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.
B-GIRL!
Beth had been looking for a steadier position than just being another B-girl in the dumpy little bar called Le Chat Noir. Although her job there called for her very best, both on the stage where she went through the routine motions of taking off her clothes for the greedy customers, or making the rounds of the tables cadging drinks. Then she met Harry Martin ... who was very much married to the voluptuous redhead, Myra ... a very successful businessman in Manhattan. Beth was extra special good for Harry, running through her entire kit of shame games in the silence of his apartment. In short order, Beth moved from Philly to New York and into Harry's private establishment of personal degradation. Occasionally, Beth arranged very exciting evenings for Harry, like the time she had Rheena there, and the three of them engaged in a free-for-all orgy. Then the mob started looking for Beth ... Harry had to protect his investment, didn't he?
CHAPTER ONE
The dingy little rain-bleached sign outside the Philly nightspot said Le Chat Noir. The Black Cat. There was a swinging panel underneath the sign, showing a big yellow-eyed tomcat with arching back. And there were some glossy eight-by-ten photos mounted in glass cases near the door, showing girls. All-but-nude girls.
Girls with sequins on their breasts to cover their nipples, and strips of fabric around their waists, and not much else. Lots and lots of flesh was showing in those photographs. The place was a strip-joint, I realized, I heard the sounds of laughter and gaiety coming from within. I could also make out the tubby thumping of a third-rate jazz pianist. I shrugged and thought, what the devil. I was alone in Philadelphia, my wife was a hundred miles away in Brooklyn, and I was in the mood for a little company.
I went in.
The Black Cat turned out to be pretty much what I expected it would be: a cheap, poorly lit place. There were tables strewn around as if distributed at random, a bar with a dull cloudy mirror behind it, and a little old fat, German-looking pianist banging out chords on a tuneless ruin of a piano in the corner.
There were probably a million little niteries like this all over the country, each one as shoddy and as sleazy as the next in the chain. But right now I didn't mind the shoddiness or the sleaziness. I was on a business trip down here in Philadelphia. I had spent the last two days here-and last night, alone in my hotel room-and this night I wanted to liven things up. Philadelphia can be a drag of drags if you're all alone in it.
A waiter in a smudged white jacket came over and peered inquisitively at me out of pale, watery-blue, squint-ugly myopic eyes.
"You got a minimum here. Three bucks," the waiter informed me. "Might as well eat it up."
"I'll drink it up," I told him. "At your prices it shouldn't be hard."
He looked at me bleakly and went off to get me my drink. After a few minutes the whiskey sour arrived. I sat at my table toying with it, swizzling it around, finally going so far as to sip it. The drink wasn't bad, even though it was probably more sour than whiskey, I thought.
I looked around the place, wondering if I'd find any unattached females. My wife Myra was a hundred miles away, and I was lonely for the company of the opposite sex.
Besides, I thought, since when do I worry about being faithful to Myra?
My wife and I had been pretty much strangers to each other, strangers living in the same house and sleeping in the same bed, for the past three years out of the seven that we, had been married. There weren't any children. It wasn't much of a marriage.
I looked around.
And, yes, I spotted a B-girl sitting in the back, beneath a sputtering neon sign. She was wearing a brassiere and a pair of briefs, and nothing more than that. I guessed that probably she did a strip routine at the club, and came out to entertain the customers between shows. A cheap place like this was almost certain to make the strippers double as B-girls.
Her legs were crossed; they looked nice from where I sat, tapering and sleek. I couldn't see her face or anything much else of her. She was talking earnestly to a dark, hard-looking man wearing a sharply-tailored, flashy green suit.
I nodded to the waiter and he came over, figuring he'd sell me another drink. His face fell a little when he saw I wasn't finished with my first one.
"Help you?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said. "Who's that girl sitting in the back over there?"
He smiled faintly. "That's Beth. She sings and dances here. Her next show gets started around five minutes, maybe. Get you a sandwich?"
"I told you I wasn't hungry," I said. I peeled a dollar bill off my expense-account roll and slid it into his hand. A dollar ought to be enough in a place like this, I guessed. I said, "Do you think I could get to talk to the lady, maybe?"
His smile became a knowing one. "Maybe," he said. "I'll see about it."
The waiter slipped away toward the back of the club. I saw him bending over the girl for a moment or two, whispering in her ear and occasionally glancing in my direction. Then he vanished into the alleyway that led to the kitchen. The girl continued to talk with the guy in the too-flashy suit.
After a moment, she got up and turned around to give me the full view.
My eyes bugged.
She was a tall girl-five feet six or seven, I guessed-and she was built. I mean, built. She was wide-shouldered, wide-hipped, with magnificent high round breasts and a sensuous face with full lips and sharp cheekbones and flaring nostrils. She was all woman.
She came toward me, twitching her hips provocatively, the dim lights glittering off the spangles and sequins that were mounted on the coarse mesh tights covering her long, lovely legs. She didn't have any of the desperate B-girl shuffle, that tired, dismal, woeful posture of defeat that the girls tend to get after a few years of pushing drinks to beefy out-of-towners on the make. This girl was alive and healthy, and proud of her body. I could see that. She had every right to be proud, too.
She slipped into the empty seat at my table, and suddenly all that luscious flesh was within an arm's length of me.
"Hello," she said softly, in what was a bedroom voice if I had ever heard one. "I hear you want to buy me a drink. I'm Beth."
That was the way we met-as nakedly and as crudely as that, just a lonely John buying a B-girl a high-priced shot of tea in a cheap Philly nightspot. She smiled at me and I smiled back at her, and in that moment the whole course of my future life was changed, although I didn't have any way of knowing that at the time.
I signalled to the waiter, and he came over on the double, ever ready to boost the sucker's bar bill another notch or two.
"Help you?" he said mechanically. I glanced at Beth. "What can I get you to drink?" I asked her.
"Scotch and soda."
The waiter nodded. I said, "You can bring me another whiskey sour, too."
He was back with the drinks in a flash. They didn't waste time on the service here. They were in business to sell you drinks, as many of them as they could possibly get you to down, and it wasn't in their interest to go into slow-motion on the orders.
Beth's drink cost me ninety cents, and that helped to pad the night club's profit margin too. What was in the glass looked like a Scotch and soda, but I was willing to bet that what was really in there was nothing but iced tea. You can brew a fifth of tea a lot cheaper than you can buy a fifth of even the cheapest Scotch. The management of these places can't see wasting good whiskey on B-girls who have to absorb dozens of drinks a night.
I didn't care what was in Beth's glass. That was a matter between her and the management, strictly. If they wanted to call a glass of tea Scotch and soda and charge me ninety cents for it, I was willing to go along with the gag. The tab came off the company account, anyway, and it wasn't an extravagantly high price to have to pay for a few minutes of Beth's companionship.
She stared into my eyes across the table. Her eyes were dark and sparkling.
"Where are you from?" she asked, "What's your name, friend?"
"I'm from New York," I said. Briefly, I debated the pros and cons of giving her a phony name, then decided to live dangerously and give her the real one. "Harry Martin. I'm down here on a business trip."
"Harry. Hello, Harry," she said, flashing me a dazzling smile. She picked up her drink and sipped at it just as though it were the real thing she had there. "Where are you staying Harry?"
I gave her the name of the hotel. It was one of the shiny new expensive ones that have been rising out by Penn Center. She thought about it for a second, smiling that bright, white-toothed smile at me all the time, and then she finished off her drink.
The waiter was hovering nearby. "Want another drink?" I asked her.
She shook her head. "I've had enough of that crap, thanks. It's phony as a six-buck bill. It's all phony, Harry."
"But-"
Her voice was a low, throbbing murmur that made me ache with desire. "Listen, Harry, everything's phony here," she said. "Drinks, music, love-everything from top to bottom. You know what I'm looking for? I'm looking for something real. You think you can help a lady out?"
This was all probably part of the standard script, I thought. Make the sucker feel like he's Somebody Special, that wows them every time. But I didn't give a rap. I was on a joyride, zooming along on a wild rollercoaster, and I wasn't going to stop to pick holes in the scenery as I shot along.
I grinned and said in a low voice, "Maybe I can. What time do you get through at this place?"
"Two-thirty," she said.
It was past one now. "Can't you leave before then?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I've got another show in a couple of minutes, then one an hour from now and that's k. Harry-?"
It was more than a question. It was a command, and I wasn't saying no.
"I'll stick around till then," I told her quietly, and she looked pleased.
I sensed that there was someone standing over my shoulder, and I swung my head around to get a better view. It was the fellow in the natty green suit. Close up he didn't look very pleasant at all. He was hard-faced, with jutting cheekbones, close-cropped black hair, flat opaque blue eyes without much love of humanity in them. That combination of black hair and blues eyes got me. It made him look weird and strange. He was standing right behind me, one big-knuckled hand gripping the edge of my chair.
"Beth," he said, in a quiet, dead voice.
She glanced up at him. "What's on, Mark?"
"Time for your show. We don't want to keep the customers waiting, Beth."
She nodded. "Okay, Mark. I'll be on in a second. Get the band out here and I'll be with them in two snakes, okay?"
"Right," he said.
Mark faded away into the darkness as suddenly as he had appeared. I looked at Beth. She was pale and abruptly frightened-looking.
"Who's that guy?" I asked. "When I saw you with him before, I thought he was another customer, but I guess he isn't."
"Mark?" Beth shrugged. "He's the manager. He runs this place."
"Oh," I said.
She flashed a nervous smile. "Look, I better get going now. I'll see you after the show. So long for now, Harry."
"I'll be waiting."
"So will I," she said. She flashed a wink at me. The wink left me tingling all over.
I sat back in my chair, thinking warm, cozy thoughts about what Beth and I were going to do later in the evening, about how we were going to liven up what had been a pretty dreary stay for me in the City of Brotherly Love. I thought about the high, thrusting breasts that she was probably keeping underneath her sequinned halter, and I thought about the smooth, sleek, cool mounds of her buttocks that I would get my hands on in a couple of hours, and I though about her kiss against my mouth and my hands on her breasts and her body against my body, the two of us pounding ecstatically along on the road to pleasure.
My throat went dry. A tight band of tension, like a coil of fine steel, wrapped itself around the middle of my chest, I signalled for the waiter and tapped my empty glass. He smiled and brough me a refill, and chalked up another one on the mounting bill.
Then a quartet of seedy-looking jazzmen ambled out of the stage entrance and took up their positions around the fat old piano-player. There were a couple of Negroes, couple of whites-a real Civil Rights combo, I thought. Drums, sax, clarinet, bass. They looked at each other as if uncertain about who was going to lead them and what they were going to play. Then the sax man waved his big yellow horn around, and they launched into a rhythm and not a devil of a lot of melody to it.
Then they started to pick up the pace a little, the drummer tossing off a couple of tired-sounding riffs by way of a fanfare.
And then I noticed Beth climbing up on top of the bar. A couple of sodden barflies right in front of her stared at her long legs, throwing their heads way back to take in the view.
The tempo accelerated, and suddenly the drummer lit in with a fast, loud rat-tat-tat, and they shifted into some new piece of music, loud and brassy.
Beth began to sing.
The song she was singing was slushy; her dull delivery nearly made me think it wasn't. Her voice was loud and clear and pretty good, though I could see that a few years of singing night club junk like this had all but robbed it of any finesse. She took the song through a couple of choruses. Everybody in the place was watching her, and they hadn't come here to listen to her pretty voice, either. There was an air of tension about the scene.
Then Beth began to shake and quiver, and she went into her dance.
It was a wild, frenzied sort of thing. She danced right there on the top of the bar, moving up and down the long counter.
Her breasts quivered and threatened to pop from the skimpy brassiere as she shook and bounced and bumped and ground; her legs moved in lovely coordination. The music behind her got hotter and hotter. Sweat rolled down her arms and calves. The dance went on for five or six minutes without a break. There was one particularly wild sequence where she came over and wiggled her hips practically in the face of a bald-headed guy sitting up front at the bar.
The crowd loved that.
I sat there hating the dance, but knowing that she hated it, too, and that she would be mine after the show was all over. That was a consolation.
Beth moved up and down the bar going through her routine, shimmying and shaking. Then the drummer went absolutely wild with his sticks, head bobbing and shoulders jumping, and even the old pianist forsook his rumpty-turn chord-strumming and launched into something alive, and Beth suddenly ripped away her bra and flung it toward the bartender.
I had thought that that sort of thing was illegal down in Philly. But you can never tell about these little night spots.
Beth stood there with her bare breasts on display, high and firm, tipped with red. Not even the traditional pasties to cover her nipples-just the bare puckered flesh itself. Her nipples were standing up high and tall, as if showing her breasts to a crowd of men made her excited, which was probably true.
They were terrific breasts. They were big, taut globes of flesh, close together with a deep valley between them, and right now they were streaked with sweat so that the skin took on a sensual shine. Beth cavorted bare-breasted on the bar, making those two delicious boobs leap and dance around, wiggling and waggling them. Then she spun around, turning her back on the audience so that if you wanted to see her nude breasts you had to look into the dim, bleary back-bar mirror.
Her hands went to her hips.
She yanked her briefs down.
She stood there for a dazzling moment with the bare, snowy mounds of her buttocks on display. My heart began to pound in triple time as I stared at the two flawless, fleshy cheeks.
She spun around. For one last moment she faced the audience, breasts triumphantly gleaming, flesh bare, only a bit of cloth hiding her at all. Then the lights went out, to the accompaniment of loud cheers.
When they went on again, Beth was nowhere in sight. Only the five musicians were still there, playing a quiet tune. I was drenched in sweat and trembling with desire. The image of Beth's bare breasts and buttocks blazed in my brain.
The act was over.
CHAPTER TWO
Five minutes later Beth came out and walked toward my table. She was wearing her skimpy costume, the bra and shorts back in place. She sat down heavily opposite me and let out her breath in a long, slow sigh.
"Thank God that's over," she said.
"Tired?"
"You think it's a picnic standing up there jumping around like that?" she asked. "Well, just once more tonight and then I'm through for twenty solid hours. The things a girl has to do for her miserable fifty bucks a week-"
She was lying there, but I didn't really mind. Even a dive like this would give her a pretty fat wage. Maybe fifty dollars a week was her basic salary, but I was pretty sure that on top of that she got a slice out of every drink she prodded the suckers into buying her. If she got only a nickel out of each drink that way, she could make as much as eighty or a hundred bucks more a week. If her kidneys could stand the pace.
I bought her a couple of more drinks, and once, obviously fed up with what she was forced to drink, she switched the glasses around, taking mine and leaving hers where it stood. I tasted it.
Tea.
Weak tea, at that. Ninety cents a shot for tea. She was worth her weight in mink pelts to the management here, I knew.
"How can you drink that stuff?" I asked.
"I don't have a choice. If I drank that much Scotch a night, they'd cart me out after a week. So I drink what they give me."
We talked for a while, about nothing much in particular, just talking. My wife Myra seemed very, very distant, off in her apartment a hundred miles to the north. I didn't know how she was amusing herself tonight, and I didn't really care at all. Let her have a good time. Let her do whatever she pleased. There was a glow in Beth's eyes that made my breath go short with anticipation.
In just a little while-
Beth and me, in my hotel room. Naked in the dark. Her body soft against mine. Her lips moist and warm, her tongue anxious. Her nipples like little hard rocks against my hands.
But I had to wait. I had to sit the evening out, until Beth got finished.
About half past one, Mark came over again, gliding up to use like a well-oiled machine.
"Beth, can I talk to you a second?" he asked in that high, flat, oddly corpse-like voice of his. If you can imagine what a corpse's voice would sound like, that's how Mark sounded.
She glared at him. "Can't you see that I'm busy, Mark? I'm with a patron right now."
"I want to talk to you," he said coldly, and there was no mistaking the whiplash in his voice. His tone left no doubt that he wasn't in the mood to debate whether or not Beth cared to talk to him.
She rose, reddening with anger, and shot an apologetic glance at me. She said, "Will you excuse me, Harry? I'll be back in a minute."
"Sure, Beth."
She wasn't. She was gone nearly ten minutes, and when she came back I could see how she was bristling in anger.
"That louse," she muttered, taking her seat. "The guy pays my salary and that makes him think he owns me. Like a slave. Like a damn slave."
"Is he giving you trouble?" I asked. "What did he want to talk about? Doesn't he want you to leave with me, Beth?"
"Never mind," she said, shaking her head. "It was nothing. Forget all about it Forget all about him. He doesn't matter."
"No," I said. "He doesn't."
We had another round of drinks. That check was mounting up, I knew. I was starting to feel a little blurred and hazy now, and I realized that I had had more than enough to drink tonight. I was matching Beth, drink for drink, but she was drinking tea and I was drinking whiskey sours. It was a hard thing to stop, though. There was always that little waiter hovering nearby, ready to bring you another drink and another one and then another one after that. That was how he made his living, of course. Tips. Fifteen per cent of nothing is nothing. Fifteen per cent of a twenty-dollar booze bill adds up to an easy three bucks, and I wasn't the only customer he had tonight.
At ten after two, Beth stood up. "Time for my show again," she said.
She went through the whole routine again-the same thing, gesture for gesture, snort for snort, as though she were some clockwork robot and not a flesh and blood human being up there on the bar. Once again, she waggled her hips in the face of a bar-fly. Once again, she pranced and twisted.
Once again she bared her stunning breasts. Once again she showed the snow-white hills of her nude buttocks to an excited audience.
I figured she must have been through that routine hundreds or even thousands of times to get it down so pat. What a life ... especially for a girl with a body like that.
Finally, the act was over.
She stood all but nude for an instant, vanished when the lights blinked out, and returned to my table a few minutes later.
"I'm going to get dressed," she said. "It'll take me a few minutes."
"Should I wait for you in here?"
She shook her head. "No. It doesn't look good for the hired hands to leave with the patrons. I'll meet you outside."
"Where?"
"Go out the front entrance, turn to the left, and walk a block. Then cross the street diagonally. There's a cafeteria located there. Meet me in front of the cafeteria. Okay?"
"Sure," I said.
She grinned at me and disappeared. I signalled for the waiter.
"Help you?" he asked, for the millionth time that evening.
"Yeah," I said. "You can be helpful and get me the check."
He pulled it out of his sleeve. I had to work hard to focus my eyes on it. It was a beauty, all right. I was down for something like fifteen drinks. That was pretty good going for two people in a couple of hours. Then there was tax, local and federal, and there was a cover charge of a buck that nobody had told me about beforehand. The total tab was over twenty dollars.
Well, I figured, when you go to a clip joint you have to expect to get clipped. I took some bills out of my wallet and added a good tip.
"Give me a receipt," I said. "For the expense account, okay?"
"You want I should beef it up a little?"
"Just play it straight."
I got the receipt, collected my coat at the door, was given a warm smile by the breasty blonde who ran the coat check concession, and stepped out into the mild spring night, feeling that I hadn't wasted my time this evening, not if I had managed to pick up somebody like Beth. I headed for the corner she had picked.
There was the cafeteria. It was closed. I posted myself in front of it and waited.
I waited there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and finally began to wonder if I was being played for some sort of a sucker. Maybe she had strung me along all evening, running up a big bar bill for me, only to duck out with somebody else at the end of the evening.
I decided that I wouldn't wait any longer than half an hour for her. But at ten minutes to three she came along, wearing a tan trenchcoat buttoned at the neck. She still managed to look lovely even inside that tent. But her face was hard and cold.
"Hi," I said.
She didn't smile at me. She didn't even say anything. She just nodded.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"That dirty skunk Mark," she said. "Gave me a hard time. But I won the argument. Come on, Harry, let's get out of here."
Somehow a taxi picked that particular moment to come along. I flagged it down and we hopped in, and a moment later were were roaring up Market Street toward the hotel where I was staying.
It was one of the biggest, newest, and shiniest hotels in Philadelphia, and there was a convention of some kind going on while I was there. Even at a little past three in the morning, the lobby was chock full of convention delegates, mostly fortyish and fiftyish couples wearing big glossy name tags. They all looked a little crocked. The bellhops looked embarrassed.
The elevators were jammed. The convention-goers were roaming the hotel, going from one all-night party to the next. Under the circumstances, with the place in a state of chaos, I didn't expect anybody to ask any questions about Beth, and no one did. We reached my room without any difficulties.
I opened the door and she went in. I followed, locking the door behind me.
Suddenly she was in my arms, soft and clinging and desirable. Over Beth's shoulder I spotted the little framed photograph of Myra that I always carry around with me on these business trips for some silly reason. I found some excuse to break the clinch, get over across the room, and sweep the photo into the top dresser drawer while Beth wasn't looking.
I didn't see any point in having to make unnecessary explanations. If Beth wanted to find out whether I was married, she could ask me. But I didn't think it mattered much to her.
I turned back to her. She had shed her trenchcoat and was hanging it in the closet. Underneath she wore a simple green dress that hardly began to suggest the opulent fullness of her figure.
"Should I order some drinks from Room Service?" I asked her.
"Lord, no! If I have any more liquid tonight I'll float away. But if you want a drink go ahead. I really don't mind."
"No," I said. "I had plenty. I just thought I'd ask."
"You know what I want?"
"What?"
"You," she said. "Come here."
I went to her. For a second her arms twined around me. Her lips met mine. Her lips were soft and full and good to kiss. Her tongue slithered and playfully tickled my lips, and then the tongue went farther, less playfully.
I was aware of the ripe hills of her breasts against my body. I remembered the way those two globes of flesh had looked, bare and jiggling as she danced on the bar, and I knew that it was the same two round things that were against me now, and that was a good thing to think about. I slid my hand along our close-pressed bodies and managed to capture one of her breasts, and squeezed. The goodies were the most.
We were both breathing hard, now. The excitement was getting us. She was shimmying happily and very suggestively against me, and the effect was an electric one.
Then she broke the embrace. She stepped back a couple of feet to give me a clear and unobstructed view, and she began to take off her clothes.
Beth wasn't wearing any elaborate strip costume now. Just ordinary every day street clothes, a green dress such as any plain recretary might wear to the office. But she freed herself from that plain green dress in an elegant and eye-widening way.
Her body rippled liquidly as she got it off. Zip went the zipper, and Beth turned and suddenly she wasn't wearing the dress any more, she was holding it in her hands. She tossed it gaily in the general direction of an armchair, and it floated down and landed.
She hadn't bothered with wearing a slip. There was nothing under that dress but a couple of wispy undergarments, and nothing under them but lots and lots of Beth.
She clicked the clasps of her bra and the cups dropped away, baring the luscious, rosy-tipped mounds of her breasts. At close range, they were even more exciting than they had seemed to me in the dimly lit, smoke-filled bar, where I had had to look at them from thirty feet away. They were round and close-set, and the skin was so very white that it seemed almost transparent. They had a perfect curve, filling outward like hemispheres, with the tips set on the upper part of the curve, jutting upward to give her bosom a tip-tilted look.
The tips were swollen, too. She wanted loving, that was obvious.
Down came her panties, now, baring the flat, taut drum of her mid-section, the generous flare of her hips, and the firm, seductively contoured lines of her adorable buttocks. She grinned at me. Nothing bid her nudity now except her stockings and her garter-belt. With a little laugh she spun in a pirouette, her breasts jiggling, and I had a view of the firm cheeks of her buttocks, framed at the top by the strap of the garter-belt, at the bottom by the upper line of her stockinged legs.
Then she began to open her garters and roll her stockings down.
"Hurry," she said. "Get undressed, Harry!"
I nodded and started to get rid of my clothing. My fingers fumbled with the buttons of my shirt. I was as tense and jumpy as a sixteen-year-old kid about to have his first girl. Part of that, I knew, was the effect of all the liquor I had had to drink this evening. But mostly I was so excited by the idea of bedding Beth that my fingers wouldn't altogether obey the commands of my feverish brain.
She waited for me, standing nude, a pink lovely statue in the middle of the floor. I stepped out of my clothes. My shorts followed in a moment, and then I was as naked as she was.
Her eyes glowed with desire.
She came to me. I held out my arms to her, and she glided to them, and the tips of her breasts were drilling at my chest, and then she got closer to me, so that I was aware of the warm soft, fleshy globes that were back of those hard nipples. She was warm and wonderful and radiant, and as I held her I was glad that I had made my trip to Philly this particular week and that I had chosen that particular nightspot to enter at that particular time.
She muttered soft little wordless sounds to me as we clung to each other. She kissed me with her lips and tongue, with her breasts and waist and knees, a sizzling kiss; a torrid, lingering, passionate kiss that set me going in a frenzy of need.
Then I knocked off the lights.
We moved toward the bed.
"Come to papa," I whispered.
"You bet," she said.
I filled my hands with the generous bounty of her bosom. My fingertips dug at firm, warm, tender flesh. She was soft and cuddly against me. Her hand reached out for me, and she twined her fingers with the hair on my chest, playing little games, tugging, twisting the hair round and round. Then her hand slipped farther.
I caught my breath as she moved. Her experienced fingers did exciting things. I closed my eyes and began to breathe hard. My hand glided out, over her body from her hard-tipped, heaving breasts, and farther along the warm, fascinating torso.
Her arm clamped tight around my shoulder. The flesh was smooth as satin, her nails were very sharp but gentle.
For a long moment we were busy with each other, lying side by side, stroking and petting and caressing. I could tell by touching her that she was ready for love. She was warm and eager.
I moved toward her.
Her soft, silken body was waiting for me, and my heart stopped beating, my breath was suspended. There was that sensation that you can't possibly describe, the sensation that you have to experience in order to understand, as my body came in touch with hers and began to take charge. I took her.
"Oh, yes," she whispered hoarsely. "That's what I want, honey!"
"That's what you've got."
"Give me all you have! Let me have you, honey!" she cried.
He body took off like an untamed bronco. All that rolling energy of hers, which earlier in the evening had gone into cavorting and leaping on the counter of a bar, now went into the wild, uninhibited expression of her passion.
She tightened her arms until I was practically flattening her breasts. She moved her body so that I could receive the greatest possible pleasure, and I drove for her. I worked my hands along her body to grasp the taut cheeks of her buttocks, and I held her, helping her receive the same pleasure.
Her arms shot up, fingers pointed at the ceiling. The bed creaked and complained beneath us. My body worked as it never had before.
It had been a long time since I had experienced any loving to compare with this.
I had been unfaithful to my wife before. Of course I had. Business took me away from New York pretty often, and when I left Myra behind I generally took advantage of the fact to find a little companionship. But the sort of casual pick-ups that you find in strange cities are generally no more than going through the motions. They don't have any real drive to give you a good show.
Beth was different. Quite different.
Beth wasn't just a hooker out for a quick buck. Beth was enjoying this herself.
I was sure of that. Oh, I know, chippies come on like gangbusters all the time, the general idea being to make the customer feel like he's the world's all-time greatest lover. But I couldn't believe that Beth was just putting on an act. I think I've had enough experience with women to know what's phony and enough to know what isn't.
This was the real thing.
Her face was distorted with lust. Her features took on that weird, twisted, almost ugly expression that means that a woman is being swept by ecstasy so powerful that takes control of her facial muscles. I don't think that that can be faked-or that a girl trying to fake would deliberately adopt such strange facial expressions.
She was gasping and panting and moaning, too. Her body was quivering with passion.
"Now!" she cried. "Now, baby, now!"
I knew she'd achieved ecstasy. I could practically hear her muscles twanging like bow-strings. I was swept away, by the surge of her passions. Against me, her body continued to twist and turn, and in another moment, her culmination reached a most hectic point, I knew I was approaching the moment of maximum enjoyment myself.
My eyes closed. I thrust my face down against the pillow and locked my arms around her. Her breasts were like globes of fire against me. Her hoarse grunts of animal-like ecstasy roared in my ear. Her hips accented a ceaseless tempo of delight.
Then there was the blaze of my own pleasure.
Then everything ended, for her and for me. The wildness went out of us. My heart was thundering and my body was bathed in sweat. So was hers. In the silence of the room the sound of our harsh breathing was as loud as a buzz-saw to me. Then came the raucous cry of a conventioneer somewhere in the corridor, breaking the spell.
"That was good," Beth said softly. "That was awful good, Harry."
"That was more than good, Beth. That was simply terrific."
"Hold me tight," she said. "Put your hands here and hold me."
I cupped her breasts. She turned toward me. I had some vague idea of waiting half an hour or so and then loving her again. As long as I had her here in bed with me, there was no sense in stopping after the first round, was there?
But I didn't get that second round, much as I thought I wanted to. I lay nestling against the soft cushions of Beth's high-peaked breasts, and after a while I drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep, feeling happier than I'd felt in years, with Beth's warmth beside me.
When I woke, it was morning.
She was gone.
It was nine o'clock. I had only had about five hours of sleep, but sunlight slanting through my Venetian blinds awakened me, and there was no sight of Beth. The bathroom door was open, so she wasn't in there. Her clothing was gone. She must have risen and dressed silently while I was still sacked out, at least, that's what I figured.
Last night had seemed to me like a real star-begotten love romance. But now, in the cold, hard light of a Philadelphia morning, some of my boozy illusions melted away. I climbed out of bed feeling old and tired, knowing that all I had done was picked up a provocative B-girl of a chippie and had myself a real nice, energetic time.
I looked for my wallet. To my surprise, it was still there, and so was the roll of cash I was carrying. When I counted through it, I discovered that there was a ten-spot missing.
Well, I wasn't astonished. The only surprising thing was that Beth had placed such a modest price on her services. A New York girl or a Chicago girl would have taken at least twenty, if she didn't simply clean out the wallet altogether. But this was quaint old Philadelphia, I remembered, where the frugal spirit of Ben Franklin still ruled.
I headed into the shower. My mind glowed with fond memories of last night. That had been good, while that lasted, but now everything was over. No matter how things had ended, I would always remember Beth as she had been last night, naked and exciting in my arms. I had certainly spent tens in plenty of worse ways m my time.
As I soaped myself, I shrugged, thinking that I'd never see her again, trying to fix every detail of her in my mind for keeps, the shape of her breasts, the contour of her buttocks, the taste of her lips, the sounds that she had made at the very highest moment of our recent passion.
A pleasant memory to file away for my old age, I figured. She was just a local good-time girl who had drifted into my life one night and drifted out of it the morning after, I thought. Perhaps I would never see her again.
But I was wrong.
Very wrong.
CHAPTER THREE
A couple of gallons of black cofffe left me more or less fit to transact business, and I kept my lunchtime appointment and got everything taken care of. My trip was over. By three o'clock, I was on the train back to New York.
I phoned Myra from the station a little after five. "I'll be home in half an hour," I told her.
"How was your trip?"
"Fine," I said.
I was in an edgy, guilty mood. If you've ever been an unfaithful husband-or an unfaithful wife, for that matter-you'll know exactly how it is when you come back to your mate after having strayed from the fold.
Suddenly, you're in a very loving mood. You feel that you've done her an injury, and you want to make it up. That was why I always took Myra out for dinner when I got back from an out-of-town business trip. She had come to expect it from me. Was it because I was generally unfaithful to her while I was away? Of course. And did Myra know that was the reason-or did she just accept the dinner out as one of those things? That I didn't know.
I took the subway to Brooklyn. We had been living, for the past few years in the Brooklyn Heights district, which is just across the river from Manhattan. A bunch of new luxury-type apartment houses had risen there. You could live in Brooklyn Heights for about two-thirds of what it would cost you to live in the same quality apartment over in Manhattan, and it wasn't much of a trip into the heart of the city.
Myra was waiting when I got home, all dressed up and ready to go.
"Hello, Harry."
"Hello, Myra. Miss me?"
"Sure," she said. "You know I did."
"Yeah."
I took her in my arms. I was in my home-to-Myra mood, which meant I was loving and affectionate. It would take at least twenty-four hours for the mood to fade and for us to settle back into our usual state of armed truce. The love had left our marriage a long time ago. We were just leisurely going through the regular paces now.
But it wasn't hard to love Myra-at least, to love her physically. It was her personality that turned me off. She had become a cold, nervous, jumpy woman. A witch in words of one syllable. But her body was still as magnificent as ever. She was only twenty-nine, after all, even though the eight years of her marriage to me often seemed like eight centuries.
She was a big, strapping, voluptuous redhead, with a pair of boobs worth walking a mile to see, and solid legs, and a firm squeezable backside. Once upon a time she had been pretty good in bed, too. Not every woman with a fabulous body knows how to do fabulous things in bed. Myra did. But not lately. Our life had settled into a now-and-then, routine kind of thing.
Tonight, though, would be an exception, because this was my homecoming night.
We went out to dinner in the neighborhood. The coming of towering, expensive, Manhattan-type apartment houses to Brooklyn Heights has brought with it some expensive, Manhattan-type restaurants, and we ate at one of them. Myra looked good in her tailored suit, dark green to set off the fiery red of her hair.
She was smiling, too.
I wondered if she had any guilts to get rid of, the way I did. Was she unfaithful too, on my week ends out? Was that why she was so friendly the night I came back?
We toasted each other in martinis. We split a bottle of good red Burgundy with our steaks. I signed for the check-no expense account stuff this time, alas-as though the twenty bucks didn't mean a thing. Then we went home.
Myra said, "I've been waiting all week end for this, darling."
"So have I," I said, keeping up the pretense that we were burning for each other's bodies.
We got undressed fast. There she was in front of me, big and statuesque, her heavy breasts bulging toward me, her waist flat and lean, her hips broad. She was bigger than Beth, I thought. But I doubted if she'd be as passionate, all the same.
We got into bed.
We moved toward each other.
"Welcome home, Harry," she whispered ardently.
Our lips met. My hands went to her big breasts. Her nipples were eager. Her body pressed against mine. Her arms tightened around me.
I took her.
Round number nine hundred ninety-nine in our married life, I thought.
That was a good round, though. Myra must have had plenty to atone for. Her body twisted and shook and pushed against mine, and she arched, going high off the mattress. I tried faster, and she trembled and quivered and gasped in pleasure, and we soared quickly up and up toward the heights of ecstasy. She got there a little ahead of me, which is the way it ought to be, I think, and then I had my jollies too, and we kissed as tenderly as honeymooners.
"Good night," she said softly. "Good night, Myra."
In the morning we had a quarrel about what movie we would see this week. Things were getting back to normal.
"You lousy dictator," she snapped. "Why do we always have to go to the shows you want to see? Why don't I count once in a while? Why-"
"Listen, Myra, we went to your choice movie last week, and-"
"We did not!"
"We did."
"Are you trying to tell me-?" I sighed. Everything was in the old groove again with Myra and me.
Welcome home, Harry. Welcome home.
And then I saw Beth again, which was about the last thing I expected to happen. Especially the way it did happen. It took place a couple of months after my night with her, and this time it wasn't in Philly. We met m good old New York, and I happened to be out with my wife Myra at the time.
It was our eighth wedding anniversary, and because even if a marriage isn't working out and is as dead as a withered tree you have to keep up appearances, I was taking her out. Perhaps all the deep and binding things of the marriage were long since dead, but the rituals, the good-morning kiss and the night club outing on the anniversary, these things still held on to life somehow without letting go.
So Myra met me at the office at quarter past five that Thursday evening in June. She was wearing her best outfit, a deep purple dress scooped down to here to show off the ripe hills of her breasts. Everything was showing, almost to the nipple. And for a second, as I looked at her, I wished that Myra and I could somehow manage to forget the old rankling bitternesses that had dried out our marriage, and start all over again from scratch.
But then she spoiled it.
She looked at my shirt and said, "Your collar is filthy, Harry!"
"It isn't so bad."
"It's a disgrace. Can't you even keep yourself clean on this night of all nights?"
I sighed. I knew it was the same old Myra that I was stuck with.
I sighed. "Don't make a fuss," I said. "Not on this night of all nights. Okay, Myra? Let's just try to have a good time."
"But your collar-"
"I spent all day in the office, Myra. What did you want me to do, bring a spare shirt to work? Lay off me, will you?"
She subsided. She had gotten a little crabbing out of her system, that was all. What was a wife for, if she couldn't grumble and mutter about every trivial thing that struck her wrong?
We had dinner at a pretty good midtown restaurant, where you could get a fairly decent French meal although no cold mashed potatoes-without having to mortgage your left, arm, and then we saw one of the big hit shows. I had bought Myra a corsage-another anniversay ritual-and the flowers seemed to soothe her a little. Once the dirty collar business was over with, we had hardly any additional quarrels through the whole evening.
When the show let out, a little before eleven o'clock, we headed for a big Fiftieth Street nightspot, as we had previously arranged. We always did that on our anniversary--even when, as this year, our anniversary came out in the middle of the week.
We took a table and ordered drinks and some sandwiches to use up the minimum, and watched the floor show for a while. There was the usual wisecracking comic with the raucous laugh and the stale jokes about shrewish mothers-in-law and about reactionary politicians, and the usual long-legged breasty girls doing their elaborate dance routines in the fancy plumed costumes. Since this was New York, they had all the vital parts covered, more or less. They couldn't show their nipples or their buttocks, but they managed to bare just as much else as they dared.
I was pushed back in memory to a time two months before-to a night in Philadelphia when a dark-haired girl in scant clothes got up on the counter of a bar to shake her body and bare her breasts. I remembered a lush seductive nude girl climbing into my bed, kissing me with lips of fire, giving her body to me.
I wondered about Beth, what she was doing tonight, who she'd be going home with when she finished her nightly grind at Le Chant Noir.
And then Myra frowned and said to me, "Harry, is that girl looking at you? Seems to me she's staring in a funny way."
I sipped at my martini. "What girl? I don't see any girl looking at me."
"That one," she said. "Up on stage." She pointed with a jabbing forefinger.
She was pointing to one of the chorines, a good-looking tall girl with wide hips and wide shoulders and a flimsy band of something-or-other just barely managing to conceal the heavy thrust of her full, creamy, nearly nude breasts.
The girl definitely was staring at me, as if I were some long-lost cousin from Ohio. I peered through the fog of cigarette smoke and frowned in puzzlement. She looked familiar, all right-but how would I know a chorus girl at the Quarter?
Then the identity of this girl smacked me between the eyes like a safe dropping from a twenty-story height. I wondered how I could possibly have forgotten those hips and those shoulders and those breasts so soon. Was it the haze in here? Was I just tired? Or getting softening of the brain?
It was Beth.
Here, in New York.
I started to sweat, and my right hand dug convulsively into the flesh of my leg. The girl parading around in next to nothing smiled shyly at me. I looked quickly away, hoping that Myra hadn't seen that bedroom grin that Beth had flashed me.
Not here, I thought. Not on our anniversary, of all nights.
There wasn't any possible shred of doubt about it. The girl in the chorus line was Beth. And she had recognized me.
"Yeu look very strange, Harry," Myra said in an edgy voice. "What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing."
"And why is that girl looking at you with so much interest?"
My voice was dry and harsh, as I tried to be offhand about my answer. "She probably thinks I'm some bigwig producer in town from Hollywood, or something, and that's why she's giving me the eye. These girls are always looking for an angle. Come on, Myra-let's dance a little, okay?"
We moved out onto the dance floor and Myra pressed against me, the big creamy bowls of her breasts jiggling as she moved.
We circled the dance floor a few times. I was dancing stiffly and uneasily. My mind wasn't paying attention to the music, or to the tall, handsome woman who was so close in my arms. My mind was thrown back in time two months, back to that single dazzling unforgettable night in Philadelphia that had seemed like the sealed-off past until this moment.
Then it happened.
I was remembering.
Everything.
Myra had looked attractive and sexy to me as we set out tonight, but that was only until I had been able to refresh my memory of what Beth was like. Now I found myself wishing that Myra was somewhere else, a hundred miles away, a million, in Chicago, in Tim-buctoo, dead, married to some other guy.
Anything, so long as I would be free to have Beth again, now that she was here in New York.
The dance interlude ended and the girls came back. There was Beth again, on stage wearing filmy next-to-nothings. Myra bent forward to straighten her stockings, or something, and as she vanished from sight Beth shot an inquiring glance at me, as though to ask, "How have you been, and just who is that busty redhead with you?"
Trying to make it imperceptible, I shrugged, shook my head about half an inch, flicked my eyes at. the un-watching Myra as if to warn Beth to keep away, at least for the time being.
She did. The act ended and the girls danced off stage, their pretty breasts bobbing and jiggling. They disappeared from sight, the curtains came down, and the dance music started again.
I sat there tense, keyed-up.
"Want to dance?" I asked Myra-the guilty-husband reflex again. When you dream of cheating your wife, you're always extra nice to her.
"In a couple of minutes," Myra said. "I've got to go to the powder room first."
"Okay," I said. "I'll wait here."
I sat alone at the table, sipping my watery drink, thinking back dreamily to the girl I had known briefly in Philalelphia on that wild night of nakedness and passion, and wondering if I would ever get to hold her in my arms a second time.
About a minute after Myra had left the table, a waiter drew near and looked me over.
"This note is for you, sir," he said. He handed me a folded slip of paper on a little enamelled tray, and stood back, waiting. There wasn't much doubt about what he was waiting for, either. I fished in my pocket for some change, came up with nothing better than a quarter, and gave it to him. He pocketed it without a smile or a thank-you, nodded, and left.
I looked around to make sure Myra wasn't coming back from the powder room yet. She wasn't anywhere in sight. Cautiously, my fingers shaking a little in anticipation, I unfolded the note.
It was written sloppily in a childish handwriting, a big blue ball-point scrawl, and the paper smelled of perfume. The note said:
Dear Mister-
This may just be a case of mistaken identity, or maybe it isn't. If it isn't, then your name is Harry Martin, and we met before, for a very nice night in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. Am I right or am I wrong?
If you're the person I believe you are, and if you're still interested in the girl you met in Philadelphia, perhaps we can get together some time. I'm living in New York permanently now.
You can call me any day after noon at PL 7-8796 and maybe we can arrange something. If you're the man I'm thinking of, that is, and if you're still interested.
If you're not Harry Martin, please forget the whole thing, okay? And that's a very pretty girl you're with. She is probably your wife, but that didn't stop you before and I hope it won't stop you again.
-Beth.
I looked at the note, reading it over and over again, my heart pounding at a tremendous rate, thump-a-thumpety-thump as though it wanted to jump right out of my rib cage. Finally I realized that Myra might be back at any minute, and that it would be dangerous to have her find me with the note. She would want to know what it was, and with her curiosity she'd keep right at it until I showed it to her. I knew Myra, all right.
So I memorized the phone number. Then I shredded the note into half a million bits, and casually scattered the pieces on the floor like so much confetti. That would take care of Myra and her curiosity!
Myra came back to the table a few minutes later. I looked at her as though she were a perfect stranger, and not my wife, celebrating our eighth wedding anniversary with me.
I could only think of Beth.
Beth nude, Beth with me, Beth close in my arms, Beth panting, Beth making soft little cries of ecstasy as she thrilled me in love.
In my mind's eye I saw round, ruby-tipped breasts and long legs and milk-white buttocks. I saw her up on the counter of the bar, laughing, breasts thrust forward at some clown's face. I saw her stark naked in my hotel room, ready for passion.
There was sudden dryness in my throat. There was sudden tension in my head.
Beth was in New York.
Beth wanted to see me again.
Beth, I thought, stunned by the unexpectedness of her turning up.
Beth!
CHAPTER FOUR
I called her the next day from my office.
It was a terrific temptation to call her as soon as I got in, at nine o'clock. But I didn't. Beth had said in her note not to call her before noon. Naturally not; she probably kept showgirls' hours, sleeping from five or six in the morning till twelve, then getting up and starting to work up energy for the night's performance. I only hoped that she'd been sleeping alone.
So I watched the clock all morning until noon came around. Everyone began to file out of the office then for lunch.
"Going to eat today, Harry?" they asked me, one after another.
I flashed a quick smile. "I got a couple of odds and ends to tidy up first," I told them. "You go on ahead without me, huh?"
It wasn't until ten after twelve that everybody in the office had gone out, finally. I forced myself to wait until then, when I was completely alone, with no chance of discovery.
Then I picked up my extension and said to the switchboard girl, "Let me have an outside line, will you, sweetheart?"
The steady hum of a dial-tone purred into my ear. My fingers were cold and quivering from tension. I could hardly dial the number.
But I managed to dial it, clumsily, as though my fingers were suddenly too big for the holes on the dial. I listened to the phone ringing at the other end ... two, three, four times.
Five.
On the seventh ring I was almost ready to give up hope. Had I gotten the number right? Was this really Beth's? Had she gone out? Or did she have somebody in the room with her who was keeping her too busy to answer her phone?
Then I heard the sound of a receiver being lifted from the hook, and a moment later a soft, sleepy voice said, "Yeah?"
Sleep-fogged as the voice was, I recognized it instantly.
"Beth," I said. "Beth!"
"That's my name, all right," she agreed. "Who is this, please?"
"Harry. Harry Martin."
There was just dead silence for perhaps ten seconds. I began to wonder again.
Then: "Oh-Harry! Harry from Philadelphia!"
"Yes."
"Sorry, Harry. I was so sleepy I didn't remember your voice for a second ... as if I could forget it, really. You got my note?"
"Yes," I said. "Sure. How else would I know your number?"
"Yeah. I guess."
"I wish I could have seen you last night, Beth, spent some time with you, but...."
"That was your wife with you, wasn't it?" Beth asked. "The redhead?"
"Yes," I said, licking my dry, taut lips. "My better half." I laughed harshly. "The devil with her, though. She doesn't matter at all. When can I see you, Beth? That's what matters."
"Any time. Any time, Harry."
I was quite for a moment. Then I said, "That morning in Philly-when I woke up you were gone. You just left. You didn't even say good-bye to me, Beth. Why did you do it like that?"
"I knew you were a guy with a wife," Beth said. "I didn't want to get tangled up with you, didn't want you to get hooked with me. There wasn't any future together for us, I figured. I thought I'd just slip away, nice and early in the morning, and we'd each have a nice memory to keep warm. But I didn't forget about you so easy after all."
"Why'd you come to New York?"
"I had to," she said.
"Trouble?"
"Sort of. That guy Mark-you remember him, the manager-?"
"The tough-looking one in the zoot suit?"
"Yeah, him," Beth said. "He kept thinking he owned me. Do this, do that, come to bed with me now, stay away the next night, so on and on. I got fed up with him and I quit the club. Then he came after me and tried to make trouble for me. I left Philly last month and went to New York to get away from him and I got a night club job, and that's the whole story."
I was quiet for a few seconds, thinking it all over, thinking how smooth and convenient it would be to have Beth living here in New York where I could see her and love her often.
I wondered how I could fix things with Myra so that I'd be free to see Beth. I didn't know how I could swing it, but I promised myself that I'd manage to work things out somehow.
"I want to see you," I said. "Right now."
"Me too, Harry. Right now."
She gave me the address. I jotted it down and got off the phone. Then I waited about thirty seconds, and picked up the receiver again.
The switchboard girl said brightly, "Yes, Mr. Martin?"
"Nelly, I've got a business visit to make. I'm going to be out of the office till-oh, about half past four this afternoon. If any phone calls come in for me, take a message, huh?"
"Of course, Mr. Martin."
"That's a good kid," I said.
I locked up my desk and got out of there in a double quick hurry.
It was a wonderful June afternoon, warm and bright, the sky flecked with little fleecy puffs of cloud. I started to walk across town, toward the address that Beth had given me. She had told me that she was living in a cheap boarding-house over on the west side of town. I made up my mind that I'd help her to find a place in a slightly better neighborhood-maybe a neighborhood that was a little closer to my office, I figured.
I reached the street where she lived about a quarter to one. I had been half-running, half-walking the whole way. I was sweaty and out of breath, and impatient as I huffed and puffed alone.
The building was a small brownstone on the wrong side of Ninth Avenue. There was a fire escape running down the front of the building like a rusty spider, and noisy kids playing in and out of the street, dodging the stream of autos that were turning in off the nearby West Side Highway.
Beth had said she lived in Apartment Eleven. I glanced at the battered letterboxes in the dark, dismal, garbage-perfumed hall, and found the little sloppily-printed card that said,
APARTMENT ELEVEN-BETH BRYSON.
That card hit me with a little jolt. I realized that I hadn't even known what Beth's last name was till now.
I bounded up the stairs. Apartments One through Four turned out to be on the ground level of the old brownstone. Apartments Five through Eight were on the second floor. Apartments Nine to Twelve were on the top.
I was winded by the time I got to the third-floor landing. I hung there a second clinging to the banister, wheezing like an old dodderer, before I started to look around for her apartment.
Rusty tin numbers identified the doors. I found a door with two ones hanging on it, one of the ones slightly askew. Apartment Eleven, I thought. I knocked.
"Who's there?" came a voice.
Beth's voice.
"It's Harry," I said. My heart began that thumpety-thump pounding again.
She kept me waiting half a second before she opened the door.
"Harry," she said. "Boy, it's good to see you again, Harry!"
"Hello, Beth," I said.
She was wearing a thin, filmy pink robe over nothing at all. I could see the proud, voluptuous curves of her body as clearly as if she were naked. The high, red-tipped mounds of her breasts, the sweep of her waist and hips, the deep socket of her navel, the firm columns of her legs-her whole gorgeous frame was there for me to behold, looking even more exciting through the filter of her negligee than it would have been if she had answered the door in the complete nude.
The room she was living in was a mess. There were over-flowing ash trays every place, clothes strewn carelessly here and there, and a rumpled, unmade bed in the middle of it all. But I only half-noticed any of these things. How could I stop to stare at the background scenery, when Beth was there?
She faded up close against me, drifting into my arms, and I held her tight.
"You know something, Harry?" she said. "Two months can be a hell of a long time."
"Don't I know it," I said.
My lips went to hers. I brought my hands up and copped them over the ripe globes of her breasts. Her nipples began to get excited right away. The gown that she was wearing didn't conceal much of the texture of her back. I was aware of the softness of her flesh, the warmth.
She slid against me, her body doing exciting things as she undulated close to me. I took one of my hands from her breasts and ran it along her back, catching the hem of her negligee and pulling it upward so that I could get my fingers to the bare flesh of her buttocks. She giggled as I caressed her nakedness.
We stood that way for maybe a minute and a half, just kissing and hugging. Renewing old acquaintance, sort of. Then we broke the clinch.
She said, "I'm sorry about the way the place looks, Harry."
"It's all right."
"It isn't. It's a lousy stinking mess, and I know it, and you don't have to pretend it isn't. I can't help it, though. I didn't get through at the club till the small hours, and when I got home I was so tired that I just collapsed into bed without stopping to tidy anything up around the house."
"So who's complaining?"
"I don't want you to think I'm this sloppy all the time, that's all," she said.
"How come you're living in such a beat-up place, though?"
She shrugged, the shrug making the deep bowls of her breasts sway enticingly under the negligee. "It was all I could afford when I came up out of Philly," she said. "I get good pay now, but I'm saving it up. I'll move soon, Harry."
I nodded. "I'll help you find a better place. You shouldn't be living in a dump like this."
"I don't mind it, Harry. It's pretty close to the club, and-"
"It's a dump," I said firmly. "You deserve a better place to live."
"Well, when I can afford it-"
"Stop worrying about that," I said. I stood back, looking her over from head to toe. Then I stepped forward again. Gently, with trembling fingers, I slid the negligee off her.
Her nakedness was a sizzling sight.
My eyes ran like rabbits all over her body, from her long, slender neck to her broad shoulders, to the mounds of her breasts tipped with coral-red nipples tall and hard, to the slimness of her waist, the flourishing hips, the tapering perfection of her knees and calves and ankles.
As though putting herself on display like a slave up for auction, Beth turned slowly in a complete circle. She showed me the profile of her body, the back straight as an arrow, the jutting, tip-tilted globes of her breasts, the curved contours of her buttocks, and then she swung around and I was looking at wide shoulders and a smooth back and two pearly white hind cheeks, and a moment later I had the other profile view again, just as good as the first, and finally she was facing me again.
She was smiling, and there was a shining lust-glow in her eyes.
"Get undressed," she whispered.
I didn't waste any time. Her lush nakedness was like a banner leading me on to the Promised Land. I slipped my jacket off and loosened my tie, unbuttoned my shirt, got out of my trousers. Beth helped. She gathered up each garment as I discarded it and carefully put it in an uncluttered part of the room.
In a moment, I was as naked as she was. She went over to the bed, smoothed it out, straightening the sheets. I watched her. As she bent forward over the bed, her buttocks went deliciously taut, and the heavy apples of her breasts swayed downward to become even more lovely than before.
I came up behind her. I bent and took a playful lHtle nip at her left buttock.
Beth yipped with pain. "Hey! What's the matter, didn't you have lunch?"
"As a matter-of-fact, I didn't," I said.
"Want me to fix you a sandwich?"
"Not now," I said. "Some other time."
"That's good," she said. "Because there isn't anything in the house, anyway."
"Except you."
"And now you're here," she said.
"And that's all we need, right?"
"You'd better believe! Just so you don't pass out from hunger...." she teased.
"I won't," I assured her. "don't worry about that, baby. I won't."
We laughed. And then we tumbled into the bed together.
A moment later we were all tangled up with one another-my legs, my rough arms, her smooth, silky ones, and my hands, seeking her breasts; my tongue finding hers while her hands wandered all over my body-exploring, hunting, possessive hands.
Neither of us really needed much encouragement to get fully excited. But we held back from the main event for a little while anyhow, even though we didn't need any preliminary playing around. There's a certain pleasure in the postponement of pleasure, as one of the great philosophers once said, or should have said.
I roamed the tantalizing pastures of her. I hefted her big firm breasts in my hands, and I planted a row of kisses along her cheek, and I snaked the tip of my tongue around the pink shell of her ear and made her giggle, and then I put my kiss to one of her breasts and teased the tip hard as rock while she squirmed, and I teased more and made her shiver and utter little gasping sounds of pleasure.
I knew that she was wildly eager and ready to go. "Harry," she whispered. "Harry-"
"I want you too, baby."
Her breasts were smooth mountains of pearly flesh. They sprouted stunningly from her chest, swelling outward and meeting in a valley. The tips were big and succulent, tilting up like rosy faces.
"Touch me, Harry," she sighed. "Touch me all over. You make me feel all warm and good."
Her hands cupped under her breasts, lifted them, caressed them, thrust them forward. The tips, stiff and protruding, swelled like rosebuds heavy with dew. Her body trembled with desire.
Her eyes were shut, her hands cradling my head. My fingers sought her breasts again and gently squeezed their melony contours, savoring the delicious softness of them. Beth sighed. He body grew tense with urgency and expectancy.
Then she slipped along my body. Her breasts were touching me first here, then there. Her kiss was like a fire, searing me. I held her, and was lost in a fog of magnificent sensations. Her long black hair swept against me, moving with gradually speeding rhythms.
Faster, faster....
A flood of passion engulfed us.
Most floods put fires out. Not this one. This was a flood of pure gasoline. The fires within us leaped sky-high, turning the sky into a gleaming arch of flame, engulfing the world.
Our bodies moved together.
We met as with a crash of cymbals.
Her arms scrabbled me to her and I took her quickly and easily, even while she was still moving in invitation; then we began and she clawed at me with her hands, not wanting to hurt, just wanting to hold me to make sure I didn't go anywhere for a while.
She didn't need to worry, though.
I wasn't going anywhere without her.
My eager body moved against hers. Every moment was an excursion into ecstasy. In a few moments we were both jumping and bouncing around on the bed like maniacs. The bed was an old, rickety, Salvation Army kind of job. I was sure that it was going to smash apart. And I didn't care at all.
The bed held together, though.
We went surging up, up, and away.
Pleasure took us. Pleasure devoured us. There was the first intimation of ecstasy, and the answering gasp from deep in her throat, and then our bodies simmered in sweat and her breasts jabbed me in a sudden hysterical movement that set her to triple time as we went soaring into the never-never world of bliss.
After a while, we came down out of those magic heights. We lay entwined on the bed, the heavy hills of her breasts resting against my chest. From outside came the sound of kids and honking horns and angry old women quarreling with each other.
I kissed each rosy nipple. I brushed my lips across her lips. I slipped my hand down to her knee and left it there.
She said, "I won't have to wait two months this time till I see you again, will I, Harry?"
"You won't even wait two weeks."
"We'll get together often."
"Yes," I said. "I'll call you every day from the office, just to see how you're coming along. And I'll see you as often as I can."
"How often is that?"
"I don't know yet," I said. "I've got to be careful how much time I take away from the office. They give me a free hand, but if I start falling behind in my work they're likely to wonder where I've been spending my time all those afternoons."
"How about evenings? I don't have to report for work till around eight."
"Then I've got to watch out for Myra's suspicions," I said.
"Myra is your wife?"
"Yes. I don't want to get her sniffing around on my trail. But we'll be seeing each other, Beth. A couple of times a week, I hope."
"Don't disappoint me, Harry."
"And I'll find you a better place to live, too," I promised.
"I told you, I can't afford it yet."
"I'll help you with the rent," I heard myself say.
I was in a very promising mood that afternoon. I promised her just about everything.
After a while we began to love again. That wasn't as stormy and as violent as our first round. She turned to me with a kiss and a caress that began to excite me.
Soon I was ready, and I rolled toward her and she was ready, eager for me to love her again. Then there was passion and we began to move, smiling into each other's eyes until we reached that point where neither of us could keep eyes open any more.
About four o'clock I said, "I have to start getting back to the office now, honey. And you ought to start cleaning the place up a little."
She smiled lazily, looking in cat-contentment from the pillow. Her big breasts heaved in open invitation. She said in a purring, drawling voice, "Do you really have to go yet, Harry?"
I nodded. I made myself start to get dressed.
"Yeah," I said. "But I'll be back. I'll see you, Beth baby. You can count on that."
CHAPTER FIVE
And so that was how I happened to get myself a mistress. Not just a girl friend, not just a pickup, not just a floozie, but an out-and-out mistress, just like in all the French movies. I would be keeping her. Of course, she'd have her own outside income, but I would be contributing to her upkeep.
I wondered if I could do it. Financially, I mean. My job paid me well, and I had money in the bank. But still, I wasn't anybody's idea of a rich man. There was a surplus, but Beth could eat it up awfully fast if she put her mind to it.
I would risk it, I decided.
What the devil, you only lived once. My marriage had gone cold on me. Beth offered all the delights of the flesh. Why not take them as they came along? Why pinch pennies at a time like this?
My first step was to get her a decent apartment. That wasn't hard. I checked the rental advertisements in the Times, and scouted out a couple of places, and before long I had found one that would do. It was over on the other side of town, about two blocks from my office, which would make things convenient for daytime visits and quickie love-making.
It was a neat little two-room apartment with kitchen and air conditioner. The rent was a hundred-forty a month, which wasn't at all bad for a new building on the East Side, not bad at all.
Beth was flabbergasted when I told her. "A hundred forty clams? In Philadelphia you can rent the city hall for that much!"
"This isn't Philadelphia," I reminded her.
"That's still an awful lot to have to pay for rent, Harry."
"Wait till you see the place," I said. "You'll love it, Beth."
"But the rent-"
"Forget the rent."
"I can't, Harry. It's twice what I'm paying where I'm living now."
I said, "I'll split the new rent with you, okay? That way you won't pay a cent more than your present rent, and you'll be living in a decent place."
She went for that idea, as I figured she would. I took her over to see the apartment and she loved it. So we signed up on a two-year lease. I lent her the money that she had to put down as a month's advance deposit.
It meant that I had taken on a regular expense of seventy dollars a month to cover half her rent. That was pretty funny, in a way, since I had gone to the trouble of moving to Brooklyn Heights so that I wouldn't have to cope with Manhattan rents, and here I was paying rent on a place in Manhattan, anyhow.
But I worked out ways of justifying the cost to myself. It was only two bucks and change a day, I told myself. What the deuce, I could squander that much, couldn't I? Against my investment I could charge off the expenses of the girls I used to pick up when I went out of town. I had been spending maybe forty, fifty dollars a month on call girls on my business trips. Well, there wouldn't be any reason to spend that any more, not when I had Beth waiting for me back in New York. I would be as chaste as a saint on my business trips from now on.
Figured that way, the cost of subsidizing Beth's rent dropped to twenty or thirty dollars a month, net. I could knock off even that much by arguing that if she went on living across town, I would have to spend a few dollars in cab fare every time I went to see her. Having her right near my office meant that I could walk. Chalk up another little saving.
Of course, I knew I'd be spending more on Beth than the seventy dollars rent money. But I didn't let that trouble me. I arranged a way of diverting part of my paycheck each week so Myra wouldn't notice that anything funny was going on. That way I built up a little fund for my Beth expenses.
I saw Beth whenever I could.
I had lunch at her place practically every day, except those days when I had to eat with clients on business reasons-and those days were agony for me. Beth and I didn't necessarily make love every time I went over there. Sometimes I had only an hour to spare. She'd greet me in some kind of skimpy costume, and we'd kiss and I'd run my hands over the proud mounds of her breasts, and then we'd sit down and eat and she'd talk to me about the night club or about anything else that came into her mind.
She wasn't much of a cook. The lunches that she served ran mostly to sandwiches-peanut butter and jam, or salami, or cold mashed potato sandwiches, with pickles-that was best-or corned beef on rye, washed down with beer. I gave her "lunch money" every week to cover the cost of buying groceries.
She never wore the same thing twice when I came for lunch. One day it would be a filmy, gauzy nightgown through which the hills and valleys of her luscious body were tantalizingly visible. Another day, it might be a bra and panties. A different time, she could answer the door wearing a shortie nightgown minus its bottoms, so that she was bare from the middle down, her buttocks peeking charmingly out from under the garment.
Or she would greet me wearing nothing at all except little sequinned pasties over her nipples and a rhinestoned G-string.
"It's my stripper costume," she said. "I used to wear it sometimes in Philly."
And there were times when she'd be totally nude as the door opened. She would stand there with everything she had showing, the ripe globes of her breasts staring me in the eye, all her pink loveliness on display. Once when she pulled that I grabbed her and yanked her to the floor and had her, quickly and without ceremony, the moment I walked in the door. The appeal was that powerful.
Of course, a lot of the time when I went over to her place it wasn't just to have lunch. I developed methods for getting far ahead on my work in the mornings so that I could be free to spend the afternoon with Beth. I'd go there around half past twelve, and we'd eat, and then I'd stay there through the afternoon in bed with her. I'd get back to the office after my "business visit" just in time to grab my brief case and catch an IRT train to Brooklyn ... and Myra.
And sometimes I invented "business trips" that would take me out of town on a one-day visit in the middle of the week or on a week end. I would meet Beth for dinner at some midtown restaurant, and then I'd go to the night club and watch her perform. I did that more because she wanted me to than anything else, because her act wasn't really very interesting. Down in Philadelphia she had done a sizzling solo strip routine, but here in New York she was just one of a horde of chorus girls doing a lot of not-very-great production numbers. The costumes were revealing, but the acts themselves were deliberately aimed for a kind of family audience, and there was nothing provocative, nothing really sexy.
I went anyway. Afterward I would go home with her to her apartment and spend the whole night in her bed, instead of just a frantic few minutes caught on the run during the day.
That was a wonderful time.
Beth never gave me any cause to be jealous, which is really more than you could normally expect from a girl of her background. I never found stray cigar-butts or men's hats around her place, never saw another man's bauble on her dress, never had any cause to suspect that she might be having some fun on the side, on those nights when I could see her. She was always terrific that way. If she had other lovers, she kept them closed off in a different part of her life. There was never a time when I had to compete with anybody else for Beth's attention. She was always available when I wanted her.
But there's a fly in every ointment, so Confucius should have said.
In this particular case trouble of a peculiar kind started with Myra. Of all times to pull something like that, too-after a few years in which bed hadn't meant anything in our marriage, Myra suddenly began to get passionate again.
I wasn't expecting that.
I wasn't geared for that.
She pretty near caved me in.
Here I was, making love with Beth two or sometimes three times a week-and when we made love, there was always an all-out, strenuous, really powerful normal, reasonably virile individual.
At the age of thirty-four, which was my age at the time I got entangled with Beth, a man ought to be able to perform the act two or three times a week and still have some energy to spare. That is, if he's a healthy, normal, reasonably virile individual.
I was healthy, normal, and reasonably virile. I was also a married man, though.
I figured that I could satisfy my mistress three times a week and my wife once a week, without any undue strain. But what put the monkey-wrench into that operation was Myra's unexpected rebirth of passion.
I would come home pooped from an encounter with Beth, only to find that Myra was in the mood for love. And sometimes in the nude for love, too.
It was the summer, now. Myra had always believed in stripping down to beat the heat. So when I came in, at six o'clock or so on a weekday afternoon with the temperature up around ninety, I would frequently find Myra waltzing around the apartment in the bare altogether-even though we had air conditioning.
There she would be. Big, strapping, breasty, my redheaded vixen of a wife. She'd be pink and fresh from a recent shower, and the heavy dangles of her breasts would be rising and falling in keen anticipation.
And there I would be. Sweaty from a hot subway ride. Tired from a day at the office. Maybe also tired from an hour or two in bed with Beth.
And Myra would come up to me, her breasts heaving and jiggling. "Hello, Harry."
"What's for dinner?"
"Dinner can wait, Harry. Kiss me."
"Well-"
"Kiss me!"
And then arms locked around my neck. Big, taut, hard-tipped breasts jammed at my chest. Hungry red lips hunting for my own. Soft knees inviting, pressing.
Any other time, I would have been delighted to have Myra get interested in love again. But not now. Not when I had Beth to take care of.
"Love me," Beth would murmur.
"Take me," Myra would command.
"You'll come visit me again tomorrow, won't you?" Beth would implore.
"Let's make love, Harry," Myra would suggest.
I began to wear down to a frazzle. My weight dropped from a respectable hundred eighty-eight to an emaciated one seventy-two in less time than I like to think about. I began to doze off at my desk every once in a while. I had to start taking pep pills to keep going at work, but they only killed my appetite, and I lost even more weight.
They were affecting my love life, too. There were times when I just couldn't manage. I began to think up dodges for Beth. And for Myra. I was delighted when a severe head-ache came along to put Myra out of commission for a few days. That gave me a chance to catch up with myself-though Beth ruined things by getting extra-passionate herself, and practically insisting that I visit her every day that week and sleep with her.
And at home I couldn't meet Myra's demands all the time, either.
Beth had several advantages going for her in that department. One was that I was naturally more strongly attracted to her, since I had know her only for a couple of months and I had known Myra more than eight years. I was stale on Myra but the novelty of sleeping with Beth kept my flagging desires alive.
Another important point was that when I slept with Beth, we were in the middle of the day, better than twelve hours after I had last made love with Myra-and I had had some sleep in between. But when I came home to Myra, it was still the same day as I had been with Beth, and my work-tired, love-tired body hadn't had a chance to recharge the batteries.
So very often Myra would reach for me and nothing would happen. And she'd say, "Don't you want me, Harry?"
And I'd say, "I'm pretty pooped, Myra."
"Maybe I can encourage you a little."
"You don't have to."
"But I'm in the mood, Harry."
And she'd lean over. She'd do things for me with her kisses and hands. This was a brand new Myra, a Myra hungry for passion. Knowing Myra as I did, I more than half suspected that she was on to my affair with Beth, and that this was her subtle way of fixing me for my infidelity. I wanted a woman? Okay, Myra figured-I'd get one, until the idea of touching a woman's body made me sick.
Myra's expert caresses usually had their result. I'd respond to them ardently enough to be able to love her, and she'd swarm all over me, her big, firm body quivering with desire. All through the gasping trial I'd wish she were Beth. I was mystified by Myra's sudden rebirth of passion.
She was taking her toll.
So a day came late in July when for the first time I simply couldn't do anything when I got to Beth's. I hadn't loved her for two or three days, but Myra had moved right in to keep me busy in bed. Beth was nude when I arrived. That was the signal that she was eager for love today.
But I wasn't. Not at all. I was exhausted, and the idea of going to bed with anyone just made me more tired.
I kissed her, and she rubbed her breasts against me, giving me plenty of hip and bosom action with her naked body as we embraced. That didn't do a thing. Nothing. Not very long ago, I had been so excited at having her answer the door in the nude that I had tumbled her to the floor and taken her on the spot. Not now. Now I couldn't care less, so it seemed.
She noticed.
She couldn't help but notice. There was a coolness in my hug, and an absentness in my kiss. "You want lunch first?" she asked. "I guess so," I said.
She turned away. My eyes ran down the smooth globes of her buttocks, the long flawlessness of her legs.
But the sight of her nakedness didn't help me mach. I watched her moving around the kitchen, nude, fixing the sandwiches, her breasts jiggling attractively as she pulled the tops off the beer bottles.
I wanted to experience desire. I wanted to know-raw, insistent hunger. But I couldn't get turned on at all. today, not for anything.
I wasn't able to hide the fact from her. The moment of truth arrived after lunch, when I got undressed and we moved toward the bed. Beth glanced at me and saw that I wasn't ready to love her.
"Not very eager today, are you?" she said.
"I'm a little tired."
"I'll fix that."
"I hope you can," I said.
Her hand went to me. But her artful caress didn't help. The cool, slender fingers passed over my body without producing a response.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I told you. I'm tired."
"Of me?"
"Just tired. Not of you."
"You haven't love me all week."
I sighed. "But that doesn't mean I've been resting, baby. I've got a wife."
"I thought she wasn't interested in bed any more," Beth said.
"All of a sudden she's interested again," I said dolefully. "She's running me ragged."
"You've lost a lot of weight, I've been noticing."
"I've been burning the candle at both ends," I admitted.
I didn't like having to say things like that. The first thing I knew, Beth would find herself some new pal, and I'd be out in the cold. Maybe that was Myra's whole idea. But I wasn't going to let it happen. I didn't want to lose Beth just because I couldn't satisfy her.
"You want to skip bed today?" she asked.
"No. I know you want to, baby."
"But if you're so tired-"
"That doesn't matter. Not when you're concerned, Beth. I want you."
I gently directed her in a way that would do the most good. Her cheeks were soft, and I caught my breath as her sure-fire technique began to awaken my sleeping desires. In a few minutes I was ready.
Beth grinned at me. "There. That's better."
"You see how much I want you?"
"You got to be careful, though," she said, pouting. "Cheating on me with your wife! You got your nerve! Who does she think she is, sleeping with her own husband when I want you so much?"
We laughed at that.
"I'll try to be more faithful," I promised.
Grinning, Beth said, "You lie back and relax. Let me do the work, honey."
She rolled over to me. Then she put her lips to mine, and we kissed excitingly, lingeringly. I cupped her breasts, squeezing them, toying with the rigid, pucker-tipped nipples.
The she took complete charge of the situation. I knew what she was doing, and I grinned gratefully at her, as her hand reached and guided me. We had a good time ahead of us, I knew. And she knew, too, judging by the grin on her.
We began to rock, around and around, each direction sending fresh shivers of pleasure through me.
I looked at her. Her eyes were sparkling, alert, gay. She was smiling. Her big breasts quivered and jiggled as she moved. Her nipples stood up, stiff and long, their color deepening from rosy pink to flame-red as full excitement gripped her.
I put my hands over her breasts, grasping the heavy rounds of flesh firmly.
I squeezed.
Harder.
Beth shivered. She shifted herself, moving the soft cushions of her buttocks, bouncing her breasts, tossing her head. She bent way back, so that her dark dangling hair touched my toes, so that all I was able to see of her lovely face was the point of her chin. The high mounds of her breasts curved upward as her back bent in an arc, the rigid nipples stabbing at the ceiling.
I found new strength.
I strove repeatedly as my passions mounted. She welcomed me. She was warm and soft and yielding. She quivered and rocked and shook.
Waves of ecstasy swept through me as she cried out the culmination of her passion to me. Her sweat-slippery body was lost to the throes of ecstasy. Her eyes were little slits of lust. Her breath came in gusty bursts as she sucked air into her lungs.
"Yes!" she yelled. "Yes, Harry, yes!"
And now the grand finale of love was grasping me, too, the million little unseen hands doing their work. My brain was fogged with delight. Dimly, I was aware of the culmination of my own desires, the surging fulfillment of hers, and then once again we were descending from the heights. She seemed shaken by the intensity of the experience, worn out, and she collapsed, dropping her lovely body close to mine.
I was exhausted. But I had given her the satisfaction that she needed, and that was all that really counted at the moment.
"You're okay," she whispered. "You're really something, you know that? Even when you're dead tired you can make a girl happy. And when you're rested you're a real powerhouse, Harry."
"It's just that a girl like you brings out the best in me," I said.
"Brings out the beast in you, you mean."
We laughed. I grabbed her firm buttock-mounds and hugged them tight. Right then I felt very good about the whole universe.
But, of course-sure, you guessed it!-Myra wanted to love that night.
I managed to sidestep her. I don't think I could have gone through with that if my immortal soul depended on it. There are certain human limitations that even the healthiest male has to abide by.
Myra didn't try to force me. But she started to get suspicious. She said, "I don't know what's come over you these days, Harry."
I tried to be calm as I looked at her. "Why? What do you mean?"
"I mean you act so strange ... sort of dreamy, all the time."
"I do? You're kidding."
"It's true. And you hardly ever touch me any more. I'm always the one who has to ask you for love. We used to be the other way around, but not any more. And when you do love me, you seem to be a billion miles away. Harry, what's going on?"
"There's nothing going on. I've been working extra hard at the office, that's all. It's coming up to vacation time and I'm worn out."
We let the matter drop there, for the time being. Myra was disgruntled about the situation, but she didn't want to come right out and accuse me of having a lover, so she didn't go any further at that point.
Then Beth pulled a surprise.
The next time I went to her apartment for lunch, there was somebody else there.
Another girl.
CHAPTER SIX
Her name was Rheena, and she worked at the same night club as Beth. She was a long-legged, full-breasted blonde girl, with the kind of silken, glossy, blonde hair that you don't get out of a bottle, and pale skin and blue eyes to match the blonde hair.
When I walked into the apartment, the two of them made quite a sight. Beth was wearing her shortie nightgown, the one that was so transparent it might just as well have been in the dresser drawer for all the good that it was doing concealing her. As for Rheena, she wa-wearing a pajama top. Nothing else, just a pajama top.
Since she was sitting down at the time, the pajama top had ridden up around her waist. Her legs were crossed, and I saw her hips and part of her buttocks, and enough else to tell me that she was really a beautiful woman.
The pajama top was buttoned about halfway down. Two milk-white, rosy-tipped breasts were mostly visible to me within the neckline.
I stood there, startled and a little abashed. I felt like an intruder, letting myself in with my key and finding Beth with company, and both of them practically naked like this.
I said, "If I'm interrupting-"
"Don't be silly," Beth said. "Harry, this is Rheena. She's from the club. You've probably noticed her in the chorus line."
I looked at her. I felt uneasy about staring at her, the way men feel when they run into those topless bathing suits at the beach. But Rheena didn't look inhibited. She didn't try to pull the pajama top down or to button it at the throat. She just sat there, with her legs and a bit of buttock and the upper part of her breasts bare to my gaze, and she grinned.
"Hi," she said. "I've heard a lot about you, Harry. Glad to know you."
"Rheena stayed here last night," Beth said. "We were just getting up. I told her that you'd probably drop in for lunch."
There was only one bed in the apartment, I knew. So Rheena and Beth must have shared it. Did that mean that Rheena and Beth-
They sure looked that way.
I tried to accept the whole situation as though this were perfectly normal. Beth went into the kitchen to fix some lunch for me. Rheena stood up-she had the longest legs I ever want to see on a woman, making her better than six feet tall, and her legs were visible from the tips of her toes right on up-and she turned a-round and walked into the bedroom to straighten the bed. She didn't close the door. I got a good view of the lower halves of her buttocks as she went out of the room, and then, as I glanced into the bedroom and saw Rheena bending forward to tuck in the sheets, I was given a complete view of the pearly white globes. It was a pretty dazzling sight.
Beth came back in, with some sandwiches.
"What's the story?" I asked.
"Friend of mine."
"So I gather. Why's she here now?"
"She stayed overnight. I figured we'd put on a little show for you, Harry."
"What kind of show?"
"Something to get you excited again," she said. "I know that you're all tired out from too much exercise. So I figured we'd put something on that would give you a little zing."
"You mean-you and Rheena-in bed-"
"Sure." Beth grinned. "Shocked?"
"Just surprised."
"I've done some girlie stuff," she said. "The guys tell me that's a pretty exciting thing to watch. So I figured maybe you'd watch us, and then we would turn you on some, so-"
I got her meaning. My pulse began to race a little faster. Beth was going to stage a Lesbian orgy for me. I was supposed to get vicarious kicks, and then to come to life and love her with all the fervor of a stallion. Maybe I was supposed to love both of them. I wasn't clear on the arrangement.
I didn't know if I liked the idea, or not. There was something sordid and ugly about this.
And yet, there was something fascinating, too. There was no denying that. Even the mere promise that I was going to see the show had excited me in a way that I hadn't been for weeks. I decided to let matters take their course. This might be entertaining, I thought, glancing at Rheena's long legs and snowy white buttocks once again, and trying to imagine her in bed with Beth.
"Okay," I said. "Let's have the show."
We all went into the bedroom. I sat down in a chair by the window and crossed my legs and waited for the action to begin.
Rheena and Beth eyed each other a little nervously. They seemed shy, a trifle hesitant, like a couple of small girls who have been asked to spout poetry at a grownup dinner party. Maybe they were having some last-minute qualms about performing in front of me. If they were, the qualms passed fast.
They moved toward the bed, two long-legged, voluptuous wenches both walking with the same kind of sinuous, cat-like grace.
Beth let her nightgown drop. Nude, she faced Rheena and smiled. Beth's breasts rose and fell in an even more rapid pace.
Then Rheena slipped the pajama top off.
Her bare body was something stunning to behold. She had big, round, high breasts, firm and ripe and close together, but what was news to me was not so much the shape and contour of her breasts-they weren't much bigger than Beth's, or Myra's, for that matter-but the color of her skin. I had never seen a girl with such pure white skin.
Rheena looked as though she had never exposed herself to the sun for more than ten seconds at a time. She looked as though she took a bath in milk every day. Or maybe a bath in champagne.
The texture and perfection of her skin was complete and delightful-the same pale flawlessness all over, white with a radiance beneath it. Her blonde hair streamed down her back. Her nipples, rosy red, rose stiffly. Her buttocks were tender-looking, her legs lush.
I might have been a tired man, but I had no trouble getting excited. I got very excited now. The two girls stood naked by the bed, the dark-haired girl and the girl with the milk-white skin. Both had full, heavy breasts that rose upward and outward even when bare and all artificial support was gone. Both had subtly rounded waists, firm legs, wide hips.
In short: both of them were built.
I sat back, hands clasped tightly across my middle. My breath got a little ragged with excitement as I took in the taut, globular loveliness of their buttocks, the endless columns of their legs, the rich promise of their nude bodies.
Beth looked at me. "Should we begin?" she asked.
"What are you waiting for?"
Rheena and Beth dropped down together on the bed.
Rheena's hand reached out for one of Beth's firm, thrusting breasts. Beth moved closer, caressing Rheena eagerly.
Body strained against body. The girls on the bed intertwined, forming a pattern of marvelous complexity. Then they kissed. I saw Rheena's soft golden hair become tangled with Beth's darker strands. Arms explored. I watched their kiss closely. The thought of all that female flesh tangled up like that on the bed was turning me on powerfully.
I had never seen two chicks together before.
Believe me, they were quite a sight.
Quite.
That was something t was never going to forget, if I lived a million ye;
The girls were going crazy with lust, now. They had swung around. I felt my face reddening as I realized belatedly what they were going to do. Somehow I hadn't expected them to do that, not in front of me, but yet, I wondered, what were they supposed to do, if not this? This was the most natural thing in the world for two nude chicks to pleasure each other.
The vice was suddenly very versa, as both girls brought their attentions to play at the same moment. Pale body against tawny, perfect contrast, two heaving torsos, breasts bobbing wildly in growing excitement, black and blonde hair tossing, arms clinging-
They were dynamite to watch. Absolute dynamite.
The two girls were getting themselves very worked up now. It was almost possible for me to see sparks shooting from the bed. Those long, long legs were thrashing around. Big breasts were jiggling and jouncing. Nipples were bulging. Bedsprings were complaining loudly.
Rheena and Beth had swung around now, changing position.
I saw the creamy paleness of Rheena's back and tender, jutting buttocks as she nestled against the tawnier backdrop of Beth's nakedness, kissing my girl's swollen lips, tangling her fingers in the long, flowing dark hair.
The girls were eager now.
The girls were ready to go wild, no holds barred.
They didn't seem to notice or even to care that they were performing in front of an audience. They were on that rising curve now, that long arc of ecstasy, that nonstop journey to blissville. The room suddenly echoed with their hoarse grunts and gasps. They pivoted and swung over, and now Beth was visible. Her body was shiny with sweat, the globes of her breasts quivering with the intensity of the emotion churning within her. She moved like a machine. A love machine.
I found that a totally fabulous experience-watching these two astoundingly beautiful girls. They loved with their breasts and hands and lips, even with their toes. Body knotted to body. Big, round breasts were pressed flat against big round breasts. Rock-hard nipple was touching rock-hard nipple.
Then the explosion came.
Leaning forward on my chair, watching closely from my ringside seat, I saw the explosion go rippling first through Rheena, then Beth, then both of them at the same time. They shook, they gasped, they sighed, they cried out to heaven, they laughed and sobbed.
Then the game was over.
As though someone had flipped a switch, turning them off. They dropped down out of outer space together and lay there in each other's arms totally without passion. Their breasts rose and fell more slowly as they returned to normal.
Maybe they were satisfied, but I wasn't. My body was bathed in sweat. My whole frame ached with desire.
I stood up.
I began to peel off my clothes.
The girls watched, grinning, as I stripped. "What did you think of our little show?" Beth asked coyly.
"I'm going to show you what I thought right now," I said.
"I think he wants to have an orgy," Rheena said. She giggled. She didn't look like she objected.
I said, "I'm invited, aren't I?"
"Sure," Beth said. "Come on in. The water's fine, Harry."
"A little warm," Rheena said, and laughed again.
They were waiting for me, the breasty witches. What they had done had only been a kind of prologue, I knew. As I peeled away my clothing I could see the excitement rising in them again. Nipples that had been soft with gratification a few minutes ago were turning excited again, beginning to stand up tall and high.
They liked loving each other, that was clear. But they also liked to have a man.
This was the time for action, I figured. I stepped toward the bed.
Never in my life had I shared a bed with two broads at once. Maybe I had daydreamed about the possibilities now and then, but that was as far as I had ever gone. Now was my chance. I wasn't exactly sure what to do, but I figured I'd improvise as I went along. I had faith in my own virility again. After a couple of weeks of feeling exhausted and decrepit, watching this show had perked me up considerably.
I got close to the bed.
The girls smiled at me.
"Hello, handsome," Rheena purred.
"Here," Beth murmured.
Clutching hands reached out for me.
Dragged me into the complicated tangle of nude, sweating bodies on the bed.
Somebody's breast was just inches from my lips. From the paleness of it, I decided that it belonged to Rheena. I kissed that while at the same time my roaming hands found somebody's buttocks-Beth's, I figured-and saueezed the taut flesh. There was a giggle.
Then I caught my breath in sudden pleasure as lips closed. Beth, I knew. The sly witch could really give a man a workout, I thought. I gasped, and released the firm, hard-nippled breast I had been toying with, as I came up for air. A moment later Rheena's hungry mouth was against my lips and her tongue was at work.
We formed a pile of naked bodies on the bed, twisting and turning and growing more tangled. But I had not taken either of them yet.
Suddenly, a moment later, I found myself in a position where one of the girls lay in a provocative, inviting pose. I couldn't see her face at the moment, because she was hidden by a bare female body. I looked at the legs. Pale. Glistening, smooth, enamel-like white.
Rheena.
She was the unknown quantity here, the girl I had not had before. So I decided that this was as good a time as any to get to know her. I took her.
Since Beth's body lay sprawled across Rheena's, Rheena couldn't see what I was doing any more than I was able to see her face, and so she wasn't expecting me when I started. She gave a little squeal of surprise. I wondered: maybe she was a full-time Lesbian who wasn't used to having a man.
But a moment later sh? was in full control of herself, working eagerly and enthusiastically. She was no novice, I realized. I had simply caught her unaware, that was all.
I worked hard, enjoying the novelty of taking a new girl, but I knew that I had to be fair to both girls. Beth had arranged this little show for me, and I couldn't very well leave her high and dry while devoting all my attention to the lush blonde stranger she had provided for me. So I held back from the last moment, trying as well as I could to blank out the sensations of excitement that were building for me as I loved Rheena.
My hand went out on a voyage of exploration and found Beth. I pulled her closer, and she complied eagerly, responding happily to my caresses. I took them high and I took them low, my body moving, never stopping. Both girls were panting and quivering.
Now Rheena began to jerk and leap around, thrashing wildly, doing a crazy lust-dance. I figured that this was the start of the finish for her, and I knew that if I stayed around to wait for her, I wouldn't be able to satisfy Beth right away afterward. So I left Rheena, but continued to kiss and caress her. Rheena didn't even seem to notice. She kept on gasping and twisting.
In the meanwhile I turned to Beth, ready and able. She realized what was going on.
"Come on," she said. "I'm all yours!" She was already waiting, ready and willing. She laughed as I wriggled over a couple of feet on the bed toward her, without letting go of Rheena. "Attaboy!" she yelled.
I took Beth immediately, while continuing to send Rheena sky-rocketing into oblivion. My lust-inflamed body stirred fresh passion for Beth. I felt pretty proud of myself for the way I had handled that switch. It wasn't everybody who could love two girls at once and keep them both happy.
Our trio rocked on the bed. I found a surge of passion rising for me now, and I fought back. I didn't want everything to end just yet. I wanted to stay with them, to enjoy the party a little while more.
I stayed with her.
I stayed with her until Beth was a quivering wreck on the bed, and then I turned my attention back to Rheena, who was lying there dreamily watching me. Rheena took me back gladly like an old friend, and without much trouble I sent her off to joyland for the second time.
I stirred her to explosion after explosion of violent passion. For a moment I felt like the greatest lover that had ever existed. I was tireless, in complete control, and it seemed to me that I ought to be able to switch back and forth between these two girls for hours before I ran out of steam.
I was wrong. Naturally.
Nobody can keep going forever. Sooner or later the end has to happen. I swung back to Beth, and put my hands to her breasts and said, "Let's go, baby!"
"More?"
"Yeah, more," I said.
She wanted more, too-the greedy little witch! But then I knew I was finished. I gritted my teeth and tensed my muscles, but there was no holding back the inevitable, and I surrendered with a little shiver and a cry of pleasure, a soft little sound, and lay there with my face cushioned by the high, soft cushions of her hard-tipped breasts, breathing in a saw-edged rasp of near exhaustion.
After a little while I lifted my head and said, "I just want to rest a while. I'm not done with you two yet, keeds."
They giggled. "We're waiting," Beth said.
"Any time," said Rheena.
We stretched out on the bed. I looked at my wristwatch, which was the only thing I was wearing. It was still early. I had another two hours here. There was no sense in wasting the time. I might never get a chance like this again, I knew. And, though up till today I had been having some problems with my virility, the idea of having two bosomy wenches at once had turned back the clock and made me a boy of eighteen again, full of enough vigor to handle a regiment of broads without working up a sweat.
After a while, Rheena got up and went to the bathroom. I heard the sound of running water. She was taking a shower. When she returned, she was all fresh and cool and clean, ready to start all over. Beth went to the bathroom and showered next.
"That's refreshing," she said. "It's your turn now, Harry."
I went into the bathroom and got under a mostly cool shower, letting the brisk needles come down hard. It was a terrific pick-up. I felt wide awake again, brand new, raring to go.
I came out and watched them.
The girls had taken advantage of my absence to get themselves involved in a complicated embrace. I stood there with my hands on my hips, enjoying the sheer beauty of their graceful motions.
But there was no point in letting them go all the way with each other and tiring themselves out again, just when I was ready to get started on a new round. I walked over to the bed and slapped the nearest pair of firm white buttocks to get their attention.
"Wait a minute, girls," I said. "Let's not carry this thing too far, huh? I want some."
"Who's stopping you?" Beth said.
I tumbled down on the bed with them. They reached for me.
They made a kind of sandwich, the best sandwich I was ever part of. Rheena stretched out, her moon-white body a delightful invitation to lust, and I stretched out beside her voluptuous softness. Then Beth joined the group.
Can you imagine a sweeter deal than that? For one thing, there was Rheena's breasty warmth and softness. I took her immediately, and she gripped me with her arms. And, on the other hand, there was Beth, with the hard points of her heavy breasts jutting against me. It wasn't so very easy for me to move, but I managed to. Right then I was inspired, so to speak.
I was inspired enough to be able to send Rheena off to bliss inside of a couple of minutes. Rheena was the kind of spicy dish who was easily triggered into ecstasy, I was discovering.
Then we switched the whole deal around. Now Beth was receiving my attentions, and Rheena was playing Beth's former role. I took Beth. Almost instantly she was gasping in a delirium of desire.
So was I. Rheena made sure of that. I had figured on lasting longer than I did, but Rheena was playing little tricks and offering a special kind of encouragement while I was making love to Beth, and I couldn't resist the double caress.
The eruption of pleasure hit me hard.
I was kaput, now. Beth and her educated lips tried to get me back into service for another round, but I didn't respond. Limits are limits, after all. Rheena took over and tried, her soft heavy breasts pressing against my body as she attempted to revive my interest in another session of exotic fun and games. Since Rheena was practically a stranger to me, and there's a certain excitement in being caressed by a ravingly beautiful girl that you've never seen before, I was able to give a response to Rheena that Beth hadn't been able to coax out of me.
But not enough. Not nearly enough.
"I think he's through," Beth said.
"I think you're right," said Rheena.
I lay there grinning. "Keep working," I said. "This is fun."
I felt pretty dizzy. Life had suddenly become a wild whirl of breasts and buttocks, of girls throwing themselves at me, of mad, lusty, uninhibited passion. But right now I had just about had my fill of passion.
A light doze took hold of me. When I came out of it, Rheena and Beth were busy with each other again. This is where I came in, I thought. I didn't feel like mixing, this time. I just watched. They were really going wild.
After a short while, they subsided, making little whimpering sounds of pleasure. I got up and went into the bathroom to take another shower. I felt lightheaded from all my exertions, so I tiptoed into the kitchen and helped myself generously to Beth's groceries, which I had paid for anyway.
It was a little after four. I had had a busy, busy afternoon.
I got my clothes on. Beth and Rheena lay curled up asleep on the bed like the babes in the woods. Beth had her hands at Rheena's big breasts. Rheena had one knee pushed casually against Beth.
"So long, girls," I said.
They didn't open their eyes. They smiled and mumbled their good-byes.
I went out. A two-block walk took me back to the office. I made my way down the corridor and to my desk to see what had piled up for me in my four-hour absence from duty.
"You get anything done today, Harry?" somebody asked me.
I laughed. "Plenty," I said.
But I knew I wouldn't be believed if I tried to tell him exactly how much.
CHAPTER SEVEN
And then the trouble started.
I knew that I had no place to go but down after that wild and woolly session at Beth's place. You don't get too many chances like that to enjoy yourself in one lifetime. The next time I was at Beth's, Rheena wasn't there. I had half expected her.
"How's Rheena?" I asked.
"Fine. She sends her best wishes."
"She isn't dropping in today, is she?"
"No," Beth said. "You want her too?"
I laughed. "She was fun," I said. "But I don't think I could take that sort of thing very often."
The truth was, of course, that Rheena fascinated me. Her blonde, breasty beauty was only part of the appeal. I was also drawn to the sort of girl who could casually drop in on a girl friend for some Lesbian loving, then give herself to a completely unknown man in a three-way orgy the same day.
But Rheena vanished from my life after that one blazing afternoon. Now and then, when I saw her at the night club, she'd smile at me from the stage, but she wasn't ever at Beth's. That was smart of Beth, I decided. Beth had used Rheena once, as sauce to spice up my flagging desires, but she wasn't going to let Rheena get between herself and me on a permanent basis.
The fact that Beth had at least one Lesbian relationship with another girl, and maybe more than that, didn't really bother me too much. I had already heard that showgirls and strippers, who have a lot of bare-bodied female company all the time, drift easily into such things. I could be open-minded about that. In fact, that even gave Beth an added kind of attractiveness in my eyes, to know that when I wasn't with her she engaged in strange and forbidden acts with girls as lushly voluptuous as she was herself. I certainly preferred that to having to share her with other men.
But the trouble sprang up, all the same.
The first-and less serious-trouble came from Myra. It was a couple of weeks after my orgy. Myra had been complaining again that I was neglecting her and didn't seem interested in her, which was true enough.
Beth was monopolizing me.
This time, though, Myra came right out and told me what was griping her.
"Harry, who is it?" she asked.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said without trying to sound too innocent.
"Yes, you do. There's someone else, Harry. There has to be. I can tell."
I blustered and stormed at her. I protested my virtue long and loud. By the end of it, I think she believed me, but she was still grumbling a little.
"Why do you think I'm unfaithful?" I asked her.
"You've been neglecting me so much."
"I'm tired. I need a rest."
"You never got this tired before."
"Maybe I'm sick."
"Why don't you see a doctor, then?"
I had no answer for that. We let the matter drop. Just to make sure all would stay calm for a while, I called off the little "business trip" that I was scheduling to take that week end-a business trip that would have been spent in Beth's apartment.
I explained it all to Beth. "She's getting suspicious," I said. "I've got to be extra-special friendly to her this week end. I'll stay home and hold her hand."
"All right, Harry. I understand."
"You don't mind? You can get along without me for the week end?"
"I'll survive," Beth said. "I was looking forward to spending the week end with you, but I guess we can make it up next week."
"Good girl."
"But-"
"But what?" I said quickly.
"There's one thing I don't understand, Harry."
"Tell me about it."
"Why are you so worried about Myra and what she thinks, Harry?"
"She's my wife."
"But you don't love her, you haven't loved her for years. Why don't you just get a divorce?"
"I can't divorce her," I said. "She hasn't given me grounds."
"Let her divorce you, then," Beth suggested. "Lord knows she could find grounds if she wanted them. Then you'd be free."
I knew what Beth was getting after. She wanted to marry me.
"I'm thinking about it," I said. "But meanwhile I don't want to rock the boat. Not until everything is worked out properly."
"When will that be?"
"Soon, baby, soon," I told her.
I didn't want to break the news to Beth that even though I loved her, I didn't want to marry her. That would be rocking the boat for sure.
Truth to tell, I was happy with the arrangement the way it was-all except the overdose of loving I was getting, and I figured that that situation would adjust after a while. Myra was a sort of cook and housekeeper for me, and also she was somebody respectable whom I could take around to social gatherings. Beth, on the other hand, was my mistress, wild and passionate and uninhibited.
That worked out swell. Myra was cold and unfriendly most of the time, except for her little surge of passion this summer, but I didn't really mind that as long as I had Beth to keep me satisfied. I tried to imagine Beth attempting to keep house for me, and I shuddered. Beth was a sloppy joe if there ever was one. She didn't believe in tidying up if she could just let things go. Nor could she cook. She simply wasn't wife material at all.
She was loving material. Period.
The Lesbian bit turned me off on her, too. What was exciting and provocative in a mistress was downright dismaying in a wife. Beth's affairs with other girls could ruin me with my friends if I married her and had to introduce her around. It was better to keep her hidden away, somebody to bed and not to marry.
Each girl had her own special advantages. The way things stood now I was getting the best of both. It was taking some fancy stepping occasionally, but everything was working out.
I couldn't complain.
All through that summer life was a dream. And then real trouble decided to arrive, one blister-mg hot day early in August.
I left my office about ten of twelve that day, and made the five-minute walk over to Beth's little apartment in nothing flat. The elevator operator, who knew my by now and knew what I was doing in the building, smiled knowingly at me as I rode up with him to the floor where Beth lived.
I fumbled my duplicate key out of the special place in my wallet where I kept it, and let myself into Beth's apartment.
The sound of sobbing was the first thing that hit my ears.
Beth was sitting on the unmade, disheveled bed. She was naked except for a pair of sheer bikini panties. Her head was buried in her hands and her body shook convulsively from deep sobs every few seconds, her. breasts jiggling.
I stared at her.
"Beth," I said. "Hey, Beth!"
She didn't look up. She just went on sobbing. Bewildered, I crossed the room in two quick bounds and lifted her head.
Her dark eyes were red and raw from crying. Tears were trickling down her face, rolling down her cheeks and down between her breasts, teardrops glittering at the very ends of her nipples.
"Beth! What's the matter?" I demanded.
A volley of wild sobs was the only response I got. Something was very, very wrong, but she wasn't telling me about it. She just sat huddled up there, looking luscious and desirable in her near-nakedness, the tiny band of flimsy panties the only thing hinding her from me.
I shook her a couple of times. That made her breasts jump around like globes of jelly. But it didn't get her out of her hysteria.
Stronger measures were called for.
I went into the bathroom, took a washcloth from the rack, and soaked it in cold water. Then I wrung it out so that it was cold and wet, but not dripping wet. I went back into the room and slapped it across Beth's sweaty, tear-streaked, swollen face. A couple of good slaps with the washcloth and she started to calm down a little bit, though she went on sobbing.
After a couple of minutes the sobbing stopped. She put her hands to her eyes to press them and soothe their throbbing. I handed her the wet washcoth and she dabbed at her face with it.
Finally she said in a low, shaky voice, "I'm glad you're here, Harry. I need you. I'm afraid, Harry. I'm scared stiff I"
"You mind telling me what this is all about, Beth?" I asked.
She looked up at me, her slim, supple, nearly nude body trembling a little. "I got a telephone call this morning'," she said. "Long distance. From Philadelphia. From Mark. He knows where I'm living."
I stared at her. "How the devil could he find that out?"
She shrugged, her breasts swaying. "Someone must have told him, that's all. Mark's got plenty of friends in New York who would keep an eye out for me and report back to him. Mark's a pretty important man. you know. And tough. Mark doesn't like to be crossed."
My face was icy. I was remembering Mark, remembering those knife-sharp cheekbones, remembering those eyes cold as death.
I said, "What did he want with you?"
"He wants me to come back to Philly. He said he misses me bad."
"He doesn't have any claim on you, does he, Beth?" I asked.
"No ... no...."
"Then why the blazes are you so shaken up just because he called you?"
Slowly she lifted her face to me. Even with blotchy, tear-puffed eyelids she looked lovely in her nudity. "He said that if I didn't come back to him inside of a week, he was going to come get me."
I woadered what kind of deal I was getting mixed up in. But I kept my misgivings to myself, or tried to. I said, "You should have told him off and let him know where he can go. This is the twentieth century, Beth. He doesn't own you!"
Another fit of sobs shivered through her. She patted her reddened eyes again. A shiny tear rolled down the side of her face, along her cheek, onto her shoulder, and right on out the steep curve of her left breast, to drip from the nipple.
"No," she said when she was calm again. "He doesn't own me, that's right. But he thinks he does, and that's just about the same thing. I'm afraid of him, Harry. I know him. I know the sort of trouble he can make for people he doesn't like."
"He won't touch you."
"It's not so much me that I'm worrying about," she said. "It's you. I wouldn't want anything to happen to you on account of me, Harry."
I went kind of numb at that. But again I tried to hide my fears.
I said, "You didn't tell him that you'd go back to Philadelphia, did you?"
"Of course not. But ... I couldn't say anything at all to him, Harry. I just hung up. The last thing he said was, 'Remember-I'll give you a week to come back to me. One week.'"
I felt sick and weak and queasy inside when I remembered Mark and his high, dead-sounding voice and his cold, cheekbony face. A zombie, I thought. A pretty scary kind of character. But I was in this thing a lot too deep now to pull out just because of someone like him. Beth had come to occupy a very important place in my life.
I said as soothingly as I could, "You listen to me and don't worry about Mark, honey. He's just bluffing you He'll never show up. A guy like him has more on his mind than coming to New York to get you."
"I wish I could be sure of that."
"Just relax and stop worrying about him."
"That's easy to say. But-"
"Listen," I said. "I tell you, forget him. You're in New York and he's in Philadelphia, and never the twain shall meet. Or something."
I pulled her close to me. She sobbed a little more, not convulsive, hysterical sobs like before, just quiet little sounds of fear. Then she leaned up to kiss me. Her lips met mine. My arms into place around her almost bare body.
She was cold with fear, even in the stifling August heat.
Gently she drew me down to the bed. I tried to make her forget all about Mark, to forget all about everything else except what was happening right here in the bed. My hands went to her bikini panties and drew them down over her ample hips. She was nude now, her pink nakedness soft and enticing.
She began to undress me.
"Smile," I said.
"I'm trying."
My clothing dropped away. I could see that she was still scared, still under the cloud of that telephone call from Mark in Philadelphia, but the promise of passion was vanquishing her fears. In another moment, I was as nude as she was.
Our bodies moved closer.
I stroked the warm-tipped hills of her breasts. I put my lips to them and gently kissed the rigid nipples. Beth began to sigh in gathering delight. I lifted my lips and drew a line of kisses down her body, over the flat waist and past the deep blind eye of her navel. This was the way to delight her, to chase the fear from her mind.
With pure passion.
My face moved, the kisses trailed over her.
Her flesh was soft against my cheeks. I heard her making hoarse little sounds of passion as I kissed her. Without stopping, I slid my hands over the smooth column of her body to her breasts, and grasped them. The nipples were like rock. But the double globes of soft flesh to which they were attached weren't like rock at all. They were flesh, Beth's flesh, yielding and resilient, taut and delightful, smooth as satin.
After a while I lifted my face and looked at her. She was smiling.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes, I like that, honeybdr, I like!"
Then she dove for me.
That was wonderful. Her hands did sly, seductive things. I gulped air into my lungs as sudden excitement hit me hard. Her head moved rapidly. I ran my hands over her dark, cool hair.
Gasping, I fought back the onset of ecstasy. I didn't want to experience a peak that way, I wanted us to have something shared, something that would sweep over both of us in the same moment.
I felt a surge of wild jubiliation sweep through me, for no special reason at all. That was something purely physical that caught me by surprise.
Grabbing Beth, I swept both, of us to our feet by the side of the bed.
"Hey," she said. "What-"
I laughed. "Climb aboard," I said.
"You're out of your mind."
"Probably," I said.
I grabbed her behind each knee and hoisted her.
She caught the idea and locked her arms around my shoulders, hooking her hands together behind me. I put my hands at the firm, cool cushions of her buttocks to give her support.
Then she took me.
She was eager and ready, and our bodies could not be restrained. I stood there with my feet planted on the floor, holding her in mid-air. I don't know what inspired me to love her in that particular manner except a sudden impulse toward variety, but there we were.
I grinned at her. I swung her close, then again. She was laughing now, too. Her red-rimmed eyes showed mirth instead of the terror that had been in them a little while before.
My hands dug at the firm mounds of her buttocks. Her breasts jiggled and jounced against me, and as she leaned forward the heavy resilient rounds of flesh flattened.
In moments, we were both gasping with excitement and pleasure.
This was a strenuous way of loving, this business of standing up. But we had fun from start to finish. I tried every innovation that would send new shivers of pleasure through us. Soon her face was contorted with desire, her eyes closed, her nostrils flaring, her mouth open and pulling in air. Sweat oiled her skin and made her gleam.
I felt my own heart pounding. I was a little dizzy from the exertion. But held on tight to her, all the same.
Pleasure, pure passion-pleasure.
And then we were consumed by a fury that hit her first, and then got me a moment later in delayed reaction. Her violent reaction to the moment sent me into my culmination.
I stayed upright, holding her, while our bodies gasped through the ultimate moments. Beads of sweat burst from every pore. Strange, exquisite sensations of delight rocketed through me. I leaned back, clutching at her, enjoying the last atom of delight from this athletic form of embrace.
Then I staggered forward. We remained together. I reached the bed and tumbled against it, so that Beth fell down onto it and I landed right next to her, kissing her laughing lips.
We were both laughing in a kind of drunken delirium of ecstasy, like two kids who had just gone on their first roller-coaster ride. I kissed her lips, then swivelled my head around to kiss each big, rosy nipple rising toward me.
She was happy And so was I.
But I didn't kid myself. I knew that Mark still spelled trouble. The mood of fear had been broken by pleasure, but we hadn't solved the problem of Mark and his threat-we had just shoved it under the carpet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Then the next day, there was more trouble, less sinister but just as annoying in its own way. It was trouble from Myra again. I guess it was the heat that got her, and gave her the bug.
Suddenly she wanted to have children. We hadn't tried that for a long time now. Like pretty nearly everybody else who gets married nowadays, we had started out with the intention of raising a family. But we decided to wait a couple of years. Then, when we did try, they just didn't materialize. After a while we simply stopped trying.
With our marriage in its present withered state, I was of the opinion that there really wasn't much percentage in bringing kids into the world. But now, out of nowhere, Myra wanted some.
"It isn't too late," she said. "I'm not even thirty yet, Harry. We could have two kids in the next four years, say, and-"
"You think it's smart?" I asked.
"Why not? Everyone has kids."
"We haven't been getting along so well, Myra," I said. "If we had kids it wouldn't be fair to them, with the chance of a split-up as good as it is."
"If we had kids maybe there'd be less chance of a split-up," Myra said.
"I don't know about that."
I managed to sidetrack the issue eventually. The way I deal with any problem Myra brings up is to wiggle around it until she drops it.
But no sooner was she through expressing that yearning than she was off on another, and almost equally troublesome, track.
She said, "Why aren't we going on any vacation this year?"
I wanted to come right out and tell her the truth. I wanted to say that it was because I couldn't bear to be separated from Beth for two solid weeks.
But I didn't say that.
Instead I said, "I've told you half a million times. The office just can't spare me yet."
"You're all tired out. You keep telling me you're working too hard. You've lost a lot of weight. You need a vacation, Harry. And I want to get out of this stinking city. Why don't we go away?"
"I've got to stay in town."
"We've always gone away in the summer in other years," Myra said.
I sighed and tried to push the problem into the future. "Look," I said, "we'll take a winter vacation this year, when things aren't quite so rushed. Okay, Myra? We'll go away for Christmas, say. We'll go to Lake Placid, maybe. How does that sound? We'll spend a couple of weeks up in the mountains skiing around Christmas time."
She glared at me. "You know we won't go anywhere for Christmas, Harry."
"Now, listen-"
"You listen to me! It's easy to talk about something like that in August, but wait till December comes! You'll be too busy then, too. You're always too busy. You and your damned office!"
Corded veins were standing out on the sides of her neck as she shouted at me. She looked like a pure shrew just then. Suddenly I hated her more than ever, as she spewed her anger at me.
I began to wonder whether or not I was making a mistake by not giving Myra the divorce she probably was longing for, and marrying Beth. Well time would tell. Right now I was strictly on a joyride and I didn't want to get involved or to make any permanently entangling moves.
"Myra-"
"I want a vacation! I'm sweltering to death in this lousy city!"
"You've got an air conditioned apartment, Myra. Be reasonable. I-"
"A man making your kind of money, can't even take his wife away somewhere for two weeks in August!" she blazed.
"Look, Myra-"
Suddenly her tone changed. She dropped her bluster and said in a blunt, direct tone that caught me off guard, "You don't want to leave her, do you? That's it, Harry. I know it is. If you take a vacation you've got to leave your girl friend behind."
I could feel my face reddening. I fought hard to keep from giving the show away with my expression.
"What girl friend, Myra?"
"You've got one tucked away somewhere."
"That's crazy."
"Is it, Harry? It's the only explanation I can think of. It explains a lot of things. Why you don't want to sleep with me, why you're so tired all of a sudden, why you don't plan to take a vacation. She keeps you busy, doesn't she?"
"Mvra, you're talking nonsense."
"I bet I am."
I moistened my lips. "I love you," I said.
It was a flat lie, and had been for plenty of years now. But the words came glibly out of my mouth with an ease that surprised me.
Myra looked surprised too. "Listen to him," she jeered. "He loves me!"
"I mean it!"
"Funny kind of love, Harry."
"Listen, Myra-"
We spat and snarled at each other for a while longer. But she was starting to calm down. My sudden declaration of love had soothed her a little, even if she didn't really believe it. She couldn't exactly back away from her argument in one fell swoop, but she could bring about a kind of cease-fire.
So the battle was over-for the time being.
If it had only been Beth I'd met, instead of Myra, years ago! But there was no sense if-fing. Wishing wouldn't make it so. The situation was inflexible. I had married Myra-even if I loved Beth.
And now that the quarrel was over, Myra had her own special way of resolving the matter. We had been snapping at each other in the living room. She walked out, once peace had been restored. Five minutes or so then went by. Then she called to me.
"Harry?"
"What, Myra?"
"Come here."
"Where are you?"
"Bedroom."
"Coming," I said.
Frowning, I went in there. Myra was lying on the bed with her hands clasped behind the back of her head. She was wearing a great big smile needless to say, that was all.
I stood in the doorway, my eyes traveling quickly over the lush but familiar territory of my wife's naked body. The blazing red hair, the tawny skin, the big round breasts, with the oddly tiny nipples, the firm, strong, long legs-yes, I had seen all of her a million times before, but that didn't mean she wasn't worth looking at again now. The only trouble with her was that she was Myra. Myra with whom I had had year upon year of quarrel and bickering to eventually spoil the joy of our marriage.
She winked at me.
"Come here," she said. "Get your clothes off and lie down."
I had been at Beth's the day before. I had been looking forward to a day of rest now. I had figured, when the fight started between Myra and me, that that would otherwise be serving in a way to keep Myra amused.
I was wrong.
"Quarreling makes me feel amorous," she said, in a very husky voice. "Let's patch things up here in bed, Harry."
She had me caught. Trapped. She had accused me of not loving her, she had come right out and openly said I was keeping a mistress who was draining energies that would otherwise be serving to keep Myra amused. I had denied that.
But now my bluff was called. Put up or shut up. If I loved her, if I wanted her-I would take her while she wanted me.
I knew that if I started any nonsense about being tired, or not being in the mood, that would result in a real hydrogen-bomb-type explosion going off in my face. So I held back the sigh of fatigue that I felt like heaving, and walked slowly toward the bed.
"Sure, Myra. Sure."
"You want me?"
"You know I do."
"Sometimes I wonder," she said.
I peeled my clothes off. I was glad to observe that my body wasn't going to be a traitor to me right now. There were signs of interest. Myra's glittering eyes flicked toward me, and she was evidently pleased with what she saw, judging from the quick grin of satisfaction.
A moment later her big round breasts were against my hands and her mouth was pushed against mine. She began to move suggestively in anticipation of pleasure. I tightened my grip at her breasts, imprisoning each nipple with two of my fingers.
Her hand went to me.
Gripped.
Caressed.
I blanked out of my mind the fact that this was VTyra, who I loathed. This was a woman That was all that mattered. This was a young, voluptuous, passionate woman, who simply happened to be married to me and who simply happened to be a shrew.
She wasn't being shrewish now.
my hand went to her hips. I stroked the satiny flesh. Then, gently. I caressed her long legs.
Myra moved, and I moved back, and our passions mounted together, her big body leading mine. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with air and held tight as we approached the goal of our ecstasy, hoping that this loving would keep Myra calm and cool and contented for at least a couple of days. The burst of ecstasy arrived.
Then all was still. Myra lay back, her hair fanning out like red streamers over the pillow. Her face was flushed, her eyes were slitted, her breasts were heaving in the aftermath of our shared passion.
Can you love a woman and hate her at the same time, I wondered?
I despised her. And yet-
Yet there was no denying that she had her good features too, especially in the the sack.
I saw Beth pretty often during the rest of that week, and Myra didn't make any immediate troubles for me. Mark's deadline was running out, day by day by day-that is, if he had really meant that ultimatum of his, giving Beth one week to return to him.
When I was with her, we never mentioned the entire subject of Mark. By mutual agreement, we kept it away from our minds. I went up to Beth's apartment every day for lunch, and she was waiting for me, always freshly showered, cool, sweet-smelling. Sometimes nude, sometimes in a wisp of a gown, sometimes in some playful little G-string arrangement.
We made love some days. Others we just talked and kissed and smiled at each other.
If life could be any better than this, I'd want to be shown.
Beth had a little bankbook in her dresser drawer. She told me that she was socking away in her savings account most of the good-sized sum that the nightclub was paying her.
"For us," she explained simply. "Some day. Soon, I hope."
"Sooner than that," I said.
Her eyes were starry Her body, bare-breasted and delightful, approached mine. I took her in my arms....
The week went on. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday-every day the same, every day wonderful. Beth always waiting for me, lovely, passionate. Outside, the August heat wave was broiling the city, making the sidewalks hot enough to fry fish on. But the air conditioners purred steadily in Beth's little apartment. The only discomfort in there was caused by our eager bodies. We never noticed the temperature as we lay together on the bed, smiling into each other's eyes, kissing, caressing.
"I won't see you this week-end," I told Beth on Friday as I was about to leave her place.
"Myra?"
I nodded. "I've got to keep her happy."
"I wish I knew why."
"There's always Monday, baby."
"I suppose so," she said.
I regretted it as much as she did. A whole Saturday and a Sunday without seeing Beth. I thought of her, though. Myra and I went away for the week-end, with some friends. We went up to Massachusetts, to the lakeside summer home that other friends had. All the girls wore their barest bikinis, and all the men sat around leisurely, discussing the stock market, with deadly seriousness.
I wasn't interested in the display of bare flesh on the beach. Even if somebody's wife had come out in a topless bathing suit, I don't think I would have cared. I was interested in Beth, and my interest in her didn't leave room for very much philandering on the side.
Saturday night one of my friends' wives made a clumsy pass at me. I pretended I didn't know she was hinting at bed. She was obviously irritated with me. She was mine for the asking-Helene, her name was, a cute little roly-poly brunette with a twitchy tail and round, ripe, high boobs. She had been flashing her body around considerably at the lake, too. Practically falling out of her bikini.
Sorry, babe, I thought. I'm not getting mixed up with you or anybody else.
She was glaring at me the rest of the week-end. I didn't really care.
Monday was coming.
When Monday finally came around, a hundred years later, I couldn't wait until the middle of the day to get over to her place. I raced through my morning's quota of work, finishing everything on my desk by about half past eleven. I got to my feet just about the time the section chief came wandering around.
He looked straight at me. "All through, are you, Harry?"
I flashed a confident grin. "I guess I finished up quick today, Joe. I'm taking a early lunch."
"Be back here by one o'clock, though," he told me. "The boss is holding a pow-wow and you're in on it."
I had a feeling in my stomach of the kind you get when you step into an open elevator shaft and begin to drop. A meeting at one? No time to make love properly to Beth, then?
I thought fast.
"Gee," I said, "I didn't know anything about a staff meeting today."
"Came up this morning. No time to send any circulars around."
"Well," I said, "I was supposed to be uptown talking about the Michaels account today. I may have to miss the meeting, Joe. Unless I cancel the lunch date with the Michaels guy. Which do you figure is more important?"
He thought that over for a moment. Then he smiled amiably and said, "Well, if you can't get back in time, you'll just have to skip the meeting. It isn't all that vital. I'd Bather have you take care of the other thing. I'll fill you in on what happens. Okay?"
"Thanks a million, Joe," I said.
I left the office. Be back by one? No, sir, not on your tintype! That would leave me less than an hour to spend with Beth, and I hadn't seen her since all the way back on Friday....
As I hurried along down the street I pictured Beth glancing up as she heard my key turning in the door. I pictured her lithe trim form, nude and expectant, breasts rising and falling, lips parted, ready to kiss and be kissed, to love and be loved. Waiting for me and only me.
Today, I thought, I'd sweep her off her feet the instant I came through the door. I'd make up for that long week-end of separation. I'd tumble her to the floor and take her in one wild sweep of ecstasy, and we could worry about eating lunch afterward.
I couldn't wait.
I reached her building. My. heels clattered as I strode quickly across the marble-floored lobby. The elevator was there.
"Morning, Ed," I said to the elevator man.
"Morning," he said. But he was staring at me strangely as we rode up together.
I couldn't understand why. I wondered if my clothes were arranged wrong, or something. They seemed to be all right.
I hurried down the hall and fumbled my key out of my wallet. I let myself in.
"Hey, Beth!" I called, as I stepped into the apartment.
I stopped. I froze.
Things were a little different from usual today, I saw right away. I was accustomed to finding Beth in the nude, or maybe wearing just panties or a negligee when I arrived. Not today.
Today she was thoroughly and decently covered, wearing a green robe drawn tight together at the throat. Her face was chalk-pale, and her eyes flickered fearfully from place to place.
She looked scared.
I stepped a little further into the apartment and realized why she was scared. I suddenly realized that it was a week ago today that Mark had telephoned to lay down his seven-day ultimatum.
The seven days had passed. The deadline was up.
And Mark was sitting in my usual chair, looking up at me with casual interest, his flat, light-blue eyes fixed coldly on me.
CHAPTER NINE
He had a cigarette clenched between two thick fingers, and a blue curl of smoke drifted up past the knife blade cheekbones of his hard-bitten face. He was wearing another sharply-tailored suit, a different one from the other time. That one had had a greenish tinge to it. This one, for all its flashy cut, was black.
Like an undertaker's suit, I thought. Zoot-suit undertaker.
He was sitting there looking at me very quietly. It was so quiet in the apartment that I could hear his regular, harsh intake of breath.
After an endless silence he said. "Who is this guy, Beth?"
She didn't answer. I ran my tongue quickly over my lips and said, "My name is Harry Martin. I'm a friend of Beth's."
"That's very interesting, Harry Martin. You mind telling me what the devil you're doing in her apartment?" he asked. Quietly, without raising his voice at all, all in the same flat dead tone.
"I don't think I'm called on to answer every question you want to pop," I said.
I was wondering if he had a gun tucked away in that smartly-tailored pocket.
His face turned a little colder at my defiant reply. He snorted and looked past me to Beth as though I wasn't there.
He said, "Beth, you're coming back with me. You got that?"
She shook her head. "I'm not going, Mark. I'm through with Philly and I'm through with you too. You don't own me."
He smiled slowly. His smile was uglier than his scowl. It was a cold smile with absolutely no friendliness in it whatsoever. A long hand reached out and deliberately flicked ashes on the floor.
He said, "I tell you that you're coming back with me. I want you, Beth. You know that. I always did want you."
Suddenly he swung his head toward me, and his eyes narrowed to little slits. "Where have I seen you before?" he asked.
"Le Chat Noir," I said. "In April."
He was silent a moment, thinking. I could practically hear the wheels turning under the dark, curly mat of close-cropped hair that covered his skull. Then he said, "You're the one. Yes, you're the one. This is the guy you sneaked out to meet, isn't it, Beth? The night you were supposed to come home with me?"
That was a stunner for me. I remembered that Beth had had some delay getting away from the night club that night when we had had our first rendezvous. She had said she had been delayed by an argument with Mark. But it had never occurred to me that she had been breaking a date with him at the time.
I said, "Beth, I didn't know-"
She cut me off. "Mark, this is my place. I don't want you here. I want you to get out right now and never to bother me again."
Good for you, I thought. Good girl, Beth! You tell him!
A deeply thoughtful expression spread over Mark's lean, carved face. He didn't seem really angry at her outburst.
"Just what's going on between you and this guy, Beth?" he asked.
"We're going to get married." I said suddenly, surprised at myself as the unexpected words came rolling out of my mouth. "Soon."
Beth's eyes widened in surprise.
"Married?" Mark repeated. He chuckled without mirth. "That's nice."
"Isn't it, though?" I said.
I moved toward the housephone that was mounted on the wall near the kitchen door. I said, "Now, I want you to get out of this apartment in a hurry, whoever you are. Or else I'll ring up the management and have them come up here with a couple of policemen to get you out."
He didn't look disturbed by the threat.
"That wouldn't be friendly," he drawled.
"No. It wouldn't be. You getting out?"
Lazily, Mark rose to his feet. He was tall, a couple of inches taller than I was. I couldn't tell how much of his shoulder width represented real muscle power and how much was just padding. I felt like telling him that the current style of suits called for a natural shoulder, not for that twenty-year-old zooty look that he preferred to affect.
He strolled over to me and jabbed a finger in the general direction of my face. "You watch out for yourself, buster, that's all I got to say to you. You're asking for more trouble than you know how to handle," he said.
He swung around and looked at Beth. "And as for you, Beth-I'm coming back here in a few days with two tickets for Philly in my pocket. Today's Monday. I'll be here on Friday, and you damn well better be packed and ready to leave with me. You understand that?"
"Get out," I snapped
"Understand, Beth?"
"Go on, Mark," she said, her face cold-looking. "Harry says get out. Getl"
"My, my," Mark said. "You're a real tough one these days."
He smiled bleakly at us, turned, and ambled out the front door. The moment the door closed I sat down heavily in the chair, shaking all over in nervous reaction. I tried to hide it from Beth, but I wasn't that good an actor. I was scared.
"He'll be back on Friday," I said tonelessly. "And he isn't going to take no for an answer. What are we going to do then?"
Beth didn't answer me. She walked to the door and made sure it was locked. Then she unbelted her robe and took it off. She was nude underneath. I stared at the lush hills and valleys of her naked, voluptuously opulent form before me.
She stretched languidly, tiger-like.
"Do you love, me, Harry?" she said to me irrelevantly.
My eyes feasted on her arching breasts and warm, satiny legs. "Of course. But-"
"Did you really mean what you said about marrying me, Harry?"
"Y-yes." Hesitantly.
"You weren't just saying it to give Mark a hard time, were you?"
"No."
"Okay, then. Mark's coming back here on Friday, that's what he said. When he comes back, well kill him," Beth said simply.
The words seemed to hang there in the air like plastic balloons that she had sent up. We'll kill him.
I looked at the naked girl in front of me. An arrangement of flesh, of breasts and legs and hips and buttocks, a machine for loving.
What had she said?
For a long moment the words just didn't sink in. I had never committed a worse crime in my life than speeding in a 45-mile zone. That is, unless you consider adultery a crime instead of a sin, which I don't. I had never cheated on my income tax, I had never robbed a blind news dealer, I had never raped a fifth-grade girl.
And now Beth was talking about murder. I said, "That isn't a very funny joke."
"I wasn't joking."
"You must have been."
"I mean it, Harry," she said, and I saw that she was utterly serious. "Do you want me or don't you?"
"Of course I want you."
"Okay," she said. "If I don't go back to Mark, he'll kill me and he'll probably kill you, too. So we've got to get him first."
"You're talking like somebody out of a television show, Beth. In real life people don't go around killing each other like that."
"No?"
I felt dryness at the root of my tongue. "Not in my world, anyway."
"Mark's not part of your world. Mark's a gangster, Harry. You think that all he does is manage a night club? He's got plenty of other irons in the fire. He's in the numbers business in a big way. He's hooked into narcotics distribution. He does something or other with jukeboxes. He supplied prostitutes to brothel? down South."
"A regular one-man Mafia," I said.
"That's the guy you're tangling with. You can make up your mind right now, Harry. Either you fight him with his methods, or else you let him take me away from you when Friday comes."
I thought that one over.
She went on, "You want to know what'll happen to me when I get back to Philadelphia? I won't just take up where I left off, everything sweet as pie. Mark will punish me first. He doesn't like his girls to run away. He's got some pretty cute ways of punishment. I've seem him in action He lets the girls watch when someone gets punished, just so it'll be an object lesson. Let me tell you what's likely to happen to me."
She told me. In grim, graphic detail.
It wasn't very pretty to listen to. Or to even think about.
She painted the picture in fine detail. I could see her stark naked, lying on a bed while Mark worked her over with a bamboo cane. The blows falling again and again to the smooth, tender flesh of her buttocks. The double mounds changing color, losing their whiteness and becoming an angry red as the flexible cane descended again and again. And then, little driblets of blood appearing as the skin of the buttocks gave way under the repeated whipping. Each stroke was light in itself, but the cumulative effect was brutal.
Worse than that. Long,, bony fingers grasping her breasts. Seizing the rosy little nipples. Pinching. Tighter, tighter, while the pain-maddened girl screams in agony. Fingers clamping, compressing.
And worse punishment than that.
Beth described, and from the vividness of her description I knew that she had seen that done to others of Mark's girls who had gone astray. The image leaped to life in my mind. Mark was naked as well as his victim now. His body was lean, and he was almost terrffyingly strong. This was going to be punishment by rape.
But not a usual sort of rape.
The girl was flung down, face first, on a bed. Mark stood near her, his hands cupping the smooth rounds of her buttocks, stroking the satiny skin as he contemplated them in keen anticipation.
The nude girl on the bed quivered in terror as Mark tormented her.
Then he leaned forward. Tightened his grip at her buttocks
"The worst torture you could think of," Beth said. "That's what that's like."
The girl's body, tortured and unable to escape sadistic lusts, twisted in convulsive agony. Mark laughed. He began to move, again and again, doubling and redoubling the torment. His hands slid around the girl's body to grip the heavy mounds of her breasts, and his fingernails dug at the soft flesh. He didn't have to worry about being gentle. This wasn't love, now. This was meant as punishment. This was torture.
He was slow, too. What was the hurry? Again and again, this man of supernatural cruelty assaulted his victim's unwilling, unprepared body. Time after time. Blazing pain. Incredible torment. A mockery of passion, a defilement, this method of satisfying his lust and adminstering punishment at the same time.
Then the moment of passion. The sudden flame of his pleasure. The grunt, the harsh hiss of ecstasy, the furious, frenzied final moments that brought howls of pain from his victim.
Then he rose. The girl lay there exhausted, her body wracked with torment.
"I've seen him do that," Beth said. "He made me watch him. That gave him kicks-making me watch. I had to stand there while he-he used her."
"What happened to the girl afterward?"
"She was a nervous wreck. Mark sold her to a house in Louisiana. I understand she takes fifty men a day, now."
"And he'd do this to you?"
"Yes," she said. "That's why we've got to kill him, Harry. There's no way out, otherwise. We're in this too deep. I hoped he'd never find me in New York, but he's tracked me down."
My fingertips were cold. I still hadn't adjusted to the realities of the situation. To plan a murder? That wasn't my line at ah.
This wasn't my world at all.
My world was the cozier world of married people, the world where you had a four-room apartment and a decent job, and money in the bank, and you bought some shares in one of the mutual funds every now and then, and you took a vacation in California or Puerto Rico when you could afford it, and went to dinner parties on Saturday nights and played bridge afterward, and cheated on your wife when you thought you could get away with it, and generally lived a dull, safe, respectable, conventional life.
But I was beginning to see that that wasn't the world Beth lived in.
What was her world like? What was it really like?
It was a world where you earned your living by standing up on the counter of a bar and showing your breasts and your buttocks to a bunch of drunks three times a night, and spent the rest of the evening drinking weak tea that you talked suckers into buying for you at ninety cents a shot. It was a world where you lived with a gangster who occasionally gave one of the girls a sadistic whipping or raped her in a ferociously twisted way.
It was a world where you went to bed with other girls when the mood pleased you. It was a world where you got into three-way orgies from time to time, and maybe even more complicated things. It was a world where you stayed up all night and slept all day, a world where neatness and thrift and law-abidingness were fuzzy and remote concepts, a world where you made and unmade the rules as you went along.
It was a world where murder served as a solution to all the tough problems.
I looked at Beth and I realized I wasn't part of that world at all. But yet I was being drawn into it, willy-nilly, by my love for Beth. She had come into my world a little way-far enough to open a bank account and start saving for the future, at any rate-but I had been drawn farther much farther into her world.
I wanted her.
I wanted her badly.
I had said-did I mean it, I wondered?-that I wanted to marry her.
Now I had to kill a man to keep her. Or else be killed myself, because that was the way the system worked in this strange new world that Beth had pulled me into.
She said, "Do you want me, Harry? Or do you want me to go back to Philadelphia and have Mark work me over too, the way I've seen him work other girls over?"
"You know the answer to that."
"Then there's only one thing to do," she said. "We've got to fight fire with fire."
"How? I'm no killer, Beth. I don't know the first thing about it. I don't even like to read detective stories. How do we do it? How do we get rid of him afterward?"
"Leave it to me," she said. "I'll work everything out over the next few days. When you come here tomorrow, I'll have the plan in shape. I'll go over it with you then, Harry."
"All right," I said tightly.
"And now-" She smiled, as though we had been discussing the weather or the baseball standings, and not a murder. "We've wasted enough time, Harry. Let's get down to what you came for, now."
"Yes," I said.
I was hardly in the mood for love just then. I was tied up in knots mentally, full of tensions and fears that hadn't existed for me an hour before. Beth seemed calm, though. Beth was perfectly relaxed.
I stood there edgily. Beth, nude, expectant, looked at me.
"What's the matter? Time's wasting!"
"Nothing-nothing-"
"You haven't loved me since Friday, Harry. I'm waiting."
I nodded and tried to focus my attention on the business at hand. Beth walked over to me. Her soft, pink, naked body pressed against me. A moment later her lips were hungrily heading for mine. I was aware of her tongue like a little serpent weaving.
I held her tight.
Indeed, very tight.
My hands slid over her body. I spread my fingers out over the firm mounds of her buttocks, digging my fingertips at the resilient flesh. I though about Mark and the kind of violation that Beth had said he was likely to inflict to her body, and the thought made me tremble and shudder.
Suddenly I wanted her. I wanted her a lot.
Suddenly I was willing to walk through a sea of fire to have her.
"Okay," I said. "Let me get my clothes off and we can go to bed."
I stripped quickly. Beth watched, her eyes gleaming with desire, her nostrils flaring, her breasts rising and falling rapidly, her nipples stiffening. In a moment I was nude. I took her by the hand and we went across and into the bedroom.
Our bodies met.
The softness, the silkiness, the nakedness of her yielded to me. She was like a flower greeting the first rays of the sun. First my hands and then my body touched her. I kissed her tenderly, and heard her little hissing sounds of passion.
Then time and space dissolved, and our turning, twisting bodies carried out the ceremony of passion, and we went soaring upward and upward on a billowing tide of bliss, until we reached the sublime moment when the crash of ecstasy overtook us, and we gave ourselves up to the power and delight.
And then we lay still. I pillowed my head against the steep hills of her breasts.
"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Yes." Yes."
"Enough to give up everything you have for me, Harry?"
"Yes."
"Enough to kill me for."
"Yes," I said, and I wondered if i had lost my mind altogether, and then I opened my eyes and stared at the lush, ripe, incredibly beautiful nakedness of her body, and I knew that I meant every word of what I was saying.
CHAPTER TEN
That night was sheer hell for me at home.
Myra made all kinds of trouble. And all that I could think of was the light, easy way that those fateful words had rolled from Beth's tongue:
We'll kill him.
We'll kill him.
I had made a commitment, a big and important commitment that was going to change the entire course of my life. I couldn't think of much else beside that. But Myra didn't let me concentrate on the strange new enterprise that I had entered into today.
Myra was in a question-asking mood.
"How's your work at the office going, Harry?" she wanted to know.
"Not bad," I said absent-mindedly.
"You don't talk much about it."
"It's the summer slowdown."
"But the fall rush will be beginning in another few weeks," she sad. "Aren't there all kinds of meetings, all sorts of plans being hatched?"
"It's the same old crap, Myra," I said. "It isn't any different this year from any other year."
"But all the other years you used to talk to me about it, Harry. You used to come home from the office all full of the latest news about what was coming up in the fall, the big deals, the new accounts-"
"Maybe I'm starting to get bored with it," I said. I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice, because I didn't feel like starting a full-scale quarrel with her just now. "I can't maintain the same level of interest all my life. After a while it just starts to get dull and mechanical, something you do for the buck. I guess that's what's happening now."
"You think they'll give you a raise?"
"How do I know?"
"You're due for a promotion. In the spring you were saying maybe they'd make you a section supervisor this year," Myra said.
"They haven't," I said. "Joe hasn't gotten his promotion. Until they kick him upstairs, they've got no slot to put me into."
"You sound as if you don't even care."
"Look, Myra, it's been a long, hot day, and if you don't mind I'd rather not discuss the office at home. Okay?"
"Okay," she said.
A couple of minutes later she was off on another, but closely related, topic.
"Are you still feeling so tired these days?"
"It isn't as bad," I said.
"You seem to have stopped losing weight."
"I hope so."
"But you aren't gaining much back, Harry. You still look like you're worn out."
I shrugged. "It's hard to have much of an appetite in hot weather. Maybe in September I'll start putting it back on."
"What did you have for lunch today?"
"What is this, Twenty Questions?"
"I'm just wondering. I want to know if you're taking proper care of yourself," she said.
I sighed. "I had a cold turkey sandwich," I said. "On white bread. With mayonnaise and a side order of cole slaw. Okay?"
"Where'd you eat? That cafeteria on Madison?"
I started to say yes, then realized that it might be a trap she was baiting for me. Maybe she had gone to the cafeteria to look for me.
I covered myself quickly and said, "No, I ate cross-town today. I had to see a client over on West 43rd Street, matter-of-fact."
She was eyeing me strangely, but for the moment she had run out of prying questions.
I kept thinking about Beth.
And about Mark.
And about my saying that I would marry her. I wondered if I really wanted to marry Beth, deep down. I loved her, sure, whatever that might mean. But did loving her mean that I would be willing to kill someone for her?
And there was a very good possibility, I realized suddenly, that I might get killed myself long before anything could happen to Mark. He might just have decided to eradicate me between here and Friday, on general principles, just by way of getting rid of a guy who bothered him and who had dared to stand up to him.
My life might be in danger.
Tomorrow morning, as I got out of the train, I might be gunned down from ambush.
That was a funny thing to have to worry about. I felt a creepy, crawly sensation on the back of my neck. In New York, of course, you have to figure that you might meet a violent death at any moment. Some moron in an apartment house might throw a flowerpot from a twenty-story window just for kicks, or some nut might shove you off a subway platform because he thinks you're active in the campaign to fluoridate his blood vessels. Or a kindly old lady driving a 20,000-horsepower Cadillac might forget which knob was the brake and which one was the accelerator, and plow through a couple of hundred pedestrians before coming to a halt in somebody's lobby. Or maybe it would be a swarthy little teen-age punk who would slit you from collar to navel because he thought you were looking at him the wrong way.
Those were the ordinary little dangers of living in a big, unfriendly city. I never gave them much thought. I had lived here all my life, and the risks had become second nature to me. Only a few hundred New Yorkers met violent deaths of that sort each year anyway, out of eight million plus, so the odds weren't so bad.
But this was altogether different.
When I had been in the Army, the drill instructors had kept pounding away at me with the idea that there would be an enemy out there, waiting to kill me. But my stint in the service had come after the Korean business and before the ruckus in South Vietnam, so the enemy was a strictly theoretical matter and I could never actually bring myself to believe that anybody really hated me enough to want to kill me.
Now I had to get used to the idea. My life was in jeopardy so long as Mark was free to threaten it.
All right. So I helped Beth kill Mark. What the dickens would I do with Myra, then? And Beth? Was I really going to marry her?
Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper ... it was like tumbling down into an endless dark pit, with no bottom in sight, only more darkness below. I didn't know where I was going.
Myra was bustling around the living room, tidying things up in a way that I knew was totally alien to Beth's way of life. I couldn't imagine Beth emptying ashtrays and folding up newspapers the way Myra was doing right now. And every few minutes, Myra would shoot off another question at me, and I'd give her an answer with half my mind, not even really listening.
I was pretty sure that Myra knew I was seeing somebody else on a steady basis. I wondered when Myra was going to come right out and tell me that she was starting divorce proceedings.
I couldn't stop to spend much time thinking about Myra now.
"We'll kill him." Beth had said.
There hadn't been any emotion in her voice when she said it. She might as well have been saying, "We'll go to the movies," or maybe, "Well have lunch now."
I wondered what kind of hold Mark had on her-how long she had lived with him, what plans he had for her, what their relationship was. I wondered, too, how many men Beth had actually slept with in her life. While she was my mistress, I didn't care if she had been had by a regiment of other men. But now that I was thinking of her as a potential wife, I had to take a different attitude.
I realized I knew hardly anything at all about Beth, really.
What did I know about her?
I knew the shape of her body. I knew that very well. I knew the contours of her breasts, I knew the texture of her nipples, I knew the taste of her lips. I knew the exact place on her left ankle, in a silky hoOow, where she had a tiny brown birthmark. I knew the kind of sounds she made as she came to the peak of her love-making.
That was all that I knew.
I didn't know how old she was. Twenty, twenty-three, twenty-five, thirty? I couldn't tell. Early or middle twenties, I guess. But I didn't know. I didn't know where she had been born. I didn't know where she had grown up. I didn't know what her childhood had been like. Did she have brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins? Did she have a close-knit family somewhere off in Kalamazoo or Oshkosh?
I didn't know how she had drifted into the line of work that she was in. Night-club performer, yeah. Chorus girl, yeah. Before that, a stripper. And before that? A prostitute, maybe? For all I knew she had been married once or twice before. I just didn't know.
She was a stranger to me, in all except the physical part. That night in April she had entered my life down in Philly, and it was as if she had simply not existed at all until the moment I first saw her. For me she had no past prior to that night. In a way, the whole thing was like a dream, a wild summer fantasy.
Myra said, "I wish I knew what's happened to you these last few months, Harry. I just wish I knew what it was."
"Has something happened to me?" I asked innocently. "You know something, Myra, there are times when I just don't understand you."
"I'll be perfectly plain, them"
"Please do."
"There's another woman," she said.
"Are you going to start that again?"
"I don't have any proof, Harry. But I know that you're seeing somebody else and going to bed with her."
"Myra, let's not drag that over the coals again, shall we? How many times have I told you-"
"How much do you think your word is worth to me, Harry? I know you, after all these years. And I'll find out who your mistress is. I'll put a stop to this. You can be sure of that."
It was my cue to tell her that if she wanted a divorce, she could go ahead and have one. But I muffed the cue. I couldn't bring myself to say it.
She stood there with her hands on her hips and her eyes smoldering with anger. I thought of the nude, passionate Myra who had given herself to me so many times this summer. Now she seemed altogether different, a banshee, a shrew. Anger made her look ten years older than she really was. It masked the real real beauty Myra had.
There was nothing I could say.
Things were happening too fast for me. I just had to hang on, and try not to get run over by the march of events.
At the office the next morning there were tons of work to go through. The meeting that I had missed the day before was a pretty important one, I was discovering. Reading between the lines of what Toe and some of the other guys told me, I gathered that I had hurt my own chances for advancement by missing the meeting-even though I had said I would be out on company business while the meeting was going on yesterday.
I wondered what they'd say if they knew I hadn't been out negotiating on the Michaels account, but that I had been visiting my mistress.
And that I had been plotting a murder.
They wouldn't believe it, I decided. What? Nice, quiet, hard-working, peaceful Harry Martin keeping a mistress? Visiting her on company time? And getting mixed up with gangsters? Arranging for a murder? Naw! It ain't so! It can't be!
But it was.
Suddenly, the job and all its petty politicking didn't mean a thing to me. The urgent meetings, the mimeographed memoranda, the nudging and shoving back and forth as we tried to climb another rung on the corporate ladder-it all seemed meaningless and empty to me.
I ploughed my way through the papers on my desk. I wasn't quite finished dealing with them all by the time noon rolled around, but I didn't let that bother me. I brushed off an invitation to have lunch with Joe and the boys.
"Sorry," I said. "Appointment."
"He's going to visit his girl friend," somebody said jokingly.
There was general laughter. I turned my head a-way quickly so nobody could see how close to the mark the joke had come. I ducked out of the office, took a back elevator down, and walked briskly to Beth's place. I was there by five after twelve.
As I put my key in the door, I remembered the jolt I had had yesterday when I opened the door and found Mark sitting there waiting for me. I hardly knew what might be in store for me today. So I opened the door cautiously, ready to cut and run if there was any sign of pending trouble.
All was well. I didn't see anybody, but I heard the sound of a shower running. I walked into the bathroom. Beth was in the shower cubicle. Through the frosted glass window I could see the outlines of her body, disorted by the glass but yet unmistakably Beth. She was busy scrubbing herself and didn't seem to realize I had arrived. I stood there a moment, just staring in rapt delight at that supple, nude, pink form.
Then I went out. I sat down in the living room to wait for her.
A moment later, I heard the water go off in the shower.
"I'm here, Beth," I called.
"Okay. I'll be out in a minute."
It was two or three minutes, as a matter-of-fact. Then she emerged, delightfully moist, looking pink and well-scrubbed. All she wore was a bath towel wrapped around her waist. The glowing hills of her breasts were bare and exciting.
She came to me. I put my arms around her, held her tight. The towel, which had been only loosely together, came apart and dropped to the floor. I played my hands out over the ripe flesh of her buttocks as I pressed her against me.
Then we parted. She stepped back, a vision of nude loveliness.
"You didn't have any trouble, did you, Harry?" she asked me.
"Trouble? What kind of trouble?"
"From Mark," she said. "There's no telling about that guy. I was afraid he might decide to go after you, or something like that."
So she had had the same idea I had. "No," I said. "All's been well."
"That's good. But you've got to be careful. You've got to keep your eyes open all the time until he's taken care of."
"I've been thinking the same thing," I said.
She spun around, going across the room to a dresser drawer. My eyes travelled down the length of her bare back to the narrowness of her waist and the sudden blossoming of her buttocks. She was a joy to look at. She was a poem in flesh.
She knelt by the drawer and took something out. "I got this last night," she said. "Someone at the club helped me out when I said I needed it. You know how to use one of these, Harry?
She handed it over to me. It fit neatly into the palm of my hand. It was very pretty, I had to admit-a snubnosed little .38 automatic, with a silencer fitted into place over its snout. The little gun was cold ... cold, like death.
"It's loaded." Beth said. "Be careful and don't wave it around."
"Don't worry," I said. "I was in the Army. I know how to handle something like this."
I examined the little weapon. Inside I was quaking, but I tried to show a facade of calmness for Beth's benefit. I didn't know how convincing an act I was putting on.
I said, "So now we have a gun But what do I do, just walk up to him on the street and gun him down? You said you'd have a plan."
"I do."
"So?"
She moistened her lips. It was strange to hear a beautiful nude girl talking about murder in such a cold-blooded way. Her big, round, ruby-tipped breasts rose and fell evenly as she talked.
She said, "He'll be here on Friday, I'll have all my stuff packed when he gets here. He'll think that I'm going with him. That'll put him off his guard. Meanwhile you'll be hiding in the bedroom."
"Yeah," I said. "I begin to see."
"You step out and shoot him when you hear me give a code word that'll tell you he's unprepared. The code word will be-let's see, make it garter."
"Garter," I repeated. "Okay."
"You hear me say the code word, you come out of the bedroom and drill him. And make sure you get him the first time, because he's awfully quick with the trigger himself. Go for the chest. That's the safest, because even if you don't kill him right away the shot will knock him down, and you can finish him off."
"You've really worked this out, haven't you?" I said.
She grinned. "There's no sense fumbling it up, is there?"
"No. But what do we do with the body after-after he's dead?"
"We just hide him away in the closet somewhere, lock the apartment up, and vanish. He'll have a couple of tickets to Philly on him. We'll go down there, catch a boat for South America, or some place ... just the two of us, Harry, you and me in Brazil or Venezuela."
"They'll find the body next month," I said. "When the rent comes due and you don't pay it, they'll come in here and smell him and find him. They'll identify him, Beth, and they'll know whose apartment it is, and they'll be able to put two and two together."
"By then well be five thousand miles away. The police won't bother. They aren't going to get worked up over the murder of a well-known crook and narcotics peddler. It isn't worth their while to try to extradite witnesses from South America when they don't care who did the killing."
"It's a risk."
"I don't think so," Beth said. "I've seen what happens in these gangland murders. The cops poke around a little, but they don't sweat too hard over them. Not if it involves South America."
"And money?"
"I'll draw all my money out of the bank," she said. "There's almost a thousand. And you must have plenty. Don't you?"
"Yeah," I said.
"It won't take much to live on down there. So long as it's Yankee Dollars we've got. We'll open a night club and rake in the dough."
"What about passports?" I asked. "You think you can just land in a foreign country and walk right in and set up shop?"
"Yes," she said
"Sounds risky."
"I've heard how it's done. You just keep a fifty-dollar bill in your hand, wrapped up in a folded sheet of paper When the immigration officer asks to see your passport-if he bothers to ask-you give him the paper He won't make any trouble."
"He would if you tried that here."
"We aren't going to the United States," she said. "It works differently down there."
"Maybe," I said.
I thought about it. I considered what I was getting myself into. Leaving wife and home and everything else-job, friends, city, possessions. Running away, probably changing my name. Starting life all over from scratch at the age of thirty-four.
Well, I'd have Beth.
And my life up till now hadn't been anything much worth shouting about-just a dull grind, a loveless marriage, a weary job whose only blessing was that it provided pretty good money. There was plenty of money in my savings account. I didn't have any stocks or bonds to worry about, just some mutual fund shares. I figured I'd draw out all the cash in the savings account. Myra could keep the mutual fund shares. They didn't come to a great deal, anyway. She could have the furniture and all that went with it. I didn't think she'd miss me much. This would only save her the trouble of getting a divorce.
'Well?" Beth said. "How does it sound?"
"Okay-I guess."
"You want to back out?"
"It's too late for that, isn't it?"
"It sure is," she said. "I'd never forgive you if you made me go back to Philadelphia with Mark-and to the punishment."
"Don't worry, Beth. I'm with you."
Gently, she withdrew the gun from my hand-I was still holding it, almost absent-mindedly-and restored it to its hiding place. Then she came back across the room to me and glided to my arms.
She kissed me gently. Her sweet fragrance made me forget my gloom and my misgivings. When Mark returned on Friday to get Beth, my hand would be steady and my aim would be sure. And I'd leave Myra and New York and everything else behind me, and take off on a permanent roller coaster joyride.
With Beth.
"I can't wait till Friday," I said. And I meant it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We loved. That was just as good as all the other times. Maybe even a little spicier this time because of the murder pledge. That put a sinister tone on our relationship that gave me a strange, dream-like feeling as I embraced her.
She was passionate. As always, I loved her quickly, without the frills, because I wanted to get back to the office on time. It was only after we had finished that I realized how silly that was.
It was almost quarter to one. Beth and I were lying nude, side by side on the bed, in the glowing aftermath of passion. And I laughed. "What's funny?" she asked. "I am. I'm a scream."
"You're a living riot," she said. "You mind explaining what the gag is?"
"I've been in a sweat to get back to the office on time. I was out yesterday afternoon and so I figured I'd better not miss much work today. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the slightest. After Friday I'm never going to think of that place again. So what's my hurry now?"
"Force of habit," she suggested.
"Maybe so." , "You better go back anyway, though."
"Trying to get rid of me, Beth?"
"You don't want to make yourself look suspicious," she pointed out. "You've got to go through this final week just like everything's normal. Otherwise, there may be some trouble. So go back now. We'll have lots of time for more loving afterwards."
"Yeah," I said. "From Friday on."
"You bet."
"Come close," I told her. "Kiss Papa good-bye before he goes off to the nasty old office."
She slipped into my arms. I put my mouth to hers, my hand to her breasts. We caressed briefly, and then I rose from the bed.
Beth lay sprawled out, nude and magnificent, watching me as I dressed. Her eyes were glowing. It would be worth almost anything, I thought, to have her for keeps. Almost anything.
Up to and including murder.
When I got back to the office, I had to make a real effort to slide back into the mundane world. It was a total shift of gears-sliding into second gear to take a steep hill after coming down a slope in overdrive. All around me were these dull little people at their dull little desks, and I was living with a nightclub stripper, and planning a murder, and about to take off for the jungles of Venezuela, or someplace like that.
It hardly seemed real.
The tension drew a little tighter around me that night when I got home. There was Myra, the breasty redheaded wife that I was planning to leave behind-and, of course, she had no inkling of what was in the wind.
She said, "Tom and Helene Brewster phoned. They invited us to come up to their place and visit with them."
"Saturday?" I asked, thinking pleasantly that I would be somewhere on the high seas by Saturday night, while the Brewsters and their company sat around worrying about world problems and the menace of creeping socialism.
"No," Myra said. "Tomorrow."
"That's pretty short notice."
"I know it is. But it was just one of these spur of the moment things, you know. An informal little summer get together. No dressing up, or anything. We're all going to go there around seven o'clock for a lovely dinner."
"All? How many?"
"I think she said there'd be three or four couples beside us. Let's see-Mike and Merry Hanover, and Don and Sue Riklin, and-"
"Okay, spare me the details," I said. "I suppose you accepted."
"Sure I did."
"You know I don't like to go out in the middle of the week," I said.
"I figured you wouldn't object. It's cool up there, and it'll be a relaxing way to spend a hot summer evening. Don and Sue are going to pick us up in their car. It's all arranged."
I shrugged. Okay, I thought. One last social evening. One last get-together with the people that I laughingly called my friends. And then it would be quits, though they wouldn't realize it. I would dip one last time into that tepid world of tepid middle-class people-and then run off to South America with my murderous mistress, while all the tongues wagged away back home.
My mind didn't dwell long on tomorrow night's party or on any other such dull matters. I couldn't help thinking about Friday, and what was supposed to take place then. I don't know how many million million times I acted out in my mind the final scene between Mark and me, with now Mark falling, now myself the one to topple.
I lay awake, shivering tensely in the late August heat, unable to sleep.
Myra said, "Are you sick or something?"
"No. I'm okay."
"You aren't sleeping."
"It happens sometimes."
"You want to love me?"
"I'm pretty bushed, Myra," I said, gracefully sidestepping the offer. I didn't think that would be an effective sleeping tablet right now. I was wound up tight as a drum, and Myra wasn't able to unwind me.
Finally I slept.
I dreamed. I dreamed that it was Friday, and Mark had come to Beth's apartment to collect her, and she had spoken the password and I had come out, gun in hand, to shoot him. For some reason Mark was naked and he looked tremendous. I lifted the gun but as I tried to shoot him the gun came to life in my hand, it turned to something rubbery.
I fired it anyway. It twisted around and the bullet hit Beth, right between her breasts. It knocked her down. She was naked, too. I tried to aim the gun at Mark, who stood there laughing. But the second bullet hit Beth again-this time her leg. Only instead of screaming in pain, she began to sigh and pant in ecstasy, as though I had loved her instead of shot her.
And then Mark came toward me in my dreams. He took the gun away from me, flipped it out the window. There was a knife in his hand. I felt a sudden blaze of pain in my chest.
I woke.
The air conditioner was going full blast, but I was covered with sweat. By my side, Myra was sleeping peacefully. She slept nude, as always, and I looked at her body, at the heavy breasts, the little nipples. A thrill of desire went through me. But I didn't touch her. I rolled over with my back to her. After a while sleep came again, and this time I don't think I dreamed.
Wednesday came.
M-day minus two. M for Mark.
I went through all the morning motions. Got up, shaved, had breakfast, put my business clothes on. Trundled down to the subway, paid my fifteen cents, got aboard, let myself be rocketed through a tube under New York Harbor into Manhattan. Up to my office. Sat down at my desk. Picked up the stack of papers as if they really had any meaning of value.
Why not go through the motions? Even though the end of the world was coming for me in two days-the end of the dreary old world and the beginning of a new one-I had to pretend that all was well. I had to cover up.
I couldn't have lunch with Beth that day. My supervisor came over to my desk around ten o'clock and said, "Harry, I'd like to go over some of the plans for the fall campaign with you."
"Sure, Joe," I said, thinking that before the leaves began to drop I'd be in the balmy tropics. "Any time. When's convenient?"
"Lunchtime today," he said. "Unless you've got an appointment."
"No, no appointment."
I was boxed in. I couldn't very well refuse. What fee dickens, I thought. Two more days and nobody would ever come between me and Beth.
So I waited until about half past eleven, and then I phoned her and gave her the bad news that I wasn't coming to see her. She took it philosophically. "Business is business," she said. "It'll all be over soon, won't it?"
"Not soon enough," I said.
I had lunch with Joe. He jawed on and on about the future of our fine organization, and I nodded my head sagely here and there just as though I were really listening to what he had to say. I think he was impressed with my perception and foresight. I got the notion that he was thinking of recommending me for a position with greater authority. I couldn't care less, but I didn't tell him that.
I got home a little before six o'clock that evening. Myra was getting dressed for our dinner date-waltzing around the apartment in stockings, garter-belt, and not a stitch besides as she assembled her clothing for the evening.
I looked at her. The big, hard-tipped breasts, the fine, pale buttocks set off by the straps of the garter-belt. A handsome woman, I thought. Even if she was a lousy, nagging witch. She'd get married again pretty fast, after I deserted her. She'd get an annullment for desertion, and then she'd find some other guy who didn't know what her personality was like and who was fascinated by her body, the way I had once been fascinated by her body, and she'd march off to the altar a second time.
Good for her, I thought.
I had time for a quick shower. Then I got into some decent eating-out clothes. The people we were going to visit tonight had a house up in that well-heeled Westchester County suburban town, Scarsdale. Once they had been ordinary city-dwellers just like the rest of us. But then Tom Brewster had struck it rich on Wall Street and suddenly off he went to the green and bosky suburb.
He wasn't any older than I was. But he had gone into Wall Street when he got out of the army. His first few years he didn't do much, just learned the ropes. He was a cutomer's man-you know, the guy at the other end of the telephone who takes your order when you want to buy some stock. Customer's men get paid mostly on a commission basis, and though it's pretty good pay it isn't any real fortune. I guess that Tom was making ten or twelve thousand a year by the time he had been there a couple of years.
But then he started playing the market on his own account-in between the telephone calls from the customers, that is.
He made his pile in 1960, and made another pile in 1961 after Kennedy was elected. In those two years all the wild space stocks were running away like crazy. Tom would buy a stock at 25, watch it go to around 60 inside of a few months, sell out, and start all over again. He began with a stake of five thousand and ran it right into six figures by the summer of 1961. Then he started getting worried, and he switched from space stocks into things like Chrysler, General Motors, and A.I.&I.
You guessed it. The market crashed in 1962, but Tom didn't get badly hurt, and the next thing that happened was that all the blue chips he now owned began to take off for the stratosphere the way his science-fiction stocks once had done. So Tom made a third fortune.
He wasn't a customer's man any more. Now he was a partner in a small suburban brokerage office. He had two acres of green grass and a handsome Tudor-style house. The house set him back close to 600,000, so the rumor went-but that was only a year's capital gains, so why worry about it? Money was money, and Tom knew where more could be had any time he needed it.
You had to hand it to Tom, though. He had the common man's touch. He hadn't cut loose from his old middle-class friends. Oh, no. He invited us regularly to come up and be awed by the mansion.
Which was what we were doing tonight.
A little before seven, our housephone bleeped, and Don Riklin's bullfrog voice said, "Are you people ready to go, up there?"
"Be right down, Don," I said.
The Riklins were going to chauffeur us up to Scarsdale. Don was in electronics; he had sunk every penny into a little company that he and his friends had founded, and Tom Brewster was acting as financial consultant. I had an idea that Don was heading for a quick bankruptcy, but it wasn't my place to say anything. Right now, at least, the future looked rosy for him. He was currently driving a sleek one-year-old Continental, of which he owned the cigarette lighter and the radio and the bank owned the rest. Just practicing up for the life of wealth and luxury, at least that's what I figured.
Myra and I went downstairs. Double-parked in front of the house was the magnificent Riklin automobile. Don was behind the wheel, a big redheaded guy with hairy arms. His wife Sue was next to him-a petite, slim, dark-haired girl who looked to be about nineteen, and a virginal nineteen at that. Actually Sue Riklin was thirty-three, but she hid it well. As for the state of her virginity, I had no first-band evidence, but it was hard to get around the fact that she had had three babies in the last seven years.
We got into the car. It sped away.
From our place to Tom Brewster's was an hour's drive, by normal standards-highways all the way, but even so there was quite a distance to travel. Don Riklin drove that Continental of his as though it was driving him. I doubt that he traveled much below sixty miles an hour the whole way, most of it in forty-five-mile zones. Anyway, we got there in about three quarters of the usual time.
It was a glorious late summer evening, with the sun still fairly high in the sky. Tom's well-watered lawns looked like green velvet. His house, dark wood timbering against cream-colored stucco, was a magnificent sight. The other two couples were there already-everybody was out on the patio for their cocktails before dinner.
Tom greeted us grandly-the country squire, in his colored shirt and Bermuda shorts. Beside him stood his wife, roly-poly little Helene, who had tried unsuccessfully to seduce me a long weekend earlier this summer. Helene, a dark haired girl with big breasts and an ample rear, wasn't really plump at all. But her breasts were so big and her legs so short that she seemed out of proportion, and therefore fatter than she really was. You just don't expect to find breasts that big on a girl who's hardly five feet two.
"Harry" she cried. "Myra! So good to see you again, both of you!"
She gave Myra a big kiss. She squeezed my hand chastely. Or not so chastely, I realized, judging by the way she held on for a lingering moment.
Helene was still interested in me.
I wondered why. Didn't Brewster's Millions satisfy her anymore? Had Tom's pursuit of the Almighty Dollar robbed him of his appeal?
I didn't really care all that much. The details of Helene Brewster's love life weren't of that great interest to me. As far as I knew, she was just another spoiled witch, whose husband had given her the best that money could buy, and whose way of repaying him was to cheat him with any passing male. It isn't exactly an uncommon female attitude. I've discovered that.
But I quickly found out that I was vitally concerned in Helene's love life. Because she was still after me. She wasn't taking no for an answer.
The party began more or less the way you'd expect any suburban dinner party to begin. With martinis. Lots and lots of martinis.
We all sat on the patio looking westward toward the setting sun, a big globe of red fire that was dropping down behind the towering oak trees that marked Tom Brewster's property line. The Brewster maid brought the drinks out. She was a handsome girl-tall, slender, with thin lips and a delicate nose. Her starched white uniform didn't even begin to hide the thrust of her heavy breasts.
Her name was Loreen. When Loreen appeared, pitcher of martinis in hand, I noticed our host and hostess each cut loose with a curious and not at all concealed reaction. Tom stared at Loreen with a warm, pleasured smile of possession. And Helene glared at her in unmistakable feminine hatred.
I saw the picture now. Country Squire Tom Brewster was fooling around with the hired help. And Helene was sore enough to look for revenge.
I wasn't in any position to criticize Tom's morals-not with Beth to my score. And I couldn't really blame him for taking a chance with this Loreen. She was quite some babe, all things considered. But as she waited on us, she was demure and modest and reserved, never once giving the impression that she might be the host's girl friend.
So we drank.
Plenty.
More than enough.
And there was the usual talk. Money-talk. Tom didn't mind talking shop after hours. I sat there, not taking part in the discussion, just listening to my soon-to-be-forgotten friends talk.
"-a good conversion factor, with provision for dilution of equity-"
"-yes, but don't you think that the tax-shelter arrangement is-"
"-I prefer the closed-end funds myself. They give you a discount from asset value, and-"
"-seems to me that the Dow-Jones Industrials are getting a little top-heavy. I'd figure we're in for a pretty sharp correction-"
"-moving into defensive stocks, as a matter-of-fact. You pick up some highly leveraged utilities, for example, and you can really go places if-"
On and on. Chatter, chatter, chatter. "What do you think of Big Steel, Tom? And how about Texas Instruments? Motorola? Minnesota Mining? What about-"
And while the money-talk was going on in one corner, the women, also oiling themselves steadily with martinis, were talking women-talk, just as dull, just as limited, just as narrow.
"-the fall styles that I've seen so far look rather severe, but-"
"-we're thinking of pulling Tommy out of his school in September and transferring him. There's a very undesirable element starting to move in, all-"
"-the chrysanthemums aren't doing too well this year, but-"
"-we had the most darling cold potatoes under glass there, and it wasn't really too expensive, I mean, when you consider the quality of the food-"
"-we're thinking of trying Martinique next winter. The Virgin Islands are getting to be such a bore now, don't you think-"
Chatter.
Drinks flowed.
More chatter.
I didn't guzzle. I had some drinks, just to be friendly, but I didn't belt the stuff away like everyone else. That was because I wasn't talking. I was just sitting there, a detached observer, taking it all in. I sipped my martini slowly and reflectively. But the others were so busy chattering and gabbing that they failed to notice the steady motion of their elbows, the regular and incessant lifting of drinks to lips, and the constant refilling by the silent, ever-present, always helpful maid.
An hour slipped by. Twilight deepened into early evening.
It was dinnertime, now.
We filed inside, none too steadily for some of us, to take our places around the large mahogany table in the oak-paneled dining room. The table was set expensively-fine tablecloth, fine china, fine sterling silver. Everything in this house smacked of money. New money, recently acquired, but only a snob would hold that against good old Tom Brewster, anyway.
Not too many of my friends were in shape to enjoy their dinners. They had had so many martinis that they had paralyzed their taste buds and well-nigh their brains as well. But it was a good meal. Probably the Brewsters had had some catering expert cook it for them.
Good food, good wine. The wine flowed freely and didn't help to make the gathering a more sober one. And after dinner, Tom broke out cigars and cognac for the men. in the fine old tradition which was that of the upper crust.
It was after dinner, too, that Helene Brewster managed to seduce me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I had gone for a walk in the garden. It was dark, now, without even a moon to light things up-just the sprinkled illumination of starlight. I had had a little too much to eat, and I wanted to walk the meal off. Besides, I was bored with the company back at the house. They were getting drunker and drunker, louder and louder.
It seemed very good to me that I would be cutting myself loose from the lives of these people in less than forty-eight hours. I was bored sick of their silly, vain, pretentious talk-their gabble about private schools and convertible debentures, about Caribbean vacations and fine wines, about school integration and new cars. They all tried to seem so aristocratic.
And who were they, these swell aristocrats? A bunch of guys who had thought that a hundred bucks a week was a good salary ten years ago. A bunch of women who'd done their shopping at the bargain counters. People whose parents had scraped for nickels during the Depression. Phony aristocrats, newcomers to wealth. They were people who had struck it rich in the big boom, and now all of a sudden they were starting to pretend that they were Cabots and Lodges. You know the type: the Methodist or Baptist who decides to become an Episcopalian when he strikes it rich; the Democrat who suddenly starts to vote Republican because he thinks it's the stylish thing to do when you get to a certain income level.
Who needed them?
Not me. I had had all I wanted of their company, right up to here.
It wasn't sour grapes, either. I couldn't complain of poverty. I had known the good things of life, even as you and you, in these soft peacetime years. The restaurants, the vacations in the tropics, and all the rest of it. But right now I felt a million miles away from all that was most important to these people.
I had a mistress.
I was going to commit a murder. I was going to skip off to South America at the end of the week.
So I didn't want to sit up there gabbing with them. I went down into the dark garden, and strolled around, thinking of Beth, wishing that I could be with her tonight instead of killing the evening like this.
It was cool and sweet-smelling in the garden. Because it was so late in the summer, there wasn't much in bloom. The roses and rhododendrons and laurels had all long since had their season. The autumn perennials weren't quite ready to flower yet. But I didn't mind. I liked the freshness of the air, with or without the perfume of flowers.
I was down near the property line. A row of hedges about eight feet high cut off part of the land, making a little enclosed bower. I stood there for a moment or two, thinking how peaceful it was.
Then a voice said, "You in an anti-social mood or something, Harry?"
I turned. Helene Brewster stood there. She was smiling at me.
"I just felt like taking a walk," I said. "It's lovely down here."
"Yes. So quiet. And so private."
"What's doing back at the house?"
"They're having an argument about politics," Helene said. "Very dull. So I decided to take a walk. Fancy that I'd meet you here."
"Yes. Fancy that," I said.
We were standing about a dozen feet apart, facing each other. My eyes, adjusted by now to the darkness, saw her clearly-a short, breasty, dark-haired girl whose eyes sparkled with hunger.
She wanted me. It was the same deal as that week-end in July, I thought.
"Don't you like me?" she asked. "Of course I do."
"Then why do you keep running away from me, Harry? Why do you brush me off?"
"I'm a married man," I said, conscious that it was a silly thing to say.
Helene snickered. "And I'm a married woman. What does that have to d. with anything?"
"Listen, Helene-"
"Are you going to stand there and tell me with a straight face that you've never been unfaithful to Myra once since you married her?"
"I didn't say that."
"Of course not. You've had other women, you must have. Nobody's faithful any more. Tom cheats on me right and left. That maid of ours-
"I figured that," I said.
"Okay. If he can cheat, so can I. And why not with you? Why not with a friend? You've always seemed attractive to me, Harry. What's the matter, don't I seem attractive to you?"
"Of course you do."
"Then why don't you let yourself go?" she asked. "I want you, and if you want me-or even if you just sort of half-want me-"
I said wearily, "I think you're a very handsome girl, Helene. But you're the wife of my friend Tom. I wouldn't want to get mixed up in anything nasty."
"Just a little fun. Quick, quiet fun. He'd never know."
"Here?"
"Right here," she said in a steamy voice "Right here and now, Harry."
I moistened my lips. I stared at the heavy globes of her breasts, outlined by the tight black dress she was wearing. I didn't really want her, I thought. Not that she wasn't a very alluring woman, and all that, but I just wasn't interested. Not now.
Not with Beth on my mind.
I said, "Maybe we ought to go back to the house before there's trouble, Helene."
Her voice was chilly. "Is that your way of saying no, Harry?"
"I'm trying to avoid trouble."
"I thought you were a gentleman."
"I try to be."
"No gentleman would make a lady beg him like this. I had to chase you all that week-end, and I didn't get anything for it. You hurt me that week-end, Harry. You hurt me where a woman is hurt the worst-in her pride. Are you going to hurt me again, Harry?"
I shifted my weight uneasily. I didn't answer her. We stared at each other in the darkness.
"Love me, Harry. Now."
"Helene-"
"Love me or I'll scream rape. There. That's a threat. I want you so bad I'm willing to pull anything to have you." There were tears in her voice now. "You've made me hate myself. You've made me beg. Come on, now! Come on, Harry!"
I realized it would be more trouble to refuse her than to take her. What the dickens, I thought, why stand here shilly-shallying? She wanted me, I'd give myself to her. If there was any scene afterward she could be the one to do the talking, the one to explain to her husband and my wife exactly what had been going on.
I didn't care.
Another two days and I'd be far from all this nonsense anyway.
So I moved toward her. A moment later, she was in my arms, and I heard her hiss with relief, as though triumphant that she had snared me at last.
Her small, compact round body pressed against me. She stood up on tiptoes, her mouth seeking mine, and the tip of her tongue was drilling. I put my hands to her breasts. They were soft but firm underneath her bra and dress. I gripped them so hard that I was aware of the nipples beneath all the fabric. The nipples were like little juts of stone.
We clung together for a long moment, bodies churning and undulating in the darkness. Then she pulled her lips away from mine.
"Follow me!" she panted. "Hurry!"
I didn't ask any questions. She grabbed me by the wrist and began to tug me across the garden. In the dark, I couldn't see too well what was our destination. But suddenly a kind of shed loomed up in front of us, and I remembered that there was a summer house at the foot of the garden, just under the trees.
We ran into it.
"Sit down!" she cried.
There was a bench running along the wall of the summer house. I sat down on it. and a moment later Helene sat down, too. She hoisted her skirt up around her waist as she took her position.
She wasn't wearing any panties.
I could see that clearly. The gleam of starlight lit up the summer house enough to show me the round curve of her waist, and the straps of her garter-belt. Nothing else was under her skirt. She was all ready.
She laughed. "I didn't put any panties on tonight. That was cooler. And I wanted to save time."
Her hands clawed at me, demanding. She yanked at my clothing. She was almost desperate for me. Doesn't Tom ever do anything for her? I wondered, as she adjusted the soft cushions of her bare buttocks eagerly, in a frenzy of hungry lust.
She seized me. There was no question of who was calling the shots. She was in charge, and, despite my mechanical physical response to her movements, I was indifferent. Let her do what she wanted-needed-to do!
Helene closed her eyes and hissed once again, that triumphant hissing sound. I was with her now, and that was what she seemed to want so bad.
We began. She rocked, she bounced, and roiled-she did all the work, all but unconscious of her actions, living for the sensations of her flesh soft and warm as she rolled round and round.
Her hands were fumbling at the neckline of her dress. I saw what she was doing. She was slipping her fingers into the top of her bra and pulling her breasts out into the open. It wasn't easy work. The bra was the tight push 'em-up kind. She really had to work to free her breasts. That must have been painful to her, too, as she tugged them out of their close confinement.
But in a moment she gave a grunt of satisfaction, and her breasts popped into the open. For the seven or eight years that I had known Helene Brewster, I had often dreamed idly of looking at her bare breasts, the breasts that were so amazingly large for a girl so short.
Now they were on display.
"There," she said. "That's better."
They gleamed in the faint starlight. Round white globes of firm flesh, lying on top of her low-cut dress's scoop neckline, the nipples swollen with desire, an angry red.
"Go on," she whispered urgently. "Take them with your hands!"
I put my hands to her breasts. They were taut and good to the touch, and the tips of them seemed to be glowing with an inner fire. My fingertips sank deep at the yielding flesh.
Helene hissed again-a hiss of pleasure.
Then she began once more.
Her body rocked violently, with a strength I found incredible, and all I had to do was sit there holding her boobs, while she worked, her eyes closed, her lips and nostrils distorted with lust, making little soft murmuring sounds as the ecstasy grew and grew for her trembling body.
That had more or less been a rape, with me as the victim. But I couldn't say I minded. This was going to be a kind of farewell present from me to Helene, I figured. She wanted me so much-well, she could have me.
Things got steamier and steamier.
Her roly-poly body began to joggle. Sweat-beads flecked her face and breasts. I was sweating too. I was aware of the peaks of lust she was experiencing. I knew that she was having ecstasy after ecstasy. She was a wild one, all right, this little butterball of a Westchester wife.
Weird grunting cries erupted from her lips now. "Oh! Oh! Ah!"
The last one was a slowly exhaled cry of pure delight. She began in triple time, bouncing around so much I thought she was going to fall, and I experienced the surge of passion rising to a peak for me now, and I began to gasp and cry out and sweat myself; I closed my eyes, and a moment later I heard Helene's final cry of ecstasy. Together we went smashing on toward the goal-line.
Touchdown!
After that was over, we sat quietly for a while, neither of us moving. She didn't leave my arms. Our bodies remained touching.
At last she said, "Was that so bad?"
"Great, Helene."
"Why'd you make me chase you like that? Just to flatter your male pride?"
"I don't know," I said. "I guess I was in a virtuous mood."
She laughed. "You'll outgrow that," she said. "Now that the ice is broken. Listen, Harry, I know that you and Myra don't get along well. And Tom and I are on the outs, too. But there's no reason why we can't make each other happy. I mean, we'll stay married to our present mates, but there'll always be times when we can slip off and-"
She had things all figured out. She was looking for a lover, and I had filled the bill. From now on, she thought, we would have a steady arrangement. Very convenient. And I couldn't have any moral qualms about making love the second time with her, could I? She had put the situation properly: the ice was broken.
The only flaw in her ointment was the fact that I wouldn't be around to serve her needs. But I didn't see any point in telling that and spoiling her mood of lovely contentment and tranquility. She'd find out the truth soon enough, I figured.
After a while she carefully got to her feet. She looked pretty comical-a short, sweaty, rumpled girl with her bare breasts hanging out of her dress.
She said. "Unzip me in back, will you? I've got to stuff my boobs back in."
"Can't you get them in the way you got them out?" I wanted to know.
"Hurts too much. Easier this way."
So I opened her dress and unhooked her bra for her. She pulled the cups, which had slid down around her waist, back over the sharp-tipped mounds of her breasts. Then she adjusted her dress and tried to get her hair back into shape at least a little.
I had some fixing-up to do, too. I tucked my shirttails in, brushed dust from the seat of my pants, dabbed the sweat from my cheeks. I passed my pocket comb through my hair.
She said, "We'll go back separately. I'm going to go in the side entrance and fix myself up in the John. If anyone sees me the way I look now they'll know the whole story."
"How do I look?"
"No so bad," she said. "Fix your tie. Otherwise you're reputable-looking."
We left the summer house. Helene started to circle up around toward the east wing of the main house, and I began to amble up through the grove of evergreens that bordered the swimming pool. I felt calm and a little depressed after the violent frenzy of love-making.
Fine old suburban pastime, I thought. Have your hostess in the summer house.
Well, now Helene Brewster could die happy. She had had me after all.
I strolled back into the party. They were going hot and heavy, the men puffing away at their cigars, the women sipping tall, cool drinks.
"-what this stock market needs is a wholly different approach by the Federal Reserve System. I think-"
"-gold reserve ought to be beefed up and-"
"-the bikinis were so very daring that they must have been French. They-"
"-sun tan cream that doesn't dry your skin at all. It's expensive, but-"
Same old bunch. I slipped into a chair and pick-ed up the snifter of cognac that I had left behind when I went for my walk. Nobody seemed to notice that I was back-or even that I had been gone.
Ten minutes later, Helene appeared from the side door I glanced at her. She was neat and tidy again, just as if nothing had taken place. I wondered if she had put panties on. But I wasn't going to shove my hand under her dress to find out.
About half past eleven, the party began to break up. Tomorrow was a working day, after all.
Myra and I got into the Riklins' car. Helene and Tom Brewster walked down the driveway to see us off.
"Wonderful party!" Myra called.
"Great food!" Don Riklin said.
"Come again, come again!" Tom Brewster called in a hearty voice.
"Yes, do!" Helene echoed.
And she was looking straight at me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now it was Thursday. M-day minus one.
I felt a little foggy in the head as I left the house that morning. It had been nearly one o'clock before I got to bed, and I hadn't had enough sleep for comfort. Myra hadn't said much about the party last night. I doubted that she even guessed that I had been loving Helene Brewster in the summer house. Helene and I had been missing from the patio for a long time, and we had been missing together, but Myra had been drinking so steadily at the party that she probably didn't notice.
I had a busy day ahead of me.
This was the day that I had to do all my planning for tomorrow s big event.
As I left the house, Myra said to me, "I'm going shopping this morning, Harry. In case you call and find me out-"
"Sure," I said.
I went over to the subway station, but I didn't get on my train. Instead I bought a copy of the Times and sat there reading it for a while, until it was nine o'clock and I could phone the office.
I asked for Joe.
I said, "I'm going to be in a little late this morning, Joe. Myra isn't feeling well and I've got to take her over to the doctor."
"Gee, that's too bad. Harry. What time can we expect you?"
"Half past ten, eleven, something like that."
I doubled back to the house and rang the housephone from the lobby. There wasn't any answer. Myra had already gone on her shopping trip. Good.
I hurried upstairs. I took one of the suitcases out of the closet and began stuffing it full of my clothes. I didn't bother with any of my heavy winter clothing, or with anything that looked worn or old. Just the light stuff, suitable for wearing in South America. Just the good stuff. I filled the suitcase to the brim. I wouldn't be short of clothes, on my trip, that was for sure.
Looking around the apartment, I checked for the possessions I wanted to take with me. There was surprisingly little. I wasn't burdened by all kinds of property. No stamp collection, no rack of beloved pipes, no guns or fishing rods or golf clubs, none of the heavy paraphernalia that men sometimes tie themselves down with.
I tossed my razor and shaving kit into the suitcase. My comb and brush. A couple of other minor odds and ends, and that was it. It was good-bye to all the rest, such that it was.
Oh-one last little detail.
I went to the drawer where we kept our bankbooks, insurance policies, and stuff like that. The insurance policies didn't interest me, but the bankbooks did. I slipped the books into my pocket.
Then I went out. For the second time that morning I made the short walk to the subway.
Instead of going straight to the office, I went to Beth's place first. It was still pretty early in the morning, by Beth's standards. As I put my key in the door, I had the uneasy feeling that maybe I shouldn't barge in on her like this-that I might find her doing something I wouldn't want to know about.
I half-expected to discover her in bed with Rheena or some other showgirl-or, worse with some other man. But my fears were imaginary. Beth was in bed alone, sound asleep, nude and lovely.
I reached down and peeled the sheet back. I started to shake her by the shoulder, and then I decided on a different way of awakening her. I put my hand over one of her breasts and squeezed gently.
Her eyes fluttered open. "Huh-whozis-oh, Harry! Is it lunchtime yet?"
"No, it's only quarter after ten," I said. "I brought my suitcase over. I didn't want to take it to the office with me."
She made a sleepy-sounding purr and reached for me, her breasts rising and firming. "Are you going to stay here with me, Harry?"
"No. Not now. I've got to go to the office."
"Why?"
"Last-minute loose ends to tie."
"Will you be back for lunch?"
I shook my head. "I've got to go to the bank and make the withdrawals. But I'll be seeing you tonight. We'll have dinner together."
"What about your wife?"
"I'm not going home tonight," I said.
I kissed Beth good-bye. She tried to lure me down into bed with her, but I wasn't having any. A quick caress, a moment of fondling her breasts, and then I slipped away from her.
I was at the office five minutes later. For the next two hours I plunged into my pile of accumulated work just as though I expected to spend the rest of my life slaving away at this job. I even worked twenty minutes or so into my lunch hour.
Then I went over to the bank where Myra and I kept our joint savings account. I filled out deposit slips for the two accounts. There was a total of about six thousand five hundred dollars in them.
The teller looked at the deposit slips. "Cleaning out both accounts, are you?"
"That's right," I said. "I-I'm making a down payment on a house."
He shrugged. "Pity you can't wait till October first. That's when the interest will be credited. You take the money out now, you're going to lose two months' accumulated interest, pretty near."
"That's too bad," I said. "But I'll just have to survive the loss."
"You're throwing away maybe forty bucks," he said.
"I need the money right now."
"Have you considered taking out a passbook loan until the end of the interest period? That way you'll be able to get your accumulated interest, and-"
"Look, shove the accumulated interest. I want the money now, and no strings attached."
"Okay, okay. Just trying to protect your interests. How do you want it?"
"Big bills," I said.
"Biggest I can offer is hundreds."
"They'll do."
He counted out a stack of bills, crisp brand new hundred-dollar bills, lots and lots of them. The line behind me at his window was getting long and irritable by the time he finished. He shoved the money across the counter at me and suggested that I check it through. Then he cancelled my bankbooks.
I had been planning to buy travelers' checks at the same bank. But somehow I felt peculiar about going over and buying them here, in full view of the teller to whom I had just said I was buying a house. So, with my thick wad of bills in my pocket, I crossed the street to the competing bank on the other side.
I kept a thousand dollars in cash on me, for bribes and such-all denominations, from fives and tens up to hundreds. The rest I turned into travelers' checks of twenty-dollar denomination, with a couple of books of fifties. The way it works when you buy travellers' checks, you have to sign your name to each check while the bank clerk watches you. Then, you sign your name again when you cash the check, and the two signatures have to match.
Have you ever signed your name to fifty-five hundred dollars' worth of twenty-buck and fifty-buck travelers' checks? It takes time. It takes lots and lots of time, believe me. Long before I was finished, I was wishing that my name was Ed Roe instead of Harry Martin. But it could have been worse. I could have been named Thorneycroft Butterworth, or something like that.
There wasn't much left of my lunch hour by the time I had signed all the checks. I stuffed the thick batch of black booklets into my pocket, grabbed a quick hamburger, and headed back to the office.
My last few hours at this lousy job. I thought I wouldn't regret leaving.
But I went through the motions. In the middle of the afternoon I pushed aside my work and picked up the telephone, got an outside line, and put through a call to my home-or what had been my home.
Myra answered. I told her that I wasn't going to be home tonight.
"A business trip just came up suddenly," I explained. "They're shipping me out to Pennsylvania overnight. I've got to have a long, long talk with a man in Harrisburg tomorrow."
"All right," she said. "Do you have fresh clothes for the trip?"
"I'll have to manage with what I have."
On this last night before the big day, I didn't want to have to see Myra or my apartment again. I didn't want to have to share my bed with the woman I'd been married to for eight years.
I wanted it to be a clean break, with no strings attached. I couldn't have taken the tension of sitting around waiting for Friday to come. So I didn't want to go home to Myra.
Oddly, she didn't complain at all at the news that I'd be leaving her on her own.
"I'll be back Saturday afternoon," I told her. "Keep well."
"Sure," she said. "You too, Harry."
"So long, Myra."
"So long."
I put down the telephone. And that was it, I thought. The last words I would ever speak to my wife. That was how it was ending.
I would never see the inside of my apartment again. I would be fleeing the city, fleeing the country-a fugitive, a murderer.
But I would have Beth.
It was three o'clock, now. I shuffled my way through the rest of the afternoon. Then five o'clock came, after a couple of million years of waiting, and we began to clear out.
"See you tomorrow, Harry," people said to me.
"Sure. See you!"
Hut they weren't going to see me.
I headed straight over to Beth's place. She was all dressed, ready to go out for dinner. She looked delicious, her slim, voluptuous outlines neatly delineated by her clothes.
"Are you going to go to the club tonight?" I asked her.
She nodded. "One last night. You don't mind, do you, Harry?"
"Not at all. But let's go get dinner first."
"Did you take care of the bank account?"
"Yes," I said. "I switched most of the money into these."
I showed her the travellers' checks. Beth told me that she had cleaned out her bank account during the day, too. She flashed five hundred dollars. That gave us nearly seven thousand dollars. You could live in comfort on that much money for quite a while in some South American country, I figured.
Everything was shaping up well.
"Dinner?" I said.
"Kiss, first."
"Okay. Kiss."
She came to my arms. I kissed her and she kissed me back, kissed me with breasts and legs and mouth and tongue and everything else. That was the kind of kiss that makes you want to hop right into the sack and finish the job off. But not now. There were other appetites to satisfy now. There'd be unlimited time for bed fun afterward.
"Dinner," I said. "Dinner," Beth agreed.
We went to a place that had once been a favorite of mine and Myra's, back in the days when Myra and I had been close enough to one another to be able to agree on such things as favorite restaurants. It was a Lebanese restaurant on 30th Street just off Park Avenue, a clean, attractive little place where the service was good and the food unusual, excellent, and cheap. I had eaten there many times in the past eight or ten years, and I felt a little pang at the thought that I would never eat here again.
We had a fine time. We smiled at each other and held hands, and Beth rubbed her feet against mine under the table. After dinner, we got into a cab and went up to the night club. Beth went inside to get into her costume for the show.
I watched the show from a table near the runway. As usual, Beth caught everybody's attention, even though she was just one girl out of plenty. I could see the patrons looking hungrily at her as she marched a-round on stage, showing off the lush lines of breasts and buttocks, her nudity hidden only by a bare minimum. And I mean bare.
I couldn't help thinking smugly, They all would give their eyes and then some for a night in bed with her. And she's mine forever.
Rheena was on stage too. I saw the big, busty blonde catch sight of me and smile. I remembered the girls making love with each other, and then the scrambled three-way orgy on the bed. That seemed almost like a dream now. But that had been no dream. I had really had her.
I wonder if Rheena had any inkling about our plans or skipping out of town. Had Beth told her?
It would be fun, I thought, to have Rheena come down and visit us at our Latin-American villa. Maybe after we were filthy rich gringos, we'd pay Rheena's air fare down for a week-end, I thought. And we'd all go swimming nude in the Amazon, keeping a wary eye out for the piranhas. And then we'd have a party, Rheena and Beth and I. Rheena and Beth, Beth and I, Rheena and I, Rheena and Beth and I-all the combinations.
That was a fun idea, all right.
I sat around waiting for Beth until four in the morning, when the place closed up. Then we hopped into a cab and went back to her place.
She stripped fast.
"I need a shower," she said. "That's hard work, all that dancing."
"I'll take a shower with you," I said. "Go right ahead."
Nude, we sprinted into the bathroom and got under the water. Giggling and squirming, we soaped each other, letting our hands linger a long while in the places where we would expect them to linger. Then we washed the soap away and scurried out of the shower.
I towelled her dry. She towelled me dry.
"And now to bed," I suggested. "Unless you have any better suggestions."
"There are no better suggestions."
The sheets were cool and fresh and sweet. Beth was fresh and sweet too, but she wasn't cool at all. She was wild for me.
Then night turned to day in the glow of our passions, and that was a night to remember, as we played the game with vim, vigor, vitality, and all the enthusiasm in the world.
And then we slept.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sun, slanting through the blinds, woke US about ten o'clock in the morning. My eyes opened first. I had had about four and a half hours of sleep, and that, coming on top of a short night the night before, left me feeling kind of sluggish. I nudged Beth into wakefulness.
"Good morning," she said.
"Morning. You know what day it is?"
"Friday."
I nodded. "The Friday."
"Nervous?"
"A little."
"So am I."
I grinned with a confidence I didn't altogether feel. "It's going to work out okay," I said. "Yes. It will."
We got out of bed. Beth looked gorgeous, standing there naked with those big pink things sprouting from the front of her body.
I said, "We ought to get dressed before Mark gets here."
"I want to take a shower first."
"All right. But a quick one. No horseplay like last night."
She smiled. "Maybe we better take separate showers then, Harry."
"Okay. You go first."
While she showered, I carefully got my suitcase oat of the way so that Mark wouldn't notice it. He might think it was kind of funny that Beth would have a man's suitcase, after all.
She came out, looking pinker and lovelier than ever. I headed for the bathroom.
"Start to pack," I told her. "fi"
"It won't take me long," she said.
I had a fast shower. I was getting edgier and edgier as the minutes ticked away. Would our cock-eyed plan work, I wondered?
I got out of the shower. Beth was still nude, busy packing. I helped her stuff her things into the suitcase. She wasn't taking much. Like me, she believed in traveling light.
We were through packing her stuff by half past ten or so. Then we got dressed. Neither of us said, much. We carried her suitcases out into the living room so Mark would see them.
Then we sat around nervously, waiting for Mark to show up. If Mark showed up. We'd feel awfully silly if he didn't. That was one possibility I hadn't taken into account. What did we do if he changed his mind about coming to get Beth? Were we supposed to go after him, hunt him out and kill him? Or just skip out of town anyway, without settling the problem?
I prayed that Mark would show up. The situation had to be settled. We couldn't let it hang. The .38 was a cold bulge along my leg.
Soon, I thought, all the feverish plotting would be over. We'd be free of Mark, free of Myra. We'd belong to each other at last.
We waited, neither of us saying much. What could you say at a time like that?
Minute after minute went sliding into oblivion. From time to time we broke the silence with some foolish bit of conversation. Mostly it was, "What time is it?" or "How do you feel?"
"Half past eleven," I would say.
Or: "Fine."
At ten minutes after twelve, the downstairs buzzer finally rang.
In silence, the buzz was like the sounding of the Last Trump. Both Beth and I jumped, but we both caught ourselves and tried to look cool.
"Here he is at last," I said, and I surprised myself with the calmness of my voice. "Ring back. Let him know you're here."
"I hope nothing gets messed up," Beth said.
I drew out the .38 and let it rest in my left hand. "It'll be over quick," I said.
"Be careful, Harry. If he knows you're hiding in there, he'li shoot first and ask questions later. That's the way he is."
Nodding quietly, I moistened my lips, got to my feet. "I'll be hiding behind the bedroom door," I told her. "Get him going in some sort of conversation. I'll be waiting for the code word."
"Garter," she said.
"Garter."
"Don't miss, Harry."
"I won't."
I went into the bedroom and glanced at the rumpled bed where Beth and I had made love so many times. I toyed with the little gun a moment, and then I unmapped the safety. I crouched down behind the door, making sure he wouldn't be able to see me through the slit.
I waited.
Hours seemed to pass. Did it take that long to get upstairs from the lobby?
Then the front doorbell chimed.
I held my breath. There was the sound of Beth's feet skipping across the uncarpeted floor of the living room to answer the door. I heard the lock being opened, the door drawing back.
"Hello, Mark," she said quickly.
"Hello, Beth."
"Well, come in."
"Is that boy friend of yours around here anywhere?" Mark asked her.
"Do you see him?"
"That doesn't mean a thing."
He was suspicious. I tensed. The image of nude Beth flooded my brain. Rudy-tipped breasts and pale buttocks and long legs. Mine. All mine.
As soon as Mark was out of the way.
Beth was saying, "You see these suitcases here, don't you? I packed all my stuff. I'm all dressed and ready to go."
"Okay."
"I've been waiting for you all morning, Mark. I'm sorry about everything that's happened. I'll make it up to you, darling, when we're home in Philly." Her voice was soft, melting, passionate now. "I'll make everything up to you, love."
She sounded convincing-too convincing? I figured they'd be in a clinch any second, and that was one thing I didn't want to happen.
I took a deep breath and started to rise from my crouching position.
"You all ready, Beth? It's a one o'clock train. We'll just about have time if we get to the station right away."
"Sure, Mark," Beth said. "I just ... want ... to ... fix my ... garter before we go. Hold it a second, will you, Mark?"
That was enough. That was the signal.
I stepped out of the bedroom. Beth had her skirl hiked up and her hands at her hip. I pulled the gun into aim and drew a quick but accurate bead on the back of Mark's head as he stood there, seemingly absorbed in the sight of Beth's lovely white flesh and nylon-clad leg.
He started to turn, as though warned by a premonition. But I fired before he had moved more than a fraction of an inch.
The silencer throttled the sound down to a strangled little thwick! and Mark never finished turning. The bullet smashed into the back of his head and blew it apart, and the impact knocked him sprawling forward.
That was it. That was all it took to kill a man. A steady hand and no conscience.
"Thank God," Beth breathed. "I thought you'd never do it!"
"It's done," I said thinly. "He's dead. And we'd better hurry if we're going to make that train."
"Make sure first."
I knelt over him, the smoking gun still clutched tightly in my hand, and touched my fingers to his wrist. "He's dead, all right. I--"
The door came crashing open and suddenly the room was full of people. I heard Beth scream; then, before I could move or do anything, strong arms were around me, gripping me tight, and someone was wrenching the gun from my hand.
It seemed like a mob had broken into the room. But there were only three people. Two men-
And Myra.
One of the men was saying in a puzzled voice, "We didn't figure on a murder case, Mrs. Martin."
"I-I don't understand," Myra said. She was deathly pale, and she looked in bewilderment from Beth to me and then at the body on the floor. She said, "I called your office, Harry. They didn't know anything about a business trip to Pennsylvania. I knew you must be with her. I hired these men-they're detectives. They traced you here yesterday. But I never ... I don't
The world was in pieces around me.
I felt very calm, weirdly calm, now that I knew it was all done with.
I heard one of the dicks say to the other, "We'd better call the cops, Sid."
"Yeah. No sense fooling with a thing like this ourselves, Mike."
I saw Beth's pale, stunned face, and looked at the equally confused Myra. Then I glanced at Mark lying dead and bloody on the floor.
"This is all a mistake," I mumbled dully. "I didn't mean to kill him. I didn't-I-"
"Save it, friend," the detective said.
I stared helplessly at Beth, and knew there was no use trying to argue my way out of it. It was going to be the chair, I knew.
It had been great while it lasted. But the joyride was all over, now.
