Monita Ruiz was fifteen years old, a beautiful Puerto Rican girl with a mature body beyond her tender years, destined to lose her fresh innocence in the passion hell of New York City's West Side lust jungle. Al Carter, an ex-con just out of Dannemora, looking for easy money and easy women, and finding both when he met the young Monita. Glenn Lansing, unhappy at home because he had an abnormal hunger for the lips of warm young girls; Ruth, his beautiful young wife-but not young enough it seemed-who turned to the arms of any man to satisfy the needs her own husband would not give her, Joan, the woman who hated men and was looking for the right girl to share her abnormal dream-life. And Ryan, the phony Cop who made his living trading on the sin market of other people's misery. These were a few of them. A few of the damned souls who wandered in the limbo of lust, caught in a vortex of doomed passion....
CHAPTER ONE
On west 104th street, on the third floor of a four-story tenement between Columbus and Amsterdam, a girl was in bed with a boy The girl was barefoot and her feet were dirty. Otherwise she was fully clothed, as was the boy. Sweat held her white sleeveless blouse tight against her firm young body and let the straps and cups of her cheap cotton bra show through. No sweat was needed to make the faded denim dungarees hug her hips and thighs. The dungarees were too tight, had been too tight for a long time, and her full hips and taut buttocks and well-formed thighs were as obvious with the clothes on as they would have been if she were nude.
The boy and the girl were kissing. They were kissing on a sagging bed in a filthy room with caked dirt plugging the cracks in the linoleum, with cockroaches scurrying hectically along the walls. The boy's tongue was deep in the girl's mouth, and the boy's hand was cupped around the girl's large breast, and one of the boy's legs was draped across the girl's thigh.
The boy had tired eyes and a weak chin. A moustache was attempting to bloom under his button nose. But forget the boy; he does not matter, and he might as well have been tall with bright eyes and a firm chin and a full beard as tar as we ate concerned. Forget the boy-he does not matter at all.
The girl's name was Monita Ruiz. Don't forget it.
A woman left the Grand Union Super Market at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 100th. She was pushing a baby carriage, but the baby inside had to compete for breathing space with bags containing two small strip steaks, five potatoes, assorted packages of soaps and bleaches and cereals and vegetables, one slab of watermelon, and two hundred Triple-S Blue Stamps.
The woman wore a brown cotton shirtwaist. The dress buttoned down the front and the skirt was full. The woman's shoes were black flats and they were quite comfortable, but the woman walked as though she might fall on her face at any moment. It was four-thirty, and she had to have dinner on the table by a quarter to six. The baby needed a bath and a bottle, and the living room was a mess, and the woman was tired.
She walked with the carriage as far as Manhattan Avenue. Manhattan Avenue ended there, at 100th, to make way for Park West Village, a huge middle-income development that covered a dozen city blocks. The woman pushed the carriage inside one of the new buildings after a struggle with the door, loaded the carriage and herself into an elevator, and rode to the sixteenth floor.
In her five-room apartment she stowed the baby in its crib, warmed a bottle and gave it to him, put the groceries away, gave the living room a hurried clean-up, and sank into a modernistic chair which looked no more comfortable than it was. She let out a long sigh.
The woman's name was Ruth Lansing.
Don't forget it.
The man left Grand Central Station at two-thirty in the afternoon. He went upstairs, tired and a little nervous from the train ride and he broke the ten-dollar bill they had given him to get a pack of Luckies. He lit one of the Luckies and filled his lungs with smoke. It made him slightly dizzy. Then he went outside into the sunlight.
For half an hour he walked up and down 42nd street. The sun was strong, and for a few moments he worried that prison pallor would show on his face, which was dead pale in the middle of a hot summer. But New Yorkers are a pallid lot; nobody seemed to notice him.
He had a new cheap suit, and he had a ten-dollar bill-the change from one, anyway. A suit and ten bucks, and he was five years older than when he had left the city.
He went to Times Square. He had a hot dog at Grant's and a glass of orange drink at Nedick's. He stood for a moment or two in front of a fifty-cent movie house, then shrugged and turned away. He walked swiftly downstairs into a subway arcade, bought a token, went through the turnstile and caught the IRT uptown.
He got off at Broadway and 96th. The cheap suit was stained with his sweat and the cheap shoes-another souvenir, along with the tenner and the suit and the pallor-were too tight and far too uncomfortable He left the station, stood a moment on the street corner to get a feel of the neighborhood. It stank, he decided. Which was fine, because that was exactly as he remembered it, and he liked things the way he was used to them.
He walked north on Broadway for seven blocks. There was a bar between 99th and 100th where he stopped for a shot of rye. When you're out on parole you can't stop at a bar for a drink, but he was not on parole. He'd done all five years of a five-to-ten, with no time off for good behavior, and it had been hell but now it was over with. He tossed off the shot, started to ask for a refill and decided he couldn't afford it.
He turned west at 103rd. Halfway down the block he entered the Hotel Alexandria, walked to the desk. The clerk was a thin Negro with horn-rimmed glasses. The eyes behind the heavy lenses took in the prison pallor and the cheap suit and registered nothing.
The man paid four dollars in advance for a night in the hotel. He took a ball point pen and scrawled his name on the three-by-five card the Negro gave him.
The name he signed was Al Carta.
Don't forget that one, either.
They used to call it Bloomingdale.
It was different then. Then was a couple of hundred years ago, when Hector was a pup and New York was a little bundle of urban nerves at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. In those days the citified types got nosebleeds north of Chambers Street. Greenwich Village was a village, not an oasis in an urban desert. So was Chelsea And Blooming-dale was a far-off town on the eastern bank of the Hudson, a town of beautiful homes and mild manners, a town of Manhattan Dutch and nouveau-riche Anglo Saxons.
Times change, and so do cities.
Especially New York. Like Topsy, New York just grew. Or not like Topsy. Like topsy-turvy.
They don't call it Bloomingdale any more. They call it the upper west side, when they call it anything at all, and they mean a big stretch of turf from Central Park to the river, from 96th Street to Harlem. The old private homes gave way to town houses for the rich, comfortable brownstones all alike on the outside and all splendid on the inside. In the Teens and Twenties larger apartment buildings went up, and the smallest apartment had five rooms, and the rooms had high ceilings and casement windows and parquet floors.
Then something happened. The New York disease happened and in the vernacular, the area caught a dose of urban clap, and Bloomingdale went to hell in a handbasket The rich moved to the east side or the north shore or Westchester, and the middle class moved to Parkchester or Levittown or Jackson Heights, and the poor spilled all over the streets of Bloomingdale. The one-family brownstones became four-family brownstones, an apartment to a floor. Then the apartments were partitioned, and re-partitioned, and re-re-partitioned ad infinitum, and the poor slept twelve to a room.
Until Boomingdale didn't know which end was up.
There were just too many ends. There was Central Park West, with snooty doormanned buildings and a view of the park that you couldn't walk through at night. Apartments rented for fifty bucks a room or more, and the address still carried a little prestige with the people who didn't know the neighborhood.
There was Columbus Avenue, where a bodega was a grocery store and a carneceria was a butcher shop and muebleria was a meat market and a zapateria sold shoes, and where all these stores cashed relief checks and welfare checks and unemployment checks. Columbus Avenue spoke Spanish, and the women who shopped in the bodegas and the carnecerias filled their shopping bags with dried beans and unpolished rice and wondered how the airlines had managed to con them into leaving Puerto Rico.
There was Amsterdam Avenue, where you could buy anything in the world second-hand, where southern Harlem merged with northern Puerto Rico. A flat, dead street; the small stores went out-of-business so rapidly they had no time to bold Going Out Of Business sales. The bars sold a lot of bad rye and cheap wine.
Broadway-the uptown version. Still the fast-buck street, but competing now for fewer bucks than Times Square. Good restaurants trying to stay alive, branch banks handling commercial accounts for stores and shops and markets.
West End Avenue. Still rich, but sagging a little.
Riverside Drive. More of the same, but sadder because of what it had been a while back.
Bloomingdale. A study in contrasts, a rich-poor hodgepodge with no middle. The old buildings were plush apartments or they were tenement houses. The new buildings were Park West Village or the Frederick Douglass Low-Income Housing Project. Junkies, winos, welfare fakers, pensioners, hustlers, pool sharks, psychotics. Housewives, junior executives, actors, artists, and remnant of a dying middle class. A many-acred monument to human stupidity. The flies and the cockroaches had big families and thrived. The poor had bigger families and died from the inside out.
Bloomingdale.
However, this isn't supposed to be a sociology text. We could probe the whys and wherefores till Hell froze over, or until railroad flats were warm in the winter. But let's not. Let's, instead, get the hell back to bed.
A specific bed.
A bed that sags in the middle, a bed with old sheets stained by wine and sweat and blood and love. The bed does not belong to anyone in particular. The bed is in a room, a dirty room on a dirty street, and the entire family of Manuel Ruiz inhabits the room. Various souls make use of the bed at various times.
Monita Ruiz was lying on the bed now. She was alone in the room, and she was very hot, and she was very tired. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with stale air. The room's one window front-ed on an airshaft, and when the window was open the air that came in reeked of the garbage which everyone threw down the airshaft.
So she couldn't do anything about the air. But she could do something about the heat and the tiredness-she could get out of her clothes and get some sleep.
It was four in the afternoon now. Monita was not wearing her blouse; the clumsy fingers of the boy had removed that. Now she took off her bra and her dungarees and her panties. She dropped her clothes in a tired heap on the floor and stretched out full-length on the bed.
She was fifteen years old. She had spent twelve of those fifteen years in Manhattan and most of the twelve on the upper west side where she lived now. No vestige of Puerto Rico remained in her speech. She spoke straight lower-income New York, heavy on the hip slang and go easy on the long words. She preferred hamburgers to chicharones and malteds to pina colada. The Puerto Rican remained in her facial expressions and her walk, and in the simple fact that she lived on 104th Street.
She closed her eyes now. She was tired, very tired, and she was glad that the boy had left. She remembered it again now, his mouth on her mouth, his hands moving on her body. It had been good. He made her feel very excited, very important, very good.
But it was bad.
Because she had not wanted to let him stop. When his hands were inside her blouse, cupping her firm breasts through the thin cotton bra, her mind had told her how fine it would feel without the bra in the way. His hands on her bare breasts, his fingers poking and probing at her nipples-Bad.
She had made him stop, had sent him away But another time she would not let a boy stop Another time she would let a boy-this one or another one, it hardly mattered-go far with her, very far as far as he wished to go.
Hands on her bare breasts. Hands on her thighs, her bare thighs, hands that moved higher. Then two bodies nude, two bodies locked in combat, two bodies ready for the one quick thrust that would take away her innocence and make a tramp of her.
She was a virgin now. Virginity was a rare commodity on 104th between Columbus and Amsterdam, even at the supposed-to-be-tender age of fifteen and Monita shivered in fear of a loss which seemed inevitable. She did not want to be a bad girl, did not want to make love with a boy and lose her claim to goodness.
But it would happen.
It always happened.
It was a rule of the neighborhood. Puerto Ri-can men sold heroin and robbed liquor stores and mugged people, and Puerto Rican girls became whores and sold their bodies. It did not happen everywhere. There were Puerto Ricans in other neighborhoods who led respectable lives and worked at respectable tobs and slept in their own beds. But 104th Street was something special.
Fight it. she told herself. Find a way. get a job, save your bread, get up and get out. Go someplace where they got green grass and a place to breathe. Tell people you're Spanish or Brazilian or anything, just so it's not PR, and be very cool, and marry an Anglo and live happily ever after. Solid.
But where did you start? Money had to come first, and how in hell did a fifteen year old PR chick get a job doing anything in the world but bouncing her butt on a mattress? Without the money you couldn't have the front, the decent clothes and the ticket to the decent town. So what the hell did you do?
An easy question, she decided. You waited. You waited on 104th Street, waited for the world to crumble, waited for one of the hot-to-trot bastards to go too far too fast until you didn't care about anything but what he had for you. Then it was too late. Then you were a tramp, and you felt sorry enough for yourself to start poking needle holes in your arms, and then you needed thirty bucks a day to keep the walls from closing in on you. Thirty a day for heroin-there was only one sure way for a girl to earn that kind of money.
On her back.
She sighed again. She was still hot. even naked, because New York in the summer is a blast furnace and the little room had next to nothing in the ventilation line. She wanted to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come.
Her hands brought it.
Her hands took up where the boy's had left off. Her hands cupped those breasts-very big breasts for a girl her age, very big breasts for anyone. Her hands petted and caressed, and her bands pinched pink nipples into stiffness.
She felt the weight of her breasts. Big and firm, soft and sweet. A boy could kiss them, she thought. A boy could take them between his lips like a baby until she lost her sense entirely and burned up with desire.
A boy could do many things. Many delicious things.
She moved her hands down over her stomach. Her eyes were clenched tight now and her breasts were heaving with her deep breathing. She touched her flat stomach, moved her hands to her thighs and squeezed gently. The boy had done that, had squeezed her thighs. But she was wearing jeans then.
Now she was not. Now her hands were coolly sweet on her bare flesh, and her hands continued to move northward. The skin on the insides of her soft thighs was like spun silk. Her fingers patted it and she shivered.
Desire was a knife now, a knife cutting her into little pieces. Her body began to churn now thrusting at the cracked plaster of the ceiling, thrusting to meet an imaginary lover. The bedsprings squealed-a sound that made her flush with guilt, because every night she heard the springs of a dozen beds creaking in the tenement, and now she wondered whose ears were being filled with the sound of her own solitary lovemaking.
But the thought went away at once. Her deft right hand moved until it could not go any higher, and every touch of her fingers sent a fresh spasm through body.
The excitement was torture in itself. She scratched the bedsheets with her left hand, drummed a tattoo on the bed with her feet. She gasped for air, writhed in torment, as her own clever fingers carried her higher and higher along the crest of passion.
Higher-Then the end.
She slept very soundly. When she woke up she felt filthy from head to toe, but there was somebody in the bathroom down the hall and she had to wait twenty minutes before she could take a shower.
Al Carter dropped a cigarette onto the rug in his room at the Alexandria. He looked down at it for a minute, with no expression on his face. Then he covered the butt with his shoe and squashed it into the rug.
He needed three things.
First of all, he needed dough. The ten-spot they handed you at Dannemora's iron gate wasn't exactly enough to keep you going for life. Ten bucks might feed him until morning, if he didn't eat too well, and it would cover his rent through noon. But after that it was over. You could take ten dollars and stretch hell out of it and still not string it for more than twenty-four hours, no matter how lousily you wanted to live.
And he didn't want to live lousy. He had lived lousy for five years, he had done hard labor in the hardest manner possible, had fought every day because every day was unbearable. He wasn't going to live lousy any more. He was going to live soft.
To do that, he needed dough. There were two ways to get dough, of course. You could work for it or you could take it. If he worked for it, fresh out of stir with an ugly record, it would take him at least a month to find a job that would pay him a hot forty a week. If he took it he could not do worse.
All right, he needed dough. That was one thing. The second thing was a bottle. He needed good hooch-good bourbon or good Scotch-and he needed a fifth of it. He was going to drink the whole fifth before he went to bed. Then, when he woke up, he might feel human again. A good drunk and a good hangover got the taste of stir out of your mouth. All the cons said so, and most of them had been in and out of Danny enough times to know everything about it.
Everything, that was, but how to stay out again. He was going to manage that. He was not going to get caught, not little Al Carter, because getting caught meant another stretch at Dannemora and five years at Danny was more than anybody had to spend. It was hell, and it was not for him.
Money and liquor.
Fine.
But the third thing was just as important The third thing was more important, maybe, because without it he would go off his nut.
The third thing was a woman.
He needed a woman. Now every healthy man needs a woman now and then, but there is a difference between this kind of need and the need of a man who has been cooped up in a cell for five years.
There is one hell of a difference, and Carter knew all he had to know about it. He needed a woman.
It had been no barrel of laughs at Dannemora. It was hard right from the start when you were used to sex and plenty of it, and it got easier for a stretch when your body got accustomed to doing without, and then it got steadily harder as the time wore on. There were ways around it, of course. Hell, you take a healthy guy and keep him away from love for five years, and something's got to give.
A do-it-yourself project was the obvious place to start. Carter had done that. Hell everybody did it, sooner or later, and he had held out as long as he could. It made things a little bit simpler. But there was a hell of a big difference between a clenched fist and a girl's body, and old Mother Palm was just no substitute for a girl's hot brdy.
There were other ways, and he'd steered clear of them.
Some of the cons went for it. Some of the cons got together and used the rear entrance or the upstairs window and got their kicks that way. They said they enjoyed it. and they evidently did, that way, but it wasn't for Carter He had nothing against Greek route or the French scene, but he was damned if he was going to make it that way with a man. A woman was another story.
He went into the John and took a shower. He dried off, checked his face in the mirror and decided he didn't need a shave yet. He wished he could spend an hour under a sunlamp, though. He'd look a hell of a lot better.
He didn't look bad as it was. His nose was long and straight, his eyes a dark brown his features clean and sharp. His hair was jet black with blue highlights and it looked good worn long and slicked back. Now it was cropped off in a good old Dannemora crewcut and he didn't like it. The hell, he thought, it would grow back.
He was twenty-eight.
His eyes were ten years older and his body was five years younger, a good hard body that the prison hadn't been able to crack The heavy work just made him harder and stronger. His legs were like steel and his chest was solid. He didn't have an ounce of flab anywhere.
He got dressed, wishing for fresh clothes. Then he went downstairs, walked around the corner to the cigar store, and made a phone call Half an hour later he met a fat man in the Senator cafeteria on Broadway at 96th and took three hundred dollars from the man.
"You kept your mouth shut tight," the fat man said. "It was appreciated."
He had taken the rap alone, leaving two other guys in the clear That didn't mean he had a soft touch to fall into. It meant he was getting three hundred bucks for playing it straight.
"There's people around," the fat man said "If you want to connect, the neighborhood's the same."
"I figured."
"I'll see you," the fat man said. He waddled off and Carter watched him go The fat man was a fixture on the upper west side. He bought stolen goods and could sell you anything from an untraceable thirty-eight to a hot mink stole for your broad. He had other things going for himself, that fat man did. He worked every side of every street and lived in a fieldstone house in Riverdale.
Al folded the bills and stashed them in his pocket. They bulged there. He finished a cup of coffee and left the Senator.
There was a package store on 102nd. He stopped there and bought a fifth of Dewar's. It ran him close to seven bucks and it had been so long between drinks that a cheaper brand would have done him a-much good, but he bought the Dewar's anyway. He wasn't going to live lousy. He was travelling first class.
In his room at the Alex he filled a water tumbler with Scotch and drank it slowly. It took him half an hour to empty the glass. He capped the bottle and stashed it in a drawer for later Then he left the hotel again.
He had the money and the liquor; now all he needed was the woman.
The need was a living thing now. He walked up Broadway to 106th with the blood pounding in his veins, and every woman who passed him made him draw a quick breath. He saw a Puerto Rican girl, young and firm, with her big breasts twisting a sleeveless blouse out of shape. He saw a young mother pushing a baby carriage and he wanted to throw her down on the pavement and knock her up again. He passed a girl who probably went to Barnard, a Negro cleaning girl on her way home from a West End apartment, a brace of high school kids.
He found the hooker on 10th and Amsterdam.
It wasn't hard to spot her. She wasn't subtle at all and she looked about as much like a whore as it is possible to look. She had bleached blonde hair and washed-out eyes and she was holding up a lamppost with her shoulder. She gave him a come-on smile and he came on like Gangbusters.
She took him to her room on Amsterdam over a store that sold used suits and overcoats. She took, off her clothes and stretched out on the bed with the same phony smile on her face, and he got out of his own clothes and jumped her.
It was the wrong way but he wasn't ready to be fussy. The right way was for free with a broad who was doing it because she wanted it as badly as you did, and this broad only wanted the five bucks so she could shoot another cap of horse into her thigh. But she was there, and that was enough.
"Come on, honey-"
He came on. He grabbed onto her small breasts and surged into her, driving home with a fury that almost made him wince. He plowed into her, slammed her hard against the mattress, pierced her again and again until it was over.
It ended too soon. When you save it up for five years, he thought, you can't expect to hang onto it very long. What the hell.
The bottle blonde started to gat up from the bed. He grabbed her by the shoulder and tossed her down again.
"I'm not done," he said.
"You didn't get five bucks worth?"
"I'll shoot another five," he said "Fade me?"
The second time was better. The second time the hunger wasn't quite so great and he was stronger than the blind need was. He let her swing her body a little, and he rode her like a cowboy riding a bucking bronc.
The third time he wore her out. The third time was more energy, energy he had held onto for far too long, and he let it all go. He caressed all of her, stroked all of her, and then he jumped onto all of her and had her.
And when he was done she was a tired pile of rented flesh curled on the bed, mouth slack, eyes lidded. He'd gotten to her that time. He knew it, knew it with calm assurance. He had reached her, had probed beneath the tramp veneer to the female underneath. The rocking had not been merely professional, and the shudder at the end had been far more real than the professional climax of the dispassionate hustler.
He had reached her.
He didn't say anything for a few minutes. Finally she opened her eyes and looked at him. She said: "Jesus."
"Tire you out?"
"Rode me blue," she said. "You fresh outta stir, baby?"
He grinned at her.
"Saving it all up," she said. "Christ, you had a lot there, didn't you? How long?"
"Five years."
She laughed. "Five years," she said. "Where? Ossining?"
"Dannemora."
"I knew a guy there. Danny Weaver. Know him?"
He hadn't, and said so.
"A bastard," she said. "You want any more, baby?"
He told her he was running out of fivers and she said he could always run a tab, any alumnus of Dannemora was a fine credit risk He laughed and said he was running out of more than money He was tired; besides, she had a nervous look on her face and he had the feeling she was about ready for a needle. He wanted to get out before she got hung up for a shot.
He got dressed and left her there. The street was darker and cooler but pretty much the same He felt easier now, easier and looser. He had the three things he needed. Money, liquor, a woman. Three hundred dollars, a fifth of Dewar's, and three bangs off a dime-store slut.
On Broadway he found a good steakhouse trying to keep open in a neighborhood which had once been able to support good steakhouses. They gave him a corner booth and brought him a rare steak and a baked potato with sour cream. He drank a mug of ale with the meal and paid the check, leaving a buck tip.
It was around eight when he left the whore, nine when he was done with his meal He walked around for a half hour and spotted a few people he had known once He didn't bother saying hello to anybody and no one seemed to notice him There was a pool hall and bowling alley upstairs of the Senator He went into the bowling alley and tried to roll a game but he couldn't get anywhere. He threw the first five balls in the gutter, lofted the next two, and had to work to finish with a spare and a strike. He paid for the game and left. What the hell-bowling was a stupid way to waste money. He had better ways.
He went back to the Alex. In some uncanny way the clerk realized that he had money now, and his facial expression was microscopically more respectful. He called Carter by name and tossed him his key. Carter went upstairs in the elevator, got into his room, found the Dewar's bottle and filled his glass. He took a quick small sip and carried the glass to the window. He looked out at the upper west side, frowned, then shrugged the frown away. Very deliberately he drew the shade before turning his attention back to the Scotch.
He was on the outside now. You could be on the outside or the inside, and it was all on how you played your cards. You could play them straight as a little arrow, living clean and working hard and dying clean, and you would go into your grave and rot in it without a single black mark on your record.
Well, shove it.
He wasn't going straight and he wasn't going back to stir. He was going to have things just right, a cushy pile of dough and not too much work for it. A little sweat, maybe. A little brainwork. But no job. No crap from a boss. None of that noise, thanks.
He downed the glass and filled it again. At Dan-nemora they were all in their beds, sleeping or playing with themselves or whatever the hell they were doing. In the morning they would get up and go to work making license plates or washing clothes or doing one of a few dozen chores for the state.
Nuts.
He was out, damn it! He was sitting in a room on the outside, drinking Scotch and remembering how it had felt an hour or two ago to slam into a woman. He was out, and he was staying out, and he was going to ride high.
He finished the bottle. He drank slowly and steadily and deliberately and by midnight the bottle was empty. He chucked it out of the window and listened to the way it shattered on the pavement.
He was not high, not reeling, and not giggly He was just drunk, and that was the way he wanted it. He got undressed, threw his Dannemora suit in the corner, and got into bed. Then he passed out and slept
CHAPTER TWO
Ruth Lansing's day began at seven, when she opened her eyes, dragged herself out of bed, and scurried to the bathroom. The alarm was not due to ring for half an hour, and she got back into bed and pulled the sheet over her shoulders, closing her eyes and trying desperately to drift back into her dream. The dream had been a good one, a sex dream in which she was kissed and caressed to the point of insanity by a faceless and nameless lover.
She did not get back to the dream. Another Alarm-not the clock-stopped her; the baby let loose with preliminary attempts at full-fledged screaming, and she got up and headed for him. On the way she stopped to look at Glenn. He was still sound asleep, his face buried in his pillow.
Go ahead and sleep, she thought. You could sleep through an earthquake, you son of a bitch.
The baby, six months and sixteen pounds of noise named Stevie, needed a change and a bottle. She changed his diaper and warmed a bottle for him. By the time she was through playing mother, the alarm clock sounded and Glenn was awake. She made breakfast for the two of them, scrambling eggs, putting up a pot of coffee. They ate together, holding the conversation until they had both put away two cups of black coffee.
"Morning." he said finally. "That's what it is."
He yawned "Not a particularly good one," he said. "But it's morning, all right."
She looked at him He always managed to look annoyingly fresh and capable in the morning, partly because he wore clothes so well. His suit, a summer tropical, was wrinkle-free and neat His hair was combed back, his face wide-awake. His repp-striped tie was knotted properly and his shoes had a shine. It seemed indecent to her for anyone to be so presentable at such an hour.
He left the apartment at eight-thirty His office was on Rector Street, in the financial district a good half-hour ride on the subway at best When he was gone she poured out a third cup of coffee and drank it. Then she went back to the bathroom and showered.
Ruth was a pretty woman. She was twenty-four, a tall and leggy blonde with a Hollywood-style figure that had recovered completely from childbirth. Outside of a few purple strech marks on her hips which were fading slowly to white lines, she looked quite the same as she had looked before she was pregnant. Her large breasts were as firm as ever, chunky cones of flesh that tilted upward slightly at their tips Her waist was girlishly slender, her hips wide, her legs perfect. She had long hair the color of young corn and wore it any one of a number of ways. Now in the shower, it was loose. It cascaded over her bare shoulders and looked lovely Other times she would bind it up in a schoolteacherish bun. or rubberband it into a schoolgirlish pony-tail, or curl it up into a French roll. She liked it best when it was loose.
She got out of the shower, her whole body tingling nicely, and she rubbed herself dry with a nubby yellow towel. She used another towel to get her hair dry, then spent several minutes combing and brushing it. She dressed-a white blouse, a tight black skirt-and she hurried through the housework ritual, finishing up in time to give Stevie another bottle and a meal of canned baby food.
At noon she relaxed. She sat down in front of the television set and stared at a soap opera and relaxed.
She was not happy.
Life, she thought, was well on its way to becoming a genuine full-blown bore. Life had become a process of caring for a crisp new apartment in an ugly slum and a fat little baby whose existence was completely attributable to the failure of a diaphragm. She did not like the apartment, and she could have lived without Stevie, and she was sick of the whole routine.
It wasn't what she'd figured on. She started out on Maxwell Street, on Chicago's near north side, and she'd spent years trying to get as far as possible from slums and the people who lived in them. She was a whip at school, caught a scholarship to Northwestern, met Glenn Lansing and changed her name from Ruth Piontokowski to Ruth Lansing. Glenn was a rising star with a Wall Street house, and they had gone from two rooms on West 68th Street to three rooms in the Village and, finally, five rooms in Park Village West The next move would be to exurbia, either upper Westchester or eastern Long Island. A solid split-level on an acre of land. It ought to sound good, she thought. But it didn't.
Because everything was boring, everything was drab, everything was dull. Glenn was a stranger who shared her bed and rarely took advantage of the fact. Glenn was a good provider and a good husband and a fourteen-karat drag. Glenn was duller than dishwater, less fun than a barrel of dead monkeys.
And she was sick of it.
She stood up, flicked off the television set, went into the nursery and dressed Stevie. The apartment was beginning to get on her nerves; five rooms, plenty of space, and still she got so she felt cooped up in the damned place. She had to get outside, had to see people, had to get some fresh air. If you could find fresh air in the rotten neighborhood.
She dumped the baby in its carriage, took the elevator downstairs, walked over to Central Park and headed down a shady path. She stopped at a bench under a tree, put the brake on the carriage and lighted a cigarette. She smoked it until there was only an inch of it left, then flipped it onto the grass.
She knew what she needed.
She needed excitement. She needed people to talk to, people to be with. She needed something that was more of a kick than changing diapers and warming bottles and spooning strained carrots into an uncooperative mouth.
She also needed a piece.
She giggled aloud. That was a near north side way of putting it and neither Wall Street nor Park West Village could be expected to confer wholehearted approval upon her choice of words. But it was the goddamned truth-she needed a piece, needed it in the worst way.
Because Glenn wasn't doing her much good.
She had not been a virgin when he married her, although he did not happen to know this. In Chicago, during her high school years, she had gone with a boy named Ray Patterson. He was as bad a scholar as she was a good one, and he had a record of three arrests for auto theft, and he cut classes regularly and smoked cigarettes that drooped from one side of his mouth.
He taught her how to kiss and how to neck and how to jump like a bunny.
She lighted another cigarette. Where was Ray Patterson now? Keeping some jail warm, she guessed. He'd been picked up for attempted burglary in her senior year and she hadn't seen him since. She hadn't put out for anybody since, either, except for her one and only Glenn, and that barely counted any longer.
Once or twice a week. That was all, and even those rare boffs were hardly worth the tronble. He didn't seem very interested. One time, after a tussle in the hay, she had tested him. She closed her eyes and asked him how the market had done that day.
"Dow Jones industrials were off a point or two," he said. "But the oils did pretty well. Jersey Standard was up two and a half at the close."
So go make love to Jersey Standard, she had thought. Go and bang Dow Jones, you jerk.
She put out the cigarette. A band of young Puerto Ricans strolled by, dressed alike in tight pants and striped jerseys and tennis sneakers. They eyed her insolently, then went on.
Like it? she thought. You're a batch of sexy little kids, aren't you. A little like Ray. Cocky as hell.
Ray.
She sighed. She didn't give a damn about Ray, not any more. But she could stand to meet somebody like him. Somebody with guts, somebody with drive, somebody with heart. Somebody who could make her feel like a woman again. Not like a housewife, not like a mother, not like a drudge.
Like a woman.
At three she left the park and went to the Grand Union again. She did not buy very much, just a bagful. On her way out the door she started to put the bag in the carriage when a voice stopped her. The voice had a Spanish accent and it wanted to know whether it could help her with her groceries.
She looked around. The voice belonged to a Puerto Rican boy, maybe sixteen, maybe eighteen. Scented pomade kept his dark hair in place. He was very slender, very dark. His eyes were large and his mouth full.
It happened all at once. She wanted him.
"I'm at Park West Village," she said. "And I guess I could use some help."
On the way she kept telling herself that she was just letting him help her, that she would give him half a buck and send him on his way. It might be fun to play bedtime games with him but she wouldn't do that, not in a million years. She was a grown woman with a husband and a baby and she didn't have to pick up Spic kids on the streets for a fast jump in mid-afternoon.
They entered her building. She thought he might be impressed by the opulence of the place, but if he was he didn't let it show. In the elevator she eyed him out of the corner of one eye. Damn, she thought, he was attractive; Knife-thin, tall and sharp-looking.
Well, she would send him packing. Half a buck and thanks a lot and so long.
Sure.
Inside her apartment, in the foyer, she told him to wait for a moment. He nodded, closing the door, and she wheeled the carriage into the nursery and put Stevie into his crib. He looked up at her for a moment, smiled foolishly, then closed his eyes.
She went into her own room. Something had hold of her now and she knew there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing at all.
She took off all her clothes. She hung the blouse and the black skirt in the closet, and she draped her bra and her underpants over the back of a chair, and she kicked off her shoes. She stood before her mirror for just a second, cupping her breasts and squeezing gently.
She was so eager she couldn't stand it.
She walked, nude, to the foyer. She stepped up to the Puerto Rican kid and stared at him.
He almost dropped the groceries.
Her voice surprised her. Sure, calm, steady. "Get out of your clothes. It's a very warm day."
He recovered quickly. He undressed, dropping his clothes on the floor, and he reached forward clumsily to embrace her. She shivered when his bare flesh touched her. She felt his hairless chest against her swollen breasts, felt his legs against her legs, and she wanted him so badly she thought she might erupt like Vesuvius.
"This way," she said.
She had made the bed earlier. Now she pulled off the spread and drew back the sheet and turned to him. He stood very still while her hands roamed over his body. She caressed his shoulders, his arms. She took hold of him and fondled him.
"Nice," she said. "Very nice."
He smiled foolishly.
"Very very nice," she said. "Such a nice big boy. Oh, come on, now. Come onf"
She fell back onto the bed and pulled him to her. He was ready and she was ready, she drew him into her, deep into her. She gripped him and squeezed hard, wrapped her arms around his chest and held him, opened her mouth and devoured him in a kiss.
He was with her and she was with him and the world was on fire. Her body heaved and the bed sang a sweet song and she was moving, moving, racing, racing, racing, spinning and diving in a desperate race with the world.
He exploded and she exploded, a mutual atomic exposion a million bombs going off all over.
And then she sighed.
She stayed in bed while he got dressed and went away She did not give him any money and he did not ask for any.
She never found out his name.
Al Carter sat in a booth at the Red Chimney, a formica-topped resturant at Broadway and 103rd. He spooned sugar into a cup of coffee and smoked a Lucky, stirring the coffee absently. He was trying to think up an angle.
He looked different now and he felt different. That morning he had shelled out close to a yard for clothes at a men's shop on Broadway in the seventies, and when he got back to the Alex he had stuffed the prison suit and shoes into the wastebasket. He'd showered and shaved, had eaten good food and downed a few shots of Scotch. Now he was a free man all the way.
And he needed an angle.
Angles were easy to come by, but there was a big difference between the right angle and the wrong angle. The wrong angle would keep him starving, or would send him back to Dannemora. and he didn't want either of those possibilities to come home for him. The right angle meant a steady diet of steak with no prison walls around him. It was worth waiting for the right angle.
There were a few things he didn't like. He didn't like robbery, not after he'd been caught at it once. You went in feeling very big and hard, with a gun in your pocket that scared the holy hell out of the schmuck behind the counter. And then you ran like hell with a pocket full of money and they either nailed you on the spot or picked you up later for questioning He had a record for robbery-they would look for him first, and he wouldn't be hard to find. So that was out for sure.
Burglary? More of the same, and he didn't have the personality for it. He couldn't play the breaking-and-entering dodge on his own hook, and he didn't like to hook up with a gang and work that way. It was a nice bit when you were in tight with the right people. Every job was cased all the way, front to back, and the stuff was generally pretty much fenced in advance. It was safe enough, and it was clean enough, but he didn't want it for a few reasons.
In the first place, he didn't want to be part of a group. He liked to play things alone; the robbery that put him in the can was a group venture and he had never gotten caught on his own hook. And in the second place it was too damned much like working when you were part of a combination You had people giving and you had to stay in line. He couldn't make it.
What, then?
Women were a good dodge. Get a couple of cows and set up a stable. Let 'em fall in love with you and take ninety percent of the bread. Soft and light, and no worries about sex, either, and no worries about cops because no matter how many whores got busted you never saw a good pimp behind bars.
But he didn't like it. It was cheap work, crud work, and no matter how you conned yourself into thinking you were just a cool number playing it smart you still had trouble looking in the mirror. A pimp was a pimp, and the Harlem cookies could call themselves sweet men forever and they would still be pimps. He didn't like it.
Two things looked nice. A con dodge, a badger game or a blackmail set-up. something like that. You didn't get caught on those because the stupid mark on the hook was too scared to make any noise. The police couldn't nab you unless they were looking for you. Take a nice quiet business with no noise going, and you could live on Easy Street forever.
He couldn't handle a big con. Those took a whole mob, and you needed a swank front, and they were tough. But something like a blackmail route or a badger deal, that was fine.
There was another possibility. It was the standard one, the pitch they talked about in Danny and Sing Sing and Q and the Rock and every other tank on earth. That was the One Big One, the single job that netted upward of twenty thou that you skipped to Brazil with. That was the con's dream, and every deadhead in stir had a different one dreamed up.
Like: We take this bank, we go in fast with our guns going off like Dillinger and Pretty Boy and all the old-timers, and we come out in time to grab this private plane stashed in the hills, and the plane goes to Rio and we're home. We buy citizenship and baby we have got it made.
Like: One big job. Take the safe at Tiffany's, blow a hole in it big enough to walk through. Clean 'em out and get the hell out of the country and then worry about fencing the crud.
Like: Those guys on Wall Street walk around with a satchel full of bearer bonds. You got 'em and you can cash 'em like they were money. So you get yourself a good car and you come on strong, one guy to drive and one guy with a gun. You case the right messenger and shoot him dead as a lox and drive like hell. They'll cash those bonds in Argentina, man. You know they will. They won't even ask your name.
Everybody had the dream play, he thought. He remembered a cutie-pie with a plan to kidnap the president's infant son, and another joker who wanted to snatch the president's wife, and still another nut who was going to kidnap the president himself Everybody had a gimmick, and they were all going to wind up in South America or Turkey or Macao or Mars, and they were all wrong.
A big job would be fine. Take a hundred thou and go away, that was fine. But the bigger a job was, the harder it became to pull off properly.
Besides, as far as he was concerned you could take South America and Turkey and Macao and Mars and you could shove them. New York suited him fine. To hell with the big stuff because that was good for dreams in stir but no good when you were outside. Just find us something soft and we'll swing with it.
His coffee was gone. A starched waitress asked him if he wanted a refill and he told her to bring him a chocolate sundae with vanilla ice cream. She brought it and he spooned syrupy sweetness into his mouth. You could get hung up in stir, wanting something sweet, something gooey and sickening like a sundae. He ate half of it. enjoying it. and left the rest.
He walked down Broadway whistling.
Monita didn't stick around the room for dinner. Her mother was cooking beans and rice and tomatoes in a foul pot on a two-burner hot plate and Monita didn't teei like beans and rice and tomato sauce any more than she felt like spending time with her family. She ducked out, hurried out of the building to the street.
She was so tense she wanted to scream. Last night she'd sat up awake most of the time, listening to rock-n-roll on WMGM. A guy named Paco had a transistor radio he'd acquired through fair means or foul and she sat with him and another girl on a roof listening to the music, dancing a little, watching the stars through smoke. Around three in the morning Paco and the other girl told her to get lost and she left the roof to them, so that they could make love under the stars in peace and quiet Around dawn she went back to the room and fell asleep again.
When she woke she had a meal went out to the park. A pair of guys tried to pick her up but she stayed away from them There was a neat copy of the New York Times that someone had left on a park bench, and she had gone through the want ads laboriously, trying to find a job that she could land. There was nothing of course. There was rarely much of anything for a fifteen-year-old Spic with no experience. She got mad at the paper and tore it into shreds and tossed the shreds to the wind. Then she left the park.
She walked around. A Negro doorman on Central Park West looked her up and down and grinned A gang of juvies who called themselves the Spanish Dukes whistled at her and asked her if she wanted to go someplace and chinga a little. A candy-store keeper stared hard at her breasts and started to drool.
Now it was dinner-time and she hadn't had anything to eat. She wasn't particularly hungry in spite of the fact that her stomach was pretty much empty. The air was cooler; a breeze was blowing garbage along the curb. She looked at the trash in the gutter and listened to bottles smashing in various airshafts and she knew she couldn't take the neighborhood just now. She had to get over to Broadway. It was pretty cruddy but it was better than where she was. It couldn't be worse.
Virgin, she thought. You're a virgin and what does it get you? Nothing. And when you quit being a virgin you got nothing then either You got less.
She walked over to Broadway headed for Ned-ick's. then changed her mind when she realized that she didn't have the price of a ten-cent orange drink. She didn't have the price of anything dammit, not a penny for a gum machine. She was broke, stone cold broke.
But she didn't want an orange drink She wanted a big fat piece of meat and a salad and a potato and dessert and coffee-
She wanted style.
The guy she picked out was nothing special. He was tall and strong-looking, clean-shaven, with a dark crew cut. He was wearing a new suit and his shoes had a high shine on them. He was good-looking. But she didn't care about his clothes or his appearance. It was his walk that got her. He walked as though he owned the world.
She went up to him. Bold as brass brassy as a general, she went over to him and put a hand on his arm. He looked down at her, not lecherously but with interest He was sizing her up. She felt as though his eyes were going right through her blouse. "I want a good dinner," she said. "Yeah?"
"Yes."
He went on looking at her. "I want a good dinner." she said again. "A real good dinner in a classy place."
"So?"
"Buy it for me," she said steadily, "and I'll do anything you want. Anything in the world."
"The hell," Al Carter said "Come on."
She took his arm and went with him down the street
"Nugent liked me today," Glenn Lansing said. "I came up with some shrewd observations and he was suitably impressed. I think we may be due for a raise, honey."
"That's nice."
"Just nice, Ruth?"
"It's ... fine," she said. So Glenn had another raise coming to him. Well, it was nice, and it was fine, but she somehow didn't feel like hanging from the rafters and whistling Dixie over it. Glenn could get a raise easier than he could get a rise, as far as she could see, and she wasn't interested. She had things on her mind, things she had to think about, things that were a good deal more important to her right now than Glenn's indefatigable progress toward a North Shore estate.
"What's on teevee tonight, honey?"
"I don't know."
"The Untouchables? It's Thursday, isn't it?"
She nodded It was Thursday A day she thought, which would live in infamy. A day on which one Ruth Lansing had cuckolded her husband with one Puerto Rican delivery boy She looked at Glenn, trying to imagine what he would look like wearing horns And she almost laughed.
"Something the matter. Ruth?"
"Nothing."
"You seem ... well, kind of distant. As if something's on your mind."
"I'm all right."
He looked at her Smoke curled from the end of his cigarette. He sipped his coffee, still looking at her over the brim of the cup, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew.
She had done everything she could to keep him from knowing. She had showered, washing the stench of sin from her skin. She had changed the bedsheets and had aired out the room spraying the place with Florient in case a trace of the boy's pomade remained in the air. And she had tried to be calm, nad tried to relax, but she could only go so tar.
"Baby give you a hard time?"
"I guess that's it," she said, grateful for the out. "I try to compose myself by the time you get home, but sometimes it's tough. He was hard to take today."
"He was bad?"
"Uh-huh."
Glenn clucked his tongue, a habit which had always annoyed her. "He's just a little kid," he said. "It'll be easier as he gets older. Meanwhile you better learn to take it easier."
"I try."
"Take a happy pill when it gets rough" he suggested "One of those blue and yellow tranquillizers. They work wonders, calm you down in a minute."
"I'll have to try them," she said. She thought how Glenn always had an answer for any problem. Just take a pill and everything would be all right. Take a happy pill and be happy Got a public itch? Take a tranquillizer Reach for a Miltown instead of a man. Fine advice on life's little headaches from one Glenn Lansing.
She didn't want to be with him that night. She wanted to get out of the house and go somewhere quiet where she could think. She would go nuts if she had to stay home.
But of course she couldn't suggest that he stay home while she went out. She had to be subtle.
"I'm sick of sitting around the apartment," she said. "Let's go out tonight "
"And call a sitter? I think it's too late."
"Oh." she said sadly.
"I'd like to go, but-"
"Listen," she said, "why don't you go out? I'll stay here with Stevie."
"That's silly."
"Why?"
"I don't want to go out," he said "You're the one who wants to go. Look, I'll stay with Stevie, and-"
"But you worked all day, Glenn."
"So did you. I'll just park myself in front of the teevee and take it easy. Shoes off, pipe in hand. You have a ball."
"Are you sure it's okay?"
"Of course."
It was that simple. She put the dishes in the sink-she could always wash them later, and if she left them there was always the chance that Glenn would do them for her. She put on a dress, a green sheath that made her attractive without looking too whorish. She gave Glenn a quick kiss good-bye and left the apartment.
It was a cool, clear night. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, wondering which way to go, and she saw a crowd of Puerto Rican boys pass on the other side of 100th, heading toward Columbus Avenue. For a moment she thought that the boy she had made love with was among them but she could not be sure. Strangely enough, she could barely recall what he looked like.
But he had been good.
God, he had been good.
She smiled to herseh. remembering Hist how good he had been. Too good, almost. She hadn't wanted to let him go. She had ached to keep him there forever, to keep her body locked with him, fleshy manacles to hold him with her until hell froze.
But why?
She couldn't quite understand it. It wasn't as if she were an old broad who couldn't get love any more, a worn-out slut with a lust for something young. She was only twenty-four, maybe six or seven years older than the kid. And Glenn made love to her-not too often or too excitingly, but often enough and competently enough. So what was it?
She didn't know. She sighed and walked to Central Park West. Halfway to the subway arcade she changed her mind and hailed a passing cab The driver stopped for her and she sank into the backseat.
Carter chewed the last bite of steak, put down his knife and fork and waited for the waiter to take the dishes away. Steak two nights running-that wasn't bad, he thought. Not bad at all. Steak made a good steady diet.
He looked at the girl across the table That wasn't bad either, he decided. Young and juicy, ready to go-he'd had Puerto Rican broads before and he'd be happy to get a crack at this one. She looked hot as a firecracker.
The waiter came. The broad ordered apple pie ala mode and Al asked for an eclair and coffee. Something sweet, he thought. Like the Puerto.
The coffee was good and strong. He sipped it, his eyes on the broad, trying to figure her out Hell, she wasn't the first Spanish chick to hustle in the neighborhood, but this was a funny kind of a hustle. She didn't want dough, just a meal. It was a strange bit.
Probably she'd finish her meal and take a powder. It figured, he decided, and if it played out that way he wouldn't kick up much of a fuss. The broad put on a decent act, and she'd been hungry enough, wolfing the steak down as if she were afraid somebody was going to grab it away from her Probably didn't have a pot to wade in, and if she was beating him for a meal he could swing it.
But maybe she had something else going. Maybe she was conning him, setting him up for some kind of play.
He'd have to see.
The girl was having milk with her pie. She finished before him. and sat there waiting for him to finish his coffee. Now's the time, he thought. Now you pick yourself up, go to the little girl's room, and beat it out the back door. Go ahead.
But she stayed where she was.
He finished his coffee, paid the check, tipped the waiter. He stood up, wondering what was next on the program "You got a place?" he asked her.
"No."
That didn't figure The dodges he knew called for the girl to supply the room, so that her buddy with the blackjack could be there waiting.
"My room okay?"
"Sure," she said.
The hell, he thought.
He took her by the hand and led her out of the restaurant.
CHAPTER THREE
The name of the cocktail lounge was Port
Hole. It was on Bank Street in the western section of Greenwich Village, and it was in the cellar of an old brownstone There was a peephole in the door, a carryover from Prohibition days when the club had operated as a speakeasy The peephole had been converted into a ship's porthole and was thus responsible for the club's name. The notion of spelling the name as two words was a gag on the part of the owner, a fat Greek names Socrates Pappas. You had to think a minute or two before you got the joke, and even then it wasn't too funny.
There were twenty or thirty customers in the bar, and they were all women. They were women from a strictly biological standpoint, at any rate, although they might have thought of themselves in other terms. The club was a lesbian hangout, a drinking place and dancing place and picking-up-something-for-the-night place. There were girls in men's clothing, girls in girl's clothing, girls dancing close together on the small dance floor at the rear of the club, girls sitting together at small tables or in small booths, girls sitting alone and crying over drinks.
Ruth Lansing was sitting alone She was not crying over her drink, but was sipping it quietly.
She was wondering what in hell she was doing at Port Hole.
She had wandered into the club more or less by accident. Her cab had let her out at Sheridan Square and she had wandered around, trying to straighten her mind out and not paying a hell of a lot of attention to where she was going or what she was doing. She went into a bar for a drink and a man made a tentative pass at her, and she was in no mood for passes tentative or otherwise, and she left. She still wanted that drink, so she looked into bars here and there, trying to find one that wasn't filled with pass-making men.
She found Port Hole.
All she really knew, when she went into the club and took a table for herself, was that there were no men there. It took her a few minutes to realize just why there were no men there, and when the realization came it didn't particularly jar her. She started to get up and leave, then decided she was being silly.
So she was in a lesbian bar. Well, so what? The dykes weren't bothering her; in fact they didn't seem to know that she was alive. So why be scared out of a pleasant and quiet little bar just because the girls there slept with other girls?
No reason.
No reason at all.
She sipped her drink, a gin buck which was just what the doctor would have ordered had he been aware of the complications of her case. The gin buck was smooth and cool, her second so far, and she intended to have a third soon enough, and maybe a fourth after that. And why not?
When you came right down to it, she might just as well get stinking drunk. She'd done something pretty far-out, something fairly difficult to explain to people. To Glenn, for example. She tried to picture herself explaining quite earnestly to Glenn that she'd had to go at it with a Spic from the streets, and she imagined him trying to compute her Dow Jones Sexual Average, and she began to giggle. The giggle turned into a laugh, and her shoulders shook and her breasts bounced, and by the time she got control of herself people were staring at her.
Girls were staring at her.
Lesbians were staring at her.
She tossed off the gin buck and waved to the waitress for another. Now you've gone and done it, she thought. Couldn't just get quietly drunk here in this dyke joint. Had to make enough of a spectacle of yourself to get all the dykes staring at you.
Dykes, she thought. If that silly Dutch boy took his finger out of them there would be one hell of a flood.
Which started her laughing again.
When she looked up there was a girl floating across the room toward her, and there was also another gin buck on the table in front of her. She poured half the gin buck down her throat and looked up warily at the girl.
"Hello," the girl said.
Ruth looked at her. She didn't look at all like a man, she noticed. As a matter-of-fact, she looked very much like a woman. And like a damned attractive woman at that.
She was a brunette, shorter than Ruth and a little chunkier. She was wearing a shirt open at the neck and a pair of slacks, but this did not make her masculine in appearance; with breasts like hers, and hips like hers, and eyes like hers, it would take a suit of armor to make her look masculine, and even then she would have looked more like Jeanne d'Arc than Sir Galahad.
"Hello," the girl repeated.
Ruth said: "I'm not a lesbian."
The girl studied her. "We are direct," the girl said. "My lord, we are direct. Now if I were a man and came over to your table and said something innocuous like hello, you would hardly have said I'm not in a let's-get-laid mood. Strange, isn't it?"
Ruth blinked.
"Let's face it," the girl said. "Just because you're sitting in a dyke farm you think any attempt at conversation is perforce a proposition. Unfair, wouldn't you say? Not only unfair but damned egotistical as well. What makes you think I'd want to sleep with you, anyhow?"
There were any number of things she might have said. What she did say was: "But you do want to, don't you?"
The girl stared. "Well," she said. "Well, yes, I guess. But to hell with it for the time being. You're not a lesbian and I want to sleep with you and to hell with it. Let's start fresh. Fair enough?"
Ruth finished her gin buck. "Fair enough," she said.
"Fine," the brunette said. She pulled back the chair opposite Ruth and plumped herself down into it, then waved a hand at the waitress. The waitress brought her a drink that Ruth didn't recognize; it was something purple in a tall glass and she guessed that it was some sort of rum drink. It looked horrible.
"First things first," the brunette said. "My name is Joan McKay."
"Oh," Ruth said. "And your is-"
"Ruth," she said. "Ruth Lansing."
"And you're not a lesbian, are you?"
"No."
"What are you, then?"
"A wife," Ruth said desperately. "A wife and a mother."
"Where's the husband and father?"
"Home. Uptown. Park West Village. That's-"
"-an architectural monstrosity designed to add a few million annually to Webb & Knapp's profit sheet," Joan said. "I know all about it. Sounds like a hell of a place to live. But I suppose it's a great place to visit, huh?"
"Uh-"
"Don't mind me," Joan said. "Why don't we get out of here, Ruth? We could go to my apartment and have cake and coffee or something. You're going to be plastered otherwise. You better get some food in your stomach."
"I can't."
* * *
Joan McKay was one of three girls sharing an East Side apartment in Andrew Sham's best-selling Nightstand Book GIRLS ON THE PROWL.
"Why not?"
"I'm a mife and wother. I mean-"
"You mean wife and mother Fine Did I suggest anything more immoral than cake and coffee?"
"No."
"So what's the trouble, wife and mother?"
Ruth shrugged. Somewhere or other there was trouble, although she couldn't quite pin it down But it wouldn't hurt her to go to Joan's apartment She'd be safer there than near a man because she might react to some man the way she had reacted to the PR delivery boy, and that would be hell. It would be fun, sure, but it would also be hell.
"There's no trouble," she said.
"Then let's go."
They went.
Monita was scared.
Well, not scared, not quite that exactly Anxious would be a better way to put it. The difference between scared and anxious is a subtle one, a difference not too many people understand Fear more or less connotes the notion terror, fright, things like that. Anxiety is more a general feeling that everything is liable to get screwed up if you don't watch out, or even if you do. A subtle difference, perhaps, but a valid one.
So the hell with it.
Monita was anxious.
She was in a room at the Hotel Alexandria, and she was about to let a man take her maidenhead away from her and she was fairly certain it wouldn't work out very well. She had solemnly assured this man she would do anything in the world that he wanted her to do, and now she realized that she didn't know how to do anything, and that she probably didn't even know the names of some of the things he might want her to do.
So she was anxious.
Very anxious.
She turned to the man, looked at him carefully. He was systematically taking his clothes off, hanging his suit in the closet, putting his shirt on a hook, untying his shoes and rolling off his socks. Then he stepped out of his underwear, and she found out that one grade-school rumor was a myth. A white man was just the same as a Puerto Rican.
"Peel," he said.
She looked at him and felt overdressed. She unbuttoned her blouse, took it off. He was looking at her. his eyes burning into her bra, and she reached around behind her to unhook the bra and wished that she only felt a little sexy. It would be easier if she felt sexy. If they could pet a little and kiss a little and hug a little she would get hot, like she got when she petted with boys. And if she got hot she wouldn't mind it. She'd even enjoy it, probably, unless it hurt as much as they all said it did.
She took off the bra. She stood for a moment, big breasts bare, waiting for Carter to reach out and handle them. But he didn't, and she took off her skirt and shoes and panties. She was embarrassed when he stared at her. She didn't like it when he stared.
Well, evidently he wanted it straight and simple. She walked over to the bed, stretched out on it, and waited.
Carter's laughter rocked the room.
"I'll be damned," he said. "Let's take our time, huh? We got all night honey."
Then he was lying next to her, close so close that their bodies were touching She felt his skin next to hers, felt the animal warmth of his body and some of the anxiety began to wash away Then his arms were around her. his hands gripping her shoulders, and he brought his mouth to hers.
Now it was easier He was kissing her now and she knew all there was to know about kissing. She was on old familiar ground, she knew just what to do-
And she did it.
She put her arms around him holding onto him, drawing him close. Her tongue darted out between her lips and into his mouth and she ground her lips against his while her tongue swirled around his mouth lighting little fires wherever it went.
She felt his chest against her breasts felt his body on hers. It wasn't so bad, she thought. It was almost fun.
The kiss ended. His hand moved finding her breasts, cupping it. She shivered because it was a wonderful feeling, a delicious feeling a far better feeling than she had hoped in her imagination. It was infinitely better with a bare hand on a bare breast so much better that the necking and petting she bad done seemed ridiculous now. It felt so good-
His hands were moving on her breasts With his forefingers he drew twin circles around each nipple, and the nipples stiffened and went rigid with desire.
Then he dotted each circle. With his fingertips he poked each rigid nipple in turn and her breasts seemed to be on fire with a hunger greater than anything she had known before.
The anxiety was gone now, His hands went everywhere. He concentrated on her breasts for ages, fondling, caressing until she was half-mad with desire. Then his hands found other places, special places, and it was even better. He rubbed her navel with a pinky, squeezed her knees with both hands, let his hands race up her thighs. The hands stopped inches short of their goal and went back again.
She couldn't bear it.
She grabbed at him, caught at his short hair with her hands, guided his face to her breast. His lips glided over the silken skin, doing more than his hands had done, driving her mad, setting her on her ear, making the world spin.
His mouth found her other breast. His lips made a circle around it, teasing her, and then his lips engulfed the nipple. He kissed it and she thought he was going to drive her crazy. She could picture all her blood and bones flowing in a stream through the tip of her nipple until she was nothing but a hollow shell. He kissed harder and she kicked at the bed with her feet.
And then his bands, the hands which had played with her legs, found what they had been looking for all along.
His fingers thrilled her, teased her, burned her.
His fingers did magic things and she began to roll and sigh and moan and do all the things that passion dictates. She did all those things and she meant them.
And then it began.
According to everything she had heard it hurt like holy terror According to common rumor from girls who had done it and girls who hadn't the first time was terrible This was what Monita had heard, time and time again They all said it hurt.
They were absolutely right.
It hurt like holy terror.
She was relaxed when it happened Then the pain came home and she was not relaxed at all She was tense, taut-wire tense, and the pain was everywhere and she wanted to scream but the scream was stillborn upon her lips.
And then, strangely, she began to relax again.
Because it wasn't that bad any more The pain was bad at first, but gradually the pain went away and the pleasure replaced it. The pleasure was so tremendous that it made breast-kissing and fondling seem like fine games for two-year-olds but something no adult in his right mind would bother with The whole world took off on brand-new tangents and her body heaved and twisted and writhed and she knew that everything was fine that it would always be fine, that it could never be anything but fine.
It ended perfectly It ended with passion reaching the heights and crashing there and she sank from the top of the world to the bottom and lay very still, very warm very quiet He moved slowly away from her and reached for a pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. He offered her one but she shook her head and he took one for himself, scratching a match to light it. She lay in stillness while he blew clouds of smoke at the ceiling.
And she was anxious again.
Because she didn't really want to do what she was going to do next. Not in the least. It was a lousy thing to do, especially lousy after the time they had just had together. It would have been lousy enough anyway, but if the time in bed had been terrible and if he had been mean to her she could have done it without a hitch.
Now it was different. The time in bed had been perfection, and he seemed like a pretty good guy, and she would have enjoyed doing it with him again. But she had to follow through. She'd have had to be an idiot to toss away her virginity for a meal, good as the meal had been.
He was going to be more than a meal. He was going to be a meal ticket. And a train ticket to another place, and enough money for rent and clothes and everything else she needed for a fresh start.
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him.
"Enjoy yourself?" He laughed. "Sure," he said. "Have a good time?"
"A great time. You know your way around a bed once you get started. It took you a while to get warmed up, but you were fine when you got to grooving."
"I'm glad you enjoyed yourself," she said. "Because it's going to cost you."
He didn't say anything.
"It's going to cost you," she said again "I'm only fifteen years old. and it's going to cost you a hell of a lot of money."
People react in different ways.
Some guys might have grabbed their clothes and headed for the door Others would have whined and whimpered and paid. Others might have slugged her silly and left her half-dead on the floor.
All Carter did was laugh.
He laughed so hard that he had to sit up. and then he laughed so hard that he fell off the bed. He laughed with his whole body, and his sides ached and his belly ached and he couldn't stop laughing. He lay there on the floor holding his guts together with both hands and he looked at the naked little broad in the bed and he went right on laughing.
Jesus, it was a panic!
Well, he had been wondering what the con was. First she puts out for a meal, and then she shows that she doesn't know the first thing about it, and finally she turns on the juice and becomes the sweetest jump in the world And it was her first time, because the bed is bloody as a battlefield and she sure as hell hadn't been had before.
And then the payoff comes. She wants to bleed him because she's jailbait.
It was just too much.
He stopped laughing, finally He put the lid on the laughter and got up. His cigarette was burning the edge of the nightstand and when he took a drag on it, it tasted of varnish. He flipped it out the window and hoped it would land on some character. A cop, preferably.
He lit a fresh cigarette. Then he looked at the girl and tried to keep from laughing again. She didn't look so sure of herself now. She looked scared, and she was probably just that. Stupid little broad-how dumb could she be, trying to shake down a crook who didn't have any dough anyhow? How goddamned dumb could one broad be?
"Honey," he said, "how dumb can you be?" She was terrified.
"If it wasn't so funny," he said, "I'd belt you in the mouth. Do I look like a mark?" She didn't answer.
"Do I talk like a mark? Do I come on like a mark? Honey, I got out of jail yesterday. I spent five years in the can for robbery. I don't give shiny new pennies to silly little tramps who want to shake me down for a statutory jump."
She looked at him, and for a minute he thought she was going to cry. She didn't. Instead she started to get up, swinging her bare legs over the edge of the bed.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I guess I'm pretty stupid. I made a mistake. I'll get some clothes on and leave you alone."
"Wait a minute."
"What for?"
"To answer some questions. Who turned you onto this bit?"
"Nobody."
"You dreamed it up?"
She nodded, She looked incredibly weak now, unutterably defenseless But the whole thins was so funny that he couldn't waste too much time feeling sorry for her It was just too funny.
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
He looked at her. It wasn't hard to believe. A full-blown fifteen maybe. A fifteen with boobs on it. But it was possible. The PR broads grew up fast and fell apart faster and it wasn't hard to believe that she was fifteen.
Besides, she'd been a virgin. And as far as he knew there wasn't a PR in the city a virgin after sixteen.
"Okay." he said. "Tell me about it."
"Tell you what?"
"You could start with why," he said. "You let yourself get boffed for the first time just to shake me down There's a reason! are you some kind of a nut?"
"There's a reason."
"Well, tell me about it."
He watched her shift uncomfortably on the bed. She had one hand draped over her groin in what was supposed to be nonchalance, and she was making motions with her shoulders as if she wanted to draw her breasts back into her chest
"Let me put on some clothes," she said.
"Why?"
"No reason why you should be embarrassed," he said. "You got nothing I haven't seen already.
Sit and relax."
She tried to relax and couldn't. He grinned at her, lit a cigarette, gave it to her. This time she accepted it.
"All right," she said.
"So?"
"I wanted to get out. I wanted to get out of this neighborhood and this city and find some fresh place. That's all. You know what it's like in this neighborhood?"
He knew what it was like. It was a fast life with no holds barred, a kick in the guts if you didn't kick out first. It was easy money or slow death.
"I know the neighborhood," he said. "I was born eight blocks from here."
"You like it here?"
"I've seen worse."
"Sure," she said. "You know where I live? Between Columbus and Amsterdam. Know it?"
"Yeah," he said, remembering the block, the tenements, the stench. "Yeah. Well, that's a bad block."
"They're all bad if you came from Puerto Rico."
He shrugged. "Fine," he said. "So you want out. Right?"
"Right."
"And you're fifteen," he said. He closed his eyes and thought, opened them to study her, then closed them again. "Fifteen," he went on. "You look about sixteen, maybe seventeen. The face, I mean. And the clothes, and when you're naked. But if somebody took you and dressed you different and put make-up on you, hell, you could look older. Nineteen, twenty-two, somewhere in there."
She didn't say anything. He stood up and walked to the phone, and she whirled about, a terrified expression on her face again.
"What-"
"Send a kid for a fifth of Dewar's," he told the clerk. He put the receiver down and turned to face Monita again. "Sending out for some juice," he told her. "To have a drink to celebrate."
"Celebrate what?"
"You and me," he said. "We're going into business together and I think we'll do just fine."
Joan McKay lived in a two-room-plus-kitchen apartment on Barrow Street. It was a comfortable place, furnished with old Victorian second-hand pieces and comfortably disorganized, with pieces of manuscript lying here and there, with books on tables and under glasses, and copies of Agony almost everywhere. Agony was an avante-garde magazine which, as its chief contribution to literature, employed one Joan McKay as editorial assistant, roustabout, reader and lackey.
Joan was pouring out coffee now She filled two cups with thick black coffee kept one for herself, gave the other to Ruth. She brought out a plate of baklava and put it in the middle of the table The baklava was oriental pastry, very light with honey and walnuts. They sold it in the Times Square station of the Eighth Avenue IND. and it was good.
"So you've got problems," Joan said. She picked up a hunk of baklava and bit into it, then sipped the coffee. The coffee was too hot. She put the cup down and tried the baklava again. "So you've got troubles," she repeated. "Well, everybody does. You've got nothing too tough."
"You think not?"
Joan sighed. "You're bored with your husband and it's dragging you. That's nothing new, kitten. Half the dolls in America are dragged with their husbands and the other half aren't married. He takes you for granted, he leaves you home alone while he goes out into the world, he's dull in conversation and everything's rotten because he's just as dull in bed."
"You make it sound commonplace."
"It is."
"But-"
"Have some of this," Joan said, indicating the baklava. "It's not bad."
"Listen-"
"No, you listen. You got fed up with everything and you had an itch so you used a delivery boy to scratch it for you. You think that's something unique? Hell, adultery is a sport now, not a sin. Nowadays a girl gets her red A and wears it on her sweatshirt. You got laid and it was fun and hurrah for you. Just so you don't get knocked up, kitten."
Ruth shivered. "Not a chance," she said. "I just got over ... I mean, it's the wrong time of the month."
"You just stopped bleeding," Joan said "Hell, k's just us girls, kitten. You don't have to get coy with me, you know."
"I'm sorry."
"And try the baklava. Imported directly from Times Square. Try it, for the love of the lord."
She worked on her coffee while Ruth obediently made a stab at the baklava. The coffee was cooler now and she drank half the cupful, then sighed again and set the cup down.
"The secret," she said, "is coolness."
"I guess so."
"You made a mistake coming downtown, taking a table at Port Hole and getting giggly and gassed. You should have stayed home with Gloomy Glenn and played a little house. You've got a good thing kitten. Glenn gets nice promotions and makes nice money and stays out of your hair. And he's dumb enough so that you can keep him wound around your pinky and still leave room for a pinky ring. You give up a deal like that and you've got brains missing."
"Well-"
"It's a fact," Joan said. "This is the kind of deal you stick with. Look, if you cheat once or twice, so what? As far as that goes, what the hell difference does it make if you cheat twice a week for twenty years? What he doesn't know doesn't hurt. They've got a saying that runs along those very lines."
Joan studied the blonde. She was silent, digesting this latest bit of homespun philosophy from the looms of Ms Kay Lay it on heavy Joan told herself. Reverse psychology all the way. plus the left-handed compliment for Glenn-o. and she would be ready to kick her husband in the groin and turn gay overnight. Coolness, she thought, was everybody's answer.
"Joan-"
"What, kitten?"
"I ... I hate to cheat on Glenn."
"Why? You don't love the guy, do you?"
"I'm not sure."
"If you love him," Joan said, "it's still better to cheat on him than to knock yourself out. Just don't let him know about it, because that would hurt the guy. But don't penalize yourself. And if you don't love him, then cheat all you want. If you don't love him, to hell with him."
"Maybe you're right."
I'm not even trying to be right, she thought. All I'm trying to do is set you up for a few nights from now. at which time I'll make you. You've got a nice head and a nice shape, Ruthie-poo, but you've got a headful of fluff.
She said: "It wasn't bright, coming downtown after a matinee with a young Puerto Rico in action. But maybe it did you more good than ill, as they used to say in Victorian novels. Or did they? To hell with it. This little coffee klatsch should put you back on your feet, kitten. You know a little more of the score now."
"You ... surprised me."
"How?"
"By not making a pass at me. I thought you would."
Joan laughed. "We settled that before we even got around to introductions." she said "I'm a lesbian and you're not. You made the point pretty clear."
Ruth blushed.
"I think you're a nice kid, Ruthie. That doesn't mean I want to jump you. I did at first, but now I know the score. I just want to be a friend." She paused significantly. "I think maybe you can use a friend, kitten."
"I can."
"Everybody needs somebody to talk to," she went on, sewing things up. "Your husband doesn't fit the bill, so I'm elected. You got something on your mind, you just bring it to Joan."
When the blonde was gone, Joan smiled. Just bring your problems to Joan, she thought. Because Joan is going to take you to bed and make you scream for more.
CHAPTER FOUR
Al tossed off a shot of scotch and glanced at the doorway of the bar. The bar was nothing special-an old Irish tavern on Columbus Avenue in the eighties. There were still a few old Irishmen in the neighborhood--retired motormen and cops, mostly-and they spent their days in bars like this one, drinking Powers or Tamieson and listening to whiskey tenors singing A Little Bit Of Heaven and Did Your Mother Come From Ireland? and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling on the battered old jukebox. It was mid-afternoon now. The jukebox was silent, and there were only a few other customers in the place. Al was waiting for a guy, and the guy was late.
He came in, finally. He was big and broad-shouldered, with a granite chin and ice-blue eyes. He looked like a plain-clothes man. Actually his name was Ryan and he had done two bits in Ossining for impersonating a police officer in a badger game setup.
He picked up a hot of Paddy's at the bar and brought it to Carter's table. "A foine broth of a day," he said expansively. "And it's good to be seeing the sight of you, Alan my boy."
"Drop the brogue," Carter said. "I'm not impressed."
"It's a sad day when a friend is unimpressed.
It's-"
"Can it. Yon got anything going for you?"
"Nothing much," Ryan said. "Why?"
"I've got a deal pending," Carter told him. "But it takes an extra man. You could fit in fine."
It took two, he thought. Two men. And that part bothered him. He wanted a simpler version, a deal he could work all alone with the girl. Still the act would play itself about four times as well with an extra man in on it. Two fake detectives were that much more convincing than one fake detective. The bit would be better, and Ryan was dependable. He acted well enough to take out an Equity card. He never finked He would work out.
"I thought you went for heavier stuff," Ryan said.
"I'm getting refined in my old age."
Ryan laughed. "Go ahead, lad."
"I've got a girl." Al said. "A young kid. fifteen years old. A PR. Beautiful, stacked, knows how to handle herself."
"A hooker?"
"No, just a kid. The age is on the level. You beginning to get a picture?"
"I might be."
"It beats the old badger game," Carter said. "It's got a few extra going for it. And I don't think it gets pulled much."
"It could even be brand-new The idea is standard, but the wrinkle is nice."
"You like it?"
"So far I love it." Ryan said "Now let me get a pair of whiskeys from the barman and you can give me the whole picture. Then we'll thrash it around and see how it comes out with two heads working on it. I think we have something pretty, Alan my boy."
Ryan went to the bar and brought back drinks. Both men tossed off the shots and lit cigarettes. Then Carter began to talk quickly and steadily. He talked for ten minutes and Ryan hung on every word he said. When he stopped Ryan made a few suggestions, added a few refinements, and Al nodded his approval. It looked good, he decided. And Ryan was the right man for the job. He knew the score and he liked the game.
At four-thirty they split up, Ryan went back to his place on 73rd Street and Al took a taxi uptown. The fat man, the one who'd given him three hundred bucks in the Senator, was in his store on Amsterdam Avenue. The fat man was behind a counter cluttered with trumpets and guitars and watches and rings and cigarette lighters. He bought things and sold things.
"I need some stuff," Ryan said.
The fat man smiled.
"Two pieces," he said. "Police stuff, .38 calibre. They don't even have to work. Just so they look right."
"You don't mind if they can be traced?"
"I don't even mind if they can't be fired. They're just for show."
The fat man told him to wait a minute. He disappeared into the backroom and Carter lit a cigarette and waited for him. He came out with a shoebox and took the lid off to let Carter look at the guns. They looked impressive.
"Standard police stuff," fat man said. "The one is missing a firing pin. Could be fixed, I don't know. The other needs work on the barrel. All out of shape. Gun would shoot around corners but never straight ahead."
"How much?"
"Thirty and forty," the fat man said. "Making a total of seventy for the two."
"That's a lot," Carter said. "For guns that don't work."
"Guns that work run even more."
"Forty for both."
"Go home," the fat man said. "Steal 'em first."
"Fifty, then. If you throw in two of those phony badges you sell."
"The special officer crud?"
Carter nodded. When you pinned it to a wallet and flashed it fast at a mark, any piece of tin would do. Nobody knew what a cop's badge looked like anyway.
"I'll tell you," the fat man said. "Go for sixty and I'll toss in straight badges. Regular New York cop shields. A couple of juvies picked 'em up off some bulls, and don't ask how because I didn't even want to know. Sixty for the lot."
Carter paid. The fat man put the two shields into the shoebox, tied the box up with twine and cut the twine with a small golden knife. He handed the box to Carter and Carter took it back to his hotel. It was only three blocks to the Alex and he walked it.
He had a bigger room now Monita had been living with him for three days, and they'd taken a room on the seventh floor with a big double bed. The management didn't particularly care whether or not they were married, just so long as they paid for a double room. They were Mr. and Mrs. Al Carter on the hotel's books, and that was fine for the time being.
Al took the elevator to the seventh floor. He smoked a cigarette and smiled. The deal was perfect-they could work it twice a week until cows were born with wings and there was no reason why it shouldn't work nine tries out of nine. Figure an average take of two hundred a shot. That was four bills a week, with a hundred for Ryan and a hundred for Monita and the rest for Mrs. Carter's boy Al. It wasn't bad. It gave him and Monita three bills between them. They could do just fine on that.
He was happy. He got out of the elevator and ground his cigarette into the carpet in the hall, then headed for the room. Monita would be there, waiting for him, and he wanted to see her face when he told her how nicely it was set up.
And then he wanted to take her to bed.
She was waiting for him. She was wearing a nightgown that he'd picked up for her a day ago, and she was not wearing anything under it. He looked at her, watched the way she let the gown slip open to give him a quick glimpse of firm tan breasts. A teaser, he thought. A real doll.
"I saw Ryan," he said. "And it's set."
"Tell me about it."
He told her in detail. He opened the shoebox to show her the guns and shields and he watched her pick up a gun and run her hands over it, almost caressing the cold metal. There was delight in her eyes, delight and excitement, and he knew it was going to be good this time.
Hell, it was always good with Monita. She was hotter than a stolen Rolls Royce and twice as much fun to ride, and she loved every little thing he did to her.
And he did plenty.
"C'mere," he said. "Why?"
"Because I want you."
"What do you want?"
He pointed at her. "I want that," he said. "I want to tear myself off a chunk of that."
She giggled softly, musically. Then her face went serious and he saw the fires burning in her eyes. "You just stay where you are." she told him. "You just stand still and don't move. I'm going to take good care of you."
He stood still and didn't move while she walked to him and began to undress him. "I was sitting here all afternoon," she said, her hands unbuttoning the buttons of his shirt. "I was thinking of something to do for you, something to make you very happy. I thought up something very nice, Al."
Her hands touched his chest.
"You will like this," she said.
He stood still while she took off all his clothing. When he was nude she ran her hands all over his body, touching him, and he went wild with de-side for her. He wanted to throw her down on the mattress and love the daylights out of her, but she told Km to wait, to relax, to let her do everything for him. He didn't hand her an argument.
He got on the bed when she told him to and she crouched over him. Her lips found his and she kissed him. Her hands were on his shoulders and her tongue was in his mouth and she kissed very well.
Then her lips moved. She began to kiss his neck, his throat, running over his skin and kissing with her mouth wide open. Her lips moved lower, and her mouth planted a trail of kisses along his body. He felt her breasts brushing across his flat stomach.
And then she began. He felt what she was doing, felt her lips and hands driving him into seventh heaven. It was the most indescribably exquisite sensation in the world. He could barely breathe, could not move at all. His whole body was loose and limp and relaxed. And she did what she was doing, did it magnificently, and everything got progressively better.
Much better. Very much better.
And then he was ready, more than ready, and it was happening, and everything in the world went kaput like a bomb.
Ruth spent the afternoon in the park. There was a playground there across from Park West Village, and the playground was a little less sordid than the rest of the park. The hoods and the drunks and the junkies stayed away from the playground, preferring to tote their switchblades or chug their sneaky pete or go on the nod in the park proper, on a bench or under a tree or by the side of the stagnant lake.
The playground was for mothers and children.
There were Puerto Rican mothers, holding one child by the hand and an infant under an arm, their stomachs distended with still another child. There were Central Park West mothers, all with plaid baby carriages or plaid strollers, chatting happily with one another while their children played on swings or slept or cried. And there was Ruth Lansing, sitting on a bench by herself with the carriage at her feet and trying to read a book.
The book was a novel which had led the bestseller list in the Sunday Times for the past eleven weeks. The book was 600 pages long and sold for $5.95, a little less than a penny a page. The book went on and on, and it didn't seem to get anywhere, and the writing was slightly subliterate. Hollywood was going to make a movie out of it. and Ruth was certain that for once the movie would not be worse than the book. It couldn't be.
She closed the book.
She had gotten through a few days now. a few days since the affair with the kid and the drinking in Port Hole and the talk with Joan McKay. And she had managed to stay away from men during that time. She had been tempted once or twice, had spent an afternoon alone until she just ached for someone to come and make love to her. But, either because the opportunity had not presented itself or because she was stronger than the desire, she had not given in.
She remembered the conversation with Joan. Joan had been helpful, she thought. Even if she was trying not to follow Joan's advice on cheating, it had been good advice. At least Joan had told her not to feel guilty and not do anything rash, and that was valuable.
Joan was a strange person. A good looking girl, a hell of a good-looking girl. Now what in the world would make such a good-looking girl turn into a lesbian?"
It didn't make any sense.
It wasn't as though Joan couldn't find a man to want her. Ruth was willing to give relatively long odds that nine out of every ten heterosexual males would be pleased as punch to make it with Joan McKay, and she could see why So what was the matter with the girl? Why did she get her kicks with other girls?
She tried to imagine what it would be like to kiss a girl, to play around with a girl. Disgusting?
Well, not exactly But it certainly couldn t be much of a thrill. God, if she wanted to caress a girl, she could caress herself-and that was a habit she had outgrown in eleventh grade.
So what was the sense in it?
She shrugged, deciding to stop thinking of Toan as a lesbian. After all what Joan did in bed was Joan's business and no business at all of Ruth Lansing. Joan was a friend, not a lover, and she could easily accept Joan in that capacity. God, she needed a friend. That was the rotten thing about New York. She never had anybody to talk to. It had been better in the Village, where everybody was friendly and where buildings and narrow streets gave the place the intimacy of a small town.
But in Park West Village, a chrome-and-steel-and-brick icebox on the Upper West Side, people did not make friends. Each apartment was a world of its own, an island unto itself, and each apartment got along without bothering with friendship. Some of the women seemed to find other women to talk to in the park, but friendships never seemed to happen so far as Ruth was concerned. And she was lonely.
She tossed the book into the carriage, being careful not to hit the sleeping baby on the head with it. She stood up and walked across Central Park and down to the entrance to her building. When she was back in the apartment Stevie woke up and began to cry. She had the bottle in his mouth about the instant the phone started to ring.
It was Glenn.
"Honey." he said. "I've got bad news. I won't be home for dinner tonight."
"Oh."
"Big brainstorming session coming up tonight." he went on. "I have to stay late and be on hand in case anybody wants to storm my brain. It's a shame, but I can't get out of it."
"What are you doing about dinner?"
"I think I'll have a fish dinner at Sweets," he said. "I tried you earlier-"
"I was at the Park."
"That's what I figured."
She sighed. "It's a shame," she said. "The more progress you make in your job, the more nights you have to work late "
"That's the way they work it."
"I know," she said. 'When do you think you'll be able to get home?"
"Let me see Heck. I don't know Ten or eleven, I hope. It might be later You know, it might not be a bad idea for me to take a hotel room downtown if it gets very late. That way I'll at least get a night's sleep.."
You always get a good night's sleep, she wanted to say. Because that's all you do in bed. You go to sleep."
"Will you be home all night. Ruth?"
"Sure." she said, a trace of bitterness in her voice. "Unless I carry Stevie on my back like a papoose."
"Well." he said, "I'll call you. If it looks like I'll be here past midnight, I'll stay downtown and give you a ring first."
"You do that."
"Fine. I'm sorry, honey but that's how it goes."
She put the receiver down and started pacing the floor That was how it went, all right He was never home, and when he was home he didn't do her a damned bit of good anyway So what difference did it make whether he came home or not?
No difference.
No difference at all.
She shook her head Actually, it did make a difference. If he were home she would be all right She wouldn't have to sit on her hands to keep from chasing a man. But if she were all alone it would be that much harder He wouldn't be there, a living conscience, and she would think passionate thoughts until she did something bad.
She needed company.
Joan, she thought. Joan could come up, have a drink or two with her, talk to her. She could get to know Joan better and at the same time she could avoid having an affair with some backalley louse who was short on brains and money and long on something else. Now what in hell was the name of the magazine Joan worked for? Nausea? Vomit?
Agony, she thought. That was it. She went to the phonebook and looked up Agony, then dialed a number. A man answered the phone and she asked it she could speak with Joan McKay. The man told her to hang on. and a moment later Joan's hello came over the wire.
"This is Ruth Lansing," she said.
"Well, hlya. kitten."
"Glenn just called me." she went on. "He said he can't make it home tonight, so I'm stuck with the kid. It can get lonely in this place when you're stuck here alone."
"Feel like company?"
"Uh-huh."
"Sounds fine," Joan said. "I've got nothing on for the evening. What's a good time?"
Should she ask Joan to come for dinner? No, she decided. She didn't feel like cooking and just wanted a sandwich for herself. After dinner, then.
"Stevie goes to bed at seven," she said into the phone. "Any time after that is fine "
"You mean I don't get to see the baby?"
"Did you want to?"
"To tell you the truth, I didn't. As a matter of complete fact babies bore the hell out of me. I'll see you around seven-thirty, honey. Want me to bring a bottle along?"
"We've got liquor."
"Then I'll bring something to nibble on. See you, kitten."
Monita Ruiz wasn't nervous now.
She had it all down pat. She and Al and Ryan had gone over the whole routine a dozen times, and she had everything clear in her mind, every little piece of it. It wouldn't be tough, not once she got going. All she had to do was pick up the man.
She was in a bar on East 53rd Street. She was sitting on a captain's chair at the bar, nursing a whiskey sour and waiting. She was dressed well-Carter had seen to that, had gone along with her while she picked out the dress. It was black and it was tight, and it was cut so low that the tops of her breasts were visible in all their glory.
She didn't exactly look like a whore.
But it was close.
She picked her man the minute he came through the door. He was tall and good-looking and he didn't look like the type who had to pay for it, but it was obvious after one look at his face that he hadn't come to the bar for a drink.
He was looking for a woman.
She turned slightly, not being too obvious about it, and she crossed one leg over the other to give him a peek at her thigh. Then she smiled, a brief smile, and it was enough. The fish took the bait like Grant taking Vicksburg. He was sitting next to her in a minute, his eyes wide, his hands shaking.
"Buy me a drink," she whispered.
He bought her a fresh sour and paid for it with a ten-dollar bill. She took a peek at his wallet while he paid for the drink, just as Al had told her to do. If the mark wasn't carrying a lot of money, Al didn't want her to bother with him.
This one was carrying a lot of money. The wallet had two compartments, one for ones and fives, the other for bigger bills. The compartment with big bills was bulging. Three hundred at least, she guessed. Maybe closer to five.
She dropped a hand to his knee and squeezed. "I only want a sip of this drink," she said. "After that I want something else. Do you know what I want?"
"I can guess."
"Do you want the same thing?"
"Yes," he said. His voice was thick, husky. "Yes, I want the same thing."
"But I have rent to pay," she said. "And clothes to buv I cost money, honey."
"That's all right."
"I'm expensive."
"Are you worth it?"
"I'm worth a million dollars," she told, him moving her hand up his leg. She moved her hand still higher, gave him a tentative squeeze, then withdrew her hand entirely.
"How much?"
"It depends,' she said. "Would you like to stay all night? I think I'd like that just you and me all night long. I think you'd like it, too."
"How much?"
"Fifty dollars"
That was fine with him he told her. It was fine with her, too. It was another test that Carter had thought of. If he was willing to shell out fifty, he'd be carrying a lot more than that. And they didn't want to waste time on somebody who couldn't pay heavy freight. If he could go fifty, he would have at least a hundred more on him, probably more. And he would be worth the trouble.
"It's nine-thirty," he said.
"That's right."
"Wait here a second," he said. "I want to call my wife."
"Your wife?"
He grinned. "She thinks I'm working late at the office," he told her. "I said I'd call if I was going to spend the night at a hotel. So I guess I'll call."
She finished the whiskey sour while he made a phone call. He came back, scooped bills off the bar and left some change for the barman. Then he took her arm and led her out of the cocktail lounge.
The air was cool. He flagged a cab and got into it after her. She gave the cabby the address of a hotel in the West Seventies, on Broadway. She had rented a room there that afternoon under a fake name. It was the place where Carter and Ryan would be coming.
He kissed her in the cab and she pretended to respond. His hand found her breast and held it She wished he would leave her alone; it was going to be had enough in the hotel room, because she couldn't imagined enjoying it with anybody but Al But she hugged him and kissed him and pretended to like it.
He asked her name and she gave him a phony one. Why in hell did he want to know her name? She said it was Cynthia Lopez.
Then he told her his name as if she cared It was Glenn Lansing, but what the hell difference did it make to her?
Ruth slammed the receiver into the cradle She cursed softly, then returned to the couch.
"He's not coming home," she said. "Just too much work, he said. He'll be at the office until after midnight and he has to be on the job bright and early in the morning. He's going to spend the night at a hotel downtown and save himself the long trip."
Joan didn't say anything.
"He said he was calling from the office." she went on. "It sounded as though he was calling from a bar. You don't suppose he's having himself a night on the town, do you?"
"I suppose it's possible."
"That louse," Ruth said. "He doesn't have anything for his wife, but he's out on the town with some two-penny tramp The bastard I"
"You can't be sure of that."
"I'm sure enough. Men stink, Joan."
"I've always thought so." Joan said. "But then I'm prejudiced. I have my own outlook on life and it's colored by my particular situation All in all, however, I think you're quite correct You made a profound observation one which ought to be immortalized in Bartlett's. Men stink"
Ruth picked up her glass and stared into it. She was drinking Scotch and soda, and as the evening had worn on each drink contained progressively more Scotch and progessively less soda. The one she had now was mostly Scotch.
She wasn't drunk. Different kinds of drinking gives you different kinds of highs, and just as the solitary-lushing over gin flips had knocked her out in a relatively short period of time, the convivial lushing this evening was just relaxing her.
So far they'd had a damn fine time. They had talked about everything, from books to plays to people, and they had frequently talked about themselves. The simple pleasure of talking seriously with another human being was a delight, and a rare one. Ruth was just beginning to realize what a fiasco her marriage had turned out to be. She never talked with Glenn the way she was talking now with Joan. She never felt as close to Glenn as she did to Joan.
Oh, it had been different, and there had been good times. When she had had the baby-a baby neither of them had particularly desired in the first place-she had felt tremendously close to Glenn. But since then they had drifted further and further apart. They never had anything to talk about any more. He couldn't come up with anything more exciting than financial news, and she lived such a fundamentally dull life that she never seemed to have anything at all to say. What could she talk about-prices at the Grand Union? Juvenile delinquents in the park?
But she had plenty to talk about with loan. The slightest, most trivial fragment of conversation became somehow gripping and fascinating. It was phenomenal.
"Listen here." Joan was ravine "You don't really give a damn where (ilenn-o is, do you?"
"What do you mean?"
"In the first place, you don't want him home. He's a bore from beginning to end and you don't really want him around at all. And in the second place you've cheated on him, and you don't love him a hell of a lot, so what difference does it make whether or not he cheats on you?"
"But-"
"No buts. You don't want him around at all. You and I are having a high old time here and you'd just as soon Glenn-o took a week off and flew to Los Angeles. It's the truth, isn't it?"
"Maybe."
"No maybe, either. It's the truth."
"You're right. I suppose it's horrible, but I don't want him around. Not tonight." She thought for a moment. "But I do want him around," she said. "For one reason."
"What's that?"
"I don't want to be alone tonight."
"You're not alone."
"Not now. But I will be, after you go home to bed. I hate the idea of sleeping alone. I know it's silly, but-"
Joan's eyes were serious. "It's not so silly," she said. "It's not silly at all. kitten."
"It's just the way I feel."
"You don't have to be alone, kitten."
She looked at the dark-haired girl. "I think I know what you mean," she said.
"I mean I could sleep over. Accent on the sleep. I could keep you company, if you want company."
"I don't want sex," Ruth said.
"I didn't say anything about sex."
"I know. I suppose I'm silly to worry, but I can't help worrying anyway. I mean ... Joan?"
"Yes?"
"Will you promise not to make love to me?"
"No."
Ruth stared at her.
"I don't make that kind of promise," Joan said.
"You may want me to, Ruthie. You may beg for it."
"It could happen. You don't know that much about yourself, kitten. You're just starting to find your way around. I'd be pretty silly making that kind of a promise, wouldn't I?"
"I mean-"
"I know what you mean." Joan was smiling softly now. "I won't seduce you, kitten. I won't get you drunk and sneak into your arms. If you want anything it'll have to be your idea. Now I'm going to get us a couple of fresh drinks. We can each use one."
CHAPTER FIVE
Al Carter was in the hallway on the ninth floor of the Sherman Square Hotel He stood in front of room 907 and he listened. Ryan was next to him, also listening.
They were listening to bedsprings.
He didn't like to do it this way Carter thought. Just let the two of them get into the room and then spring the trap, that was the way he would have liked to work it But it didn't play best that way. They had to let the mark have a chunk of Monita, or part of a chunk of Monita Then they could crash the crib. It put the mark in a disadvantage psychologically if he'd already had the girl. It left him feeling guilty.
Carter and Ryan had waited in a coffee pot across Broadway from the hotel. They had waited for Monita to come back with a sucker and then they'd crossed to the hotel and had gone up to the room. She was in the room and the mark was with her, and it was time.
Carter stuck his key in the lock. He'd had a duplicate made when Monita rented the room He turned the key, kicked the door hard with his toot He went into the room with his gun in his hand and Ryan was right behind him.
The scene inside was a panic. They had managed to catch the mark riding hard, and now he didn't know whether to finish the job or quit He saw the guns and got the hell up from Monita. and she screamed quietly and pulled a bedsheet over her
"Okay," Carter snapped. "You re under arrest. Both of you."
"What the-"
He pulled out a wallet, flipped it open. He gave the mark a medium-long look at the badge. What the hell, he thought. It was an okay shield. There was no sense in hiding it.
"Vice Squad," he said. "This gal's been hustling a couple weeks now and we've been watching out for her. A loner with no connections. We're picking her up now."
"Jesus," the mark said.
Monita made a good show, swearing at Carter and Ryan in rapid-fire Spanish. Carter laughed at her. then pointed at the sucker with the gun. "Don't go anywhere," he told him. "Afraid we gotta take you in, too. Under arrest."
"What the hell for?"
"Just consorting with a prostitute would be enough of a charge," Ryan said, a trace of brogue in his voice. "But we got more than that on you."
"What?"
"The broad is fifteen," Carter shot in. "Fifteen years old, mister. You know what that means?" The sucker turned white.
"It means statutory rape." Ryan told him. "Statutory rape by three big years."
The mark started to fall apart. He blubbered that he didn't know, that he'd been sure that she was twenty, that he was a decent guy with a wife and kids.
"Don't sweat it," Carter advised him. "You got nothing much to worry about."
"You'll let me off?"
"Can't do that But under the law. you know you could do twenty years The broad's a hooker, though so that kind of eases you off We gotta take you down and book you, then you can make bail and come for the trial You plead guilty, cop off with a suspended sentence."
"Oh. Jesus."
"It goes on your record," Ryan said "And it might make the papers. But you won t De spending time in jail."
The mark was petrified.
Then the cat-and-mouse play started. The mark was wondering aloud why they couldn't let him lust plain go and keep the girl He hinted that it would be worth money to him They said it couldn't oe done that way The mark wanted to know why.
"Because the broad's under age," Carter told him. "Now, if we got a piece of jailbait up for hustling, we got to have the guy she hustled in order to get a conviction. And the guy has to stand charges of statutory rape. Now no judge in the world is going to put him away for twenty years Just a quick suspended sentence, maybe a year's probation if the newspapers make a big thing out ol it. No more than that."
"There's a lot of charges," Ryan added "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor disorderly conduct, mopery with intent to gawk, a lot of stuff.
But you'll just draw a suspension and come out of it okay."
Carter had to fight back laughter. The beautiful part of it was that it had a solid sort of logic behind it. The girl was underage She was a whore. Somebody had to make her, and he was then guilty of statutory rape. It was cute.
And the mark was sweating. He wanted to settle up now, wanted to bribe the two cops to let him the hell out of there. But they just plain wouldn't be bribed. That was the neat touch, one Ryan had added. He was teaching Carter a lot about the mechanics of a con game.
"If it was up to me," Ryan said, "I'd let you go. But you can see what the situation is. We can't do it."
"We'd be blowing our case against the broad," Carter said.
"Suppose you let her off too?" That was the whole idea, of course. But the mark had to think it up all by himself. And, as soon as he did, Carter and Ryan shook their heads.
"Christ," Carter said, "that would do it for us. The squad knows we're up here, see, and if we don't come back with a tight case against this little tramp we're in dutch. You see what we're up against, mister? We'd like to spring you but it's not that easy."
From there on it was soft all the way They got around to the notion of paying off the lieutenant and the captain to look the other way, a rather brilliant move because it left Ryan and Carter on the mark's side against the lousy higher-ups who were making all the trouble.
"Give me your wallet," Carter said.
The mark did. Carter thumbed through the bills, counting. There were four hundred and twenty bucks there, plus a few ones.
"Nuts," he said.
"Isn't it enough?"
"It would take five hundred, and that's minimum. I don't know what in hell we do now."
"I could go home and get more money-"
"Naw, that's no good. We're due back downtown already. That won't work."
"Well-"
"I've an idea," Ryan said. "Listen, we can shave it closer than that, can't we?" The brogue was thicker now. He was a good old soul coming to the rescue of a troubled man, and he played the part flawlessly. "Listen now, we can handle this for four hundred fifty, I know we can. And ... uh ... you and I could each put up twenty, wouldn't you say?"
"Sure," Carter said. "I guess we could do that."
Carter took the money from the wallet, leaving a tenner plus the singles. "You'll need this much to see you through the night." he said. "You make it all right with this?"
The mark was close to tears. "Sure," he said. "Sure, I got Diner's Club, I can stay at a hotel. Look, you boys take the ten, huh? I mean, you're already putting up twenty each. That's too much of a favor to begin with. Take the ten."
They let him talk them into it. It was beautiful, Carter thought. Emphasize the only-a-suspended-sentence bit until the guy saw the walls coming down around him, saw his wife divorcing him and his boss firing him and the world coming to an end. Then they were his buddies, buying the captain and the lieutenant for him, even tossing in a few skins of their own to get him off the hook.
That was important. If you left a guy knowing he had been picked, you set yourself up for possible trouble. But this mark was walking out grateful. He wasn't mad at the nasty old fuzzerinoes that kept him from finishing his piece. He loved them. They had saved his neck for him, and he would lick their boots like a puppy.
Now the blow-off, Carter thought. Blow him off against the wall, so that he left his way and they left theirs. That was an important part of any con. You had to leave clean.
"You ought to be pretty damn grateful," he said to Monita, scowling. "This guy's getting you off the hook."
She forced a smile. Hell, Carter thought, she had a right to smile. She'd just knocked down some nice dough for herself.
"Get your clothes on," Carter told her. "And get out of here. I catch you hustling again and you don't come out of it smelling like a rose. You want to give for free, fine. But any more hustling and you go to jail, baby."
Monita got up, got dressed. Carter kept an eye on the mark. The mark was funny. Monita was nude, fumbling with clothes and pretending to be nervous, and the mark was trying not to look at her. He was having a tough time. Stupid jerk, Al thought
Caught in the saddle, all warmed up and no place to go. And embarrassed to stare at Monita, but so eager to tear one off that he couldn't help it.
Monita got dressed. She scurried out the door without a backward glance and Ryan closed the door after her.
"Give her ten minutes," Ryan said. Carter nodded The mark got up and started to put his clothes on. Carter gave him a cigarette and the guy smoked nervously. The ten minutes went by.
"We'll take off now," Ryan said. "You let us be on our way another ten minutes. Then you be going straight out of here. Don't spend time out in front. Sometimes they put another squad on, you know, to be checking up on us, and we wouldn't want them looking after you. You understand?"
"Sure," the mark said. "Sure."
"And stay away from the young stuff," Carter added. "Hell, it's against the law to go with any hooker, you know. But if you want to buy it, buy it from something over eighteen. Otherwise you can find a hell of a lot of trouble for yourself."
They left the hotel and jumped in a cab. The cab took them to the Senator Monita was already there at a table. She finished her coffee and they took her around the corner to a bar They each had a drink Ryan and Carter had Irish whiskey and Monita had a whiskey sour.
"Four-twenty," Ryan said. "Plus the fifty dollars that the fool paid to our little girl, and I vote that she keeps that money as a reward for enduring his embraces. Now what's to be done with this four-twenty?"
"Easy," Carter said. "Two-ten to me. one-oh-five to each of you. A half, a quarter and a quarter. The way we agreed."
"Why not three ways even?"
Carter shook his head. "I financed this," he said. "I set it up, I thought it up, I arranged it. I get half. We agreed, Ryan."
"I don't know as I like it."
"That's rough."
Ryan sighed sadly. He was playing the old Irishman to the hilt, Carter thought, God, he should be on television. He was perfect.
"Alan, my lad," he said, "I'll agree this time."
"White of you."
"But in the future, a third to each. You'll not be financing any longer, and the operation will be established, and it's only fair. Agreed?"
Carter thought about it. Better to keep peace in the family, he thought. Better to make it simple. He nodded his head, then divided the money and passed it around. Monita returned her share, plus her extra fifty, and Carter held onto it for her.
"Now we should go out and paint the town," he said. "A good club for a couple of drinks."
But Monita was shaking her head. "No," she said.
"No?"
"Some other time," she said. Her knee found Al's under the table and nudged suggestively "Some other time well go to a club and have ourselves a ball. But not tonight."
"Why not?"
He was teasing her now, teasing her and enjoying it. Hell, he knew why not. It wasn't hard to tell. All you had to do was look at her eyes.
Her eyes were wild. Her eyes were hot and he looked at the heat in them and tried to keep from grinning. A real sexpot. he thought. A real hot number. God, he could tell she was burning for it. She never got enough. He accommodated her every way in the world and she loved every minute of it and twitched around begging for more.
So what the hell he thought. He didn't exactly hate it himself not with little Monita. She had a pair of boobs that made you drool and a mouth like warm honey She made a damned stud out of him, for God's sake.
"Why not?" he said again.
"Because that idiot started something he didn't finish," she told him.
"You wanted him to finish?"
"No."
"Then-"
"I want you to finish." she said "I want yon to take me back to the hotel and finish you understand? I want to make that bed break from it. I want to go all night, Al."
She didn't seem to care that Ryan was there, hanging on every word she said A wild one. Carter thought. An animal. And that was the way he liked her.
He stood up. caught Monita by the arm. "You'll excuse us," he said to Ryan. "I'll see you tomorrow."
He led Monita outside and hurried toward the Alexandria He stopped halfway there hauled her into a doorway and kissed her. His hand found her breasts.
"Come on," he said. "God, I want it as much as you do. Let's go, baby."
They ran the rest of the way to the hotel.
Ruth wasn't exactly drunk. She'd had a lot of Scotch, and by now the drinks were just Scotch and ice with no soda at all, and all that Scotch was having an effect on her. But she still wasn't what you would be justified in calling drunk. Under the influence, perhaps, but not drunk.
Drunk, of course, is a variable term. They tell the story of the mountain williams of the Arkansas hills who saw a man lying very still in the road. "Drunk," one 'em said. "Naw, he ain't drunk," said the other. "I saw his eyelid movin'."
So drunkenness was relative. Ruth decided that she herself was not drunk at all. The Scotch had brought a pleasant warm glow to her cheeks, had overcome her with a general feeling of well-being. But she was still the master of her fate and the captain of her soul, fully aware of where she and who was with her and what she was doing.
This was important to her. Because she had the inescapable feeling that if she got drunk, really drunk, then Joan would seduce her. It was not that she did not trust Joan. She did. Obviously, Joan wasn't the sneaky type. She could have promised not to make love to Ruth, had she been sneaky, then she would have given Ruth a false sense of security, after which point she would easily have broken her promise and led Ruth astray.
But she hadn't done this.
So Ruth trusted her.
"I'm glad you called me," Joan said.
"Why?"
"Because I'm glad to be here with you. And I'm glad your finky husband isn't coming home tonight, because I'll enjoy staying here with you. I like you, Ruth."
"I like you, too."
"And I enjoy feeling close to you. Poor kid, you have a rough deal, don't you?"
"How?"
"This," Joan said, waving her arms to include the whole apartment. "All of this. All this coldness and emptiness. It's a nice apartment, I suppose, but I couldn't stand living in a place like this. All planes and angles. And this building is really a panic from the outside. One terrace stacked on top of another from the first floor to the twentieth. It looks like something a kid could build out of an erector set."
Ruth laughed. She sipped her drink, listened to the music on the hi-fi. She had put on a stack of chamber music and a Brahms sonata for violin and piano was playing now. It was warm. cozy. But she agreed with Joan about the apartment. She didn't like it either, and she couldn't stand to look at the building from the outside. It looked more like an institution than like a place to live.
"The funny part," Joan said, "is that from 100th Street you get a great picture. The project on one side of the street and Park West Village on the other. And the project looks one hell of a lot better than Park West Village. Not on the inside, of course. On the inside the place stinks, the kids urinate in the elevators and throw garbage down the stairwells. But the architecture is cleaner."
"But they don't have terraces," Ruth said. "Come on-I'll show you our terrace."
"Another drink and I might fall off it."
"Come on, Joan."
They went out onto the terrace. The sky was dark, with no moon and only a scattered handful of stars. The air was cool. Ruth filled her lungs with it and looked out at New York.
"The neighborhood is better at night," she said.
"Unless you're out for a walk."
"I mean to look at. It looks-I don't know, almost romantic. Lights in the distance, cars passing by down on the street. In the daylight it's hell. But at night you can pretend that it's a decent neighborhood. You get the pulsebeat of New York and it becomes pretty nice."
They stood for a few moments and didn't say anything. How long since she'd talked to Glenn like this, speaking her thoughts, almost getting poetic? Too long.
They went inside silently. Ruth closed the terrace doors, sat down again. The Brahms was still playing. A moody part now, slow and measured, with the violin singing a love song to the piano.
"I think we should drink up and go to sleep," Joan said. "It's getting kind of late."
"How late?"
"A few minutes after one."
"Oh, God. Stevie'll be up at seven like a shot.
How did the time go that fast?"
"We were enjoying ourselves."
"Uh-huh. A new experience for me. I'm afraid. We'd better get to sleep. You have to work is the morning, don't you?"
"Yes. Agony at Agony. Let's go kitten."
In the bedroom she felt funny It was one thing to sit with a lesbian, talk to a lesbian feel close to a lesbian. It was another thing to undress in front of her in a bedroom next to a big double bed. There was something automatically sexual about it. The bed was a marriage bed, a bed on which she had made love, and that changed things somehow.
She took off her clothes, peeled down to her underwear. Joan was looking at her and she felt herself flush with embarrassment. It was silly they were both girls, and Joan wouldn't be seeing any thing that she herself didn't possess in good measure. But she couldn't help it.
"Good," Joan said.
"What-"
"I'm sorry," the dark-haired girl said. "I can't help it. You're very beautiful, Ruth."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. It's the truth."
She took off her bra. wanting to turn away but afraid it would be an insult, an unfortunate reminder of the special nature of the whole situation. She stood still, her large breasts exposed and she blushed horribly when loan looked at her.
"Don't be ashamed," Joan said her voice feather-soft. "Don't be ashamed of those. God no woman should be ashamed of those. They're magnificent, Ruth."
She couldn't say anything. She took off her panties, and this time she did turn away, walking past Joan to the bathroom. She had the insane notion that Joan would reach for her as she passed, her hands touching her, grabbing at her. This did not happen. In the bathroom she washed her hands and face, brushed her teeth. The toothpaste was advertised as leaving one's breath kissing-sweet. But no one was going to kiss her tonight.
She had sex on her mind. Well, it was only natural, she told herself. She was spending the night with a fine girl who happened to be a lesbian, and she would be less than human if she weren't thinking about it, thinking about making love with a girl, wondering what it was like. That certainly didn't mean she wanted it. It was only curiosity, that was all, just simple and natural curiosity.
When she returned to the bedroom Joan was nude. She couldn't help looking at the girl's large breasts. They were firm with no trace of sag and the nipples were dark brown points on milky flesh.
She got into bed. Joan walked to the bathroom and Ruth's eyes stayed on her, studying her buttocks, watching the way they moved. Such white skin, she thought. Black hair and white skin. Skin that looked amazingly soft.
She blushed again.
When Joan returned she had the blankets pulled up to her neck. She watched the brunette walk nude to the light switch, then turn to smile at her.
"Well," Joan said. "Time to turn in. Good night, kitten. Sleep well."
"Goodnight, Joan."
Joan flicked off the light. Ruth lay in bed, looking at the darkness, hearing the girl pad across the room to the bed. The covers were pulled back and Joan slipped under them. She did not say a word.
And Ruth was trembling. Joan was right next to her, next to her in the bed. and she could hear the girl's breathing, could remember her nude body, and-
God!
After a long time, Joan spoke just her name, just Ruth and the single syllable was warm and soft and sweet.
"What is it, Joan?"
"May I kiss you goodnight?"
She didn't say anything for a moment.
"All right," she said finally.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Do you want me to?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I ... I want you to."
She lay still, tense. And then she felt the warmth of Joan, the sweet warmth of Joan, as the girl came to her aid took her in her arms. She felt Joan's mouth on hers, so soft, so incredibly soft, Joan's lips, soft, warm, soft, and she put her arms involuntarily around Joan and returned the kiss.
Her lips parted. She felt Joan's tongue move slowly into her mouth, warm, warm, and she felt Joan's breasts against her own breasts, a feeling totally unlike anything she had ever experienced. There was something abnormally clean about it, clean and sweet and gentle.
God!
And then Joan was releasing her, moving slight-ly away. She could still feel the warmth of Joan's body close to her. She could barely breathe. "Ruth-"
She tried to speak but could not make a sound.
"You want to, don't you, Ruth?"
God!
"Ruth, baby, tell me. You want to. I know you want to, I know you need me. Let me love you. kitten. Let me make you happy. That's all I want, poor Ruth, poor kitten. Just to make you happy."
God in heaven I
"Ruth-"
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, Joan, yes, yes, yes-"
She did not think about lesbianism. She thought only about love and warmth and comfort. They were together warm bodies in a warm bed and she did not worry about the comparative morality of the affair, did not concern herself with words like abnormality or wrong.
Nothing was wrong.
Everything was right.
Joan's mouth was right, warm and gentle with her own mouth Joan gave a small gasp of pleasure and her heart warmed with joy.
God!
Joan's hands were caressing her. Joan's bands were on her breasts now and it was new, new and different These were not the hard hands of a male lover. These were soft hands, sweet hands, and they were touching her, teasing her, doing delicious things to her.
She was not bashful. She wanted to be touched, yearned and burned to be touched, but she wanted also to touch Joan. She put her own hands on Joan's breasts and felt their sweetness, touched them, held them. She pressed against Joan. God above, was there anything in the world like two pairs of breasts touching? There was not. It was unique, new, strange.
But it was Joan who played the more active role. It was Joan who shifted her position on the bed, moving to find Ruth's big breasts with her lip. It was Joan's lips, gliding over the smooth skin, tickling the nipples in a wonderful way. It was Joan's lips moving-
And then it was Joan's lips doing the most wonderful thing in the world, doing it to her, tasting the sweetness of her and warming her in a way no one had done before. How did lesbians make love? The question was answered now. Lesbians made sweet love, good love, and it was heaven.
She was alive with desire, aflame with passion. It was a new sort of love gentle, tender, a love that didn't jet higher and higher to new peaks of stabbing passion but a love that moved slowly, building up gracefully. It was sublime.
And she wanted to be active, to caress while she was being caressed. Me too, she wanted to shout. Let me, let me do it for you, let me-
Joan knew.
Because Joan was turning, her hungry lips still busy, her clever lips, still active. Joan was moving on the bed, and Ruth grabbed the brunette, reached up to cup her sweet firm body with both hands. She drew Joan down to her, wanting her, needing her.
Finding her.
And then it was perfect. Then she was giving and receiving at once, abandoning herself to caresses and lavishing caresses upon Joan as she did so.
Better.
Better-
And the moon came up and exploded, and the stars went out like candles in a windstorm, and the bed rocked like a boat on a seasick ocean.
God!
God!
GOD!
With winds wailing and wings beating and love love love, and the whole world dipping and soaring, and everything crashing and smashing-
And then silence, stillness, warmth and sweetness, and it was over, all over, and it was good.
They shared a cigarette. They sat in bed, warm and happy, and they took turns dragging on a cigarette and sucking the smoke deep into their lungs. It was a quiet time, a time for few words. It was a happy time.
"I don't think it's wrong," Ruth said.
"It isn't."
"I didn't want it to happen. Not at all. But I wanted you to kiss me, and when you kissed me-"
"I know."
"I just wanted everything. Everything. I didn't know what to do, I was afraid I would do it all wrong-"
"You were heavenly, kitten."
"I wanted to be. You'll have to teach me everything, Joan. All the things I don t know."
"I'll love teaching you."
"It may be hard work."
"A labor of love," Joan said. , "Can we-"
"What, kitten?"
"Oh, I'm shameless. I want to do it again. Can we?"
"Of course, darling, darling kitten. I'm not a man. dear, and neither are you. Men get tired. Girls can make love all night."
"Oh, let's," Ruth said. "Oh. let's do it let'? do it all night long. Let's not stop. Oh, God, I love you!"
CHAPTER SIX
Glenn Lansing was in bed He was not keening.
He was lying on his back with the lights out, his eyes closed, the covers pulled up to his neck. The room was air-conditioned and the air-conditioner was humming softly.
But he was not sleeping.
He was in the Hotel Taft at Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street. He had gone there from the Sherman Square like a bat out of hell, racing from the hotel and flagging the first hack he saw He felt slightly ridiculous, and he felt very much afraid, and he only began to relax when he was in a room at the Taft with the door securely shut.
Fifteen years old.
Statutory rape.
Just his luck he thought bitterly. One night on the town, one night to pick up a little fun, and he had to find some jailbait. And that wasn't all-the cops had to bust down the door in the middle of the act. God, what would have happened if they had taken him to the station?
He knew damn well what would have happened. It would have been the end of the world, the end of a guy named Glenn Lansing. Ruth would have left him and the firm would have let him go-can't have that sort of publicity on Wall street, not in a million years-and he would have been not a man with a future but a bum with a police record.
Statutory rape.
It was a good thing the cops had been right guys. It had cost him more than four hundred bucks but the hell with the money. He'd bought his life back, and that was worth a lot of money. To hell with the dough. He could make that much money with one bright move in the market. But all the bright moves in the world wouldn't do him much good with a record for rape, statutory or otherwise.
Son of a bitch, he thought, why did I have to pick up a kid? All the whores in the world and I had to pick up a kid.
But it was a lie and he knew it. That was why he had picked her up in the first place, in the cocktail lounge. She looked young, high-schoolish, and that was what he wanted. He hadn't worried about her age at the time. But he had known she was young, very young, and that alone was what really excited him.
He wanted young stuff.
Married to a beautiful broad and aching to get into something half her age Well, not quite-Cynthia Lopez, or whatever the hell her name was, was fifteen, and Ruth was twenty-four. A little more than half her age.
But not by much.
Jesus, what was the matter with him? He had a perfectly good wife at home, and he couldn't even get interested in taking her to bed. She left him completely cold now; most of the time he just turned over and went to sleep without even making a rudimentary attempt at making love to her. He just wasn't interested.
And, when he did make love to her, it was the wrong way. He made love with his eyes closed, and he pretended that she was not Ruth at all, that she was someone else. That she was fourteen or fifteen years old, young and virginal, sweet and petite, hot to trot but too young to know much about it. Married to a beautiful woman, dammit, and he couldn't make it with her unless he pretended she was a kid. What in hell was wrong with him?
Sleep, he thought. Have to get to sleep. It's late, very late, and I have to go to work in the morning, and I have to sleep, have to close my eyes and keep them closed and forget about the girl and forget about everything and just go to sleep.
He tried.
He really tried.
But it didn't work.
It didn't work because he still wanted her, wanted her so badly that he could taste the need in his mouth, in his hands, in his body. The cops, bless them and damn them simultaneously, had walked in at the worst possible moment. A few more seconds and he would have finished. Another minute and he would have been done. But they hadn't given him that minute. They had walked in while he was going at it, and he had frozen up and stopped short of his goal, and now sleep was out of the question.
He couldn't sleep. His glands were aching and he was in agony. He needed the release, the letting-go that he could only get with the girl. And the girl was gone.
He got out of bed, walked halfway to the phone intending to call Room Service and have them send up a bottle Then he remembered that it was too late for them to sell liquor to him The bars were still open-they didn't close until four-but he didn't want to get dressed and go out of the hotel just for the chance to drink himself senseless. He got back into bed and tried once more to relax, but he only lay awake listening to the hum of the air-conditioner and remembering what the girl's body had been like.
It had been one hell of a body. Great to touch, great to handle, great to get into. God, what a feeling! Like nothing else in the world, nothing ever.
It had been tough enough before, when he carried a lech for young stuff without knowing what it was like. But now it was going to be ten times worse Because now he knew damned well what it was like, knew how it felt and how it tasted and how it moved, and he knew he wasn't going to be able to look at a girl of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen or sixteen without wanting to make love to her until she screamed.
And it was hard in his neighborhood. The Puerto Rican girls and the Negro girls-they all got stacked out to here when they were that age, and they all paraded around in tight sweaters and tight slacks, and they all looked so hot you could practically go nuts just watching them strut around They had a way of swinging their little tears when they walked, and it was too much, too much to take.
It would be tough.
He started to remember the girl all over again.
And his body stirred in response, and he felt himself filling with an awful need, and he knew the need would remain until it was put out of the way by one means or another He could go downstairs and find a tramp, there were millions of them on Seventh Avenue at that hour, but that wouldn't do any good. A whore wasn't the same A whore was just a form of masturbation, as far he was concerned. And he couldn't afford a whore anyway. He didn't have the cash, and relatively few whores were members of Diner's Club.
So he found another way. Alone.
It wasn't very good that way It made him feel like a kid behind a locked bathroom door, but that couldn't be helped He did what he had to do. thinking all the while of the girl on the bed in the hotel and remembering how great she had been. He did what he had to do.
Then he slept, and dreamed bad dreams.
Monita slept through the morning. She stayed in bed while Carter got up and showered and went out for breakfast. She was just opening her eyes, tentatively, when he came back to the room and told her he was going downtown to get some things. She waited until he left then took a shower of her own and had breakfast at the Red Chimney She had a pecan waffle downed in maple syrup, four strips of bacon, a large glass of fresh orange juice, two cups of black coffee with a lot of sugar She ate as though she had been starving, finishing everything set before her and polishing oft two seeded rolls from a basket on the counter. She paid the check, left a up, and went outside.
The sun was shining and the day was very warm. Monita stood for a moment or two, looking up and down Broadway. Al was downtown and she had the day to herself but she didn't know what to do with it. She didn't want to stay cooped up in the hotel room, nor did she want to wander around the neighborhood. She had outgrown the neighborhood now. She had one hundred ninety dollars in her purse, and she did not have to stay in the rotten neighborhood any more. They could keep 104th Street. Monita Ruiz lived there no longer and would never live there again.
So where should she go?
She could go shopping, she thought. That would be a good idea. But she would have to be careful not to spend too much money. That would not be good at all.
As a matter-of-fact, she thought, the money worried her a little. She wanted to save up until she had enough to get out of New York, enough to go far away. But she had the feeling that Al would not let her save money. He had given her share to her in the room, but she felt that he would be mad if she were putting it away and saving it. It would be all right if she spent it, but if she kept it lying around sooner or later he would take it away from her.
She was sure of this. She liked Al, even loved him a little, but this did not blind her to the fact that, in a great many ways, he was nothing more or less than a rotten unprincipled son of a bitch. He was wonderful in bed, good to her and he was showing her how to make a lot ol money, but he was still a son of a bitch notwithstanding.
She didn't want to make it easy for him. "If the money was lying around he might decided to take it. If it wasn't around he wouldn't be tempted And, at the same time, she wouldn't be able to spend it. It would be easy for her to get in a bind, making a lot of dough and spending it as fast as she made it, and she didn't want that to happen. It wasn't any good that way. The racket with Al and Ryan was a temporary thing, not something she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
That was the important thing. She hadn't minded what they did that night, had enjoyed all of it except the bed part, had even gotten a little kick out of that. How excited the sucker had been! It was funny.
Yes, it had been fun. But things that were fun once were less fun if you did them forever. Right now she was just a sharp little Puerto Rican chick salting some money away so she could make a break. But if she stayed in a racket long enough she would be something else, a con man's whore, a tramp. That wasn't what she wanted. If she wanted to be a tramp, she could sell herself on Columbus Avenue like all the other pigs. She didn't have to get in a fancy racket to be a whore.
So she had to save some money. She walked uptown on Broadway to 106th Street where there was a branch office of the Manufacturers Trust Company. She went inside, walked up to the teller's cage and waited in line while varous people cashed checks, made deposits, and converted bills into rolls of coins. When it was her turn she told the clerk she wanted to open an account. He asked her what kind of an account and she was lost. Then he pointed at a desk where a slender man with a white moustache sat smoking a cigar. The clerk told her the man would help her. and she went to him and sat down in a chair near his desk.
The two of them managed to agree that what she wanted was a savings account. She filled out a whole batch of forms, using the name Mona Rich. It was enough like her own so that she could remember it easily and answer to it promptly, vet it was American instead of Spanish. It was the name she would use when she left New York, she decided.
She left the bank with ninety dollars in cash and a crisp new bankbook which showed that she had one hundred dollars on deposit in the 106th & Broadway branch of the Manufacturers Trust Company. She was very pleased She tucked the slim bankbook into a zippered compartment of her purse and began walking again.
Joan sat at her desk. She opened a brown ma-nilla envelope with a paper knife and pulled out the manuscript within. There was a short story in the envelope, hopefully submitted to Agony on the chance that Agony might somehow be interested in publishing it. By the looks of the manuscript. Agony was not the first place the script had been seat. Closer to the hundredth. The first page had been retyped, but the other pages were already turning yellow around the edges. An Ill Wind, it was called.
It was an ill story, too. Joan read through it in a hurry and quit a few pages before she reached the end. There was no point in going any further The story was impossible, and it was lousy, and Agony was not interested.
She fastened a form rejection slip to the script with a paper clip, an ingenious slip which explained that while Agony could not take such trash on a bet in a million years, they were always glad to receive such material (hah!) and perhaps the writer might find it to his purposes to subscribe to Agony, thus gaining a clearer picture of the magazine's needs. She shoved all this into the stamped brown envelope which was addressed to the author, who happened to be someone by the name of Loretta Kallett.
Loretta Kallett, indeed, she thought. The woman sounded like some young housewife raising an infant and taking a course in night school and trying to write deathless prose. Up yours, Loretta Kallett!
She sealed the envelope and tossed it into a basket marked Phegh! on Harvey's desk. Harvey Chase was the editor of Agony, and he was out now, drinking his lunch somewhere. Joan was minding the store.
She was also trying to figure out what was happening.
It was hard to figure. She'd done something new last night, something brand new She had gone to bed with somebody's wife Hell, even somebody's mother-the little brat slept on in the nursery while she and Ruth had been, to be cute about it head over heels in love And it had been one hundred per cent wonderful with violins in the distance and starbursts and all the other paraphernalia ol successful copulation.
Starbursts. All the lousy writers in the world used the starburst metaphor to describe an orgasm. Suppose you reversed things she thought amused. You could have a whole new school of writing. The starburst was like an orgasm. Cute!
Oh, hell, she thought What was she going to do next? She wasn't the love-em-and-leave-em type of dyke who slept in one bed one day and another the next. She liked to drift into a nice pleasant arrangement that lasted as long as both parties got a kick out of it. Nothing permanent, no exchanging of golden wedding rings or any of that comic crap the militant lessies went in for, just a nice solid kind of an affair that was kicks all around.
So the next move would be for her to move in with Ruth. Or vice-versa-it didn't make much difference. Vice-versa would be better, since her humble flat was a damn sight more livable than Park West Village could ever hope to be Ruth would move in with her, and all would be hunky-dory.
But it wouldn't.
Because Ruth wasn't a properly unattached gal like the types she generally bedded down with. Ruth, God love her was married Ruth God help her, had a squalling brat of a baby And these unhappy little factors made things difficult.
Joan didn't like to hide things. If she was having an affair she didn't keep it a secret She wasn't a butchy type wandering around in public feeling up her date to show what a make-out artist she was. But she wasn't a secret dyke either. She had been, when she shared that apartment with Sandstone and Marilyn. Hell, she only had one-night stands in those days and she never gave her right name Ruth. She'd changed now. She accepted herself.
So hiding bothered her And sharing Ruth with a husband bothered her even more The thought of that louse Glenn-she hadn't met him. and she hoped she never did meet him, but you didn't have to meet that kind to know he was a louse and nothing else-the thought of him, climbing into bed with Ruth, touching her, getting to her was galling.
She didn't want to think about it.
But what the hell, she thought. Where do we go from here? What do we shoot for next?
It was hard to figure. Before things had been simpler. She had had her affairs with single girls, rootless girls, and there were no problems. Most of the time the girls had been lesbians to begin with, and on the few occasions when she had been a girl's first female lover there had still been no snags. One girl, a Hunter College student from the upper Bronx, had lived at home with her parents; her affair with Joan had caused her to leave the parental abode and move in with Joan. But that was as great a readjustment as she had ever caused a girl. Nothing genuinely traumatic. Nothing like a divorce.
Now what in hell was she supposed to do with Ruth? There were three courses of action and none of them looked too appetizing. She could get Ruth to divorce her husband, of course. It was a bad marriage at best and it might be wise to end it.
But hell, she thought. Then where do we go? The baby comes along, she thought, and Ruth plays mama to it while I play what? Father? An uncomfortable role, though not entirely lacking in its own psychotic sort of appeal And suppose Ruth can't make it, can't face divorce and all? Suppose she doesn't want to give up a good secure deal for a life in the gay whirl? Then Joan would lose all around. She'd lost bedmates before-when you were gay you got used to a sexual merry-go-round But she wasn't prepared yet to give up Ruth. The blonde was too vital to her well-being at the moment. That was one course.
The second was clear-cut too-give up Ruth now, make the break, let the gal write it off as a one-night experiment in sex and forget if forever. In the long run, that might be the kindest move. Lesbians didn't exactly live in a world of Stardust and moonbeams. The shadow world could be a bitter pill to swallow, to mix a metaphor in the manner of a writer like Loretta Kallett, for instance. Let Ruth straighten out again, let her commit adultry or commit matrimony or commit suicide, let her get out of gayness and into the sun again.
Kind? Maybe. And maybe not Maybe not at all, because maybe Ruth was gay as a jay inside and maybe she could only come to life as a lesbian and maybe leaving her as Glenn Lansing's wife out of kindness would be tantamount to locking her in a cell to keep her from getting into trouble.
So what was left, she wondered. Just one course, an unhappy one but the only one that would work for the time being Maintain the status quo. See Ruth when she could, sleep with Ruth when she could, date her like a high-school kid and share her in bed with Glenn-o. Not perfect, not close to perfect, but the best there was.
Hell.
Double hell. Witt bells on.
I ought to get a premature hysterectomy, she thought. I ought to go to some doctor and let him chop my ovaries out with a meat cleaver. Make a lot of things a damn sight simpler, wouldn't it? No more sex to get a person in a bind. No more problems. Just wind up a bitter old biddy with gay memories for a gay life. Just open Agony's mail till hell froze without ever having any agony of her own.
Or any joy.
She lit a cigarette, opened another envelope. A sheaf of petty poetry. Poems, six of them, by someone named Karl R. Colby. She picked up one of them. The title was Augury:
Black moon in darker sky And stars that gleam of ice A broken mirror, I See double-dotted dice.
Double-dotted dice. In a claustro-jail Single-spotted twice: A snake without a tail.
Oh, hell, she thought. Oh hell and hogwash. She dug out a form slip, pinned it to the sheaf of poetry, and tossed the mess into the Phegh! basket. She sighed and reached for the next envelope, the cigarette burning itself up in the ashtray, her brow furrowed in concentration.
Carter was happy.
They had been going for two weeks now and in the two weeks they had pulled the routine five times. The first one had been neat enough but on the four since then Monita and Ryan and he had gotten it down to a science The pickings had been a little lower averaging around three hundred a shot, but the whole bit had gone like clockwork.
And one thing was definitely on the plus side. Monita was getting sharper by the minute and she learned to spot a native New Yorker at thirty paces and brush him off from the start. Ryan had made the suggestion Stick to out-of-towners he had said. They aren't as hip for one thing, and they'll tremble at the idea of spending an extra two weeks in New York waiting for their case to come up for a hearing.
They were stuck, those out-of-towners They didn't have a New York lawyer and they didn't know a New York judge, and New York was just a big jungle that frightened the hell out of them They were easy. And the out-of-towners Monita had picked up so far had been peaches and cream. An insurance man from Omaha, a buyer from Salt Lake City, a small-scale oil man from Tulsa, another patsy that Carter couldn't remember.
They all took the bait and bit hard They all got Mona into the bay-a different bote) every time, never repeat too much never get the clerk or the cops or anybody wondering-and they all got surprised by Ryan and Carter, bursting into the room with empty guns and official police shields. They pulled the bit almost word for word each time,, improving it a lit tit here and there, ironing out the wrinkles, getting their timing just right. It always worked.
It beat the hell out of the strong-arm stuff. Al told himself You didn't have to make a getaway You walked out of the hotel like a king and got into the first cruising hack and went away to count our money. No kick to the cops, no running, no chasing, no sweat. It worked better and it paid better and he liked it.
And the best part of all was afterward, when Monita was hotter than a pot-bellied stove. That was the end of the world. The mark would get her started and it would be up to Carter to finish the job for the girl. She was a furnace on those nights, all pent up and excited as much by the excitement of the con game as by the act itself. It all bubbled out and she would keep Carter busy all night, would keep the bedsprings groaning their sensual song until the sun started to come up in the morning.
She was passionate, Monita was.
Carter stirred his coffee. Now, for about a week, there would be no jobs, no cons, no fun and games. That was one of the tough parts of the deal, he thought. Once a month they had their vacation because Monita's machinery was on vacation. Call a plumber, he thought. The pipes aren't working right.
Well, at least she wasn't knocked up. Now that would stop the action-a pregnant underage hooker would strain everybody's imagination. Better to take a week off than nine months.
He grinned but the grin didn't last long He didn't mind the lack of work-hell, they were bankrolled well enough, they could live without a week of income. He minded staying away from the kid for a week, though, because that was something else. He wanted her.
She had his number, dammit She had him but good He couldn't look at her without getting warm for her. couldn't get close to her without reaching out for her. This was a new one for him. He was used to needing a woman, but not used to needing a particular woman, not accustomed to that type of bit at all.
He needed Monita. Not a make, not a warm place for a cold night. Just Monita.
And that was funny, too, in another way. Because he was beginning to get the feeling that the more he needed her, her in particular, the less important he was becoming to her. It was a hard kind of feeling to be sure of, but he didn't think it was just his imagination. Any man would do, he thought. Hell, if he and Ryan just lay back for awhile she'd get herself happy with one of the marks they had on the string. Just anything, just any man who would ride her long enough for her to get happy.
He laughed at himself. He was starting to fall in love with the little tramp he thought and she was getting independent. And God alone knew what she did with the bread he gave her. He'd searched the room and hadn't found a thing.
Maybe she was stashing it. Maybe she was getting ready to make her break the way she had talked about when he was setting up the deal. He'd forgotten about it, had written it off as hot air, all that jazz about pulling out and starting fresh in another town. But you could never tell. She didn't talk much any more. She kept everything bottled up inside that pretty head.
He finished his coffee and went outside. Damn it, he needed her, and he couldn't wait a week. Well, why wait? What did you do when the front door was closed? You climbed in a window or used the back door, obviously.
And Monita owned a nice rear entrance.
He found her in the hotel room. She was lying on the big double bed reading a mystery magazine. Her shoes and socks were off and her head was resting in her hands. She was supporting her weight on her elbow, her eyes fastened on the magazine in front of her. She looked up at him and smiled.
"This story here's about a con game," she said. "It's kind of a gas."
"Stories are phony," Al said.
"This isn't bad. They get the words right, anyway. In the end the con man gets picked by the mark. It's a cute twist, don't you think?"
"I think it's horrible."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I think it's bad to think about. All we need is to get picked by some jerk from Omaha. Then we can turn in our guns and go home."
She laughed happily. She rolled over onto her back, stretched, and her breasts strained at the sweater. Carter couldn't contain himself. He stared at her breasts, then jumped onto the bed and embraced her. She returned the kiss eagerly enough, her arms tight around her, her breasts drilling holes into his chest, her tongue tickling his lips. Tease, he, thought. Playing little miss sexpot when her plumbing was out of order. She had a surprise coming, damn it A cute surprise.
He stretched out beside her, his hands busy with her breasts. She sighed and covered his hands with her own, pressing them tight against the firm flesh. He could feel her nipples getting as hard as little rocks.
He told her to raise her arms. She did, and he pulled the sweater over her head. Then he took her bra off and buried his face between her warm breasts. A soft brown color sweet to look at and sweeter to touch. One handful of them and he went crazy.
He flicked his lips against one nipple and she started to squirm.
"Al-"
"Strip." he said.
"Al, you're crazy. It'll be another few days, three or four days, and-"
"Strip."
"But-"
"I got things to teach you" he said. "Nice things. You oughta get a charge out of them."
"I don't-"
He grabbed her opened her skirt and practically tore it off of her. He ran his hands over her legs and felt himself going crazy, God what a body.
"Get your pants off," he said. "Come on, dammit."
She took oft her panties. She was puzzled obviously, and she seemed a little afraid of him. He studied her nude body, smiling at her.
"Now kneel on the bed," he said.
She got the message now and she didn't like it. She didn't like it at all, and she started to say something, started to shake her head, but he cracked her hard across the face with his open palm and made her get in the position that he wanted her in. He got behind her and reached around, gripping her with his big hands. He caressed her carefully, expertly, and grinned to himself when she began to respond in spite of herself.
"Al, please-"
He told her to shut up.
"Al, I don't want to. Not like that, Al. I don't want to, we can wait, it's only a few days, Al-"
She screamed when he took her. There was pain, real pain, and she screamed with it. He would have stopped then, wanted to stop, but he couldn't. He needed her too badly, needed the sweetness of her, the pungency of her, and he could not have stopped to save his soul. Not now, not now.
"Oh-"
He touched her all over with his hands, touched her breasts, held them while he surged into her with the full force of his being. She moaned at first, in pain, and then little by little her moans changed, and he knew it was right now, it was perfect, and she was enjoying it, getting the message, moving with it and loving it.
When it was over they both lay very still and stared at the ceiling....
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fall was Bloomingdale's best season. Summer was bad and winter was bad and spring was fair at best, but in autumn Bloomingdale's worst features were minimized and her good features were flattered, and the area came as close as possible to becoming a good place to live.
The heat spoiled summer. The heat, endless and unrelieved, made a general Black Hole of Calcutta out of all of New York, and on the upperwest side this heat was worse and its effects greater. It is bad enough to sleep six or seven to a room in any weather, but in the summer it is impossible, and the brownstone tenements are hellholes. The slum population spills out into the streets, and the kids open the fire hydrants, and the cabdrivers swear at the kids, and everybody is uncomfortable.
The cold spoils winter. The snow is turned to slush by traffic and the subways, and the slush is as gray as the face of the city, and the tenements are not heated properly. And when it is really cold the whole city is paralyzed. The snow removal trucks try to dump snow in the Hudson, but the Hudson is frozen over and the snow is simply and unimaginatively piled onto the ice until the piles are as high as skyscrapers. Traffic stops altogether, and mounds of snow six feet high line the curbs, and the side streets are never plowed out at all. So the winter is no good either.
The spring is short, and it rains then. The kids all catch colds and sniffle from morning to night. New York's spring is nothing much, especially in Bloomingdale, because spring is the time nature comes to life and there is no nature to look at. Central Park isn't bad. Leaves come on trees, and that's something. But away from the park spring is nothing but melting slush and slightly warmer air, because there are no trees and no grass, and concrete and steel do not burst into bloom in April. There are no buds on the buildings and the pavement never turns green.
But autumn is okay.
In autumn the summer heat dies, and anything that kills summer heat is deserving of highest praise. In autumn the air cools and the streets are less cluttered with humanity. The birds fly south-there are birds in the parks, believe it or not, birds beside the pigeons and starlings and sparrows. Leaves fall off trees and Central Park is picture-pretty. Girls put on woolens and men wear jackets and nothing is nearly so bad as it was a month earlier.
In autumn the hansom drivers do their best business. They cart lovers in antique cabs pulled by refugees from glue factories, cart them along the winding lanes of Central Park. In autumn the junkies sit on stoops and benches and scratch themselves while the cool air is gentle on their skin. In autumn the kids go back to school, and they don't get up enough nerve to knife their teachers until winter. At night the kids go up on the roofs and do what kids do everywhere. It's not too hot or too cold. It's just the right temperature for love, and everybody loves passionately. Autumn is fine.
It was the first week in October. A Tuesday and a few minutes past noon Ruth Lansing hart heard the noon whistle just a little while ago At first she thought it was an air-raid siren. It was getting to the point where everything sounded like an air-raid siren, maybe because she still glanced at the headlines of the Times every morning and the headlines led her to suspect an air-raid any day, any hour, any minute.
She remembered a poster, a civil-defense thing. What would you do in the event of an atomic attack?
I'd faint, she thought And wet my drawers. And then I'd get blasted to hell.
But it was only a noon whistle And now it was a few minutes past noon and she was sitting in her kitchen drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. And thinking, or at least trying to think, since thinking was difficult in the extreme.
If she could think worth a damn she wouldn't be in the mess she was in now If she could think a flying damn she wouldn't be married to a man and sleeping with a girl and all mixed up inside. And she was mixed up, all right She was torn in at least fifteen separate parts and she didn't know what to do next.
She had to stop it with Joan It was getting more and more dangerous She had started with Joan more than a month ago, closer to two months now, and at first it had merely been something wonderful and she hadn't worried about it at all. The first night, with Joan sharing the double bed and holding her close all night long. The excitement of it, the joy of woman-with-woman lovemaking. all the new things to do and the new ways to feel, everything that was so absolutely perfect.
Then it had changed subtly. Then, the next night, she had been at home with Glenn, and Joan had been somewhere else, and Glenn had made love to her. It had been his idea and she had gone along with it, and it had been terrible. She remembered-
His awkwardness, his terrible awkwardness. He had seemed guilty-after it was over she was certain he had spent the night with a girl somewhere-and he had been clumsy, and he had not succeeded in arousing her at all. Lying on the bed, her arms around him, she had felt like a robot. No, not that, not exactly. Tt was as though she were sitting across the room, watching dispassionately, while Glenn made clumsy love to a woman with her face and body. There was no involvement, none at all. Just cool nothing, cool clear nothing, with no sexual charge and no emotional interaction to make it worthwhile.
So for a month-no, more like two months, mustn't forget the time, must keep it straight-for two months she had lived as Glenn's wife and as Joan's lover. They had not yet spent a night together again. They met at odd moments. Occasionally Joan came up to her apartment, stealing a day off while Glenn was downtown on Wall Street. Occasionally she faked an evening shopping trip to Gimbel's. While Glenn stayed home with Stevie she would rush downtown to Joan's apartment where they cracked a bottle of red wine and rolled around in each others arms And sometimes she and Joan would go out together, when Glenn said he was tired, and they went to a play or a gay bar before returning to Joan's apartment for a lovemaking nightcap.
Those times were partly good and partly bad. She liked to be with Joan, to have her as more than a sexual partner, and in that respect she enjoyed those evenings on the town. Seeing a play, listening to some music, then going to bed-that was a fuller relationship than simple hit-and-run sex.
But at the same time there was something less than ideal about it. She was embarrassed often, embarrassed to be out with a lesbian, most embarrassed when they went together to a gay bar Everyone in the bar knew at once that she and Joan were sleeping together, and she did not want them to know. Joan seemed almost proud; Ruth couldn't stand the whole thing.
Because I'm not really a lesbian, she thought. If I were, I could take it. I wouldn't mind it at all, I'd be proud of it, I'd want everyone to see what a beautiful lover I have. Like with Glenn, when she used to delight in going out with him so that every other girl in the world could see what a handsome man she had landed. But not now, not with Joan. She wasn't proud at all.
She wasn't ashamed when they were alone When they were in bed together her lips and hands sought Joan's breasts, and she thrilled with the joy of what their perfect bodies could accomplish together But in company she was uncomfortable, and this seemed to prove that she was not a lesbian.
Glenn had driven her to Joan, she thought. If he were the husband she needed, she would never have gone to bed with another woman But in reality she had slept with Joan for the same reason she had slept with the Puerto Rican kid. Joan was a more acceptable lover because a lesbian affair somehow did not seem to be adultery. It was on a different plane.
I need a man, she thought. That's what I really need. Not a kid and not a guy like Glenn. A man.
Someone like the first one. Someone like Ray Patterson, a hard and intense person, even a criminal. Someone fast and loose and easy, gusty and strong, someone very unlike Glenn. Oh, hell she thought, she was just a little blonde babe from the Near North Side, and the marriage to Glenn Lansing hadn't done much to change that. She was not a suburban matron. She was a hot babe who needed a man with guts and fire.
And she didn't need a woman. Not really.
She finished her coffee. Joan had called her three times in the last four days, wanting to see her, and each time she had invented a fresh excuse. She didn't want to see Joan now. The thing with Joan was getting out of control because the dark haired girl was in love with her and Ruth was not in love at all. She had to break it off.
But how could she break it off the way things stood? She'd just go nuts again. She was already so horny she couldn't bear it. and only tremendous determination had kept her from telling Joan to come aver immediately and hop into bad with her.
What was she going to do?
Cheat, she thought. Pick up any slum kid and give for him, now and whenever else she needed it. Somebody she wouldn't even like, for that matter. Just someone to relax her and keep her out of trouble.
Now.
She needed someone like that.
She went to the nursery. Stevie had had his bottle just half an hour ago and he was sleeping like a top. He would sleep for another three hours, two at the very least, and that was time enough. If he cried to hell with him. She'd be back soon enough. She had plenty of time to get herself taken care of.
She hurried out the door and down to the street.
Monita sat in Central Park and studied her bankbook. According to the little book, she had almost two thousand dollars on deposit in the Manufacturers Trust Company's Broadway & 106th Street branch. Two thousand dollars, she thought, was a hell of a lot of money. When she first met Al Carter she hadn't a penny in her pocket, and now she had almost two thousand dollars.
It was time.
Time to get out of New York. The con deal wasn't a kick any more and it was beginning to make her nervous. She had used the same bar twice for pick-ups, and on the second time the bartender had given her a funny look and she had known that she could never go there again. And there had been one time when a potential pick-up seemed a little bit wrong, wrong enough for her to vanish into the ladies' room and slip out a side door because something about him smelled a lot like a cop Jesus, that was all she needed-after all the arrests they had faked, she did not want to be arrested for real. That would be the payoff in spades, all right. That would be great, just great. Just what the doctor didn't order. "Baby-"
She looked up. A man, fairly well-dressed, was standing in front of her. He was carrying a rolled umbrella and he was looking at her with interest.
She looked away.
"Could I buy you a drink, dear?"
Oh, great, she thought. She spent so much time looking like a whore when they were working the badger routine that she even looked like a hooker on her off-hours. She couldn't sit in the damned park without getting passes tossed at her.
She looked at him, her eyes cool and appraising. He was about thirty-five, tall, black-haired. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and he had a moustache. He looked Italian, continental. His suit was an expensive job.
She said: "Drop dead."
He smiled. "Perhaps I have misunderstood," he said. "A less than facile approach. But-"
"Drop dead, will you?"
He sat down next to her, dropped a hand to her knee. "You are very lovely," he said earnestly. "And you and I-"
She told him to get lost or she would call a cop. He didn't seem to believe her at first, but she arid it again with a steel-hard voice and he decided he was wasting his time He got up and went away. A cop she thought. That was rich-a slut like her calling a cop because a guy was putting the make on her. She watched him walk and thought that maybe she had made a mistake. She could have gone somewhere with him, not to take him for a ride but to have a little fun for himself. He looked sexy, and he probably would have treated her like a lady. That was the trouble with Carter. He treated her like a tramp and she was sick of feeling like a tramp. She wanted to feel like a human being, She looked along the path, wondering whether she could chase this guy and tell him she had changed her mind. It was too late now; he was out of sight, and besides she would have felt like a damn fool. She shrugged, feeling at least twenty years older than fifteen, and got to her feet.
A man would be nice. A man to hold her breasts, to kiss them. A man to do things to her.
Oh, it was bad. She had to quit the racket and the city and get out. Pittsburgh, maybe. Chicago. Los Angeles. That sounded best-some town on the West Coast, far away from New York, where no one ever saw a Puerto Rican. She wouldn't be a Spic in Los Angeles. But hell, they'd probably figure her for a Mexican and put her down just as hard. That was no better.
Pittsburgh, Buffalo, something like that. Far enough away so that Carter would never find her. She would start fresh.
Where there's a will, there's a way. If you want something badly enough you will get it, especially if you can carry the freight. If you want it, need it, you get it.
Glenn knew this was true.
He wanted something young. That was what he wanted, and the first try he'd made for it had cost him close to five hundred dollars and had left him unsatisfied and scared stiff. A lesser man might have given it up at that point A lesser man might have decided to get his fun from his beautiful blonde wife and leave the young girls to the young boys.
Glenn tried. He tried with Ruth, and he tried to take it easy, and he almost tried a psychiatrist. But that psychiatry stuff was a racket-if a guy had anything on the ball, he could settle his problems by himself Why pay out twenty-five to fifty an hour to lie on a couch alone and talk?
Not for him.
But the need persisted He needed a young girl, needed her in the worst way, and he was going to have her He wouldn't pick up a free-lancer at a bar, though He knew better than that, he had learned his lesson, had paid out a lot of dough and had learned better. He would just keep his eyes and ears open and wait. When you wanted something, and when you had the dough, you got what yon needed. It always worked that way.
And finally someone put him hip to Kyros.
If you needed something, Kyros could take care of you. Whatever you needed, the fat Greek could swing it for you for the right price Whether your appetite favored young boys or young girls, hashhsh or heroin or absinthe, Kyros could make the connection for you. Glenn had met Kyros at the man's habitual hangout, a Greek coffee-house in Chelsea. For one hundred dollars Kyros had given him two things, a key and an address. He used the key and met Arlette.
Arlette was French Canadian, a thirteen year old prostitute from a small city in Quebec. She spoke a little English. She had black hair and chalk-white skin and a body that could do anything in the world.
Now Glenn was seeing her again. .He had a different key now and a different address, and this time the price was two hundred dollars, and it was going to be worth every penny of it. It was a special package deal arranged by the incredible Kyros. It would be perfect.
Glenn took a cab to the address, a building on West Nineteenth Street near the river. The building was in the middle of a row of warehouses, ostensibly a warehouse itself, and the cabby couldn't understand why Glenn wanted to go there in the evening when everything was closed. Glenn gave him a decent tip and told him to worry about something else. He walked to the front door. Ruth thought he was working late-or at least that was what she was supposed to think. Hell, maybe she knew the truth. It hardly mattered any more. His marriage didn't figure to last much longer, not the way things were going. And to tell the truth he didn't much care.
He put the key in the door, turned it. He stepped inside and stopped to light a cigarette. The building was dark. He made his way up a flight of creaking stairs, his nostrils filled with the building's odor of dankness and general decay There was a small yellow bulb in the hallway upstairs that cast an eerie light over the floor He went to a dark numbered 4 and knocked twice.
Arlette opened the door. He stepped inside at once and she closed the door after him and slid the bolt across. She turned then, shy and sweet and he looked at her His heart jumped She was even more beautiful than he remembered.
She was an inch over five feet tall. Her hair was jet black and it had not been cut in a very long time. It trailed all the way down her back, past her waist. She was wearing pale green lounging pajamas. They were silk, and they were expensive. They showed her figure off magnificently. The pa-jama bottoms were moderately tight, tapered at the cuffs and snug around her small buttocks. The top was looser but her firm breasts swelled the front, and the V-neck let the tops of them show slightly.
Her nose was a button and her mouth was a thin red line. When she smiled, which happened frequently the corners of that pretty mouth turned up and gleaming white teeth showed. She smiled now, and he took her in his arms and kissed her.
She kissed like the child she was, lips shut, mouth pressing against mouth But she made love like a weird combination of child and woman, a perfect combination, a magnificent blend.
"I miss you, Glenn."
"I missed you, Arlette."
"We have fun tonight," she said. "We have lot of fun. You see what fun."
Her accent was French, but not Parisian French by any means. It was Quebec French, strange to the ear, husky and sensual. Anything concerning Arlette was sensual.
"Movies," she said. "Happy?"
"Very happy," he said.
The apartment was much more plush than the exterior of the building or the hallway would have indicated. The furniture was Victorian, heavy and massive and comfortable. There was a couch, very long and very wide, with large pillows. Opposite the couch Arlette had set up a motion picture screen. She led him to the couch and he sat down.
"Glenn," she said, making a caress out of the name. "You get more comfortable, okay? Here."
She took off his tie, her fingers deft, unbuttoned his shirt. She helped him off with his suit jacket. She knelt before him, unlacing his shoes, removing his socks. She rubbed the soles of his feet with her small hands, massaged the insteps, then kissed his toes and laughed for joy.
"Now," she said. "Jus' a minute."
He waited. She walked to a wall and killed the lights, then went to the back of the room. She threw another switch and a title card flashed onto the screen. PASSION AND LUST was the name of the movie.
She came back, sat beside him. No time to rush things, he thought. Time to relax, time to be comfortable. The rest would come in due course. He had all the time in the world.
The movie was not the usual stag film, a sloppy job in black-and-white with ugly actresses and poor photography. It was in technicolor, and lacked only a soundtrack.
He draped an arm around Arlette and she cuddled against him like a kitten. She was warm, warm and soft, and for a moment he cared very little for the movie, cared only for the girl beside him. Then he forced his attention to the screen.
Title Card: Passion and Lust
Picture opens with a medium shot of a street in downtown Brooklyn. It is evening and the street is empty. Camera focuses on a man, medium height, about twenty-five. He wears a grey business suit with white tennis shoes. The man walks along the street, stopping from time to time to look at buildings, and the camera dollies in for a close-up of him. He is moderately attractive, with wavy hair and short sideburns.
Subtitle: "Here's the place."
Camera moves for a shot of a second-floor window with Vendome's Dance Studio painted in gold letters -edged with black. The camera follows the man into the building and up a flight of stairs. At a door, similarly inscribed, he pauses and undoes his clothing. The camera moves in for an extreme close-up of his hand and what he is doing.
Subtitle: "No time for that. I have to learn to dance."
The man knocks at the door, which opens inward. A very attractive redhead is standing in the sparsely-furnished room, her hands on her hips. She motions him inside.
Subtitle: "Come on. I'll teach you how to dance."
The camera pans the woman's body. She is wearing a very tight red dress. As the camera studies her, she pats her breasts, then strokes her buttocks. The camera moves back tor a two-shot as the man takes the girl into his arms and begins, clumsily, to dance with her.
Subtitle: "Let's dance with our clothes off."
The man is first to disrobe. The camera records his progress step by step. He has a small amount of hair on his chest, and his arms are well-muscled. There is an anchor tattooed on one forearm, a heart on the other. When he is naked the camera pans his body. The woman's hand enters the picture slowly.
Subtitle: "I like it!"
Shot of the woman's hand, working.
Shot of the man's face, contorted with pleasure.
Subtitle: "My turn now!"
The woman disrobes, quite slowly, and the camera pays a great deal of attention to her. Her breasts, while not especially large, are perfectly formed She handles them lovingly, stroking and cupping them.
Subtitle: "Now we can dance!"
The man and woman dance, half-heartedly at best, with the camera recording their physical contact. There is a close-up of the woman's breasts flattened against the man's chest.
Subtitle: "Now let's make love."
The woman bends backward finally lying upon the floor, her eyes shut her knees bent. The man lies with her and they begin.
The camera is busy.
Glenn was having trouble breathing. He sat on the couch, one arm still around Arlette, his eyes riveted to the screen. He gulped for air His heart pounding against the sides of his rib cage and his head was reeling with excitement.
Two hundred dollars.
And worth it.
Well worth it.
He had seen stag movies before. In his fraternity at college, at a smoker, he had watched half a dozen one-reel epics. He had been excited, but it was nothing like this.
He was seeing this movie with Arlette.
Now, on the screen, the man and woman were doing something that looked physically impossible. He saw the expression on the man's face, the expression on the woman's face. He saw the hands of the man, the hands of the woman. He saw everything anyone could possibly want to see, and his hand, resting on Arlette's shoulder, dropped down into the V-neck of her pajamas and found her breast.
She giggled throatily.
He felt the softness of the breast, the sweetness of it. He felt the girlish nipple, rigid now, and he took the nipple between thumb and forefinger and rolled it around, listening to the increase in the tempo of her breathing.
And then she giggled again. Her hands were busy now.
Soft hands.
Very soft hands.
He held her breast while she held him. held him gentry but firmly, and together they watched the movie. Her hands moved, gently but firmly, and his head swam, and he thought that this was costing him two hundred dollars and was worth two thousand.
And then she was not watching the picture any longer. While he watched the man and woman, little Arlette was disentangling his hand from her breast and dropping to the floor in front of him.
It was wonderful.
He watched the movie. Arlette did not watch the movie because she couldn't. He moaned.
Arlette didn't moan. She couldn't do that either.
After the man and woman have made love an incredible number of times, the two of them stand up again, still nude, and begin dancing. They are doing a basic box step, uninspired enough to be sure, when the woman stops suddenly and points to the door.
Subtitle: "Knock, knock."
Shot of the man's face.
Subtitle: "Who's there?"
The woman points to a door. The man goes and opens it. It is a closet. He gets into the closet and shuts the door. Then the camera follows the nude blonde across the. room to the main door. She throws open the door and a tall Negress comes in. Evidently the Negress has removed her clothes in the hallway, since she too is nude. Her body is fine, with large brown breasts and trim buttocks. She takes the blonde in her arms and covers her face with kisses.
Subtitle: "I missed you. My lesbian sweetheart!" The two women move to the center of the room and begin to caress one another. The blonde rubs her breasts against the breasts of the Negress, and the camera moves m for an almost surrealistic shot of white and brown breasts moving together slowly and sensually. Then the Negro girl stands up, arms akimbo, and the blonde begins to caress her.
Subtitle: "Talk to me in French, lover!"
The conversation interests the camera Suddenly the camera switches to the closed closet door, which bursts open. The man erupts from it, nude, his arms outstretched.
Shot of the two women, looking up at him from one of the classic postures of lesbian love.
Shot of the man's face, smiling.
Subtitle: "Now I'm getting into the act!"
And he does.
Glenn was exhausted.
One may be pleasantly exhausted, depressed and exhausted bone-weary exhausted, or otherwise exhausted in any number of ways. Glenn was deliriously exhausted. Every muscle in his body was tired in a magnificent way. He dragged himself down the flight of stairs, opened the big door, and stepped out into West Nineteenth Street.
It was well after midnight and no cabs cruise the Chelsea warehouse district at that hour. He walked three blocks to Eighth Avenue and caught a cab going uptown. He gave the driver his home address and slumped into his seat.
He could go home to Ruth now At first he had thought he wouldn't be able to, but after ail the lovemaking was done Arlette had washed him with a scented cloth, had given him an alcohol nib. and had finally washed him again, drying him with a soft towel He did not smell of passion now Ruth might guess what he had been doing, especially if she got a look at the circles under his eyes. But he had a feeling she would be sleeping soundly by the time he got home.
He took out a cigarette and lit it. He dragged hard on it and blew out a cloud of smoke The cigarette tasted wonderful. It always tasted good after love-making.
Arlette had been divine.
That was the only word for it. She had been divine. All right, maybe there was something wrong with him, maybe you had to be some kind of weirdo to get a big kick out of young stuff. He didn't give a damn. No older woman could show him what Arlette had shown him, no older woman could give him that sort of time.
Never.
He reviewed it all in his mind, savored every memory. Arlette's breasts, Arlette's legs, Arlette's beautiful face. She was thirteen, and she was sweet and virginal, and she knew more tricks than the oldest whore on Seventh Avenue, and she was divine.
Divine
He tossed his cigarette out the cab's open window and filled his lungs with air. How long would he stay married to Ruth? Not much longer, he thought. It wasn't going to work out. He'd miss his kid and he'd probably pay out half his money in alimony, but he was just going to have to get his freedom. As it stood it was not fair to Ruth or to himself. It was a mess.
He was what he was; he couldn't help ft. And he was a guy who would rather go to a teen-aged whore once a week than make love to his own beautiful wife seven days a week. Unnatural? Maybe, but so what? He couldn't help it.
Arlette, he thought. God, what a girl!
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carter was in a bar. It was a cheap bar on Columbus Avenue, and it served cheap liquor to cheap people, and Carter was getting an edge on from the raw garbage. They had had a close one the night before. Too close. And after a close one he needed to let it all out. He had gotten back to the hotel, had taken Monita to bed, and in their bed he had gotten rid of part of it. He had made love to the girl with a vengeance, driving her down against the mattress, piling his lust to her again and again until bombs went off and sirens shrieked.
That took care of part of it. But now it was afternoon and some of it was left, some of the tension, and he had to get rid of it. A bottle was the only way he knew. A bottle of booze in a cheap bar, pour the shot and toss it off, pour and toss, pour and toss, then get into a fight and pound the hell out of some poor jerk. And then get home and go to sleep and wake up better in the morning. It was the only way.
The barman filled his glass for him. The barman was a fat-bellied beerdrinker with three gold teeth in the center of his upper jaw and a scar across his neck where a drunk had slashed his throat once, and the barman didn't take anything from anybody. Once, after his throat mended, another drunk reached into his pocket suddenly and came up with something shiny. The barman took up a gun and shot him dead, and the cops came to find the drunk clutching a ball-point pen in one hand. The barman didn't take chances any more.
Al Carter looked at the liquid in his glass He drank part of it and fumbled for a cigarette When the cigarette was going he finished the rest of the shot and motioned for another. He smoked the cigarette and sipped the whiskey and remembered.
Another patsy. Monita picked him up in a Third Street strip club and took him to a hotel on Fourteenth Street that wasn't much more than a whorehouse itself. The manager had been at Sing Sing with Ryan and at Dannemora with Carter, a fine old mutual acquaintance who liked to talk about old times. They waited with him until Monita brought the patsy home to roost, then planted themselves outside the door while Monita steered him into the saddle. All according to plan, all in line with standard operating procedure.
They went through the door, as usual, and they played their game along its standard lines. It worked, but it didn't work for much. The patsy had a hot hundred bucks on him and he whined like a baby when they took it away from him He was some nut of a soldier on a furlough, he didn't have a wife or a job, and the only thing that bothered him was the idea of being cooped up in New York for a month, waiting to pick up his suspended sentence He'd be AWOL from Fort Dix and that bothered him a little.
They finally leaned on him, let him know he could do twenty years for statutory They didn't get fancy, explaining that they would have to pay off the captain and the lieutenant. They let him know he was paying them For a hundred bucks cut three ways you didn't have to work your rear off They got the money and started down the stairs-leaving the mark in his room until last-and they were almost in the lobby when Ryan slapped his palm to his forehead and turned around.
The damned hotel was raided. The lobby was crawling with cops, legit cops, and they were in a pickle.
Carter finished his drink and got another Everybody's fault, he thought His own fault for picking a dump instead of a decent hotel Monita's fault for picking up a cheap soldier instead of making sure she was getting somebody with dough Maybe the tramp just wanted to put out for the soldier maybe she was trying to do it in a hurry and she didn't care about the money Maybe-
To hell with it. Ryan had crowded them all back up the stairs, back into the room. The mark tipped, about then, or would have, but Ryan took out his police positive and conked him over the head with it. The soldier folded up They wiped their guns off and jammed them into his pockets took their shields out of their wallets and pinned them to his uniform. Then they loaded him into a closet and closed the door and got the hell out.
The police patted them down and sent them out. If they had walked right into it everything would have blown up on them A routine patdown would turn up the shields and the guns and they'd be back in stir for impersonating police officers and committing fraud. As it stood they were clear. The soldier boy was left with a half-cocked story that would probably see him tossed into the Tombs to cool off and they were home free.
Great, Carter thought. So this way they were out two guns and two shields, sixty bucks worth of stuff that might cost a yard to replace They were also out their expenses for the evening. And in return they got a lousy hundred to ait up three ways.
Great.
And that wasn't all. "If the soldier made head or tail out of the deal, he could talk. If he talked, the cops could listen. And in no time at all Bunco Detail would have their pattern down pat. The beauty of the deal was that nobody ever squealed to the cops. With no squeal there were never any cops looking for them.
That could change now.
Great.
He'd laced into Monita when they got back to the hotel. He gave her hell, asking what in hell was wrong with her to pick a soldier. And she gave it straight back him, as mad at him for picking a cheap hotel as he was at her They settled it in bed, but something was still wrong.
"Another shot," he said.
The bartender gave it to him, then stood back and looked him in the eye. A long careful look. Start something, Al thought. Go ahead. So I can throw you through your own window.
"Say," the bartender said.
"Yeah?"
The bartender pointed. "You see that broad?" He turned The bartender was pointing at a blonde on a stool at the end of the bar. A blonde about twenty-five tall and built big A pretty blonde nursing some fancy kind of a cocktail, something with a cherry in it. "I see her."
"Comes in here every day," the barman said. "All a guy has to do is go over and grab one ol her boobs and she's ready to go. That's all."
"Yeah?"
"Never seen it to fail," the barman said. "Every damn day Comes in around two gets herself picked up, and then comes back the next day She ain't a lush neither. Gets one drink and makes it last, never has a second. Never around that long."
"So she's a hooker. So what?"
"She don't charge."
"So what's the pitch?"
"No pitch. You like her, just take her home. That's all."
Carter drew a breath. It couldn't be a con-you didn't con people in a bar like that one because none of them had more than three or four bucks to begin with There was no percentage in it And the broad had too much class for Columbus Avenue.
"I still don't get it,"
"What's to get?"
"The whole bit," Al said "Why me? You don't know me and you don't owe me. Why me?"
The bartender thought about it. He craned his head up and scratched the scar on his neck. It was quite a scar Put me on Carter thought, and I'll open it up tor you again. Only I won't use a knife. I'll use my fingernails.
"It's like this, Mac. I been watching you."
"So?"
"The way you been drinking. Tossing shots down like tapwater. You know?" He didn't say anything.
"I says to myself, here's a guy with steam to let off. Here's a guy could take it into his head to throw things, pick a fight. You know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean."
The barman scratched the scar again. "You want to let off steam, fine. Pick a fight, also fine. But not here. You take that broad to her place and you won't make no trouble for me. That's how come, if it's no gag."
"That's all?"
"That's all. Just grab her boob and you're in like Errol."
"She got rabbit itch or something?"
The bartender laughed. "Maybe." he said. "Maybe that's her story. Mac, I don't know. But I never seen it to fail. Not in two weeks she's been coming here."
Carter stood up. The hell, he thought. So he'd give it a try. If it fell in he could take the broad and throw her at the bartender and make a wreck out of the place. If it worked he could take the broad. A big blonde, big and worth taking. So he would win either way. He'd get a piece or a fight and either one would be just about fine.
The blonde was sitting with her eyes lowered now. She was looking at her cocktail and Carter was behind her. She wore a forest-green skirt and a white sweater. The sweater was woolly. As tar as Carter could see, she wasn't wearing a bra under it.
He moved closer to her, let his arm go around her. She didn't move a muscle. He put his hand on her breast and squeezed No bra, only her.
Nice.
Then she turned, raising her eyes to meet his. There was no delight in her gaze, no annoyance, and all in all her expression was tough to read One quantity was present. Lust. Carter saw it and recognized it and grinned.
The blonde grinned back.
"My name is Ruth," she said. "Let's go to my place and make love. All right?"
It was all right with Carter.
Monita shifted uncomfortably on the bed She was wearing a skirt and sweater, and she bad a pair of black tights under the skirt and a, bra under the sweater, and she still felt half-naked It was Ryan, she thought. The way he was looking at her the way he was acting. She wished to hell he would go away.
"So Alan is not here," the big man said. "A sad day it is when my friend Alan is not around to me. And you have no idea where he has gone to?"
"Probably out drinking."
"Do you know where?"
She shook her head. "He was upset about last night."
"I do not blame him."
"And he wanted to get some of the tension out of his system. So he went out on a bat, I guess. He should be home in a few hours, Ryan."
He seemed to wink at her. He even looked like a cop, she thought, and there were times when he led Carter through the door and she thought for a moment that a genuine raid was in progress. He was Irish, of course, and that was part of it. But not all of it. He had a big cop's way of walking, a big cop's speech mannerisms, and this went deeper than Irish features or his brogue.
"So we're alone," he said. "You and I, colleen, alone with one another."
"I guess so."
"I can think of worse things, girl."
He sat down on the edge of the bed and she wanted to shrink away from him. A pass was coming up now, she knew. God, that was just what she didn't want-an attempt on her virtue by a clown like Ryan. She would have to brush him quick and easy and get him the hell out of there.
"I was going to take a shower," she said.
"Don't bother, Monita."
"Listen-"
"You smell fine," he said. "You don't need a shower at all. Not at all."
Here we go, she thought. Next he'd start putting those big hands on her and she'd feel like puking on the floor. It'd been bad enough with Carter the night before. Yelling at her first of all, blaming her for wasting his time on a cheap mark, when all along he had been the dumb one in picking a rotten cat-house of a hotel that the police raided once a month, rain or shine. And then his lovemaking, no fun at all this time, no good for her, only submission to him while he sank his fury into the depths of her.
For the first time it had done nothing for her. For the first time all her excitement had been feigned and although she had done a good job of fooling him she had been unable to fool herself It had been as cool and passionless as the beginnings of sex with a sucker she had picked up. less enjoyable actually than her session with the soldier from Fort Dix.
And now Ryan wanted her.
"Ryan," she said, "just keep away from me."
"A-way from you?"
"That's the idea Keep your hands to yourself, Ryan. You know damned well what Al would do to you."
His face was creased with a smile. "Al? You think he would object, colleen?"
"He'd hand you your head."
Now Ryan was laughing. "Ah. sure," he said. "Alan is the jealous type, indeed That's why he lets every trick with a full wallet take you to bed. You're Alan's meal ticket and Alan's steady quail, my girl, and that's all you are."
"Listen-"
The brogue was gone all the way now "And you'll put out for me, Monita You been teasing me with it long enough Rubbing your boobs all over Al while I'm standing there watching. Banging away with a mark and giving me a long look when we crash the door. You like to tease a guy, kid-"
"Ryan, get out of here!"
"Shut up," he said."
"Ryan-"
He slapped her open-handed across the face and she fell reeling from the bed to the floor. Her jaw ached from the slap and she was dizzy. She tried to get up, tried to clear her head, but before she could get off the floor his hand was at the front of her sweater, bunching the material and lifting.
He hauled her to her feet. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could get a word out he very deliberately let go of her, balled his hand into a fist, and buried the fist in the bit of her stomach.
He hit as a mule kicked. The air sagged out of her and she folded in the middle, clasping both hands to her sore stomach. He lifted her like a rag doll, dropped her onto the bed. She moaned and he hit her again, and then she stopped moaning.
He took the belt out of his pants. Then he took off all his clothes and stood nude before her. She looked at him, seeing how frighteningly large he was, and then she looked away.
"Strip, Monita."
She didn't want to. But the clothes were decent clothes and she knew he would only tear them from her body if she didn't take them off herself. He would rip them, and he would hurt her, and she did not want that, So she got undressed. She pulled the sweater over her head, unclasped her bra and removed it, took off her skirt and her panties.
He was staring at her, his eyes greedy and filled with lust, and she knew she was seeing him as she had never seen him before. He was a model of reserve most of the time, calm and cool, a percentage player who never lost his temper and never boiled over. But now he was different. Wild.
"That's what I've been looking at." he snapped. "Big boobs and a nice rear. Lie on your belly, tramp!"
She was afraid. But she knew that she might just as well do everything he told her to do. He had picked up the belt now and she looked at it. A heavy piece of leather, black, long, thick. She rolled over onto her stomach and waited for the blow.
It came soon enough. Ryan brought the belt back over his head, brought it down hard across her rump. She couldn't control herself and she screamed into her pillow. The belt whistled through the air again, lashed into her soft buttocks.
"Whore!"
He dropped the belt onto the floor. The bed creaked when he sat down on it, and then his hand was whistling through the air like the belt, slapping hard on her injured buttocks. She cried out again, the pillow muffling her scream. But at least this wouldn't leave a mark. It would hurt, but it wouldn't mark her.
He began to slap her, swinging his hand full strength, lashing at her butt. Then he gripped her, one meaty hand on her thigh and the other on her shoulder, and he rolled her easily onto her back. He drew back a hand and she thought that he was going to strike her breast. Instead he made a fist of the hand and drove it again into her soft belly.
She retched but nothing came up.
When he took her, driving himself deep into her, it was nothing An anticlimax, a let down. It was nothing at all, and she merely lay on her back and let him have her, neither putting up a struggle or moving with him. He had beaten her and he had hurt her and she was half-dead inside. She did not move and did not fight, just lay there while he exhausted himself upon her.
He dressed, then, and left.
She did not move for half an hour. She stayed on the bed, weak and hurt, and from time to time she cried softly like an injured kitten. Finally she got up, dragging herself to the shower. She stayed under the spray for another hour and soaped and rinsed herself a dozen times. She got out and put on clean clothes and went to the Red Chimney for coffee. No food-her stomach ached and she did not even want to think about food. Just coffee.
There was no point in telling Carter. Carter would laugh or shrug it off. Ryan was his partner, a good partner, and she was just the San Quentin Quail they used to bait the trap. Carter didn't give a damn about her.
That wasn't all.
She didn't give a damn about Carter.
Not any more. Not now. At first she had fallen hard for him; he was a sharp guy, a guy who had been around, and she was Miss Nobody from nowhere. He was a mainland American with savvy and she was a stupid Spic. He made love to her, and he was the first, and it meant something.
Now things were different. Now she wasn't a virgin-she had been around a little. Now she wasn't a brainless tiger fresh off the boat-she was a hard-headed little hooker who knew her way around. And Carter wasn't a knight in tarnished armor any more.
He was just a bum.
A bum. A rat who let the world crawl in bed with his girl for the sake of a Jast shakedown and easy dough A punk a louse. To hell with him.
She was getting out She was going to fix his little red wagon tot him and she was going to get the hell out Monita Ruiz could go to hell in a hand-basket Mona Rich would do all right for herself, dammit.
Mona Rich. She liked the name It had a nice sound to it, a swinging sound. Mona Rich would have it made.
Ryan and Carter could go to hell.
Joan McKay spiked her coffee with brandy and smoked a cigarette in a long black holder That was one nice thing about working at Agony, she reflected. You could drink coffee all day long and you could even flavor it with something properly alcoholic without getting your head bitten off Naturally Harvey Chase wasn't going to raise hell about drinking on the job. Harvey drank on or off the job and drank steadily and was firmly convinced that anyone who avoided alcohol was a fool or a criminal or both.
Joan wasn't working now. There was work to do-a form letter to write tor a mailing they were getting out soon, a batch of About The Author blurbs to shape up for the January edition, odds and ends to get out of the way But there was nothing that couldn't wait for awhile, and she was in no mood to work. , She had been hurt.
It happened all the time, of course. Lesbians didn't marry and have children and live happily ever after. They loved for awhile, parted, and sought new lovers. Joan had ditched girls before, and had been ditched before.
But it still hurt.
She had loved Ruth Lansing more than she should have. She'd fallen hard for the tall blonde, and it was a mistake. A good strong love was almost always a mistake because you left yourself wide open, and it was far more a mistake when the girl you loved was married to a man. It couldn't work out. You lead with your jaw, and you got belted.
Ruth had been dodging her steadily. It was dose to three weeks now, three weeks of No Ruth, and while she had managed to slough off the first week, since then the whole deal had been fairly obvious to her. Ruth was straightening out, either by laying her husband or by laying half the men in her neighborhood. Either way, Joan was out in the cold. She lost.
She sipped the brandied coffee, ducked ashes from the cigarette. Have to get over her, she thought. Have to forget all about her and find somebody else. Just ruining myself like this. Eating my heart out and starving to death.
Joan had tried. A night or two ago she had picked up a girl at Port Hole. The girl was a scrawny redhead with a butchy streak, and in the redhead's apartment they made a strange sort of love in which Joan lay back, receiving, while the redhead gave of herself for hours. The redhead had tired, sunken eyes, and her breasts were dotted with freckles, and now, in the cold light of day, Joan hoped she would never see the girl again.
But she would get over it Loves came and went, and there would be a new love to take the place of the old. and she would get along. A Swinburne poem, a fragment-"
One love grows green.
One love turns gray.
Tomorrow has no more to say,
To yesterday ... She finished the coffee Dear Ruth sweet Ruth, was gone but not forgotten But she would get over it. It was just a matter of time.
Ruth was awake, more or less. Her eyes were still shut and her body did not move, but she was awake again. She felt cool air on her bare skin, felt the pleasant ache in every muscle She yawned and stretched, liking the way her arms and legs ached. She kept her eyes shut and yawned again.
With one hand she rubbed her breasts stroked her stomach, then began to scratch herself Her stomach itched gently and she scratched, liking the way it felt She hoped the itch was just an itch and nothing more significant than that. She had been doing some hectic sleeping-around of late, and all she needed to make her life complete was an infestation of something God!
She opened her eyes, blinked, and closed them again. She yawned once more She pneo her eyes open, keeping them open this time and took a long look at the clock on the bedside table. It was alter five and Glenn would be home soon She was somewhat less than enthusiastic over the fact but there was no getting around it Glenn would be home soon, damn it.
Now, if she wanted to be a good little hausfrau, she would grab a fast shower, change the bed sheets, straighten the apartment, and get a good meal cooking. But she did not want to be a good housewife at all. She could not care less.
For two weeks now she had been picking up a man a day, rain or shine. She had not been changing the sheets lately, had barely bothered to bathe. She would walk to Glenn and kiss him hello with her body reeking of sex. And he didn't appear to notice. Or maybe he just didn't give a damn. He didn't come home too often, and it didn't take much imagination to figure out that he was getting his love somewhere else. He obviously wasn't getting it from her, and it didn't seem to bother him at all, so it was a good bet that someone else was having his bedtime companionship.
But who cared? She didn't, certainly. Because she had just had a man who made Glenn look like nothing at all. She had just had a man like Ray Patterson, who had been the first one. She had just had a man named Al-he never told her his last name-and he had the same repressed violence in his soul, the same tight-lipped cunning, the same sort of ruthlessness. A criminal, she was sure. A hoodlum of one sort or another. Gone now-he had left her there when she fell asleep, and she wondered if she would ever see him again. She hoped so. It had been good with him.
The baby was crying. She got out of bed and tossed a housecoat on and went to the nursery.
Stevie had cried while they were making love, but she had not bothered with him and Al had not seemed to hear Now she went to him His diapers were filthy and his face was red from crying Poor baby, she thought A fine mother you've got I ought to take care of you better, baby I ought to be a better person, but I'm not and we're stuck with each other. I never wanted you in the first place, kiddo and you probably would have picked some other mother if you had any choice in the matter so I guess we got to stick with each other until something better comes along. Hungry, Stevie?
He was hungry. She went to warm a bottle, and she spilled milk on the kitchen floor and didn't take the time to sponge it up. Sloppy, too. she thought A real sloppy bitch. She put the bottle in a pan of water on the stove and turned the fire on under it. When the bottle was warm she took it to the nursery. Usually she gave the bottle to Stevie in the crib, propping it up with a floppy stuffed dog with an elastic band attached to hold the bottle But now, somehow, she felt as though she would like to be close to her son. She lifted him in her arms, changed his pants, and held him in her arms while she fed him his bottle. He stopped midway through it to cry hysterically, and she held him over her shoulder, cooing to him and patting him on the back. He belched noisily like a fat man after a heavy meal and she gave him the rest of the bottle.
She put him in his play pen. went into the bedroom and got dressed Glenn would be home soon. She didn't want Glenn home. She wanted a hard man like Al. With a man like him she wouldn't mind taking sate of a house all day. She would eook and stay home and let him be the boss. You could only be a meek wife if you had a husband who could take charge of you. And Al was a take-charge guy.
He was gone now. And she didn't stand much chance of running into him again.
It wasn't like that with most of the bums she dragged home from the bar. They were rumdumb pigs and they didn't get much in the way of tail. They went nuts over her and gave her a heavy play, but they never got any place. She would take on anyone in the world once and no one a second time.
She would take Al any day in the world.
She started to go to work on the bed but gave up before she had accomplished anything. She sat down in the living room and waited for Glenn, and she met him at the door when he came in.
He embraced her. then let go of her. He looked around the apartment, his eyes missing little. Then he looked at her.
"Bad day?"
She nodded.
"I guess you had a man up here," he said softly. "Didn't you?"
She nodded again.
"I guess you have them up here all the time," he went on, his tone curiously flat. "I guess you have to. Ruth. I guess you don't get much from your husband."
She couldn't even nod, couldn't even look at him. She turned away and drew a breath, holding it as long as she could in her lungs. She walked to a table and got a pack of cigarettes, put one between her lips and lighted it. The smoke made her dizzy. "I'm sorry, Ruth."
She was sorry, too. But she couldn't speak the words.
"I didn't want it to turn out this way, Ruth. When we got married I thought ... that it would last forever. Oh, I suppose every couple thinks that. Otherwise they wouldn't get married in the first place, would they?"
"I guess not."
"We made a mess of it, Ruth."
"Yes. We did."
"Do you want a divorce?"
"I don't know," she said. "Do you?"
"I think so."
She didn't say anything. Better all around, she thought. But she was shaking inside. She was all tense and all mixed-up and all quivering.
"I don't know the etiquette in this situation," he was saying. "Emily Post doesn't have much to say on the subject. I suppose you start out with a separation. I'll pack a bag and find a hotel room. Then we can each get in touch with lawyers and work something out. I guess a Nevada divorce is the easiest way. Don't you think so?"
She managed to nod.
"I'm sorry about this, Ruth."
He packed two suitcases and left. She walked him to the door, wondering hysterically whether or not she was supposed to kiss him good-bye. She didn't. She watched through the peephole until he got onto the elevator and the door closed. Then she walked into the nursery. Stevie was playing in his playpen, banging absorbedly on a toy piano.
You poor little kid, she said silently. You don't have a Daddy any more, you poor kid. And your mother isn't worth much either.
She started to cry.
CHAPTER NINE
The bank teller had wire-rimmed spectacles and white hair that was turning yellow like old newspaper. His nose was thin and his lips were bloodless. He counted out hundred dollar bills, added twenties and tens and included a few ones and a handful of change. The total amount was $2315.47. Monita Ruiz scooped the change into her purse, put the smaller bills into her wallet, and accepted a money envelope into which she put the twenties and hundreds. She wedged the envelope between the lining of the purse and the leather itself. Then she left the bank.
She carried her purse only, but she did not return to the Hotel Alexandria to pick up additional clothing. Instead she stepped to the curb and flagged a cab and told the driver to take her to the West Side Airlines Terminal.
The terminal was large, well-lighted, modern, air-conditioned. She found the TWA flight desk and asked the uniformed clerk for her reservation, giving her name as Mona Rich. He found her ticket, took her money, and told her to take the next bus to Newark Airport. She did.
She waited for three-quarters of an hour in Newark, then boarded a plane for San Francisco The plane was a new jet and it made the trip non-stop in less than four hours. She sat back in her seat throughout the flight, eating a good meal, drinking several cups of coffee, leafing through a copy of Time which the stewardess gave her The plane landed smoothly in San Francisco and she debarked with her purse over her arm.
She bought a suitcase in a Market Street store for fifty dollars and spent two hundred dollars in other stores, buying enough clothes to fill the suitcase. She took a taxi to the Hotel Cardigan, tipped the doorman half a dollar, and asked the desk clerk for her room. The clerk found that Mona Rich did indeed have a reservation. A bellhop carried her suitcase to her room, opened the windows, checked the soap and towels for her, and palmed the dollar she handed him. She waited until he had left, closing the door softly after him. Then she began to laugh.
She laughed for three or four minutes. Finally she caught hold of herself and straightened up. She unpacked her suitcase, put the new clothes in closet and dresser. She went to the window, looked out at San Francisco. A pretty city, she thought. A good place to be, and a long way from West 104th Street.
Los Angeles might have been better. It was November now and San Francisco, in the northern part of the state, might be cold during the winter. The weather would be better in L.A.
But she liked San Francisco already. Los Angeles was full of pretty girls trying to crash the movies, pretty girls with Hollywood Stardust in their eyes. San Francisco was quieter, and people wouldn't give her knowing looks wherever she went. She could learn to fit into the town.
And then what?
A job, maybe. Something easy with good pay-modeling, reception work, something along those lines. She liked the idea of being a receptionist, for a high-class doctor or something like that. You didn't really have to do much, just look pretty and say bright things to people. She had the face and figure for the job and she was full of bright things to say. And she had the money to get herself the wardrobe that a job like that would take.
A job, then. And a husband after that. Not an upper west side husband with a drug habit or a weakness for the bottle, a slob who knew how to make babies but didn't know how to prevent them. Not that kind of a husband.
A husband with class. A husband with money, a husband who only got high on twelve-year-old Scotch and who made a phenomenal amount of money without working very hard for it. Maybe a doctor-become a doctor's receptionist and marry a doctor; hell, it sounded like an ad for a correspondence school.
She opened her purse, found a cigarette, lit it. Everything was going to be smooth sailing now. The hustling and the sharp stuff was done. And the next time she went to bed with a man she would have a ring on her finger, and the bed would have clean linen sheets and the man would be tall and handsome.
She smiled.
She had it made She was a little PP r-hidr from the worst block ut the upper west side ana she had it made.
Ruth smiled at the kid. He was halfway across the street, his lips curled in a smile and his eyes omniscient, before she realized that she knew him. He was the kid she'd made it with the first time, the Puerto Rican boy who had carried her groceries. He seemed older now, more sure of himself.
Well, he probably was older. How old was he, anyway? Seventeen? And how many men had she slept with since she took him to bed? Fifty? A hundred? It took a long time to sleep with that many men, time enough for a seventeen year old kid to look older.
He spoke better English, too.
"I seen you around," he said-his English was not perfect, not by any means, but better. "I seen you around, here and there. I like you, you know?"
Did she like him? A good question. No, she thought. She didn't like anybody. But she would sleep with him. Glenn was gone and Stevie was living with Glenn's mother somewhere and she rattled around alone in the apartment in Park West Village. She would move to a smaller place sometime. She'd been meaning to, but she hadn't quite gotten around to it yet.
She would sleep with the kid. She had a man every day, sometimes more than one, and she made love with a fury that almost compensated for her utter lack of attachment to. her partners. She was compulsive about it. There were only a few days when she did not sleep with a man, and on those days nature was responsible for her abstinence. Whenever sex was physically possible, she indulged herself.
She looked at the boy He was playing strong-and-silent now. hands on hips, eyes meeting her eyes almost insolently. He was waiting for her to say something.
She said: "You want to come with me?"
"Sure."
"To my apartment?"
He started to say sure again, then changed his mind and shook his head. "You come with me," he said.
"Where?"
"I got a place."
"Can we ... be alone there?"
He looked for a minute, then laughed. She wasn't sure what he was laughing at. At her, probably, she decided. Everybody laughed at her these days.
"We can be alone," he said.
She walked at his side. He led her along 100th to Manhattan, up Manhattan to 105th Street. They turned west at 105th and walked halfway down the block. Brownstones lined the street on both sides. Children played in the gutters and men sat on stoops drinking wine from pint bottles.
"Downstairs," he said.
"You live in the basement?"
"No."
"Then-"
"We got a dub." he said. She thought a moment. "You mean a gang?"
"Not a gang. A club "
"What's the difference?"
"Gangs is bad," he said "Gangs get trouble with the fuzz, bad stuff in the papers. This is a club. The Latin Counts. We don't wear no jackets, nothin' like that. Like a social club, you get it?"
She nodded. If he wanted to call his gang a club, well, that was okay with her. She wasn't going to give him a argument. He could call it the Elks Club as far as she was concerned, just so long as they had a bed there and she could lie down on it and he could join her. That was all she asked.
Because she was beginning to need it. She had turned into something great now, hadn't she? She couldn't go twenty-four hours without something male on top of her, and all she had to do was think about it a little and that old itch started in. It was getting cute, all right.
"This way," he was saying. She let him lead her down a flight of stone steps and through a door. The clubroom was dark; no light entered from the street because the windows had been given several coats of black paint. There was a massive tufted sofa near one wall, a record player on a black metal stand.
The kid closed the door and whistled.
Ruth blinked. The whistle evidently was a signal, because the instant the kid whistled boys seemed to emerge from the woodwork. One blooming hell of a lot of them, too. Tall boys, short boys, thin boys, fat boys, older boys, younger boys There were around twenty of them, and they were all Puerto Rican, and they surrounded her.
"I figure you love it so much," the kid who brought her was saying, "that you can spread it around. You know?"
She knew On the near north side in Chicago they had had a word for this sort of arrangement. A pair of rhyming words, actually. A clever turn of phrase.
The first word was gang.
The second word was bang.
A gang-bang, a line-up. an old fashioned midnight revue. God. if there was anything she didn't need, that was it. Twenty young kids on a tufted couch, she thought. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of nitric acid.
"Listen, kids-"
One of them reached into his pocket. He pulled out something, pressed something. A switchblade leaped into action. The blade was five inches long and it glinted. The boy began to pick his teeth with it.
She got the message.
Well, hell. Maybe that was the answer. Make a break for it, and get caught, and fight like hell so that they had to kill her That would end things, anyhow. It might hurt, but it wouldn't hurt for very long and when it stopped hurting nothing would hurt again. Ever.
No.
She didn't want to die. She didn't want to live either but she wanted to die even less. And what was it, anyhow? Twenty at once was nothing that terrible, nothing she wouldn't build up to sooner or later at the rate she was going. God, if she didn't calm down soon she'd be one of those broads who couldn't sit still for five minutes with her legs together A nywpho with a short fuse-fine. girl. fine. Better you should stick with Lone Joan and be a lesbian. Much better.
But she hadn't. And she was stuck with twenty fire-breathing spies, and they had knives that they picked their white teeth with When rape was inevitable, you were supposed to lie back an enjoy it. And it only stood to reason that the same thing applied to a gang-bang.
She looked at the one with the knife. He was Ugly, and his eyes had an oriental cast to them.
"You can put the blade away," she told him. "I'm game. I'll play ball."
"You know the rules?"
"Sure," she said. "Only I got a few rules of my own."
"What?"
"One at a time." she said. "The rest of you wait somewhere else while it goes on. This isn't a spectator sport, and I don't need a watchbird watching me this month."
They caught the general drift, even if they weren't up on their Munro Leaf. They shuffled off into another room of the basement all except the guy who had brought her. Evidently he had the right to go first. He pointed at the couch and she got off her clothes and climbed aboard While she was undressing he took a tiny transistor radio from his hip pocket and dialed in WMGM. A rock'n'roll program was blasting away.
Music To Get Gang-Banged By, she thought A nice touch, and the music was sure as hell appropriate. An Elvis Presley record in a teen-age cellar club. Wha else?
The first one didn't take long. When he left she was alone, breathing heavily, and moments later a second one hart taken his place The second one took a little longer before he turned over the reins to the third.
Then the fourth.
And the fifth.
By the time her body embraced the sixth boy, a lot had ceased to bother Ruth Lansing The smell of the boys which had alienated her at first, no longer seemed as objectionable. Evidently the Latin Counts had a rule that members abstain from bathing. But the smell was all right once you got used to it. It was almost exciting.
At any rate, it didn't bother her Neither did the idea of putting out for a seemingly endless procession of teen-age talent, most of them remarkably untalented and low on staying power Amazingly enough, she was getting to like it, starting to groove with it.
Her breasts started to ache from the constant pawing and pummeling. Her hips felt as though they had been grinding away since the creation of the universe, grinding like the mills of God.
But she was digging it.
When the eleventh boy took over from the tenth, the gang forgot about the injunction to stay in the other room while she gave her all for the Latin Counts. They crowded around to watch, snickering with a Spanish accent, mumbling gutter comments on her physique and her abilities She couldn't understand what they were saying but it did not worry her She barely heard them. And she didn't care whether they watched or not. because that only seemed to add some measure of excitement to the whole business. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen-
The nineteenth kid had special tastes. It was something she would not have done normally, but now she had no qualms at all. It was abnormal and disgusting; at least she thought so once. Now it was fun.
Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two-
There were twenty-six of them all told They came one after the other, and she did about the same thing, more or less. And when it was over she was too weak to stand, too exhausted to see straight Two of the boys dressed her. The one who had found her, the package-carrier from the Grand Union, led her up the stairs and took her to her door She staggered into the elevator, stumbled into her apartment, and passed out.
On Friday, Monita Ruiz changed into Mona Rich and took a plane from New York to San Francisco.
On Monday, Al Carter got a letter.
Monita had mailed the letter from Newark Airport. She wanted it to be postmarked in New York so that he would not know where he should start looking for her, but at the same time she wanted to be well out of New York by the time he got the letter. So she mailed it from the airport, and it arrived in Monday morning's mail.
Al had wondered about her Friday night and all day Saturday and Sunday. He wondered whether the cops had picked her up, or whether she had finked out, or just what the hell happened to her. He didn't clue Ryan in, just sat on it and waited.
Then the letter came.
It was a pretty simple letter, actually. It was on drugstore stationery and the writing had been done with a ball-point pen. On the envelope there was his address-Mr Al Carter, Hotel Alexandria, New York City. There was also a postmark which informed Al that the letter had been mailed in Newark, clearing the Post Office at 5:33 p.m.
The text of the letter was simple, too. The handwriting was neat, and the sentences straightforward. It went like this: Al:
I am quitting and leaving town. You will never see me again. Thanks for everything. I hope you and your lousy friend Ryan rot in hell.
Tt was not signed. But he had a fair idea who had written it, signature or no. He read the thing three times from beginning to end, tore it into little pieces and flushed the pieces down the toilet. Then, very systematically, he went through Monita's dresser and her half of the closet, taking out every stitch of her clothing reducing the clothes to shreds. He 'stuffed most of the crud into the bowl of the toilet and flushed it until it overflowed and made one hell of a mess on the bathroom floor. Fie kicked the bathroom door, splintering the lower panel, and he kicked the dresser, nearly breaking two of his toes.
He told Ryan that afternoon.
He called him first He'd been stalling Ryan over the weekend The Irishman was anxious to work and he'd made excuses, holding him off, waiting for Monita to turn up. But Monita wasn't going to turn up. He told Ryan over the phone to meet him in the Irish tavern on Columbus. Ryan was there waiting for him. There were two shot glasses of Irish whiskey on the table top and the jukebox was playing Gal-way Bay.
Carter said, "Listen, the girl took off. Monita."
"She quit?"
"She ran," Carter said. "Took off like a rabbit, sent me a note from the airport. It came this morning."
The record played, with Bing Crosby singing. Ryan tossed off his shot and looked over Carter's shoulder to the doorway. Al tried to read his face; he couldn't get anywhere.
"Well, my lad, it was fun while it lasted."
"We can get another girl."
"Oh? You know one, then? You have one handy?"
"I can find one."
"You have one in mind, Alan? Or do you plan to put an advertisement in the classified?"
Carter drank his drink and didn't taste it. A girl, he thought. And then he remembered the broad in the bar uptown, the blonde who went like a bunny.
"I know one." he said. "Jail bait?"
He tried to think fast. How old was the blonde, anyway? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? But Ryan noticed his hesitation and laughed at him before he could answer.
"Too old," Ryan said. "So I guess she'll not do, Alan."
"So what?"
That's our meal ticket, Alan. We're selling youth and collecting on statutory. Use your head."
He banged the table-top impatiently. "We can make a change or two," he said. "Just listen to me."
"Go ahead."
"We pull it the same. The gal picks up a guy, we let him get in the saddle and bust in on him. We're arresting the broad, you get it?"
"So?"
"So he's gotta take a trip to the station and spend the night in the can as a material witness. His family'll find out and everything. So he pays and we let him go."
Ryan looked at him for a lona moment. Then the Irishman's eyebrows went up a notch.
He said: "It stinks."
"But-"
"Stinks like a dead mackerel. Not a mark in a million falls for that one. Alan. The statutory kicker is necessary. You can't leave it out or you've got an amateur game played against two-penny rubes for half-penny stakes. I don't buy it."
"Look-"
"I don't want to look " No brogue now, Al noticed. Just hardness, coldness. No friendliness at all in the voice. "I don't want to look at a thing, Alan, and I want to look at you least of all. You think I want a cheap racket with you for a partner? "If I played that kind of game I'd play it on a solo basis. Because you stink." Carter stared.
"You stink," Ryan went on. "I stuck with you because the girl made up for you. She was just right for the con and she played it like a pro, start to finish. She was good, Carter. Now she's gone because you didn't have the brains to hold her and you want me to stick with you while you break in some overage bonehead who's been giving it away for years. Not in a pig's rear, Carter."
Al was shaking. He wanted a lot of things. He wanted a drink, and he wanted a gun to put a hole in Ryan's head. And he wanted Monita's neck between his hands.
But Ryan was still talking. "You're a bum, Carter. You're an old-line heavyweight, a snatch and grab man with no feel for the game. You don't know how to think on your feet, you use the same lines every time because you haven't the brains to improvise. You stuck us in a cheap hotel and left us standing with our pants down when the bulls came in the door on a routine raid. You don't have any brains, Carter, and you'd better rob liquor stores because you're not good for much else."
Ryan stood up, turned on his heel, headed for the door. And Carter looked at him without moving. He wanted to grab the big ape and stick his arm down his throat but he was too numb to move. Ryan had him pegged as a bum. Ryan didn't want any part of him. And he was the one who doped the whole thing out, the one who set it all up, the one who found Monita and Ryan, the one who got the guns and the shields and-
Well, to hell with them. Ryan and Monita, rats leaving a sinking ship-to hell with them He would work it out himself, him and the blonde. She had it for him, dammit. She had it bad, it wasn't just a tumble, and he could get her to jump through any hoops he held up for her.
It would work.
Two hours later he was in another bar on Columbus Avenue, farther uptown. And when Ruth Lansing walked in half an hour later he was ready for her.
She was glad to see him.
The apartment was on Houston Street a few blocks south of Greenwich Village. It was on the third floor, and you got to it by climbing two flights of old stairs that creaked and buckled when you put a little weight on them. The building wasn't much and the apartment itself was less. Second-hand furniture from Third Avenue, a rug from the Salvation army. The suits in the closet cost around a hundred and a half apiece, but you couldn't guess that by looking around the two-room apartment.
Glenn Lansing lived there.
The brokerage house had dumped him hard. He thought at first that it would be easier, living away from his wife, living without quite so much pressure. But it worked the other way around. He started taking too many days off, and he started dropping the pose of earnest young man, and he stopped reading the Wall Street Journal every morning on the way downtown. He started coming in with too little sleep under his belt and it showed in his appearance and in his work. And one Friday they gave him a check that was larger than usual, with a note saying that the check included two weeks severance pay plus some additional money that was coming to him from the profit-sharing plan.
That night he took his check home and stared at it. He opened his attache case, spilled out everything he had brought home from the office everything that had been in his desk. He looked over all his papers and possessions, and he went outside and took a long look at the building he was living in.
Then he went to see Arlette.
He didn't work for two weeks. There was money set aside and he made it do. living frugally, cooking his own meals on a single-burner hot-plate and staying away from liquor. His rent was sixty a month and his expenses were light.
Except for sex. The sex expenses were high-a hundred a shot, because when you let yourself get used to quality you couldn't settle for the cheap stuff, and he was used to quality all the way. There were moments when he felt very strange warming a can of beans and making a bitter cup of instant coffee, then dressing in a Chas. Young suit and going to see Arlette. But his living pattern had its own sort of logic. Necessities like Arlette came first. Luxuries like food followed.
Arlette was not always available. But Kyros knew everything and everyone, and when Arlette was busy he found another to take her place. A fresh and young one, a teen-age one. Like Faye, a mulatto from Georgia whose breasts were just beginning to bud Like Sally Jean from the Ozarks, whose father had taught her how to please a man, and who had virtually sold her to the Greek.
He was working now He'd answered a blind ad in the Times one morning and picked up a job with an outfit that employed a few hundred part-time salesmen selling mutual funds and real estate syndications. It was straight commission work and if you could sell it wasn't a bad deal. He made two sales a week, working his own leads, selling his head off when he had to. The job was one that the boys on Wall Street would look down their noses at, but it paid the rent and bought the groceries and took care of necessities like Arlette and Faye and Sally Jean.
Which was plenty.
It was a bad life. He tried to kid himself into thinking he had everything he wanted, tried to convince himself that he was living the only way he could, but most of the time he couldn't escape the knowledge that it was a mess. It was a bad life, a psychotic life, and he seemed to be stuck with it.
You're a nut, he would tell himself. You don't care about love or anything like it. Just youth That gets you every time-flaming youth, bashful youth, any goddamn kind of youth just so long as it's young.
You're a nut.
He didn't go to a young girl every night Once a week, twice on a good week-that was all The rest of the time he kept to himself He had never had many close friends, and what friendships had endured were broken off now He would stay home, burying himself in a book, or he would go out and walk the streets of the lower east side. Some nights he wandered east to the Bowery and nursed a solitary glass of muscatel in a bloody bucket, rubbing elbows with derelicts and inhaling the smell of stale sweat and fresh vomit. Other nights he made his way through the Village, studying the tourists from Iowa and the kiddie-beats from Kew Gardens and the boho types who lived there. He felt vaguely at home in the Village, as if the people who lived in the narrow streets would accept him. But he never talked to them. He felt at home on the Bowery, too, or in Chinatown. It was all the same to him. A bad life.
But he was stuck with it.
The man was about forty-five He had a potbelly, and he was mostly bald, and his face was blotchily red. At the moment he was lying with Ruth Lansing, his heart beating at a speed in excess of what his doctor would have advised. The man had a heart condition, brought on by a hectic life in the garment industry and a high-cholesterol diet, and his doctor had advised him to avoid exercise. He was now violating doctor's orders and it felt wonderful.
Ruth strained, meeting him with sharp movements of her own Her breasts were flattened out by the weight of the man, as he heaved again, groaned mightily, and finished.
Ten minutes later he was gone and she was richer by twenty dollars.
Now this, she thought, made a hell of a lot more sense than what Al had suggested. Why go to all that trouble for a couple hundred dollars when you could make twenty dollars in a few minutes and when you could handle four or five tricks a night with no trouble at all? It was simpler and safer and she loved her work almost as much as she loved Al.
She smiled a private smile and went into the bathroom. Then she sat down on the bed, lit a cigarette and smoked silently She was wearing a silk wrapper now with nothing under it. There wasn't much point iD getting dressed each time when you only had to get undressed again in a little while. So why bother?
She never knew when Al would send another trick up. That was the way they worked it: she stayed in her apartment, cool and quiet, and he hustled prospective tricks on Broadway and sent them uptown to see her. It was the perfect front-God alone (and Webb & Knapp, perhaps) knew how many people lived in Park West Village. She could have a steady stream of clients without arousing any attention from the law It was cute.
At first Al hadn't liked the idea. "They got a name for that kind of a guy," he said. "I don't like that name."
But he had seen the light in time. He certainly didn't mind the money Already he had bought a car with it, and some days he would take her for drives up the Henry Hudson Parkway and the Saw Mill River Parkway and through Westchester, and the country was nice up there He had sharp clothes now, plenty of expensive suits and jackets and an overcoat that ran three hundred bucks. He wasn't complaining.
Neither was she.
Because it was the right business for her. Work that she liked, easy hours, fine money And all the time she'd been giving it away-a fortune's worth of merchandise, dammit. A fortune.
But there was plenty more juice in the lemon, she thought. That made her giggle and she stretched out on the bed giggling like a schoolgirl and waiting for the next man to arrive.
CHAPTER TEN
The girl was a graduate student in mathematics of at New York University. She was very short, with thick glasses and a boyish build She had brown hair and fair skin and she was sharing a bed with Joan McKay.
Joan was lying very still now. The girl put a hand on Joan's hip and rubbed gently aimlessly Joan was on her side, facing away from the girl The girl let her hand move higher until she was massaging Joan's rib cage to the side of her breast The hand slipped, on purpose of course, and grazed the breast.
Cute, Joan thought. Oh. so very cute. And this had nothing at all to do with Boolean algebra or number theory. Where had the little minx learned her stuff?
It was a good question, so she asked it
"In college," the girl said. "I went to a college for women only. No men around except for the janitor. And he was nine hundred years old. Like Methuselah, sort of."
"In Illinois?" That was where the girl lived, originally Some town called Danville.
"Oh. no," the girl said "In New England of course A veddy exclusive place, my dear And some of the courses weren't listed in the catalogue I started playing gay games in my freshman year and I haven't stopped yet, God, you get horny with no men around. So you get horny for each other. Fan-enough?"
"I won't argue."
"You have nice breasts, Joan. Like this?"
"Uh-huh."
"Tricks-we-learned-in-school department. I wish I had a body like yours."
"The one you've got is fine, kitten."
"You think so?"
"Uh-huh."
"Kind of flat though, no?"
"I wouldn't worry about it, kitten." The brown-haired girl sighed Kind of simple-minded. Joan thought, for a math student doing graduate work. The girl would probably wind up teaching math to uninterested high school kids and sleeping with the ladies' gym teacher on the side Either that or she would straighten out and marry a man and play wife. A boring girl, fun for a night but intolerable for a week. God. she didn't even remember her name; that was why she called her kitten. "I don't love you, Joan."
"You shouldn't have told me."
"No?"
"Of course not. I won't be able to sleep for the next three weeks. I'll eat my heart out, kitten."
"I'm serious."
"Congrats, then. I don't love you either." The girl sighed again. "I've never been in love, Joan. I've been in sex a lot, but I've never been in love. Isn't that a nice way to put it?"
"It's lovely," she said. It must have been lovely when Sappho said it, she thought But it was getting a little rusty now and some of its charm was gone.
"Have you ever been in love, Joan?"
And Ruth leaped into her mind, blonde Ruth, lovely Ruth. Why did it still hurt? It had been a long time, and she neither knew nor cared where Ruth was now, who she was living with, what she was doing. That was a closed chapter in a dull book. So why did it still hurt, for the love of the Lord?
"Have you, Joan?"
You silly little butch, she thought. Oh you siHy silly little butch. You tiresome thing.
"No," she said. "I've never been in love, kitten."
Kyros was a genius.
Glenn sat on a pillow on the floor of an apartment very much like the one where he went to see Arlette. Another grubby building in a commercial district another nice apartment inside. No chairs or sofas here, the apartment was furnished in oriental fashion, and mats on the floor served for sitting, relaxing, and lovemaking. There was a Japanese screen in one corner of the room, and a small phonograph was playing oriental music.
But Leslie was the supreme attraction. Leslie was sweet and soft and fourteen years old. Leslie had a sweet high voice, a pair of liquid brown eyes. Leslie was warm to the touch, good to hold-Leslie was magnificent.
Glenn had been smoking a perfumed cigarette that scented the room neatly He put it out now and he removed the towel he had been wearing around his loins, and he opened his arms. Leslie came to him. He held Kyros's latest find close, stroking the warm body, whispering into the shell-like ear.
God bless Kyros, he thought And then, because the thought seemed somehow improper, he changed it.
Satan bless Kyros.
"I am happy," Leslie said.
Glenn smiled.
"I like this," Leslie said. "To be with you and to touch you. I know how to please a man. Do you find me pleasing?"
He kissed Leslie for an answer.
"So happy," Leslie said.
The excitement was building now. Glenn stroked the satiny skin, felt his own passion building desperately. This was what made life worthwhile. It was a bad life, God knew it was a bad life, but it had its moments.
This was one of them.
"Oh," Leslie said. "Oh!"
Satan bless Kyros. The fat old Greek was wiser than Solomon, if not so benevolent. Hell, benevolent as well-he had done a great service for Glenn. He had taught Glenn more about his inner self, more about his needs and desires.
And Kyros had been right. It was youth that fascinated Glenn, youth that turned him on, youth that sent his senses reeling and made life mad.
Youth was all that mattered. Other things were unimportant. The breasts of Arlette were secondary to her age, and the warm brown skin of Faye was secondary to her age, and Leslie-
Well, Leslie was the proof. Glenn ached for Leslie, burned for Leslie. And Leslie was a boy.
Al Carter leaned up against the doorway of a dance hall on Broadway between 48th and 49th. The dance hall had two placards in the window and they seemed to contradict one another. The first card invited all men to come upstairs to dance with beautiful young hostesses. You didn't have to know how to dance, the card assured all men. The girls would teach you. They were experienced in the business and they would instruct you.
The second placard was addressed to girls. There were openings for hostesses, it stated, and no experience was necessary. Apply within, girls.
Carter wasn't reading the signs. He was lounging in the doorway, looking pretty as a picture in his most recently acquired suit. The suit was a continental job with cuffless trousers and a cutaway front. The material was the world's softest flannel and the color was pearl grey.
Carter liked the suit.
He liked his shirt, too. It was a charcoal silk job from DePinna's and it had cost twenty bucks. He liked the shoes-genuine lizard, made in Italy. He even liked the initialed handkerchief in his jacket pocket and the cashmere socks that separated his shoes from his feet.
Carter was smooth.
And he had it made. He didn't do a damn thing really, just steered tricks to Ruth and kept her happy, belting her around a little when she got weepy and taking her when she got itchy. There couldn't be a softer touch in the world. Carter was pretty damned pleased with himself, if you want to know the truth. He was pretty as a peacock, he drove a hell of a car and lived in a good place, and he had the world by the short hairs.
He saw the trick coming a mile away.
If ever a man was looking for a woman, this one was. The eyes darting, the hands shaking slightly, the desperation shining in those eyes. And the guy was dressed straight out of the best shop in Kansas City, if Carter was any judge. Expensive clothes but square. A conventioneer looking for a hot time before he had to go home to the old lady.
Carter emerged from the doorway He spoke to the guy out of the side of his mouth, his lips barely moving. They taught you that in stir. You could carry on a conversation three feet from the screws and they never caueht word one.
"You looking for a girl?"
The trick got a little more nervous, He nodded, finally, and Carter led him down the block to the Elpine fruit stand. Carter ordered a glass of pina colada and the trick had milk.
"I got this broad," Carter mumbled "You never saw anything like this one, man. Just twenty-three-" he'd cut Ruth's age down a little, just for the hell of it "-and built out to here. A real blonde, not one of those dark-root jobbies. This is one you won't forget, man."
"How much?"
"Twenty-five."
"That's a little high," the trick said His accent was somewhere out in the corn country. A fanner, Carter thought contemptuously. He wanted to tell the bum to shell out the twenty-five or go back and hump a cow.
He came down to twenty, finally, and the trick agreed. Carter had his car at the curb. They got into it and he started to drive to the apartment where Ruth was waiting. The rube didn't say much on the way. Probably nervous.
He stopped the sleek car in front of the entrance and gave the rube Ruth's apartment number. And then the trick pulled out a wallet and flipped it open and let Carter's eyes have a peek at a familiar-looking hunk of tin.
"Vice," the rube said, no longer sounding like Kansas. "You drive fine, pimp. Drive to the precinct house, will you? It's right down the block on 100th. You can't miss it."
It was a con, he thought. A new twist, and a cute one The cop was no cop at all. It was a con.
He was wrong.
He did three years at Dannemora to prove how wrong he was, and the old cons looked down their noses at him because he was a pimp.
It was a fine wedding.
It wasn't particularly showy. There was an organist and a small orchestra for the reception and the bride wore a white gown, but the guest list was small. After all, it wouldn't do for the groom's family to invite a few hundred persons when the bride was not inviting a soul.
The groom was Lee Cushing. Dr. Lee Cushing, to be precise. He was a resident surgeon in neurology at San Francisco's leading public hospital, and in a year or two he would be going into private practice.
The groom was thirty-two. He was tall and handsome, dark-haired and white-toothed, athletic and intelligent. His father was a doctor himself and his mother was a lady.
The bride was Mona Rich. The bride had worked as receptionist for the groom's father for a little over a year, and the couple had met in the older doctor's waiting-room one afternoon All brides are beautiful, as everyone knows, but Mona Rich was more beautiful than most. Her white wedding gown was as pure and virginal as snow, and her black hair was lovely, and her eyes were bright.
She was nineteen. Her father, now deceased, was a New York lawyer who had gone to Spain in '36 with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Her mother, also no longer among the living, was the daughter of a Castilian banker. She had fallen in love with the dashing young American, had run away to America with him when Franco's fascist troops had crushed and routed the Loyalist government. They were married, they produced Mona, and now they were dead.
It was a beautiful wedding.
It was a beautiful wedding night. It was tenderness and kisses in the bridal suite of a beachfront hotel in West Palm Beach. It was very sweet love and very gentle passion, and Mona's moans and Lee's lusts, and peace.
Mona lay awake in the darkness.
Call her Mona Cushing, or Mona Rich or Mo-nito Ruiz. A name is a label, and the name changes when the label no longer applies. Call her what you will.
She was a happy girl. Very happy.
She had gotten what she wanted, and she had found that it was worth the effort, and she could not possibly have been happier.
Life had been good to her.
She remembered the start, the tenement on 104th, the hotel room, Carter, Ryan, the marks, everything.
And smiled.
She remembered the year in San Francisco, learning, growing, studying, and falling in love. The last part amazed her still. She had planned on marrying well but love had never really entered into the picture; you couldn't expect that too. But she had been lucky, incredibly lucky. She loved him completely.
He had gotten damaged goods. She was no virgin, not by a country mile. She was no daughter of a New York lawyer and a Castilian upper-caste woman. She was hard slum stuff, upper-west-side stuff, and she knew more tricks than any girl should know. She had even lied about her age-Lee thought she was nineteen, and she wouldn't even be eighteen for a few months.
But she would make him happy. She knew this. She had had a lot of practice. She hoped his would be as mutually profitable.
