the neighborhood standing on line for his turn. Where do you live, anyway?"
"Forest Hills," Karen murmured. She was starting to come out of her daze now What had she done? She felt soiled, filthy, polluted. She had given herself to dozens of them, strangers, bums, who-knew-what. She began to tremble and shake.
"Forest Hills?" the cop said. "What the hell are you doing here, then?"
"I don't know," Karen whimpered.
"You don't know? Come on, kiddo. Put your clothes on and I'm taking you in. I don't know when I ever saw anything like this before. What kind of a filthy tramp are you, anyway?"
"I'm-not a tramp," Karen said. "I'm-I was-I never did this before!" She looked at him wildly. "I was a virgin this afternoon."
The cop shook his head slowly. "You know something, girlie? You're crazy!"
He tossed her clothing at her. With trembling fingers Karen pulled her bra on and tried to fasten it. She was dizzy with fear and confusion. Her brain was sizzling. She was starting to realize, now, the immensity of what she had done, and as that realization came home to her, she felt her sanity starting to give way. She was soiled forever. She. would never be the same again. She had not simply lost her virginity today, she had lost her soul, her identity.
She tossed the bra away. "Let me go!" she yelled. "Don't come near me!"
Naked, she started to run from the room. The cop caught her, slinging his arms around her breasts and clamping her tight. She could hear him talking to some other person beyond the room. "Get the wagon," he said. "And a strait-jacket. We got a real kook here. I think she's buggy."
Karen felt hysteria close in.
She began to scream, and the scream went echoing down the corridors of her tortured brain, and she went on screaming until they carried her, kicking and thrashing in the strait-jacket, out of the building and into the police wagon.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fred Bauman caught his breath as he stared at the girl by the post office box. Because of the heat, Joanne was wearing only a blouse and a light skirt; her slim, lovely figure was breathtaking, with those high breasts thrusting the front of the blouse out, and for a moment Bauman almost forgot that this was the girl who was cold-bloodedly blackmailing him and ruining his life.
Safely out of sight back of the writing-table, Bauman watched her open the box and take out the letter. He could see it was some kind of circular. She scanned it quickly and then dropped it in the nearby waste paper barrel. She seemed disappointed that that was all, and no wonder; this was the first Wednesday in weeks that there hadn't been a nice little money order for a hundred dollars waiting in her box!
She started to leave the building. As she neared the door, Bauman stepped out from behind the table and said, "Hello, there."
She whirled, surprise brightening her eyes, and glared at him.
"You!"
"Me." Bauman's heart throbbed fiercely. He hoped that this plan of his was going to work out all right. "I want to see you. That's why I came."
"What do you want?"
"Outside," he said.
They stepped out, into the warm morning sunlight. Bauman saw the peaks of her breasts through her blouse, and desire formed a lump in his throat.
She said, "I didn't get my check this morning. I warned you about what would happen if you missed a payment."
Bauman shook his head. "I didn't mail it because I decided to bring it in person. I have it right here with me. In my jacket pocket."
"Well, let's have it, then," she snapped impatiently. "And from now on don't pay me any visits, you hear? Go back to mailing it the way you used to."
Bauman took the envelope from his pocket, ripped it open, and let her see the filled-out money order that was inside. She reached out for it, but he grinned at her, snatched it out of her reach, and put it back in his inside pocket. She stared at him.
"You playing games?" she asked.
"I'll give you the money later. Take me to your apartment and I'll give it to you there."
"My apartment? You dumb clown, you think I'm going to bring you up there?"
He winced at her words. "Joanne-"
"Give it to me."
"Joanne, look, I can't get you out of my mind. I wake up nights thinking about you."
"That's damn sweet of you."
"I want you," he told her, and there was truth in that as well as scheming. "Once more, Joanne-and not just in an automobile, either. Some place where I can appreciate you. Will you do that for me?"
"You got a good case," she said.
He ignored her coldness and leaned close to her, letting her see the intensity of his passion. In a low voice he said, "Listen to me, Joanne. Take me to your apartment now-and I'll give you all the rest of the money tomorrow! A check for three thousand. Payment in full."
"You mean that?"
"Of course I do," he said, meeting her appraising gaze and hoping she didn't see through him. "That's why I waited around all morning for you to come and pick up your mail. The check's all ready for you. I could even give it to you this afternoon."
The gleam of greed danced in her eyes. "How about letting me have it now?"
He shook his head. "Uh-uh. You're too shrewd, Joanie, but I'm not falling for it. No payment in advance. But I promise you, you'll have it by this afternoon. Just once more in your arms-"
Her apartment was on West Forty-fifth Street, near Ninth Avenue-a rundown neighborhood, with kids yelling in the streets and women hanging out the windows talking to each other. She had given in to his proposition readily enough, after Bauman had waved the promise of full payment under her nose.
Money grubbing little witch, he thought, as he walked along the midtown streets with her.
In half an hour you'll be dead, he thought at her as they walked. And I'll be free of you.
It was a walk-up apartment. She went first, he following her, up the creaking stairs. Nobody saw him as he entered. That was good. Nobody would see him when he left either, if his luck held out.
She threw open the door of the place. Two rooms, and messy. Dirty clothing all over the place, an unmade bed, drapery hanging askew on the windows. Cheap furniture that probably came with the room. There was a stale and musty smell about the place.
He felt perfectly calm now.
She said to him, "Come on, let's get this over with, buster. And then you go get the three thousand you were talking about."
"Sure," he said. "Sure. Come here."
She moved toward him, and there was a light in her eyes-a money-loving light, Bauman thought. And she was so young, too. She couldn't have been more than twenty-four. She was just a kid, a pretty kid with a good complexion and a pretty face, the kind of kid college boys liked to date, wholesome and good fun, the kind of kid his daughter Karen might grow up to be-
She was wearing a man's white shirt, open at the throat. The lovely globes of her breasts thrust against the shirt. Bauman made sure the door was shut and the window curtains were drawn.
She glided toward him, took his hands, put them to her breasts. Desire coursed through him as he touched the firm flesh through her clothes. He caressed her for a moment as they stood together, and she made small purring noises. Then he began to unbutton her blouse. It dropped away. Today she was wearing a bra, and he took that off, too. Her bare breasts were splendid, full and pale and dark-tipped.
"So soft," he murmured. "So nice-"
In another moment he had her completely naked, and then so was he. They moved toward the rumpled bed. Bauman wondered whom she had entertained on that bed last night.
He ran his hand down the silken smoothness of her. She was so very good, he thought. He lingered over the hard ridges of her nipples, and then slid his hand down the smooth front of her waist, slowly, delightedly. He held her, and then he put his mouth to hers, and kissed her, hard and passionately.
She wanted him now, he thought, gloating.
He took her.
All his pent-up tension of the last month and a half freed itself in the wild headlong frenzy of that moment. He did not hold himself back. He had nothing to gain from giving her pleasure, and he was out for himself alone now, so his twisting, punishing body moved in eager motions.
He sobbed in ecstasy. His body jolted, shoved. "Wait a second-" she said. "Hold on-"
"No," he said.
He took his pleasure from her in fast, blazing ecstasy. Sweat burst from his pores. His body shook. This was the most expensive pleasure he had ever had in his life, but almost worth the price.
"Hey," she said. "You could have waited. Another minute and-"
Bauman laughed. "I wasn't interested," he said.
He took a deep breath. He reached down and put his hands to the ripe, lush globes of her breasts. Then, suddenly, brutally, he slid his hands upward and locked them around her throat.
In that moment, all his thirty-eight years flashed before him. They say that that happens to you in the moment when you die; but Bauman had never expected it to happen while he was killing someone else.
For that matter, he had never expected to be killing someone else, either. He saw himself as a schoolboy, and as a night student at business school, too busy for dates, and then getting his first job as a bookkeeper, and meeting Ethel when he was twenty, and falling in love with her, and thinking that she was the most wonderfully lovely girl in the world.
And here he was, eighteen years later, with hi: hands on the throat of a girl who had lured him into raping her and then had blackmailed him for nearly two thousand dollars so far. A girl who had been no more than three or four years old when he had married Ethel, a girl who had been playing hopscotch then and now was about to die.
His hands tightened.
Bauman held her away from him at arm's length, just in case she decided to claw at his eyes, but she didn't try that. She tugged at his hands, but the fury that rippled through him doubled his strength, and she could not budge him. From her came thick gurgling noises. Bauman almost felt like letting her go, but it was as if his hands were glued to her throat and he could not let her go. Her face was turning a mottled purplish color and her eyes, bulging, were frightful to see.
Bauman kept up the pressure and felt her beginning to go limp. He didn't dare release her yet-not while she was only half-dead. He gripped her throat, one minute, two minutes, days perhaps. Her eyes were closed and her head was sagging, lolling backward floppily.
She was blue in the face, now. She had stopped making noises. Bauman let go of her throat and she slipped back against the pillow. Picking up her wrist, he searched for a pulse and found none. He looked at her. He put his ear against her breasts. He heard nothing.
A mirror lay in an open handbag on the cheap dresser. He seized it, held it to her lips, looked at it. It did not cloud.
She was dead.
He was free.
She lay in a rumpled naked heap, her body loose-limbed, all her beauty gone from her. A little while before she had been passionate, exciting; now she was not. Bauman looked at her and wondered if this were just a dream.
No, no dream. She was dead, and he had killed her.
Bauman knew that he had to get out of here, now. Fast. Women got killed in cheap rooming-houses all the time, and the police never worried much about it. He had taken care not to leave fingerprints on anything. Nothing except her throat anyway, and he didn't think they would be able to trace him from the purplish blotches on her throat.
He quickly got back into his clothing, looked around the apartment and turned to leave.
The door opened suddenly and somebody came in.
He was a tall man, over six feet tall, it seemed, and he dressed well. In the first shocked moment Bauman thought that this might be another victim of the dead girl but then he saw the man's eyes and knew that this was her confederate, the friend that she had once mentioned.
He looked surprised. And he was holding a gun.
Bauman backed away, mouthing something wordless and soundless that refused to leave his throat. He stood with his back against the dresser, with the dead girl sprawled naked on the bed in front of him.
The tall man said "So you killed her, eh?"
"I-I-"
"Go easy, chum. Calm down. I'm not going to use this rod unless you make me do it. What's your name anyway? Miller? No he's dead too. Bauman, then. Yeah, you must be Bauman. Joanne told me about you. The one from Forest Hills."
Bauman moistened his lips and looked from the nude body on the bed to the man with the gun.
"Are you Bauman?" he repeated.
Bauman nodded weakly. "Yes, Yes, I am. Who-who are you?"
The other shrugged. "I was a sort of a friend of your late playmate. You seem to have ended my friendship for me. Well, if you didn't do it somebody else would have, I guess."
"She was blackmailing me," Bauman said.
"Of course she was. I showed her how to work the dodge. I showed her lots of things she didn't know before. And then you came along and killed her." He didn't sound very disturbed. "Well, I was going to pull out of town anyway, without her. Now you saved me the trouble of explaining things to her."
"I don't understand," Bauman said.
"You will," the other said. He slipped the gun into his pocket as if to show that he was contemptuous of Bauman. "My name's Buddy. I was sort of Joanne's manager, you might say. But she was always yapping about the women I was seeing. It was okay for her to pick up guys and go to bed with them whenever she wanted to, but I had to walk the narrow path." He chuckled. "Poor Joanne. Well, the blackmail gimmick was a good one, but I knew one of these days she'd hit a sucker who wouldn't come across."
"What are you going to do with me?"
"With you? Nothing, chum. I'm going to high-tail it out of New York City tonight and get me back to Chicago where I belong."
Bauman glanced at the naked dead girl on the bed. "You won't say anything about-about this?"
Buddy grinned cheerfully. "Sure I won't say anything about it. Why should I? But you're going to meet me tonight and give me ten thousand as a going-away present, or else I phone the cops and tip them off."
A wave of dizziness rocked Bauman at the quiet words.
Not again, he thought.
Freeing himself from one blackmailer, he had only made things twice as bad for himself. Now he was a murderer-and he was being asked for ten thousand dollars!
He sat down heavily in a rickety chair.
"I don't have ten thousand," Bauman said in a dull voice, looking away from the huddled naked thing on the bed.
Buddy grinned. "Get it. Borrow it. Steal it. But come up with it by tonight or I call the cops. It won't be too hard for them to trace the money orders you were giving her and find a lead back to you. Of course if I keep my mouth shut you'll squeak through."
"Ten thousand," Bauman said.
"Yeah. In cash, certified check or money order. I'll meet you at half past eight tonight at a roadhouse called Marty's, across the river near Fort Lee on Route 4. You know how to get there?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Be there and make sure you have the dough. I'm gonna leave here now. You wait five minutes and then you leave too."
"Wait a minute," Bauman said. His business sense still functioned in his numbed mind. "How am I going to write a check? Who do I make it payable to?"
"Payable to cash," Buddy said. "You don't need to know my name. So long, fathead."
He turned and left.
Bauman stared at the dead girl on the bed, at the lush full breasts, the tender legs. He waited, counting out the minutes as they passed. When five minutes were up, he, too, left.
No one saw him as he slipped down the stairs into the open. It was a little past noon now. Kids were coming home from school and the sun was fearfully hot. And he had to produce ten thousand dollars-more than he had in his entire savings account-by half past eight this evening, or he'd be turned into the police as a murderer by a man whose name he didn't know, for the slaying of a lustful, immoral blackmailing witch.
It was incredible, Bauman thought.
But this time he knew exactly what his course of action was to be.
Raising the ten thousand dollars he knew, was impossible. It would plunge him so deep into debt that he would never get out again-and in any event he would have to make explanations to Ethel, and that way she would grow suspicious, and sooner or later she would drag the whole horrible story from him.
No. No money.
But there was another way out.
He had killed once, and his life was thus forfeit to the law. He could kill again without making matters much worse. They couldn't send a man to the electric chair twice. He had everything to gain and nothing whatever to lose by killing a second time.
First he stopped in a candy store and phoned Ethel. In a voice that amazed him by its steadiness he told her, "I'm going to have to work late tonight, Ethel. Maybe till nine or ten o'clock."
She didn't seem to mind. "All right, if you have to. Everything okay at the office today?"
"Yeah, sure," he said. "Sure. See you tonight-by nine-thirty or ten, no later."
"So long, Fred."
With that chore out of the way, Bauman stopped at a bank and cashed in the money order he had brought along as bait for the girl. Then he walked downtown to Macy's and visited the sporting-goods department.
He bought himself a hunting knife, five inches long and razor-sharp. It came in a scabbard that he could attach to the inside of his jacket. He paid for it in cash and left. The knife was the only way. He didn't know where he could get a gun without a permit, and besides he didn't know how to use one. And guns were noisy. Poison was strictly for the horror movies. And though he hadn't hesitated to strangle the girl, Bauman knew that force would be impossible with the man. Buddy was much too big.
Crossing over to Gimbel's, Bauman bought himself a pair of solid black gloves. Then, hungry, he stopped off for lunch at the Automat. He spent ninety cents for his meal. He had to remind himself that after today he would have no more hundred-dollar payments to make every Wednesday, no more scurrying around and cutting corners to find the cash. His only problem was the bank loan falling due in the autumn, and Bauman figured he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
He was too tensed-up even to consider going back to the office at all. Instead, he killed the afternoon at a movie house on 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue, watching a couple of old films. One was a western and the other was a detective story. Halfway through the first film, he realized he had already seen it, five years before. He had taken Ethel.
He left the theater after seeing the western a second time-not really seeing it, just letting it slide past his eyes. The time was twenty past six. Rush hour was at its peak now; people were still flocking into the subways at Times Square, heading home to their wives and kid and their nice, quiet lives.
He would have been heading home now, too. Except that one rainy night he had decided to take the bridge instead of the tunnel, and had set off a chain of nightmare happenings that still hadn't reached its end.
Walking over to Sixth Avenue, he ate once again in the Automat. This time he wasn't very hungry. He left the Automat a little after seven and stopped in a stationery store. He bought a single envelope, took a blank check from his checkbook, put it in the envelope and sealed it. Then he slipped the envelope into his insid breast pocket, in the same pocket where the hunting knife was clipped.
He walked over to Bryant Park and sat down for a while. He closed his eyes, thought about Joanne alive and naked and passionate, thought about Joanne dead. She had asked for it, he thought.
At quarter to eight Bauman got up, walked north to 48th Street where he had left the car, and got in. He drove uptown on the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge, crossed over into New Jersey, found Route 4, and drove into Fort Lee.
It was eight-thirty on the nose when he pulled up outside the roadhouse whose garish neon sign proclaimed its name to be MARTY'S.
The thin sound of a jukebox whined in his ears as he walked in. The big man was waiting at a table in the back, nursing a beer. He looked at his watch as Bauman entered.
"Right on time," he muttered. "You bring the dough?"
"Sure," Bauman said. "You don't think I would have come out here just for a glass of beer."
"I don't think anything."
A waiter came by and looked inquiringly at Bauman. He shook his head and said, "No thanks. Nothing to drink right now." The waiter vanished.
The big man said, "Come on with me."
"Where?"
"Outside. In back. I don't want you to hand me the money in here."
Bauman shrugged and followed him through a back door that led outside. The back of the roadhouse was shabbily painted and dreary. Stacks of soda bottle cases stood heaped up everywhere, and empty beer barrels. It was dark out there. There was no moon. Bauman thought of another night when it had rained. He thought of bare, soft hard-tipped breasts and velvet arms.
This is going to be easy, he thought.
The big man said, "Okay. Let's have the dough."
Bauman took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. The big man grabbed it and ripped it open with a quick swipe of his thumb. He reached in, pulled out the check, frowned-
"Hey, this a gag? The check's blank!"
"Oh, dreadfully sorry," Bauman said. "Wrong envelope. Heh-heh. Little mistake."
He reached into the pocket again and his hand closed on the hilt of the knife. It felt good to the touch. He brought it out casually, and before the big man could do anything Bauman leaned up and rammed the hunting knife into his throat. Buddy sputtered once, blinked in amazement and toppled as Bauman yanked out the knife. He landed heavily behind a pile of cases of soda bottles, out of sight and dead.
"Hey, mister," a thin voice said.
Bauman whirled in panic. The door of the road-house had opened, and the waiter was standing there, staring at him. "Mister," he said again.
No, no! Bauman thought wildly. He saw too! There's always someone watching. Every misdeed was part of a chain that led to another. And now he thinks he'll blackmail me too. Everyone in the world is a blackmailer. But Ftt escape this time.
Bauman let out an agonized sob and thought of Ethel and Karen and the dead, naked Joanne. Then he plunged the knife into his own throat. There was a moment of blinding pain and that was all.
The waiter, standing framed in the back door of the roadhouse, went bugeyed with shock.
"Damn," he muttered. "Stuck the knife right in himself. And I only wanted to tell him he left his car lights on! You'd think I caught him killing someone, or something!"
He didn't stay to see the other body behind the case. He had seen enough. He turned and hollered inside, "Hey, Marty, come on out here! Some guy went buggy and killed himself!"
