This is the lowdown on the filthy "dance schoo!" racket and all its sex-loaded students. Meet the girls who sell their bodies when class is over ... meet the hungry men who prey on lonely women ... meet them all in a book that will open your eyes and stun your senses!
You Will Never Again Encounter As Frank and Uncompromising A Book As This Shocker!
CHAPTER ONE
At noon the clock-radio on the bedside table began to play softly.
Foggy with sleep, Laura Grace reached across Sid Hardy's still form and flicked off the automatic switch. She did not know precisely why she had awakened with a vague feeling of dread and unhappiness. But somewhere deep inside she knew she desperately needed a few moments to herself.
Sid, his dark, curling hair unkempt and rumpled by sleep, grumbled faintly. He pounded a fist against the pillow, Laura watched him until she was certain he was again sleeping soundly. Then she turned over to look out the window, to attempt to organize her strangely disturbed thoughts.
The rain dribbled slowly down the glass, coating it, giving the world outside a bleak, distorted appearance.
Why don't you admit the truth? Laura said to herself.
Laura bit her lip, frowning. Then she forced her self to finish the distasteful thought: He may want to get in you.
Make you cry out and beg for more, as you've done so many times these past months.
And this morning, suddenly, you don't want that. Why?
Why, why?
The question tortured her, hade her chew absently at her lower lip.
She was twenty-six, with brunette hair so dark it shone black in certain lights. Turned on her side the sheer white silk nylon nightgown she had worn to bed had worked itself above her thighs, so that she lay with her pale-cream, fully-fleshed legs outstretched. Her painted toenails shone like bright splashes of blood in the half-dark.
Above the milky roundness of her thighs the sculptured curve of twin soft mounds of buttocks lay exposed. The flat plane of her smooth, soft belly plunged downward beneath the folds of the gown, as twin upthrusting cones of her breasts pressed against the gown's fabric. Incredibly firm and shapely, with a deep, shadowed cleft between, through the sheer whiteness of her bedclothes the delicately pink tips of large round nipples thrust impudently.
The rain continued to pour dismally down from the cotton-wool sky.
With a small sigh of regret Laura raised her hip. off the rumpled sheets and pulled down her nightgown As she did so, Sid Hardy rolled over toward her. gram bling again, as though ready to awaken.
Laura lay rigid. Her palms pressed against the flat of her belly as though to suppress the suddenly waxy ball of desire that had coagulated within her loins.
No, her mind said coldly, no, I don't want him not this morning Something is wrong, wrong-
Yet the cry of her rational self dwindled slowly away, overwhelmed by the mounting warmth stealing up her body, making her breasts burn like firebrands.
She clasped both hands to those breasts, squeezing tight.
It did not help.
The nipples kept erecting, aroused, hot as acid Desperately she squeezed her thighs together No use.
The mere fact of Sid's turning over had put thoughts in her head, stimulated her until she lay with her hips twisting and turning against the crisp sheets.
With a start and an exclamation. Sid Hardy sat up straight.
"What the hell time is it?"
Urgently he flipped over, peered at the clock-radio Then he dropped back against the pillows with a sigh of relief.
"I was afraid I'd overslept."
Sid blinked Then he turned to look at Laura beside him.
"And we coulun t nave that, uot today, ol all days." He gave a pleased smile. "Not when this is the day I've waited for seven miserable years."
Low in his throat, Sid chuckled. He put out his hand, his palm moving insinuatingly on the fabric stretched taut over Laura's belly.
Sid Hardy was a wiry, dark-haired man in his middle thirties, heavy-browed and handsome in a florid sort of way. His eyes had a habit of lighting with black, insolent fires. His smile always seemed a trifle crooked. Now, in the apartment's shadowy gloom his unshaven beard stood out black, giving him a faintly satanic look.
Laura lay staring at him, whipped by uncontrollable desires.
"Don't you think we ought to celebrate some, Laura baby? I mean with ten grand walking into the till tonight, it's a sort of special day."
Insolently Sid's hand reached under the bodice of her nightgown. When his fingertips brushed the roughened tip of her hardened pink nipple, a knowing smile split his face.
"Way ahead of me. weren't you, honey?"
Sid slipped one arm beneath the small of her back and pressed close.
"Then what are we waiting for?"
"Sid," Laura began, making a last, desperate attempt to stop, "I don't think we should...."
His mouth came close to her ear. His breath buzzed warmly on her earlobe.
"Why not? This is it, baby. We're half way home!"
Drawing back, his face lit by an odd combination of sexual lust and anticipation of something that had nothing to do with sex. Sid looked down at Laura even as his hand lifted the hem of her nightgown and gently began to stroke her, working higher, along the silken flesh of her flanks as a musician plays an instrument.
"This is an occasion, Laura. Tonight, in the Cole & Miranda Dance Studio, in the city of Genesee, in the month of September, that lovely old fat bitch from Lake Cliffs, Mrs. Sophie Thyssen, is going to sign on the dotted line for a Lifetime Membership Plan. She's going to press a down-payment check into the hand of dear old Sid Hardy. And then Sid Hardy isn't going to be just a crummy studio manager anymore. He's going to wrap up one more Lifetime Plan, just one more, and then he'll have a franchise. He'll own a layout In a couple of years, he can capitalize, tell Cole & Miranda to kiss his tailbone. And then you'll see the first Sid Hardy Studio opened up."
Now Sid's voice had dropped to a whisper hypnotic, half-wild as he seemed to stare through Laura toward a place where his ambition stood triumphant:
"Seven years I've been a manager, doll Seven years, signing up more damn Lifetimes than Cole & Miranda ever had before. I've come up faster than any other manager in the whole midwest territory. I've cut every corner invented, but by God it was worth it. I'll have my own chain of studios before I'm forty! The next step is the Cole & Miranda franchise. And one more Lifetime will do it."
His hands caught Laura's shoulder. "Isn't that reason for celebrating, baby? I think it is."
Almost like a wolf attacking prey, Sid's head dropped and he mashed his mouth against Laura's.
All the while Sid had been talking, the movement of her body against the sheets had become more frenzied, and now the last shred of resistance left her.
Quickly she opened her lips, sent her tongue questing out to meet Sid's moaning softly. Sid tore loose the bows at her shoulders, stripping the nightgown from her.
"Like it, baby? Like this?"
"Oh, God, yes, Sid," Laura cried uncontrollably.
Her hands caught the fabric of his garish red silk pajama jacket, ripping feverishly. Sid's hands worked upon her like living things, bringing each nerve ending to a pitch of unquenchable desire. With a cry of pleasure Laura locked her arms around his neck, pulled him down until his bony hips crushed her.
"Oh, hurry, Sid darling," Laura breathed, closing her teeth on his neck. "Yes, yes, I'm ready! Take me, lover! Hurry now! I'm ready for you! Hurry, Sid. Come lover! Hurry now! I'm ready for you! Hurry, Sid! Come on, now darling! I want you! I want you! I want you...!"
Sid laughed hoarsely. "Hot, aren't you? Beg me for it, doll. Beg me!"
"I beg you, Sid. I beg you! I can't wait. I need it! Sid, I beg you! Give it to met"
Give you all you can stand. There, there."
"Oh, yes, Sid! That's it, that's it! Faster, Sid, I beg you, please, Sid...."
"Love me, don't you? Can't stay away? Want me to really go to town, do you?"
"Yes, all right, I love you, anything, but hurry t Go darling, go, go, go!"
Somewhere, deep in a last inner core of her mind, Laura Grace felt a cold despair at the power Sid's love making had over her. the power she felt sweeping her now, turning her into a savage, depraved animal, screaming and biting and thrashing against the covers and the twisted sheets.
Her whole body throbbed and burned and pulsed, thundering faster and faster, making her tear the flesh of his back, rip him with her nails claw and rake him like a debased creature.
A voice cried within her, Love is more than this, more, more....
But then the voice died away under the panting hotness of her breath as she implored Sid to hurry to lash her, hammer her, work her into a pitch of uncontrollable frenzy, turn her into a mad, demanding thing imploring Sid to love her. love her. Love her . .
"Ah, baby, baby...."
"Yes, yes, oh, sweet God, yes, go on, Sid. GO ON, GO ON!"
And then with a burst of flame, a thunder, an explosion in her loins that tore her apart and made her strain and pant and tear her lover's flesh with desire. Laura Grace screamed in ecstasy, sank her teeth into Sid Hardy's shoulder and let the muffled, sobs of joy claim her entire being.
Sometime past one o'clock, when the climax had spent itself. Laura felt drained physically sated but peculiarly empty.
She lay in bed, smoking. Her nakedness was covered now by a light woolen blanket. Sid came into the bedroom carrying a cup of coffee and whistling an off-key tune.
"Maybe I'll make it with my own studio even before I'm forty. Hell, I've still got six years to go. Pm positive I can line up one more Lifetime by the first of January. I guarantee I'll get one, because that's all between me and a Cole & Miranda franchise."
Sid's eyes went down to slits for a moment.
"One way or another, I'll get it. I know I can float a bank loan to pay for the franchise, and in two years. I can pinch a buck here, a buck there-Cole & Miranda's such a damned big outfit, they'll never miss a few dollars out of the register. That'll make the Sid Hardy Studios spring up even faster. That'll-"
He stopped. The naked avarice, the barefaced, unscrupulous ambition on his face was wiped away as he looked at Laura.
Quickly she turned her head, knowing it was too late, knowing he had already seen her disgust.
"Now what the hell kind of a face is that? Don't go nice-nelly on me."
"Is it necessary that you steal from Cole & Miranda to get ahead?" Laura asked quietly.
"'I'll do anything I damn well have to, for my own studio!" Sid jabbed the air with a cigarette. "I was born in a lousy garbage-can of a slum, but I won't end up there."
He stalked to the bed, sat down quickly, stared at Laura.
"Where the hell did you develop scruples all of a sudden? Don't you understand that I couldn't sucker that old Thyssen bag into paying ten grand for a lifetime of lessons and membership privileges in our club unless she wanted to be suckered? There are dozens like her down in that high-toned Lake Cliffs ... bored sick, with more money than they need. They're asking for it."
Sid puffed quickly on his cigarette, appraising her with a hard glance.
"Besides, when you moved in here, I told you what my business was, how I operated it. And you said it sounded good, because you'd always wanted mink for those white shoulders of yours. Mink and everything that goes with it. Well, you're on the road now We're getting close enough to smell the real green. So what's with the squeamish routine?"
"I don't know," Laura hedged. "Maybe I'm just feeling tired or...."
Evasion.
Laura knew it was evasion, but she tried to keep the knowledge off her face as Sid bent closer.
"It's not wearing off, is it, baby? You still want the mink, don't you?"
Of course, Sid. I wouldn't have come to live with you otherwise."
Sid kissed her lingeringly, his tongue moving on her lips.
"And you still like the way I make love, don't you? From the way you acted a little while ago, I'd say you were still the same old Laura."
He reached beneath the covers to caress her.
"A knockout. And very, very hot."
"Yes, I still like that," Laura admitted. "And the good steak dinners. And the clothes I can buy. But-oh, Sid, I just don't know."
She turned her back to him, staring out the window
"This is a bad day, I guess," she lied. "Why don't you go ahead to the studio. I'll be down at four when it opens."
Turning again to him, Laura feigned a smile.
"I'm sorry, Sid. I was acting like a fool."
"I didn't think you could give up our little mattress parties."
Sid laughed, fondled her breasts a moment longer, then completed dressing and waved goodbye, bound into the rainy afternoon on a trip to the banks as well as several other errands.
Laura had at least a couple of hours before she was to be on duty as a teacher at the studio. When Sid's footsteps had died away in the hall outside the apartment, she got out of bed and padded nude into the kitchenette. Once she had put the coffee pot on to warm, she returned to the bedroom, opened the closet door and stared at herself in the full-length mirror which Sid had installed for her.
Critically, she eyed her naked body. Dull red love-marks still stood out. The signs of her union with Sid that brought a flush to her cheeks.
Wasn't Sid and the way of life Sid offered-plenty of money, fast-what she wanted?
She tried to reassure herself that it was.
And yet, a small inner doubt nagged her.
For a time, when she had first come to live with Sid, her life had seemed clear-cut, simple. And now it had become complicated again.
As Laura tried to analyze her own motives she stared at herself in the mirror.
In the rainy shadows of the bedroom, her legs were twin white columns, her hips wide, inviting. Turning, she ran a palm over the sleekness of her buttocks, liking the feel of soft flesh. Her breasts rose up proudly, needing no support, their tip-ends youthful crimson and softened now. Alone now, the memory of Sid's techniques, the hundreds of ways his hands and his lips caressed the secret softness of her love-hungry body, brought a hot glow rising in her cheeks. She swayed a little in the aftermath of Sid's noontime assault. She closed her eyes, savagely gripped her breasts. Then she slid her palms down her tapering belly to stifle the beating ache.
Wasn't this all that mattered in life? she asked herself.
A thrill of ecstasy, of wild, whipping fulfillment?
That-and the money to buy soft clothes for her white body, exquisite laces, the finest woolens and silks?
The more she thought about it, the more confused she became. Confused, unhappy. Upset.
Hugging herself until the passionate ache of her breast-globes died away, she looked in the mirror at her image.
"That's what you like. Money. And Sid's love. That's what you want, all you want. Isn't it?"
The naked and lovely young woman in the mirror was unable to give an answer.
CHAPTER TWO
Slowly, with a bitter sigh of discontent, Laura closed the closet door and padded barefoot into the tiny kitchenette.
She poured a fresh cup of coffee and flicked on the radio. The rhythms of a Latin American band filled the kitchen. As if by instinct Laura closed her eyes, her feet moving precisely, intricately in the dance pattern of the cha-cha beat. Her lithe, nude body turned and swayed in tempo with the music, her full breasts bobbing and swaying in the kitchen's half-light. Somehow though, she was incapable of surrendering herself to the dance, or of deriving pleasure as he usually did from her mastery of intricate steps.
The questions which had arisen in her mind a short while ago returned to haunt her. The fact that she must be on duty at the studio at four filled her with a kind of vague dread. Switching off the radio, she drank her coffee hastily and returned to her bed, drawing up the sheet so that it half-covered the cones of her breasts.
Inexorably she was being forced back to the questions which had risen unbidden into her mind to day....
What about Sid Hardy, first of all?
Wasn't she still attracted to him, to the life he represented?
On the simplest level, there was no doubt of Sid's fascination.
Lying back with her dark hair spread against the pillow, Laura again felt delicious little licks of physical hunger steal over her calves and loins, almost like Sid's caresses when they had sexual relations. Closing her eyes, she could imagine the two of them together in the bedroom on a Friday evening, after a good dinner following the closing of the studio at nine....
The picture sprang full and clear into her head:
Sid chuckling, that odd, hypnotic brightness in his eyes as he put his arms around her, bore her to the bed's edge, both of them tumbling backward, Laura flushed and made shamelessly eager by wine drunk during the evening meal.
Then Sid's expert touch capably moving to stroke the fabric of her suit where it tightened over the provocative curvature of her buttocks.
Suddenly Sid would be kissing her, the man-scent of him, liquor and tobacco and shaving balm, strong in her nostrils.
His hand would rove to the buttons of her jacket blouse, unfastening them expertly.
One hand would plunge beneath her clothing, to toy with the lacy fabric of her underthings.
Another would work its way, practiced and expert, up her nyloned leg, making a faint whisper of flesh against material.
Then the hot knot of desire would form in her belly, as it had formed once already today....
And Sid would be stripping her, clothes flying in a heap until his spare, hard belly crushed her.
Then her legs would whip like live things, her nails would dig his flesh.
The drum-beat of their love-making would quicken to a steady rhythmic roar while Sid played on her body like un instrument, making it tingle and throb until at last, when she could bear it no longer, the knot of love in her belly, tightened again, would loosen spasmodically and leave her on the border of sleep, Sid nuzzling her still-warm neck, his hands relaxed now as he stroked her stomach....
A warm, delicious smile would turn up the corners of her lips....
Sleep would drift in....
Laura Grace had never known her father. Her mother she recalled from childhood as a withered woman who only now and then showed signs of once having been attractive; a woman who never smiled, because scrubbing floors from four until midnight in the Genesee Bank Building was not the sort of existence which put a smile on a person's face.
Laura's teen-age years were unrelieved misery-a rapidly-maturing body shabbily clothed; cold-stew meals in a dismal, smelly three-room shotgun flat near the railroad yards; no chance to learn in school, because there always had to be a wearsome, tiring outside job after school hours. Laura's only pleasure had come from a cracked, chipped portable radio which sat on the icebox. With it, incredibly, she came to know, when she was fourteen and fifteen, that she had a natural bodily rhythm that would make her a good dancer.
But she never went to a dance, for although the invitations came in quantity (and she knew, or felt she knew, why the boys wanted her to go with them), she never accepted. She had no decent clothes to wear, nothing that was not patched or mended.
At seventeen she quit high school. She went to work in the local five-and-ten. clerking behind the counter.
And then came the balmy spring-scented evening when the half-sensed power of her body proved itself, taught her a lesson in terror and pain that she never forgot....
The five-and-dime had closed at six.
Laura started down the hill through the early dusk on her reluctant way home to the sour-smelling flat. She wore bobbysox, loafers, a skirt and blouse with a sweater thrown over her shoulders. She hurried along past the ramshackle houses because the neighborhood filled her with uneasiness. The darkening air was alive with clangs and hoots from the nearby Northwestern freight yards.
Laura stopped suddenly.
On the coiner, shadow-shapes, four men blocked her path.
All were turned to stare at her.
Then, slowly, one began to walk in her directcion.
The others followed.
With a start she realized that the street was deserted. It was the dinner hour, even in the sleazy tenements.
Laura drew back against an iron railing, knowing she had to run. Her legs had turned watery beneath her. Then she saw that the four men weren't men at all, but more like boys, none over twenty, each one garbed in the black trousers, jumper and white cap of a boot from the nearby Naval Station situated midway between Genesee and the expensive suburb of Lake Cliffs.
Laura bit the back of her hand.
The quartet approached without a sound. Suddenly, she turned and bolted. With quick steps the leader, a stocky, pimply-faced boy, caught her wrist and dragged her back. "Where you goin', sugar?"
Laura came close to gagging. A sickly smell hung over the four. She knew well enough what cheap wine smelled like.
"Man!" said a skinny Southern boy. "We hit it good. Here we been trampin' up and down these rutting streets looking for poontang, and it walks right up to us."
He ran a lewd hand over the belly of his bell-bottoms.
"What's you' name, kitten? Mine's Henry. These here are my friends from the base. How 'bout fixin' us all up with a little of what you got down there?"
"You're drunk," Laura began, terrified.
Wasn't there a patrolman who walked the beat in this neighborhood?
She couldn't remember.
The heavy-set boy was gripping her wrist, leaning close. His hand came up and closed around her breast, feeling through her blouse and brassiere until his fingers could work at the nipple.
Laura cried out softly in pain.
"Let me go, or I'll-"
"You'll do exactly what we say and nothin' else," Henry laughed, cutting her off. "Phil, let's push her back in that there alley before somebody comes along. I want to enjoy this little hunk of sweet stuff."
"Wait a minute," Laura panted. "Wait! You wouldn't try-I mean, you're not-stop, oh, God, stop it, you're hurting met"
But they were already shoving her roughly into the fetid alleyway, bunched around her so that people passing on the street would be unable to see the girl hidden among the four boys.
Laura's mind swam.
This couldn't be happening.
Yet Henry's hand was jerking her roughly while the stout boy pulled up the hem of her skirt and twisted the fabric of her panties.
Laura wanted to scream, but instead she tried to plead with them:
"Please, I've never had-"
Henry chuckled.
"No kidding?"
Laura sobbed yes. Henry laughed appreciatively. "How old?"
"S-seventeen. Please stop, you're hurting me oh. your hands ... oh God, please not there...."
"If you're hurting now," the stout boy laughed "that ain't nothing, sweet. We all been out looking for one like you. We're going to screw hell out of you."
"Shut up and strip her, Phil," another of the sailors growled.
As if in a nightmare, Laura felt the sweater and the blouse torn from her back. Then her brassiere was ripped off. Suddenly her skirt was gone and she lay on her back on the putrid bricks of the dark alley while one of them held her shoulders and another knelt between her thighs, holding them apart while he fumbled with his trousers.
As though a light had flashed on in her terrified head, an idea came to Laura, desperate and bold. She tried to put a smile on her face, tried to dimple prettily at Phil crouching over her. She even managed to raise one sweat-cold hand to touch the sailor's cheek.
"Wait. Please wait ... honey." Phil blinked, stupefied.
"Look, kid, you might as well face it. We're gonna have you."
"I know," she forced herself to say, fighting for control, "I know you're going to ... to ... I know you've got me trapped here. I won't fight you," she blurted. "Not if you'll go slow. Not hurt me."
From the depths of her horror she smiled at them.
"You can each have your turn if you'll go slow. And I promise I-I'll make it nice for you. As nice as I can."
Wildly she cupped her hands under her breasts. She held them up like meat in a butcher-shop. The nipples were blank and round in the gloom.
"Aren't ... aren't they nice? Big ones, aren't they? You'll like it more if I ... I help. Go slow and let me help. Please. Please."
"Mount her, damn it!" Henry snarled. "The little cod-teaser's stallin'...."
"Shut up," Phil shot back. "I'm of a mind to give her a try. Hell," he burbled drunkenly, "it's no damned fun when they're fightin' you every inch."
Phil wiped his hand across his mouth, stared down.
"All right, pussy-cat. You better not be fooling, because I expect a good ride off you. And I'm coming for it right now."
He crouched down as one of the sailors ran to the alley mouth to stand guard.
Laura forced her hands to caress Phil's neck, forced her tongue to dart against his as his rough uniform twisted over her body.
And then, suddenly, to the depths of her being, she felt a white-hot stab of pain.
Then another ... another.
She closed her eyes, working her tongue frantically against Phil's mouth in an effort to forget the abuse her loins were suffering. The alley, full of garbage-smells and filth, swam dizzily around her.
After a time Phil was gone and another faceless one took his place. This time, he seemed more gentle She cried out not at all. In fact, deep within her belly she felt a spasmodic pleasure-urge seize her. Suddenly her loins twisted and wrenched with knife-like, spasmodic desire. Desperately her hands knotted around the sailor's neck. She buried her face against his sweating cheek, then against the top of his head as his mouth warmly caressed the soft-fleshed valley between her breasts. Before she could stop herself she was crying:
"Honey ... again ... again!"
Then, abruptly, as her hips convulsed in a sudden oddly thrilling spasm of climax, the darkness of her whirling mind was pierced by the shrillness of a whistle, and she fainted....
When Laura awoke in the charity wing of the Genesee hospital there was a policeman present to take down her story of the youths who had assaulted her.
And as she lay in the crisp white hospital bed, the knowledge of how she had used her wits-more accurately, her body-to prevent the agony from being as bad as it might have been, filled her with a sense of pleasure and discovery.
Perhaps at last she had found a means of ending her life in the gutters of this dismal town.
If four drunken youths had responded to the beauty of her maturing body, wouldn't other men, too?
Sober men-men with money to buy her things?
That night the nurse gave her a hypo to help her sleep, but before it took effect completely she lay in a twilight haze as the cracked, ruined face of her mother, Nell Grace, bent over her bed.
Laura told her mother what had happened, and she saw her mother's wrinkled, wasted face floating above her, smelling of gin, the lips moving:
"You learned a big lesson, honey. You got a pretty, smooth body. Use it. Use it while you can. It's all I had to give you. I wasted mine, but don't you waste yours."
The words began to grow fuzzy, far away, as the anesthetic took effect.
"Use your body. Use it, Laurie, make a man pay dear every time you give it to him. Make him pay ... make him pay ... pay ... pay ... pay...."
Looking out over the rain-drenched rooftops, remembering, Laura Grace asked herself whether she had not learned the lesson well.
The lesson was what had put her, finally, in Sid Hardy's bed. Thus it was right to stick with Sid. She had, literally, made her bed, and it was foolish to have guilt-pangs over Sid's mode of behavior. Sid paid handsomely for the use of her flesh, didn't he? Then why complain, why question?
But even as this new resolve grew firm within her, the grayness of the dripping rain recalled another scene
-the burial of her mother in a pauper's section of the local cemetery, exactly one month after Laura was released from the hospital after the rape in the alley.
Her mother's death by coronary had marked a turning-point. It had sent her out alone into the world, to resume her job at the five-and-dime.
Her life, for three years, had been lonely, relieved only by an occasional date.
Then she'd met Tom Anderson.
And the memory of him seemed to wipe out her resolve to stop questioning her relationship with Sid Hardy.
Tom had changed her feelings for a while, made it seem that the world was a warm, safe place, not the jungle in which she was forced to use her body like a weapon. Biting her lip, closing her eyes. Laura heard a strain of music, a saxophone drifting out over a moon-silvered lake, and she remembered Tom again .
Swiss Lake was a popular and fashionable summer resort about fifty miles northwest of Genesee. Every Saturday night during the summer, in the sprawling brick dance pavilion at the lake's northern end, a name band played for the hundreds of couples who drove to the spot from everywhere in the vicinity. And it was to Swiss Lake that Laura had gone, on a Saturday night, on her first date with Tom Anderson.
Laura had dressed in her best skirt and blouse Already she felt warm as they moved smoothly through the tight-packed throng. Distantly lights glimmered on the bandstand. The silver ball threw patterns of light-flecks on Tom's face as he drew back to smile at her.
"I've never been much with girls," he said, laughing. "When I asked you for a date the other day, I never believed you'd take me up on it. It's a little like being awake during a dream."
"Quite a bit like a dream," Laura murmured.
And it was: the well-dressed couples, the smooth liquid music, Tom's crisp smell of shaving lotion, his body rubbing hers occasionally as he kept an almost overly-shy distance while they danced. Suddenly, lost in the rhythm, Laura pressed herself close to Tom, pressed her belly tight against his trousers, her breasts tight against his jacket, as though trying to show him how much she appreciated his asking her for a date.
A trifle flustered, Tom drew back. He grinned foolishly, stammered:
"Not much," Laura replied. "Once or twice. It just seems easy with you ... Tom."
"Well, you're damned ... I mean, very good."
Suddenly a fanfare blared from the bandstand. The regular Saturday-night dance contest was announced.
"Let's try the jitterbug," Tom said enthusiastically.
Laura protested, but Tom's eyes were sparkling with eagerness. At last she relented. Then, swiftly, the evening became a blur, a swift whirling of their bodies in the center of a circle of people on the dance floor a roar of applause.
Next thing she knew, they lay side by side on the warm, luxuriant grass above the beach, several hundred yards from the lighted pavilion.
Across the lake the moon flung a silver path. Saxophone music echoed from the dance floor Tom was still shaking with laughter, happiness and exertion as he lit two cigarettes for them and passed one to Laura. In the orange glow she saw him looking at her almost with a worshipful expression.
Biting his lip again, Tom concentrated on the cigarette.
"Whew," Laura said softly, lying back on the grass and looking up at the stars, "Dizzy."
"Me too," Tom murmured. Suddenly he raised on one elbow. "But not from dancing."
He -edged closer, looked down at Laura as though she were fragile enough to break at his touch. She could feel the exertion of the contest, the perspiration soaking her undergarments, until she yearned to be free of them, and cool. There was a tightness in her belly, a moist feeling along her inner thighs and her breasts seemed to burn, trapped in the cups of her brassiere.
Suddenly she knew what it was-not exertion, but happiness, really complete happiness. Never had she known a boy as decent and considerate as Tom Anderson. If only she could tell him, show him.
And then a little secret urge of pleasure stirred her.
"You'll hit me right in the jaw for saying it," Tom spoke. "But all of a sudden, Laura ... oh, God, what's wrong with me? I get so muddled, I ... damn it, Laura, I fell in love with you the day I walked into the store. I'ts gotten worse every hour since. Now, being here with you like this ... I can hardly stand it. I'm afraid this is all going to melt, vanish, just go...."
Tom snapped his fingers. Laura gave a low laugh, touching his hand. Tom's fingers tightened over hers, involuntarily. Desire washed over her like scalding lava.
"There's no need to be afraid," Tom. I wouldn't trade you for anyone."
"Do you mean that? Laura, if I thought you did...."
"Kiss me, Tom. Please kiss me and see whether I mean it."
Clumsily Tom put his arms around her, slid his hand beneath her back. Laura rested her fingertips lightly on his shoulders. Tom gave her a rather prim kiss.
Laura answered the kiss, alive and aroused in every quickening fiber of her desire. She opened her mouth hungrily to Tom's tongue. It darted against hers, telling her of his desire. Before she could stop herself, she was pressing her mouth against his ear "Tom, Tom, you're the kindest boy the sweetest oh, Tom, I'm not afraid of anything when I'm here like this...."
Drawing back still once again. Tom said slowly:
"Laura, if I ask you something...."
"Let me ask it," she whispered. "It's all right, Tom. I know what you want. I can feel it. It's what I want, too. Tonight, this very evening."
She kissed his mouth eagerly, pressed her moistened lips to his ear.
"Tom, dearest, I want you to take me...."
"Oh, God...."
His hands worked on the small of her back, caressing.
"Oh, Laura, I...."
"Don't hesitate, Tom, don't feel afraid. I....
I'm in love with you. I want you ... in me, Tom."
With a strangled cry Tom pressed his lips to her throat and kissed the gently throbbing flesh.
Inexpertly he slid his hand beneath the hem of her skirt where rivulets of sweat from the contest had turned the nylon soggy. Her whole body felt that way now, moist, wetted with desire, limp with the eagerness of the love beating in her belly.
With a little cry of pleasure Laura closed her legs tight.
Tom's hand ripped at her blouse. Laura strained and writhed in the grass, fighting free of the confines of her brassiere. She held Tom's head in the starlight as his mouth caressed her breast-tips feverishly.
The dark, grassy bank was deserted. Saxophones from the pavilion moaned like the mounting of her desire. Tom fought her slip from her body, her panties from her milky hips, his fingertips caressing the smooth planes of her stomach, her navel, her buttocks.
Tom's hand formed a firm cushion under the twin soft mounds of her rump, constricting with desire as she pressed herself against him, felt his chest rough against the straining ends of her breasts.
Tom's mouth roamed her shoulders, her throat. He nipped at her ear.
In a frenzy of desire in the hot, dark grass, Laura raked his back with her nails.
"Oh, Tom, darling, darling ... let me help you. Come to me, Tom. Take me, Tom."
"Laura, it's like milk and honey, the sweetest milk and honey ... oh God, I'm so in love with you."
"Hold me, Tom. Like that. Now, Tom, faster. Go faster, Tom, it doesn't hurt. It's wonderful, dearest, it feels wonderful loving you."
And then Tom's inexperience, his timidity, was wiped out by her own eager desire.
The moaning of the saxophone over the moon-washed lake became Laura's moaning as her body began to vibrate, to throb with its own special kind of music, a rhythm that increased in tempo, making her shake with passion, her mouth bite frenziedly at Tom's while the saxophone moaned, moaned louder....
The rhythm became quicker, quicker, pulsing up and up to new peaks of sound beyond endurance, driving her into pain and quick-running ecstasy she had never known before, making her writhe, twist, cry out, shriek, moan as they rolled over and over down the dark, sloping bank, wracked by spasm after spasm of desire, to lie at last, their bodies coated with sand that adhered to the perspiration streaming from them, on the dark beach, locked in one another's embrace, Laura's whole perfectly-tuned body aware and aroused and vibrant with the last heavenly notes of music too beautiful and exciting to endure, music that burst in her loins like liquid sound, wrenching her again and again, until at last she lay still in Tom's arms, sated, thrilled, helplessly, wholly in love....
Beyond the window, rain dripped dismally on the rooftops of Genesee.
The clock-radio, its dial glowing faintly in the gloom, showed the time to be nearing three-thirty.
Six months, Laura thought.
Six short months. And then a chain broke and a load of scrap metal crashed down one night at the outboard motor works and it was over, all over-the warmth, the security, the dreams of marriage, of children.
Tom Anderson was dead: Laura was alone again.
The dismal chain of events swam through her mind--Sid's invitation for her to come live with him; his promises of money, clothes. And with the ghost of Tom and all he might have represented in the way of a happy secure life still hovering, Laura had accepted, had said yes to Sid.
Almost four, Laura thought, rising from bed. Time to go to the studio.
If you're unhappy, she said to herself, you've made the choices all along the line. Don't blame Sid Hardy or Tom Anderson.
Blame yourself.
As she selected a pair of black panties from the bureau and slipped into them, Laura wondered whether she could ever escape Sid ... and whether she really wanted to.
She still didn't know.
Pulling the wispy transparency of the panties over the inviting curvature of her buttocks, Laura slipped her shoulders into her black brassiere, reached around and fastened the hooks. Her breasts thrust out, twin lace-hugged cones, firm and cream-soft as they mounded above the bra.
"Whore," she said. "Common whore."
The words had a harsh, degrading sound. But remorselessly she made herself realize that they also rang with unmistakable, undeniable truth.
CHAPTER THREE
The Cole & Miranda Dance Studios occupied a suite of rooms on the second floor of a building on one of Genesee's busiest downtown thoroughfares. Next to the plate glass window of a Finance Company which occupied the building's first floor a door opened on a steep, rather badly lighted stairway leading upward.
At five minutes until four Laura opened this street door and hurried in out of the gray dismal afternoon mist which had already caused the city streetlights to be turned on.
Laura paused at the desk. She leafed through the pages of an appointment book and noted with considerable dismay that her schedule for the evening was open. That meant she would be required to work at the desk in case new customers walked in unannounced. Of late Sid had been discouraging such customers. They generally signed up for no more than the forty-dollar basic course. Sid preferred to concentrate on potential Lifetimes.
Closing the appointment book, Laura started along the corridor that led back through the studio when she heard a throaty laugh echoing from the half-open doorway.
The laugh belonged to Cherry Marple, the only other woman on the studio teaching staff. Powerless to stop herself, Laura found herself trying to catch a look through the door into the studio room.
Cherry Marple was busy instructing a client in the intricacies of jitterbug. Laura knew the client well. He was a stout, monumentally ugly man in his mid-forties named Wallace Buckmaster, a wealthy widower from nearby Lake Cliffs.
Attired in a two-hundred dollar tweed suit and expensive oxblood shoes, Buckmaster was clumsily attempting to dance with the younger girl, and botching the effort badly. Buckmaster had no inherent rhythmic ability whatsoever-Laura had given him a lesson or two-but like so many other Cole & Miranda clients, it was basic loneliness, not a desire to dance, which brought him back again and again.
Laura found the sight almost nauseating-the heavy-paunched man with his big, florid scarlet nose and faintly protuberant eyes stumping clumsily back and forth over the highly waxed linoleum floor, staring down at his feet as he held his partner at arm's length and tried to master the simple steps.
Still, Laura thought with sudden bitterness, forgetting the role of inquisitive snooper in which she found herself, Buckmaster was the type of client in whom Sid preferred to specialize-men or women in their forties, widows or widowers preferably, from the upper income classes of Lake Cliffs. Buckmaster was now in the process of completing a five-hundred-dollar one-year advanced course. Cherry Marple had been working for months to sign him to a Lifetime.
Hypnotically Laura found her eyes drawn to the girl instructor. She knew with a pang of jealousy why she had stopped to peek in the half-open door. Sid, in the past, had seemed a little too interested in Cherry Marple for Laura's peace of mind; Laura found herself staring now with open antagonism.
Cherry Marple was a voluptuous, rather tall blonde girl in her mid-twenties, an expert dancer who treated all her customers with a kind of cool contempt. Tonight Cherry wore a bright yellow two-piece sweater and skirt combination, obviously picked out for its tightness. The skirt clung like molded rubber to the muscular outlines of her long, rather meaty calves, showing clearly the outlines of her garters and the rolled edge of her panties as well as the deep crease where the fabric pulled tight over her ample behind. The sweater hugged her breasts, full and heavy, the nipples showing through as twin taut puckers at the out-thrust tips. Cherry danced with a vague, disinterested expression on her face, gazing out over the bent head of the clumsy Buckmaster, her hips moving sinuously in time to the music.
Laura felt a hot flush of envy rising in her cheeks, born of her jealous fear that Sid could easily become too interested in this attractive girl.
Suddenly Cherry's eyes snapped around, flashing at the door.
Laura felt trapped, discovered.
Cherry's wide, heavily made-up lips curled in a faint smile of greeting, in which contempt was mingled. Laura stood rooted, unable to move, deeply ashamed.
Suddenly Cherry threw back her head and laughed, a clear, victorious taunt.
Buckmaster raised his ugly face. Cherry concentrated all her attention on him, saying:
"That's it, Wallace, you're doing fine. You've been missing the second beat. See how it goes? One, two, and three...."
Laura forced herself to move out of range of the door. Cherry's laughter floated behind her.
God, Laura thought emptily, hurrying along the long corridor past several other empty instruction studios, what's happening? Am I running scared all of a sudden?
Is the real reason I'm thinking about staying with Sid the fear that one day he may throw me out-right back into some gutter?
The sound of voices behind double doors at the hall's end distracted her from agonizing thoughts. These doors bore a gilt-painted legend. Lifetime Members' Club. Laura realized that she had a certain dismal little ritual to perform, and that she might as well get it over with. She was in no mood for social amenities tonight. Digging in her purse, she brought out a small gold key, inserted it in the clubroom door and with considerable reluctance went into the clubroom.
The quarters where Lifetime Members held their parties, three large rooms, were decorated in better taste than the rest of the studio. Three people sat at a desk just inside the door, a large, elaborately-printed presentation book open before them.
Closing the door, Laura immediately knew something was wrong.
Sid, seated beside the woman at the desk, glanced up and grinned crookedly. He waved, but his eyes had a glazed quality. He smelled overpoweringly of bourbon.
"Hello, Laura," he said thickly. "Just going over Mrs. Thyssen's Lifetime book with her."
"Congratulations, Mrs. Thyssen."
Laura extended her hand, feeling like a cheat.
"Thank you, my dear, thank you!"
The woman struggled to stand up and put forth a gloved hand in return.
"I feel at least that I've made the right decision, taking out a Lifetime plan."
Mrs. Sophie Thyssen was in her early fifties. Though she might once have been attractive, her figure now was running to fat, although she tried to give herself a girlish appearance by wearing clothes which were far too tight, which bulged over her hips and showed the outlines of foundation garments. The bodice of her suit was cut too low for a woman of her age, exposing thick pendulous folds of powdered breasts. She kept making a conscious effort to lean forward so that the suit material fell away exposing the deep, thick crease between them.
Pumping Laura's hand, the wealthy widow burbled, "Ever since Harry died, I've been awfully lonely, and you people finally showed me a way to have a little fun." She gestured vaguely to the modern furniture with which the clubrooms were decorated. "I can't tell you how happy I am."
"And we're equally delighted to have you in the Lifetime club," said the third member of the group, the studio's other male instructor, Norman Percy.
Sid reached down, patted Mrs. Thyssen's hand, Laura saw the matron give Sid a long, liquid stare of open admiration. Somehow Laura felt the whole scene she was witnessing was cheap, and more than a little fraudulent. Mrs. Thyssen was paying ten thousand dollars over a period of years for the privileges of coming twice a month or oftener to these rather dowdy rooms. But the matron seemed to be pleased by it all, for Laura noticed with distaste that she had moved closer to Sid and was pressing her heavy hip against his trousers, leaning forward to allow her massive, perfumed breasts to become clearly exposed.
"All we have to do this evening," Sid continued, glancing away and jabbing a cigarette nervously in his mouth, "is officially welcome Mrs. Thyssen into the club. Right now, though-look, Norm. You go over the book. I want to see Laura a second about another matter."
Before Laura knew it, Sid had caught her arm and propelled her from the room, down the hall and into the small, crowded cubicle which served as the studio office.
Sid slammed the door, leaned back and ran a hand through his hair.
"Christ. Oh, Christ."
"What's wrong, Sid?"
He raised disgusted, drink-glazed eyes in her direction.
"That bag," he said, waving with his cigarette. "That sex-crazy old bag makes me want to puke."
"Be nice to the customers, Sid. That's a cardinal studio rule, isn't it?"
Suddenly Sid lunged forward, dropping the cigarette into an ashtray. He gripped Laura's arms.
"I've been waiting for you all afternoon, baby," he said thickly. "I've got to give that old bitch a-a lesson tonight. She expects it, I'm so sick of her face I can hardly look at it any more."
Deftly Laura tried to slip out of Sid's tight hold.
"Is that why you're half-boiled, dear?"
"Some things even I can't stand."
Then Sid slid one of his hands down Laura's hip. A crooked smile twisted his mouth. He leaned forward, put his lips against her neck, kissed her.
"But I'm glad you're here. We can spend a couple minutes in here and maybe that'll help me forget I have to make up to that old slob tonight."
Sid nuzzled Laura's ear, backing her against the desk.
"For God's sake, honey, love me up a little so I can stand her."
"I'm a little surprised at you. And not just because you've had too much liquor."
"Come on, honey," Sid crooned, his mouth slobbering on Laura's neck. "Old Sid needs some of your special forgetting medicine...."
Laura tried to protest, but he put his arms around her, bent her head back, forced his mouth against hers, his tongue probing out, smearing her lipstick.
Laura found herself backed against the desk, her legs wide-spread to prevent herself from falling. Suddenly Sid's hands were working at her skirt, lifting it, lifting her slip as well. With a laugh that concealed rising revulsion, Laura tried to push him off. But liquor Had given Sid peculiar strength.
Before Laura knew it her skirt and slip were hiked above her waist and Sid stood with one of his legs between hers, moving his knee suggestively against the exposed surface of her inner thigh where her nylon was drawn up tight and held in place by her garter.
"Please baby...."
One of Sid's hands fastened around her nylon-clad leg now, pulling it tight against his as he wedged her against the desk while his other hand lifted the edge of her sweater, cupping her right breast, stroking and manipulating. He swayed over her, kissing her neck, the downy hair behind her ear, his voice suddenly twisted and broken, a little desperate:
"Let me do it to you, doll. You don't know how bad I need it. I've been dreaming about it all afternoon...."
"Sid, stop!"
Laura fought him now, desperate and suddenly sickened.
"Get your hands off me, Sid. I don't want it now, lying on the floor like ... like animals."
Her voice rose a notch as she tried to push him away.
"Sid, please, stop it."
"Damn it, you got to," Sid choked, pulling at her, catching hold of her panties and twisting. "Laura baby, you got to let me have it before I have to go back there with that old-"
"Sid, what's happening to you?"
"Please, Laurie, don't talk, just open up for old daddy Sid, let nice old Sid strip your pretty little body and-"
Abruptly a light glowed on a communicator box on the desk. A buzzer sounded.
Laura slid out of Sid's grip, leaving him swaying unsteadily, anger flaring in his eyes.
"A customer," Laura said, straightening her skirt and trying to arrange her hair. "No one on the desk."
With a feeling akin to terror she ran from the office and slammed the door behind her, biting her knuckles, sick with the feeling of Sid's drunken caresses, feeling as though the world as she knew it was slowly, slowly but inevitably, crumbling into ruin.
CHAPTER FOUR
What in the name of God is happening to Sid?
Laura wondered desperately, hurrying along the corridor on clicking heels toward the reception area.
For a moment he had been like a wild animal, tearing and pawing at her clothes. She could still feel the livid hurt left by his hands on her legs, her belly, her loins. She bit her lip, lifted her chin, tried to look composed as she slowed her pace and approached the desk. Somewhere behind her, the office door opened and Sid's footsteps clacked along the hall. The Lifetime clubroom doors crashed shut loudly.
"Good evening." Laura tried to control her shaking voice. "May I help you?"
"Yes," the man at the desk said with a tentative smile. "I'd like to enroll for some lessons, please."
"Of course."
Laura sat down and handed him a descriptive brochure.
"Won't you have a chair while I take down a little information? Our basic course includes fox trot, waltz, jitterbug and all the Latin dances. Eight half hour sessions at a cost of thirty-eight...."
Laura stopped.
She had taken an application form and a pen from the desk but her hand was suddenly arrested as she looked at the new customer for the first time.
The man standing opposite her, twisting his hat in his hands, was thirty or thereabouts, plainly but well-dressed in a suit and white raincoat. He had dark hair, a strong mouth and level gray-blue eyes. Without warning Laura found herself drawn to his gaze, staring at him as he stared back, each of them embarrassed but each caught and held by some sudden and electric bond that had leaped immediately between them. The man smiled, hesitated, about to speak. Then his smile vanished. His gaze swept Laura downward for endless falling miles. The reception room grew unaccountably warm. A twisting, wrenching desire filled her, making her thighs burn, making her press her legs tight together beneath the desk.
You fool, she told herself, it's just because Sid was manhandling you, arousing you even though you didn't realize it, and now the first stranger who walks in makes you pant for satisfaction.
Laura swallowed hard, tried to smile again...." a cost of thirty-eight dollars, including a ten-dollar deposit," she finished.
"That sounds fine."
The man opened his wallet and put two fives on the desk.
"I've come to the conclusion it's about time I polished up what few social graces I have."
His grin was easy, relaxed, his voice quiet but with the unmistakable timbre of a man who knew his own mind and purpose. He scaled his hat onto a chair, perched on a corner of the desk and took out a cigarette.
"I've some time right now. Do you suppose we could start tonight?"
"Yes, we have a half-hour open immediately, if that's agreeable. I'm afraid you'll be stuck with me for your instructor, though. Our other teacher, Miss Marple, is busy. My name is Miss Grace, Laura Grace."
The man held out his hand.
"Very glad to know you. Vic O'Keefe. Please use the first name."
O'Keefe held her hand a moment longer than necessary, the palm warm, the fingers strong, firm. Laura felt the quick, spasmodic twist of desire lash her body again. She fought it, avoiding Vic O'Keefe's eyes as she fumbled in the desk for an application form.
Oh, God, stop! she thought desperately. It's only because oj what happened today, the doubts about Sid, the way he tried to get in you just a few moments ago, pawing and pushing.
To help regain her composure, Laura pulled on the cigarette and wrote Vic O'Keefe's name on the top line of the application.
Then she said, "I'll need a little more information."
"Anything."
His eyes probed into her, disturbed. "Anything at all."
Rapidly Laura filled in the basic information, name, address asd occupation, which Vic gave in a rather indefinite way, saying only, "Oh, put down salesman, that's as good as anything."
"I wonder if you could give me a local bank reference. It's just a formality...."
"Genesee National." His eyes narrowed. "Is all this customary, Miss Grace?"
"We do like to make sure about our clients. Checking or savings?"
Vic seemed to hesitate a moment, then shrugged.
"Both, if you're sure you need all this just to teach me to dance."
A faintly mocking light shone in his level eyes.
"Are you always so interested in the income of your students? I suppose I should expect it, though," he added, with just a trace of humor. "I've heard a little about some dance studios-not this one, just some-how they're always very interested in signing people up for long-term courses."
Vic stood up, picking his hat, and though he smiled, he was deadly serious:
"Do I get the proposition tonight, so soon?"
"That's all the information we'll need," she said lamely.
And then, as though some inner self deep inside her brain made her speak, words came unbidden to her lips. She looked straight at him.
"And I can promise you, Vic, that tonight you won't get a proposition. At least ... not the kind you mentioned."
Again she felt stripped naked, her whole body exposed to his gaze, pulsing with strange, quick new desire. Yet it was a warm, wholly pleasant sensation. Vic sensed the embarrassment her own thoughtless, impulsive remark had caused her. He tried to dismiss the moment with a brittle laugh. But his eyes bored into her, saw her loneliness even as he tried to return an air of lightness to the moment by saying:
"Well, if you're ready to try a tanglefoot like me, let's have at it."
They started for one of the empty studios.
"I warn you, I have not only the two traditional left feet, but several extra as well. I'm a regular clodhopper, with the emphasis on the clod."
Laura laughed, flicking on the lights in the studio, feeling suddenly warm and secure with him.
"What sort of things do you sell, Vic?"
She busied herself putting a stack of long-playing records on the console phonograph. She knew she was violating a cardinal principle of the studio-never to become too familiar with a student unless he was definite Lifetime material. And yet, all at once, Sid Hardy and his eager, greedy search for ten-thousand-dollar members seemed utterly unimportant and false. Vic hesitated again, seeming uneasy over her question.
"Oh, various things, hardware mostly."
He shucked out of his white raincoat. Laura noticed that he was extremely tall.
"You'd find it about the dullest subject in the world. So why don't we switch things around? I suppose you're used to fresh students, but tell me-are you married?"
"No." Flustered, Laura switched on the phonograph.
"No, I'm not married," she repeated.
"Been working here long? I mean, are you an old hand in the dance ... ah ... business?"
"I've been here a little less than a year."
Facing him, her breasts thrust tight against the material of her sweater, so tight she wanted to tear the fabric away and let them burn shamelessly, exposed to his gaze, she added, again trying to banter:
"My, but you are just about the most inquisitive pupil I've ever met. I know! You're planning to open a studio of your own, so you've decided to scout the opposition and learn all you can by all sorts of devious means, and then-"
Vic moved closer, hesitated. Then he touched her hand.
"Look, I've sort of gotten things off on the wrong foot. And no pun intended ... Laura. I really didn't mean to pry."
Once more the troubled look which she could not understand flashed in his face.
"Maybe I ought to come back another time."
He gazed deeply at her, admitting the electric bond which had sprung up between them, giving her a chance to back away if she wished. A delicious shiver of ecstasy sprang up in her breasts and worked its way, throbbing and pulsing, down her belly, plunging down her legs until she felt faint.
Vic said: "I don't mean to talk like a television soap opera, but there's no point in my starting-something neither of us would want started."
Then he lit a cigarette impatiently.
"Excuse me. I'm talking in riddles. Just forget it, can you?"
He took a deep, nervous drag.
"Do you want me to get out of here? I think you know...."
Impulsively Laura pressed her fingers to his mouth.
"Please ... Vic, I don't quite know what's happened, either. Don't think badly of me, but ... I don't want you to leave."
Vic crushed out his cigarette under his heel, the truth naked between them now, naked and alive.
He held up his arms. His smile belied the seriousness of his gaze.
"Lesson, teacher?"
Vic took her in his arms. She made an effort to observe the customary proprieties, maintaining a good arm's length between them.
"Well, the first step we have to master is the fox-trot, which is the basic dance that begins with a step like this. One, two and...." Abruptly she stopped. Vic's arm tightened around her waist. You're a slut, she said to herself bitterly, shameless, wanton....
But somehow she knew it was not the truth. They stood unmoving, their gazes locked, while the music beat around them.
Then, with a little sob, Laura pressed her head against his shoulder.
"Please," she whispered. "Don't think I'm ... I'm just a common tramp. But I can't teach you. My legs won't work right. I don't know what's wrong. Would you despise me if I just ... just asked that we dance, and see whether...."
"I wouldn't despise you," Vic murmured. "I'd like that ... Laura."
And suddenly his hand gently tilted her head back and he was kissing her.
His mouth was firm and gentle as it sought hers. At first she was afraid, brushing his lips lightly with her own, but then she felt desire quicken his body, and she responded.
Her mouth crushed up against his as he raised her on tiptoe. His arm slipped around her waist.
His hand moved downward to her buttocks, pulling her tight against him so that they both could feel the throbbing life waiting for release deep in her belly.
Her breasts were firebrands, smashed against his chest, crushed together, the nipples two erect peaks of desire yearning for satisfaction.
Hungrily, desperately, trying to wipe out the thought of Sid Hardy and his brutal, conniving ways, Laura found her mouth coming open, wet and eager.
Vic's mouth answered.
His tongue quested, flicking with desire.
Hers lashed out in frenzied response.
Drawing away, her brain groggy, she whispered against his shoulder:
"Better ... dance, Vic."
But that made the desire all the more strident.
Slowly his hand began to make a small, stroking circle at the small of her back.
Then it stole downward until he held her with one hand on her back, the other cradled tight beneath her buttocks, pressing her as close as he could.
Fiery, convulsive spasms quickened her secret being more frequently now. His mouth stole to her ear, nipping the lobe gently. His voice sounded strained.
"Laura ... I didn't come in here intending that something like this happen. But it has, and it's like being suddenly alive, really alive again. If you don't feel ... if you want me to stop...."
"No!"
Laura pressed his back, driving her belly fiercely against him. "Don't stop!"
"Then...."
His mouth, moving in her hair, was hot with desire. "Then I have to ask...."
"The answer's yes!"
And with eyes closed, she gave him her open mouth in all its wet hunger.
"I have no place except my car," he began awkwardly.
The pressure of her body answered him.
A moment later they were stealing down the stairs of the studio, hand in hand, Laura's temples throbbing, her whole body alive, quickened by happiness.
A thin drizzle fell over the street. There was little traffic. As if in a dream, she found herself in his car.
"Darling," Vic whispered, it's cold out here ... chill ... but I have to ask...."
His face was serious in the dim glow of the dash lamps.
"For the first time ... I want you totally nude."
"Oh, yes, Vic!"
Laura hugged him, seeing for a moment the ghostly face of Tom Anderson, knowing suddenly that she had found again what she had lost with Tom-love that was clean, decent, gentle.
Her eager nails dug into his throat as she moved her mouth wetly across his, caressing him with her lips. Her voice was low, throaty, eager:
"Yes, darling, the first time, I have to be nude for you, I must be. Quickly, Vic darling, help me ... here ... help me with this ... make me nude for you, dearest...."
His hands, so different from Sid's, worked at her clothing, pulling the slip over her head, taking the brassiere and unfastening it so that her breasts suddenly jutted free.
Then she peeled away her nylons and at last her panties, until she lay on the leather with Vic pressing close, his mouth kindling bonfires on her shoulders, between her breasts. Invisible music, thick with throbbing drumbeats, began to hammer in her hips, as Vic pressed close.
"Darling, I've fallen in love ... hopelessly in love," Vic said.
"Yes, Vic, yes, I love you, faster now darling, faster Vic my dearest, oh Vic, it's wonderful, oh God, Vic, faster, Vic ... hold me, I'm there Vic, I'M THERE I'M THERE I'M THERE...!"
Slowly, Laura climbed from Vic O'Keife's car. He leaned over the window-sill, pressed her hand to his lips.
"Laura, you know I have to see you again. After tonight, it couldn't be any other way."
"I know."
Miserably Laura remembered, now that the ecstasy of their love-making had passed, that she had told him nothing about her relationship with Sid. In spite of that she forced herself to say:
"Come to the studio, darling. Come soon. We ... we have a lot to talk about."
Feverishly she pressed her open mouth to his, their tongues meeting in a last parting caress.
Then, with that strange, haunted look in his eyes, Vic gunned the motor of his automobile and shot away down the wet, dripping street.
CHAPTER FIVE
To her surprise Laura found the outer door of the studio unlocked.
She had a sudden impulse to turn and run back down the stairs, flee through the night to the apartment. Then a calmer mood prevailed.
She would have to confront Sid eventually, and the best time, she realized, was now, when the sensuous memory of Vic O'Keefe's caresses still made her flesh tingle warmly, giving her the resolve she needed. Yet even as she turned the handle and stepped through into the darkened reception area, some hidden instinct made her stop a moment before she called Sid's name.
She closed the door and leaned against it, her reluctance to meet Sid suddenly wiped away by the eerie feeling that something was wrong in the studio-grotesquely, repulsively wrong.
To her left, the light she had seen from the street still burned in the instruction studio.
But music drifted through the dark, smoke-stale rooms.
Suddenly Laura recognized its source-a line of light spilled out from beneath the double doors of the Lifetime clubrooms.
Moving carefully now, her nails digging into her palms, Laura took a few steps along the corridor and paused to listen.
Above the liquid refrain of a dance band's melody issuing from the big high fidelity console inside the clubrooms Laura recognized the harsh, guttural syllables of a man's voice.
That voice belonged to Sid.
A moment later another voice spoke.
A woman's.
The words blended finally into a giddy laugh.
Laura bit her lip. thinking at once, Cherry Marple.
But the voice was much too husky to belong to the voluptuous blonde instructor. Instantly, then, Laura placed it, and her lovely face tightened and grew ugly as she tried to stifle a cry of horror and disgust.
She must be wrong, she had to be wrong!
Again a frantic impulse to run drove her a few steps back toward the stairway.
Then, with a sick, inevitable feeling, Laura knew that she had to see what was transpiring behind those doors.
As she moved along silently, drawing her own key from her purse, she tried to tell herself that she would not find what her mind already told her she would see.
Weakly she leaned against the Lifetime doors, closing her eyes, resting her head on her arm. The woman's voice had grown suddenly strident and insistent, mingling with a rhythmic creaking sound of leather and springs.
Laura bit her lips until blood came.
The woman's voice cried obscene demands, the breath coming shortly until at last, in a series of explosive moans and gasps, the voice gave one long, wracking grunt and then sobbed away to silence.
Holding her breath, Laura inched one of the doors open a fraction.
For a moment she was afraid she would scream aloud. Once more an hysterical desire to escape seized her, yet she forced herself to stare through the lighted slit at the carnal scene unveiled before her.
At first Laura could see nothing but Sid himself, tugging on his trousers, his back to the door, his skin filmed with perspiration.
Then Sid moved aside, reaching quickly for a cigarette on the desk. Now he had his back turned to the woman on the couch. His face was twisted into a mask of disgust as he pulled frantically on the cigarette.
Still lying on the sofa, obscene and flabby, Mrs. Sophie Thyssen spread her arms, watching Sid with a dew-eyed expression that had a mindless quality about it.
Mrs. Thyssen was virtually naked. Her big thighs rolled in pasty white folds over the leather. With mounting horror Laura noted that the hideous creature still wore her stockings, fastened to an indecent-looking garter belt of black lace embroidered with pink roses.
Above the waist Sophie Thyssen was entirely naked, her massive, mounding breasts spread out on her chest. Her hair was tousled and stringy. Perspiration glared in the naked shine of the clubroom lights, dripping from her nipples onto her belly.
Even as Laura watched, close to retching with the ugliness of it, Mrs. Thyssen turned on her side and raised her arms, wriggling her buttocks provocatively against the leather.
"Sid," the matron said huskily, "Sid lover, come back here again. Come back here, darling."
Half-turned, Sid tried to suppress an exclamation of disgust which only Laura could see.
He swung around, forcing a smile to his face. He moved to the couch, sitting on its edge. Sophie Thyssen wriggled over to make room for him.
"Not any more tonight, dearest."
Sid's hand dropped down to stroke Mrs. Thyssen's jutting hip. He touched Mrs. Thyssen's rumpled hair, then bent over her ear, nuzzling it.
"You've worn me out, honey."
Laura could not hear what he whispered next in the older woman's ear.
Sophie Thyssen guided Sid's hand to her face. She fastened her gummy lipsticked mouth on his cigarette, sucking ferociously. Then, with a giggle, she said:
"Do you really mean that? You make me feel like a young girl again."
She ran her palm over Sid's naked chest.
"You have no idea how a woman of my age needs sexual affection, Sid. And how little chance there is for it. Do you know, the last time I ... had a man on me (and he was more boy than man) was when a delivery boy came to the house last Thanksgiving. I felt so ... so cheap and degraded. Besides...." Sophie Thyssen giggled again, obscenely, ". . he lacked technique, Sid. He was finished before I even got half way home."
Again she giggled, running her red-nailed hands over Sid's upper arms.
"But you! Oh, you're good. I didn't think I had strength left at my age for twice in one evening, dear, and yet with your body next to mine...."
Hastily Sid bent forward and pressed his mouth to Mrs. Thyssen's breasts. "You're good, Sophie Damned good Why, you taught me a couple of tricks I never even knew."
"Let me teach you a few more, Sid darling . .
Jerkily. Sid rose and threw off her grip.
Then he smiled hastily, noting the look of shock and surprise on her face, put there by the strength of his blow as he released himself. At once Sid bent and stroked her breasts again, laughing:
"Don't worry, Sophie. We'll have lots of good times together from now on. Only remember," he added with a touch of warning in his voice, "Laura can't know anything about what's between us or it'll have to stop altogether."
Sophie Thyssen suppressed one more giggle.
"Can't there be something between us just once more tonight? Oh, Sid, lover, when you come down it's heavenly, like a tank tearing my belly to pieces, ripping me up. I want to kill you, it hurts so much, but it feels so wonderful, I can't stop."
Suddenly fat crocodile tears appeared in the woman's eyes.
"You've made me a woman again, darling, a full, complete woman. I thought what I had down here was dead, lifeless, but it's not, it's not, it's alive...."
"You'd better get dressed," Sid said, a ragged note in his voice again as he glanced at his watch. "I have to get back to my apartment pretty quick, or Laura'll wonder what's going on."
"That pretty little bitch," Sophie Thyssen sneered, struggling up. "I'd like to get my hands on her. I'd like to take her little tits and burn them, twist them, scar them so you'd never look at them again. Oh, Sid, it makes me sick to think of you having that girl. But I'll make you want mine more, I promise you."
"I already do," Sid grinned, touching her chin. "You, and that, and all your pretty money."
Mrs. Thyssen laughed senselessly.
"Oh, darling, you're a tease."
Then she glanced at him with a more calculating look.
"But if you're nice to me, there is a little matter of my will. I wouldn't be at all averse to remembering the man who took care of ... shall we say ... servicing me?"
"You'll get all the servicing that you can take, Sophie. Just get dressed. I mean it. I have to lock up and go home."
"Yes, darling."
The woman weakly reached for her brassiere lying on a chair.
Revolted by what she had seen and heard, Laura turned and lurched down the hallway into one of the dark and empty instruction studios.
Shutting the door all but a crack, she sank down on a chair, feeling mindless, empty, her mouth dry and bitter-tasting.
Presently footsteps came along the hall, Mrs. Thyssen murmuring softly.
At last the matron left the studio. Laura heard the front door close. Then Sid walked back to the office.
Light sprang up in the hall as Sid entered the office. Laura opened the studio door and crossed the hallway, Sid, wearing a shirt now, was seated at the desk, smoking a cigarette and examining Mrs. Thyssen's check for a Lifetime Membership. He did not hear Laura approach.
"Is that part of the service of the studio, Sid? Doing what you did with that woman?" Cursing, Sid leaped up. "Where in Christ did you come from?"
"I went out for some coffee," Laura lied, trying to look at Sid as a human being and not as some vile animal. "But that's beside the point. I came back. I'm sorry I did, because what I saw made me so sick I could hardly stand it. Yet I'm also glad I did. Because it shows me what kind of a man you are. What a dirty, greedy, depraved-"
Sid's hand swung, smashing her across the face.
Laura sobbed and reeled, dropping into a chair. Anger flushed Sid's cheeks as he caught the chair with his toe, pulled, and sent Laura crashing to the floor, pain jolting through her body.
Her skirt hiked up around her thighs, revealing long golden nyloned expanses with bands of cream-white flesh at the tops. But she no longer cared, touching her cheek where Sid had struck her.
Sid was trembling with rage.
"What kind of a naive kid are you? And who do you think I did that for, just myself? Do you think I got any kick out of sticking it into that sex-crazy old bag tonight? If you do, you're sick in the head. But if you were playing snooper outside the door, maybe you heard her say if I treated her right, my name might wind up in a clause in her will. Mrs. Thyssen's got plenty of green, Laurie baby. For her kind of green I'd give her a ride twenty times a night!"
Weakly Laura tried to rise, then slumped down again, almost beyond speech.
"Is ... is there anything you wouldn't do to have your own studio, Sid?"
"You act like you just came out of a nursery school!"
Angrily he bent over her, emphasizing his words with jabs of his cigarette.
"Do you think that what I did to the Thyssen dame fe something new and different in the dance racket? Old creeps like that expect it, doll. That's part of the service they get for smacking down ten thousand clams for a Lifetime. It's not in the list of benefits the home office puts out in their crap-sheets, but it's part and parcel of the reason dames like her sign up for a Lifetime. So what if I have to bang her? I got the Lifetime, didn't I? Now I need just one more. And if I have to bang some other hot-pants jane, I'll do it, I'll do it until I can't drag myself up one more time. But just because I do it, honey, don't think for one minute I like it."
Sid's face contorted.
"It makes me sick."
"Then that's all the worse. Hating it, being sickened by it, and still...."
Furiously Sid knelt beside her, gripping her shoulders.
"Why in the name of God do you think I stoked up on booze this afternoon?" he shouted. "Why do you think I got you in here and tried to make you this evening? Because I wanted you first, you dumb little broad! To try and wipe out the thought of what I knew I had to do tonight, with that dirty fat pig of a Thyssen broad."
Panting, Sid stared down at Laura, running his eyes over her exposed thighs.
Suddenly a smile made the corners of his mouth crawl up. His eyes lighted with dark pinpoints. He lifted Laura, kneeling beside her, holding her head tight against his chest. His hand began to rub her back insistingly.
"Stop it, damn you, Sid...."
Laura pulled back.
"I'm finished! I'm sick of you-of this place-of what you have to do. I've had enough, Sid. I'm getting out."
Sid threw back his head and laughed.
Laura shrieked softly and beat at him with her fists, but it was useless. Exhaustion had claimed her.
Sid suddenly let himself go limp. His weight bore them both to the floor.
Twisting and fighting, Laura felt his fingers close on her knee, working their way upward. Suddenly his lips were close to her ear. She closed her eyes and tried to fight the insinuating way his words buzzed in her ear:
"Don't make damnfool remarks like that, doll. You won't pull out on me. You won't leave. You like what I can give you. Things like those little mink items. And something else...."
One of his hands constricted at the small of her back, pulling at her skirt.
With a sick feeling Laura felt her girdle give an inch under her writhing hips, give and slip downward as Sid crooned:
"You love what I can give you, baby. That makes everything else right. You like what I'm going to give you right here, right now, to show you just how much you like it...."
Laura tried vainly to fight him, the strength of his hands as he pulled the tight-fitting girdle down over her hips.
Then, beneath her skirt, she felt his hands working and she knew her panties had slipped free.
Sid was strong now, his fingers hard and capable as they fastened in the neckline of her sweater and ripped all the way down, tearing slip and brassiere away.
Laura looked down at herself, stricken, her fists beating on the floor.
She lay in the pool of light thrown by the desk-fop lamp. In horror she saw the up-thrusting twin cones of her breasts shining white in the light.
"No, stop, Sid," she moaned softly as his ham . worked on her. "No, Sid, don't do that to me, you'it getting me hot, Sid, Sid, don't get me hot, please...."
"I'm going to get you hot," Sid said, growling low crouched over her, his face contorted and shining with sweat, as though he knew, like Laura, that he was facing a test of strength.
Watching, Laura saw the soft pink tips of her own nipples begin to grow puckered and firm. Suddenly they were erect, taut and sharp-pointed with desire, heaving up and down while Sid jerked the tatters of her skirt, her twisted girdle and panties and nylons over the lower portion of her body.
In the depths of her mind Laura thought of Vic O'Keefe ... but she could no longer remember what his face looked like ... suddenly there was nothing but Sid and her own nakedness, Sid hard and firm against her, ruthlessly tearing at her body.
Like living things she felt her own fingers begin to steal up his arms, caressing, then knotting, digging in as her hips began to burn and she ground her buttocks against the floor, futilely, to try and halt the fevered love-urge crawling like lava up her legs.
"Getting hot?"
Sid loomed over her, smiling.
"You won't leave me ... you're hot...."
Laura dug her teeth into Sid's shoulder, tastiag blood.
"You like it too much...."
Sid's voice roaring in her ear ... as her hips became living things, craving satisfaction, craving sensation and satiation like independent creatures.
Sid's voice took on the roar of thunder as his face loomed closer in the half-light, tough and ruthless.
"I can watch you getting hot, getting hot in every inch of your sweet beautiful body...."
In the depths of her swooning mind, Laura knew with sick defeat that she had lost an important battle, perhaps the most important of her life; and she knew that what Sid said was true, that she would not leave him, could not leave him because she was chained to his flesh by the limp, acid-hot desire jetting and coursing through her limbs.
"You're hot," Sid was whispering, "you're so hot you can't stand it any more, you're so hot you're going to scream for what you want, Laura baby...."
Then Laura could stand it no longer.
She felt the shriek of desire rising in her throat. It spilled over her lips and she fought no longer, pulling Sid down savagely, down and down onto her, into her, his weight pressing her, lighting her desire to bonfire proportions as her hips beat and spasmodically arched high off the floor and she felt herself welcome him with ecstasy.
CHAPTER SIX
In the days that followed, Laura began to notice a definite shift in her relationship with Sid Hardy. Almost, Laura felt dismally, as though once was not enough to prove her own weakness, she had demanded-cried, begged, teased-another wracking fulfillment under Sid's ruthless caress, so that at last she recognized his true power over her. Recognized that it was foolish, useless, to even think of leaving him, because of the intimate bond of physical satisfaction which Sid had forged between them.
For now it was no longer her body that had power over Sid. Now he was very conscious of the way she clung to him, in desperate need. As a consequence, his behavior became casual, offhand, even cruelly indifferent at times.
To make matters worse, Sid also showed no inclination toward making love to her again.
At the end of fifteen days, Laura, her normal, healthy desires working on her again, found herself almost wild with frustration and thwarted urges.
Late one afternoon, when thin, yellow sunlight fell through the windows of the studio, Laura sat woodenly at the desk in the reception area, turning pages in the appointment book.
Beneath the desk her nylon-encased legs felt warm, humid. She cursed her own nature bitterly. The urges were coming on her again.
She found herself wishing she were an aged crone, withered and beyond desire, but the thought did little to assuage her raging inner torment. And the feeling grew worse as she leafed the pages of the book.
In two places, dates during the last two weeks, she had written the name Vic O'Keefe at specified half-hours arranged that very first night he came to the studio.
Through each name a line had been drawn.
O'Keefe had not appeared either time.
Laura's depression and bitterness grew even darker as she stared at the cancelled appointments, thinking that O'Keefe had lied to her that ecstatic night.
Why hadn't O'Keefe come back, she thought desperately. Am I that ugly?
Why hadn't he telephoned, gotten in touch somehow?
Is the mark of the common whore stamped so clearly on my face?
Could he tell even then?
Conscious of footsteps approaching along the corridor, above the tinny sound of a samba issuing from one of the instruction studios, Laura snapped the book shut and tried to compose her face.
Into the reception area walked Sid, whistling, struggling into his topcoat, winding a long plaid scarf around his throat.
He paused, an amused light in his dark eyes, making a show of adjusting the scarf.
"Like the neckwear? Finest imported English wool. Nothing but the best for old Sid. At least that's what Sophie tells me."
Desperately, Laura concentrated on lighting a cigarette.
"You're an expert torturer, Sid."
Sid bent over the desk and squeezed Laura's arc-,, "More mink, baby doll. Bushels of it. Stacked to the ceiling. This is for both of us."
"Of course," Laura said emptily. "But Mrs. Thyssen seems pretty demanding. Every other day-"
"Can I help it if she likes to play bed games? Let's drop it, huh?"
"Don't threaten me, Sid," Laura snapped back. "Just tell me what I'm supposed to do when you're out all the time. When you come back night after night so exhausted you can't move or speak."
A low chuckle came from his lips.
"What's the matter, baby? Getting hot pants again?"
Laura leaped up, faced Sid.
"Damn you! You haven't looked at me or touched me in two weeks. How long do you think a normal woman can go on needing sex? What must I do, Sid? Get down on my knees? Crawl to you? Beg you to throw me in bed and-and service me like you service that disgusting Thyssen woman? I will, Sid, if that's what it takes. I can't stand it much longer. I've got to have something Sid, or I'll go out of my mind. Night after night, lying in bed, hoping you'll reach over-"
Laura's voice broke. She turned away, humiliated.
Instead, he merely laughed low, shook his head again and started for the stairs.
"Maybe one of these nights, if you're good, I can persuade Sophie to let me off easy, so I can take care of you. We'll see."
Sid waved, slammed the door and disappeared down the stairs.
Slowly Laura sank down at the desk, wondering why she didn't simply take her own life, and end this living nightmare.
If only she had the strength, the courage to leave Sid ... If only Vic O'Keefe had come back....
If only the sour taste of her early days of poverty weren't so bitter in her mouth, making her desperately afraid of being alone, without a man to pay her bills....
If, if, if....
She grew conscious of a man and woman approaching from a studio to the rear. Laura busied herself, shuffling papers on the desk.
"Thank you very much, Mrs. Helmholz," came the voice of Norman Percy, as he showed his student to the stair door and waved goodbye.
Percy closed the door and came back across the reception area, shaking his head, a strange, distasteful expression on his delicately-molded lips.
Laura looked up. She could hardly control the intense, humid throbbing in her loins now, as an idea crept into her brain.
Quickly it took form, and in an instant she had made up her mind. Here, right in front of her, was the means of satisfying her urgent need, and at the same time repaying Sid for his callous, unfeeling behavior.
Sitting on the corner of the desk, Norman Percy lit a filter-tip cigarette and sighed.
"Sometimes," he said in his soft voice, "I really wonder why God bothered to make women. All they do is chatter, chatter, chatter. I really shouldn't be in this business. I suppose one sees nothing but the fattest, the ugliest, in places like this. It's pretty damned sickening."
"Just the smiling blues," Laura said, rising, going around the desk. "You get it after a while, when you have to be nice to people whether you like them or not.
The feeling that the smile on your face is made of concrete and you can't break it to save your soul."
Laura reached down and ran a fingernail across the back of Percy's hand.
"But as to why women were created, Norm, that's an easy question to answer."
Stifling her feelings of guilt, responding only to the hot, liquid spasms of desire creeping up beneath her clothes, Laura said in a low voice:
"There's a very simple reason, Norm. One that's-easy to demonstrate."
Norman Percy looked around restlessly, drew his hand away.
"Laura, I've an appointment soon-"
"No you haven't," she said huskily. "I looked at the book. Not for half an hour. Come here."
She tugged Percy's hand. He followed her reluctantly across the reception area into an unlighted studio, standing awkwardly in the gathering gloom while Laura shut the door.
Suddenly Laura's head began to buzz and swim with the physical nearness of a man.
Involuntarily she crushed her hips against him, feeling the throb of her body through the layers of skirt, girdle and panties as though they did not exist, but only the nakedness of her desire, crushed against Percy now.
Slowly, slowly, she began to rotate her hips, pressing tighter and tighter every moment.
Street lights had come on outside. In the reflected gleam, Laura saw a trickle of perspiration running down Percy's forehead.
"Norm," she pleaded, her voice suddenly desperate and thick, "oh, Norm, I need somebody to love me up.
Please, Norm dear, I'll be very good. I can be so good you won't believe it. Only make love to me. Right here, right now. We can lock the door, Norm. No one will disturb us. Sid's gone. Cherry's got a student in back."
Frantically now Laura felt her desires take control of her.
She unbuttoned her suit jacket, baring the lace-clad cones of her breasts.
Taking Percy's hand, she cupped it around her left one, making his fingers stroke and work, forcing him to feel the aroused quivering and hardening of her aching love-flesh.
"Please," she whimpered, "Norm, I'm desperate, lover. Undress me, make love to me, please...."
His face streaming with sweat, Percy began to struggle free of her grip.
Laura," he said, his voice thick, almost incoherent with terror, "Laura, not now, I can't, I can't do it. Laura, let me go ... I...."
Percy took two quick steps to the door, turned, his face contorted into a bizzarre expression of fear and loathing.
"I can't, Laura!" he choked. "Don't ask me why, it's not-you, I simply can't, that's all."
And then he was gone, slamming the door, his footsteps racketing up the hall.
With a strangled sob Laura leaned against the wall, grasping her breasts, digging her nails in. trying to stop their pulsing love-ache.
Percy's mere presence had aroused her to a high pitch of desire. Her breath came raggedly as she tried to quell the throbbing in her body.
No one wants you, she thought bitterly, not even Percy, when you offer it to him free, when you practically nana it to him, when you offer all you've got to give, hot and ready and aching for love....
A moment later her cheeks were moistened with the salt trickle of her own helpless tears.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Two afternoons later, Laura found the weapon she wanted to strike back at Sid's indifference.
Returning to the reception desk after a lesson, she noticed a Phone Message slip stuck under the dial of the telephone.
The handwritten portion of the message showed it was for Cherry Marple. Guiltily Laura read the message.
J. T. Crome wanted a private lesson at his home in Lake Cliffs at eight o'clock that evening.
For a moment Laura could not place the name. Then, abruptly, she remembered. Crome was a man in his early forties, a wealthy bachelor, heir to the immense Cosmos Steel fortune. She also remembered the night a few months earlier when Crome and a group of his male friends, all thoroughly drunk, had staggered into the studio off the street, demanding dancing lessons. As Laura recalled it now. Cherry had fawned over the group of rich men and conducted a group lesson, but Crome had never called again.
Now, suddenly, he had telephoned. The words private lesson had an unmistakable meaning for someone in the dance studio business, yet the more Laura stared at the note, the more excited she became.
How low have you gotten? she asked herself in a moment of guilt. It's for Cherry, not for you.
Covertly Laura glanced around. She was unobserved.
Quickly she took the note, folded it and concealed it in the palm of her hand.
Jack Crome, she remembered now, had a reputation as a thorough-going libertine, changing women as other men changed shirts. Yet somehow that filled her with anticipation. Finding her purse, Laura put the note inside, feeling again deep in her loins the stirring of a basic sexual need.
Perhaps ... she hardly dared think it ... perhaps, too, Crome might represent a way to break the terrible money-hold Sid had on her. And Laura was now desperate enough to try anything.
For a moment she grew limp with desire, leaning against the desk. Then she straightened up, a half-smile forming secretively on her lips.
Fight back! she told herself. Fight back!
At a quarter to eight that evening. Laura was riding in a taxi along the lakefront highway leading south to the suburb of Lake Cliffs, and her private appointment with J. T. Crome.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Crome mansion, a dark, rambling Tudor house set far back on spacious and heavily-planted grounds, was situated on one of the winding lanes which the planners of the suburb of Lake Cliffs had laid out years earlier in an attempt to preserve the privacy and exclusivity of their estates. Gas lamps, a further affectation of their wealth, threw dim yellow flickers along the lane as the taxi drove through a high iron fence and up a circular drive, to stop beneath a portico.
Watching the taillights of the cab swing down the drive through the light snow which had begun to fall, Laura experienced a bitter pang of self-contempt. It was exactly as if she had been summoned like an expensive call-girl to this lonely, silent place. Turning up the collar of her coat, she stood for a moment in the darkness, trembling a little. She suppressed an impulse to run after the departing taxi. It was too late in any case. The cab had already vanished from sight.
As to what precise advantage she hoped to gain through association with Jack Crome, Laura did not exactly know. That she was going to this rendezvous with a calm, calculating mind she admitted, but how she would use the advantage she'd gained in stealing Cherry's note-that was a consideration she would have to worry about when she knew more of the situation.
Her heart beating heavily in her breasts, she touched the bell-knob.
Chimes rang and echoed in a distant part of the house.
A moment later the door opened. Inside stood a dour balding man in a black jacket and trousers. He stared at her in a bored manner. "Something, Miss?"
"I'm the ... the instructor from the Cole & Miranda studios," Laura forced a smile. "Mr. Crome telephoned earlier today. I believe he's expecting me."
"Ah, yes."
In the servant's eyes Laura saw the same knowing expression the cabbie had displayed. She struggled to ignore it as the dour man held the door open so that she could step into the luxurious foyer, thickly-carpeted and crowded with heavy, expensive furniture.
"Come this way, please."
Laura followed the black-clad man across the foyer, which conveyed an atmosphere of age, taste and wealth, an aura compounded of the dim lights, the armorial antiques lined on pedestals around the walls, and the mingled aromas of polished wood and thick velvet draperies.
The servant moved to the left, pulled double doors aside.
"The girl from the dance studio is here, Mr. Crome."
"Tell her to come in, please," responded a rich, rather husky voice.
Stepping into the book-lined library, Laura at first could not clearly make out the speaker, since he stood with his back to a massive fieldstone fireplace in which flames blazed and guttered scarlet. She paused awkwardly in the center of the room, her gaze lingering over the silver cart set up near an antique sideboard.
The shadow-man moved forward a pace. An immense fluted brandy snifter in his hand caught the firelight and gleamed.
"I believe that will be all for tonight, Mailers. If I should need you, I'll ring."
As if sensing her reluctance, Jack Crome moved forward so that his profile stood out in the firelight.
"May I help you with your things, dear?" His voice was warm, cultured.
"Yes, thanks."
Laura let Crome lift the heavy coat from her shoulders. He deposited it in an arm chair on the far side of the room. As he walked back toward her, Laura had a chance to study him.
Crome stood an inch or two over six feet. Although a bit on the stocky side, he seemed splendidly conditioned, his skin the burnished mahogany color of winters spent in Palm Springs or Nassau. His eyes, rather narrow and of a somewhat implacable gray color, swept Laura appraisingly. She felt them linger on the full, lush undersides of her breasts where her blouse fabric hugged tight.
Then the gaze dropped. Laura felt a twinge of excitement. Crane openly and frankly inspected her hips, her thighs, the almost-impudent upthrust of her buttocks with its tantalizing valley between the two soft mounds where the skirt was pulled taut by her slightly wide-legged stance.
Crome touched his sandy mustache, then smoothed a palm over his graying, crew-cut hair. A faint diamond-hard brilliance, which Laura took to be a glance of approval, shone in his eyes.
A moment later however, it was replaced by a look of speculation, followed by open astonishment.
"Just one moment," Crome said quietly. "Now that I think about it, I distinctly remember that the girl I called for ... the one who gave the lesson that time I was slightly, shall we say, incapacitated by alchohol ... was a blonde. You're not that girl at all." His voice hardened. "Perhaps you had better show me some credentials, Miss. I'm accustomed to receiving what I order, whether the item in question is a dinner or a woman."
"My name is Laura Grace, Mr. Crome. The other instructor, Miss Marple, was taken ill suddenly-"
"That's right, it was Miss Marple," Crome nodded, snapping his fingers gently.
He took Laura's business card which she had produced from the depths of her purse.
"I'll, you say?"
He faced her, a mocking shine in his lead-gray eyes, as though he did not quite believe her.
"Well, no matter. Your ... ah ... papers seem to be in order."
He raised the snifter, took a swallow, his eyes riveted to the deep cleft between Laura's full breasts, breasts which were rising and falling stridently. The fireplace generated an almost stifling heat. Again Laura felt indecent, and helplessly trapped. Crome set the snifter on the sideboard and all at once stepped forward so quickly she had no time to think of her plight.
Like a stock-breeder handling a piece of horseflesh, Crome caught Laura's skirt. He lifted and stared frankly at her stocking-tops, her garters and the hint of pantie-fabric revealed in the shadowed firelight. Then he dropped the hem and leaned back on the heels of his tasselled slippers, drawing a cigarette and ivory-holder from the pocket of his yellow silk hip-length dressing gown. "Excuse my suspicious nature, Miss Grace. Or may I call you Laura?"
"Please do," Laura said, smiling shakily. "I ... I wonder if I might possibly have a drink?"
"Certainly, forgive me." He gestured to the silver cart. "We also have dinner."
"No thank you. A ... a drink will be fine."
Crome bowed his head in acquiesence. He lifted a bottle of Mumm's from a silver bucket, poured a goblet and passed it to Laura, still appraising her with his flat gray eyes. She had the uncanny feeling that this man had seen and practiced almost every known vice, and that all of them had left him with his appetites intact and unquenched. Laura swallowed her champagne hastily, felt it instantly turn to a ball of warmth in her belly, driving some of the chill from her body. Crome resumed his conversation:
"It may sound rather silly-medieval, if you will-to insist upon seeing identification, my dear, but regrettably, when a man has a quantity of money, you'd be astounded at the tramps and charlatans constantly trying to gain his attention with one dishonest scheme after another. Just last week, for exa pie, a wretched little tart I met at a cocktail party down the Shore some months back came to see me with her lawyer. Paternity."
Crome snorted in derision.
"Fortunately, I had a witness. A friend of mine was present at the time. We had both enjoyed the charms of this particular little nonprofessional whore, so I was immediately relieved of the burden of responsibility."
Crome hesitated.
"You look shocked. Does the notion that two men in a single room can enjoy sexual intercourse with the same woman shock you? Ah, well. You don't know the halt of it, my dear, I have developed some rather unusual appetities, I must admit. When one has nothing to do but enjoy leisure, it takes genuine inventiveness to come up with something different." dome's hand, aglow with a massive diamond signet ring, stroked the soft flesh on the inner side of her wrist.
"I do hope you can divert me, sweet. I'm desperately in need of diversion lately. The same bodies, the same flat, dry little breasts-"
Crome stared at her hard Then he laughed loudly, enjoying her discomfiture.
Laura forced herself to stare calmly at the man, repelled yet fascinated.
"I'll try, Mr. Crome."
"Do call me Jack,' he said easily as he refilled her glass with the sparkling Mumm's. "Care to tell me a little about yourself? I feel we should become better acquainted before the-ah-lesson begins."
Unaccountably, Laura felt a laugh bubble to her lips.
She crossed the room and perched in a massive leather armchair, surprised at the feeling of giddy warmth coursing through her body.
"There's not a great deal to tell. Mr. Crome. I was born and raised in Genesee, I'm a dance instructor...."
Laura hesitated, then added:
"Unmarried and ... uninterested in marital ties. And very pleased that Miss Marple was taken ill. I suppose I shouldn't admit that. Still, it's not every teacher of dancing who has the chance to give lessons to the man who owns Cosmo Steel."
"Greed," Crome murmured, still mocking her. "Sooner or later it comes down to that-greed. No, don't speak. Don't try to defend yourself. I should be adult enough by this time to accept the fact that women are interested in me for one reason only. Why pretend? Honesty is a virtue. Although, my dear, I hope I can demonstrate before the evening is over that I have a certain facility with the techniques of love that make me an amiable partner in my own right. Certainly I feel sure I can satisfy you. I only trust that the reverse is also true."
Expertly he poured more champagne in Laura's glass. Hearing Crome talk of sex, she felt herself growing warm, her head bubbling lightly with the effect of the sparkling wine.
He crossed the room, lifted a polished oak panel and twisted two dials. A small red bulb glowed. A moment later a built-in sterophonic system began to pour the frantic, insistent beat of a mambo into the firelit library. Crome took Laura's hand, caressing her palm with his fingers.
"I should like to watch an exhibition of your skill. Would you care to dance for me?"
Laura leaned forward, ran the tip of her tongue over his ear.
"I'd love to dance for you, Jack."
Crome laughed again, a rich, satisfied sound, and settled himself in an armchair by the fire. Now the swift, intoxicating rhythms of the bongos and congas filling the room infected Laura, set her body to swaying. With slow, langourous motions she reached up and loosened the clip which held her dark hair in place.
It cascaded around her shoulders, shining with highlights.
Then she moved her legs apart so that the skirt pulled drum-taut across the round curvatures of her fleshy upper thighs. Slowly, slowly, she began to rotate her hips from side to side.
As she began to unbutton her blouse, staring into the shadows where Crome sat, daring him not to be aroused, Laura felt her own desire quickening with hot, livid jets of passion.
Again the desperate, lost voice inside her bobbed: You're selling yourself, just like with Sid....
But the wine had made her defiant, a heated, wanton thing, and she cried back in her mind:
At least I'm selling myself high!
And then she forgot scruples as the last button came open.
She shrugged out of the blouse, let it fall while she unzippered her skirt and stepped from that also.
Crome reached out, turning up the music volume until the drumbeats became a physical thing, invading Laura's body, making her throb with each primitive, hammering vibration of sound.
Her hips began to move faster, writhing from side to side like wild things.
She tore the slip up over her head, flung it aside.
The bonds of her brassiere had become painful, too tight and binding. She reached to the back, struggled with the hooks, then ripped when they would not loosen.
Her breasts fell free, proud and firm, bathed by the hot caress of the fire's warmth.
Laura closed her eyes, intoxicated now, drunk with the champagne. She put both her hands to the hair at the back of her neck, swept it upward in a pile, held it there.
Wickedly, she widened her stance and thrust her belly forward, rotating it.
The music increased to thunderous proportions.
Suddenly Laura felt that she was being taken over by the rhythm, whipped by it, aroused until some giddy climax was approaching even as she swayed and twisted in the firelight.
The confines of her panties, stifling the life quivering now in her ivory hips, became unbearable.
Rolling her palms down along her silky thighs, she pushed the upper edges of the material downward, slowly downward while her hips snapped back and forth.
Like a white ivory eye her navel was exposed.
Then the plane of her lower abdomen coated scarlet by the licking tongue of the fire's glow.
Twin sensuous gorges, soft and scarlet now, plunged downward to shadow as she rolled the panties free of her hips and let them fall to the floor.
There was a muffled crash.
Crome dropped the brandy snifter Laura advanced a step, whimpering, clasping her breasts like ripe fruits, holding them up and out. offering them to Crome while the soft roseate tips grew hard in the lava-hot caress of the flames.
The music thundered, roared, made her demented, started a spasm in her that she knew she could not control. Unbidden, a low shriek of pleasure escaped her lips.
She fell back, stumbling, lying on the carpet, her arms upraised.
Her hips writhed with a life of their own, hammering the carpet, rising, falling, grinding into the nap, trying to find fulfillment but receiving none.
Blindly, drunkenly, eyes closed, she threw her arms wider, crying out:
"Where are? Oh, God, where are you, Jack? Don't make me wait ... please, have me now!"
A drunken laugh sounded. Hands brushed her flesh.
"I'll have you, damn you, you exciting black-haired bitch!"
Then she was conscious of Crome's hands under her nude back, under her spasmodic legs, lifting and carrying her into darkness.
She felt a touch of cool bedding. Then her own love-hot body transformed it to steaming sheets of metal as the torment, the storm, the need for climax swept over her in ever-mounting fury.
In the dark Crome's iron-hard naked body came to her. His hands and ruthless mouth abused her cruelly, yet it only stoked her desire.
"Scream, damn your lovely soul," Crome panted. 'Come on, lovely, bite me and scream!"
Her living, aroused hips were lifted and wrenched and tortured by a last love-wracked spasm of desire, and she screamed with pleasure too great to bear, screamed screamed, screamed ... until at last she fainted.
Three times more during the long night Crome awakened the drowsing Laura, nuzzling her gently at first, planting soft kisses on her throat and under-breasts, and each time miraculously, his caresses soon brought her to a pitch of frenzy she had never known before. Each time he lifted her to such heights of impossible, soul-searing ecstasy that she thought her body would explode with the agonized love-pressures it felt as, slowly, slowly, he led her up peak after peak of desire, making her caress him wantonly until he was ready again to take her still again. Her thoughts became a dazed, whirling red-lit holocaust of physical ecstasy that left her battered, ripped inwardly, assaulted and violated with every sort of depraved caress, but still she craved more, more, in an insatiable urge to glut appetites which she had never known herself to possess Crome laughed with pleasure as he manipulated and manhandled her to impossible frenzies and extremes of indecency, until at last pure physical exhaustion claimed her in the chill light of dawn and she struggled away from him, falling over the side of the bed. lying with her abused, satiated, throbbing legs sprawled wide, her numbed hands pressing at her rounded, love-wracked breasts, her cheeks raw with salt tears and pressure of his caresses. In a delirium of ecstasy half-way between purest pleasure and vilest pain she thought numbly of her own behavior during the last few hours, the indescribable wantonness of it, and with a shudder of fright that convulsed her whole body like a last delicious climax, she fainted again.
Through the chill, empty streets of Genesee, Jack Crome's chauffeured Rolls Royce bore her homeward at a quarter past six in the morning.
Laura had felt a need to escape, although Crome had asked her to remain for breakfast. Leaving his house, she had decided his request was mere politeness, sensing somehow that he was through with her, that he had used her to his full satisfaction and now wanted to be rid of her. They had spoken only a few words before she departed, Crome making some vague promise about sending her a present.
Wearily she staggered toward the bedroom door, dragging her coat.
And then sickness and nausea swept over her, making her bite her knuckles to the bone.
There, in her bed, panting and snuffling while Sid's back rose and fell jerkily over her, lay a woman, a woman with kicking legs, squealing and crying out to the man on her.
It was Cherry Marple.
CHAPTER NINE
For a long, ghastly moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Laura stared at the two figures on the tangled bed, their bodies rising and falling in a jerky, piston-like rhythm, washed a pale, lewd gray by the dawn radiance coming through the adjacent window.
Sid's naked back, bowed with lust, made Laura think suddenly of the kitchenette, of carving-knife blades nestled in neat compartments. During one hysterical instant the carnal scene before her faded, to be replaced by a distorted vision of one of those blades plunging hilt-deep into Sid's shoulder blades.
Laura sagged weakly against the door frame, recoiling, suppressing the nausea which welled up in her throat.
Then, dully, she grew conscious of sounds which her shocked brain had not previously admitted to her startled senses. The torment of what she saw and heard mounted second after second as she watched from the shadows, her eyes rounded with horror, her teeth biting deep into her lips to suppress a scream.
The two bodies heaved, twisted like intertwined sculpture in some nightmarish work of art.
Sid braced his palms on the sheets, shaking his head dazedly, drawing away while Cherry moaned and pressured her hips deep into the bed, shifting from side to side, her cheeks raw and smeared with lipstick, her eyes closed, her forehead shining with perspiration.
With a low chuckle of pleasure Sid eased himself away from Cherry, who moaned faintly in exhausted protest.
"A smoke, baby," Sid said throatily. "Lord, you take enough loving up for seven women."
He stabbed a hand at the bedside table, fumbling after a pack of cigarettes. Accidentally he knocked the pack to the carpet, cursed, leaned down to get it. In that instant, grotesquely, Sid was looking toward the bedroom door, his head cocked sideways.
Suddenly he saw Laura's legs in the shadows.
His head snapped up, going pale.
He flung himself off the bed.
"Laura? For God's sake-"
Sid ran a hand through his tangled hair, astonished, confused for a moment.
Then his face began to darken, turn the blood-purple of anger.
Snarling, he jerked at the edge of the sheet, pulling it up over Cherry's sprawled form.
"Cover yourself, Cherry."
Sid took a threatening step forward.
"What the hell are you? Some kind of lousy peeper that gets kicks out of watching?"
His fury mounted by the second, even as Cherry mumbled questions at him and tried to waken herself.
Laura retreated a step, aware that black tides of anger were taking control of Sid, making his naked shoulder muscles throb with fury as he stalked toward her. Sid spat his words like bullets:
"You walk in here after being out God knows where all night, you've got to expect to see something that isn't very pretty. Now shut the damned door until I can get some clothes on this broad and get her out of here. Laura! You do what I tell you, damn it. I'll settle with you, I promise, you'll pay for this!"
Numb, near to hysteria, Laura found herself laughing.
"You? You'll settle with me, Sid? You'll pay me? When you're the one caught-oh, God, that's wonderful, that truly is! Acting as though I'm the guilty one!"
Abruptly Laura's hysterical laughter changed to a mindless fury that shook her, make her sob:
"You unspeakable-you filthy, deceitful, obscene-"
The sound of Laura's voice made Cherry Marple come suddenly awake.
Cherry pressed both fists to her cheeks and screamed.
"Get her out of here, Sid! Get the bitch out of here! Get her out, get her out, get her out!"
Like a madwoman, Cherry screamed and screamed, until the sound drove like a knife into Laura's brain, breaking her immobility, making her turn and run blindly from the apartment, pressing her head to drown the sound of Cherry's echoing screams, her incredibly foul profanity.
Somehow Laura managed to reach the street without fainting.
The crisp morning air revived her a little. Hugging her coat around her, she began to run, seeing nothing, knowing only that she had to escape.
She ran for two blocks, trailed by the demon sound of Cherry's shrieking. Then she saw a yellow blur beside the curb.
In another moment she struggled inside the taxi, leaning back. Her outraged, tortured mind reached desperately for the only hold on sanity which it could think of at the moment. She heard herself mutter weakly:
"Lake Cliffs. Just drive to Lake Cliffs, as fast as you can. I'll give you the address in a minute."
And then she collapsed against the leather, fighting back the sobs that twisted her body in one convulsion after another.
The taxi shot away from the white snow-glare of the lakefront highway.
CHAPTER TEN
The fire in the library had nearly died, leaving only a few embers still burning dull red.
Laura paced frantically, drawing deeply on a cigarette in an attempt to gain control of her shaken nerves. She knew she was acting the cheap fool, coming back to Crome this way, yet the events of the past hour had literally forced her to seek human companionship, seek a sign that her world was not totally destroyed.
Fleetingly Vic O'Keefe's face swam in her mind, filling her with bitter longing. Then it was blotted away by the click of the library door.
Laura threw her cigarette into the fireplace and swung around. Jack Crome stood there, clad in a high-collared yellow silk robe of Oriental cut, a curious mixture of puzzlement and anger on his mahogany-tanned face.
A low cry came from Laura's lips. "Jack-oh God."
And then, almost without volition, she was running to him across the library, flinging herself against him, locking her arms around his neck, pressing her trembling body against his warmth, she could feel pulsing beneath the thin silk of the robe.
Hysteria swept over her again, making her sob:
"Please, Jack, hold me for a moment. Hold me. Something terrible's happened. I had to come back here. I had nowhere else to go."
"Why you came back is eminently clear."
Crome looked down at her, stroking her hair absently.
"Very well, Laura. I'll give you what you so obviously want. But with it, my dear, a lesson."
Shocked. Laura tried to break free of his tight embrace.
"No, you don't understand, that's not-"
"Your eyes tell quite a different story."
Crome pulled her hips tight against him.
"This has happened before, dear. Women crawling back to me to beg for just one more drink at the well."
Suddenly he knotted his fist in her hair, snapped her head back.
"Don't snivel to me, dear. I'm not the least interested in your cheap little personal problems. I wish to make just one thing clear. You are by no means the first woman who's turned up here this way, nor will you be the last. But my dear, as I think I told you, I despise parasites. I despise women who try to clutch on to me like vultures picking at a bit of carrion meat. I refuse to be held in such fashion, victimized by tawdry little desires. So I'm going to give you what you want, dear But it will be the last time. You're boring me. And if you should try to bore me again, I might grow exceedingly angry."
Crome's face swam over her, the lead-colored eyes harsh.
"And when I become angry, dear, I can hurt."
Fiercely, brutally, his mouth ground against hers.
Laura's lips opened, unbidden, her tongue responding in desperate need. Then, with a guilty little cry of realization, she tried to twist away.
"Oh, God, Jack, you're making a mistake-I didn't come to have you make love to-"
But, helplessly, Laura knew it was too late. Crome had already interpreted her actions in terms of the behavior of women who had tried to attach themselves to him, to his wealth, in the past.
Weakness overcame her. Her legs turned watery, making her fall against Crome, feel the sudden cruel virility of his body.
Numbly she realized his hands were unfastening her skirt even as he laughed flatly in her ear.
Laura tried to raise her fists to strike him but her strength had ebbed. She hung in his arms while he unfastened her brassiere, slid her panties down over her legs, lifted and carried her to a long, oversized divan in the corner.
Crome's mouth muffled her, vicious in its caress.
"Don't!"
Laura cried feebly, her back chill against the leather. "Don't, not yet, you're hurting-"
But again it was too late, again Crome's superbly-conditioned body mastered her.
The library whirled and tilted.
An ember popped faintly.
Laura anew he had taken her.
But there was no affection in his love-making, only swift, capable, practiced effort. He completed the act just as she felt the first primitive stir of her own desire. She whimpered to him.
"Oh, God, you can't leave me like this-you hurt me-you didn't finish-oh, Jack! For sweet God's sake! Do it again! Let me finish!"
"Get out, whore."
Crome's voice, amused, came from a vast distance. "I gave you what you wanted. Now get out. I don't want to have to look at your greedy little face again."
The library door slammed, echoing with a distant finality.
Moaning softly, Laura over and opened her eyes.
As consciousness returned, a hundred different spots upon her body began to ache with pain.
In the name of God, what was happening to her?
Was there no peace, no release from the torture her life had suddenly become?
Cupping her outraged breasts into the confines of her brassiere, she managed to dress and leave the library, crossing the foyer and stepping outside under the portico.
The sun on the snow burst against her eyes, blinding. Weakly she began to stagger down the drive. One thought was uppermost in her mind now, making her tremble with fear. She had no alternative since that Crome had discarded her like a used toy. She forced her legs to move, to carry her along the narrow lane to the small shopping center three blocks away, where a taxi stood at the stand in the frosty morning light.
Opening the apartment door, Laura listened. Silence.
With a sigh of relief she stepped inside. Then, horribly, she knew she had made a mistake. A lurching shape came at her out of the gloom. Laura recoiled against the wall, terrified out of her wits.
The shape pulled a cord with a sharp racheting sound, Venetian blinds spilled tiger-bars of light onto Sid Hardy's naked frame.
He glowered at her. One hand was tightly clasped around a highball glass containing half a tumbler of uncut bourbon.
Frantically Laura turned and struggled to get hold of the door knob.
Sid was almost blind drunk, but he moved swiftly, dropping the glass with a crash, snatching her wrist, throwing her across the tiny living room. He pushed at her shoulders so that she fell into the bedroom and dropped to the carpet in a crumpled heap.
Sid came after her, kicking the door shut with his naked heel. Some of the bourbon from the spilled glass had trickled down his hairy calf, making him reek with liquor..
Trapped, Laura stared up at him from her sprawled crouch on the floor. The collar of her blouse had fallen open, revealing the fast rise-and-fall pulse of the deep, alluring cleft between her full breasts. Her skirt had twisted high on her hips, exposing her tapered thighs with their silky roundness clad in nylon and held fast by her garters.
A lopsided smile warped Sid's face into ugly lines.
"Back? Back, huh? After what you saw and heard? I knew you'd come."
Laura tried to rise, fell back, weakened.
"Sid, let me talk. We can-can straighten it out. I'll forget what I saw, I'll forget everything. Just-let me stay here, let me rest. Sid, I'm hurt. I'm tired and I'm so hurt I can hardly move."
Even as she spoke, some deep inner recess of reason mocked Laura's pleading, told her that she well knew she was making a terrible move, begging Sid this way, placing herself firmly in his power once again. Yet the shattering experience of Crome's abuse of her body had so wounded her already-shocked mind that she could think of nothing else except the security, ghastly sham though it was, which Sid represented.
With a mouth from which the lipstick had been smeared. Laura implored:
"Help me, Sid. Help me up. Don't just let me lie here, Sid-"
"You've come back?" Sid repeated drunkenly. "You mean it? Come back because you can't stay away from me? Come back for some of Sid's loving?"
"Sid, help me!" Laura shrieked softly. "I'll do anything you say-just, just help me, Sid!"
Raw black fury ridged Sid's brow.
"You're damned right you'll do what I say."
Abruptly he dropped to his knees. His hair was matted on his forehead. A crooked smile of drunken pleasure and vindication cracked his mouth.
Laura tried to crawl away from him across the rug, sensing his intent.
Sid snared her wrist, held her while one of his hands whipped across her cheek, whipped again, then again.
Jolted, Laura began to cry helplessly. Sid crouched beside her, his voice low, ugly: "I'll teach you to spy on me, Laura. I'll teach you to run out, to think you're some high-class broad who can pay her own way. Well, you can't, and I'm going to make you remember it. There's only one way a broad like you can pay her way, Laura. That's by spreading them."
Sid slapped her twice more. Skyrockets of pain exploded in her head.
"You're mine, baby. Every inch. Your legs, your belly, your big round tits. I pay the bills so I get you when I want, as often as I want, and you're going to spread when I say spread, baby, from now on."
Sid's voice mounted in drunken fury.
"I bought you, Laurie baby. I own you, like a piece of goods."
Once more his hand cut across her cheek, jarring her with agony. "Whenever Sid wants it, he gets it, baby. When Sid says jump, you jump!"
Laura screamed feebly as Sid twisted her elbow, forced her up, made her sprawl over the bed, her arms across her eyes trying to shield the sight of his blurred, fury-ridden face.
His hands caught the waistband of her skirt and tore her slip and skirt in half.
Then she felt her garter-belt ripped away, her nylons shredded. Vainly she tried to hold her hands over her heaving belly so that Sid could not get at her.
"Let go!" Sid cursed, nails biting into her wrist. "That's mine, too, baby, and when I say I want it, I get it!"
With two vicious rips Sid tore away the fabric of her panties and flung the bits of lace off to a corner.
Then, with a burst of breath, he flung himself down beside her, caugh? her chin in both his hands and forced her lips apart, digging his teeth into her lower lip, pawing and mauling her.
In a detached, distant part of her mind, Laura knew hysterically that Sid was going to rape her, that it would be rape because she was too beaten and bruised to make it anything else.
Sid's voice roared at her, proclaiming his power:
"Ready, doll? Ready for me? I don't give a damn whether you are or not, because I'm going to take it, because I own it, get me? Don't ever forget-I own this. I'm taking it-now!"
With a shriek of agony that nearly burst her brain. Laura felt Sid mount and violate her.
At last the cruel frenzy of his attack, the steadily increasing bursts of pain, became so unbearable that Laura's mind could stand them no longer.
Like a blessed balm, darkness claimed her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An odd, almost thoughtful expression crossed Sid's face.
He climbed slowly from his swivel chair, rounded the desk and shut the office door with a gentle clicking noise. The rhythm of a Strauss waltz blaring tinnily from one of the studios dropped to a low murmur.
Sid looked haggard. Large dark circles underscored his eye sockets. Laura experienced a savage twinge of fright. She was afraid Sid might lunge for her again, repeat the brutal rape of a few hours earlier.
Instead he opened a small wooden cigarette box on his desk, spiked one into the corner of his mouth, held out the box then snapped its lid shut when Laura's dark hair bobbed negatively. He indicated a chair beside the desk.
"Sit down, Laurie."
Sid's voice seemed strained.
"I imagine you feel pretty lousy now."
"How I feel has nothing to do with my question, Sid, except indirectly. If you don't mind I prefer standing. There's hardly any use pretending that any shred of politeness exists between us, is there? I mean, not after this morning. Not after you tore every stitch of my clothing to pieces and then made me receive you when I didn't-"
Putting one hand to her cheek, Laura bit her lip. She was unable to continue, shaken with memory.
A light sigh of resignation escaped Sid's lips.
The swivel chair squeaked as he sat down and stared at the smoking end of his cigarette.
"First of all, kid, you know I was drunk. Blind up to here."
He chopped the edge of his hand across his neck.
"For that-well, I don't exactly apologize, because i don't think I have anything to apologize for, but at least it explains why-"
Laura had turned a livid white.
"Apologize? So you think all you have to do is mumble a few sugary words about being sorry you raped me, and that will take care of everything?"
"I didn't-rape you," Sid said, stumbling on the word. "I was just trying to show you-"
"You raped me," Laura repeated. "You raped me.
Sid."
"Well, by God, you had it coming!"
Sid's eyes flared with anger and possessiveness as he leaped up and came toward her.
"Don't worry. I'm not drunk now. In fact I've got one hell of a swollen head. And I don't remember exactly what I told you when I did-what you say I did, but I do remember something about your belonging to me. That still goes, kid."
He stabbed his cigarette at her for emphasis. Somewhere the Strauss waltz swelled up with false, frenetic gaiety.
"But get this straight, Laurie. I'm sorry for the way I taught you the lesson I needed. Oh, yeah, I'll bet that surprises you, doesn't it? Sid Hardy being sorry for anything. Well, I'm a human being, believe it or not. Once in a while I get sorry about something, and that-rape-is something I'm sorry about. If you hadn't burst in on the bedroom earlier, I wouldn't have started drinking. But you really threw me a curve. I was wild, and I mean wild. After I kicked Cherry out, all I could think about was how sore I was. I started socking away the bourbon."
Sid tried a smile that pleaded for understanding. Laura continued to stare stonily at him. The smile left Sid's lips.
"So now I've said my piece about being sorry for the way I treated you. But baby, you've got to face it."
Now little mocking black lights began to burn again in the depths of his eyes.
"We have an arrangement. Under that arrangement you're my property. Maybe putting it that way assaults your delicate senses, but that's the way it is. I call the tunes around this joint. And you deserved to get slapped down, doll. You did something very wrong. Jack Crome was Cherry's cup of tea. Not yours. You made your mistake pinching that note from the desk. Why you did it doesn't interest me very much. Just the fact that you stepped out of line. You should have kept hands off."
Trapped, flushed with guilt, Laura tried to brazen it out.
"Note? What are you talking about?"
"Don't give me that bullcrap! You went to Crome's house, and if I know Crome, you didn't give him any dancing lessons. You let him have you. Didn't you, Laurie baby."
Words clogged Laura's tongue, Sid gripped her wrist, his fingers probing, holding viciously.
"Didn't you, doll? You went to Crome's in Cherry's place? And let him lay hell out of you?"
"What if I did, damn it?" Laura sobbed, tears welling at the corners of her eyes, tears of shame and humiliation that she tried to fight back. "Since we're getting down to an animal level, I went to Crome because you wouldn't give me what I needed. Because you looked at me like I was invisible. I tried to plead with you but yau were too interested in Sophie Thyssen."
Laura leaned forward, tense, her voice taking on a shrill note.
"I went to Crome because a normal woman needs sex, Sid. You wouldn't give it to me."
"No other reason?" Sid mocked. "Sure Jack Crome's financial status had nothing to do with it?" .
Laura struck at him with balled fists.
"You filthy-"
Laughing harshly, Sid gripped her forearms. Helplessly Laura found herself collapsing into a chair while Sid planted his fists on his hips and grinned crookedly at her. All at once she knew he had seen through her pretense, seen that he had hit the truth. Her cheeks burned scarlet. "What's that line, baby? Methinks the lady doth protest too much? That's supposed to mean when you say no too strongly, you really mean yes."
Abruptly Sid slammed a fist on the desk. "Damn it, doll, you can't seem to get through your pretty head that I don't care how many times Crome had you. That's not the point. The point is, you double-crossed my setup in the studio."
"You don't care?" Emptily Laura shook her head "That makes me feel wonderful, Sid."
Now it was Sid Hardy's turn to display a humiliated, lobster-pink color. He rubbed at his faintly bluish chin and grinned mawkishly.
"To that, doll, all I can answer, is, how in hell can I expect you to believe I'm jealous of you fooling around in Crome's bed, when there's that other old line-as long as I'm being so damned literary tonight-about people in glass houses? I've got a couple of beauts myself. You saw one of them this morning. Hell, what can I say when you caught me pounding hell out of Cherry?"
"Ah."
Laura let out the syllable as a low, relieved murmur. She stood up, facing him, trying to draw on her nearly-depleted inner reserves of strength.
"At last I see the strategy, Sid. Forgive and forget, is that it? Because we're both equally guilty? Well, I'm sorry to tell you I can't do that. I won't apologize for what I did. I'm fool enough to think that just because I live with you, it doesn't mean I'm a piece of furniture. I've got feelings. Maybe a whore isn't supposed to have feelings. But I have them, Sid. .And I can't escape the thought that what's happened between us is the fault of one person alone. You."
"Damn it, don't go throwing accusations at me," Sid shouted. "I said I was sorry, didn't I?"
"Sorry for what? Sony because I caught you loving up Cherry? I don't care whether you're sorry about that or not. I don't give a damn about that, Sid."
Laura's temper was rising uncontrollably now.
"What I care about is whether you're sorry you've acted like a cheap hustler, manipulating people-me, Cherry, Mrs. Thyssen-just to satisfy your own greedy, grasping-"
Sid's finger shook warningly.
"You've said enough, baby. Knock it off."
"The hell I will!"
Laura stamped her pump angrily on the floor. "You'll lie, cheat-"
"You're a swell one to talk!" Sid shouted back. '"Stealing that note off the desk! A common sneak-thief! "
"Don't you ever think of anything except your own disgusting greed?" Laura blazed.
Sid stifled mock laughter.
"Few lecturing me about greed? When I picked you up behind a dime store counter-bought you, like something off a store shelf? Don't talk to me about greed. Not when you sell yourself. Not when you're the kind of broad who puts herself up to the highest bidder. The kind of broad who'd take bids on what she's got down there. Not when you'll give that hot little pelt of yours to whoever's got the biggest bankroll...."
Like a gunshot, the sound of Laura's palm against Sid's cheek racketed in the stuffy office.
Sid took a step backward.
He touched his cheek in disbelief.
Then murderous fury invaded his dark eyes. Laura's own rage rose now, made her tremble with shame and degradation; brought raw tears to her eyes; made her grind her balled fists against her hips; made her full breasts push out against her sweater in an agony of sharp-tipped tension. "Damn you, Sid! Did you ever stop to think that maybe I'm getting sick of being a whore? Sick of selling myself to you or anybody else? Do you think a whore can't wake up to the fact that she is a whore, and want to do something about it? Somehow you just can't understand that, can you Sid? You can't understand how I could finally begin to realize that I've been making myself as cheap, as low, as a human being can get. That I want to do something about it. You can't understand how I could look at myself in a mirror and get sick to my guts with what I see there? No, you can't, Sid, because you're worse than I am, you're so rotten you stink oj greed and corruption, you're beyond help-"
Laura was screaming now, the words pouring out in a torrent.
"You're dirty and rotten. I know you don't give a damn about me any more, that I'm just what you say-a piece oj goods, ready whenever you want it. So that gives you license to behave like an alley cat, doesn't it, Sid?"
Suddenly Laura's voice dropped low, dangerously low, choked with sobbing:
"What happened with Cherry? Did she ask you to get her lined up with Crome again? Did she persuade you to intercede, call me off, by doing what you two were doing this morning? Well, it's too late for that!"
Now Laura's voice shrilled out again, while Sid stared, half-furious, half-astonished.
"Too late, Sid! If I'm a thief, a cheat, a greedy whore-ok, you dirty bastard-it's because I've had an expert teacher!"
Sid moved jerkily forward. His hand came up in rage.
The office door crashed open.
"Sid honey, ' Cherry Marple said as she entered, "do you want to get Buckmaster's Lifetime presentation book ready now, because he's due here for his lesson in a couple of-"
Rounded-eyed, Cherry stopped.
Her heavily-lipsticked mouth formed a fruity o of surprise. Halfway into the room, she thrust out one leg arrogantly and cocked her full hips. A glitter of contempt flicked in her eyes. Making an elaborate show of casualness, she glanced down at the protruding swelling of her overripe breasts mounding beneath her dress. She flicked absently at the nipple region of her left one, vastly amused.
'Well! Pardon me, dear. I didn't mean to interrupt anything in the way of a family quarrel."
Venomously Cherry glanced up.
"Or are you still part of the family any more, honey? Maybe I've taken over."
Laura's voice was low, razorish, deadly:
"Get out of here, you cheap tramp."
"Tramp?"
Cherry's eyes burned with controlled fury.
"I haven't been spreading for Jack Crome. dear. What I do in bed is strictly for kicks. So don't go calling me a tramp. I might use a few choice words of my own."
Cherry paused.
"Like thief. Appropriate?"
"I warn you, Cherry...." Laura said tensely, on the border of hysteria now, unable to keep a check rein on the lash of her temper.
"I warn you," she repeated. "Don't get in my way This is between Sid and me. I saw you this morning, rolling and panting like a bitch dog with Sid, and I know just what you were trying to do-get Sid to fix it up so you could go to Crome instead of me. Well, it won't work! Because I've got Jack Crome tied up tight He-he wouldn't even sniff a common piece of garbage like you any more. So go try your tricks on a dirty old man like Buckmaster. Go rub your dirty body up against him and see if he'll give you ten cents for a-"
'Bitch!'" Red with rage, Cherry Marple screamed and swung her palms against Laura's face.
Recoiling, a curious smile touched Laura's lips.
"You'll pay for that." And before Cherry could react, Laura leaped.
All the pent-up fury of the past few days broke loose in one flood of rage and hurting fury. Laura's hands formed into claws, cruelly raking Cherry's face.
Then Cherry's own anger took over. She slapped Laura viciously again. With a yell. Sid tried to separate them, but it was futile. Laura was infected now with a near-superhuman anger, a blind rage that made Cherry Marple the object of all her difficulties.
Like a tigress defending herself, Laura fought, seizing fistfuls of Cherry's hair, scratching and clawing like a wild thing. Cherry's mouth twisted with obscenity after obscenity as she struggled, her hands finding purchase in Laura's sweater, pulling. There was a sharp tearing of fabric.
Suddenly Laura felt a new, almost alcoholic burst of power. She leaped full against Cherry, slamming her to the floor.
Laura's skirt twisted up over her hips, giving her room to kneel over the kicking, struggling blonde.
Viciously Cherry Marple sank her teeth into the soft flesh above Laura's nylon, leaving an ugly lipstick-mark.
Laura shrieked and began to tear Cherry's clothing, ripping and mauling in her fury.
Bits of slip and brassiere flew up as Cherry, a wounded she-cat, bit cruelly into Laura's inner thigh again, making her scream.
In return Laura felt her own teeth cruel and sharp on the soft underslung surface of Cherry's right breast.
Cherry went rigid, eyes closed, fists beating on the floor, making tight agonized little moans of pain.
Laura felt hard hands on her shoulder, brutally wrenching lis: up.
Sid sp i her around, slapped her.
"Get control of yourself! Cherry, damn you, get up and pull yourself together. Someone just came into the reception room, probably Buckmaster."
Sid hauled Cherry to her feet while the latter stood caressing her own breast, rubbing and stroking it, glaring at Laura with murder in her eyes. Sid shook Cherry until her head snapped back and forth.
"Hear me, Cherry? I run this joint! You do what I say! Get your clothes together and go take care of Buckmaster!"
"Not until I get my hands on her," Cherry hissed. "I'll tear those pretty boobs of hers to pieces...."
Once more Sid's hand crashed against her jaw.
"No you won't, God damn it! I won't have this place wrecked by either of you. Now move!"
Harshly he shoved Cherry forward to the office door, then started after her. With a depraved oath Cherry pushed her blonde hair back out of her eyes and staggered from the office, fumbling with her clothing as she went.
Sid started to follow, then turned, one hand on the doorway. His eyes shone black with inner fury as he stared at a disheveled Laura who stood with one nyloned leg up on a chair, rubbing her bitten leg.
"Laura, you clear out, understand? Get out, go home. Don't let me see you around here again tonight."
It was the old Sid now, harsh, demanding, brooking no disobedience.
"Don't let me see you around here causing any more trouble tonight. We'll finish what we started tonight. I promise you that. But not now."
Sid's shoulders were shaking with anger. His voice dropped to a growl and his shadowed, haggard eye sockets stood out like twin botomless holes in his face, welling with rage.
"Not now," he repeated, "I-I couldn't promise that I wouldn't-come close to killing you." And with a last, spat-out epithet of frustrated anger, he slammed the door so hard the glass vibrated.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Walking beneath the massive flickering neon sign, Laura noticed that the cocktail lounge was called The Dream Tap. Somehow she had never been aware of it before, even in its proximity to the dance studio.
But perhaps that was because liquor, in the past, had been merely a pleasant commodity which money could purchase, an appurtenance of the kind of life she had craved since her earliest poverty-grim years here in Genesee.
Tonight, though, the thought of a drink had an almost overpowering effect.
She hurried inside, oblivious of the stares of two men sitting at the upper end of the bar.
The Dream Tap was tastefully decorated in dark leathers, with muted blue lights along the back bar. The few customers present seemed no more than vague shadows to Laura as she sank onto a chromium stool leaned wearily on the rail and waited for the bartender.
He came trundling heavily up, putting aside his glass-polishing rag to stare with open lust at the ripe firmness of her breasts, which moved up and down restlessly in tune with her broken breathing.
Avoiding his gaze, still feeling the aches Cherry had inflicted on her, Laura fumbled with a cigarette. "Bring me a bourbon, please. A double. On the rocks."
"No mix?"
The bartender's eyebrows elevated. "A double, neat, is pretty strong medicine for a lady."
"Thank you for lying and saying I'm a lady," Laura told him with bleary bitterness.
The bartender licked his lips, eyeing her breast-tips again. Then he shrugged and moved away to lift a bottle from the backbar.
Laura lighted her cigarette, rested her elbows on the hard security of the bar's edge slowly felt her nerves settle into some semblance of control.
As she smoked she grew aware of a jukebox to the rear of the lounge, multicolored, pouring out a soft torrent of music. The instrumental number had a sentimental tone, with strings sighing gently of love and emotion. Listening to the music, letting it suffuse her, Laura's mouth quirked with bitterness again. When the bourbon arrived she threw down a bill, then tilted the glass and let the liquor's raw warmth explode like a series of bombs in her belly.
A moment later, however, she felt a creeping sense of ease begin to glide along her limbs.
II you just get drunk enough, she thought hollowly, that will wipe it all out.
Forget it.
Wipe it out.
Drown it.
"Laura? It is you! What in the name of God are you doing, drinking that stuff that way?"
The thought entered Laura's head that somehow she had lost her mind, slipped over the brink of insanity into some limbo of hallucination.
She hardly dared turn. She knew the speaker would not be there, that he existed somehow only in her agonized mind. Yet she forced her head around. "Oh, God," she sobbed softly. "Vic!"
She swayed, nearly falling from the stool.
Her hands reached out automatically, catching his aim for support. And as her nails touched the tweed of his coat, she knew, miraculously, that he was real, that he had emerged from the faceless group of customers at the rear of the bar, just at the desperate moment when she needed him most.
Vic wore an embarrassed, almost guilty expression as he slid onto the stool next to hers, one hand still holding her forearm, the other gliding expertly to her waist to steady her.
Gradually the dizziness left. She patted hurriedly at her mussed hair and tried to smile.
"I might ask you the same question," she said, making a poor attempt at bantering. "I seem to remember we met somewhere once. The seat of a car, wasn't it?"
Vic's face, blue-lit by the back bar lights, was strained and grim.
"Don't joke, Laura. What's happened? There's a look in your eyes that's-terrible."
Laura shrugged, raised her bourbon glass absently.
Firmly Vic took hold of it and returned it to the bar.
"That won't help. Whatever's wrong, you can't wipe it out with a bottle."
"Then how can you wipe it out?"
Laura searched his face, trying to read his thoughts.
"First we have to localize the difficulty."
Vic, also feebly attempted light conversation. The effort failed miserably. He shook his head.
"What can I say, Laura? After that first night when something started for us-it hasn't been the same for me."
Again guilt shone in his expression. "But I haven't gotten in touch with you, have I?"
"No. Two lessons. I could name the hour, the minute of each."
"Did it mean that much to you? It did to me, but-"
"Yes, Vic," she said to him, from the very depth of her loneliness and longing. "It did."
"Is that why-"
One of his big, capable hands indicated her glass.
"The drinking?"
"No."
Laura shook her head. Then, impulsive, she added:
"No, darling, that isn't the reason for it. But Vic-please don't ask me to explain why I'm here, or what happened."
Her gaze met his, locked and held.
"Vic, I fell in love with you that night. Why should I lie to you? Maybe-maybe you're married. Maybe you don't care about me. But it's been like pain inside me ever since, the wanting you to come back, the hoping you'd call or stop in the studio."
Vic met her gaze searchingly. Suddenly Laura was shamed by her outspoken behavior. Studying the tip of her cigarette, site once more summoned a last reserve of strength and forced a smile.
"But you haven't explained something to me. What are you doing here, just a few doors from the studio? I couldn't believe it when you spoke to me a minute ago. You don't live near here, do you?"
"No, I don't."
Vic gazed off into the blue distance of the back-bar lights.
"And I'm not married. And I do care. But it's as you said-there are some things in each person's life that can't be talked about."
.Agonized, he seized both her hands and held them tight, leaning close so that Laura could smell the clean soapy tang of his skin, feel the warmth of his breath on her cheeks. Deep in the center of her being, she felt a quickening as Vic's voice came softly to her through the blue gloom:
"Why didn't I show up for the lessons? I wish to hell I could tell you. But I can't. You'd hate me if I did."
"Never, Vic. I couldn't possibly."
"Yes!" Almost savagely, his face twisted with self-hate.
"If you knew what I had in mind-if you knew how I planned to use-ah, hell." Bitterly he turned away.
So here we are. Two people. Sick in love and hiding behind masks."
Again his eyes searched hers.
Convulsively he clasped her hands tight between his. His eyes probed into her, stripping their souls naked to one another.
"Do I make sense? Of course not. Because I can't tell you what-I won't tell you-oh, God."
Hastily Vic reached for her unfinished drink, downed it in one shudder.
"Don't you see, Laura? There are reasons why this can't work for us. My reasons and-apparently-yours."
Vic's gaze indicated the haunted, shadowy look of her face, the disarrayed condition of her hair.
"For my part, I don't care what you've done. Or what it is you're afraid of. I only know I can't let myself get involved, because if I do-well, didn't I say you'd hate me? You would. What's that old saw about ships passing in the night? That's all it can be. Yet I've been here every night almost, hoping-oh, I'm a damned fool, Laura. Blind in love with you. But I won't use you like-agh!"
Enraged, Vic released her hands and stared, haunted, at the blue lights.
Tentatively Laura stretched out her hand toward the gentleness, the strength, the strange and inexplicable dark sorrow that was Vic O'Keefe. v
"Did you mean it when you said you loved me?"
"I never meant anything as much in all the years of my life."
"Then there's one thing we can have, together, darling...."
Her breath was soft now, filled with a quiet, hushed panting as she leaned forward and brushed her lips gently against his, letting the moist adhesion of her lipstick hold their mouths together.
Briefly her tongue licked out, a hot-tipped firebrand.
Before she could stop herself she had seized his hand, gripped it, clutched it tight to her as her suddenly-eager thighs began to burn with longing.
"Whatever happens after tonight, Darling, we can have one thing together. This."
Sharply he shook his head.
"Not in a car. Not cheaply, not this time. And I have no place...."
"I don't care where it is, darling, don't you see?
I need you, Vic. I'm desperately in love with you. I-have to show you how much I love you. regardless of what happens. If I don't, I'll-I'll die. Look in my eyes. Believe that, Vic darling."
Furiously she pressed his hand against her legs, feeling the hardness indent her tender flesh, arouse it to hunger.
"Love me, Vic. Please."
"It's wrong-a-a mistake. It'll only bring us more agony-"
Wildly, she leaned against him. her breasts lava-hot now, the aroused points crushing his arm.
"Vic, I'm in love with you, I have to give myself-oh, darling, please!"
Tormented, Vic caught up her coat, standing suddenly tall. There was deep pain in his eyes but it was mingled with the love for her which he could not hide.
"All right."
He caught her hand, pressuring her moist palm in the half-gloom.
"God help us both, darling-but, all right."
In spite of the liquor she'd drunk Laura felt crystal-headed, alive and vibrant for the first time in longer than she could remember. As in a dream, Vic took her hand and led her outside into the still, clear, almost gem-like darkness where street lamps marched into the distance. Cradling his arm around her, they walked for several blocks until they came to a rather tawdry brick structure, a hotel patronized mostly by travelling men. Vic led her up the steps and into the dusty, deserted lobby.
The paunchy night clerk nodded his head knowingly, accepted Vic's ten-dollar bill and handed over a key.
"We'll find our way," Vic said when the clerk offered to show them up to the room.
Stepping into the elevator, Laura was suddenly washed clean of guilt and fear. The sly leer on the clerk's face did not matter, nor the soiled, unswept floor of the creaking elevator that bore them upward to waiting ecstasy.
Laura flung open her coat so that she could press herself more closely to Vic, and he took her in his arms with a low, guttural growl of desire.
Laura kissed his throat and frantically, stroking his hair, whispering:
"No guilt, darling. Just for an hour tonight, no guilt, no recriminations. Only the two of us, in love."
"That leering bastard at the desk," Vic muttered. "Oh, God, Laura. I'm making you so dirty-"
"If you only knew," Laura breathed. "If you only knew, darling-I'm clean. Now, for the first time, in months, in years. You've made me clean again, with a pure body. Can you believe that, darling? That tonight I'm clean again? A virgin. Your virgin. Vic."
"Laura, Laura...."
He kissed her wildly as the elevator creaked upward.
"I love you so."
And suddenly, joy and expectancy replaced the guilt on his features, transfigured him so that when the elevator stopped, he led her along the seamy corridor to the dim, musty room with an almost boyish smile on his deep-etched features.
With the door closed, in darkness lit only by the faint gleam of streetlights under a tattered blind, Laura kissed and caressed his neck, her hands roving in his hair as she pressed herself against him with wanton eagerness.
"Undress me, Vic," she panted. "Make love to me with all the power you've got. This has to last a long time...."
And then the ecstasy began ... the gentle yet urgent insistence of his hands upon her garments ... the frantic, languorous loveplay which suffused her body with a liquid heat, whetting her love-making appetites to almost impossible proportions.
Waiting became unendurable, sheer torture.
"Oh, Vic, dearest, oh my sweet darling, I love you. Now, Vic. Oh, now. sweetheart, now, now."
"Beautiful," Vic murmured as he took her, "my beautiful, oh God, how much I do love you...."
"Yes, yes, and I love you ... let me show you ... there ... there ... I'm on fire, Vic. I'm on fire!"
"It's ... never ... been ... like ... this ... Laura ... darling...."
"I'm burning, Vic," Laura screamed softly, locked in Vic's embrace. "Oh my sweet darling, I'm on fire, you're burning me, burning, it's wonderful, so wonderful!"
"Darling ... darling ... darling ... hold me tight, Laura darling, tight, TIGHT!"
Until at last, spent beyond endurance ... taken to the very frontiers of pleasure ... the furthest limits of love-endurance ... she collapsed with a tiny cry of joy ... fell against Vic's sweated cheast ... and with utter, complete happiness ... slept.
A harsh white light in her eyes awakened her.
A dream-like smile crossed her lips, full of secret memories of total, blissful satisfaction.
She rolled deliciously onto her side, wishing the white radiance would go away.
Her breasts fell from beneath the concealment of the sheet. The nipples had softened again to a delicate, baby-skinned pink, giving off a warm glow that delighted her.
Then, suddenly, through sleep-drowsy eyes, she saw Vic standing by the iron bed, buttoning his shirt. At once warning bells clanged in her drugged mind. She fought upright.
All at once reality crashed down around her with stunning force.
Vic had nearly finished dressing now. He looked down at her, his face like a wound.
"I'm leaving, Laura. Before it goes any further. I-won't hurt you any more."
"Hurt me?"
Desperately Laura crawled to him across the bed, pressing her soft warmth against his legs.
"But I love you, Vic. We can work it out. Whatever troubles you-if we love each other-"
"No."
Doggedly, Vic shook his head. "I can't see you again."
The sorrow that claimed Laura was like none she had ever experienced.
Slowly, haltingly, with tears welling in her eyes, she whispered:
"Will you at least tell me why you have to leave me?"
Stubbornly fighting back the agony he clearly felt, Vic shook his head again.
"One day, Laura," his voice came distantly, "Maybe you'll understand why I've got to walk out like this. The quick cut of a knife hurts like hell, but it's cleaner in the long run. I hope you understand. I love you, Laura."
And then with a savage twist of the rusty knob, he was gone.
His footsteps died to echoes in the hall outside.
Faintly, off down the corridor, the elevator creaked, whined and was silent.
"What was it?" Laura said emptily, almost to herself. "Why, Vic? What was it that made you afraid to-to use me? Why couldn't you have trusted my love to be strong enough, darling?"
In the shabby mirror which adorned the wall of the unwholesome little room Laura saw her face distorted by a crack in the glass. With a sob she twisted off the light and flung herself back on the suddenly-chill bed, letting the sobs come, letting them claim her in great shivering bursts of pain.
All throughout the long, empty night Laura lay sobbing, until she could cry no more, and felt dead inside.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The three weeks following her single night of complete love and fulfillment with Vic O'Keefe became for Laura Grace a kind of gray, automatic hell.
Like a whipped bitch she returned to Sid Hardy's apartment. She even went through the motions of being pleasant to him, receptive and pliable as she tried to sort out the horrid confusion within her own mind.
Sid received her with a kind of concescending contempt, as though accepting her return as a token of surrender. But their conversations were empty, guarded, almost formally polite. Laura replied mechanically and obsequiously to whatever Sid requested.
Sid did not bring up the incident of his love-making with Cherry Marple, nor the subsequent fight in the office. Laura suspected this was because he realized that her return to him-meekly, almost subserviently-meant that she had accepted his mastery, his point of view.
For her part, Laura did not care. The pain of the final, total separation from Vic was so complete and all-consuming that nothing else mattered.
Like a robot she found herself reporting to the studio each afternoon, going through the smiling ritual of instruction, seeing the faces of her students only as void white blanks before her, dead weights in her arms, straw dummies she was somehow forced to carry around the floor of the bare, chilly studios for several hours a day.
The only evidence left to remind her of what had happened was the barrier of silence which had sprung up between her and Cherry Marple. The latter glared, her lips clamped tight together, whenever the two women happened to bump into one another at the studio, which was infrequently. Laura suspected that Cherry was deliberately keeping out of her way, but again she didn't care one way or another. Nor did she care whether Cherry was enraged by her lack of politeness.
Nothing mattered ... absolutely nothing.
The only way she could deaden her heart's agony was to keep moving, keep talking, eating, dressing, dancing. At times she felt like a puppet jiggling on strings, especially during the seemingly interminable stretches of instruction at the studio. Yet she realized two things:
First, that her return to Sid somehow meant another armed truce, and perhaps even-as Sid saw it-a surrender.
Secondly, she knew that unless she did somehow manage to keep moving through the distorted, broken world she inhabited, she would go out of her mind with loss and longing.
Alcohol and extended periods of sleep helped anesthetize her against the pain. Gradually a brittle shell of indifference erected itself around her.
No longer did she care whether Sid was making love to Cherry Marple, Sophie Thyssen or any other woman. Sid made love to her almost every other night in their apartment, but it was a tastless automatic thing, Sid stroking her, teasing and petting her flesh until at last, through habit, and to avoid a fight, she forced herself to hold him close, grind her hips and shriek in a cheap, grotesque imitation of being thrilled.
She felt Sid knew he was leaving her unmoved, un-aroused after their unions, but he said nothing and Laura preferred it that way.
All feeling, except for the pulsing ache left by Vic's departure, was dead.
Nothing brought her pain.
Nothing brought her pleasure.
Nothing moved her at all.
Wrapped in a blanket of numb indifference, she moved like a zombie.
Jack Crome never telephoned or communicated with her in any way.
Not that she expected it, or even thought of him....
... until that fateful morning when, faint and light-headed, she stared down at her nude belly in the apartment bathroom and felt the shell of indifference she'd built up crumble into ruins, utterly destroyed, smashed, obliterated, in one single instant of blinding realization.
Sid, passing the bathroom door as he dressed, frowned.
"What the hell's wrong with you?"
"N ... nothing."
She closed the door suddenly and sank down on the edge of the tub.
She raised her hands.
Pressed her palms against her eyes.
The old torture returned.
"Oh, God," she said emptily, shaking her head, disbelieving.
But she knew it was true. "Oh, God. Oh my God."
Exactly four weeks after her night with Vic O'-Keefe, Laura emerged from the revolving doors of the Genesse Professional Building at a little past six in the evening.
The terrible, hideous truth had been confirmed by the bland, quiet-spoken obstetrician she had just visited.
Laura had left the studio shortly after five, pleading a headache. Earlier, she had spent hours debating whether to make the appointment, until basic, ruthless honesty within her demanded that she learn the truth.
Now the truth struck at her with hideous force.
What was she going to do??
Unmarried, a child in her belly, what could she do?
Sid would not want her walking about with a swollen belly, evidence of her loose morals.
And the baby did not belong to Sid in the first place.
Or to Vic, she thought, leaning weakly against the concrete pillars in front of the Professional Building.
Oh, dear God, ij only the baby had been Vic's, a love-child, sweet and pure....
Somehow that would have solved everything, bridged the barriers between them.
But the infant hidden somewhere in the depths of her still-flat, ivory belly belonged ... thinking of it, staring into the misted maze of streetlights and neon swimming in a chill drizzle, Laura could hardly repress a shudder ... the child, a child of vicious lust, belonged to Jack Crome.
How long Laura remained leaning against the pillar, she could not quite remember.
She only recalled that afterward, she moved like a mechanical being toward the curb, not glancing at the light. Dimly she perceived someone calling to her ... a glare of red on wetted pavement.
Then tires screamed.
Hands tugged frantically at her sleeve.
She felt herself jerked backward.
Blinking, she realized she had almost walked in front of a speeding car, against a red light.
Perhaps, she thought dully, I want to die. Maybe that would be best, sleeping capsules or a stove turned on....
Then the thought was pushed away by the knowledge that a man was still gripping her arm, smiling quizzically down at her as a group of curiosity-seekers clustered around.
"I ... I'm sorry," Laura muttered weakly. "What a fool I am. I ... didn't see the car. Thank you."
"Nearly got yourself killed, lady," came the voice of the man holding her.
And then, like a thunderbolt of horror, realization struck.
"Oh my God," she breathed. "Oh my God in heaven...."
"What's wrong?" He backed off a step.
"Leave me alone!" Laura cried, feeling nausea shake her, convulse her with revulsion. "Get out of here before I scream!"
She ran all the way to the corner, where a yellow dome-light on the roof of an auto signified a taxi for hire. A curious resolve quickened her as she ran, giving her strength.
Dropping inside the cab, she gave him the address of her apartment.
Arriving there, she pressed a five-dollar bill into his hand, asking him to wait.
Ten minutes later she emerged, her clothing changed, her hair and makeup tidied. She climbed into the cab again.
Fortunately Sid had not been home; she remembered he'd mentioned some vague appointment earlier that afternoon at the studio.
Leaning back as the taxi began to roll through the rain-wet streets, Laura felt the core of strength within her grow toughen. Her course was clear in her mind.
When the taxi driver asked for an address, Laura responded in a clear, tight voice:
"Lake Cliffs. And hurry."
Her courage waned somewhat when the taxi glided up the curving drive and Laura realized that a party was in progress at Jack Crome's mansion.
Long ranks of Cadillacs. Imperials and tiny foreign sports cars lined the driveway. For a moment she knew fear. Then she fought it down as the taxi stopped and the door opened under the hand of a liveried Negro who reached in his striped waistcoat for bills with which to pay the cab.
Laura said nothing. The taxi driver shrugged, pocketed the money and shot away down the drive.
Then the imperious Negro turned toward her, really seeing her for the first time. Light spilled out under the portico. From inside the house came the sound of an orchestra playing loudly.
The Negro's eyebrows raised.
"Excuse me, Miss. I assumed you were a guest . .
"Not exactly. But I want to see Mr. Crome."
"Miss, you can't go in there without an invitation.
This is a private party. Mr. Crome would be mad as hell if I let anyone in who...."
The Negro stopped, dismayed.
"Why'd you want to see him? This is a funny hour to come calling."
Laura kept her face immobile, her voice flat.
"Tell Mr. Crome." she said coldly, "that I have to talk with him. The name is Laura Grace. Have you got that?"
The Negro nodded, started to protest when Laura interrupted:
"Tell him that unless he sees me for a moment, I'll walk in on his pretty little party and make a scene he'll never forget. Understand?"
"I'll tell him," the Negro said reluctantly, holding the door for her.
Trying to control her nerves, her tension, Laura stepped into the foyer which held so many ugly memories for her.
All at once she felt frightened again, a stranger. From the open doors of a ballroom to her right drifted the rhythmic beat of the orchestra, the giddy mingling of male and female voices and a sudden spatter of applause and hoarse shouts.
Laura bundled deeper in her coat, trying to close out the sounds of revelry, concentrate upon her purpose.
The Negro returned in a few moments. He took her elbow and guided her past the ballroom doors to the staircase.
"Mr. Crome was pretty angry, I can tell you. But he said to wait and he'd give you five minutes in the upstairs study."
The Negro shook his head.
"Lord. I haven't seen him shaking like that in a spell."
Fighting for strength, Laura ignored the words, tightening her resolve.
The Negro led her to a small book-lined study on the second floor Another doorway opened in the opposite wall, and after pacing restlessly for a moment. Laura inched it back a bit.
Startled, she looked out upon a balcony which circled the ballroom.
Down below swirled a glittering panorama of men and women in formal dress, and with a little shudder Laura realized she was looking in upon one of Jack Crome's infamous revels.
Her gorge rose as she picked out various couples around the room.
In the middle of the dance floor a man was dancing with a woman who had pulled her evening gown below her waist, leaving her breasts exposed.
In a dim corner, Laura saw two fortyish, well-built matrons kissing one another, open-mouthed, fondling each other's meaty breasts in clear view of the crowd.
Drinks were being served at an immense set-up bar by young girls, completely nude and simpering.
Abruptly, the orchestra gave a fanfare.
A spotlight probed to the center of the floor.
The crowd drew back. Several of the bar-girls wheeled out an immense silver cart bearing a fountain-like silver bowl nearly three feet across.
There was a ripple of applause. Then the lights dimmed and jets of liquid began to rise from the fountain's center. A man dipped in a goblet, drank, and the crowd applauded as multi-colored spot-lights began to play over the jetting champagne that began to fill the bowl.
Laura clutched the door, sickened, disbelieving.
The crowd parted. A nude girl was hoisted up into the fountain.
The girl fell to her knees in the champagne, laughing, her naked body wet and gleaming, alive with colored lights.
The girl bobbed her head under the surface of the champagne and again applause burst from the crowd.
Laura felt a tight stab in her belly. The girl in the fountain was Cherry Marple.
And on the far side, in a backwash of green light, Laura recognized Sid Hardy, his arm around one of the naked bar girls.
Sid's dress tie was askew, he had a cigar in his mouth, and his hand was fondling the bar girl as he watched the performance in the fountain.
Laura closed her eyes, numb horror sweeping her.
So Sid had somehow managed to get Cherry back in Crome's favor again ... and gone along for the ride.
At that moment the drummer in the orchestra began to hit his tom-tom. beginning a low, insinuating rhythm.
Cherry swept her champagne-wetted hair to the top of her head with one hand.
With the other she let a trickle of the bubbling liquid run down between her light-bathed breasts.
On her knees in the fountain, her body resting on her heavy calves, Cherry extended her arms and began to sway back and forth.
As she swayed she bathed and rubbed herself with handfulls of champagne.
Each gesture elicited new bursts of enthusiasm from the crowd.
Hypnotized, Laura watched while the colored lights played over Cherry's heaving, dripping-wet body.
Bracing with one arm, Cherry thrust her hips upward into the light....
Higher ... still higher ... her belly rising and falling to the drum beat, her eyes closed, her hair hanging down, dripping champagne.
The colored lights turned her body into a nightmarish thing as she acted out a ritual of love, punctuating the drum-throbs with low moans that grew more frenzied the more her back arched, the more her champagne-laved thighs quested upward for some invisible satisfaction.
The drums beat out a hammering tattoo.
Cherry fell back in the overflowing fountain with a splash, moaning and clutching her body in mock-climax.
The lights came up. The applause grew thunderous The bar girls started to wheel the fountain away and bring forth a fresh one for drinking when hoarse male cries of "No! No!" rose up. A crowd formed around the simpering Cherry, and Laura saw Sid among the group. Too horrified to watch further, Laura started to close the door as Cherry rose to her knees in the fountain and a paunchy gray-haired man bent forward to cradle her huge champagne-dripping breasts in his hands and kiss them one by one, to the crowd's roared approval.
The closing of the other door cracked in Laura's ears.
Laura whirled around to face Jack Crome. "You filth!"
She was trembling, pointing through the still-open door to the balcony.
"You indescribable filth! Now I'm glad that I came. A ... a diseased thing like you deserves to be taken for every cent you've got."
Color sparked in Laura's cheeks. "This time, Mr. Crome, you've done it."
Jack Crome's cheeks had turned lividly pale. His leaden eyes were veiled with fury. Stalking forward, he gripped Laura's arm.
"What the hell do you mean, you hustler? Coming here and demanding to see me? Demanding! Well, because I'm having a party, I don't want a scene, so I suppose I'll have to pay your dismal little blackmail."
Crome reached inside his dinner jacket, produced a flat money case and removed five twenty-dollar bills.
He flung the money on the carpet.
"Pick it up, hustler. Then get out. And if you ever come back, you'll regret it."
Laura shook her head.
"Oh, no. It's going to cost you a lot more this time. Mr. Crome."
She gave the Mister an acid, contemptuous delivery.
"I'm knocked up."
"You're-"
Crome's eyebrows shot upward in disbelief. Then he stifled a smile. "Oh, God."
"Think it's funny?" Laura cried, her temper slipping now. "You're the one who knocked me up, Mr. Crome. And with all your fancy ways and your twenty-dollar bills, you're going to take care of the baby you made in my belly, and you're going to pay for it, pay. and pay and pay...."
Crome surveyed her, cool through his anser.
"How do you know it's my child?"
"I have ways," Laura returned sharply. "I know, that's all. It's yours."
"My dear," Crome said, his voice dangerously low, "how many times do you suppose women have crawled to me, threatened me because they said I made them pregnant?"
A vein in Crome's forehead began to beat. Suddenly he caught Laura's wrist, twisted. His teeth clenched in fury.
"Now you get your things together, you cheap whore, and leave this house or I'll have you thrown cut bodily."
Viciously he threw her off, turned and started out of the room.
Driven nearly hysterical now, Laura lunged after him.
Crome heard her coming, spun around and delivered a stinging blow to her cheek. Laura reeled.
Then, blind with pain and rage, she clawed for Crome's face.
He cursed, struck her with his balled fist. Laura felt herself stumble backward. Crome cried out suddenly.
Desperately Laura tried to grab for the doorframe. Too late.
Her momentum drove her backward against the balcony rail.
"Watch out "
Everything tilted around Laura. She tried to open her lungs to scream as she fell, plunging downward toward the ballroom, straight down to the rock-hard floor of walnut parquet.
An exclamation of horror and surprise from the crowd roared up around her.
With bone-jarred agony she struck the floor.
She tried to crawl but the pain was too great.
It washed over her in churning waves ... until at last her pain-deadened mind went dark.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the far side of a pleated cloth hospital screen. the door of the private room opened softly.
Suppressing the soft cry of pain that came to her lips unbidden, struggling against the waves of dizziness that overcame her whenever she moved quickly, Laura tried to turn on her side toward the door.
Her face was even paler than usual, lacking makeup. Her eyes stood out large and shadowy against the whiteness of her skin. The ebony fan of her hair was spread over the crisp pillow-slip. Awkwardly she adjusted her white hospital gown and pulled the sheet up to her throat, finally able to lie on her right hip and face the doorway.
From behind the screen a thin, kindly-faced woman of middle age in nurse's uniform appeared.
Taking in the gloom of the small room, the nurse moved briskly to the window and adjusted the Venetian blinds. A little more of the last wintry afternoon sunlight filtered through, coating the pastel walls with a rectangle of burnished, fading copper.
Then the nurse tucked in the covers at the bed's foot, folding the corners in neatly before she announced:
"Miss Grace, you have a visitor outside. The doctor left no specific orders against visitors, but I preferred to check with you before admitting him. Usually only husbands are allowed so soon after a surgical procedure."
There was no censure, no hidden mockery in the woman's words, simply a flat practicality, a stating of fact that came from frequent dealings with unpleasant truth.
"A Mr. Hardy," the nurse continued. "He's the gentleman who sent all those."
The nurse indicated two immense wicker baskets of red roses on the bureau.
"If you don't feel up to seeing him, just say the word."
The word? Laura's mind echoed emptily as she stared at the ceiling for a moment.
What word? What combination of words could possibly help me now?
Laura had a desperate impulse to tell the nurse that she would not see Sid, that she wanted him to leave, never come to her again.
But the burden of loneliness in the faintly chilly room, the hours she had lain alone after the surgery, her mind swimming with the delirium that came from the pain-killing hypodermics the doctor had prescribed, made her hesitate.
Her eyes rested momentarily on the immense scarlet rose baskets. A stab of something akin to tenderness and longing-perhaps it was only the wish for tenderness-made her say softly:
"I'm feeling well enough. Ask Mr. Hardy to come in. And would you raise the bed just a little for me, please?"
The nurse nodded, bent and cranked the bed to a sitting position. Laura held tightly to the sheets, fighting the pain.
The nurse disappeared behind the screen. Sid stepped into the room a moment later.
"Just a short while, please," came the nurse's voice from the corridor. Then her heels clacked away.
Sid stood just inside the screen, twisting a Tyrolean hat in his hands, his face more relaxed, somehow, than Laura had ever seen it. Her apprehension abated a little.
Sid came forward, stepping gingerly. He rolled the bedside stand to the side. With his hat he indicated the edge of the bed.
Laura nodded.
Placing his hat atop the stand, Sid settled himself on the bed's edge, watching carefully to see that he did not cause Laura any pain.
The silence became overwhelming.
Sid starred at her.
The silence was broken only by the muted hum of activity down the hospital hall outside.
The more Laura looked at Sid's features, the more she disbelieved her own senses.
His face, usually so animated, so mobile with greed and cunning, had taken on an oddly quiet, gentle, even timorous look.
Don't trust that feeling, Laura warned herself. Remember Sid's an expert with all those mannerisms that put people at ease. It's part of the business, part of the-the racket.
"How are you?" Sid asked finally, searching her face, reaching down to touch her hand.
"Fine, Sid," Laura answered, not meaning it in the least. "I'm feeling much better tonight."
"Tough about the baby," Sid said awkwardly. "But it must have been for the best. I mean-"
Sid licked his lips, struggling for words.
"After that fall you took, the doctor said you were lucky to pull through yourself, considering the way the fall started the miscarriage and all."
Again his fingers brushed hers.
"Would you believe me if I told you I've been out of my mind these last couple of days, Laurie? Worrying about you? Wondering whether you'd pull through? I-I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you, baby. I may be a son of a-I mean, for the first time in my life, I was scared."
Laura could not fight the bitterness filling her.
"Guilt feelings, Sid?"
"Maybe."
He gave a shame-faced shake of his head. "Maybe I do feel guilty about it."
"Don't. I went to Crome. I asked for what happened."
"Let's not talk about it, huh?"
Sid lighted a cigarette to conceal his nervousness.
"What I wanted to tell you today was this-don't worry about the doctor bills or the cost of the room or anything. I'll take care of it. I've already made arrangements with Dr. Bernhard."
"No, Sid, I don't want-"
Her words had come automatically, but Laura left the sentence unfinished, staring at the fragrant roses on the bureau.
Face reality, she told herself harshly. Where will you find money to pay for all this? Will Crome pay? Will Vic O'Keefe?
When she spoke again, Laura's calm tone hid her inner torment.
"That's very kind of you."
"Kind?"
Sid's eyebrows raised in surprise.
"Kind? Laura, you're my girl. You know that."
Again Laura felt the old trap closing about her
"I don't know that any more, Sid."
"Well, this is no time to talk about it. What you need is a good rest. Plenty of sleep, so everything heals."
Rising, he picked up his hat and put it on.
"I'll get the hell out now. But Dr. Bernhard said he'd telephone me when you're ready to come home. I'll be here for you."
Before Laura could protest Sid leaned over and kissed her quickly on the lips.
Then, with a small wave of his hand, a wink of false cheer, he vanished behind the screen.
Laura lay for a long moment listening to his footsteps retreat down the hallway.
The nurse returned to inquire whether she wished her reading light turned on. Full dusk had settled in the room, a thick, rich purple shadowiness in which the heaped-up roses looked almost black.
Laura shook her head, welcoming the dark, the chance it gave her to be alone with her thoughts, to try and sort out the tangled skein of her emotions, her fears.
Around her the wintry dusk deepened. Home.
Sid had used that word in reference to their apartment.
And yet the word home to Laura conveyed entirely different meanings ... associations of security, warmth, closeness and happiness which she had never known during her lifetime.
Her home with Sid was quite another sort of place; a lodging only, rooms with closets full of expensive clothing, each bought with the skill of her body; each item paid for by a night or a day in bed with Sid, letting him work out his desires upon her flesh.
In that sense, it was no home at all, but a place which had, of late, become filled with associations of confusion and unhappiness.
Yet Laura had always possessed the ability to face the world realistically. This sort of calm took hold of her now.
Where could she go, if not with Sid?
At least for a time she must return to him, until she regained her strength.
But then-ah, then, it would be a different story.
Then, she knew, trying to gather resolve, she must leave him.
Because if she did not she would be irretrievably trapped.
Where would she go when she was stronger? She didn't know.
There was no person, no place left to her. But she must leave Sid eventually, that she decided at last.
It was cold and calculating to use him for a few weeks, to pretend she wanted to be back with him again, knowing she would leave soon. Yet no other choice lay open to her, and besides-now her thoughts were harsh, bitter-she would only be paying him in kind. For he had used her thoroughly and completely during their months together.
For a moment she entertained the farfetched possibility that the gentleness on Sid's face signified some new facet to his personality, born of her tragic accident. Hope coursed in her heart.
If only that were truth-But she dared not believe it.
All the evidence of the past said it could never be true.
Sid might wish to change, might have a real flash of tenaerness toward her, but it could not materially alter what she knew to be his real personality.
Could it?
The more she characterized her hope as foolish, the more it overwhelmed her.
Pain began to wrack her limbs again. She reached out and thumbed the call buzzer, asking for a hypodermic when the nurse arrived. As the drug began to take effect, she welcomed its euphoria, its mind-dulling fog, for her sureness about Sid's character had suddenly been weakened again, the structure of her certainty destroyed.
She drifted off to twisting fog-clouded slumber in complete misery, all of her decisions suddenly confused and worthless.
Four weeks to the day following her release from the hospital, Laura made her final decision.
That same evening, as she worked hastily to pack her things into her matched set of luggage, folding each item neatly, with a sense of finality, placing it in its appointed place, all the thought and agony that had gone into her decision as negated by the sudden, sharp sound of the apartment door closing.
Startled, Laura looked up. Sid came whistling into the bedroom. "Hey, Laurie! I thought we'd send out for a couple of steaks and celebrate tonight. I got sick and tired of the damn studio. A guy can only take so much. Norm Percy's handling the rest of the schedule, and-"
He stopped, taking in the welter of luggage on the bed. on chairs and on the floor. His face turned pale.
"Kid, what are you doing?"
"I-I'm leaving. I've finally made up my mind."
"Leaving! Laurie baby, you're not strong enough to go anywhere, let alone-"
Laura's mouth twisted.
"I was strong enough to do what we did in bed last night."
A sudden flush colored Sid's cheeks. "Okay, okay. But-why. Laura? In the name of God, why?"
There it was again, the odd, puzzling gentleness, almost shyness, in Sid's voice. Laura could not bring herself to accept it.
Quickly she crossed the room, the hem of her pale pink peignoir belling around her as she hastily picked up a cigarette pack.
One lamp burned in the bedroom. As Laura turned to face Sid the semi-transparency of her gown admitted its beams. Her body, pink-hued by the gauzy material, was clearly revealed, the light falling over her shoulders, around the thrust of her firm breasts, throwing pale pink shadows on their tips. Sid's gaze dropped momentarily. Then he looked away, guiltily.
Laura regretted having dressed this way, but she had not expected Sid to return; she had planned to be gone before the studio closed at nine that night.
Now she was actually conscious of the way the lamp highlighted the curve of her thighs, the swelling excitement of her buttocks, the half-revealed contours of her lower belly where twin ivory gorges swept precipitously downward and converged into a pink-hazed, uncertain triangle, all the more provocative and inviting for being but partially revealed.
Perspiration stood out suddenly on Sid's forhead. He flung off his topcoat and confronted her, lifting one hand to plead.
"Laura, haven't I treated you right these last weeks? Haven't I, doll? God knows I've tried to give you everything you wanted. You can't leave now."
"I must. You know the reason, Sid. After the mess we've made-oh, I'm not holding you intirely accountable. It's my fault as well as yours."
A thin edge of desperation came into her voice.
"But there's no other choice left. I've finally worked it out and it's the...."
"Worked what out?" Sid rushed to her, bending over her. Again his gaze roved to the gauzy peaks of her breasts where the nipples stood out full and dark and magnificent beneath the soft netting of the peignoir. Like a man hypnotized, he pulled his gaze away. "Give me a reason, Laurie. One reason. Can't you tell I've tried to change things since you lost-since you had the accident? I've been trying like hell to straighten things out for us, baby."
Laura's gaze met his, locked briefly.
Then she forced her eyes away, because somewhere in the depths of his blazing black eyes a spark burned.
And it kindled another spark deep inside her, one of which she was afraid, one which she knew she must fight desperately.
"There are too many things we can't overlook any more, Sid. Things in the past-"
"Name me one. Just name one and I'll show you it's been changed."
Laura gave a little sigh.
"If we have to bare wounds like this-what about Mrs. Thyssen?"
"That cow?" Sid laughed in disbelief.
"Baby, I'm done with her, finished. I haven't seen her in two months. What I did with her was-it was for us, Laurie. But it's over. I got the clause into her will. I saw her lawyer, and we're set, baby. There's a bequest in my name, and that means in your name too."
"You see?"
Sadly Laura shook her head.
"We try to escape it, but we can't. And I don't have your name, Sid. We live together, we-go to bed like husband and wife, but it's not the same at all."
Sid blinked uncertainly.
"You want me to marry you, is that it? Hell, Laura, I thought we-"
"Were too mature to bother about such foolish conventions? That was our arrangement, yes."
She shook her head, aware of being dangerously close to a precipice. "No, Sid, I don't want to marry you. And let's grant for the moment that you-had to do what you did with Sophie Thyssen. Grant that you did it for me, as well as for yourself, so that we could live well. Then what about Cherry Marple?"
"I got rid of her!" Sid exclaimed, triumph lighting his eyes. "That's right, I canned her. threw her out. A week ago. I was a rotten tool to piay arouna witn her I can't excuse what I did, but I see the mistake T made. She was cheap, Laura. A no-class broad with greed running in every vein of her body. I did it for you, Laura, just so things would work for us."
Now Sid moved closer to her, sitting on the bed's edge, his hip touching her naked flank where it quivered suddenly beneath the peignoir's fabric.
One of Sid's hands stole around Laura's waist. The fingers probed tentatively into the soft flesh of her hips, beginning to stroke, to move gently in tiny, stimulating circles.
Frantically Laura pressed her legs together.
She swayed, felt dizziness overcome her.
And somehow she knew she had lost again ... been defeated by Sid's power ... by the hot, urgent arousal of his hands fumbling even now with the black velvet tie-string of her peignoir.
Run, she thought, run, Laura....
A hot, lascivious throbbing was hammering in her breasts, turning the nipples spongy, then firming them to paired peaks of eagerness.
She felt Sid's hands brushing her peignoir back, roving openly over her thighs.
Eyes closed, she leaned weakly against him, powerless even to beg him to stop as he whispered:
"I threw Cherry out for you, baby. For us. You can't walk out. Not now. Because we're so close, so damned close to getting all we want. Remember what we used to say? Little mink things? Well, we'll have them! And soon! Mink up to your beautiful, desirable neck if you stick with me. Laurie-Laurie, I love you. That's why I went to Crome and made him pay. I didn't tell you before, but he's paying, paying through the nose to keep quiet about what happened. I arranged it all. As long as you're here with me, he'll keep paying...."
"Oh, my God, Sid," Laura sobbed, ruined now, lost. "Oh, my God, Sid, no, not blackmail."
But it was too late, the last words lost under the sudden crushing force of Sid's mouth on hers.
Vainly she tried to struggle with him, keep her resolve firm.
But Sid's lovemaking was expert; he had aroused her, whipped her to feverish heights of desire so that all she could think about was tearing the peignoir from her steaming body so that she could clasp him as her lover.
Sid lifted her higher on the bed, and in doing so he knocked against the lamp, smashing it. The bedroom plunged into darkness. Fight, Laura, her mind screamed, tear away, leave, run, or it's too late, he has you forever!
His hands tore away the peignoir, pulled it back to expose her heaving breasts.
His mouth closed demandingly, hungrily over her firm nipple in the dark.
Her hands became wild things, teasing him, arousing him so that he would match her blazing passion.
The pillow beneath her head became damp with her love-sweat as they rolled and kissed frantically.
Sid's hands locked beneath the small of her back, iron vises cupping the heated mounds of her buttocks, pulling her, locking her, drawing her close, clamping her in the grip of unendurable passion.
The darkened bedroom whirled.
Laura's mind cried out suddenly that she was doomed, doomed....
But it no longer mattered.
Nothing mattered but the too-long unsatisfied appetites of her excited flesh!
Panting, she pressed hands to her breasts, held her breast for Sid to caress and kiss until the agony in her became a fever.
Her thighs hammered with electric fury, demanding satisfaction, craving assault, violation, fulfillment.
Sid's hand knotted in her hair, forcing her head back so that he could bring his mouth to hers, two dark, lashing caverns of desire.
Her legs were alive, thrashing.
Sid's masculine power broke them apart, tremblingly.
Desire suddenly pierced her loins like a hot spear.
Doomed, her mind cried, doomed....
And then the voice of her reason was quelled forever by the feverish cry of her own lips pressed against Sid's ear, her tongue licking out, nuzzling, her teeth biting him with wild eagerness as she convulsed against him in the dark. "I'll stay with you, Sid darling, oh God, yes, I'll stay, only take me, Sid, take me now, quick, lover, take me!!"
Sid moved furiously, rhythmically in bursts of power. "Laurie, oh Laurie, doll...."
That was how Laura considered the night in the apartment when she had started to pack but had allowed Sid to seduce her again, take her twice more that night, bring her at last-through awareness of her own sexual urges-to the point where she accepted her relationship with him as a permanent thing.
Thankfully, Sid seemed inclined to make things easier for her by treating her more gently, more considerately than he had ever done before.
Perhaps he knew she thought, that she was still passing through an unsettling emotional crisis, but a crisis which grew less dangerous, less threatening, with each day that she successfully met and lived through. Occasionally, however, she still wondered about Sid's motives.
Was his new-found gentleness the result of a genuine change of heart?
Thus the days and weeks passed.
The chief concern of the studio at the moment seemed the securing of one additional Lifetime Membership, the one Membership remaining before Sid would be in line for his own franchise.
The target of Sid's carefully-contrived promotional campaign was Wallace Buckmaster, the ugly, rather stout Lake Cliffs widower. Laura found herself thinking of Buckmaster one snowy afternoon as she reported for work at the studio, wondering just how close Sid was to signing the wealthy man. As she climbed the stairs, Laura suddenly grew conscious of two figures ascending ahead of her.
Laura saw Wallace Buckmaster pause, lean against the rail and put a hand beneath his overcoat. An unusual flush discolored his cheeks.
His companion was Norman Percy. Bundled in a heavy polo coat, the massive-shouldered dancing instructor was leaning close to the other man, talking in low tones. Buckmaster smiled in return, weakly. Then he started up the next flight, wheezing hard.
Laura moved after them, her heels clacking on the risers.
Norman Percy glanced around. His eyes became startled circles of surprise as he saw her.
"Oh, Laura ... Hello," he said clumsily, withdrawing his hand from Buckmaster's arm. "Didn't see you."
"Just signing in as usual."
Laura smiled at the ugly Lake Cliffs widower as he pulled himself laboriously up the top step. "How are you today, Mr. Buckmaster?"
"Tolerable."
The older man puffed, licking his lips. His eyes had a distended quality as the three people passed into the reception area.
"Damn steps of yours get steeper every day," he grumbled with false affability.
As they halted in the reception area Norman Percy reached up to assist Buckmaster with his coat. The latter glared at Percy, shook his head. Percy flushed, thrust his hands deep in the pockets of his polo coat and vanished down the hall.
Buckmaster hung his hat, coat and muffler on the rack and stumped unsteadily toward the open studio door.
"You'll be giving the lesson today, eh, Miss Grace?"
"That's right. Since Miss Marple is no longer here."
Moving closer to him, Laura put a hand on his arm in friendly fashion.
"And I do wish I could persuade you to call me Laura, Mr. Buckmaster. After all, Cole & Miranda prides itself on friendliness. Especially in the ranks of the Lifetime Members. By the way, have you thought any more about taking out a Lifetime?"
"Some," Buckmaster grunted. "A lot of money."
He glanced toward the open door. Somehow Laura could not quite understand his almost indifferent manner. "Well?"
Buckmaster showed a trace of impatience, even boredom, as he looked at her. "Shall we start?"
"In a minute. Make yourself comfortable while I report in with the boss."
Mumbling to himself, puffing noisily again, Buck-master stumped into the studio.
Laura shook her head and started down the hall to the office. She could not understand the widower's behavior.
It was almost as though he had no interest whatsoever in the lessons. If that was the case, she wondered why he bothered coming at all. Most students at least deluded themselves into believing that they genuinely desired the alleged fun and companionship which would be theirs while they mastered the latest steps. Buck-master appeared totally indifferent.
Shrugging off the thought, Laura tapped on the closed office door and went in.
"Hi, Sid." Sid was behind the desk in shirtsleeves.
He had been working at the electric typewriter, typing out the name Wallace L. Buckmaster in capital letters, with two spaces between each letter.
Now he took the sheet of glossy paper from the roller with a nod, slipped it into an acetate sleeve which formed the first page of the elaborate presentation book the studio prepared to outline the advantages of Lifetime Membership to potential participants in the plan.
Glumly Sid leafed the pages-the specially drawn, grinning caricatures of Buckmaster surrounded by smiling, jolly cartoon figures at the monthly Lifetime parties, Buckmaster whirling around dance floors doing the latest South American steps.
Laura's mouth curved in amusement as Sid slammed the book shut.
"I think we're wasting our time and his," Laura said. "Buckmaster's waiting outside, and I've never seen a colder fish in my life. I honestly can't understand what makes the man come here."
"Damn it!" Sid cried angrily. "His Lifetime's all I need for the franchise now."
Laura shook her head.
"I repeat-you're wasting your time. You'll never get him to sign anything.' "Oh, yes I will!" Sid's eyes narrowed.
"One way or another-besides, a couple of times he's come close. Then he says he has to think about it."
Tigerishly, Sid began to pace the office, rubbing his chin, his expression sharp and speculative.
"I'm too close to quit now."
Executing a bored shrug, Laura started out of the office, indicating it was time she go for the lesson.
"Wait a second, doll."
Instantly Sid was at her side, a persuasive smile on his darkly handsome face.
He leaned close, kissing her lightly, his tongue flicking out to brush her moist, red lips. Almost instinctively Laura knew what Sid would ask.
His fingers stroked her hip insinuatingly. "Maybe you could try your charms on old Bucky. Now don't get sore or get me wrong. I don't mean offer to sleep with him or anything like that, God forbid," Sid added, with a pious air of revulsion which Laura found faintly amusing.
"Maybe just...."
Sid waggled one hand back and forth in the air...." just a little discreet sexing up. You know, a couple of words here and there, words he could misinterpret. Hell, these suckers like to fool themselves anyway. Cherry didn't have any luck that way. But then, Cherry was a dumb, obvious broad."
With a sigh, Laura nodded.
"All right, Sid. I owe you that much help, I guess. I'll try."
"Don't do it if you don't want to, Laura," Sid replied quickly.
Once more he smiled, fairly oozing charm and gratitude, his eyes growing heavy-lidded, promising some kind of payment when he saw that Laura would cooperate.
"That's my baby," Sid said, kissing her again.
Laura automatically responded by letting her tongue flick through her teeth, contact his tongue for a moment. Then she pulled away and started from the office, feeling suddenly dull, depressed. She wondered whether Sid had changed after all.
Still, he had given her the opportunity to refuse.
But some inner sense of guilt had forced her to willingly become his tool.
Moving toward the studio, she unbuttoned her sweater. Beneath it she wore a blouse with a deeply-scooped neckline which displayed the secret cleft between her breasts, which mounded creamily above the neckline edging, almost too full and thrusting to be contained.
Stepping inside the instruction room, Laura closed the door. She leaned against it, thrusting her hips forward in mechanical provocation. The v-line of her panties stood out in bold relief through the front of her tight-fitting skirt.
Buckmaster looked at her dispiritedly.
"Would you mind turning on the music, Wallace?"
Buckmaster had switched on the music and turned around.
Carefully Laura worked at the pump strap, brazenly letting her skirt ride up over her thighs, exposing the curving tops of her nylons fastened in place by black garters. "Oh!"
Laura feigned surprise, trying to assume a false modesty which she did not feel.
"Excuse me," she stammered in a good imitation of surprise, realizing that Buckmaster was staring at the floor with a wooden, lifeless face.
"That's quite all right."
He gestured clumsily.
"Ready?"
"Of course."
Again, feeling somehow cheap, trying to supress the emotion, Laura moved forward into his arms.
"My, you're getting very good, Mr. Buckmaster," she said, trying to press her breasts against his chest, bring her smooth belly in contact with his stomach. "Perhaps we'll be ready to try a more advanced step today."
What's the man made of? Laura wondered to herself. Sawdust?
Buckmaster gave no sign of response whatever.
Moving her upper body so that her left breast pushed sharply into contact with Buckmaster's coat, Laura said:
"You know, Wallace, as a Lifetime Member you'd be entitled to certain privileges and ... special favors ... regular students don't receive."
Staring him directly in the eyes, Laura smiled suggestively.
"Don't you think you'd like that, Wallace? It could be very nice."
"I suppose so."
The ugly widower vacantly, drew back again.
"Still thinking about it," he added.
"Perhaps it would pay you to think a little harder," Laura teased, her vanity wounded somewhat by his lack of response.
This vanity forced her to stop dancing suddenly, take his hand and make the fingers cup around her breasts.
Through the fabric of her blouse she could feel his lifeless fingers inert against her soft pink nipple. She knew she had failed even as she said:
"I could be awfully nice to you, Wallace, if you'd just take time to seriously think about a Lifetime."
Sweat had popped out on Buckmaster's forehead now, but it was the sweat of embarrassment, not of desire. He stared at his hand on her breast as though it was a diseased thing. "Could ... we go on with the lesson? I really don't want to think about a Lifetime just now."
"Very well." Mechanically, Laura let him draw his hand back in acute embarrassment.
When the lesson had ended, Laura returned to the office and reported her failure.
Sid greeted the news with an explosive curse, pounding the desk.
"I absolutely cannot figure out what makes that old bastard tick! Here you practically offer him a piece on a platter and what does he do? Ask to finish the lesson!"
Furiously Sid raked his fingers through his dark hair, uttering a disgusted sigh.
"You tried. Thanks, doll, but I guess I'll have to think up some stronger medicine."
For a moment Sid's eyes shone with veiled greed, as though he had suddenly concocted a scheme, but this was quickly wiped away as he touched Laura's elbow and his smile widened.
"You did your part. I'll figure out something. It's not your problem anyway."
The pat on the buttocks which he gave her was a clear sign of dismissal. Laura left the office, grateful that Sid had let her off so easily.
She really wanted no part of his schemes to get Buckmaster's ten thousand dollars, and for a moment, seeing the avaricious shine of his eyes, she had expected him to propose some vile plan that would involve her even more deeply.
Returning to the reception area to wait for the next student, Laura wondered again whether some miracle had really changed Sid Hardy into a different person.
Well, not totally different. That could never happen.
But the very fact that he had taken Buckmaster's problem upon himself was reassuring. It renewed her shaken faith in him, so that she felt almost happy as she greeted the next waiting pupil.
Two nights later, a raw, windy evening, Laura's opinion of Sid altered sharply once again.
He told her that he had cancelled all appointments for the day so that they could have dinner together. When she asked what victory he was celebrating now. he kissed her with a laugh.
"None. Except that I'm crazy about you, and damned glad to have you on my side. We're going to the best place in town, Villa Adrian, and have the two biggest filets in the house, and wine and all the trimmings. Just because I'm nuts about you, doll," Sid finished, grinning, kissing her with fervor.
Delighted and pleased, Laura went into the bedroom to dress, her spirits buoyed up.
Was he changed?
Oh, if only that were true ...!
The Villa Adrian, located on the outskirts of Genesee, was a luxurious restaurant with impeccable decor, dim lights and a strolling string ensemble. Throughout the meal, Laura found herself bursting into laughter at Sid's conversation. As the evening progressed she began to feel some thing almost akin to genuine affection. Her mood was further elevated by the wine which Sid ordered. Laura found that her glass was refilled each time she emptied it. The wine had a delicious taste and an even more delicious effect upon her spirits.
By the time they had finished the meal and a final after-dinner drink at nine-thirty, Laura's head buzzed gently. Her body felt moist and warm from what she'd drunk. She found herself giggling foolishly, bands pressed to her mouth, as Sid helped her with her coat, an oblique smile lighting his face.
As they drove back toward the lights of the city Laura snuggled against his side. Sid's free hand rested in her lap, straying occasionally beneath her skirt to tease her with provocative strokings of her nylons.
Abruptly Sid asked:
"Mind if we stop off at the studio a minute? I might as well come clean--I set up a special meeting with Buckmaster tonight. He's ready to sign for a Lifetime-called me this afternoon. It should only take a few minutes."
Pausing, Sid added guardedly:
"You can wait outside if you want, while I get Buckmaster's signature and check."
Laura giggled, nestling against him, knowing she was drunk, not caring.
"No, I'll come in too. So the old goat finally came around? I wouldn't miss seeing him hand you the money for anything."
Sid released a suppressed sigh. Somewhere in the depths of her muddled mind, Laura thought it sounded like a gasp of relief.
"Anything you say," Sid murmured.
He stroked her leg gently until warm erotic thoughts stirred Laura's mind and temporarily allayed her momentary suspicions.
Again she realized she was thoroughly drunk. It was a strangely wonderful feeling, as though she could say or do anything without guilt. They seemed to be driving over downy clouds, although the weather had actually turned raw with a sudden wintry rain squall.
When they reached the studio Laura dimly saw a light shining from the second floor. Sid explained hastily that he had left the door unlocked for Buckmaster.
"Walk into my parlor, said the spider...." Laura giggled, falling against Sid's shoulder in drunken mirth.
They entered the studio and turned to the left, toward the open door of the instruction room. Inside, Buckmaster was pacing up and down.
Just before they reached the doorway Sid pressed Laura back into the shadows.
He kissed her long and hard. She responded, feeling desire quicken her, make her grind her hips impulsively against Sid's thighs.
"You my girl?" Sid whispered in her ear.
Laura mumbled a reply.
"I've been feeling like hell all evening," Sid breathed. "I mean, I didn't come absolutely clean. Buck-master isn't exactly ready-well, what I mean is, I thought you and I together could put some pressure on him tonight."
Convulsively Sid fastened his hands over her girdled buttocks pulling her close.
"This is all we need, baby. If we get him tonight, we're set."
"What ... do you want me to do?"
Laura giggled, even though, somewhere at the base of her mind, a voice was crying alarm now, crying a trap, crying danger! The wine boiling in her blood blotted out that alarm, made her think only of Sid's masculinity bruising her, stimulating her so that she nipped his ear feverishly.
"Anything, lover, if you'll take care of me tonight. Sid, all of a sudden I need you to take care of me. Will you, Sid?"
Again she giggled and Sid pressed his hand over her mouth, shushing her. Helpless with drunken mirth, she leaned against him and whispered like a conspirator:
"Just ... just tell me, Sid. Tell me, lover. I'll do anything you want, go all the way, sweet, just so you go all the way with me. Oh, Sid, you've got me hot. Will you fix me, lover? Promise?"
"Promise," Sid echoed, his voice flat, triumphant in the gloom.
Quickly he pulled Laura's coat off her shoulders. She struggled to help him.
"We're going to fool that slob Buckmaster," Sid whispered, like someone sharing a secret joke.
Laura nodded, giggling. Again he pressed a hand to her lips. Laura bit his fingers playfully.
"Hurry, doll!"
Sid's voice was ragged now, and suddenly Laura grew aware of his hands pulling at the hem of her suit-top.
Before she knew it the suit came free.
Sid fumbled with her zipper, sliding the skirt down over her thighs.
Then he helped her off with her slip, kept her from falling in a stupor.
Again Laura heard the warning somewhere in her mind.
But standing in her undergarments, the wine was making her impossibly drunk, she could only respond to Sid's hands steadying her, guiding her toward the studio door.
Blearily, Laura leaned against the wall as Sid closed the door and faced Wallace Buckmaster.
A single table lamp burned in one corner of the room. It threw a pool of light, in the center of which the ugly widower now sat awkwardly in a chair. His eyes protruded noticeably at the sight of Laura leaning drunkenly against the wall, her hands roaming restlessly over her breasts, massaging her own thighs in an effort to quell the drunken delirium of desire which Sid had so capably stimulated.
Buckmaster made an effort. Sid held him down deftly in the chair.
"Don't get up, Wallace."
Sid's voice was harsh. A flat, predatory look gleamed in his eyes. Sweat had begun to mask his forehead.
"I brought you down here to give you a little present. You know we can be pretty generous to our students who decided to take out Lifetime Memberships. See Laura over there? Isn't she a pretty little doll? All soft and warm and round. Well, you can have her, Wallace. Right tonight. Right here. She's all worked up and ready for you. I can promise you'll have a good time. She's got hot pants, Wallace. And she knows plenty of tricks."
Insinuatingly Sid bent over Buckmaster, his voice low, while Laura watched through a film of drunkenness, dimly aware of something terribly wrong.
If only her head was not swimming so ... "I don't want...."
Buckmaster struggled to rise, his eyes protruding wetly from his head, his face beginning to take on an oddly purplish hue, mottled, sickly. That face was washed with open revulsion.
"Let me go ... I ... I don't want her ... any woman...."
"Come here, Laura!"
Sid extended his hand. "God damn it, Laura, I said come here!"
Terror-stricken now, her body a raging battleground of fright and sexual arousal, Laura staggered forward.
A drunken spasm pushed a giggle from her mouth. Sid seized her wrist and flung her forward.
She landed straddling Buckmaster's lap. She saw the naked avarice on Sid's face now. Then he moved out of sight behind her and she felt his hands on the hooks of her brassiere, unfastening them one by one.
Her breasts fell free, pulsing in the light.
Buckmaster stared at them, sickened.
"You're going to take out that Lifetime tonight, Wallace."
"Let me go!" Buckmaster shrieked, trying to rise. "You devils, let me go before ... agh, aght"
Like a bullet smashing in her brain, Laura saw Buckmaster fall back against the chair.
His mouth worked in a fish-spasm of excruciating agony.
He clutched his chest.
His eyes popped big from his head.
A long, gagging rattle came from his throat.
As though a string had been snapped, Buckmaster's head flopped over on his shoulder. His eyes filmed shut.
A last spasm traveled down his clutching fingers. "My God," came Sid's voice, rising in intensity. "Oh my God. My God!"
"Dead," Laura said, whispering. Then she screamed: "He's dead!!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At that precise moment, Laura's mind cracked and the final, unendurable nightmare began.
Another scream ripped out of her throat She closed her eyes and let it come, hysterically, long and piercing, shaking her to the depths of her being.
Like a wild creature she pressed her nails into her thighs, dug them deep, cruelly, gouging, abusing, lacerating, as though to expunge the tremors still shaking her with the last depraved lashings of her desire.
Sid's hands caught her naked shoulders, pulled.
She fell backward to the floor, lying sprawled and screaming until she saw his polished shoe flash through the air.
A thunderbolt struck her head, snapped her neck.
In that exploding moment of pain the last traces of drunkenness and sensuality were washed away, leaving only the raw and exposed nerve of mounting hysteria.
She saw Sid leaning over Buckmaster's swollen, bluish face, from which the tongue now protruded, dark and ghastly-colored.
As though Buckmaster were the guilty one, Sid began to shake the dead man back and forth, his lips writhing like worms, spittle flying through the light as he screamed:
"God damn it, you bastard! God damn it, a lousy God damn heart condition. God damn you, you dirty, old fool. God damn you to hell!"
Now Sid was sobbing, almost crying in his terror and rage.
Watching the cruel pantomime, Laura dug her nails into her cheeks until the pain restored her senses. But even then it was no use.
Suddenly she remembered seeing Buckmaster labor up the studio stairs, puffing heavily, and she knew that she had also seen a warning that this would end this way.
Then she remembered Sid's lying gaiety, the way he poured wine for her, got her drunk, pretending it was because he loved her, wanted to treat her nicely, when all the time, he wanted to use her again, use her-
And Buckmaster was dead.
Mindlessly, Laura shrieked.
"Stop that!"
Sid kicked her again, his toe wounding her breast as she tried to roll out of the way.
"Shut up, you stupid little whore! Shut your dirty mouth!
But Laura screamed again and again, unable to stop, until Sid caught her hair and pulled her up, making her scream all the more sharply.
"Will you stop?"
Sid's shoulders trembled, his fists balled, a killing rage in his eyes.
"Will you stop, you whore?" Or do I have to kill you, too? By Christ, you dirty whore, shut up, SHUT UP BEFORE I STRANGLE THE LIFE OUT OF YOU!"
And then, knowing black goading, fear, Laura made a lunge for the door.
Somehow she managed to get her hands on the key, snatch it and dart through the darkened reception area, insert the key in the other side of the lock and twist.
The door shook as Sid tried to open it. Then, maddeningly, he began to beat on the frame.
In another moment the glass would shatter and he would be after her. Already Laura could see his swollen shadow, a phantasm-shape, distorted, looming up on the frosted glass in silhouette, the arms working frantically, the fists thundering a tattoo.
"Open it, Laura! I'll kill you, I swear to Christ I will, if I get my hands on you...."
Some last vestige of sanity made her fumble in the corner for her clothing, draw on the skirt and suit-top, pull them over her nakedness. Her pumps clattered loudly as she ran toward the stairs, struggling into her coat, knowing only that she had to escape or go mad.
A shadow-shape loomed out of the darkness.
A hand closed on her wrist.
A voice called her name.
Laura screamed again, bending and sinking her teeth into the hand holding her.
The hand jerked away. She heard a muffled cursing. Dazed, she ran on, thinking it was Sid who had tried to stop her, realizing a moment later as she plunged down the stairs that it could not have been Sid, because the hammer-blows of Sid's fists on the door still thundered behind her.
As she reached the street and began to run she heard a distant shattering of glass. The mysterious figure was driven from her mind as her legs carried her frantically toward the corner.
"Here now. miss-!"
A blue-coated figure blocked her way, looming high against a streetlamp.
Laura swung her clawed hand at him, raking the policeman's face cruelly.
He growled low in his throat and reached for his billy.
Laura shoved with all her strength. The policeman toppled backwards against the wall of a building, off balance. Before he could right himself Laura had turned and plunged across the rain-slicked thoroughfare. Halfway across she slipped, going to her knees, sobbing as her legs wrenched apart.
Brakes screamed. Headlights flared.
Disheveled and wild, Laura struggled to right herself, her coat flying open, her skirt ripping so that the headlights bathed her naked buttocks, the backs of her thighs in white radiance.
A car door slammed.
A voice called out.
Footsteps beat on the pavement behind her.
Laura gathered her strength, leaped up and ran like a hounded animal, plunging across the intersection, down an inclined street, crashing against brick walls that lacerated her flesh, until at last some inner vestige of sanity made her turn and flee into a sour, garbage-fouled alley way.
On and on she ran, into the depths of the alley, until at last she could run no more. Her legs buckled.
As she fell, her hands clawed wildly for purchase. The galvanized lid of a refuse can clanged hollowly, knocked off by her fall, rolling away.
She sprawled on her belly in the sour darkness. She felt rainwater running down the alley beneath her, soaking through her dress, chill and damp, wetting her thighs and back. She bit her lips until the hot, salty taste of blood ran over her mouth.
She spat it out, her back heaving as she lay prone in the filthy gloom of the alley, the bricks hard beneath her, mashing her breasts flat, bruising the nipples viciously. One of her hands flopped out. The fingers brushed against a cold, hard surface.
Laura braced her palms against the slimy bricks, rising up. Her hair hung before her eyes. She pushed it back.
In the distant reflected light from the street the object which she had touched gleamed coldly. With a desperate, blind and instinctive craving she reached out for the whisky bottle and pulled it to her, crooning senselessly now.
Holding the bottle up, she shook it.
Roughly an inch of whisky remained in the bottom, cast aside in the alley by some miracle.
Wildly Laura pulled the cork and poured the liquor down her throat.
She choked, gagged, retched for a long minute.
But the cheap, raw whisky had a reviving effect, bringing her half-way to her senses.
With weak-kneed steps she tottered toward the alley mouth, slipping occasionally, bracing herself on concrete walls until her nails were broken and bloodied. Then she realized she was heading back in the direction she had fled and she turned, retracing her steps, knowing that terror lay the other way, the terror of Buckmaster dead of a heart attack.
His bloated face, his blackened tongue, his filmed eyes swelled in her mind until she had to beat her forehead against a wall to blot it out.
Then, as she staggered toward the beckoning streetlight at the other end of the alley, the sudden jolt of whisky which her system had absorbed began to temporarily dull her memories of what had transpired in the studio. She saw a way of escape....
If she could only secure another bottle, enough bottles to keep herself perpetually sick and drunk, then she would never again have to remember the ghastly scene she had left behind her.
How could she get a bottle?
How, how?
Night again.
Laura leaned weakly against a rough surface, hideously sick.
When she lifted her head, she pulled her soiled coat around her and realized she had wandered drunkenly down into the tangle of the railroad yards near the hotel.
And she was sober.
Oh, God there was no more liquor!
Her flanks, her breasts, her loins seemed alive with crawling things.
A cold sweat broke out on her forehead.
She began to walk, bumping against boxcars shunted on a siding.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, a headlight blinded her.
A switch engine was coming along a track, chuffing down on her.
Laura stared at the pulsing center of the light.
Suddenly it all seemed so simple, so clear.
This was where it had to end.
Bundling her coat around her, she watched the engine thunder closer.
Then she stepped forward onto the gleaming rails.
A hand caught her.
A shapeless figure pulled her back, dragged her out of che way just as the switch engine roared past.
Cruel hands dug into the fabric of her stained, filthy coat.
Laura fought, struggled, screamed softly. But all her strength was gone ... and her mind went blessedly dark.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"I couldn't let you die, Laura. Not by killing yourself. I owe you too much to let you die...."
Far away, echoing and reverberating, Laura heard the voice of the person who had prevented her suicide.
Heard it, recognized it, puzzled at it long before she was able to give the voice a name; even longer before she was able to summon strength into her weakened body and open her eyes.
As consciousness returned she became aware of merciless white brilliance beating at her closed eyelids.
Dream-fragments of her drunken stumbling in the railroad yards floated through her mind, causing her to understand that she was somehow sober again, the intoxication that had prompted her to try and destroy herself gone now. leaving her drained, a dry husk of a human being.
Gradually, awareness of her body returned.
She seemed to be lying upon a mussed bed which had a familiar hardness beneath her bruised, outraged legs and hips.
Her nostrils filled with the nauseating smell of her own body, unwashed for days, soiled with liquor and befouled in other ways.
Blindly she threw an arm across her eyes, trying to shut out the glare, almost knowing what she would see when she opened her eyes.
Conscious that she was still wearing the soiled remnants of her woolen suit, but nothing underneath. Laura felt her breasts burn and ache with pain as her breathing grew a trifle more steady.
Then she knew she could prolong the awakening no longer.
Hideously afraid of what would greet her view, she pulled her arm down and looked up.
A sick, dry gasp of horror came from her cracked, dry lips.
Above her hung the swollen frosted whiteness of a lightbulb on a cord, the same lightbulb that had hung over the bed in the room in the railroad hotel during her days and nights-how many had there been?-of degradation and shame.
She sensed more than heard a stirring at her side, the scrape of a chair being pushed back, of a person standing up.
Abruptly she remembered her benefactor, just as the voice came again:
"It was a piece of luck, Laura. Spotting this hotel so close to the yards, I mean. And when I carried you in here, I could hardly believe my ears when the clerk told me you already had a room. That made it extremely convenient for me."
The voice was thick with a kind of loathing now. "The clerk also told me you've been very busy in this room, Laura, during all the days I've been hunting for you. A man in a bar on the corner remembered seeing you. He said he thought you worked out of this hotel. Before I had a chance to come up to the room, I saw you wandering on the street down near the station. I followed you to the yards. Wasn't that lucky, Laura? You don't know how hard I've been searching. In every part of town. All day and all night sometimes."
The voice grew barely audible. In disbelief Laura heard hateful acid dripping from the speaker's words:
"Yes, Laura, I owe you a lot. And now I've got you here, and I mean to pay you. Fully."
With a gasp of horror, Laura wrenched her head to the side, turning her gaze for the first time to look at the person who had saved her, the person who stood over her now, neatly-dressed in a tweed jacket which his immense shoulders fully filled.
The man looking down at her was Norman Percy.
"Norman-" Laura began. "You-I don't understand-"
She shook her head, too tired and confused to say more.
Subtly, fright had taken possession of her again, because Percy's usually calm and expressionless face had a pasty, fanatic look in the ruthless shine of the dangling bulb.
His eyes seemed moist and cloudy, even a little-a little mad.
He clasped his slender hands at his waist and seemed to be nervously dry-washing them as he stared at her, unblinking, a glisten of saliva on his pursed, too-pink lips.
Actually aware of the silence, of Percy's fixed, hypnotic gaze, Laura felt dim stirrings of guilt.
Painfully she licked her cracked lips.
"Norm-I don't understand this. I don't understand why you came to help me. I don't know what I can do to repay you."
Pathetically Laura's bruised, filthy hands fluttered down to her skirt, gathered up handfuls of material, pulled, until the front of the skirt was bunched over her belly, leaving her loins exposed.
"If you want, Norman, I'll let you have me, to repay-"
Pitifully blinking at him, Laura stopped. Something made her cover herself again. Perhaps it was the sight of a thick vein in Percy's forehead beginning to hammer and vibrate, or the way his fingers suddenly turned bloodless, or the way perspiration suddenly popped out like grease on his forehead.
Or perhaps it was the twisted loathing on his face.
Percy lurched forward, teeth clenched. Spittle flew in the light as he hissed:
"You rotten lump of filth. You perfumed little harlot. You're like all the rest, thinking no man can live without that-"
Percy's shaking hand indicated her belly.
"Well, I can. I learned how to live without that a long time ago. I had something much better, something you couldn't even begin to understand, something that was true and real and-and exciting."
Percy trembled now.
"You killed him."
"I ... killed...?" Laura stammered.
And somehow, she began to realize the ghastly, perverted truth even as she felt nausea overwhelm her.
"Buckmaster!" Norman Percy screamed at her, his lips twisted with drool. "Buckmaster, you little whore, Wallace Buckmaster! I was in love with him! He was my lover and you ... you killed him."
"Oh, God, Norm."
Tortured, Laura turned her head away from him.
Percy twisted her hair, forced her head around. She saw madness in his eyes, in his saliva-streaming lips.
"You think every man has to have women, do you? You're so puffed up with filthy conceit that you think every man in the world just crawls and dies unless you'll give him this!"
With a cruel gesture Percy jerked up her skirt, pushed her legs apart and stared fixedly at the object of his twisted hatred.
"That's the center of your world, isn't it? That diseased, rotten place where you accept all your sweating, swinish lovers?"
Again Percy's hands moved, ripping the fabric of her fouled dress until her breasts were bared to the light. Trembling with fury, his lips writhing like worms, Percy looked at her body.
"By your standards all a man wants is to see those things, get his hands on them, play with them. And you like it! You like it! Rotten! Filled with rot, with putrefaction! I found a better way, a cleaner way. No one ever thrilled me like Buckmaster. Buckmaster was like I am. He hated your kind. Hated all the games men play just so they can have a woman like you. Why do you think Buckmaster came to the studio? Because he liked to have your dirty body rubbing up against him all the time? He came because I was there! Because we could meet there. Do you remember the night Buckmaster died? Do you remember someone grabbing you as you ran out of the studio? I was there."
Percy's eyes rounded with mingled lust mingled and insane hatred.
"I was waiting for my lover up there and I saw you and that bastard Sid kill him. I watched you kill my lover!" Percy shrieked softly, his hands bruising into Laura's shoulders, the nails digging deep, hurting cruelly. "I should have killed you both then. I should have strangled you when you ran past me that night, but I was too shocked, too surprised."
A cunning, clever smile glided over his sweating face, the face from which Laura could not take her numbed, stunned gaze.
"That's why I've been looking for you ever since, in hotels and bars and on the street. Now you know why I saved you. So that I can kill you myself, Laura. So that I can repay you for taking my lover away from me, you foul, dirty, unspeakable piece of-"
Suddenly, sharp against the mad whine of Percy's voice, knuckles rapped on the door.
Cat-like, Percy swung around. A long silvery thread of drool dripped onto his jacket. His eyes shone like peeled eggs, moist and sickening.
"There! There's the other one. Because you're not the only one I owe, Laura. There's one more. I telephoned him from the lobby downstairs. He doesn't know, yet. But he will, he will. The second fish in the trap...."
Watching Percy move to the door, powerless to scream, hypnotized by the horror of the scene, Laura watched the burly homosexual twist the doorknob.
Sid Hardy stepped inside.
Quickly Percy slammed the door and leaned against it. A smile of satisfaction was on his face.
Sid, gritty-eyed, blinked in the harsh light. He looked first at Laura, then at Percy, unsure of himself. Automatically he tried his old technique, the false, brilliant smile, the mechanized mask of the promoter.
"Laura?" Sid began tentatively, as though unsure he really wanted to see her again. "Where have you been? I thought you'd left town, or...."
He hesitated, confused, turning to Percy.
"I couldn't believe it when you telephoned the apartment and said you'd found her down by the yards, trying to-"
"Sid!"
Laura's voice cut through the room like a blade, piercing in its power as she struggled up on her elbows, blind to everything now except some deep, human link with Sid that made her want to warn him of the deadly madness swirling around them.
"Sid, run! He's insane, he-"
"What?"
Sid chuckled weakly, glancing again at Percy, then blinking.
"Norm, what the hell's wrong with you? You look white, and-Norm!" Sid's eyes rounded.
"Norm, what in hell are you staring-"
"Watch out, Sid!" Laura shrieked simultaneously. "Get away, he's going, to kill...." And then Percy lunged.
His thick, tough fist swept up to smash against Sid Hardy's stomach, doubling him over.
Percy chopped at the back of Sid's neck. Sid stumbled, going to his knees. His quick curse of anger was stifled by stark terror as Percy aimed a murderous kick at Sid's midsection, drove him against the wall, sent him sprawling.
Percy's whole body quaked in fury. Laura found the scream in her throat silenced, cut off to a noiseless gagging as Percy lunged again toward Sid.
Laura was sure Percy would kill Sid. leap on him and batter him to death.
But at the last instant Percy restrained himself.
Sid swiped at a trickle of blood dribbling down his chin. He tried to rise, tottering to his feet with a baffled, hurt expression.
"Norm, for Christ's sake-Norm, what's got into you? You're acting like a crazy man, you-"
Again Sid stopped. He grasped fully now the meaning of Percy's intent, glaring stare.
In the taut silence Laura heard her own voice say desperately: "Sid-I tried to warn you. Percy was Buck-master's lover. They were lovers, Sid, don't you understand, lovers!"
"Lovers?"
Sid goggled.
Then he looked at the trembling Percy again. "Fogs! Is that what-"
The word blinded Percy. With a howl he smashed his fist against Sid's face.
Sid crashed against the wall. Laura pressed her hands to her face, trying to shut out the drone of Norman Percy's voice as the big man howled at Sid, telling him how Sid was responsible for killing his lover, repeating for Sid the whole ghastly perverted story he had told to Laura. During the recital Sid turned even paler than before. He licked his lips feverishly, his eyes darting around the room as though seeking a means of escape from the hideous trap.
Bending over Sid, Percy breathed:
"Now you understand, don't you, Sid? Why I'm going to kill both of you? Right here, right now."
"Wait, Norm!"
There was desperation in Sid's tone as he scrambled to his feet, his cheeks running with sweat, his eyes terror-haunted.
Sid's hands plucked at Percy's coat. Across his mouth, like an epileptic convulsion, twisted a ghost of the automatic smile he practiced so well, and suddenly Laura knew even greater terror because she could not believe she was hearing Sid's voice in true perspective.
Instead of fear, instead of surrender or dismay, there was actually confidence in his tones, a wheedling, whining, pleading confidence.
Deep inside her brain Laura felt a secret stir of hope.
Perhaps, for once in his life, Sid Hardy's chatter, his slick, smooth brand of discourse might have some real value.
If only Sid could gain Percy's confidence ... wheedle him into being reasonable! If only for a moment, so that they could both escape...! Laura raised on one elbow, conscious of nothing but Sid's ingratiating smile, his desperate urgency as he fingered Percy's lapel like a fellow-conspirator.
And then, like a spike being driven through her skull, the buzzing of Sid's voice began to make sense, the words began to have a dreadful reality.
"... be reasonable, Norm. I won't say a thing. You know the kind of sentence they'll slap on you if I'm arrested in connection with Buckmaster's leath. Even if I'm not, even if you kill me, that'll make it all the worse, because somehow, somewhere, your-connection w.'lh him will come out. It's bound to come out, Norm, don't you understand? People don't live in a vacuum. Somewhere, someplace-in a motel maybe-a hotel-somebody saw the two of you together. One death can be squared. Two or three, no. There's bound to be an investigation. Your part's bound to come out
"Buckmaster was my lover. He loved me. I loved him. Someone has to pay for killing him. You, her. I've got to have payment for what you did to my lover."
"Nobody can connect us with Buckmaster's death now," Sid pleaded desperately. "Norm, listen to me! Nobody knows who killed him. I-I took his body across town. I left it in an alley, with booze poured all over him. The police have already come to see me. I'm in the clear. I told them Buckmaster came up for his lesson that night, and left. They bought it, Norm. They bought the story that he went on a drunk and his heart gave out. Buckmaster lived alone-you ought to know that. Nobody--no maid, no servants, nobody-can disprove what I told the cops. So I'm in the clear! and you're in the clear, too, unless there's a double murder. Because I'm the only one the cops have questioned in connection with Buckmaster's death. If I disappear, they'll start digging. And once they start-you're finished."
Percy blinked uncertainly, licking his lips.
He turned his head to stare down at Laura on the bed.
"What about her? Won't the police connect her with Buckmaster if something happens to her?"
"Why should they? Norm, I'm making sense and you know it. I'm the one they'll hook up with him, because I'm the one Buckmaster did business with. If they search his house they'll find all the stuff I gave him on the Lifetime. But her? She's just a teacher, Norm."
Sid swung around and stared emptily at Lauta.
"I can square her, Norm. I talked my way out of one mess and I can do it again. I can make them believe there was no connection between the lessons Buckmaster took, and the girls who gave him those lessons. We'll be in the clear."
Sid braced for the final assault, bent closer to Percy's face.
"Norm, let me go! We'll keep our little secret about Buckmaster, yours and mine. But let me go, Norm. Let me walk out of here. You want Laura? You can have her. She's all yours. Just let me go!"
Now the horror penetrated Laura's mind, wave after wave of unbelief and revulsion. She tried to struggle off the bed, seeing Sid Hardy in his true light-the greasy shine of his face, the cowardice that wiped all other decency from his heart, made him a sniveling, cowardly thing groveling before Percy, begging, pleading, willing to do anything in return for his life.
Laura tottered toward the two men, her hands groping helplessly.
"Sid! You don't mean that, you can't-"
"Shut up!"
Sid shoved Laura. Her legs twisted under her. She fell to the floor, her hair over her eyes. Nausea and delirium swept her again, making her mind tremble, threaten to crack. Distantly she heard Sid's voice still whimpering:
"Norm, she's the one that killed Buckmaster, not me. She was making up to him. you saw it. She rubbed herself on him, pushed her boobs in his face, you saw it. She's the one you want, Norm, not me. Take her and good riddance. She's a nothing. Just a cheap broad good for one thing. You want her, Norm? Will that pay you? Then take her, I beg you, take her!"
Sid's voice dropped lower, tilled now with a husky, whispering indecency which Laura could not believe:
"You can have your job back in the studio. And I can make it nice for you, Norm. I'd do-anything you asked, Norm, if you just let me walk out of here. Do you understand Norm? Anything. I've always liked you. You're good looking, and I'm sick of broads, sick of Laura and her kind always pushing their hips at you. I could learn to treat you real nice...." A pause.
"What do you say, Norm? Let me go. I'll be nice. I'll be all yours, Norm. Norm? Lover ...?"
The sound which tore out of Laura's throat was a scream of mind-shattering madness.
"Sid you can't mean you'd turn yourself into a pervert just to...."
"Keep quiet!"
He kicked at her, smashing his foot against her jaw so that she wrenched back like a twisted marionette. She covered her face with her arms, trying to shut out the glare of the light, the lascivious whisper of Sid's voice. Her head throbbed and thundered with horror and a sense of impending madness; her brain was strained to its limits, ready to fly apart, destroyed.
"Want me to describe what I'd do for you, honey?" Sid was whispering somewhere. "Let me tell you...."
"All right."
Norman Percy's voice had a choked, eager quality.
"Tell me what you'd do, Sid."
Lying heaped on the floor, her back wrenched with sobs of mind-numbing terror, Laura could not believe that the man she heard speaking was Sid Hardy.
She could not believe that the vile, unspeakable descriptions pouring like dark rot from his lips were being spoken by the man she had lived with, had accepted as a lover.
And yet, as the utterly depraved syllables filled the air around her, Laura knew it was Sid who spoke them ... knew at last in the depths of her tortured, fear-crazed heart just what sort of a man she had lived with, had sold herself to.
At last the whispered conversation came to a panting end.
Distantly an engine rattled in the yards. Norman Percy spoke softly:
"I like you, Sid. You're very handsome. I-think we can get along together."
"Norm, I promise you I'll treat you right. I'll do anything you ask me...."
"I'll hold you to the promise, Sid Darling," Percy replied. "You'd better get out of here now."
Realizing her last chance was slipping from her, Laura struggled up, bracing herself with one hand, reaching with her other hand toward Sid, the fingers constricting, trying to fasten on air, convulsing and clawing as she crawled across the floor, inch by painful inch.
"Sid! For the sweet love of Christ don't leave me here! Sid, he'll kill me, he's going to kill me if-"
Sid's shoe smashed her breasts, filling her with blinding, red-flashing pain.
Through the damp strands of her hair twisted in front of her face Laura had one final image of him towering above her in the open doorway, his face sweat-streaked, lips twisted in contempt, his skin ashen but his expression victorious as he stared down at her from a great height. Through the haze of pain blinding her Laura read at last his true personality in the way he looked at her, and dismissed her like a scrap of refuse found lying in his path.
The rasping sound in his throat should have warned her, but it did not.
Flicking a glance at Norm, a glance full of lewd, secret understanding, Sid bent over and spat full in Laura's face.
She fell back, sobbing hysterically.
The door closed with a thud.
Blindly, helplessly, Laura began to crawl across the soiled linoleum, away from Norman Percy, like an animal wounded beyond endurance but still somehow able to drag itself out of range of its tormentor.
Then, at last, Laura knew she could go no further. Her strength was spent.
She twisted onto her back, raising her arms to shield her face from Percy, the woolen skirt forced upward over her thighs by her movement, riding up to her waist now so that she lay exposed in the bare light. Percy's face became mottled.
One hand reached into his jacket pocket. Through the film of her delirium Laura saw metal wink cruel and blue, and she knew Percy held a revolver in his hand.
Kneeling, Percy looked down at her nude hips.
"That's what I want to destroy . That's what I want to kill ... That's what I want to wipe out forever ... that hideous thing ... that unspeakable thing you use to torment men that vile sickening thing that turns all of you into whores-depraved lustful whores. That'll pay me for Buckmaster...." Laura suddenly realized what Percy planned, knew now how he intended to kill her, and somewhere deep inside, another anguished burst of superhuman effort coursed through her.
"If I destroy you by destroying that, then I'll wipe out the score, because it was that thing that killed Buckmaster, that soft, evil thing...."
A scream ripped out of Laura's mouth. Her hands clawed, the nails driving like knives as she struck at Norman Percy's face and eyeballs, digging in with her nails to blind and maim.
Percy howled in pain. The revolver clattered out of his hand.
Laura lashed at him again, saw blood trickle down Percy's cheek as she pulled herself upward, drove a knee clumsily into his throat, then brought her pump down brutally into his groin.
Percy twitched away across the floor, moaning and cursing.
Laura plunged toward the door and into the hall.
Behind-her, Percy screamed her name.
She heard his heavy footsteps on the tawdry carpet as she crashed against the stair landing and started downward.
The lobby of the hotel blurred around her.
She plunged straight out into the street, slipping once in the light snow drifting down. Ahead, she vaguely glimpsed a clattering place of noise and motion alive with red and green signal lights.
Suddenly Laura realized she was running straight back to the rail yards, that she had placed herself in even more deadly danger in her blind urge to escape.
Twisting, she saw Norman Percy race across the street, his hair flying, his face murderous, green-washed by the hotel neon.
Percy was gaining!
Madness hammered at her temples, forced Laura to turn arid run forward to the only haven left to her, the yards.
"I'm coming, you whore!" Percy's voice roared over the damp wind behind her. "I'm coming for you, whore. You can't get away...."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Now the night whirled around her in a mad, surrealistic pattern blended from drifting ribbons of snow, cold iron shapes of boxcars booming right and left, the distant flash and blink of red and green lights like eyes suspended in the sky, the occasional glare of a switch-engine headlight through spaces between deserted gondolas.
A whistle shrieked shrilly in the distance. Couplings clattered. But for Laura the only true or real world was the earth flying by under her terror-stricken feet, the series of ties which blurred beneath her as she ran down an empty track between two lines of silent freight cars.
Now she stumbled, putting out her hands to brace herself as she fell.
Her palms struck the side of a boxcar with numbing force, sending bursts of pain along her arms, down her torso, into the aching ends of her breasts.
Then she realized again that she had to keep moving, for somewhere behind her, a shadow in the snow, Norman Percy lunged in pursuit, his mind fouled with his insanity, intent upon one purpose-her death.
Death ... it seemed all around her, leering, beckoning in dark shadows between the silent lines of cars as once more she flung herself down the endless ribbon of track.
Her mouth went open and shut in frenzied spasms, gulping for air. The harder she breathed, the more the pain of exertion stabbed into her lungs.
The heel of her left pump broke. She nearly fell again, saving herself only by seizing a boxcar handrail at the last instant.
She kicked off her shoes and ran on, sobbing now, her hair flying, the snow brushing like chill evil fingers against her raw skin, the cinders of the roadbed cutting, lacerating her feet, shredding her nylons to tatters, sending jolts of hurt mounting through her legs until her whole being ached with brutal agony.
Then, with a cruel sob of defeat, she stopped, swaying in the center of the tracks.
Around a curve, perhaps a mile away, a great blooming headlight swung, bathing the curtain of falling snow in brilliant light.
To the right-and left, long lines of freight cars blocked her path.
Ahead, the switch locomotive was chuffing toward her.
Behind, Norman Percy's feet chunked relentlessly, his voice crying above the storm:
"Wait, whore! You can't get away from me! Not this time! You're finished...."
Laura flung up one hand, bit her knuckles to the bones, felt blood spurt into her mouth.
She had wasted precious seconds, precious instants, and she realized her mistake even as she flung her body wildly to the left, toward a portion of shadow between two refrigerator cars.
Something brutally hard, cold and feeling iron, smashed her across the hips; she had stumbled against the coupling.
The pain sent new skyrockets of agony up into the aching, half-mad cavern of her skull.
She had to rest, had to let the pain work itself out as she leaned against the coupling, panting like a wild animal.
No time! her mind screamed. Run, run! He's coming!
Demented, she dropped to her knees and tried to crawl beneath the coupling. It was too late.
A dark shadow-figure loomed in the spray of light from the approaching engine. Norman Percy's hand closed upon her ankle, tight as a vise.
Suddenly his body was close to hers in the shadow between the refrigerator cars, his body was upon her, holding her down, forcing her down into the gravelled snow, one hand on her throat, digging in with irresistable force.
Like a scream of madness in the night, the engine's whistle tore through the snow. A signal light reflected scarlet on the sweat-streaming, twisted mask of madness that Norman Percy's face had become.
Brutally Percy clubbed her on the jaw, snapped her head back.
The snow whirled and danced. She knew she was close to fainting.
Percy crouched beside her. She felt his hand working at the hem of her dress, pulling it upward, ripping it away until she lay nude in the snow, her flanks chill as death.
"Now," Percy crooned. "Ah, now ... you whore."
And then, hard and firm against her knee, Laura felt the caress of the muzzle of the revolver.
She knew what Percy planned to do. But it was too late, too late. The world was a nightmare of racketlag thunder, of snow and white light. The switch engine rolled like thunder down the tracks.
"This is the lover you deserve," Percy was whispering as he pressed the muzzle against her thigh.
Then he moved it upward, hard, steel-hard and implacable, the barrel tracing a cold line of pain up her thighs.
"Open, lover...."
He pried her anguished legs apart with one hand, moving the gun with the other.
"Open for the last climax you'll ever have, whore. The last time you'll ever accept a lover into that dirty body of yours. The last time you'll ever feel an orgasm ... because this orgasm is going to be death ... death speaking into your body to make love to you...."
And the muzzle moved higher, higher, along the soft, secret inner flesh of her thighs.
Brutally Percy forced her legs apart.
The steel was colder than the coldest ice ... And Laura knew somehow that he had the muzzle in position. "Feel your lover, whore? Percy screamed above the nearing roar of the switch engine. "Your lover is coming to mount you, your lover is taking you now, your lover is claiming you now."
Between her bruised thighs, Laura felt a convulsion, knew Percy's finger was tightening on the trigger.
"An orgasm of death, whore! Now, whore, now!"
And with a last, final burst of will. Laura came up and pushed blindly against him, wrenching her legs, feeling the steel tear away, hurting.
Percy tottered, his legs kicking, suddenly off balance as he twisted backward.
His face was red-washed by the signal, then blazing white as he fell through the snow to sprawl on the tracks.
He screamed, flailed, helplessly ... and the switch engine thundered, thundered and covered him, roared over him, smashing his head like a melon so that blood jetted up hot and red through the snow, bathing the great drive wheels with bits of gore and brains, the twisted bone and gristle hashed by the tremendous wheels. The drive-rods screamed, protested with shrieking metal as the engineer tried to brake. Laura watched mindlessly as the engine swept on, still trying to brake, the great bloodied driving wheels suddenly past her, bringing darkness, darkness as the engine howled and creaked to a stop somewhere up the line.
In the snowy darkness Laura's leg brushed against Percy's fallen gun. Its chill, metallic touch set off a burst of screaming, agonized screaming from the depths of her soul, tormented with the torments of the deepest hell ... until at last the snow seemed suddenly warm, inviting, and merciful darkness stilled her tortured voice.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It began as a low, vibrant wailing, resounding somewhere deep within Laura Grace's mind. The wailing seemed to pulse, alter a pitch, grow alternately shrill and then blur away to almost a mutter before it began its keening rise up the scale once more.
Painfully, Laura felt sensation returning through her limbs.
Her hands rested, palms downward, on something crisp and crinkly, which she took to be the fabric of a sheet.
Then she moved her body slightly, trying to gauge the surface on which she lay. It had a resiliency, but also an inner firmness.
Puzzling over it, Laura grew aware of a sense of motion, augmented by a flickering pattern of light and darkness that darted across her closed eyelids.
Carefully, afraid of what she might see, attempting to lie very still so as not to arouse new pain in her already-brutalized body, Laura opened her eyes.
A patch of dark slid past, followed by a floating yellow globe which receded behind her. Peculiarly slanted shapes and dark twisted arm-like things flicked through her field of vision.
All at once she understood-seeing a white-coated back.
She was riding in an ambulance, looking at buildings and trees and light-poles through glass, hearing the high-pitched whine of the siren.
Instantly her mind flooded with a torrent of thoughts and images: the acute pain of the gun muzzle; in the roar of the switch engine pulsing past on the snowy tracks; the death-agonies of Norman Percy caught beneath the iron wheels and pulped into red ruin....
Involuntarily she started up, struggling with fears that gripped her blindly.
She tried to rise, tried to fight the nightmare washing over her. But her body was far too weak and she fell back, trembling.
It was then, when her head turned, that she saw a man's head and shoulders outlined against the lights sliding past the window of the ambulance.
Laura blinked dazedly, wondering for a moment whether a trick of shadow and movement was deceiving her; or whether she had been given a drug and was under some narcotic spell; or simply whether her mind had somehow fallen to pieces completely.
The light shining against the side of the man's face made it stand out clearly, unmistakably.
He was looking at her, longingly, searchingly.
It was Vic O'Keefe.
"How ... oh, dear God...."
Laura felt salty tears on her cheeks. "Vic...?"
Gently he smiled, took her hand in his.
"Afraid so. I happened to be at the police station this evening when the call came in from the yards, about Percy. I came along."
"Where are we?" Laura said weakly. "Where are we going? Where are they taking me. Vic?"
"Rest easy, darling."
Vic pressed her back on the hospital cart with the gentlest of pressures of his strong, capable hands.
"Don't move too much, at least not until we get you to Emergency and have the doctors look you over. Laura-"
His face was suddenly careworn, older, harboring a kind of compressed anxiety.
"-if anything should happen to you now-"
"I'm all right," Laura said, the warm tears laving her cheeks. "Oh, Vic, it was like a nightmare, a ghastly dream. When I woke up and saw you, I thought I'd lost my mind."
Trying to turn on her side to face him, she experienced a new stab of agony through her loins. "Oh!"
She bit her lip 'and fell back, her temples throbbing, every nerve alive with livid agony. She fastened her fingers around Vic's, held tightly. Gradually the tide of pain ebbed, leaving her shaken but able to talk again.
Vic watched with agonized tenderness as she once more made the effort to speak, moistening her dry, cracked lips with her tongue, forcing the words out:
"Vic, you said...."
"Laura, if the train hadn't gotten that Percy, I think I'd have killed him myself, with my bare hands, for what he did to you. But it's all right now. I'll stay with you."
"Something you said ... You talked about the police...."
Vic's mouth quirked.
"That's right. I've been cooperating with the local force ever since Buckmaster was found dead of a heart attack. You see, Laura, I'm a detective. A private detective. I work for the Palmerton World-Wide Agency, out of the Chicago office."
"Detective?" Laura gasped. "But you told me, that first night, that you were a salesman. Hardware, or something...."
Laura stopped, searching his face, seeing that she had brought him new pain.
"I couldn't tell you the truth, because Palmerton sent me up here undercover. The Better Business Bureau division of the Chamber of Commerce here in Genesee hired Palmerton to investigate complaints that had come in about a certain local dance studio. Cole & Miranda. Some of Sid Hardy's students felt they had been stung, so Palmerton took the case. I was to pose as a student, expose myself to the full treatment, then report back any evidence of fraud."
Vic hesitated.
"But I met you that first night. It changed everything. I ... I fell in love with you Laura. And I knew I couldn't carry out the assignment properly. Remember how I tried to question you, then stopped? I stopped because I think I knew, even that first night, that I was falling in love ... knew that if I went ahead, did my job and made my report, it would mean using you, playing on whatever ... affection there might have been between us, to get you to tell me as much as you could about the studio. I asked the home office to take me off the case. But Palmerton was handling a big strike downstate. They couldn't spare anyone. So I stayed on, phoning in fake reports, telling them it took time, stalling. All the while I practically went out of my mind. Then came that night I met you in the bar ... and I knew, much as I loved you, that I had to do my job. That's why I ... walked out. I don't blame you if you hate my lousy lying guts till the day you die," Vic finished fervently, his voice thick with emotion. "But I fell in love with you, Laura. And that ruined everything for us."
"You've ... been working with the police?"
For a moment, Laura knew fear; knew that if she told him what she wanted to tell him, the consequences might me damning.
Yet she had plumbed the very nethermost pit of horror, and somehow, telling him did not seem painful any more.
"Then you'll want to know what really happened to Buckmaster...."
Quietly, with a minimum of words, Laura sketched everything that had taken place since that night-it seemed ages ago-when Wallace Buckmaster fell over in his chair, dead of a heart attack.
"And that's the truth, Vic," Laura finished quietly. "You're the one entitled to do the hating, because I'm despicable ... a ... j tramp. And I only realized it when it was too late. Oh, Vic...."
Tears came suddenly again, hot and scalding, brimming with bitterness and regret.
"If it could have just started differently for us ... "
Then, miraculously. Vic was shaking his head, his face lighted with wonderment and love for her.
"If that's the truth, Laura, then there is a way. The police can find Hardy-"
His face twisted with disgust, recalling what she had told him of Sid's behavior with Percy
"-no matter where he runs, no matter how far. They'll find him and make him stand trial. You'll be implicated. Because of the very fact that you've just told me the truth. But if you'd go forward voluntarily ... give evidence . then there might be a way out for us."
"There can't be anything left," Laura said, turning away. "Not when you know what you do about us. How cheaply, wantonly I've behaved. Oh, Vic, I'd be bad for you, I'm not decent or...."
Vic leaned over, touching her cheek.
"Laura, you're the best, the loveliest woman I've ever known."
With remarkable tenderness, he kissed her lips.
"I love you, Laura. I'll never fall in love with anyone else, of that I'm sure. So it's your choice, darling. If you want me, I'll be with you, every inch of the way. If not...."
Turning his head, he shrugged.
"Well, I guess I'll simply have to live with it. It won't be easy. It'll be hard as hell. But I guess I can try."
Unable to speak for a moment, Laura let her mind rove back through the preceding months, lifting the veil of the past on sights which repelled her, filled her with agony and suffering as she thought of the way she had literally sold her flesh to Sid Hardy, mistaking the excitement of his caresses for genuine love; mistaking the feel of good clothing, the taste of expensive food for true security, a security which had proved empty, a sham, founded on rotten bulwarks, based in the decayed quicksand of Sid's diseased, greedy soul.
Then she thought of Jack Crome, of his child which she had lost, and of all the indecencies to which she had subjected herself, her body, in a desperate escape from reality after Buckmaster's death.
Could Vic O'Keefe's love cancel all those things and more?
Cancel all the years in which she--wrongly, falsely, she saw now-had sold her body, employed her body as a weapon?
Bitterly, she felt that it could not.
"Hospital coming up just ahead," said the ambulance driver from the front seat
"Well?"
Vic leaned forward, close to a precipice of raw emotion, questioning her with his eyes.
"Vic, if you still want me, after all the things I'll have to tell you, then ... then...."
"I want you, darling," he said, bending close. "I love you, I want to marry you. I don't care what the past was like. This is the here and now. A fresh start. For both of us."
"Then ... oh, my darling Vic, yes, yes, I love you, I'll marry you. Darling ... please ... kiss me."
And as Vic O'Keefe bent and hesitantly pressed his lips to hers, with painful effort Laura parted her own lips slightly and sent the moist bud of her tongue shyly through, caressing Vic's mouth in a lingering, gentle flow of warmth, full of love, full of the promise of the day soon when-proudly-she could give her body not as a weapon but as a gift, wholesome, pure and healed; give it to this man who loved her, whom she loved with all her soul.
Happily, impossibly happy, Laura began to cry. Vic bent down and pressed his face close to hers, comforting her, telling her of his love.
The ambulance turned and began to roll up the long hospital drive to where the Emergency entrance spilled out its radiance like a beacon of hope in the blackness of the night.
