In the social set whose millions were gained in business, whose sins would stop only when the money did-the biggest sin was failure! And for Sky Benton, the playboy whose playground was Europe and whose playmates were the wanton daughters of nobility, the day the house of money cards collapsed was the day the world ended. He was free to walk, to breathe, to eat and drink-but the lust carnival was over, and as far as he was concerned, he might as well have been as dead as his suicide father. To get his passion life of ease back he was willing to risk anything-even if it meant going to work for the tycoon who had been his father's downfall. But there would be compensations-the lovely, young, sin-eager daughter, and a wife whose flesh hungers were as rampant as Sky's own. And then would follow the long parade of moneyed-wantons who would set him up as King of the Social Studs!
CHAPTER ONE
The day after his father committed suicide, Sky Benton packed his bags and took a plane to New York from Rome, where he'd been fooling around and living on his father's generous monthly checks for the past two years. He didn't take a taxi up to the family estate in Pelham Manor when he reached New York, because there might still be reporters hanging around the place; instead, he moved into a nondescript midtown hotel and spent the next week reading the newspaper stories about the old man and listening to people discussing the case in bars and restaurants and other places.
And then, when things had begun to quiet down a little, he walked over to the Horace Ross Agency on Lexington Avenue, a seventy-five-year-old establishment which specialized in securing employment for high-grade domestic personnel, and applied for a job as a chauffeur.
He didn't, of course, use his own name. It wasn't that he felt so awfully sure that the Ross people would make an immediate connection between him and old John Barclay Benton, because Benton, after all, was a fairly common name; but the case had been a pretty sensational one, and a couple of the newspaper stories had mentioned that the old man had a playboy son named Peter Schuyler Benton, so why take chances? Sky just dropped his last name and used his first two, putting "Peter Schuyler" on his employment application. It sounded to him like a good chauffeur's name, anyway.
As it turned out, it was a cinch. He had one moment of panic when he was sent inside to be interviewed by Horace Ross III himself, and he took one look at Ross and remembered that he had met the old man on at least three previous occasions in the course of hiring servants for the Benton household, but there was no cause for concern. The old man peered at him nearsightedly for a few moments, obviously didn't remember or recognize him at all, and then proceeded to put him through the usual $64,000 servant's quiz.
"You haven't registered with us before, Schuyler?" Ross asked.
"No, sir," Sky said, and he relaxed in his chair, stretching out his long legs. "I've been in service in Europe for the past five years, and-" he smiled a small, polite servant's smile "-I was in another kind of service for three years before that. The United States Air Force."
"I see," Ross said, and looked down over his glasses at the long application form which Sky had filled out. And then, though it was all down there on the form, he asked, "Who was your last employer?"
"I was head chauffeur for the De Cortesa family of Rome and the Italian Riviera for four of those five years," Sky said.
"And before that?"
"Before that," Sky said, "I worked as chauffeur for the Padini family. I went to work for them right after my Air Force discharge."
Ross nodded. "Why did you leave your service with the Padinis for the De Cortesas?" he asked.
"It was a much better opportunity," Sky said. The Padinis made the error of boasting to the De Cortesas at a party about how good a chauffeur they had-how good a driver I was and how careful and all. The very next day, the De Cortesas called me up and offered me a job at more than twice the salary, and I felt it was only good sense to take the offer. And I never regretted the decision."
A lot of that, as it happened, was perfectly true; the only small discrepancy in the story was that he hadn't been involved with either family as a chauffeur, far from it. But he had been rather intimate with the Padinis during the early part of his stay in Italy because he'd done a lot of sleeping around with lush, blonde young Ilsa Padini, and then he had transferred over to the De Cortesas when Ilsa had told the Marchioness" De Cortesa about him at a party and the lovely young Marchioness had promptly called him up the next morning and invited him over for a late breakfast. And after that, he'd remained more or less loyal to the Marchioness, because, beautiful as Ilsa had been, she just didn't compare to the slim-waisted, huge-breasted, long-legged Marchioness.
"I understand," Ross said, cutting in on Sky's thoughts, and Sky almost grinned impudently at him and almost said, "The hell you do." But he kept the smile off his lips and his comment to himself, and he listened gravely and politely as the old man asked, "Can you tell me, please, why you've returned to this country?"
"Just plain old-fashioned homesickness," Sky said. "Italy's a very lovely country, but it isn't, of course, the United States. And after all my years among-well, let's face it, sir, foreigners, I suddenly felt that I'd had enough, and I gave notice and returned home."
"Your home, then," Ross asked, "is New York?"
"No, sir," Sky said. "I'm from Wichita Falls, Texas, originally. But I'm not homesick for Wichita Falls, Mr. Ross, not one bit; Wichita Falls is the reason I enlisted in the Air Force in the first place. My homesickness was strictly for the United States, and by United States I mean the big cities like this one. And anyway," he added, "I'm sure there are better job opportunities for a man in my line of work here in New York than in a place like Wichita Falls."
Why in hell, he wondered even as he said it, had he picked a place like Wichita Falls? He'd never even been in the town as far as he could remember, so he'd be in a hell of a pickle if old Ross just happened by some crazy coincidence to be familiar with the place and started asking him questions about it. But it had seemed like a nice remote spot to mention, remote enough so Ross probably wouldn't bother checking him there. And he was lucky; the employment agency owner obviously was no more interested in the town, and no more familiar with it, than he was, and passed it over without further attention.
"I presume," Ross said, "you're as familiar with American cars as Italian makes?"
"Completely," Sky said. "The Padinis owned a Lincoln along with their other cars, and the De Cortesas own two Cadillacs and an Oldsmobile convertible."
That, too, was true. He had once spent one of the best evenings of his life with Ilsa Padini lying naked underneath him on the back seat of that Lincoln, and he'd long ago lost count of the times he had taken the Marchioness in the front and back seats of those Cadillacs and that Olds.
"All right," Ross said abruptly, snapping him out of his reverie again. "Will you stand up, please, and let me get a better look at you?"
Sky stood up, arrogantly and lazily confident that the old man would approve of what he saw. He had no modest illusions or doubts about his good looks: too many beautiful women in New York and California and all through Europe had told him about his good looks and then succumbed easily to them through the dozen years since his fourteenth birthday. He stood up and let Ross look him over, let the old man study his close-cropped dark hair, his startingly blue eyes, his sensitive, high-cheekboned, extremely handsome face, and his broad-shouldered, hard-muscled, narrow-waisted, athletic, six-foot-three body; and then, when Ross nodded, he sat down again.
"You'll look good in a chauffeur's uniform," the old man said. He paused for a moment, studying Sky's application form once again, and then he said, "That's it for now, Schuyler. Can you come back in, say, three days?"
"Three days!" Sky said, startled. And then he went on, lamely, "I-I'd sort of hoped to start work somewhere right away."
The old man shook his head. "That's impossible, I'm afraid," he said. "We'll have to check your past employers, of course, and that takes time-even when you do it by cable." He added, "I presume, incidentally, that you're willing to pay cable costs?"
"I donl have very much money," Sky said. That, too, was unfortunately true; he'd been just about at the end of his current check and waiting hopefully for his next one when there had come, instead, the call from his father's lawyer that there would be no more checks-that John Barclay Benton was broke and jailed and a suicide. Sky had even had to borrow money from the ever-willing Marchioness to get back to New York. He went on, "But if you're willing to take the charges along with the agency fee from my salary-?"
"That's what I had in mind," Ross said. "Do you have enough money to manage for the next three days?"
"Just barely," Sky said. "I was never much of a saver-my salary always managed to disappear right after every payday. Is it really necessary to cable?"
"I'm afraid so," Ross said, "if you want any kind of a job in this town. After all, you don't have any written references...."
That was a pity, but Sky had left Rome so hurriedly that he just hadn't thought of asking Ilsa and the Marchioness for phony references; they'd have gone along without question, of course, but his plan hadn't really evolved completely until he was on the jet and halfway across the ocean. Well, anyway, he'd taken care of everything now: he'd phoned both of them and explained the situation from his hotel here.
"I'm sorry about that," Sky said. "But I didn't need references, of course, when I left the Padinis to go over to the De Cortesas-and when I left the De Corteasas, I was suddenly in so much of a hurry to get a look at my own country again that I just didn't stop to think about asking for references." He shrugged.
"I guess I'll just have to wait those three days." He fought back a smile again, and he said, "Anyway, I'm sure both my former employers will be glad to tell you that they were completely satisfied with me."
"I'm sure they will," Horace Ross III said. "I'll look for you back here on Thursday at about the same time."
He took a trip up to the Benton estate in Pelham Manor that evening, shooting a precious ten-spot and renting a car at Hertz to get up there. He parked the car a quarter-mile away from the main gate and walked the rest of the way, making sure there were no reporters or police around before he went through the gate and approached the front door of the house.
From a distance, the place looked exactly the way he remembered it, but his stomach churned with sudden sickness when he got up close and saw how different it really was. It had been a showplace, the John Barclay Benton estate, kept beautifully landscaped and jewel-bright and clean and lovely by a small army of servants, and the curious and the envious came from miles around to gape at it through the tall, forbidding gates. But the place which looked up suddenly before Sky's sick eyes was just a shattered wreck....
It wasn't anything big or startling: there weren't any hanging doors or broken windows or gaping holes in the walls or anything like that. It was just a difference in the mood, the feeling of the place. The old man hadn't really been so old, just barely fifty at the time of his death, actually, and he'd been a widower for almost twenty years; so the place had always been brilliantly alight and shining and, as befitted a multimillionaire stockbroker without the encumbrance of a wife, always alive with music and parties and the presence of high-fashion-dressed, delicately-perfumed, jewelled women. And now the place was dark and silent and strangely dead looking, and the careful landscaping had already begun to fall apart and grow choked with weeds.
And there was one additional, ugly reminder of what had happened: the big, blaring FOR SALE sign thrust into the front lawn.
Sky stood there looking around him for a long time before he finally dipped into his pocket and pulled out his key for the front door. He half expected the door not to work, half expected the people who had taken over control of the remnants of the Benton properties to have changed the lock, but the key slid in smoothly and the door opened at his touch. And then he was inside.
There were no lights, but he had expected that, and he'd bought and brought along a flashlight. He flicked the flashlight on, and then he was even sicker as he looked around him.
They'd stripped his old man clean. Every piece of furniture, the antique furniture on which J. B. had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and of which he'd been so unembarrassedly proud, was gone, swept away as though it had never existed and been picked out piece by piece all over the world and over many years-sold now, undoubtedly, at some cold-blooded and impersonal auction. And the paintings were gone from the walls, too: the world famous Benton collection of modern masters, the Utrillos and Picassos and Renoirs and all the rest. All that remained in the house were a few scraps of wrapping-paper-that, and some sudden memories of a man who had been very good to Sky and had gotten himself in trouble while Sky was away having himself a great time knocking over a bunch of big-bosomed European babes.
The thought filled Sky with almost overwhelming bitterness, but he fought it off, and he forced himself to think cynically: Well, it's poetic justice, isn't it? They've picked him clean, but he picked them clean first, didn't he? At least that's what all the papers say. And that's what the old man's lawyer said, too, when he called.
There had been no doubt about it at all, the lawyer had said in answer to Sky's stunned questions. The old man had had plenty of money, no doubt about that, and he'd also made a lot more steadily and constantly as head of one of the largest brokerage firms in the country, but he'd also had extremely expensive tastes and habits, so expensive that he'd managed to run through his holdings and then begun to outrace his day-by-day earnings. Those parties of his, for example: there'd been a big one which had cost an incredible hundred and forty thousand dollars one Saturday evening. And those lovely, perfumed ladies that Sky remembered so vividly: "Your father," the lawyer told Sky, "once presented no less than five of them with jewelry averaging ten thousand dollars apiece in a single month...."
And then the lawyer had said something else which rang for hours in Sky's ears after the conversation had ended, and which had continued to haunt him ever since.
"You didn't help very much, either," the lawyer said. "Do you have any idea of how much it cost to keep you tomcatting all over Europe for years?"
So Benton, the lawyer went on, forced against the wall by his own extravagances and his son's, had done the usual thing: after he'd gone through his own holdings, he'd begun to dip into his clients'. And he'd done it just as he did everything else in life: in a big, big way. He'd gone through better than a million and a quarter of his clients' stock and bond holdings when one of them, one of his own partners, a man named Hugh Lattimore, had become suspicious and begun a quiet investigation and had quickly uncovered the truth. And after that it was the end of the twenty-four-hours-a-day party for John Barclay Benton, and the beginning of his quick trip to the hoosegow.
There'd been no publicity at all given to the matter at first; there'd been hope, then, that Benton could raise enough through sale of his personal properties, his paintings and his furniture and the rest, to pay back enough so that Lattimore and the others would drop their charges and the criminal part of it could be quashed, after which Benton would be released and simply through as a broker and thrown out of his company. The police and the district attorney's office weren't delighted with the idea, saying they were charged with prosecuting criminals and not with collecting bills, but they went along with it because there were extremely important people involved and very heavy pressure had been brought to bear on them. And after the usual preliminary denials, Benton succumbed and went along too-he authorized the sale of his remaining properties, content, finally, with the hope of simply getting outside.
It didn't work out that way. His properties went for less than a third of the million and a quarter and then further thefts of better than another half-million were turned up; and bitterly Lattimore and the others instructed the district attorney's office to proceed with criminal prosecution. And that evening John Barclay Benton hung himself with his belt in his cell, and his lawyer called Sky in Rome, catching him breathless and worn out after a two-hour session in bed with the lovely young Marchioness De Cortesa.
The realization of his own part in his father's death taunted Sky all through his flight back to New York, and, as the plane moved noiselessly though the air, he was further tormented by the strange, recurring thought that it just wasn't possible even though he knew that it had actually happened. He didn't doubt for a minute the part about his father's wild spending: his father had always been, just as Sky had become in his young manhood, quite a guy with the women and with the high living. He'd always bought jewelry and other gifts for a lot of babes and thrown a lot of big parties. But that was the whole point; he'd been doing that kind of thing as long as Sky could remember, and he'd never had to resort to stealing to support his habits.
It just didn't ring right, Sky decided as the plane moved over the ocean toward Idlewild. It just didn't make sense: that lawyer and all the others could say whatever they wanted to say, and they still couldn't get him to make himself believe that his father had become a thief. He'd just known John Barclay Benton too well to believe that, ever.
Because there was one thing for which Sty's father had been even better known than his famous parties and his lovely ladies and his fabulous success as a stockbroker; and that was his Gibraltar-strong honesty. It was almost a saying and a truism in Wall Street; John Barclay Benton was so honest and reliable that if he said something to you, you could take his word to the nearest bank and draw cash on it. His wildness in his social life had never extended into the business world; he had been just as conservative in his office as he had been abandoned at Pelham Manor, which was why the news of his thieving and his suicide was so great a shock to the city at large.
Sky mentioned this to the lawyer during the phone conversation, but the lawyer simply sighed and dismissed it. "People change," he said. "Your father was growing older and just couldn't stand to face the fact, and his parties grew bigger and bigger and his romances grew wilder and wilder. And after a while the expenses were just more than even the Benton fortune could handle..
It had all seemed like an ugly, unbelievable dream to Sky, even when he had sat in the hotel room in New York and read newspaper account after newspaper account of his father's exposure and suicide, but it did not seem like a dream now. There was nothing dream-like about the bleak blankness of the walls and the cold emptiness of the house, nothing dream-like about the chilling aura of decay and death.
You know, Sky thought suddenly, a lot of newspapers handled their stories with an almost comic touch. They seemed to think it was funny as hell, this fall of a big shot.
After a while, he left the deserted house and walked slowly and heavily back to the rented car.
He was back at the Horace Ross Agency early Thursday morning, and was kept waiting for just a few minutes. Then he was ushered again into the owner's private office.
The old man waved him to a seat, and then sat there beaming at him for a moment as he took it. "Nice to see you again, Schuyler," Ross said. "You'll be happy to know that your former employers responded promptly and favorably. Very favorably indeed. Their reply cables read as much like love letters as references."
"The Italians are an emotional people," Sky said calmly. "And I always tried to give satisfaction when I was with them."
"You apparently succeeded completely," Ross said. "And now let's get down to business."
"That's why I'm here," Sky said. "Do you think you can turn up a job for me?"
Ross smiled, a dignified smile but an attractive one. "Actually," he said, "You have a rather wide choice. Good chauffeurs don't happen to be plentiful in New York; not too many young men seem to want to go into service these days. I don't think, however, that you'll have too much trouble making a choice-there's one open position which stands well above the rest"
"Which one is that?" Sky asked.
"It's with the McNeill family up in Pound Ridge," Ross said. "It's really a particularly good position. Mr. Joshua McNeill is semi-retired and doesn't go out very much, and Mrs. McNeill is an invalid and doesn't go out a great deal either, so you won't find yourself driving them around at all hours of every night. And the pay is particularly good; four hundred a month to start."
"I don't think I want to go as far away from the city as Pound Ridge," Sky said. "Can you tell me about the other openings?"
Ross' shaggy grey eyebrows lifted. "You really ought to give the McNeill position a little more consideration," he said. "Pound Ridge really isn't that far away-it's in Westchester County, after all-it's just about an hour's brisk drive from midtown Manhattan. And the McNeills don't offer a single room for the chauffeur as some employers do-there's a complete three room apartment over the main garage."
"I don't think so," Sky said firmly. "I'd like to hear something about the other jobs, please."
Ross was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. "Well," he said, "there's an opening at the Chatham estate in Westport. But that only pays three seventy-five."
"Westport's a little remote, too," Sky said. "Anything else?"
"How about the Rosenhecht family in Cold Spring Harbor?" Ross asked. "That's out on Long Island. Three seventy-five, too."
"I know where Cold Spring Harbor is," Sky said, "but I think that's almost as far as Pound Ridge. What else do you have, Mr. Ross?"
Ross studied a long sheet of paper on his desk, his lips pursed. He said, after a few seconds, "Well, I've got a much closer one out on Long Island-the Lattimore family in Glen Cove-but the pay only an even three hundred. They're very nice people, though...."
So it was working out, and Sky fought to keep his voice steady. "Glen Cove sounds just about right," he said, casually. "Three hundred a month, you say?"
"That's correct," Ross said, a little anxiously "But there are a lot of added advantages in the job. They pay for all your uniforms, and they throw in a good hospitalization policy, and the place has a particularly good cook-I know, I placed her in the position myself. And the Lattimores also provide a nice three-room apartment over the garage instead of just a single room."
Sky let a full minute pass before he spoke, because he didn't want to blow everything now by appearing suspiciously anxious. Then he said, quietly, "You've sold me, Mr. Ross. What's the address in Glen Cove?"
CHAPTER TWO
He used the hired car to get him out to the Lattimore estate, and there was a tight, humorless smile on his face as he drove. Everything seemed to be working out beautifully. All that remained now was for him to convince the butler, who did the actual hiring, that he was the right man for the job-and that would apparently be a cinch in view of the shortage of capable chauffeurs and the long list of people who seemed to be in the market.
It had not seemed to him that it would be quite that easy when he'd first gotten the idea. He remembered the exact instant the notion had come to him; it was during the flight to New York, and they'd been aloft exactly two hours and he'd been sitting slumped and dejected in his seat and refusing to believe that his father had done what they'd said he'd done-and all at once he'd straightened and sat erect as the thought had struck him. The thought was a simple one: If he was so damned sure that his father had not done what he'd been accused of, why not try to find out the truth for himself?
He'd tossed around the idea in his mind for a long time after that, considering it from every direction, and the first plan he'd evolved was to go straight to Hugh Lattimore, his father's partner and the man from whom J. B. had allegedly stolen the biggest chunk, and ask him a lot of questions and try to trip him up somehow. That seemed like the logical path to pursue if his father hadn't over-extended himself and stolen those stocks and bonds, then Hugh Lattimore had framed him somehow, since he was the one person who would profit directly by getting J. B. out and taking over the firm himself. But Sky rejected that plan not long after he got it, because the man hadn't been born who could trip up clever, fast-thinking Hugh Lattimore with a lot of fancy questions. And anyway, his father's attorneys would already have tried something like that-and handled it a hell of a lot more expertly-while J. B. was still protesting his innocence, before they'd managed to break him down.
The next thought he had was to go to a good, reliable detective agency and hire himself some experienced investigators and see what they could turn up, but he thumbs-downed that one the minute it occurred to him. Hire detectives? he said to himself. With what? Buttons or kitchen matches-take your choice. He sure as the devil didn't have any money.
It was right after that that he got the idea of getting himself a job on the Lattimore estate and seeing what he could nose up on his own, and a first he started to reject this idea, too, as too wild. And then he stopped to think about it a little, and he asked himself; what the hell's so wild about it? For one thing, the Lattimores had one of the biggest estates on all of Long Island and they employed a lot of servants, and he remembered his father remarking all the time that the Lattimores were always firing and hiring someone. It wasn't like the old days, of course, when the big estates had a dozen footmen and fifty other kinds of servants, but the Lattimores had more than most in these days of big income tax bites. There were many jobs he might be able to snag; handyman, assistant gardener, chauffeur, stable hand, something like that.
There wasn't any danger that Hugh Lattimore or his family would recognize Sky. Lattimore and John Barclay Benton had been partners for years, but their long relationship had been strictly business and never in the slightest way social. Although Sky had met the Lattimores two or three times, the last time had been close to a dozen years ago. Sky had changed completely in that time-he'd shot up a full twelve inches, he'd filled out and changed facially while he matured, he'd begun to wear his hair close-cut, and a lot of other things. Hell, look at old Horace Ross III, the employment agency king; Sky had met him more often and more recently that he'd met any of the Lattimores, and the old man hadn't even shown a flicker of recognition when Sky had sat and talked with him at length across a desk.
The plan solidified when Sky checked in at his hotel and called an old friend of his, a boyhood buddy who had been close to both the Bentons and the Lattimores and could be counted upon to keep his mouth shut. The friend commented that the plan was typical daredevil Sky Benton, and he thought it was a waste of time because it was dead certain that J. B had been guilty as hell whether Sky enjoyed hearing it or not. But he gave Sky's plan his blessing if Sky was determined to go through with it, and he mentioned that the Lattimores had recently lost their chauffeur to a higher bidder and were scouting around for another one. So all that remained was for Sky to go to the Horace Ross Agency, because he knew that was the one Lattimore and his father and most of the rest of moneyed New York always used, and hope that the job was still open and he could manage to get himself tapped for it.
And now that, too, had been accomplished, and all that remained was to work things out with the butler.
The butler, whose name was Solloway, proved to be as much a cinch as Sky had anticipated. The man, who later admitted to Sky that he was the first applicant to show up even through the position had been open for nearly three weeks, practically threw his arms around Sky's neck when Sky knocked on the front door. Solloway had been phone by Horace Ross III and had had the glowing reply cables read to him. Sky was hired and shown, with almost fawning courtesy, to his above-the-garage apartment within fifteen minutes after he'd arrived at the estate.
The Lattimores, it turned out, were away on a brief European trip. The butler confided the story of John Barclay Benton to Sky in a mournful, hollow voice, and said the Lattimores had taken the trip right after J. B.'s suicide to "recover from the shock." They wouldn't be gone too long, just a week or ten days, but in the meantime Sky would draw salary and could loaf around and get the feel of the three Lattimore cars and get used to the estate and meet the rest of the staff.
Sky unpacked his clothes after the butler had left him alone in the apartment. He took a shower and changed his clothes and smoked a couple of cigarettes before he went downstairs to look over the estate. It hadn't changed much since he'd been there as a kid. The big main house was as impressive as ever, white Colonial and fifty-two rooms and looking more like a breathtaking public building than a private residence. Behind that, the six not-too-small guest houses for weekending friends, the garages and Sky's apartment, and the rest of the service quarters. After that, the big, rolling grassy stretches and the incredibly colorful gardens stretching out for what seemed to be miles and was actually not much less than that. And all around the estate, of course, the six-foot iron fence with the , sharp spikes on top of each metal post.
Sky took a slow, leisurely walk around the grounds, a walk which took almost an hour, nodding to gardening personnel and other employees he met and grinning to himself when they nodded back with that uncertain look which meant they couldn't decide if he was a stray leftover guest or a fellow-slave. And then, since it was getting to be dinner-time, he went back to the main house and found Solloway and got himself introduced to the rest of the "inside staff"-all the people who worked directly with the Lattimores rather than with the Lattimore's grass and flowers and shrubbery.
It took him no more than a minute to pick out his pigeon: Leigh Morrissey.
He'd decided positively that he needed a pigeon when he'd sat in the hotel room mulling over and perfecting his plan. It was obvious that he had to get help from someone who would be more familiar with the inside of the house than he could get to be in a hurry. This was before his friend had told him about the opening for a chauffeur, but even then he'd realized that any job he might snag would probably not get him into a position where he could easily get inside safes and strongboxes and desk drawers and other places where revealing evidence might be kept. So he'd realized even at that point that he had to catch himself a pigeon, some other servant or employee who was in a more intimate and long-established relationship with the Lattimores and could be persuaded to help him. And, for many reasons, Leigh Morrissey was a perfect choice.
For one thing, she was Mrs. Lattimore's social secretary, and she also doubled as Hugh Lattimore's business secretary whenever he had work to do at home, so there was a good chance that she knew the safe combinations and could find many opportunities to do some quiet digging around. For another thing, she'd been with the Lattimores for nearly four years, so she might even have overheard some things which could help. And for a third thing, and perhaps most important of all, she looked ... vulnerable.
Sky managed to sit next to her at dinner in the servants' wing of the main building. Under other circumstances and in different times, he might have gone after her even if those reasons had not mattered at all because she was very, very beautiful. Tonight, however, he was interested in her solely because she was the possible means to the end for which he had come to the place; but that did not prevent him from being acutely aware of her loveliness, or prevent him from feeling a sudden flush of heat throughout his body whenever her leg touched his as they sat close together at the table.
She was a girl of probably no more than twenty-two or twenty-three, a slim blonde whose pale-gold hair was drawn back severely in a tight bun at the back of her rather patrician head. Her eyes were wide and as dark-blue as Sky's, her nose was straight and just faintly tilted at the tip, and her mouth was dark-red and soft and passionate-looking-a curious contrast with the severity of her hair style. She had the same kind of cool, distant beauty, Sky thought, as the models in the fashion magazines, all except her hot-looking mouth.
But it was only the pale perfection of her skin and that schoolmarm haircomb which gave the impression of coolness, Sky realized after a while. As they ate and talked he continued to study her closely. Her body matched her mouth in hotness, there was nothing cool-looking about that part of her, either. She was wearing a tan sweater and a straight, darker-tan skirt there at the dinner-table, and underneath them Sky could see that her breasts were very large, full and firmly high-thrust and that her hips curved out in inviting wideness below her tiny waist. When she stood up and bent slightly over a nearby buffet-server to put some vegetables on her plate, Sky stared unashamedly and saw that her buttocks were very full and swayed a little with her movements, and her legs below were long and straight and beautifully shaped.
The dinner was slow and pleasantly stretched-out because none of the servants had very much to do with the family away in Europe, and Sky talked almost unceasingly to Leigh and found that it was easy to talk to her. She was, he learned, a Long Island girl who had gone to work for the Lattimores almost immediately after she had left school, and had been with them except for two brief vacations ever since. Although she did not say so in so many words, he got the impression that her own family had once had a lot of money but had lost it while she was still pretty much an infant. She had been practically nowhere other than Long Island except for a couple of trips to Palm Beach with the Lattimores, and a trip to Acapulco on one of her vacations. She listened wide-eyed while Sky told her one little-known and interesting thing after another about Europe. There was a particular reason for her interest; she had hoped to be taken along with the Lattimores on their present trip, and had been very disappointed when they'd decided to go alone.
"I understand their reasons, of course," Leigh said. "Mr. Hugh Lattimore and Mrs. Lattimore-her name's Veronica, incidentally, and everybody calls her Ronnie-recently had a terrible experience. A very old friend of theirs stole a lot of stocks and things from them and killed himself when he was discovered. I guess they wanted to be alone with just the family and no strangers like me along. I suppose their daughter Carol felt the same way-that's the whole Lattimore family, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Lattimore and Carol. But it was still kind of disappointing...."
It hurt Sky to hear her tell it this way, a casual outsider accepting his father's guilt so positively and without question, but he managed a grin. "Well," he said lightly, "if you hunger for Europe so much, why don't you and I get married and take our honeymoon there?"
He meant nothing by it, of course; it was just casual banter, just flirtatious word-play. But he knew the minute he said it that it was a mistake, because sudden frost showed in her eyes, and she was no longer as friendly though they continued to talk through the rest of the dinner. He remembered, all at once, something his father had once said. "It's not the millionaires who are the real snobs, Sky," his father had said. "It's our servants." And how true that was; the caste system in the servants' section of the house was always far more rigid than the caste system among their employers and their employers' friends. A butler would always go to dinner on his days off with other butlers, but never with footmen ... and a chauffeur was many cuts below a social secretary.
He should have realized it, particularly at the start of their relationship, and should not have made so forward a comment even in fun although the whole business of caste was silly as hell, he had to accept the fact that it existed. Realizing it now, he did not press the relationship further that night. When the dinner was over, he said good night politely and went on up to his room.
He saw her again the next day, he was in the garage familiarizing himself with the three Lattimore cars: a Cadillac limousine, a sleek silver-grey Cadillac convertible which was probably used mostly by Mrs. Lattimore, and a pale-blue Corvette which was probably Carol's. Leigh wandered in and stood idly watching him. He had learned a lot about cars in all his knocking around, and the convertible's engine didn't sound right to him and he was tinkering with it when she came in. He tinkered with it for a long while before he looked up and pretended to notice her for the first time, and then he smiled and said, "Well, hi!"
"Hi!" she said back at him, and she continued to stand there while he worked, looking excitingly lovely in a low-cut sleeveless white sweater and white tennis shorts which hugged tightly around her rounded buttocks. After that they began to talk again, and the ice was gone from her voice now and the conversation was again as easy and pleasant as it had been at the beginning of the previous evening.
They went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and continued to talk there for an hour, with animation and genuine pleasure in each other's company. But he did not make the same mistake twice; he kept his side of the conversation pleasant but completely impersonal, then he just said so long and left her, even though he could sense her disappointment. He had good instinct for this kind of thing, and, though she tried to keep it well-hidden, the reason he'd felt she was vulnerable when he first met her was that he had sensed a strong, agonizing loneliness within her. That loneliness showed itself even more plainly now, but he still did not pursue it.
He saw her again at lunch and dinner that day, and he saw her a number of times the day after that, but he continued to keep it impersonal It was only on the third day that he took his next step.
"Look," he said to her, as they were walking out of the room after lunch that day, "Solloway tells me there's a terrific foreign film at the Cinema over in Manhasset-a Japanese film that's won twenty prizes or something. I guess we can all use a break with things so quiet here with the Lattimores away-I wondered if you'd like to go with me tonight."
For an instant, eagerness, astonishingly strong, flared in her eyes, underscoring the feeling he'd had from the start about how lonely she really was underneath that casual, controlled exterior. But then the caste-consciousness took hold of her again, and she slowly shook her head. "No," she said.' "No, I don't think so. But thanks very much anyway."
Sky didn't press it; he was perfectly content to let her loneliness and her standoffishness war within her because he felt certain that the loneliness would win out, and, besides, he'd already learned his lesson about pressing too hard and too fast. "You're the boss," he said mildly, and after a moment he left her and went up to his apartment to read a book and go to sleep.
She raised the subject herself the next morning at breakfast. "How was the movie?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I passed it up," he said. "It didn't seem like fun going all alone, so I settled for a book and early lights-out instead."
She looked distressed. "Oh," she said, "I'm awfully sorry. I didn't mean to spoil your evening." And then, as though she felt suddenly compelled to manufacture some explanation, she said, "It was just that I had a sort of headache, and...."
He cut her off, but he did it very politely and casually. "Forget it," he said. "It wasn't very important." And he was pleased when he knew by the twin frown-lines between her eyebrows that she didn't like that one bit.
He knew, too, that she was expecting him to ask her again, and for that reason he did not do so. He made no attempt to stay away from her, but, when he met her on the grounds or at meals, he was polite but distant, and he knew that the loneliness was building and building inside her and tearing the consciousness of their difference in status to bits. And still he did not ask her again.
He waited three more days, and was secretly amused by the fact that she made all kinds of excuses to come to him in the garage or when he was walking around the grounds. She even came to see him a couple of times, as she'd done that first time in the garage, without any excuse at all. In the late afternoon of the third day, be asked her again.
"Look," he said, "that Japanese film is still playing, and I'm really getting anxious to look at a different view than the Lattimore estate for a few hours. Would you like to come along with me?"
She didn't even try to conceal her eagerness this time, and the fact that she was a secretary and he was only a chauffeur didn't mean a damn thing. "I'd like to very much," she said. "Shall we have dinner here and then go, or...?"
"Let's have dinner near the theatre," he said, and he smiled and let his eyes move deliberately up and down her slim, rounded body.
He used his hired car because he wasn't sure how the Lattimores would feel about his using one of their cars even though they were away, and they had dinner at an intimate, dimly-lit little restaurant on Northern Boulevard. They sat side by side at a corner table lor two, and she didn't seem to mind the fact that he kept his leg pressed tightly against hers all through the dinner. When they went into the movie theatre, the Japanese film turned out to be not much at all despite the rave notices and the umpteen awards, but he enjoyed himself tremendously because he held her hand through most of the picture, and when he freed his hand two or three times he let his fingers brush lightly against the swell of her breast. And she didn't protest that, either.
When the picture was over, they got back into the car and she sat very close to him. He looked at her for a moment, noting the hot, shining look of her eyes, that her red lips were a little apart and she was breathing more rapidly than was normal. He said, "Let's not go back to the estate right away."
"All right," she said quietly, and moved even more tightly against him. He turned the key and started the car. Then he put his arm around her and very deliberately dropped his hand onto the curve of her breast. She did not protest this either, and he began to squeeze the softness of her flesh over her clothing; and as he did so he put the car into motion and drove very slowly along Northern Boulevard, headed east.
The touch of his hand against her body, despite the cloth of her dress and underclothing which separated them, seemed to have an immediate effect. He felt her trembling against him, and then her hand suddenly and tentatively touched his leg and thigh, caressing the muscled hardness of him. She pulled her hand away at once, almost as though she were ashamed of her boldness, but an instant later she had put her hand back on his thigh again.
He began to drive more rapidly, suddenly breathless himself, and just past Syosset he turned off onto a dark and deserted road and drove for about half a mile. It was a road and area he knew very well because he'd discovered it by accident one day long ago, just after he'd gotten his driver's license and was driving all over New York and environs just for the sheer fun of being behind the wheel. He'd taken a couple of dozen girl friends there since that time. It wasn't a lover's lane in the usual sense of the phrase because he'd never run into any other couples there. Sky had always been a loner and didn't cotton to the idea of making love to his women in chorus with a bunch of other guys and dames in parked cars all around him-the place suited him perfectly.
Just about half a mile off Northern Boulevard he turned the wheel sharply and pulled the car in to a small deserted field. He took his arm away from Leigh to turn off the key. The car went silent and he turned toward her again and put both arms around her this time. And her body was immediately pressed hard against him, her breasts soft and warm and exciting.
He put his mouth against hers and kissed her, bruisingly hard, and she returned the kiss with a fierceness even greater than his. The pressure of her soft red mouth increased as he put a hand down between their bodies and began to squeeze and caress her full breast again. As they kissed, her mouth opened and her tongue moved upward and touched his-their tongues caught and began to twist and move and rub together.
They kissed that way for a long time, their mouths and tongues held together, and again Leigh's hand had begun to slide along Sky's leg and thigh, rubbing and gently caressing him. And suddenly Sky pulled his mouth away and said, unable to control the slight tremor in his voice, "Let's get into the back seat."
Leigh nodded assent without speaking and turned to open the door on her side, Sky stepped quickly out of the door near him and moved around the car to open the rear door for her. As she bent to get into the back of the car, he saw the round softness of her buttocks tight against the thin yellow summer dress she was wearing that evening, the crevice between the twin mounds clearly visible. Wild excitement and heat burst suddenly within him like a roaring river released as a dam bursts. When she had sat down inside the car, he moved quickly inside next to her-almost immediately he lay her down gently against the seat and pressed his body down against her.
He kissed her again, hard and bruising kisses in rapid succession, their mouths grinding against each other and their tongues joining again. Then he began very slowly to undress her.
Her dress had big yellow buttons all the way down from its low-cut bodice to the bottom-he opened only the top four, just opening the dress to the point barely below her breasts. Then he lifted her a little and pulled the dress back away from her shoulders and arms, pulling the dress off her arms and below her breasts. Then he let her lie down again.
She lay there looking up at him with her dark blue eyes bright and shining, and it seemed to him suddenly that he'd never seen a more beautiful woman. She either wore a half-slip or no slip at all; he couldn't tell which. Her breasts, rising and falling rapidly with her breathing, looked suddenly huge with only the thin bra separating them from his eyes. Her shoulders, too, were very beautiful, slim and delicate and feminine; the sight of the bra-straps marred them and suddenly bothered him; he pulled them down and let them hang loosely against her arms.
He continued to look at her for a moment longer. He bent his head and kissed the softness of her slim throat, feeling his excitement increasing even more within him as he felt her tremble violently at the touch of his mouth. He opened his mouth and bit the skin and flesh of her throat gently with his strong white teeth-he moved his mouth down, kissing her shoulders and the soft, pale skin above her breasts.
As he did so, he put a hand under her and found the clasp of her bra. He opened it and felt her breasts surge free against him as the cloth of the brassiere loosened. He lifted his head to look down at her again, and with one quick movement he pulled the bra away and tossed it onto the front seat of the car.
Her breasts were even bigger than they'd seemed when he'd first looked at her, even bigger than they'd seemed a moment ago with only the bra over them. They were really incredibly large, far bigger than was usual in a girl of her delicate slimness, but so beautifully well-shaped that they seemed somehow exactly right as she lay there beneath him. They were very white, particularly in contrast with the dark-redness of the wide circlets around her nipples-they stood very firm, up-curved and high-pointed and breathtakingly inviting.
After a moment Sky bent his head again and put his mouth between them.
He kissed the soft moistness between the mounds for a little while, then he turned his head a little to the right and kissed the soft flesh of her breast. She tembled again, violently, as he did so, and her arms moved around his neck and her slim fingers began to caress and stroke his close-cut dark hair. Her arms tightened even harder around him as he moved his head and touched his mouth against her nipple.
He kissed her nipple two or three times, feeling it hardening noticeably against his lips, and then he let it slip inside his mouth a little and he put his teeth against it. He began to bite her nipple gently, so lightly that there was barely any pressure at all; and then, all at once, he closed his teeth savagely and sharply. He knew that this would bring a stabbing streak of pain, and she cried out, but the sound of pain was mixed with the even stronger sound of pleasure. She began to stroke his hair and his face even more caressingly; her own head lifted and she began to kiss his forehead and his hair.
He lifted his hand and put it under her breast, cupping and squeezing it lightly. He moved her breast against his lips and he began to caress it. He heard her suddenly begin to moan, a moan of deep-felt passion-her moans increased in violence as he continued to caress her and move her breast in and out of. his lips.
After a while, he released her breast, and continued unbuttoning her dress. He did this with only one hand, using his other hand to caress her body and run his fingers over her nipples and the smooth skin above. When he'd opened the last button she lifted her slim body and he pulled the dress away from her and threw it on the front seat over her brassiere.
She was, he saw, wearing a half-slip, and he got rid of it at once. He pulled it down over her buttocks, down her long legs and her high-heeled lemon-colored shoes, and added it to the pile of her clothing on the front seat. And then, because it was a warm night and she'd worn no stockings, she lay there wearing only her pants and her shoes.
He did not remove her pants at all; he liked the way she looked just as she was, with the shadow of her slim, rounded body almost, but not quite, visible under the thin pink cloth of her pants. He lifted himself so he could look down at her there, resting on his arm-he held himself that way for a long while, enjoying the delight and the loveliness of her. Then he sat up so he could have the use of both his hands and arms, and put his fingers under the elastic rim of her panties.
He began to move the panties downward. He moved them down with slow-motion steadiness, a fraction of an inch at a time, deliberately teasing himself. He watched-his mouth a little open, holding his breath-as the first downward movement showed her deep little navel, and her flat belly. Then he began to pull them over her buttocks, watching the soft, swaying roundness show itself little by little-finally he saw her complete beauty and all its promise as the panties moved down her slim legs and off.
He did not remove her shoes at all. There was something enticing and exciting about them, about their delicate femininity and the sharp-spike length of the heels. He began to remove his own clothes. He did not take his time about it.
He was wearing a grey-blue suit which could have been a tip-off if anyone had stopped to think about it; no chauffeur on this green earth, however, well-paid, could have afforded one like it. It was, in fact, his best and favorite suit, put together of Italian silk by a tailor in Rome who was so fashionable that he took you on as a customer only if he liked your looks and thought you'd go well with his creations. The suit had cost Sky $475 and he'd worn it deliberately tonight because he knew he looked good in it, and he'd wanted desperately to look good to Leigh. He didn't give a damn about the suit and its fragility now; he pulled off the coat so quickly that he almost ripped it and threw it in a crumpled ball onto the front seat over Leigh's clothes.
Then he pulled off his black-silk tie and added it to the pile-followed up with his custom-made button-down white shirt. His T-shirt came next, and then he kicked off his shoes and slipped off his socks.
He realized that Leigh was watching him hotly as he opened his belt. He changed his pace immediately-teasing her the way he had teased himself with the pulling down of her panties a few moments before. He began to move with maddening slowness, pretending to be having great trouble with the hook until he finally got it open, and then to have even more trouble getting his clothing all the way down. Watching him, her eyes never leaving him, Leigh's slim body began to writhe a little in anticipation on the car seat; her white buttocks twisting against the seat covers, her full breasts trembling and swaying as she moved.
Finally, there could be no more stalling. Sky let his trousers slip to the floor. He stepped out of them and tossed them in front, posing in his shorts for a moment, letting her see the wideness of his shoulders, the flat slimness of his belly and waist and the smooth muscles of his chest. Then, very slowly, he pulled his shorts over his buttocks and down his legs, and he, too, was naked.
He did not move to lie above her immediately; he simply knelt so that his mouth was on hers and his hands held her shoulders and his chest touched her hardening nipples and pressed lightly against the softness of her breasts. The rest of his body did not touch hers at all, and her yearning for him became so strong it was almsot audible. She began to writhe more and more frantically on the seat, her buttocks twisting and turning and her body rushing up toward his.
He continued to resist the call of her. His mouth crushed harder against the redness of her lips, his tongue probed and curled more frantically against her tongue. He took his right hand away from her shoulder and caught hold of both of her breasts and held and rubbed them together with increasing frenzy. Still he did not put his body against hers. He managed to hold off from doing so for nearly ten minutes.
She became wild, almost animalistic, at the nearness of him. She began to sink her small, even teeth in his lower lip as they kissed; her silver-painted fingernails raked up and down his back and tore at his skin and flesh. The twfeting and writhing of her lovely body was like a moving flame beneath him. All at once he could stand it no longer. He moved swiftly to crush completely against her there on the car seat.
As their bodies merged and their arms tightened around each other, their mouths caught again and held-it was as though the car had been struck by the beautiful, searing white flame of lightning and had been lifted high into the heavens. A million stars and suns and moons seemed to explode around them there in the stillness.
They did not speak very much, afterwards, as they moved apart and began to dress. Words were really not necessary; the depth of their emotion was evident in the way they stopped to kiss every now and then and in the way their hands sometimes moved out just to touch each other. It was Leigh who finally spoke first-that was much later-when they were back in the front seat and driving slowly through the night to Glen Cove and the Lattimore estate.
"I guess you think I'm horrible," she said.
Sky half-turned his head, without taking his eyes off the road, and grinned at her. "On the contrary," he said. "I thought you were absolutely wonderful."
He was amused to see sudden color flood her cheeks; h made her look like a kid, like a teen-ager at most. "You know that wasn't what I meant," she said. "It's just that-well, we hardly even know each other. I-I don't even think I've ever called you by your first name." And then she said, in a sort of rushed confusion, "Do your friends call you Pete?"
The tentative question was so odd, so incongruous after what they had just been through together, that he grinned at her again. "Some of them do," he said "But my close friends, my real friends, call me Sky. You know, short for my ... last name. Schuyler."
She did not speak again for a moment and then she said, very softly, as though she were trying it out, "Sky...." Then she was silent again, for an even longer time. Her next quiet words startled Sky so completely that the wheel spun for an instant in his hands. "I love you, Sky," she said.
He was absolutely stunned, and it was not because of the words, because he had heard them often through the years-particularly from girls during and just after an act of passion such as he and Leigh had just had. But the tone was completely new to him, there was a sincerity and simple truth in it which he had never heard before at all. He was so moved by it that he pulled the car over to the curb, turned off the motor and sat there staring at her for a moment.
Afterwards, when he thought about it, he admitted to himself that a quick, ugly thought came to his mind the moment the surprise had passed. After all, he thought to himself, this is what you wanted, isn't it-though maybe just a little more than you expected? You wanted to get this girl under your thumb so she'd help you out, didn't you? Well, buddy, you've got her....
He couldn't buy that even as he thought it, because love, the kind of love he knew instinctively was genuine and real on her part, was something he had not expected or bargained for. Love, real love as opposed to animal heat, was something he'd never known in his life. He'd had many girls through the years who'd said they loved him; possibly even thought they meant it, but what they really meant was they loved the muscled, masculine handsomeness of him and loved to go to bed with him. That had always been enough, enough to keep him happy, because they would always do what he wanted after he got them in that state. That was all he planned and intended, that was all he needed, from Leigh. He had never considered for even a minute the incredible possibility that she might really fall in love with him-real love-love from her mind and her heart, instead of the way it usually was, only from her body.
Somehow, as new as it was to him and as incredible as it was to him, he knew absolutely and positively that this was the real thing for Leigh-not the ersatz emotion which had been dished up to him by all the other women since he'd been old enough to start running around with them. A second ugly thought followed the first one-to try and convince her that he loved her too and really one-hundred-percent pin down her loyalty-he just couldn't get the words out. He knew that, for him, love could not come so fast, had not come now, and might possibly never come at all.
So he did not try to lie to her; instead, he risked blowing the whole thing by trying to convince her that she was wrong. And he did it for a completely unselfish reason, he just didn't want to hurt her.
He looked at her for a moment, put a hand gently under her chin and lifted her head so that her eyes met his. He said, very quietly, "No you don't, Leigh. You just think you do right now because you've had a strong emotional experience and maybe you're still riding the clouds-and because of something else I've sensed in you from the first minute I met you-that you're lonely and probably needed something like this. But you'll feel differently about it in the morning, and I don't want you to kid yourself now that this was anything but kicks for both of us."
Leigh looked at him unwaveringly while he spoke, but then with quiet assurance, she shook her blonde head. "No, Sky," she said. "I know you don't feel the same way about me, and probably it's difficult or impossible for you to understand the way I feel about you, but it's absolutely certain. I do love you, Sky."
He started to speak, but she lifted a hand and put her silver-tipped fingers over his mouth. "Wait Sky," she said. "I'll admit that I've been lonely. It's not much of a life for a young girl, living there on the Lattimore estate with nobody around who interests me even a little-until you showed up. And I'll-I'll even admit that I knew what was going to happen between us when we went out tonight, and I decided to go because I was just so hungry for a little fun. But it changed, Sky-somewhere, sometime tonight, it changed. I found, all of a sudden, that it wasn't just loneliness and it wasn't just hunger for fun-I found that I was in love with you."
They were both silent for a long time after that, and then Sky said, very gently, "I won't try to kid you, Leigh. You're a nice girl, and I think you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life, but I don't feel the same way about you. I don't think it'll ever happen to me that fast...."
"I know that, Sky," Leigh said, "and I'll just have to hope that it will happen to you about me one day. Meanwhile, I think I'm sensible enough to be content with letting it stay one-sided."
They were silent again for a while, then Leigh leaned over and touched Sky's face with her hand. She moved forward and kissed him, very gently. "I do love you, Sky," she said. "I think I'd do anything for you."
She started to move back, but Sky caught her slim shoulders and held her and kissed her, fiercely, bruisingly. He said, "Do you really mean that, Leigh? Would you really do anything at all for me? Or is that just talk?"
"It isn't talk, Sky," Leigh said.
"All right, then," Sky said. "There is something I want you to do for me." He did not speak for a moment, letting the silence in the car build up. "I want you," he went on, finally, "to give me the combinations for all the Lattimore safes."
CHAPTER THREE
The silence in the car became so thick he could almost taste it.
Leigh said, quietly, "I had the feeling you weren't really a chauffeur. You just don't have the look of a professional servant."
"No, Leigh," Sky said, "I'm not really a chauffeur."
"Are you a thief, Sky?" Leigh asked.
The question was so blunt and direct that Sky laughed aloud. "No, Leigh," he said, "I'm not a thief, either. I've taken the job with the Lattimores because someone very dear to me is accused of being one." He took cigarettes from his pocket, gave one to Leigh and took one himself, and lit both. Then he said, "Perhaps the best way to explain it, Leigh, is to tell you that Peter Schuyler isn't my real name-at least, not my complete name. My full name's Peter Schuyler Benton...."
He saw her dark-blue eyes widen. "Benton !" she said. "But that's the name-"
"That's right, Leigh," Sky said. "I'm John Barclay Benton's son."
She continued to stare at him. "I don't understand, Sky," she said. "I still don't understand why you've dropped your last name and pretended to be a chauffeur and taken a job with the Lattimores."
"I've done all that, Leigh," Sky said, "because I don't think my father was guilty. He was always too rigid about things like that-he was almost a fanatic on the subject of other peoples' rights and properties. I just don't believe he'd have done what they say he did under any circumstances. The reason I want the combinations to the safes is that I want to look through Hugh Lattimore's private papers to see if I can turn up anything to prove I'm right."
Leigh took a long drag at her cigarette before she answered. Then she said, very softly and with a note almost like pity in her voice, "You're building up a terrible letdown, Sky. Because he was guilty-there's just no question about it. I read every newspaper story about the case from beginning to end because it was all so close to me, and the case against your father was absolutely open and shut. And I also heard Mr. and Mrs. Lattimore talking about it a lot before they went off to Europe, talking about how shocked they were and about the things the district attorney's office showed them to prove your father's guilt. He did do it, Sky-you've just got to face it...."
Sky shook his head. "Those things don't convince me, either," he said. "Men have been framed with open and shut cases before this. I want to see what I can find out for myself."
"There may be nothing to find in the Lattimore safes, Sky," Leigh said.
"I'd still like to have a look," Sky said.
"That isn't what I mean," Leigh told him. "I mean that the safes in the house in Glen Cove aren't the only ones. I'm sure Mr. Lattimore also has a safe at his office in Manhattan. And don't forget that the Lattimores also have another big house in Palm Beach."
"I don't think there'll be anything at the office," Sky said, "the police and the district attorney's office must have gone over Benton, Lattimore and Company inch by inch looking for added evidence when they first arrested my father. Palm Beach will just have to wait for the time being-let's start with the place in Glen Cove first."
Leigh was silent again for a moment. Then she said, "All right, Sky. I still feel you're letting yourself in for even more heartbreak, but I also realize you won't be content and ready to settle down until you've gone over the whole thing for yourself. This is a good time to do what you want to do, with the Lattimores still away-we'd better get it moving right away because they'll be back before long. I'll give you the combinations and the keys to Mrs. Lattimore's desk drawers right after breakfast tomorrow morning. I'll keep Sollo-way and all the other parts of the house so you'll have plenty of time to yourself."
Sky kissed her again. "I don't have to tell you how much I appreciate this," he said.
"I'm in love with you, Sky," Leigh said.
They did not separate when they got back to the estate in Glen Cove. They went together to Leigh's room and her bed-they lay naked in each other's arms and made violent, passionate love through most of the long, wonderful night.
Leigh gave him the combinations and the desk keys late the next morning, and with cool efficiency, sent the other residents of the house off on distant errands. Then, because Sky said he'd rather do the searching himself and without assistance, she, too, went off, on a shopping tour in Manhasset's Miracle Mile. Sky had the important part of the house all to himself for at least four or five hours.
Knowing this, he did not hurry and take the chance of going too fast; and possibly missing something. He started, because it was the least likely place and therefore just where something important and super-secret might be hidden, with the wall-safe in Ronnie Lattimore's bedroom.
The safe was located, conventionally enough, behind a small Renoir oil to the left of Ronnie Lattimore's big canopied bed, but the safe's combination was not conventional at all. It was not a simple combination of four or five numbers, as was usual with wall safes of this type, but, rather, a triple-combination set-up involving so much twisting and turning back and forth that it took literally five mintues to get open. As Sky studied the sheet of paper that Leigh had given him and moved the dials slowly and carefully in accordance with Leigh's written instructions, hope grew and strengthened within him. This was the kind of combination used by smaller banks and other important strongholds, it indicated strongly that there might be something particularly and unusually important inside the safe.
He got it open, finally, and was not completely surprised to feel that his heart was pounding and his hands were shaking when he reached inside to pull out the rectangular drawer which comprised the inside of the safe. The shaking of his hands increased as he fumbled with the catch of the drawer and lifted the top into the air.
But then, as he bent his dark head and looked inside, his feeling of heart-throbbing anticipation changed to sharp disappointment. There was a reason, all right, for the complex triple-combination on the wall safe-it was not at all the reason for which he'd hoped. The safe contained a small fortune in jewelry, and not really so small at that: an emerald necklace, a diamond necklace, a half-dozen pairs of diamond earrings and a full dozen diamond rings of various designs and shapes, and a lot of other things. It wasn't an incredible collection of jewelry for the wife of a man as rich as Hugh Lattimore, but it was more glitter than most people kept in their homes. Most of the very rich kept their baubles in bank vaults and took them out and used them only on special occasions-it explained, unhelpfully enough, the why of the special precautions with the lock.
That was it, the safe contained absolutely nothing else.
It was a pity, Sky thought with irony, that he wasn't a thief-the haul would have been a beautiful one for a guy interested in that kind of thing. But he wasn't-there was nothing there for him.
He straightened out the contents of the drawer, careful to put the jewelry back in place just the way he'd found it. He closed the safe, flipped the dial to lock it, and carefully wiped the dial with a handkerchief. Then he proceeded to give the room a shakedown, going carefully through every drawer, every closet, and every other possible hiding-place around.
Nothing. Ronnie Lattimore had a lot of beautiful clothes, enough to stock a couple of fair-sized specialty stores. She had lots of interesting and sexy black underwear for a woman who was probably on the wrong side of forty by now. He realized from having seen her pictures in Town and Country, Harper's Bazaar, and other swank magazines in Rome that she was a dish and looked a good ten or twelve years younger than she really was. There was nothing at all that helped him in what he was after-not a letter or a document or a scrap of paper of any kind relating to his father's alleged thefts.
He left the room, and proceeded into the daughter's bedroom, Carol's. She had a wall safe, too, Leigh had told him. That was an even more un-likely place than the mother's, so it was pretty promising. He'd already had one disappointment with Ronnie's safe so he approached this one with a shade less enthusiasm.
He was right in his caution, Carol's safe contained nothing but jewelry either. It wasn't quite as much jewelry as the mother's, but it was still a hell of a lot: necklace and earrings and bracelets and ankle-bracelets and more valuable rings that she could wear on all ten of her fingers. Too much, Sky thought, for a young girl to have and to own. Then he grinned inwardly and sheepishly at his own reverse snobbery, and thought to himself: Who the hell are you to talk? He'd owned thirty-some-odd suits when he was just barely at voting age-was that typical for the average American boy of twenty-one? No, the trouble with all of them in his moneyed class was that they were all spoiled, all of them.
He started to move around the room, opening Carol's bureau drawers and going slowly through the contents. He stopped and whistled when he came across a framed picture of the girl, taken apparently, at the time of her graduation from some plush finishing school like Finch. Man, he thought, talk about dishes. This one was the whipped-cream dessert dish to out-dish them all.
She was a dark-haired girl, with her hair worn unusually long in this day of short haircuts, down to her shoulders and a little below. Her eyes were dark, too, and serious-looking, and she had a cute little nose and a well-shaped, passionate mouth. Her body, too, was right up there at the head of the class; even the demure little white graduation dress she was wearing did nothing to hide the full uppointed look of her breasts, the curves of her hips, and the wicked, sleek length of her legs.
Dish was the word, all right, Sky thought, she's sure grown since the last time I saw her. She'd been not too long out of diapers then, but she was certainly no infant now. She must be-let's see, he thought, twenty, maybe even twenty-one. Well, the years surely did pass, he grinned inwardly at the old gag line, Vive la difference.
It was hard to get his eyes away from the picture, she was that good. He finally managed it and went through the rest of the drawer, her closets and shelves. Her underwear turned out to be far less spectacular than her mother's, much more utilitarian than decorative, but, curiously, he found it far more exciting as he ran his fingers over the smooth silk as he continued his hunt. That was, of course, because of his accompanying vision of the slim, dark-haired girl who was sometimes inside the things. He found himself suddenly wishing fervently that the Lattimores would get their European trip over and get back to Glen Cove so he could see Carol in person again.
He shook the thought off, after a while; there was no time for that kind of thing in his life right now, he continued to search the room. It was no good; he found many intimate, delicately perfumed articles of clothing which succeeded in stimulating and exciting him, but nothing at all connected with what he was after.
His next stop was Hugh Lattimore's bedroom and sitting-room. Neither of these had a wall safe because Lattimore used a big safe in his study-library downstairs. He took even more care than in the women's rooms because perhaps Lattimore wasn't a subtle type who hid things in un-likely places but instead put his stuff exactly where you'd expect to find it-in his own quarters.
Sky went over the rooms with painstaking care, even looking under Lattimore's big, square bed and moving the furniture aside to look in back because an envelope might have been taped onto the floor or the walls. He did find some papers relating to J.B. in Lattimore's sitting-room, though not in an exotic place like under the bed or taped to a wall, he found the sheaf of papers in an open drawer of the little cabinet in the room. It wasn't anything helpful-it was the simple accounting of an open and aboveboard stock purchase Lattimore and J.B. had made together some months before and resold at a substantial profit when the stock went up sharply.
That was it-there was nothing more.
Reluctant to leave the wing, Sky made a round of the other unchecked areas. He looked through linen closets and auxiliary closets and bathroom medicine chests because something just might be hidden there. But he found nothing worthwhile, and went downstairs to the final open area-Hugh Lattimore's study-library.
The safe was as big as Leigh had described it to Sky, so big and ugly that Lattimore kept it hidden behind a false partition among the ceiling-high rows of bookshelves in the room. It was like the safe in a big jewelry store, so big that a hundred important files on John Barclay Benton could have been kept it it-Sky attacked it first.
This safe, he found after he had it open, contained a certain amount of jewelry, too: a case of gold and pearl-studded cufflinks, two Patek Phillipe watches, another with the Vacheron-Constantin label, and several big, handsome men's rings, but most of the contents were papers. Sky lifted these out carefully, lay them down in order on Lattimore's desk, and began to go through them slowly.
There were plenty of interesting things. There was an old will, marked VOID in heavy pen on the front, which contained an extremely substantial bequest to J. B., probably as part of a mutual-will set-up in connection with their business, but which also, surprisingly, contained a very large bequest to Sky himself even though he and Lattimore had not seen each other in many years. There was a new will, completed and dated just about the time of J. B.'s suicide, which no longer listed the old man, of course, but which continued to list Sky.
There are also a great many other papers which mentioned J. B.; Lattimore's private notations of deals made in conjunction with Sky's father, official company records of these deals and others, and correspondence from Benton or carbons of letters from Lattimore to Benton when one or the other of them had been out of the city or out of the country. Ail of these gave Sky nothing at all; they revealed only the closeness and continued success of the business relationship between the two men-a relationship which had ended suddenly and sharply, according to everything Sky had been told, when Lattimore suddenly discovered that his partner had been stealing from him steadily for quite a long time.
Unhappily, and with his hopes almost gone, Sky put the papers back in the safe and closed it, careful to wipe his fingerprints off everything as he had been doing all along. Then he went slowly and inch by inch over the bookshelves. It was slow, dull, torturous work, but in Sky's mind absolutely necessary-if the bookshelves contained one false section which housed the big safe, they might contain another which concealed another hiding-place.
All he got out of it was a lot of dust on his fingers. He lifted out each book in turn, flipping its pages and looking for something inside, then he tapped each section of shelves to see if he could pick up any sounds of hollowness. He found some things inside some of the books, but nothing significant, just some old pieces of paper obviously used as marks in books which were never finished, and one mildly interesting thing; a scorching-hot letter to Lattimore from some woman in Paris which revealed the man was not above having a little side-venture while away on a business trip alone, horsing around when he should have been Bourseing around. But the walls behind the bookshelves were only hollow where they contained the big safe-none of the things Sky found related to his father at all.
That left only Hugh Lattimore's desk.
It was a huge, ornate, mahogany desk. Sky sat down in the big swivel chair in back of it and used the keys Leigh had given him to open all six drawers. The drawers, too, were crammed full of papers. He went through these even more slowly than he had gone through the papers in the safe; this was the last possibility in the entire family wing-it would all have been for nothing if he couldn't turn up something here.
Again, his father's name leaped up at him on sheet after sheet. The business of Benton, Lattimroe and Company had been long-existing, hugely substantial, incredibly complex. Lattimore seemed to keep at least a sheet on the more important deals at home in the proud way that an expert golfer might keep his loving-cups and other awards on his mantelpiece, or the way a big-game hunter might keep his stuffed trophies on his walls. There seemed to be nothing at all, not even a memo or a newspaper clipping, about J. B.'s thefts.
Methodically, but with growing hopelessness, Sky continued to plow his way through the masses of papers in each of the six drawers. He read each paper and each file from start to finish, even though it seemed at first glance to be unrelated to J. B. You could never tell what might be buried deep within an apparently unimportant report or business study. He turned over each sheet to see if anything important had been scrawled and then possibly forgotten on the other side of the sheet. He found nothing in the first drawer-there was nothing to help him in the second or third drawers either.
He turned toward the other side of the desk, pulled open the fourth drawer, lifted out the contents, and began slowly and carefully to go through it. Not a thing. Nor was there anything helpful in the fifth drawer. He approached the sixth and final drawer with deep despair building inside him. A few moments later, the despair was overwhelming and complete, the sixth drawer was equally worthless as far as he was concerned.
He did not leave the desk-chair immediately after he had slammed the final drawer shut again. He sat there for a few moments with his head in his hands, overcome with unhappiness and wondering where he would go from there. All at once, he sat sharply upright-a sudden and possibly important thought had come to him.
Bookshelves, he realized suddenly, weren't the only places you might find secret compartments, they were also frequently built into desks. That was particularly true of desks such as this one, an authentic antique which probably dated back a hundred years or more.
Filled with rising excitement now, he got down on the floor and began to move over the wood surface of the desk with his fingers, tapping with his fingertips and his knuckles every few inches. He hit nothing on either side of the desk below or above the drawers, but when he moved to the back of the desk, he struck pay-dirt almost at once. The first area he struck with his knuckles, below the undersurface of the bottom drawer on that side, responded with a hollow sound.
His breath was suddenly shallow as he moved around to the front of the desk again and eased his lean frame into the area of the desk between the two banks of drawers, the kneehole section, and tapped the comparable section on that side. Again he drew a hollow sound-he slid his fingers along the surface, searching for the telltale slit which would give him the location of the top of the secret drawer. It was well hidden, but, after a few moments, he found it-a small, shallow, secret drawer-so well-hidden that it was approachable only from the uncomfortable position he'd now taken crouched in the desk's kneehole.
Leigh had given him no key for this one, of course; in all probability, she didn't even know that the drawer existed. Chances were that no key was needed for this kind of drawer-secret desk-drawers usually opened by pressure or a spring or button even better-hidden than the drawer itself. He began to move his hand slowly along the underside of the desk and search for it.
It took him nearly fifteen mintues to find it, but he finally did: a faint, barely-perceptible protrusion of dark-painted metal on the opposite underside of the desk. He missed it completely the first two times his fingers slid over the area, but caught it the third time. A tight grin of triumph on his lean face, he pressed the button. The secret drawer sprang open and he quickly put his hand inside.
Paydirt, and then double-paydirt. There was a thin file folder inside the door. He pulled it out into the light and looked at it. That brought the greatest triumph of all, there was a name and designation printed in big bold letters on the flap of the folder: John Barclay Benton-Criminal Prosecution.
Sky sat down quickly on the desk-chair, an eager smile of hope and anticipation on his face, and he began to read. Almost immediately, the smile disappeared from his face, and, as he continued to read, he felt suddenly and violently sick.
The file on his father was the exact opposite of what he'd hoped for. It was the file the district attorney's office had compiled on J. B. for use in their case, probably acquired by Lattimore somehow after J. B. had killed himself and the case had been closed. Leigh had been right, the evidence against the old man had been thorough and damning. There were photostats of the backs of blocks of stock owned by Lattimore showing Lattimore's signature clumsily forged. Many of these accompanied by sworn statements by clerks testifying that the stocks had been turned in to them by Benton but they'd thought nothing of it because Benton was Lattimore's partner. There were financial records prepared by the DA's accountants proving that Benton had been depositing far more money into his private accounts in the past couple of years than he'd been earning-money which clearly pointed to the old man's conversion of other people's property for his own use.
Most damning of all was a one-sheet document which even to Sky's sick eyes meant nothing other than J. B.'s guilt. It was a balance sheet in J.B.'s own neat, familiar handwriting listing each instance in which he had stolen somebody else's stocks.
CHAPTER FOUR
There was no chance to tell Leigh about it until late that evening. After the various servants began to return, she called in to say there was still a lot of shopping she wanted to do, and as the stores were open late that night, she'd have dinner on the outside somewhere and continue her shopping. She returned to the estate, finally, at nearly ten o'clock. Sky was sitting in her room in the darkness, waiting for her.
She sensed his overwhelming unhappiness as soon as she flicked the light switch and, with a start, saw him sitting here. She understood the reason when he told her briefly and bleakly what he had found in the secret drawer in Lattimore's desk. He seemed so shattered and lost-she set out to relieve him and make him happy in the way of women from the beginnings of time-by giving herself to him.
He seemed curiously uninterested when she started. He seemed to have room for nothing more than the struggle for unwilling acceptance of his father's guilt even when she sat down next to him on the bed and put her arms around him and her eager, warm mouth on his. He did not even respond when she slipped onto his lap, tightened her arms around him, and began to move her slim body gently, letting the softness and warmth of her buttocks rub against him.
Finally she stood up, placed herself in front of him and began to undress, baring her loveliness and beauty for him-he still continued to look at her with unhappy, lacklustre eyes. It was only when she had removed her blouse and let him see the full sweep of her large breasts under the narrow, barely-confining brassiere that he began to come to himself again.
She was wearing a crisp little tailored white blouse and a slim blue skirt-looking fresh and lovely even though she'd just spent a long day shopping. She looked even lovelier as she unbuttoned her blouse and revealed the deep tan of her delicate shoulders and arms and the contrasting milk-whiteness of her firm, high-held breasts underneath the brassiere. As Sky watched her with his interest finally awakened, she opened her brassiere and tossed it away from her and stood there before him naked to the waist.
Her body, he thought as he looked at her now, was just amazing. It had been his experience that even the most well-shaped breasts seemed to sag a little when a brassiere was removed-Leigh's breasts were larger and fuller than all the others, yet her soft mounds did not even slip a fraction of an inch when their confining cloth was drawn away. Her breasts remained erect and beautifully curved toward the ceiling, upswept firmly from their meeting with her chest to the deep-red nipples and pink circlets surrounding them.
Sky made a move as though to get off the bed and put his arms around her, but she touched him gently on his shoulder and held him down. His interest was caught now, but she wanted to increase it and strengthen it so that he would not slip away from her into his black pit of unhappiness again. As he understood and sat down on the bed again, she began to move her body.
The radio was off in the room and there was no other music, but she moved as though she were dancing. Her slim body swayed in a smooth and lovely rhythm, her red-capped breasts lifting and falling gently, and her full buttocks moving excitingly underneath the tight blue skirt. She turned several times so he could see the gentle movement of her breasts and the more frantic twisting of the mounds of her buttocks. When she turned back to face him again she took hold of her own breasts. She put her hands under them and lifted them as though offering them to him, her thumbs and forefingers caught hold of her nipples and pinched and squeezed them as she did so.
Again Sky lifted himself as though to seize hold of her, but she whirled quickly away. As he settled down again, she moved a little further and turned her back to him, her buttocks still swaying from side to side. She caught hold of the front of her skirt for a moment and pulled it forward, so the back of her skirt was forced more tightly against her body-revealing the exciting roundness of her buttocks as she increased the circular, grinding movement of her body. She kept this up for a long while, the strain of it causing her to breathe more deeply, and matching the sound of Sky's heavy, excited breathing-finally she stopped the grinding movement and began to work on the buttons of her skirt.
There were three buttons on the left side of the skirt, and though she worked on them as quickly as possible-not using Sky's trick of teasing through slowness-it seemed to Sky that she was taking forever.
It was actually only a few seconds, then the buttons were open and she was sliding the skirt down over her buttocks and legs.
He watched the appearance of her pink half-slip as she did so, watching the top of it appear, then saw more of its pink sheen as it curved tightly over her buttocks and dipped deep into the space between. Finally he saw the bottom of it and the glint of her thighs underneath as the shirt reached the floor and she lifted each lovely leg in turn to take it off. After that she began to remove the half-slip itself.
She put her fingers, underneath the back of the soft, clinging garment and moved it downward, pulling it over the buttocks concealed now only by the thin, transparent little pair of panties. He gasped at the sight of her revealed loveliness, his troubles forgotten now and completely wild and hungry for her. As her slip dropped to the floor and was kicked off he could stand it no longer.
He got to his feet, and, though she tried to wave him away again, he ignored it and moved up quickly to where she stood. She was still standing with her lovely back to him, her blonde head half-turned, looking at him over her shoulder. He reached her and moved against her, his body crushing against her softness, he put his arms around her and his hands on her breasts. They felt even softer and more wonderful to him than they looked, warm and yielding under his grasp. He took hold of both of them and began to crush his fingers into their softness. He heard her gasp with a mixture of pain and enjoyment at the brutal masculinity of his caress. He tightened his fingers even more harshly around the lovely mounds.
Then, still holding and caressing her, he bent his head and kissed her satin-smooth back He heard her gasp again and felt her entire body tremble. He kissed her back again, letting his teeth sink a little into her soft, perfumed flesh-she trembled again even more violently.
He released her right breast and caught both of them in his left hand, squeezing them together and rubbing her nipples with his fingers. He slid his free right hand down her back and caught hold of her panties-with a quick rending movement he tore them away from her body. They tore easily, peeling away from her in long pink shreds, and he continued to pull at the cloth until all of her cover was away from her. When she was completely naked, her body bent a little so that the round curves of her buttocks were thrust upward toward him, he pressed again against her and, still holding both her breasts in his left hand and rubbing his fingers lightly over her protruding, hardened nipples, he used his right hand to undress himself.
He was wearing no tie or coat, just a sport shirt, and he managed to get the buttons open and the shirt shrugged off with just his one hand He was forced to release her after that, reluctantly taking his left hand away from her breasts but still crushed against her with his middle. He quickly pulled his T-shirt over his head and threw it away into a corner of the room.
Then he put his left arm around her again, sliding the hand up from her smooth belly to lift and squeeze each breast in turn. He felt deep pleasure and enjoyment as he pressed his bare chest against her bare back and warmth blended with warmth. He used his right hand again to open his belt and lifted his pressure away from her for a moment to let his tousers drop to the floor.
They fell slowly down his legs and were stopped at his shoes. He lifted one foot and kicked off a shoe and then did the same with the other. He kicked his trousers off and away, and peeled off his socks. That left only his shorts-it was not difficult to get these off with just one hand either.
He was completely naked, and he pressed his body against Leigh again, hearing her gasp at the touch of him and at the muscled strength of his caress. He continued to hold her the same way, his left hand caressing both of her breasts and squeezing them together, and ran his right hand along her smooth back and onto her buttocks. He began to caress her buttocks in rhythm with the movement of his other hand on her breasts, squeezing each soft mound then running his fingers along the deep, shadowed crevice between.
She began to move a little as he did this to her, pressing her body against his body and his hand while he kissed her throat and her back again. Their breathing was deeper and more racking now-both of them completely wild with hunger for each other. She did not mind now the bruising brutality of his hands on her; nor did he mind when she put her arms behind her and began to tear at his skin with her nails.
After a while, she twisted suddenly in his embrace and turned to face him, overwhelmingly feeling the need to kiss him. His mouth welcomed hers gladly, and then-lips met and crushed hard together, their bodies meeting so her breasts touched and flattened hotly against his chest. Their middles sought each other and ground together. As they kissed, he moved his hands again so one hand caressed and fondled her breast and his other hand caught her just under her buttocks and lifted her closer to him.
For a long time, they kissed and held each other this way, their moving bodies pressing and moving against each other, their mouths and tongues clinging together-kissing each other. Then Sky's hard-muscled arms lifted Leigh into the air, carried her over to the bed, and put her down on it.
He did not pause at all this time. Her lovely face looked up at him, her eyes bright, her red lips a little apart, her beautiful body waiting for him-he moved down onto her softness immediately. Their arms moved tightly around each other, their mouths met again, and they were both deep in the abandoned, fiery embrace of passion.
For quite a while afterward, he lay there rested and happy and content. Slowly, little by little, the un-happiness began to move over him again and she saw the bleakness and bitterness begin to appear on his face one more. He sighed and lifted himself so he could look down at her. He said, "Well, Leigh?"
"Well, Sky," she said, mimicking his tone but without cruelty or mockery in it, "you saw the evidence for yourself."
"I know," he said. "Somehow that makes it even harder-spending all those hours trying to find something to clear my father; finally turning up something which seems to condemn him in his own handwriting."
He was silent for a moment, then he said, deep un-happiness in his voice, "What do I do now, Leigh?"
"There's only one thing you can do," she said. "You've got to accept it and learn to live with it-then you've got to forget it"
"I'll never forget it Leigh," he said.
"Of course you will," she said. "You're bitter and unhappy now because you never expected anything like this from your father-because it all happened so suddenly, without warning. You're not the only one in the world whose father committed a crime and went to jail for it, or committed suicide when he was found out." She went on, almost pleadingly, "Other people have managed to live with it, Sky. So can you."
Sky shook his head stubbornly. "There's the trouble right there, Leigh," he said, "right in what you've just said. I don't care about other people's fathers-all I'm interested in is mine. That's the whole question right there, did my father really do what people say he did? Did he commit suicide because he was guilty and got caught-or because he was innocent but knew he'd been framed so neatly he couldn't possibly clear himself?"
Leigh stared at him. "Framed?" she said. "For God's sakes, Sky I You told me yourself that that paper you found-the list of your father's thefts-was in his own handwriting. You told me yourself that you recognized the handwriting positively...."
"I know I said that," Sky said. "But right now I'm not so sure. All of a sudden, I'm beginning to wonder if it's my father's handwriting or a first-class forgery which fooled me the way it seems to have fooled everybody else."
Leigh shook her head wonderingly. "Didn't you say that file you found came from the district attorney's office?" she asked.
Sky nodded.
"Well, then," Leigh said, "that clinches it as far as I'm concerned, even if you're not convinced. The district attorney's office doesn't just accept something like that as evidence because the handwriting looks like your father's. They've got experts to check out things like that--handwriting experts to make sure that it really is."
"I know that, too," Sky said. "I saw the official corroboration with my own eyes. There was also a document from a handwriting expert in that file-positive testimony that my father wrote that paper."
"Then what more...?"
"Just this," Sky said. "I've heard that expert witnesses for the prosecution sometimes see only what the prosecution wants them to see, hot what they ought to see. The prosecution has itself a pigeon and the handwriting on the incriminating paper looks like the pigeon's, so that's good enough for the expert, even if maybe the paper's just a forgery designed to wrap up the pigeon good and tight. Well, I'm not ready to buy it just yet."
Leigh shook her head again, a look of deep concern on her lovely face. "You're letting this become a mania, Sky," she said. "You're trying to talk yourself into things that don't make sense Who do you think is behind this fancy, elaborate frame-up?"
"It ought to be obvious," Sky said. "Let's try Hugh Lattimore on for size."
"Hugh Lattimore!" Leigh said. "I should have guessed-I thought you wanted to go through his papers because you were hoping to find something to clear your father that Mr. Lattimore had missed." She sighed. "That's just absurd, Sky."
"Is it?" Sky said. "Maybe you feel that way because you think of Lattimore as a man whose partner robbed him and who ended up minus a lot of money because not too much could be recovered. But I look at it differently-I see him as a man who got rid of his partner and got full control of a big, thriving business at not too big an investment"
"I still say it's absurd," Leigh said. "You wouldn't think that at all if you'd seen more of Mr. Lattimore in recent years-if you knew him better these days. He's one of the kindest most unselfish, most generous men in the world."
"Sure," Sky said. "I've also read some people thought that about men who turned out to be mass murderers or child-rapists." His misery showed suddenly in deep lines etched across his face, he buried his face in his hands again for a moment. Then he looked up at her, his voice a little more steady, "I know that was unfair, Leigh, and I know you may be completely right-maybe this is becoming a mania with me. But I'm still going to stick around a while and renew my acquaintanceship with the Lattimore family and see what there is to see...."
Leigh looked at him gravely for a moment. "Well," she said, "you won't have to wait very long to do that Solloway told me he received a cable from Mr. Lattimore tonight. The Lattimores are on their way back, they'll be landing at Idlewild tomorrow morning at eleven."
CHAPTER FIVE
The Lattimores, Sky found out a little later on, believed in the old-fashioned lords-of-the-manor bit, and in spades. When Sky left Leigh's room and returned to his apartment, he found a note had been slipped under his door summoning him over to the servants' section. When he got there he found the other servants in full uniform being put through a full-scale parade inspection-standing in line, at attention-being looked over the way the Lattimores would be looking them over when they returned to the Glen Cove estate the following day.
Solloway was a man who had been born to be a butler, he was perfectly type-cast, with a white-fringed bald head, a big, majestic belly, and a frozen look of haughtiness. He had been putting the other servants through their paces when Sky arrived, picking up minor infractions of dress or mannerism and alternately scorching and freezing the others with a look and a word-he'd taken an immediate liking to Sky and his face unfroze and he smiled when Sky walked in.
"Good evening, Schuyler," he said. "I've been waiting for you."
"Sorry," Sky said. "I didn't know about the family returning until I ran into Miss Morrisey just a little while ago and she told me. You want me to join the line-up?"
Solloway's heavy white eyebrows lifted at the irreverent phrase-a lesser man might have fell the sharpness of his tongue-then he decided to smile. "That won't be necessary," he said. "You won't be taking part in it. You'll be taking the limousine out to the airport to pick up Mr. and Mrs. Lattimore and Miss Carol-I just wanted to make sure you knew about it."
"Right," Sky said. "The plane lands at eleven a.m., I gather. I'll be there at a quarter of."
"Better make it ten-thirty," Solloway said, "just in case the plane picks up time. We don't want to keep the family waiting. Would you like to see their pictures so that you can recognize them? There are some paintings and photographs upstairs...."
"No, thanks," Sky said. "I know what they look like." And then, because that was a slip, he added quickly, "They get a lot of play in the better magazines."
He had no trouble at all recognizing the Lattimores at Idlewild.
Hugh Lattimore came down the stairs first, he was so little changed from the way he'd looked when Sky had last seen him, years before, that it was startling. He was older now, of course, probably in his upper forties instead of in the early thirties as he'd been then; the only perceptible difference was that his thick, curly hair was grey-flecked instead of glossily brown and his thin figure had thickened and broadened around the waist. He was still an extremely good-looking man, still a striking figure with his piercing-sharp grey eyes and his carriage so erect that he looked much taller than his five-eight or five-nine.
All in all, he looked so similar to his appearance the last time he and Sky had met that Sky felt sudden concern, fearing that he too, looked sufficiently unchanged that he'd be immediately recognized. But that was, of course, not true, and he also had the advantage that people don't really see uniformed servants-or, rather, see the uniform rather than the servant inside. Lattimore recognized the car and walked over to it, but merely glanced casually at Sky and said absently, "You're the new chauffeur, I take it?"
"That's right, sir," Sky said. "I'm Schuyler. May I have your baggage checks, please, Mr. Lattimore?"
Lattimore handed him the checks and got into the limousine, Sky turned to walk over to the baggage pickup section and get the Lattimores' trunks and suitcases. As he walked, he saw Lattimore's wife and daughter coming slowly down the stairs. He got only a quick glance at them before he had to turn a corner and lost sight of them, but it was enough to make his mouth go dry and his heartbeat quicken. They were both so strikingly beautiful that he'd have stared even if he hadn't had a special interest in them.
Ronnie Lattimore came down the stairway first and Sky's immediate reaction to her was that this woman of probably-past-forty outshone the average girl of twenty. She was a truly beautiful woman-exotic-looking with a patrician, high-cheek boned face, large, dark eyes which slanted slightly at the corners, a lovely nose, and a hot-looking mouth with just a shade of cruelty in it. She was a little taller than average, very slim-bodied, and with just enough maturity in her figure to make it exciting-a slight added fullness in her up-pointed breasts and in her hips and buttocks. In his one quick glance, Sky could sense one other thing; a prowling restlessness in the way she looked at the males around her, the polite, hovering stewards and the male fellow-passengers who walked down the stairs near her.
It was funny as hell, Sky thought, the last time he'd seen her he'd thought of her as an ancient woman-she'd probably been something like twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time. Well, she certainly didn't seem ancient to him now. In his quick, searching study of her as she walked down the movable stairs, his eyes took in everything-her obvious passion which seemed to lie so close to the surface, the ripe fullness of her breasts, the curvature from hip to hip forming an incurved softness in which a man could lie in happiness, the swaying swell of her buttocks as she stepped down the stairs, the sheen of her lovely legs below the skirt of her rather short black traveling dress-and the look of her remained with him long afterwards.
Carol, the daughter, followed her mother down the stairway. In most ways she was a younger carbon copy of her parent. She had the same exotic look, the same high-cheekboned, aristocratic manner, the same slanted dark eyes, delicate nose, and full-lipped mouth. Even her figure was similar; there was none of the subtle maturity, of course, but her slim body, too, curved into sudden, unexpected, exciting fullness at the breasts and hips and buttocks, making her flesh underneath her fashionable striped-grey suit look somehow softer and warmer and more yielding than other women's.
Despite the similarities there was an immediate difference, too-it went deeper than the fact that, as Sky had seen in her picture, Carol wore her dark hair very long, down below her shoulders, rather than exotically braided around her head like Ronnie. Sky sensed the difference at once, yet he could not pin it down and name it. He was able to do so only after they were long out of his sight and he was busy at the pick-up area gathering together the Lattimore baggage. Then, all at once, it came to him. Ronnie Lattimore, he realized, was a stalking, hunting tigress, making no secret of the fact that she was examining the possible prey around her with open hunger; whereas Carol, for all her vivid beauty, seemed withdrawn and inturned and unapproachable.
One seemed to invite with every movement of her so-female body, the other to exude ice and coldness and keep-your-distance. And yet, he thought suddenly, and the thought made him grin, was the second trap really any less effective in its own way than the first? He was damned if he knew which one would be the more exciting choice-that thought excited him, too-he knew his next step in trying to pin down the truth about his father would be to choose one of them, go after her, and see if she knew any secrets she might be wooed into revealing.
He finished gathering the baggage together, got a redcap to load it onto a hand-truck, and help him get it to the limousine and inside the car-trunk. Ronnie and Carol were already inside the car with Hugh Lattimore when he got there, he removed his chauffeur's cap, got behind the wheel, and started to drive off.
His one and only close call came immediately afterwards. He'd forgotten that he might just possibly be recognized, and was pleasantly alternating between watching the road and looking at the ladies' sleek, slim legs in the rear-view mirror. He realized, with a sudden chill, that Ronnie had leaned forward in her seat and was staring intently at his lean, handsome profile. Carol had been too young, of course, to remember him, but Ronnie might remember him easily and he suddenly stopped breathing as her dark eyes moved over his face.
When she spoke, her voice was as unembarrassedly sexy as the rest of her, breathy and husky and almost caressing, but he was too tense now to enjoy and appreciate it. "Your name's Schuyler, isn't it?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am," Sky said.
"You look extremely familiar to me, Schuyler," she said, and she sat there studying him again while he waited for the blow to fall. But then she went on, "Have you ever worked for us before, Schuyler? In some other capacity, I mean-a footman or on the gardening staff or something of that sort?"
He let his breath out sharply. "No, ma'am," Sky said. "I've been a chauffeur ever since I went into service-and I've worked only in Europe until now."
And to his complete relief, Ronnie let it go at that. "Oh, yes," she said, casually. "I remember now-Sollo-way told me when I talked to him on the phone from Paris one day. You were in the Army or the Air Force and you went into service right after your discharge overseas, isn't that right?"
"The Air Force, ma'am," Sky said, and the conversation ended there. Ronnie continued to look at him; a different kind of look now, a look of sudden awareness of his lean handsomeness-that kind of wide-eyed study did not bother Sky at all.
The rest of the trip from the airport to the estate was completely uneventful. He took the Belt Parkway east, turned north along the Cross Island Parkway, and went east again on Northern Boulevard out to Glen Cove Road. Then it was briefly north again to the estate rounds and he could sense that the Lattimores were please with the relaxed smoothness of his driving.
It was during the drive from Idlewild to Glen Cove that he decided to go after Carol rather than her mother.
There were two reasons that he reached this decision: The first was logical and realistic and sensible-it seemed to him that Carol was more likely to know what he wanted to find out than Ronnie. This was, he knew, a curious conclusion to reach, since usually the longtime wife is more apt to know the innermost secrets of the head of the household than the young daughter, but Sky felt positive the opposite situation existed here. His feeling was based on observation and analysis; it was such elementary, clear-cut observation and analysis there seemed to him to be no doubt about it.
He knew soon after he had begun the drive toward Glen Cove that all was not well between Hugh and Ronnie Lattimore, and had probably not been well for a long, long time. It was obvious from many things-Lattimore had popped into the limousine first instead of ushering his wife in, sat stiffly and consciously apart from each other in the car. Even their few minor exchanges of conversation during the ride to the estate carried a definite and noticeable undertone of bitterness and mutual dislike. As far as Sky was concerned, it explained a lot of things.
It explained why the Lattimores bad separate bedrooms, a rarity these days even among the rich-particularly when the rich are both good-looking, relatively young, and apparently healthy. It explained the love-letter to Hugh Lattimore which Sky had read and found surprising-not because Sky was naive enough to think only unhappily-married men had outside affairs, but because Hugh had kept the letter around so I-don't-give-a-damn openly. It explained Ronnie's predatory, unhidden look of hunger toward the men around her-she obviously wasn't getting any attention at home.
Yes, it seemed to Sky there was no question that Ronnie and her husband were living together out of convenience rather than out of love. That meant she might well be less knowledgable about Lattimore's secret maneuverings than Sky was. And it was also obvious, on the other hand, that an entirely opposite relationship existed between Lattimore and his daughter. Toward her father, Carol's coldness vanished; she was loving and attentive, daughterly and obviously genuine in her feelings-Lattimore's joy in life seemed to stem completely from her. So if Lattimore had any secrets and anyone knew them, it would be Carol.
That, then, was one reason, the logical and sensible one.
The other reason was not sensible and logical at aS, and yet, in its way, it was the stronger reason. The second reason Sky decided to go after Carol rather than Ronnie was that Ronnie looked as though she could become interested in almost any man, whereas Carol did not seem interested in the slightest.
This seemed like a paradox, and yet it, too, made a certain kind of sense. His basic motive in going after either of the Lattimore women was to try to get them to reveal the details of the frame-up if there had been a frame-up, and, looking at it that way, either Ronnie or Carol would do. But, he reasoned further, as long as the woman he chose was going to have to be wooed, he might as well choose the more interesting woman-that meant Carol. Perhaps she seemed less experienced, less animalistic than her mother-her slim body was a shade less lush. She had one great attraction which made her win hands-down over her mother-unlike Ronnie, she didn't look easy to get-
It was easier, of course, to decide it than to accomplish it. He thought almost constantly about it in the next two weeks, wondering how to make a mild pass and get it started without risking getting heaved out on his ear, but the opportunity never seemed to arise. Ronnie was around almost everywhere he turned, displaying her lush loveliness in tight halter-and-shorts sets which seemed to grow briefer and more revealing with each passing day, while Carol remained cool and distant and apparently completely incapable of seeing him as a man. It was obvious that, to her, he wasn't a human being at all, capable of excitement and passion and emotion-he was merely an added part of the automobiles, a device to get the cars where she wanted to go without the strain of having to do the driving herself.
In those two weeks, Sky saw Carol perhaps a dozen times. She never once said a word to him beyond the barest instructions regarding where to go and where to pick her up again after she'd been dropped off. He took her into New York City several times and out to see friends in East Norwich and Huntington. Once he even drove her all the way out on the island to see a girl friend in East Hampton. But despite their long hours spent together in the car, she never gave him even the beginnings of an opening. In the limousine, be sat in the chauffeur's position behind the wheel and she sat separated from him by the glass-panel in the back seat; either reading a book or gazing stonily and silently out of the window. Even when he drove the Cadillac convertible on the occasions when she wanted an open-air drive, she sat without speaking in the back seat. On the few occasions when the Corvette was used, the drove alone.
And curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, in view of human beings' insatiable hunger for the apparently unobtainable, Sky's interest in her increased as her own disinterest remained constant and unchanged. He had, plenty of opportunity to look at her through the rear-view mirror during those long, silent rides, and he liked her looks better with each passing day.
She was a little careless and casual in her exposure during the drives, presumably because it wasn't necessary to be modest in the presence of someone who was, after all, less than human and just part of the automobile. He saw plenty to interest him. Once, even though the summer was drawing to a close, it was an exceptionally hot day, and she apparently grew tired of lying around in the air-conditioned closeness of her room. She phoned him to pick her up in the conertible because she felt the desire to have a cool, fresh breeze blowing against her body. When he pulled up in front of the house and she got into the car, it was obvious she'd been lying naked in her room and had simply thrown on a thin dress and nothing more to go for the ride. As he drove along at over sixty miles an hour to keep the coolness and the breeze working, the wind whipped her dress against her body. It revealed, almost as plainly as if she wore nothing at all, the soft uplift of her breast, the flatness of her belly, and the curves of her thighs. The look of her was so exciting and inviting that he almost stopped the car then and there and got into the back seat just to see what would happen. But he knew all too well that she would either freeze him with a stare or yell for the police-so he did nothing at all except keep driving.
Another time, during another very hot day, she wore a skirt and blouse. She had unbuttoned the blouse so far down that he could see she wore no brassiere. He saw the swell of her full breasts so clearly that even the redness of her nipples was completely visible. In any other woman-particularly in her mother's case, such flagrant exposure would have been obvious invitation. But with Carol it was equally obvious, from her cool and absolute indifference to his presence, that it was not invitation at all-it was simply regard for her own comfort and he just wasn't important enough for it to matter if he happened to see more than he should. On one other occasion, the long trip to East Hampton, her dress rode up well over her knees as she got into the car. He spent the hour-and-a-half drive staring in the mirror at the softness and whiteness of her thighs and the lovely shadows above-again he knew this meant nothing more than that she had no interest in, or concern about, his presence at all.
It bothered him, it bothered him plenty because the experience of complete indifference toward him on the part of a young and healthy woman was an absolutely new and unpleasant one to him. It had literally never happened to him before in his life. Ever since he could remember he had attracted every woman he met, and if there was ever indifference in the relationships, it was in those instances where some of the women were not his type, and then strictly on his part. But Carol continued to regard him as though he were either completely transparent or five-one, four hundred pounds, and Cyrano-nosed-rather than tall, lean, and handsome. He found himself thinking about her and aching for her even when she wasn't in sight. He thought of her in the wee hours when he was alone in his apartment and should have been sleeping, and when he was spending the night in bed with Leigh and should have been thinking of no one else.
At the end of two weeks, he was so wild with need for her that he was constantly frantic for an opportunity-any kind of opportunity, to try to make it with her. And suddenly, without warning, the opportunity came.
He was in his apartment that evening, lying on his bed, smoking, and trying to watch television. He found his mind returning to Carol, to the slim loveliness of her body, when the phone rang. It was Solloway on the phone to tell him Lattimore wanted to see him immediately in his study. Sky put on his tie and his chauffeur's coat and went right over.
He knocked on the door of the study and was told to come right in. He walked into the room and said politely, "You wanted me, Mr. Lattimore?"
Lattimore nodded. "Yes, Schuyler," he said, "I did. Thank you for coming right over. I wanted to tell you the family and I have decided to go down to Palm Beach this week-end. You've been informed, I take it, that we usually spend our falls and winters at our place there?"
"Yes, sir," Sky said. "But I understood from Solloway and Miss Morrissey that you usually go down there much later in the year."
"We usually do," Lattimore said. "But-well, I'd rather not go into details-we had a very unhappy experience recently. My wife and daughter are restless again and I think they'd like another change of scenery. So we'll be going down to the Beach now instead of late October or early November as usual."
Sky had to struggle to keep from showing his sudden elation, to keep his face in its standard look of chauffeur's impassiveness. He felt completely happy at the news. As he'd discussed frequently with Leigh, there was the chance, even though the things he'd found at Glen Cove had blackened the picture against his father rather than lightened it, there might be something hidden in the Palm Beach house which could do exactly the opposite. He didn't know how good the chances were, he wasn't even sure Lattimore had gone down to Palm Beach in the period since his father had been accused and arrested. It seemed like a logical possibility, and the hope of getting down to Palm Beach and shaking down that house was one of the main reasons he'd stayed on the job.
He managed to hide his feelings completely, and said casually, "I understand, sir. When will you be wanting me to drive all of you down?"
"Not all of us," Lattimore said. "I don't spend the entire period down there with my wife and daughter, I've got a business to attend to here in New York. I fly down most week-ends, spend a couple of weeks or so there around Christmas and New Year's." Then he added something in a sudden burst of man-to-man fellowship which started Sky's heart pounding fiercely. "I'll tell you confidentially," he said, "I'm personally not exactly crazy about Palm Beach. I spent a week-end down there a couple of weeks before we went to Europe, and, even off-season, the place is beginning to get so damn crowded it looks like Coney Island. But Mrs. Lattimore and Carol like the place, so I maintain the house there and get down myself now and then."
"I understand, sir," Sky said again, this time he meant it in more than one way. He understood, all right-he understood that Lattimore's recent week-end at Palm Beach meant he'd had the opportunity to stash away evidence which might be favorable to J. B. His eyes glittered suddenly as he stood there looking at the man.
"Anyhow," Lattimore said, "I won't be going down there right now and Mrs. Lattimore doesn't like long drives so shell be flying down. But my daughter feels she's had enough flying for a while, after our European trip, so you'll be driving her down."
Suddenly Sky's heart was beating twice as hard and fast as before. His mouth felt completely dry-this was going to be the opportunity if he was ever going to get one. It was one thing for Carol to look right through him and appear unaware of his presence in those trips into the city and around the Island, but this would be entirely different. Even the longest of those trips was less than a couple of hours. But this trip, figuring there'd be stops for meals and she wouldn't expect him to have the gas-pedal jammed to the floor constantly, would take a couple of days, maybe even three. She wouldn't be able to remain silent and aloof from him all that time. Once he got her to talk, possibly even to sit next to him, he was confident of his ability to move it from there.
There was a faint smile on his face, even though he tried to fight it off. Then he had a sudden thought and the smile vanished completely-maybe he was taking too much for granted. Maybe the two of them wouldn't be alone because Lattimore would also be wanting him to cart along some of the other servants. He asked casually, "Which car do you want me to drive, Mr. Lattimore?"
"The Corvette," Lattimore said, and Sky felt complete relief, because the Corvette was just a two-seater. He felt more than relief-he felt such wild excitement and heat that he was suddenly weak with it. Because the Corvette was a two-seater meant Carol would be sitting next to him during the entire long trip-very close to him at that, the Corvette's seats were small and jammed together. He hardly listened as Lattimore went on, "The reason for the Corvette is it's a hell of a long drive, and Carol will want to spell you. She won't drive any car but her Corvette. Solloway and some of the other men will come down in the limousine. Miss Morrissey, my daughter's maid, my wife's maid, and the cook'll drive down in the convertible."
Sky shook himself awake, away from the vision of all those hours and days alone with Carol close to him and next to him. "Right, sir," he said. "What day this week-end will we be going down?"
"My daughter wants to leave bright and early Saturday morning," Lattimore said. "You'll have to stop over for a couple of nights, of course, I've had Solloway take care of the reservations-you'll have to check with him about that. Carol wants to be sure to be there Tuesday morning-she wants to have the day to rest up and take it easy, there's a party she wants to attend that evening."
"'I'll check with Solloway right away, sir," Sky said.
His steps were light and happy as he left.
CHAPTER SIX
He was waiting for Carol at eight o'clock Saturday morning and she looked lovelier than he had ever seen her before. She wore no make-up at all and the freshness of her skin and natural redness of her mouth gave her a virginal look. They made her seem more desirable than ever. She had her long, shiny black hair done up in a ponytail which hung down well below her slim shoulders, almost to her waist. She wore a comfortable travelling costume-a sleeveless, light-blue blouse and darker-blue slacks that emphasized the beauty of her figure. The blouse was tight against her breasts and showed their soft, upthrust fullness, the slacks showed the lush curves of her buttocks and the delicate incurve of her thighs.
Sky was breathless before the trip began. His breathlessness increased as he maneuvered the Corvette onto the Long Island Expressway and into Manhattan and then through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey on the first leg of the trip. Perhaps Carol recognized that they'd be constant companions for a long period of time and might as well get to know each other, or perhaps the trip away from the estate freed her in some subtle way from her feeling of icy superiority. Whatever the reason, Carol began to unfreeze almost the moment the trip began.
She actually smiled and said, "Good morning," when Sky opened the door for her. To Sky's surprise and pleasare, she opened the conversation herself after they'd started driving. She asked if he'd ever been to Palm Beach. Though he'd been there a number of times in his early teens before he'd decided he didn't care for the place, he knew that wouldn't fit in with his ficticious biography of Schuyler the chauffeur and said No.
"You'll love it," Carol said, her dark eyes shining. "It's the most pleasant place in the world-relaxing and exciting at the same time-much nicer than Palm Springs, Southampton, the Riviera, and all the other places." She proceeded to give Sky a long and glowing description of the joys of the town, forgetting in her enthusiasm that most of the items she detailed-the parties, the sports activities, and the clubs-were far beyond the financial and social reach of a chauffeur.
And as she talked animatedly, Sky gave only the barest attention to the road and mostly watched her; overwhelmed by her vivid beauty. The spell of her descriptions brought excitement to her, making her up-pointed breasts rise and fall bewitchingly-and the way she sat, with her legs rather wide apart, made Sky think constantly of the incredible pleasure which could come from lying between them.
On each side of the car, there was interesting and beautiful countryside, soft-swaying greenery which would have given Sky pleasure at another time, but now he was hardly aware of it. He thought only of the slim, lovely girl next to him, so close that the movement of his hand just a few inches could make him touch the softness of her breasts, the flat smoothness of her belly, or the rounded warmth of her legs and thighs. Right now, he knew, those few inches were like a hundred million miles. A touch like that, even m apparent accident, might well explode his chances permanently. But there was promise for the future, enough promise to turn the pit of his stomach into a tight, twisted ball of excitement, and the promise grew as the hours passed and they continued to talk with growing intimacy.
Toward noon, they stopped at a pleasant, clean-looking roadside restaurant which looked like a good place for lunch. There was a little awkwardness then; Sky had been given two hundred dollars for expenses but he'd forgotten to ask, and hadn't been told, if he was supposed to escort the lady in to meals or dine apart in family-vs.-servant manner. Carol resolved the question by smiling up at him and saying she hoped he wouldn't mind having all his meals with her but she just hated to eat alone, and he said with sincerity that it would be a pleasure. They went happily together into the restaurant.
The place wasn't much on the inside, but the tables for two were all against the walls and they had to sit close together side by side, so Sky loved it. Carol's slim softness was pressed hard against him from the thigh up. As the lunch progressed she made things even better. Accidentally, once, their legs touched and she moved her leg away only very slightly, so he continued to feel the warmth of her even below the table for the rest of the meal. Several times in the course of the lunch, she reached for salt and other things at the same time he did. When that happened their hands touched and she kept her slim fingers unmoving and in the same position for a few moments. After a while, of course, she moved her hand away but his entire body tingled long after each touch.
It was one of the most pleasant meals he'd ever had in his life. They had only light things; sandwiches and coffee and Danish, but they lingered there for more than two hours, talking and laughing and looking at each other. Sky's hunger for the slender, beautiful girl next to him grew so strong he became almost faint and dizzy with the need for her.
It was almost two-thirty when they went back to the Corvette. The bucket seats of the car kept them apart but Carol managed to sit on the side of her seat so he continued to feel the warmth and closeness of her. She still hadn't exactly thrown herself into his lap, he realized, but that was too much to expect. After all, she was Hugh Lattimore's daughter and he was just the family chauffeur. Give it time, he told himself, give it time....
The excitement continued rampant within him, and, as they drove along, she continued to give him subtle encouragement. She asked him for cigarettes a couple of times-when he held them out to her she took them, touching his hand each time far more caressingly than was strictly necessary. When he held the lighter for her, she leaned over toward him, over the barrier which separated them. She leaned over much more closely and intimately than was necessary to get a light. When they stopped once to get out for a few minutes and stretch he sat down on an old fallen log. She didn't move away from him, but sat down on the log too-as close together as they'd sat in the restaurant.
It wasn't quite invitation enough there for him to try anything, and they got back into the car again without occurrence. He found his thoughts more filled with her than ever-he wondered if he ought to try another phase of maneuvers now, something really bold like stretching out his right arm and accidentally-on-purpose touching her leg or her thigh. Bold was the word for it, all right, bold as hell even if he made it seem completely accidental she might blow up about it. He wouldn't ordinarily have tried anything like that at all so soon. But she had, he felt sure, been encouraging him in a lot of different ways. So should he or shouldn't he? He just didn't know.
He didn't rush; he thought about it long enough to let twenty more miles roll by, wondering whether or not he ought to risk it. It was a pleasant, breathtaking, exciting prospect-if those little accidents on her part had been invitations, then she might let it go on from there-before long he'd have her lovely body in his arms and under him. But it was also dangerous....
He continued to think about it Then, finally and with regret he decided against it. It was just too damn risky. There was just too much chance she might consider the action over-forward and pretend she hadn't been encouraging him. She might get sore and possibly even fire him. He just couldn't take the chance. There was too much at stake-the chance of clearing his father and getting into the sack with her if he didn't rush it and blow it And he told himself again, Give it time....
He began to count the hours. It was a little after three-a few hours from now it would start getting dark. When it grew dark the fifty miles an hour he'd been averaging would sink to forty then thirty and twenty.
Finally he'd be crawling along because the roads would be unlighted and unfamiliar, it would obviously be too dangerous to speed. When they reached the hotel where Solloway had made reservations for the first night they'd both be pretty cramped and tired. They'd welcome the opportunity to end the creeping drive and bed down for the night.
There, perhaps, would be the big moment: Solloway had undoubtedly set up the reservations to fit their relative stations-a nice suite for Carol on an upper floor facing the best view and a crummy little single room off the alleyway on an entirely different floor for Sky. But if Carol were worn out enough and left everything in Sky's hands, he could easily manage to change things around to get side-by-side rooms with a nice, convenient, connecting-door between.
The miles flew by. They had taken the New Jersey Turnpike all the way across the Garden State across the Memorial Bridge into Delaware-then driven through Delaware into Maryland. They'd skirted Baltimore and Washington and moved into Virginia. It was late in the afternoon when they stopped for a drink at a pleasant little bar in Richmond.
That meant they were not too far from their destination for the first night, Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Sky's AAA triptik showed it about a hundred twenty miles away. Going at a good speed, Sky could have made it in a couple of hours or so, but it was getting dark and he slowed down deliberately. He slowed down so the time seemed to drag and the trip became more and more tiring. He dragged along through a lot of little Virginia towns, Carson and Stony Creek and Jarrattand then the Corvette had crossed the state line and they were in Pleasant Hill, North Carolina.
It was just a hop and a skip to Rocky Mount from that point, perhaps forty-eight or fifty miles, but he made it last. "These roads are murder at night," he said once, as if to himself, and he let the car slide down to a slow, boring pace. When Carol's face showed sudden impatience, coupled with a look of anxiety which he took to indicate a strong desire to end the ride and get into that hotel, he slowed down a little more and really worked at tiring her out.
But, inevitably, the Corvette reached Rocky Mount and the Claridge, the hotel at which Solloway had made their reservations. It was then that Sky got his first surprise. He was pretty tired now himself-he could not hold back a sigh of relief when he saw the hotel down the street. Carol did not match his sigh and as he started to pull up in front of the hotel to leave the car in the doorman's care, Carol touched his arm.
"Don't turn the car off," she said. "Keep driving."
He showed his surprise, and he tapped the brake and turned to look at her. "What was that, Miss Lattimore?" he asked.
"I said keep driving," Carol told him. "Stay right on 301 until it changes to 95, and keep going."
He continued to stare at her. "But I don't understand," he said. "This is The Claridge in Rocky Mount right alongside us, Miss Lattimore. This is where Sallo-way made our reservations...."
Carol said a single word, a word so unexpected that it shocked him. "Solloway works for me," she said, "not the other way around. I want to go or. to Fayetteville."
Fayetteville was the next fair-sized town along the way, and for an instant Sky felt a surge of hope-perhaps this was her way of going along with his ideas of the pleasant way the night might be spent. Perhaps she was ill at ease at the idea of getting involved with her chauffeur in a hotel where they would both be registered under their own names and was suggesting Fayetteville where they could shack up in pleasant anonymity. Even as he thought it, Sky knew that was not the answer. Carol wanted to get to Fayetteville for some reason which was strictly her own and in no way concerned with him. It was all too evident because the intimacy which had begun to grow between them was suddenly gone. She was again as cool and disinterested as she had been before the trip.
He knew, all at once, that it had to be Rocky Mount if there was to be a chance for him at all, and he said, lamely, "Fayetteville's about a hundred miles away, Miss Carol. I'm pretty tired...."
"I'm not," Carol said coolly. "Just move over and let me take the wheel." So what he had mistaken as tiredness on her part had just been boredom. What he had hoped was anxiety to get into the hotel alone with him had been anxiety and eagerness for something else-or someone else-entirely.
He made one more try. "We don't have reservations in Fayetteville," he said. "We might drive all the way there and find-"
Carol cut him short. "Don't worry about it," she said. "We won't end up in the street. Fayetteville isn't New York during buyers' week, it never gets that crowded even with Fort Bragg right there will all its visitors. Anyway, the people I want to see practically own the town, they'll see we get places to sleep." She tapped his shoulder impatiently. "If you'll just slide out from under the wheel and come around to the other side," she added, "I'll take over."
Sky looked at her bleakly for a moment, and then he shrugged. "I can manage if you're as anxious as all that," he said. And he put the car into gear again and drove off down the road.
He went along more rapidly now because there was no point in pretending any longer that the darkness was slowing him down. He drove more than twenty miles before either of them spoke. And then, because he felt a sudden urgency to know who it was she was so anxious to meet, he asked, "You say you have friends in Fayetteville?"
Carol nodded. "Yes, I have," she said. "There's a girl I went to school with ... I phoned her yesterday and told her I'd look in and say hello while we were passing through."
Again Sky felt a surging rush of hope-it was just a girl friend she was going to see, not a man. It was innocent, after all; that meant he still had a chance. These school friendships never carried over afterward. When she'd had her visit and gotten herself supremely bored and headed back to the hotel, he'd be there waiting for her.
The towns moved by, and once, when they stopped for a light, he studied the road map so he could tick them off as they passed: Micro, Seima, Four Oaks, Benson, Dunn. Then they were passing Godwin and Wade and heading into Fayetteville.
He pulled up in front of a fairly good-looking hotel, the King George. Sky got his second disappointment when Carol walked to the desk ahead of him and made the necessary arrangements. She took a suite for herself and a single room for him-strictly not together or connecting. But at least the two accommodations were on the same floor-he managed to be philosophical about it. Maybe she'd selected accommodations apart from each other because she didn't want to be obvious about it. As for the fact she'd gotten herself a suite and him a room, well, that was just her way, the way she'd been brought up. She couldn't help herself if she was spoiled. Or perhaps it was because, despite the fact he wore no uniform for the trip, she felt people would realize he was her chauffeur, and it would look funny if she got him a suite, too.
It was strictly wishful thinking. As two separate bellmen picked up their bags and moved off with him, she turned toward him and said coolly, "I'll be going out to have dinner with my friend and her family after I shower and change. They'll pick me up, so I won't need you again this evening. You're free to do whatever you want."
He looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he said, a little stiffly, "I guess I'll have some dinner, too, and maybe take in a movie. Shall I wait up until you get back?" And when she looked at him with raised eyebrows, he said, "I mean-to see that you've gotten back safely."
He thought he saw, then, faint mockery in her eyes. But she merely said mildly, "That won't be necessary. My friend and her family will see that I get back safely." Then she had turned on her heel and walked away from him without looking back, following the bellhop who carried her bags.
It took him less than twenty minutes to shower and change. He went down to the hotel's nondescript dining room and had a tasteless, soggy, and solitary dinner. After that, he walked out to the street to a nearby movie without even stopping to notice what was playing.
He stood looking after her for a minute. And then, slowly and unhappily, he went to his own room. The picture was a moronic mess but anything would have seemed that way to him in his present mood. Ten minutes after he'd entered the theatre, he got up again and left, scowled at the puzzled stare of the ticket-chopper, and he went back to the hotel.
His cubbyhole of a room didn't have a television set but there was a radio. He snapped it on even though he could get nothing but dismal mountain music on every station. There was nothing in the room to read except the Gideon bible and the telephone directory; he hadn't thought to put a book into his baggage. He slumped down in the chair and closed his eyes and listened to the mournful yowling from the radio.
The minutes crawled by. He'd come back to his room at around nine-thirty, and, after what seemed to be three hours of sitting there in the chair, he looked at his watch and it was ten minutes to ten. Then another year passed-it was ten-fifteen and after a century or two-it was eleven o'clock. Somehow it got to be midnight; and at twelve-forty, though he was not particularly sleepy, he fell asleep.
He woke with a start at two a.m. The radio station had signed off for the night-it was probably the sudden silence which awakened him. He sat upright in his chair and stared around him, bewildered, still half asleep, and uncertain as to where he was. Then he saw the Gideon bible, the Grand Rapids-rejects furniture, and he remembered and groaned.
He reached into his pocket, found a cigarette and lit it. Then he stood up, stretched, and began to pace the room. There wasn't much area in which to pace-just a few steps forward to one wall, about-face and a few steps to the opposite wall. He began to move with increasing unease as the memory of the long day with Carol returned to his mind. And suddenly the picture of her vivid loveliness was in front of him as clearly as if she were standing there.
She was a beauty, all right, no question about that. In his mind, he saw again her soft, long, dark hair; hair which looked as though it would be exciting to the touch-her sparkling, dark eyes, her cute little nose, and full-lipped, passionate-looking mouth. As he pictured, he paced back and forth even more clearly, the breathtaking, exciting beauty of her body-the fullness and erect firmness of her breasts, the way her waist dipped into such incredible narrowness then swelled out again into the inviting wideness of hips and thighs, and the way her buttocks jiggled a little when she walked. The way she'd walked in front of him as they'd entered the hotel-the sleek length of her legs....
What the hell was her angle, anyway? What the hell was it with the superior coldness before the trip-and the way she kept touching him in the restaurant sod the trip-then the coldness all over again when they reached Rocky Mount? Could those touches and those pressures all have been accidental? The way she let her hand touch his all those times, the way she kept her leg and her thigh pressed tinglingly against his in that roadside place? It just didn't make sense. But if it didn't, then what did?
She must be back in the hotel again by now, he thought. The thought of her alone in a hotel room so close to his-just a matter of perhaps twenty feet-increased the growing heat within him. He pictured her suddenly lying on her bed in her suite down the hall, wearing pajamas perhaps-tight around her slim body, revealing the lush curves of her buttocks, the deep crevice which separated them, and the upcurved hillocks of her breasts-or perhaps even gaping open a little at the blouse so a lovely red nipple peeked out.
Or perhaps she wore a nightgown, a dinging silk nightgown that traced the lines of her breasts, her flat belly, and the desirable in turn below. A gown that could be lifted easily and quickly to reveal her trembling, pale-skinned loveliness. Perhaps she was even in bed wearing nothing at all-just lying there naked with her firm breasts high-pointed toward the ceiling and those long, slim legs a little apart....
He wondered, Is she wide-awake right now, like me, or fast asleep? If she's awake, is she lying there wondering why I haven't come over there-why I haven't come knocking on the door, or just turning the knob and walking in? There had been that funny little smile on her face just before she'd walked away from him in the lobby-that one little smile even though the rest of her was all coldness and queen-to-vassal again. Was it a smile of invitation? Was she trying to tell him she'd be waiting for him when she got back from her visit with her friend-waiting for him to come into her suite and take her?
No, he decided savagely, she wasn't trying to tell him any goddamn thing of the sort. Those rubbings and touchings against him might not have been accidents-it was possible that she had begun to develop a yen toward him during the trip. The return of her distant attitude made it clear that she'd remembered her place, and his, and dropped the whole bit. If he gave in to his impulse, tried to go into her suite; she'd probably belt him with a night-table and call the police.
He lit another cigarette as he continued to walk back and forth in the narrow little room. The heat continued to build inside him; he had another idea, another notion of how he might put himself at ease. What about calling the desk and asking the bell captain to send up some local talent? But that, he realized, was no good either. This just wasn't that kind of hotel; despite what the cynics say about it, there are some hotels where you can't call for a woman as casually as you can for a glass of orange juice. If he tried anything like that, the bell captain was likely to call the police-or, even worse, call in the local ministry to give him a sermon on die importance of a return to continence and decency.
The time passed even more slowly now. He lit a third cigarette, and then one more, and the time crawled slowly by ... At five past three he reached for another cigarette and crushed the pack angrily when he saw it was empty. He went swiftly to the door and out into the hall, closing the door softly behind him.
If he'd been asked where he was going, he'd have answered without hesitation, and almost believed it, that he was simply going out to try to find a place open where he could buy himself a pack of cigarettes. It was, after all, the tail-end of Satruday night. Even though this was a quiet Southern town and not New York, Saturday night was a big event here and there might be some ginmill or other place still open where he could find a cigarette machine.
Although he had almost convinced himself that cigarettes were his purpose when he walked out of his room he did not turn toward the elevator, or the steep stairway alongside it. He turned, instead, in the opposite direction-toward Carol Lattimore's suite.
There was no one else in the hall-no sound of movement or activity in any of the rooms-the residents of the floor had obviously bedded down for the night The proprietors of the hotel, in a burst of economy, had dimmed the hall-lights so severely he could barely see the end of the hall ahead of him. He moved forward slowly and cautiously. He stopped and stood in the near-darkness in front of the door to Carol's suite.
For an instant, he almost turned and headed toward the stairway-almost driven by fear of the possible consequences to going out for cigarettes after all. Then one of the pictures he had had of her returned to his mind-the picture of her lying naked on her bed, her red-tipped breasts upthrust, her belly and thighs gleaming-white, and her legs moved a little apart. He moved closer to the door and lifted his hand to knock.
He stopped again, his knock on her door might do more than rouse her. In the dead silence at the hour it could also rouse the test of the residents on the floor. It didn't seem like a likely possibility, but the thing to do first was try the knob and see if the door was open.
Without much hope, he lowered his hand to the doorknob and turned softly. The door swung open in his hand.
All at once, his heart began to beat so rapidly he found himself choked and struggling for breath. He fought for logic and realism and told himself fiercely, Don't jump to conclusions. It may not mean anything at all, she may have just forgotten to lock the door.
But it might also mean, he knew, that she was lying there in the darkness of her suite and waiting for him. He felt his body trembling uncontrollably as he stepped inside and closed the door noiselessly behind him....
He did not move for a few moments-the place was pitch-black, not even a ray of moonlight to show the way. He was sure to bump into something and send it tumbling butt-over-teakettle if he tried to move forward at once. He stood there, silent and still, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness-after a while he began to see the things around him.
The door did not open right into Carol's bedroom. He had entered into a big, spacious sitting-room. It was furnished in far better taste and style than his single room; full of big, ornate French provincial pieces. He was able to see them clearly enough to avoid them as he moved forward again. He moved slowly and carefully, headed for the room which adjoined the sitting-room, Carol's bedroom. He was so wild with heat and hunger for her now that he felt almost ill.
He reached the entrance to the bedroom, and stopped to allow his eyes to adjust to the even deeper gloom. This room fronted on the main street and it should have been filled with starlight and moonlight, but the shades were pulled all the way down and the room was in absolute darkness.
It took even longer this time. At first, he couldn't see into the bedroom at all, it seemed to him it wasn't going to change no matter how long he stood there. Then, very slowly, the blackness of the room seemed to fade little by little; gradually he began to see. There were just dim, bulky shapes of furniture for a while-then shapes melting slowly into details.
As he stood there, Sky leaned forward and stared, barely able to control himself in time to keep from crying out. He had to hold onto the door-jamb to steady himself. He felt suddenly and violently sick, his heat replaced all at once by an all-enveloping, overwhelming sensation of nausea. His hopes and desires and dreams crumbled into tiny pieces at his feet.
He could not quite believe what he saw, but there was no question about it. This was no dream-fantasy, like the pictures of Carol he had mentally formed in his room a few minutes before. This was for real.
Carol was in the bedroom and wide-awake, just as he had pictured her, but the important difference was that she was not alone. She had brought her girl friend back to her suite with her. It was easy to see that the relationship of the two women was more than a simple schoolgirl friendship. Carol and her friend were locked in each other's arms, their mouths crushed together, and they were both completely naked.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It explained everything, Sky realized as be stood there in the darkness of the room. It was like a sudden, brilliant flash of right in the pitch blackness all around him. One instant, he was staring in frozen amazement at the unexpected proof that the slim, feminine-looking girl for whom he'd had such a hunger was really not feminine at all. The next instant, he'd accepted it and realized it explained everything that had been baffling him since the Lattimores had returned from Europe.
The reason Carol had found him uninteresting despite the fact that nearly all other women went for him at once was now self-explanatory. Carol had no interest in him because she had no interest in any man, period. Her attentions, clearly, were reserved for members of her own sex. That she was one of those was all too clear from the glazed, feverish look of her eyes and the deep flush of excitement on her lovely face as she lay now in the other girl's arms.
Sky's discovery now explained why she had begun to play up to him in the car and had drawn away when they were approaching their designated first-night stopover. His strong mouth twisted in bitterness as he thought about it-those pressures and touches of the hands and hip and thigh had been neither invitations nor accidents. They had been done with cool intention or deliberation, Sky realized now. Not because Carol bad been either attracted to him or intending to let those beginnings proceed any further-they had been done because she knew nothing would come of it. He'd heard of that sort of thing before; it was part of the unnatural woman's constant war against men, her born rivals. It was done usually by members of that tribe who were feminine-looking and pretty-they could temporarily fool men into thinking they were starting to make out.
It had been, in short, nothing more than an act of deliberate, calculated cruelty of a type he'd heard about before-hot 'em up just for the pleasure of watching their agony and when it gets close to the time for paying-off you brush 'em off instead.
Slowly, as he stood there, a deep, burning anger began to replace the shock in Sky's mind and he thought, Well, what does a guy do now? Should he, as immediately occurred to him, snap on the lights and have the satisfaction of letting them see him standing there in his towering, sneering contempt? That had its pitfalls, of course, Carol's first reaction of shock and embarrassment at his presence would probably change quickly to fury and she'd fire him. But he thought he could handle that, too, by threatening to make public her private little habits unless she let him stay on. Or should he just say the hell with both of them and turn around and walk out of the suite as quietly as he had come into it?
In the end, he did neither. He stood there thinking about it and watching the fevered movements of the two women on the bed. Suddenly the dry-mouthed heat he had felt for Carol ever since he had met her began to sweep over him again; and he ended by simply standing there motionless in the darkness and watching.
The two girls on the bed were a study in contrasts. Carol was as beautiful in her nakedness as Sky had known she would be, dark-eyed and vivid as a flash of lightning-her long, black hair loose now and almost covering the delicate pinkness of her back down to the rounded swell of her buttocks, her thick lashes lowered and her eyes closed, her passionate mouth a smear of red in the darkness, her big, carmine-nippled breasts rising and falling rapidly in her excitement. Her playmate, the ex-schoolmate from Fayetteville, was just the opposite physically-a cool, self-contained, grey-eyed blonde whose short, pixie-style haircomb showed not a hair out of place, and who went about her side of the lovemaking as calmly as Carol's lovemaking was frantic.
The blonde, too, was feminine-looking, with a slim figure which swelled into lovely, breathtaking fullness at her breasts and hips and buttocks. Her breasts were unusually large, soft-fleshed twin mounds so beautifully developed and firmly upcurved that they seemed created only to give men pleasure. Her buttocks were more full and out-thrust, too, than most women's, but the rampant femininity of her looks was more than counteracted by a manner and an air which made it clear to Sky that she was even less female in actuality than Carol. It was all too obvious in the practiced, experienced way she went about her side of the woman-to-woman action, revealing with every gesture that she was the active rather than the passive side of the partnership.
As Sky watched, the two women, who had appasently just begun-or, more probably, had just begun again, judging by the hour of the night-had been locked in each other's arms, merely touching each other gently, moved into more positive action. It was the blonde who began it, slipping out of her position alongside Carol on the bed and moving her body so she lay above Carol, barely touching her and looking down at her.
She lay that way for a moment, supporting herself with her arms stiff and her hands pressed flat palm-down on the bed. She freed her right hand, holding herself upright with only her left hand and took her right hand and put it on her own breast. Carol's shining black eyes opened slowly and she watched. The blonde began to squeeze her own breast, tightening her fingers around the soft flesh and moving her index finger out to touch the deep-red nipple and stroke it, making it move back and forth. And then, swiftly, the blonde pressed body downward and, still holding her own breast, pressed the hard nipple and yielding flesh against Carol's breast.
Sky heard Carol draw her breath in sharply at the touch, then Carol put a hand up and grasp her own breast, too. Each girl holding her breast, their tense fingers biting deeply into the softness, the two women began to touch and rub and probe their breasts at each other; their nipples touching and darting together, their soft white flesh crushing and seeming to blend.
As they did this their mouths moved together, too. Their soft red lips met, very tentatively at first, just barely brushing, then moving apart as thought they were teasing each other, and they repeated this many times. Their mouths moved together again and held and they kissed with sudden fierceness-pressing and straining crushingly against each other. Their gasping breathing was loud and clear in the room and the movement of their breasts and nipples by their own hands grew more and more frantic.
Then, as they kissed, the blonde's hand moved away from her breast and after a moment Carol followed suit The blonde let her body drop down against Carol's, both breasts pressing now against Carol's. With their lips still held together, the two girls put their arms tightly around each other. The blonde's hands moved restlessly up and down Carol's slim back, one hand stroking the long, dark hair, the other moving under the hair and raking Carol's skin lightly with her fingernails. Carol put both her hands on the blonde's out-thrust buttocks and held and squeezed their softness.
They kissed that way for a long time, the slight movement of their heads indicating that their tongues were busily at work, too, held against each other and the tips straying probingly. The blonde made the next move, she lifted herself a little and moved her mouth away from Carol's so she could kiss the dark-haired girl's forehead and eyes.
She lifted her body a little higher than Carol's to do this, letting her mouth move over the smooth surface of Carol's forehead and kissed each long-lashed eye in turn. As she did this Carol reached up and took hold of both of her breasts. She continued to kiss Carol's face, her mouth leaving its faint lipstick trace on Carol's eyelids, forehead, cheeks, and upturned little nose. Carol's hands moved lovingly over her breasts, squeezing the soft flesh and rubbing her breasts together, lightly stroking and pinching her nipples.
Then the blonde moved downward again, kissing Carol's eager mouth. When Carol removed one hand from the other woman's breast and put her arm around her shoulders to hold her there, the blonde shook her head slightly and moved downward. She kissed Carol's chin, her throat, and the smooth skin above her breasts; then she dipped her head still lower and put her mouth in the deep hollow between the breasts.
She kissed the shadowed hollow for a moment or two. Carol gasped again as the blonde turned her head to the right and put her mouth directly on Carol's breast. The blonde took Carol's breast in her hand as she did this, holding it underneath, lifting it high and squeezing it as she moved it-her questing mouth touched first the underside and then the front of it just below the nipple. Sky saw Carol tremble visibly and lift her hand to stroke the blonde's bright hair, and the blonde continued to move her mouth around he satin-smooth surface of the uplifted breast.
She kissed only the soft curvature of the breast itself for a while, deliberately avoiding the nipple and the pink circlet which surrounded it-even in the shadowed darkness where her mouth touched Carol's body, Sky could see her pink little tongue move out between her lips. The blonde began to move her tongue around the circlet, moving around and around it-then her small white teeth showed, too, and she began to bite and nibble at Carol's nipple. On the white sheets of the bed Carol's slim body twisted and moved in increasing desire.
The blonde took her time about it. It was obvious that she and Carol had been doing this together for a long, long time, probably beginning when they were roommates at school. She used her mouth, her tongue, and her teeth on Carol's full breast with skill and experience and expertise-steadily increasing the other girl's thrashing, frantic passion.
After a while, she moved her mouth over to Carol's other breast, lifting this one too, kissing its rounded surface, running her tongue around the pink circlet, and biting gently at the nipple. She went on to give the breast the full treatment-she opened her mouth suddenly wide and plunged the breast deep inside. Holding the breast deep inside, her mouth tight against its softness, she began to move her head back and forth, side to side, so her mouth moved repeatedly over the entire surface from the nipple to the joining with the body and shook the breast as she moved.
Now Carol began to moan aloud; her hands moved restlessly and unceasingly over the other woman's body. Suddenly the blonde gasped, too, her first outward show of passion. She pulled her mouth away from Carol's breast and moved downward again.
Her kisses became more fierce now, a harsh, tasting pressure of the mouth rather than a light stroking movement of the lips. She kissed Carol's chest and belly with a ranging thoroughness that did not let her miss an inch. Her mouth held and moistened and left its faint lipstick mark all across the flatness of Carol's belly, pausing for a longer stay at the navel so that she could dip her tongue deep inside it, and then she was at Carol's waist.
Carol moved her legs swiftly and eagerly, and Sky found himself straining forward almost despite himself to watch. The blonde dropped her lips to Carol's white thighs and began to kiss her. Carol caught hold of her shoulders and tried to lift her upwards, but she fought away from the grasp and merely brought her mouth down lower.
There was no anger on the part of either of them when this happened. It was clearly an old game between them, a teasing and refusal now, so the eventual yielding would be sweeter. After a moment Carol released her shoulders and the blonde continued the movement of her mouth along Carol's thighs. Again the blonde was thorough in the way she made love to Carol with her lips; her hands holding Carol's buttocks, her mouth moving caressingly over the smooth, trembling whiteness.
Then she moved down to Carol's knees, kissing their rounded, dimpled sheen. She went on from there to Carol's legs-legs that Sky had so often pictured with his own straining body. She kissed the length oi he legs, and she did not stop when she came to Carol's tiny feet. She kissed the slim ankle and then each toe. She lifted Carol's foot a little and kissed the surface of the sole.
After that, she remained at the edge of the bed for a moment, gasping faintly and waiting to catch her breath. Then, with a swift, strong movement, she caught hold of Carol's body and lifted her over so she lay on her belly. Then she lifted herself so she lay flat against Carol and even with her, her middle resting against Carol's buttocks, and she began her questing journey downwards on this side.
She kissed Carol's long hair first, stroking the shining length of it with her hand as she did so. She moved the hair away from Carol's slender body and began to kiss her delicate back. She kissed Carol's shoulder blades, her sides, and continued to kiss her all the way down-when she reached Carol's twisting, churning buttocks, she paused.
Again she teased her a little, letting her mouth barely touch the hot, smooth skin. After a while, she increased the pressure. Then she began to nip at the rounded flesh, more and more sharply. When Carol "finally cried out in pain, she took her mouth away and continued her progress down Carol's long legs, kissing the sensitive underside. And when she was down at Carol's feet once more, she turned Carol over again, and finally she put her lips against Carol's abdomen.
Now the movements of Carol's body were frenzied and completely wild. The last fragment of the blonde's composure slipped away, too. Carol twisted and turned frantically on the bed, her buttocks wriggling, her middle bucking up and down. The blonde's head moved frantically too, savoring Carol's loveliness and making more and more violent love to her. Her fingers tore at Carol's buttocks now, her nails biting deeply into the dark-haired girl's skin and flesh, and both women moaned aloud together.
They held together this way for no longer than a minute, then Carol moved. She pulled her body away from the other woman's grasp and twisted around so that her lips too, were probing and making love. Now both women were caressing each other and twisting and wriggling their bodies in wild abandonment. Their bliss mounted and heightened and reached its shattering crescent-then they fell apart and lay gasping for breath on the bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There was danger for him then, Sky knew. They might snap on the lights to dress or look for cigarettes-all at once he did not want to be discovered. He moved swiftly but quietly back toward the door, opened and closed it behind him soundlessly and moved out into the hall. And he realized he had not moved a moment too soon, because, as he reached the hall, he saw that the lights had gone on underneath the door of the suite.
He went quickly back to his room and entered it, but he did not close the door completely. He left it a a couple of inches open so he could watch the door of Carol's suite. He knew what he had to do, absolutely had to do. He did not put the light on in his room, he just sat there in the darkness, watching Carol's suite.
He had to wait quite a while, more than half an hour. Then the door opened and the blonde, fully-dressed in an expensive-looking black suit, stepped out into the hallway. Carol came out with her, wearing a tight robe which beautifully displayed the lush curves of her breasts and buttocks underneath.
Sky strained forward to listen to what they were saying. He heard Carol asking the blonde anxiously if she'd be safe going home at this hour. The blonde said she'd be perfectly okay because there was an all-night stand right outside the hotel and she really had to go because her folks would murder her is she didn't get home at all. He sighed with relief. He'd realized there was a chance that Carol's little playmate might remain all through the night, in which case he'd be stopped from doing what he had to do, but that was okay. The blonde had had it and now she was going back to Mama and Papa.
He did not do anything for a while after the blonde had kissed Carol a fond good night and gone down in the elevator and Carol had gone back into her suite. He waited, for a cautious fifteen minutes in case the blonde forgot her gloves or her underpants or something and came back. Then, moving soundlessly, he returned to the door of Carol's suite.
He didn't like what he was doing. He felt ugly and a little sick, and he thought, the way a rapist must feel when he starts out after his prey even though he knows what he is doing is wrong. He couldn't help himself now any more than that rapist could, not after the way he'd been hungering for her and after watching her slim, lovely body in passionate lovemaking with that other girl. He knew that sleep-no, much more than that, life itself-would be impossible without taking her now.
There was one more potential obstacle, she might have locked her door this time instead of just closing it. He put an anxious hand on the knob, turned it slowly and softly. He let out a faint whooshing breath of relief when the knob turned in his hand and the door opened. He stepped into the sitting-room and closed the door gently behind him.
The suite was dark again, and at first he heard no sound at all. Then, as he continued to listen, he heard Carol's soft, even breathing. She was probably asleep now, worn out by all that had happened. He waited a few minutes to become accustomed to the darkness again, then, knowing his way now, he moved quickly between the big pieces of furniture into the bedroom and stood looking down at her.
Well, one question was answered-she wore pajamas when she was in bed for sleeping purposes. She was fast asleep, her thick lashes curled against her lovely face. She looked no more than fifteen or sixteen in the blue striped pajamas, so angelic and childish with that sweet face and long dark hair. It was almost possible to believe she was innocent and virginal and knew nothing at all about the ways of life and love. But not quite-not, anyway, for a man who had stood for forty minutes in the darkness, watched her in the animalistic abandonment of unnatural love with a member of her own sex.
As he looked down at her, there were other things that revealed she was not quite the angelic innocent she appeared to be as she slept. Her mouth for one thing-that hot-looking, passionate mouth was not the mouth of an immature girl who had never known love. Nor was that width of hips and that length of legs made for anything but love, or the breathtaking fullness of her breasts which showed suddenly as she turned in her sleep, or the red nipple that peeped out suddenly at that moment, just as he had pictured it happening in his imagination.
She awoke suddenly. He had not moved or made a sound-she was apparently one of those people who awake automatically at the presence of someone else in the room with them. Her eyelids fluttered in fear for a moment at the sight of him leaning over her. She became fully awake then and recognized him-the look of fear changed to harsh, ugly anger.
"What is this?" she said, sitting up in bed and pulling up the bedclothes to cover herself. Her voice was suddenly the voice of a fishwife rather than a post-deb, "What the hell are you doing in my room?"
Sky grinned down at her, a humorless grin at her gesture of modesty in concealing her pajama-clad body after what she'd been doing a little while before. But of course she didn't know he was aware of all that. He said calmly, "You've got a bad habit, Carol. You keep leaving your door unlocked all the time."
The fear was back in her eyes. "You get out of here," she said. "You get out right now or I'll call the desk and have you arrested."
"That isn't necessary," Sky said quietly. "I'll go if you want me to go." He paused and added softly, "Right hack to my room so I can phone your father."
He watched the fear deepen on her face, her voice still the flat fishwife's, "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just this," Sky said. "I've been wondering whether or not it's my duty as a nice loyal servant to call your father and tell him what went on in this suite a while ago."
Her mouth trembled, and he saw deep color flame in her face. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "Nothing at all happened in this room."
"Let's not waste time," Sky said. "I've already told you, you're a little careless about the locks on your door. You should have locked up before you went into action with your little blonde friend."
"How did you-?"
"It wasn't exactly intentional," Sky said. "I walked in to pay you a little visit myself, and I found you already had company." He shrugged. "So I hung around for a while. Yoa wouldn't expect me to leave right in the middle of the main feature."
She stared at him in silence for a moment. Then she said, harshly, "You animal...."
Sky shrugged again. "You're probably right," he said. "But you're not exactly over-civilized yourself, judging by recent events." And then he said softly, "Well, Carol?"
She got out of bed, making no attempt to hide the anger and hatred on her face. "You can go to hell," she said. "Call my father and tell him whatever you want. He won't believe you, anyway."
"You're probably right there, too," Sky said mildly. "But I'll give it a try anyway and see if I can convince him."
He turned on his heel and started to walk away from her. He reached the archway between the bedroom and the sitting-room before she said, "Wait!" He did not smile because he felt no particular triumph, he simply felt that what he knew was going to happen had happened; he turned and walked back to face her.
"All right," she said. "All right. My father'll believe you if you call. I-I got into the same kind of trouble back in school, he told me he'd throw me out without a cent if it ever happened again." She lifted a hand to touch her trembling lips, and she said, "What is it you want, Schuyler? Money?"
"I don't want your money," Sky said contemptuously.
"Then what-?"
"You know what I want," Sky said. "I want what you were tossing at me all the way down here."
She looked completely frightened again, and, strangely, the fear seemed even stronger now than it had before. She did not speak for almost a minute. Then she said, her voice so low he could barely hear her, "You told me yourself that you saw what happened here tonight. So you know I-" And then she stopped.
Sky finished the sentence for her. "You don't go in for male-female stuff," he said.
"That's right," she said.
"Well," he said casually, "I'm afraid you're going to have to do a switch for tonight. Maybe next time you won't offer something you don't intend to give."
Suddenly and unexpectedly, she began to cry, soundless crying that sent tears streaming down her lovely face. He did not speak, he waited her out until the tears ceased. And then he said. "You ready, Carol?"
She didn't answer him directly. "I've never had a man before," she said, her voice strange and oddly distant. "I've been the-the way I am ever since I first met Marianne."
"Marianne?" Sky said questioningly.
"The girl you saw here tonight," Carol said. "We went to school together, and we ... started making love when we were only fourteen. There've been others since, but it's always been other girls." She shuddered suddenly. "The-the thought of a man," she said, "makes me sick . .
Sky surveyed her steadily for a moment. "It looks," he said, "like you're going to have to give it a try anyway."
It was important, he knew, to be gentle about it, never brutal. He did not even undress in front of her because he knew that, in her state of mind, the sight of his male body might create horror rather than pleasure. He told her to get in bed and under the covers. He took off his shirt and undershirt and shoes and socks while she lay there staring at him. Then he crossed in back of her to slip off his trousers and shorts, and got into bed with her.
He did not approach her at once. He lay there quietly for a while until her mind grew used to the idea of a man, rather than a woman, sharing a bed of love with her. He reached out very gently and put a hand over her pajamas at her belly. Almost immediately, he felt her tremble under his hand. He was all too aware that it was not the kind of trembling, born of pleasure and excitement, that she'd done when Marianne had had her hands on her.
The reaction did not surprise him at all, but it bothered him tremendously. It reminded him that, for the first time in his life, he had had to force himself upon a woman. It jarred him to feel, again for the first time, revulsion instead of a return of desire emanating toward him. For an instant, the notion of giving up the whole crazy seduction-by-blackmail passed through his mind-but only for an instant-his hunger for her was still too strong, and growing even stronger at his knowledge that she was in bed with him at last and ready even if against her will.
He took his hand away at once, and waited a few minutes before he put it back on her. This time, there was no reaction at all, certainly no response of pleasure, bat at least she did not shudder in disgust.
He proceeded slowly. He kept his hand steady and unmoving on her pajamas, not even letting the fingers stray a little to touch her skin where the pajamas gapped between top and bottom, and he left it there for a moment or two. Very slowly he let his hand move up and stray under her pajama-top, stopping to rest on her smooth skin just below her breasts.
Gently, he reminded himself; gently. His fingers ached to move up and close over the warmth of her breasts, but be did not let himself move. He kept his hand still on her skin for a long while. When he did finally move again, he moved only around her chest, still not touching her breasts.
Then, finally, fully ten minutes after he'd gotten into the bed with her, he allowed his hand to move up and cup her right breast. Again she shuddered, and again it was not a tremor of joy, but this time he did not stop. He held her breast lightly in his hand, lifting it and shaking it gently from side to side, and his thumb and forefinger reached out to take hold of her nipple and caress it.
He made no attempt to kiss her or put his other band on her, he kept his face away from hers and his free arm down at his side. He continued only to squeeze and caress the softness of her breast, and was pleased after a while to feel that her nipple was at last beginning to harden. It was only then that he did a little more-he spread out the fingers of his hand and caught hold of both her breasts and held and rubbed them together in his grasp.
He waited a minute or two longer, and at last brought his second hand into play. He lifted the hand up to the top button of her pajamas and unbuttoned each button in turn. He lifted her gently to a sitting position and slipped off the pajama-top and lay her down again.
She was naked to the waist now, so lovely and desirable in her nearness that he found it increasingly hard to breath. Still he did not push to speed things up. There was still no response in her other than the hardening of her nipples. Except for that one small sign she lay there as rigidly and unmovingly as a mannequin.
It was then that he decided to kiss her. He approached her with extreme slowness because he knew this would create special revulsion in her. He was about to begin making love to her with his mouth, and the unnatural love to which she'd become accustomed was essentially a lovemaking with the mouth. Her subconscious mind would probably make immediate and distrubing comparisons. He moved very, very slowly, letting her frightened eyes stare up at his lean face coming toward her, letting her see in almost slow-motion pace his mouth move down toward her and on her mouth.
She didn't like it, he could sense that at once. She had probably been kissed by men before, at parties, but this was different-this was no light party kiss, but a kiss which was preliminary to complete love. She was used to feeling a soft woman's-mouth on hers, a soft woman's-face against hers, not the hard crush of a man's mouth and the tingling scratch of a man's beard.
Well, hell, he thought, it feels different to me, too. He wasn't used to this complete absence of reaction, either, this feeling of a woman's mouth lying stiff and uninterested under his; he was used to immediate and happy response. The thought made him angry and instead of relaxing the pressure of his mouth against hers he strengthened it, forcing his mouth down upon her and hurting and bruising her.
And that, incredibly, was the key to it. She remained unmoving an instant longer. But then, to his absolute amazement, he felt her mouth move a little as she kissed him back. Very quickly, he moved so he lay completely over her, and he put his free arm under her and pressed her closer to him, her arm slipped up around his neck to hold him, too.
He kissed her for a long time and then had to take his mouth away to catch his breath. He returned his mouth to hers very soon afterward and kissed her even more bruisingly this time. He continued to keep his right hand on her breasts, squeezing her full breasts and alternately stroking her nipples. He found himself overwhelmingly pleased that her nipples were now as hard as any woman's in his considerable experience.
She was kissing him back now as urgently as he was kissing her. One of her arms still tight around his neck and her other arm lower on his back, her hand sliding up and down almost wonderingly over the hardness of his muscles. As they continued to kiss, her hand moved suddenly down and touched his hips and pressed his body even harder against her.
This was no abnormal, he knew now; this was a completely normal girl who had been led down the wrong path in her early, formative years. She had proven that by her response to him the moment he had begun to treat her with the strength of a man instead of the gentleness of a woman. The thought created even greater desire in him. He crushed his mouth more fiercely against hers, and as he did so, he put his tongue out and let it touch her lips.
She responded immediately. She opened her mouth at once to let his tongue slip inside and find hers. Inside her mouth, their tongues fought and twisted and wrestled together, the desire building and growing within them both.
Sky pulled away and slid his mouth down onto her breast. This, too, was a challenge, because that blonde, that Marianne, had done the same thing to Carol in his sight, but he didn't intend to be gentle about it. He put the breast to his mouth, moving it around and nipping it with a savagery just short of brutality. He knew from the sudden wild movement of her hands and the way her nails had begun to bite into his skin that she was enjoying him more than she'd every enjoyed Marianne or any other woman.
He continued to kiss that breast for a long time, then he moved over to her other breast, taking it to his lips and biting at the nipple and the yielding flesh. Her slim body began to move under him, her hips swaying from side to side in instinctive invitation and her buttocks lifting to plunge her body against him again and again.
The rest was automatic hunger rather than planned-out, thought-out action. He was suddenly completely wild and overcome with his need of her. He felt she needed him now in the same way too. He reached down almost frantically and opened the snap-button of her pajama-bottoms. She lifted her body eagerly to help him remove this last item of clothing that separated them. He pulled the bottoms down over her buttocks and her lovely legs and dropped them quickly to the floor.
He moved down lungingly toward her and she moved up toward him with her eyes shining and happier than he had ever seen them before-their bodies met and merged. For a long time after that the woman who had never known a man before and the man who had wanted her so desperately flew swiftly together through the heavens.
They fell asleep after that and slept until almost noon, then they separated to wash and dress. They met again in the hotel restaurant and had a quick breakfast. They hardly talked at all. It was not because they felt anger and dislike for each other now, quite the contrary. It was because, in the daylight, they felt a strange and sudden shyness toward each other, and they remained silent even after they had checked out and gotten into the Corvette again and continued on the trip.
Mileage began to be racked up again: they passed Bttle towns like St. Paul's and Rowland and bigger ones like Lumberton and Dillon, and they were still silent. And it was only after they'd driven more than sixty miles that Sky broke the silence with more than just a three-word request for a cigarette.
When he finally spoke, the words came rushing and tumbling out. He felt, all at once, absolutely horrified with what he had done last night, even though it had turned out so beautifully, and he tried to tell her that that ugly kind of blackmail wasn't like him at all-that he'd never done anything like that before in his life. He told her, stumblingly and with a sudden and complete loss of eloquence, that it was just because he'd felt so overwhelming a hunger and need for her that no step had seemed too drastic to take, and he experienced genuine relief when she put her hand over his and made it clear that she felt gratitude rather than horror or hatred toward him now.
"It was my fault completely," she said. "I realize that now: I brought it on myself with my-my damn habit of leading men on just for the fun of hurting them by turning away just when I look ready to give in." She sighed deeply and was silent again for a moment, and then she said, "Anyway, that's all over now-thanks to you. I think that when I was busy hating every man I met, I was really hating myself for what I was, or what I thought I was. But I know now that I've been living all these years in a sort of sick dream: that what I thought was the only kind of love for me is just a pallid substitute for the real thing, for natural love. And I know I'll never want the substitute again...."
"I'm glad," Sky said quietly, and was amused when she threw her arms around his neck suddenly and with such violence of affection and gratitude that he had to pull the car quickly over to the side and park to avoid swerving off the road. And they remained there kissing each other and holding each other close for quite a long time after that.
When Sky started the car up again and moved down the road, they were silent once more, but this time it was the silence of complete and mutual contentment. And this time it was Carol who broke the silence-with a question which startled him and threw him completely.
"Who are you, Schuyler?" she asked. "I mean: who are you, really?"
He let the seconds tick by as he fought for control, because her question might be an entirely innocent one: perhaps she meant only that she wanted to know what he'd been and done before he became a chauffeur. It didn't seem possible that she'd guessed that he had a special, secret purpose in taking the job, and he hoped not, because he wasn't sure by any means that he wanted to let her know just yet-or possibly even ever-that he was John Barclay Benton's son. It was true that one of his reasons for going after her, and possibly even the main reason, was to see if he could pry some information out of her which might help clear his father's name; but he was still giving the matter consideration and thought, and he was not at all convinced that the best way to accomplish this was to let her in on the secret of his real identity. On the contrary, it might be swung only if any questions he asked her seemed to stem from nothing more than innocent, motiveless curiosity.
"Me?" he said blandly. "I'm nobody interesting at all. I'm just a plain, ordinary, garden-variety chauffeur named Pete Schuyler."
He became aware of the fact that her vivid dark eyes were fixed intensely on his face. "No, you're not," she said quietly. "I had the strongest intuitive feeling you weren't a bona fide chauffeur the minute I saw you at Idlewild, and all of a sudden right now I'm absolutely convinced of it. You just don't have the servant's manner, the-the doormat look. You know: 'I'll lie down and you can step all over me, master ... '"
Sky grinned and tried to laugh it off. "Don't be old-fashioned, Carol," he said. "Servants aren't that way any more-you ought to know that. This is the age of independence, even among guys who've chosen to drive around rich people as their life's work. And anyway, I haven't been a servant that long-only since I got out of the Air Force."
Carol said: "I don't buy it. You haven't been a servant at all before this job: you're the kind of man who's had servants, not been one." She paused and said softly, "What's the story, Schuyler?"
And in that instant Sky reached his decision, and he sighed. "You win, Carol," he said. "So you can start calling me Sky instead of Schuyler."
"Sky?" she echoed.
"That's right," he said. "Sky like in Sky Benton...."
He watched her wide eyes grow twice as wide. Then she said, "I knew it. I knew there was something-" and then she stopped again and was silent for a few moments, and shook her head. "Peter Schuyler Benton," she said, wonderingly. "You've grown considerably since we last met, Sky."
He grinned at her again, and let his eyes roam boldly and openly up and down her slim body. "So have you, Carol," he said, and was amused to see her lovely face turn deep red.
She smiled back at him, then, but after a moment her face grew serious once more. "What are you after, Sky?" she asked.
"Evidence," he said quietly. "Evidence that my father was innocent."
She shook her head, and her voice matched his m quietness. "There's no such evidence," she said. "He was guilty, Sky-guilty as hell."
"I'm not so sure," Sky said.
"I am," Carol said, and she put a gentle, sympathetic hand on his arm. "Look, Sky," she went on, "you were away when it was all happening-Europe, wasn't that what they told us?-but I was right in the middle of it all. My father talked to me about it for hours on end, and I also saw all the evidence with my own eyes and heard all the facts with my own ears. And I'm telling you that he did exactly what the police said he did...."
The milestones continued to skim by; they had crossed the state line now, and were in South Carolina, passing towns like Dillon and Latta and Sellers and Mars Bluff. Sky was silent for a while, and then he said, "Sure-that's what you would say. Because if my father's innocent, it means that yours isn't."
And now it was Carol's turn for stunned silence. "Is that what you think, Sky?" she asked, finally. "That my father framed J. B.?"
"What else can I think?" Sky said. "You're father's the one person who's gained by what happened to my dad. Now he's got the business all to himself."
Her fingers tightened on his arm. "Can't you see how crazy that is, Sky?" she said. "My father just didn't need a hundred percent ownership of the business. He's got millions of dollars of his-own."
"What does that prove?" Sky said. "Sometimes what people have just isn't enough for them, no matter how much they have."
"Doesn't that apply to J. B., too?" Carol said quietly. "He had plenty of money, too-but the police and the district attorney's office proved pretty conclusively that he was living well above it...."
"I think that's the key to the phoniness of the whole thing," Sky said. "My father just wasn't that kind of man: he was practically a fanatic on the subject of other people's property. I don't believe he'd have touched a nickel of another man's money no matter how much he needed it...."
"People do strange things, sometimes," Carol said, and there was a grave, almost sad expression on her beautiful face. "You're riding for a fall, Sky, if you go on pursuing this. Because your father really was guilty...."
The road was almost empty, but Sky had slowed the car down as they talked, and he jammed his foot down on the gas now to pick up speed. "Spoken just like Hugh Lattimore's daughter," he said. "I was probably a damn fool to tell you I'm Sky Benton, anyway. Even if you knew anything which might be favorable to my father, you'd just hide it and bury it."
Her face did not match his look of bitterness. "No, Sky," she said softly, "That's where you're wrong. I'm not as loyal as all that to my father. My mother and dad haven't been getting along very well in recent years, and there's even a chance that they'll be splitting up: and if they do, I'll be going along with my mother, not staying with my father. I won't try to convince you that I'd tell you the truth even if I was close to my father, which is what I'd do-but maybe what I've just told you will convince you that I wouldn't hold back anything which might help you. But there just isn't anything, Sky.. "
"Nothing, Carol?" Sky said. "Nothing at all? Not even some little thing which seems out of place or just doesn't ring right?"
"Nothing, Sky," Carol said. "I'm honestly convinced that J. B. did exactly what he was accused of doing."
And Sky knew then that-at least as she saw it-she was telling the truth. He covered her hand suddenly with his and squeezed it awkwardly, and they drove on after that in silence.
More towns were left behind them. They passed Manning and Summerton and stopped in Orangeburg for lunch, and then they continued on past Bamberg and Allendale and then they were out of South Carolina and in Georgia.
And not too long after they'd crossed the state line, as they were heading toward Statesboro, Sky asked suddenly, "You going to tell on me, Carol?"
Carol looked toward him in surprise. "Tell on you?" she said. "You mean tell my mother and father that you're really Sky Benton?"
"That's what I mean," Sky said.
"Not if you don't want me to, Sky."
"I don't," Sky said. "I just want to go on being Pete Schuyler the chauffeur for a while longer."
"Then you really intend to go on with this-this scheme of yours," Carol said. "You really still hope to find something that just doesn't exist...."
"If it doesn't exist," Sky said, "then I won't find it, and sooner or later I'll give up and that'll be that. But I've got to try."
"I won't stop you from tyring, Sky," Carol said. "So as far as I'm concerned, you're still just a chauffeur named Schuyler."
They continued to push along, Carol taking over the wheel in the late afternoon, and they crossed into Florida just as it was starting to grow dark. They could have gone even futher after that, but Solloway had designated their next night-stop as Jacksonville and they accepted it. They pulled the car up in front of the Thomas Jefferson Hotel.
Sky walked up to the desk this time, and he made no pretense of false modesty or kidding around. He told the desk clerk that he wanted their accommodations changed to two connecting rooms instead of the original reservations of a widely-separated suite and single room, and he stared the clerk down when the man looked up at him curiously. And when he and Carol got to their rooms, the first thing they did was open the door which separated them.
They had a leisurely room-service dinner, and they showered together after that and got into Carol's bed. And they made violent and completely satisfying love through most of the night, and almost managed to forget the spectre of Sky's dead father.
They made extremely good time on the road the next day, so much so that they could easily have made Palm Beach that same day if they continued to move along at a fast pace, instead of making it the following morning as originally planned. But neither of them wanted this, because both of them knew that arrival at the Beach meant at least outward separation and return to their former relationship.
They decided to stop for a swim at one of the small, lovely beaches which dotted the road now, and, though their swim clothes were buried deep in their baggage, they managed to rent swimsuits at one of the public beach-clubs. They swam off and on for several hours and lay on the beach enjoying the hot sun, and went to the club restaurant and had a pleasant lunch, and then went back to the beach and lay in the sun once more.
As they lay there, their arms shamelessly tight around each other, Carol asked suddenly, "What about afterward, Sky?"
"Afterward?" Sky said. "You mean after I find evidence to clear my father and convict yours?"
"You know what I mean," Carol said. "I mean after you realize that your father did it, even if it wasn't in line with his character, and you give up this chauffeur masquerade."
"If it turns out that way," Sky said, then it doesn't really matter much what happens afterward, does it?"
"It does to me," Carol said, and suddenly her eyes studied the white sand and she did not look at him. "Because I think I'm in love with you, Sky."
"You think you're in love with me?" Sky said lightly. "That's not very flattering. All my other girl friends were absolutely positive of it when they said it."
"That's because it meant nothing to them to say it," Carol said. "But it does to me." She continued to look away from him, and she said, her voice extremely low, "I'm not joking, Sky."
Sky felt a sudden surge of warm affection toward her, even stronger than he'd felt in these last wonderful days. But he knew that this was not love, and he reached out and lifted her young, serious face toward his.
"You're not in love with me," he said, self-consciously aware of the closeness of this conversation to the one he'd had with Leigh not too long before. "You may think you are right now because I've ... released you from something which was essentially alien to you even though you didn't realize it yourself, but that isn't love. You'll know what real love is when it hits you, Carol."
Her grave eyes studied his handsome face. "You're wrong, Sky," she said. "You're wrong about such an awful lot of things." She shivered suddenly, even though the air around them was warm, and she said, "But what will you do, Sky-afterward?"
"I'll have to answer that one when I get to it," Sky said. "Right now I just don't know. Maybe when I give up disguising myself as a chauffeur I'll do a real switch and become a chauffeur. I'll need a job of some kind, after all: the Bentons are dead broke, you know."
"You'll be able to do a lot better than that," Carol said. "I'm sure you'll be able to get a good job with a good future right in Wall Street. I'm sure my father-"
She stopped when she saw the look on Sky's face, and the way his mouth had drawn thin with bitterness. "I'm not interested in your father's charity," he said, "Or anybody else's."
"It won't be charity at all," she said. "Any number of people can really use a bright young-" And then she stopped again.
"Sure," Sky said. "Why don't you go ahead and finish the sentence? If I'm wrong and you're right about my father, there's just one way to finish it: the bright young son of a thief...."
He stood up abruptly, and he said, "It's getting a little late. We'd better be on the move again."
And as suddenly as that, the thing which had begun to grow between them was shattered. They changed their clothes and went back to the car in silence, and they did not sleep together that night when they stopped at a hotel at Cocoa.
They reached the Lattimore estate at Palm Beach early the following morning, Tuesday, and, though they had begun to talk easily again during the last leg of the trip, they were both a little glad that they had arrived at their destination and could move apart, at least for a while. Tomorrow or the next day they might be able to return to the intimacy which had enveloped both of them during the trip, even thought it would now have to be undertaken with secrecy and caution, but for now-starting with that brief, final little argument on the beach-the trouble between them had all at once grown too difficult to bear.
CHAPTER NINE
There were several servants on hand when Sky and Carol reached the estate; people who constituted the permanent staff even when the Lattimores were not in residence, and one of them showed Sky to his quarters-a single room here, though also over the garage. He unpacked and showered and lay down to rest for a while, and then he went down to look over the estate and refresh his memory of the rest of Palm Beach.
He found himself grinning with amusement, an old amusement, as he looked over the Lattimore estate. Not because the place was undistinguished or unimpressive in any way. It was, on the contrary, impressive as hell.
But it was still amusing because, in a sort of reverse snobbery, the Lattimores, like most of the other residents of the Beach, did not refer to their estates as estates at all: they called them "cottages". This was, supposedly an attempt to lend an air of casualness to the residences by giving them a less ostentatious, more modest label, but of course it had the opposite result completely. It was rather like referring to the Hope Diamond as "my little piece of junk jewelry": you end up boasting rather than appearing modest because it's all too obvious that the diamond is neither junk jewelry nor little.
And, Sky thought as he looked around him, the same thought he'd had many times before in his visits to Palm Beach as a kid, the residents of the Beach emphasized the lushness of their homes, the ostentation of the places, by calling them cottages when they certainly were not. They were huge, sprawling, eye-catching and breathtaking homes, and the Lattimore place, a brick-and-fieldstone thirty-five rooms, was one of the most beautiful of them all. A cottage in real-estate jargon is generally a modest little place in the ten-thousand-dollar class; the Lattimore cottage had obviously cost all the way up in six figures.
He spent a pleasant morning looking around, had lunch in the servants' quarters, and then spent an equally pleasant afternoon wandering around and looking over some of the other cottages. When he got back to the Lattimore estate, he found that Ronnie Lattimore had arrived and had been looking for him.
"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Lattimore," Sky said. "I wouldn't have left the premises if I'd known you were arriving and might need me. But I was told I was off duty until I had to take Miss Lattimore to her party at nine o'clock."
"That's all right, Schuyler," Ronnie said. "I hadn't intended to fly down until tomorrow or the next day, but I changed my mind and took an earlier plane at the last minute. It was no trouble-I got a cab at the airport." She smiled at him, the provocative, interested look unhidden as always. "I just wanted to tell you to bring the car around at eight instead of nine because I'll be going to the party, too, and my daughter and I have decided that we want to do a little visiting with the people who are giving the party-the Kennicotts-before the mob starts showing up."
"There's a problem, Mrs. Lattimore," Sky said. "All we have down here is the Corvette, and that's just a two-seater, of course. Shall I take one of you to the party first and then come back and get the other?"
"That won't be necessary," Ronnie said. "I talked to my husband on the phone just a few minutes ago, and he said the others left Glen Cove not too long after you did and should be getting here shortly. I'm sure that either the limousine or the convertible will be here in time for us to use one or the other tonight."
That was good news, because Leigh would be in the convertible, and he felt his heart beginning to pound with overwhelming happiness at the thought. And he thought, suddenly: They're both beautiful girls, Leigh and Carol, but it's really no contest. The trip down here was wonderful, but Carol's a mile behind when Leigh's around....
"That's fine, Mrs. Lattimore," he said. "I'll keep an eye out for the others, and I'll get hold of the first car that arrives and get it tuned up and cleaned up and ready for tonight."
"You do that," Ronnie said, and he nodded and turned away. He was conscious of her eyes on his back as he walked out of the room, but he ignored it; his mind was too full of the fact that Leigh would be with him soon.
The two cars arrived within minutes of each other an hour later, and he helped the others take their baggage out of the cars, but he helped Leigh take her baggage all the way up to her room. And in a sudden burst of wild heat, he took Leigh, too, so hungry for her suddenly that he removed only the few necessary items of her clothing rather than stripping her completely.
It was hell to leave her after that, but it was suddenly seven-fifteen and absolutely necessary. Reluctantly, he went down to the car and got it cleaned up, and then he took it down to a local service station for a quick oil-change and greasing, and he was back in front of the cottage's main entrance at eight.
The worst part of a chauffeur's existence, the most boring part, took place after he took Carol and her mother to the Kennicott cottage, an edifice only barely less imposing than the Lattimore's. That was the waiting, the standing around. Carol did not say anything at all to Sky, avoiding his eyes so studiously and carefully that Sky was almost afraid it looked suspicious; but Ronnie said that she had no idea if she and her daughter would be leaving the party early or late and preferred that Sky wait around instead of leaving even for a little while.
So Sky waited around, sitting in the car for a while and listening to the radio, and then getting out and smoking a cigarette, and then walking around but never too far from the limousine. He looked at his watch repeatedly, half-expecting because of the stick-around order that the Lattimore women would be out early. But the hours continued to pass without either of them making their appearance, and by one o'clock in the morning, and then by one-thirty, they had still not left the party.
At one-thirty-five, a woman appeared suddenly in the doorway of the Kennicott cottage, her slim figure silhouetted becomingly in the white light of the foyer, and started to walk gracefully down the flagstone path toward Sky. It was impossible to make out the woman's face or even the color and style of her dress in the faint illumination outside the house, and for a minute Sky thought it was either Carol or her mother, but then the woman came closer and he saw that it was neither of them. Both Carol and Ronnie Lattimore, of course, had black hair, and this woman's hair was flame-red.
The woman continued to walk toward him, and he recognized her the moment she stepped under a street light and he could see her clearly. Her name was Danielle D'Arcy, and, despite the Gallic sound of the name, she was thoroughly American and a member of a family which had either come over on the Mayflower or on the boat which followed it. He had never met her, or even, to the best of his knowledge, seen her in person before this; but he recognized her at once because he had seen her picture so often in the past in the fashion magazines and on the society pages.
She was within a few feet of him now, clearly headed for him and not for one of the other cars parked nearby, and as she approached him he knew positively that he'd never seen her in person before rather than just to-the-best-of-his-knowledge, because he'd never have forgotten this one if she'd come within his sight in the past. This was a woman no man on earth could look at and regard casually.
He'd read somewhere once that she was heiress to a fortune of nearly one hundred million dollars, but she was beautiful enough to have made her way easily in any circles even if she hadn't had a dime. And it was a tossup as to which was more lovely, her face or her figure.
She was a rather tall girl, probably five-eight plus three inches for the spike-heeled green shoes she wore, and, if he correctly remembered the statistics in one of the articles, she was now just about twenty-four. Her red hair was a legit color, not dyed, a deep copper color and worn shoulder-length. Her eyes were bright-green and her nose was small and upturned. Her mouth was a different shade of red entirely; a hot, moist slash of crimson. And her skin was the special startling white sometimes found in genuine redheads.
She wore a green dress which emphasized and deepened the color of her eyes, and the body inside the dress was special, too. She was very slim, but her breasts, half-exposed by the low-cut bodice of the dress, were full and rounded and more than sufficiently well-developed, and her hips were wide and softly-curved. And though her dress was cocktail style and rather long, her legs showed slim and lovely below the hem.
No, Sky thought, he'd never have forgotten this one. But he kept the look of interest off his face and smiled a respectful chauffeur's smile as she reached him.
"You're the Lattimore chauffeur, aren't you?" she asked. Her voice was low and just a shade husky, fitting her perfectly, and her smile in response to his heightened her loveliness.
"Yes, ma'am," Sky said. "Can I be of assistance?"
"Yes, you can," the red-haired girl said. "Mrs. Lattimore said you'd be able to drop me off at my place-and you're to go on home after that. Mrs. Lattimore and her daughter will be staying on at the party for a while, but they'll be taken home in one of the Kennicott cars."
"Right, ma'am," Sky said, and he moved around to the side Of the car to open the door and help her in. He watched the attractive flash of her legs and saw the embroidered trim of the hem of her slip, and then, reluctantly, he closed the door and walked around the car and got in behind the wheel.
"Where to, please?" he asked.
"Head in the same direction as the Lattimore place," the girl said. "My house isn't too far from theirs-a half-mile or so. I'll tell you where to turn once we pass Ronnie's-Mrs. Lattimore's house."
"Okay, ma'am," he said, and moved the car smoothly down the street.
He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove, enjoying the exposed milk-white crescents of her breasts. She had, he thought, particularly lovely breasts, soft-looking and high-curved, and he wondered, not too ir-relevantly, if her nipples were as red as her mouth and her hair, or a softer pink like the flushed tone underlying her smooth skin.
And then, all at once, he realized that she was looking at him, too, and he became suddenly tense and watchful. Because her examination of him was more than just the usual, casual appraisal many women give to a member of the opposite sex met for the first time, however low his station; it was a serious, faintly perplexed study of him, as though he looked familiar to her and she was busily trying to place him, trying to pin him down.
It wasn't possible; he was positive, absolutely positive, that he'd never met her before. And yet what other explanation was there for the wide-eyed, questioning way she was staring at him as he drove? Could it be-was it possible-that his memory had somehow slipped a cog and his real identity was again in sudden danger of being revealed?
His heart skipped a beat when she suddenly spoke, but he relaxed a little when he realized that she was just directing him, very casually, toward their destination.
"There's the Lattimore house up ahead," she said. "Just go past it for four blocks to O'Dare Road and then turn on O'Dare to Maxwell, and turn again on Maxwell toward the beach." And then she added, "Do you know Palm Beach very well?"
It sounded like an innocent question, but was it? Or was she trying to pin down her identification of him, double-check her recollection of him by getting some facts?
"No, miss," he said. "Not at all well. This is my first visit to Palm Beach, and I got here only this morning."
"I see," she said. And then she was silent as he drove down O'Dare Road to Maxwell Street, and turned right on Maxwell toward the beach.
And then she seemed to pounce on him. She leaned forward almost triumphantly, and she said softly, "You seem to know the Beach better than you think. How'd you know it was a right turn toward the beach area?"
But he was ready for her; he had realized his error the moment he'd made it, realized he should have asked her which way to turn. "I took a long walk this afternoon," he said blandly, "practically all over this section.
And I guess I just remembered that the beach is in this direction." He watched her settle back on the seat, and he said, "Which way now, ma'am?"
"Straight ahead," she said. "Two more blocks, and then left again at that light." And then, abruptly, she asked, "Are you sure you haven't been to Palm Beach before this trip? When you were just a little boy, perhaps?"
Was that it, then? He'd visited Palm Beach with his father many times in years past, before he'd grown up; was it possible that Danielle D'Arcy had been one of his friends on one or more of his trips? After all, she was just a couple of years or so younger that he was. Then he thought, No, damn it, it isn't possible. He'd heard about the famous D'Arcy family and their redheaded daughter for years, practically as far back as he could remember, but he was positive he was meeting Danielle tonight for the first time.
"Never, miss," he said casually. "It's a lovely place, and I'm sorry now that I hadn't come down before, but this is my first visit to the town."
The red-headed girl continued to study his profile, her wide green eyes never leaving his face, but her voice was as casual as his. "That's my cottage over there," she said. "The ranch-style place there on the right."
He edged the limousine toward the right and parked at the entrance to the house she'd indicated, a place even bigger than the Lattimore house but not quite as flashy because its front was constructed almost comp-pletely of antique shingles. He walked to the side of the car to open the door for her, and when she stepped out she stood very close to him for a moment. And then she dropped her bombshell.
"You're a bad liar," she said softly.
He didn't have to act startled; he was startled as hell because he thought he'd managed to convince her. He stared and said, a little hoarsely, "What was that, miss?"
"I said you're a bad liar," she repeated. "You know Palm Beach every bit as well as I do because you used to come down here all the time when you were younger...."
And then, as he continued to stare at her, she moved even closer, so close that their bodies almost touched. "I'm dying of curiosity," she said. "What are Hugh and Ronnie up to? Why have they got Sky Benton disguised as their chauffeur?"
CHAPTER TEN
Sky didn't answer for a moment. Then he said, his voice still hoarse and tense, "I don't understand you, miss. My name isn't Benton. It's Schuyler."
"That's your middle name, you mean," Danielle said. "You're Peter Schuyler Benton, and there's no point in trying to fool me any longer. What's it all about? Are the Lattimores trying to pull a gigantic hoax on Palm Beach society or something?"
Sky made one more try. "I'm afraid you're mistaken, miss," he said. "You've got me confused with someone else. I'm really just-"
Danielle cut him off. "All right," she said. "Don't tell me if you insist on being stubborn. I'll just go inside and call Ronnie at the Kennicotts and ask her instead...."
She started to turn away from him, but he put a hand lightly on her arm, and she stopped and looked at him again. "Don't do that," he said, and he sighed. "I'm Sky Benton, all right. But Hugh and Ronnie Lattimore don't know it: they think they've hired themselves a bona-fide chauffeur."
Danielle stared at him, incredulously. "They don't know it?" she said. She shook her head, firmly. "You're just trying to lie to me again. How can that be possible? Hugh and your father were partners for years and years...."
"That's true enough," Sky said, "but their relationship was always strictly business instead of business plus social. I didn't see the Lattimores from the time I was a little kid up until the day I got this job with them a few weeks ago, and I've changed completely in all those years. They didn't recognize me at all."
Danielle looked at him thoughtfully, studying his dark-blue eyes as though she could read all his secrets in there. "I suppose it's possible," she said slowly, "but it still doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain why you took the job as a chauffeur."
"The reason's simple," Sky said. "So simple that you probably won't even believe it. I'm sure you've heard about what happened to my father, so you must know that he left me absolutely stony broke. Well, I went to an employment agency to look for a job, and they told me the Lattimores were in the market for a chauffeur and they offered me that job, and it sounded easy and pleasant, so I took it. And the only reason I've changed my name and kept my identity secret is that I don't want any of my former social equals recognizing me and starting to slobber with pity all over me.
Danielle reached into her purse and took out a cigarette, and she stared at him with cold amusement as he lit it for her. She let silvery smoke move out from between her red lips. "You're right," she said. "I don't believe it at all. It's just absolute nonsense: if you were really trying to avoid pity on the part of your friends, you'd stay away from them. You wouldn't take a job where there was such an excellent chance of running into someone who might recognize you."
She turned away again, impatiently. "I think I'll go inside and call Ronnie now," she said, "and find out if she really doesn't know who you are. And if she doesn't, perhaps she can make some good guesses about why you're doing what you're doing...."
And again Sky stopped her by touching her arm. "Wait," he said. She looked at him again with her beautiful green eyes, and he said, "Okay, there is another reason, the real reason. But if you insist on knowing about it, can't we go somewhere and talk? Do we have to stand out here on the street?"
Danielle smiled suddenly, her teeth small and white and even. "Sure," she said. "Let's walk around to the back of the house. It's a lovely night-or morning-and we can sit on a couple of lawn chairs and be comfortable."
She led the way around the side of the house, her slim body moving gracefully and her buttocks undulating. It was impossible not to be aware of the exciting, feminine loveliness of her, but only a part of him watched her because the rest was trying frantically to decide how much it was safe to tell her. And then he realized that it was not a matter of decision at all. To convince her not to call and tell the Lattimores, he had to reveal everything to her.
The back of the house was a modern miracle; he saw acres of emerald-green grass which changed abruptly to glistening white sand leading down to the beach. There was a clean line of demarcation between the two areas; there was all that smooth grass, as full and healthy as any grass he'd every seen in his life, and then abruptly the grass ended and there was the spotlessly clean sand. There was nothing to explain what kept the sand from creeping forward and overwhelming the grass. This kind of gardening had not existed when he'd last come to Palm Beach, and he shook his head in wonder of it.
Then he sat down on a lawn chair and lit a cigarette, and Danielle moved another chair close to his and sat down, too. And after they'd smoked in silence for a little while, she said, in her husky voice, "Well?"
"You tell me something first," Sky said "How'd you happen to recognize me? I know who you are, of course, because I've seen your pictures in a million places, but I'd swear we haven't met before tonight."
"We haven't," Danielle said. "But that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with the way you look, too. I spent a month or so in Europe this Spring, and you were pointed out to me everywhere I went-the playboy son of John Barclay Benton. I saw you at the Red Cross Ball in Monaco dancing with that Marchioness What's-her-name, and I saw you on the Riviera cavorting with Ilsa Padini-oh, and a lot of other places."
"That's strange," Sky said. "I didn't see you."
"It's not so strange," Danielle said drily. "You were pretty much occupied and content with what you had in hand. And I got a pretty good look at you and thought about the way I was always hearing about you when we were kids-which was why I remembered tonight that you used to spend a lot of time here on the beach." She shrugged. "I was sure it was you the minute I walked over to the limousine and looked at you, but I just couldn't believe it; I said to myself, What can Sky Benton possibly be doing pretending to be a chauffeur?' And then I was sure of it when you took that turn even though you said you didn't know Palm Beach. You came up with a good, quick explanation, but somehow I just didn't believe it."
Sky grinned. "The funny thing," he said, "is that I did take a long walk this afternoon, even though I don't think I happened to pass O'Dare Road or Maxwell Street. Anyway, I can see now how you got on to me."
Danielle stubbed out her cigarette. "All right," she said. "You see, but I still don't. What the devil are you up to with the chauffeur bit, anyway?"
The grin disappeared from Sky's face. "The real reason's pretty simple, too," he said. "I'm trying to find something to help me clear my father."
Her green eyes looked into his for a moment. She said gently, "Your father's dead, Sky."
Sky said grimly, "Ugly reputations have a way of lingering on after people die. I've got to find some evidence to prove he wasn't the thief they say he was...."
"Do you think there is any such evidence?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "But there's one thing I do know: if I'm right about my father, the one place to find the evidence to clear him is somewhere around Hugh Lattimore. And that's why I'm here."
She took another cigarette from the case in her purse and waited while he lit it, her lovely face serious in the shadowed moonlight. "The evidence against your father was pretty conclusive," she said. "There's a good chance that the evidence you're after-evidence for him-just doesn't exist."
"I won't deny that," he said. "But I've got to stick around in this job long enough to find out for myself."
She was silent for a long time after that. And then she said, her voice suddenly strained, "I don't think I can permit that, Sky. I've got to tell the Lattimores who you really are."
He stared at her, leaning toward her urgently. "For God's sakes, why?" he said. "I've opened up completely to you-told you everything there is to tell. Why do you want to ruin everything for me?"
Danielle sighed. "Call it loyalty to my friends if you need a label," she said. "I've never been particularly close to Carol because she's always been sort of. .odd, but Ronnie's been my friend for a long time even though she's almost twice my age, and I like Hugh a lot, too. And I never even knew your father...."
Sky put a hand on her arm, his fingers biting into her skin and flesh in his urgency. "But don't you see, Danielle?" he said. The only way I can do Lattimore any harm is by turning up something which proves he framed my father. I can't do him any harm if he turns out to be innocent. And I'm sure you don't want to protect him if he turns out to be guilty...."
"That isn't the whole picture," she said. "Hugh may be completely innocent, and you may still find something which looks bad and will give him trouble." She shook her head in sudden decision. "I'm sorry, Sky," she said. "I've got to call Ronnie now and tell her."
She stood up, and Sky stood up, too, and stepped close to her. "You can't," he said quietly. "And perhaps I can make you change your mind...."
He put his arms around her suddenly and pulled her close to him, crushing her soft body against his, and he put his mouth on hers. He kissed her fiercely, harshly, bruisingly.
She made no attempt to fight him, but she did not join in with him, either. She lay in his arms and let him hold her and kiss her, her body still and unresisting and her mouth unmoving. And when he finally released her, she said, very quietly, "Do you think something like this can influence me?"
"I don't know," Sky said. "Let's try it some more and find out."
He put his mouth against her mouth again, kissing her so bruisingly that she cried out softly in pain. She started to move in his arms, struggling to free herself, and instead he tightened his arms around her, crushing her soft breasts and incurved middle against his body. And as he kissed her, he put the tip of his tongue out and pressed it against her mouth.
She fought him now, holding her lips stiff and tight so that his tongue could not enter her mouth. He did not let it stop him; he continued to kiss her almost brutally and continued to touch her lips and teeth with his tongue, and he reached one hand between them and caught hold of her breast over her clothes and held it. The thin cloth of her dress and the stiffer cloth of her slip and brassiere separated his hand from her hot flesh, but he continued to squeeze the yielding curve of her breast as he kissed her, and after a moment her mouth opened to admit his tongue.
Her mouth opened a little, just a little, but he forced his tongue all the way in, deep inside. He began to move his tongue around inside her mouth, touching and teasing and covering her smaller tongue, and he let his other hand slip down now so that it rested on the outsweep of her buttocks. He moved his hand over her buttocks, sliding over the smooth flesh and searching. He continued to squeeze her breast with his other hand and pressing his middle against hers, and he heard her breathing quicken with the excitement which she could not conceal.
He pressed his advantage quickly: he began to move his body against hers, crushing harder and harder against her, and the movements of his hands and his lips became more and more fierce. And very slowly, as though she were fighting it but beginning to lose the battle, her arms, which had remained rigidly at her sides, began to move up, first touching his sides lightly and tentatively, and then slipping all the way around him and finally holding him as tightly as he had been holding her.
Now she was kissing him, too, her red, passionate lips crushing against his and her tongue encircling his tongue and moving frantically with it. And her body probed his body now as he was probing hers, and her hands slid restlessly over his back, feeling and enjoying the strength of him and the smooth ripple of his muscles.
They held and kissed each other for a long time, the desire increasing and beginning to run rampant through them; and then, very gently, he moved her back so that they fell together onto the soft, dewy grass.
A wry, inconsequential thought flashed through his mind: her dress looked extremely expensive, probably expensive enough so that the price would have paid his chauffeur's salary for a half-year or longer, and here he was ruining it by getting it full of grass stains. But he hadn't been poor long enough to let the thought bother him, and it didn't seem to bother her, and he shrugged inwardly and put his mouth on hers again.
She returned his kiss eagerly now, her arms moving around his neck and crushing him down harder against her, and he put his hands on the sides of her dress to search for the zippers which would loosen the dress. He found a zipper on each side, little ones about two inches each in length, and he pulled these down together, feeling the dress loosen and billow away from her body.
Then, guided by long experience, he put his right hand under her and on her back, searching for still another zipper on the back of her dress, and he found another one there, a longer zipper extending about six inches down the dress, and he opened this one, too, and her dress became completely loose.
He pulled his mouth away from her, then and he lifted himself so that he looked down at her waiting loveliness for a moment, and then he reached down and put his hands on the hem of her dress. He lifted the dress upward, revealing first the full length of her well-shaped legs and then the soft fullness of her thighs, and Danielle raised her body a little into the air so that he could pull the dress over her buttocks and above her waist.
He continued to move the dress upward, over her belly and chest, pausing as he reached the sweep of her breasts to touch her slip and brassiere and feel the yielding warmth below. Then he lifted the dress the rest of the way over her face and flaming hair and off, and tossed it onto one of the nearby chairs.
Then he repeated the same upward trip with her slip, and looked down at her again after that as she lay there on the cool grass wearing only brassiere and pants and her shoes and stockings. He removed the shoes next and then the stockings, loosening her garters and pulling these down with the stockings and off her legs. And finally he went to work on her brassiere.
It had a complex, unusual clasp, and he fumbled with it unsuccessfully for a few minutes. She laughed softly, the sound echoing and reechoing in the stillness of the night, and she put her hands behind her and helped him, showing him a second little catch below the first. Together they got the clasps open and pulled the straps wide apart, and the brassiere lay loose and open against her body.
She put her hands back at her sides, letting him take over again, and he did not move the brassiere away and off her immediately. Instead, he slipped both his hands underneath it, putting his fingers gently and lovingly on the soft, upright mounds. He caught hold of the soft, warm flesh and began to squeeze her breasts with both hands, letting his index fingers stray forward and slide along and stroke her hardening nipples; and as he did this he lay forward and kissed her again, softly at first and then with increasing fierceness.
His hands, he realized after a moment, were too gentle with her breasts; she made this clear by reaching up and putting her hands on his and pressing his fingers more dghtly against her. When he did not respond immediately, she began to move her fingers over his, squeezing her own breasts and stroking her own nipples by moving his hands with hers. And then he understood, and he tightened his grip on her flesh, letting his fingers dig into her softness and bruising her, rubbing her nipples more harshly. And she sighed deeply, and her teeth bit suddenly deep into the skin of his neck.
For a long time, he caressed her breasts with his hands, and then he lifted himself again and pulled the brassiere away from her and off her. He took a moment to enjoy the look of her breasts, the full up-pointed curves and the red length of her nipples, and then he moved down again and put his mouth where his hands had moved and explored just a moment before.
He kissed her right breast very lightly, feeling her tremble as his mouth touched her creamy skin, and he let his mouth stray all over her breast, kissing all of the surface and then lifting the breast with his hand so that he could kiss the perfumed underside.
He kissed her nipple for perhaps a minute, and then he bent his head a little lower and let her breast slip into his lips. He opened his lips only partially so that her breast did not move all the way in; he let it go in little by little, tightening on its softness and nibbling at it gently as it moved. And when it was finally all the way in, he began to slide it back and forth, caressing it while Danielle writhed and gasped on the grass underneath him.
After a while, he made love to her other breast, and then he lifted himself away from her, and without removing her final garment, her pale-green panties, he stood up and began to undress.
He undressed quickly. He unbuttoned the chauffeur's tunic and tossed it onto a lawn chair, following up with his undershirt so that Danielle could look up at the width of his shoulders and his body's hard-muscled dip to slimness at his belly and waist, and then he pulled off his shoes and socks. After that, he opened his belt and took off his uniform trousers, tossing it on top of the tunic on the chair, and then, as she lay there breathing deeply and watching him, he slipped out of his undershorts.
Then, completely naked, he knelled down alongside her, looking at her loveliness underneath her semi-transparent panties before he put his hands on them. And finally, with a quick gesture, he caught hold of her panties and pulled them down over her buttocks and legs, and now she was naked too.
Again he looked down at her for a moment, drinking in the intoxicating beauty of her pale, smooth body, letdng his eyes move over the round upsurge of her breasts and the flat whiteness of her belly and the breathtaking incurve, and he ran his hands over her from throat to toes and enjoyed the tremulous shivering of her slimness as he did so. And then, at last, he moved his body to hers.
She strained forward to meet him, and, as his hands slipped along her back and stopped to hold the soft curves of her, their mouths met and held, their tongues joining this time inside his mouth, and their questing bodies moved forward and met. And then the world around them seemed to whirl and twist crazily and finally explode into molten heat.
They lay on the dew-covered grass in silence for quite a long time afterwards, pleasantly aware that the night and the morning had at last grown cool just before the sun rose and brought its immense heat again. And then Sky used the one-word sentence which Danielle had spoken to him when they had first come here to the lawn area in back of the house. "Well?" he said.
Danielle did not answer him for a moment. And then she stretched luxuriantly, and she said, almost lazily, "You egotistical stinker."
"I'm sorry you feel that way," Sky said.
"But I do," Danielle said. "And the worst part of it is that you win the argument, anyway...."
He put his hands on her slim, naked shoulders and pulled her to him and kissed her, and he said, "You mean you're not going to tell the Lattimores?"
"You know I'm not," she said. "You knew it the minute I stopped fighting you and starting helping."
"I began to hope then," he said frankly, "but I wasn't sure. I'm glad, Danielle."
"I'm not so sure that I am," she said. "I just hope you won't turn up something you can twist and shape into making your father look innocent and Hugh Lattimore look guilty when it isn't true."
"I'll give you my word on that," Sky said. "I haven't gone into this thing to fake evidence to save my father's reputation; I just want to make sure that the evidence against him wasn't faked. So I'll call anything I find just the way I see it-if I find anything."
"I don't think you will, Sky," Danielle said.
"We'll see," Sky said. "Meanwhile, I appreciate your help, and there's just one more thing. I'm wondering if you can give me any more help...."
"What kind of help, Sky?" she asked.
"Information," Sky said. She started to shake her head, and he said, "I know you feel you don't know anything new, anything that can help-but stop and think about it for a minute, and maybe something'll come to you. Something that was said casually and then forgotten-some little thing that might have meant nothing then but might mean a lot now-"
Danielle lay back against the grass, her arms under her bright head and her green eyes staring up at the fading stars. Sky reached for his trousers and found cigarettes and lit one for her and another for himself, and she took hers absently, but she did not speak. She remained silent for a long time after that. And then, slowly and regretfully, she began to shake her head.
"I'm sorry, Sky," she said, "really sorry. I do want to help you now and I'd tell you anything which might help. But there's nothing, just absolutely nothing. There was a lot of talk about the case when it was going on-a lot of things that Hugh and Ronnie said to me back in Glen Cove-but they were all things that were reported completely and thoroughly in the newspapers. And I'm sure you've read all that-"
Sky nodded somberly, and he said, "I need something more. Think hard, Danielle. Even some little thing, something which seems unimportant-"
Again she was silent, and then again she shook her head. "I'm sorry, Sky," she said. "There just isn't anything."
He stood up, then, and she stood up, too, and they began to dress. It was almost light now, and the sun had begun to rise, but the coolness which had come so suddenly was still in the air. Danielle shivered, and Sky put his arms around her and kissed her, and she clung with unexpected fierceness to him.
I hope you don't get hurt, Sky," she said, her voice almost a whisper. "It seems to me so sure that you'll get hurt."
"I won't get hurt," he said. "If I was able to take the news about my father when I first got it, I'll be able to take it if I end up confirming or realizing that it's all true. But I've got to look into it a little more before I give up."
They finished dressing after that, and then they walked to the front door and kissed again there, and then they separated and Danielle went inside and Sky walked to the limousine and got behind the wheel.
He drove slowly and thoughtfully through the deserted streets, his mouth a thin, grim line. And as the car moved through the soundless morning, he thought bitterly, Well, I'm safe to go on again now. But I'm still no closer to what I want than I was that day in the plane coming home....
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It took nearly a month for Sky to find and seize an opportunity to search the Palm Beach cottage. He had almost begun to give up hope when the opportunity arrived, because there were a number of things about the cottage which made it look as though he'd never be able to search it.
The biggest obstacle, of course, was the fact that the house was just never empty. Ronnie and Carol Lattimore were there along with Leigh and a batallion of servants, and then Hugh Lattimore started coming down for week-ends; and though Sky could have managed a search if he was ever left alone in the house with either Carol or Leigh or even both of them, that just never happened. There were always a lot of other people wandering around, the Lattimores or the servants or, now and then, occassional Lattimore house-guests. And the second biggest obstacle, actually a part of the first, was that the important areas to be searched weren't clustered together here as they were back in Glen Cove: Carol's bedroom, which had to be searched because something might have been hidden here without her knowledge, was located in one part of the house, Hugh's and Ronnie's bedrooms in another, and Hugh also had an office in a third section.
Carol's bedroom was no problem: Sky moved in there during the night several times, after the other residents of the house were fast asleep, and one night they spent several wild, passionate hours in bed and then devoted the rest of the night to an inch-by-inch search. Carol's attitude was negative; she continued to maintain that nothing would be found because J. B. had not been framed, but that did not diminish the vigor and thoroughness of her part of the search. They found nothing at all.
Aside from that night, Sky spent most of his time just waiting around for an opportunity to search the rest of the house, watching the days pass and doing the minimal driving and garage work required of him, but the month was not completely unpleasant. The sessions with Carol were abandoned and exciting. So were the few nights he spent with Danielle D'Arcy, and he also had a lot of violent and enjoyable nights with Leigh. Mostly, in fact, he spent his nights with Leigh, enjoying the look of her and the way she spoke and the way she thought-finding, as the days passed, that her mind was as exciting as her slim body.
Every day and night he spent with her strengthened his assurance that she was the woman for him, the only woman, and as the month at Palm Beach began to draw to a close, the few stolen sessions he'd had with Carol and Danielle made him feel so guilt-filled afterward that he finally told both of them that he would not be seeing them, at least in that way, again. Neither of them reacted to the news with outpourings of joy; Carol cried bitterly and unceasingly through the long evening and night in which he told her, and Danielle, whose relationship with him he'd considered nothing more than a casual fling for both of them, revealed unexpected depths of emotion toward him by being unmistakably shattered by the news when she heard it.
But in the end both of them accepted the situation and lived with it. He told both of them that he was ending the sleeping around because he was in love with Leigh and intended to marry her, that his relationship with Leigh was built on the solid foundation of a complete community of tastes and thoughts discovered gradually, instead of solely on sexual passion. And in the end the dark-haired girl and the redhead accepted it because they new within themselves that he was right.
And after that, he saw only Leigh on his time off, falling more and more deeply and desperately in love with her, and he spent his working hours waiting around and beginning to despair of ever getting the opportunity to search the place. And then, out of the blue, the opportunity came.
The thing which brought about the opportunity was the fact that one of the most important and socially prominent residents of the Beach, Emily Wall Hathaway, threw a gigantic lawn party one Sunday afternoon at her estate in the north section of the Beach. There were over six hundred guests invited to the party, and it dragged in every member of the Lattimore household: Hugh and Ronnie and Carol Lattimore because they were great friends of the Hathaways and were called upon to serve as co-hosts; Leigh because a lot of Palm Beach's perennial gay bachelors had been invited and every unmarried higher-echelon employee on the Beach was commandered to serve as a dinner partner for these men; and all of the Lattimore servants because they were needed along with the corps of Hathaway servants to help out. Only Sky was not tapped because he was not needed: the guests would have their own transportation and chauffeurs, and he pleaded lack of knowledge of the social niceties of serving when Lattimore asked him if he'd be interested in doubling for extra pay as a waiter.
He drove the Lattimores to the Hathaway cottage that day with his hands on the wheel shaking a little with suppressed excitement, and, when Ronnie told him that they'd be there until at least nine and he had the rest of the afternoon to himself, he turned the car in the garage and entered a house which was empty for the first time since he'd driven down there.
He started on Ronnie's bedroom first because it happened to be the first room he passed, starting with the drawers of her bureau. He worked slowly, careful not to move anything out of place so that it would be noticed afterward, and careful not to miss or overlook anything, and he went through every drawer and shelf and every closet in the room. There was a huge collection of handbags in one of the bedroom closets, at least fifty bags, and he went through these painstakingly and patiently too because he knew that women had the habit of hiding or forgetting important papers sometimes in little-used purses.
He found nothing at all. But he did not stop there: he looked under the bed and behind pictures, and then he pulled each piece of furniture away from the wall to see if an envelope, perhaps, had been taped in the space there. There was nothing; Ronnie's bedroom contained nothing but Ronnie's own belongings and the faint perfumed aura of the woman herself.
There were no safes at all in either Ronnie's or Carol's rooms, but there were three in Hugh's quarters: a wall-safe in his bedroom and another wall-safe and a big standing safe in his office. Once again, Sky had gotten Leigh to provide the combinations for these when he'd learned of the impending exodus of the household to the Hathaway place, and he went through the safes as soon as he had finished checking Ronnie's room. But there was nothing in any of the safes which related in any way to his father.
He searched the rooms themselves next: inch by inch as he had searched Carol's and Ronnie's. His luck was exactly the same: no good at all. He found some things in the desk-drawer which related to business between Hugh Lattimore and J. B., but these were innocent items and unconnected with J. B.'s alleged theft.
It was nearly four o'clock when Sky finished his examination of the rooms, and his eyes were dull and his steps were heavy with despair as he started to walk back to his own quarters. It was over now: he'd spent long weeks waiting for this day, this last chance, hoping to find something which might prove that his father had been innocent, and he'd come up with empty hands.
Just before he entered his room, he turned and, strictly because he still had so much time left before the house would be filled to over-brimming with people again, went back to make a slow, careful search of the rest of the house. It wasn't likely, but it was at least possible-perhaps something important had been hidden in one of the other rooms without the knowledge of the occupants, perhaps in one of the servants' rooms. Without much hope, he began to look.
It was a hell of a job because the house was such a big one, but he went at it methodically and did not miss a single possibility. It was no good. At a quarter of nine, he had searched the rest of the house from door to door and found nothing at all, and he went out to the car, his lips twisted with bitterness, and drove to the Hathaway place to see if the Lattimores were ready to leave.
Well, he thought as he drove, you've had it, pal. And he had indeed: there was no place left to search, no other avenues to explore, and John Barclay Benton was still down on the books as a thief and would remain so through eternity.
And then, suddenly, he hit his fist down savagely on the seat of the limousine, and he thought, No, there's still one more possibility. That was truly and unquestionably the last one, and it wasn't very promising in view of the way all the other things had conked out completely, but it was still a possibility. He still hadn't gone after Ronnie Lattimore, and she might have something to tell under the right circumstances.
That meant, of course, hanging around and waiting for opportunity all over again, but, he told himself grimly, he was a hundred percent willing to wait a week or a month or a year if there was even the smallest possibility that this one final chance might pan out. And then, as it turned out, the opportunity arose that same night.
He found, when he reached the Hathaway cottage, that the party was just about over and the Lattimores were almost ready to leave. They got into the car just a few minutes after Sky pulled up in the limousine. Only Hugh and Ronnie were there, because Carol had gone off a few minutes before to another party with some other young people; and the moment they got into the car, and for the first time in Sky's presence, they began a bitter and vicious argument.
They began to scream and snarl at each other the moment they sat down, almost as though Sky were not in the car at all. The argument was typical and covered no new and undiscovered ground as husband-and-wife arguments go, mostly concerning itself with both of them accusing each other of drinking too much and getting too friendly with guests of the opposite sex at the party, but it was obvious from the deep-felt bitterness underlying the things they said that they had had these arguments many times before and that any love between them had long ago ended.
Sky listened to the ugly speeches with an acute feeling of discomfort and embarrassment, wishing he were somewhere else, anywhere else-but then, as the argument went one and on, a new thought began to make itself felt in his mind. If ever, he thought, a married woman was ripe for an alliance with a sympathedc outsider, it was right after a violent argument with a husband she had begun to dislike anyway....
He began to hope that she would not get out of the car with her husband, and the hope worked out perfectly. When the Lattimore cottage loomed up in front of them and he pulled the limousine up on the long driveway, Lattimore opened the door on his side and slammed it behind him and stomped away angrily toward the house. Ronnie started to open the door on her side too; but then she closed it again and moved back inside the car.
"Let him go," she said, almost to herself. And then she looked up at Sky as though she were aware of him for the first time, and she addressed her next words to him. "Back the car off the driveway again, please, Schuyler," she said. "I'd like you to take me for a drive."
"Any place in particular, Mrs. Lattimore?" he asked.
"No," she said shortly. And then, because she realized that the tone she'd used had been as sharp as the voice she'd directed toward her husband in the course of their argument, she added more quietly, "Just drive around town for a little while, please. I ... feel the need for a little air after all that partying.'.."
"I understand, ma'am," Sky said, and he pulled the car off the driveway and onto the street again.
He began to drive slowly and smoothly through the streets, and as he drove he began, as he'd done so often before since he'd taken this job, to study his passenger in the back seat. She was sitting tensely and stiffly and puffing with little puffs on a cigarette, but the anger which still flamed within her had put deep red in her cheeks and made her look more attractive than ever.
And he thought: This once can be a witch, that's for sure, but she'll never be a bore.
She certainly didn't look her age, particularly in the dress she was wearing. It was a simple little strapless black dress without ruffles or lace or other decorations, and it looked as thought it had been put together in a minute and a half; but it had probably taken weeks of thought and cost hundreds of dollars because, when you continued to study it, you realized that it was full of subtle little touches which emphasized and underscored the beauties of the figure of the woman wearing it. They were just unnoticeable little things, like the way the material was gathered at the waist to point up the tininess of Ronnie's waistline and the contrasting full out-sweep of her hips, and the way the dress was extra-tight and taut at the bodice to thrust forth her large, milk-white breasts with even more breathtaking exposure than most strapless dresses. And though a man might not realize how these effects were being accomplished, he could not fail to be aware of the exciting results, and of the fact that Ronnie looked more like Carol's sister than her mother.
It seemed to Sky that she looked, that night, like a woman in her early thirties at most, even younger than she'd looked the first time he'd seen her at the airport and all the other times since, and he watched her full breasts rise and fall in her continuing fury as he drove. He became fascinated with them, his eyes held by their roundness and stark whiteness, and he was startled when she suddenly spoke.
"Turn on this street, Schuyler," she said, "keep going until you get to the end of the road. I'd like to sit and look out at the water for a while."
He turned on the street she had indicated, and stopped the car when the road ended at the foot of a long stretch of white, deserted beach. He looked around curiously; this was a section of Palm Beach with which he was not familiar at all.
It was a completely empty part of the Beach, with no houses or cabanas or other edifices of any kind as far as the eye could see in either direction. Palm Beach had undergone a housing boom in recent years like most other parts of the country, but this section had not been touched at all: the sand was clear and smooth and free of footprints, so it looked as though no people had been here at all today instead of merely gone now because it was late. The water seemed particularly rough here, crashing and churning-white as it hit the beach-perhaps that was the reason.
He said wonderingly, "I thought I'd visited every square foot of this town since I've been here, Mrs. Lattimore, but this spot is brand-new to me. Where are we, anyway?"
Ronnie had been about to light another cigarette, and she lifted it out of her mouth to smile at him and answer him. "I don't think it has a name," she said. "It's a sort of a no-man's-land, a little inlet where the ocean is so rough that most people think it's dangerous to swim and avoid it."
"It never is," Ronnie said. "That's what I like about it. I come here all the time when I feel like being all by myself-when I feel like going for a solitary swim or just lying alone on the sand...."
Sky looked over at the huge waves, hurling themselves resoundingly against the shoreline. "I hope you're a good swimmer," he said.
"I can take care of myself," Ronnie said. And then her dark eyes met his in the rear-view mirror, and she said, a curious inflection in her voice, "In everything."
It sounded like a cue because it carried the clear implication, or so it seemed to Sky, that she could also handle and take care of herself when it came to swimming in other rough waters, when it came to doing a little playing around. But Sky hesitated, because he wasn't quite sure about how to follow it up, and he hesitated a moment too long. And then the instant was gone, and Ronnie gave an odd, regretful little half-shrug and finished lighting her cigarette, and then she opened the door and stepped out onto the road.
He was out of the car himself immediately and at the door to help her out, holding her arm perhaps a shade too tightly, but she did not give him any other cues just then. She lifted each foot in turn and slipped off her high-heeled black shoes, and then, in her stocking feet, she walked out onto the beach and toward the ocean.
He stood there watching her, uncertain as to whether or not to follow, and the soft wind moved against her back and toward the ocean, tightening the dress against her slim, graceful figure and outlining the rounded curves of her buttocks. Her hair, dark as her daughter's but worn attractively tight around her head, shone in the moonlight, and, when she turned and look back at him for an instant before she moved on again, he found himself moved by the deep sadness of her eyes and by the faint weariness of her high-cheekboned, patrician face. He felt sudden hunger for her, a hunger much stronger than the "necessity seduction" he had intended for her in order to learn what she might be able to tell him about his father, and he felt suddenly ashamed of it because of his so-recent decision to remain faithful to Leigh. He had managed to convince himself that to take her for her secrets was okay because there was no other path left for him, but how could he square away this sudden surge of desire for her for no reason other than her loveliness? And then he stopped trying to analyze it: his hunger was all at once too strong, and he moved quickly after her.
She heard him coming, his shoes slapping on the sand, and she turned again and looked at him, and he thought for a moment that she was going to order him away. But she said, instead, "I'm going to sit on the sand for a while. Come and sit with me: it's lovely and relaxing out here at night." And his heart lurched wildly inside him.
She continued to walk down the beach until she was within ten feet of the water, and then she sat down and lifted her slim legs to slip off her stockings. She began to move her small feet around, digging her toes into the sand, and he stood there admiring the slim lines of her legs and the delicate smallness of her feet for a moment, and then he sat down, too.
He sat down fairly close to her, but not so close that it was over-obvious, and she turned and looked at him, smiling, her eyes dreamy and half-shut against the wind. She looked breathtakingly lovely, the moonlit night and her graceful pose slipping still another ten years away from her, and his heart began to pound even harder because it seemed to him that the hot, measuring look, the look of open invitation which he'd seen a number of times before, was back on her face again.
Their eyes met and locked for a long minute, and then she slowly drew her eyes away and she looked down at her cigarette. It had gone out, and she said, "My cigarette's dead. Do you happen to have a match?"
He caught her eyes again and held them this time, and he thought, as he reached into his tunic-pocket and pulled out a book of matches and leaned slowly toward her, that there could be no mistaking the look on her face and the certainty of her cue this time. She wasn't calling for a match at all; she was calling for him....
And as he leaned toward her, so close that their shoulders touched, their eyes never left each other, and their breathing became suddenly so loud that it seemed to shatter the night. Her eyes seemed wider as she stared up at him, and he lit a match and touched it to the end of her cigarette; and then, abruptly, even as she drew in her first breath of smoke, he reached up suddenly and lifted the cigarette away from her lips and put his mouth in its place.
He kissed her harshly, brutally, hungrily, and for an instant her soft red mouth returned to the pressure. And then, to his absolute and stunned amazement, she pulled away from him and pushed at him with her hands, and she moved away on the sand and sat there with her hands half-lifted as though she were ready to fight him.
For the next long minute, there was a dead silence between them. And then she said, flatly and definitely, "No. Absolutely no."
He was bewildered by it, because he was absolutely certain that he had not mistaken her open invitation, now and many times in the past. He said, his voice showing his bewilderment, "Why not?"
She did not answer him for a moment. And then she said, in the kind of patient voice used in talking to a child, "There are a lot of reasons. Let's start with the moral one. I'm a married woman-"
He was suddenly almost overcome with fury, fury at his hunger for her and at the way she had urged him on and then held him off. He cut her off; he said, bitterly, "Let's skip the moral jazz."
She seemed amused by his statement; a faint smile touched her lips, and she said, "all right, I'll concede that. Let's go on to the next reason-the social one. I'm a member of society here, and you're my chauffeur."
"That's jazz, too," he said harshly. "Our social differences won't show with our clothes off."
He was deliberately brutal, then, but she seemed to like it. Her smile was completely visible, suddenly, and she said, "I'll concede that one, too. Let's try one more. I'm old enough to be your mother...."
He waved an impatient hand at her. "That's more bull," he said. "We're people, not calendars. I don't care if you're older than I am or younger-you're a beautiful woman, and all I know is that I want you desperately and I was sure until a minute ago that you wanted me, too." He moved forward, suddenly, and caught hold of her shoulders, and she tried to struggle out of his grasp but he would not let her go. "Admit it," he said, harshly. "I wasn't dreaming all this, making it up. You did show me that you wanted me, too...."
She continued to struggle in his grasp, her breath hot against his face, and then all at once her body went limp against him. Her voice was suddenly husky with emotion, and she said, "All right. All right, I'll admit it. I have wanted you, ever since I saw you when Hugh and I got off the plane-and I was wild with happiness when you started to walk after me here on the beach and you took me in your arms and kissed me. But I came to my senses just in time-"
"You still haven't given me a reason," Sky said.
"You saw the reason for yourself when you drove us home from the party tonight," Ronnie said. "You saw the way my husband and I feel about each other-we're just about at the end of the road. And I just can't take the chance of getting involved right now in something my husband might find out about and use against me.
"He won't find out," Sky said.
"I can't take the chance," Ronnie said. "If he did find out, somehow, his lawyers would use it against me in court and make me out to be the worst possible kind of tramp, and I'd end up without a cent."
She pulled away from him, suddenly, and got to her feet, and he stood up, too, and stood looking down at her. There was a tense silence between them for a moment, and then she said, "I mean it. I don't blame you for hating me because I did want you and I did show it and I did encourage you. But I just can't go on with it, not now. It would just be too crazy a chance to take...."
He wanted to continue to argue with her; more than that, he wanted, suddenly, to strike out at her, hit her, hurt her, beat her. But he did none of it-because what the hell would be the use? He knew, all at once, that he would never convince her no matter what he said and did-because this was a mature woman, not some kid he could talk into anything, and she just wouldn't yield and change her mind when a mountain oi money was at stake.
And, finally, he managed to shrug, and he said, "It's your loss, lady." And he managed to force a look of calmness onto his face, and he took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth and lit it with a who-gives-a-damn air.
And then there was silence again, a silence broken at last by Ronnie. "I'm really sorry," she said. "But I think you'd better go now. Take the car and stop and buy yourself a drink or something and come back here in an hour or so."
He stared at her, puzzled. "What'll you be doing?" he asked.
"This hasn't been so easy for me, either," she said". "I want to do something to cool myself off. I want to go for a swim...."
He looked down at her expenisve cocktail dress. "In that?" he said. "Or-don't tell me you have a bathing-suit on underneath?"
"I don't need a bathing-suit," she said. "I don't need anything at all. I've already told you nobody ever comes out here except me."
He had an immediate picture of it in his mind, a picture of her slim, naked body swimming through the green water, the waves parting with her movements to reveal her full red-capped breasts and the inviting inturn below her waist, and the vision excited him and he took an instinctive step toward her. But she stepped back quickly and said, "No! Please ... ," and he turned away unhappily and walked slowly back to the car.
He reached the car and turned and looked back at her, and she sat down again on the sand and said, "I won't move an inch until you're away from here." And he shrugged again, another forlorn attempt at indifference, and he got into the car and set it into motion and backed out of the street.
He did not go to a bar for a drink, and he did not go for a long, restless drive. He did not, in fact, go anywhere at all; he merely drove the limousine a couple of blocks until he found a spot where he could park the car unobtrusively in the shadows, and he left it there. And then he walked quickly and soundlessly back to the deserted beach, relying on his black chauffeur's uniform to render him considerably less than clearly visible.
When he reached the beach, she was nowhere in sight at all, and he stepped into the shadows of a cluster of palm trees and looked around him for a long time before he spotted the little pile of her clothes all the way down close to the water. And then he continued to look around for another long while, and finally he saw Ronnie swimming in the ocean, a tiny moving dot in the distance.
He moved quickly, then: he stripped off all his own clothes and left it in a neat pile there in the shadows, and he moved across the beach in a crouching run which kept him hidden in the event that her eyes were sharp and she happened to be looking toward the beach. And he hit the water with a smooth, expert thrust-forward movement which created not even the faintest traces of a splash.
There was one thing he'd gotten out of the weeks and months he'd spent as a boy here in Palm Beach: he'd learned to swim as cleanly and noiselessly as a marauding shark. He moved swiftly and silently through the rough water, swimming below the surface, and he came up behind her so quietly that she was not even aware of his approach.
She was treading water as he reached her, her full, high-held breasts bobbing up and down in the water as she managed to remain almost in the same spot, and she cried out in surprise and fear swhen he came up in back of her and thrust his dripping body against her buttocks and put his big hands over her breasts. She turned to stare at him with fear in her big black eyes and the fear left her immediately when she saw who he was, but then she began to struggle and try to get away from him.
He did not let her move at all; he held her captive with his hard-muscled body pressed against her and lying over her in the water, and his fingers began to open and close on her breasts. He squeezed their rounded wet softness and caught hold of her nipples with his thumbs and forefingers, and he stroked them as she struggled and felt the nipples hardening against the surfaces of his fingers.
She continued to struggle and try to get away, and the movement of her beautiful body was even more sensuous in doing that than if she'd been deliberately trying to excite him. The full round mounds of her buttocks and the deep separation between them slid back and forth against his belly and his middle as she fought to force him to let her go, and her long legs kicked out wildly against him, letting him feel the tingling warmth of her calves and her thighs.
And the harder she fought him, the more tightly he held her. He continued to caress and stroke her breasts and hardening nipple, and after a while he released one breast and slid one hand down to move over her wet belly and navel and the area which promised heaven below, and his body moved a little in rhythm with her as her back and buttocks rubbed frantically against him.
After a moment, she stopped struggling; she was suddenly out of breath from the mixture of her struggle and the excitement of his hard, probing body against her. She struggled to catch her breath for a moment or two, and she said, her voice low and difficult to hear against the crashing roar of the waves, "I begged you not to do this...."
And he looked down at her then and grinned, a fierce, savage, possessive grin. "Forget it," he said between his teeth. "You were set for this the minute you smiled at me 'way back there at the airport."
CHAPTER TWELVE
He let her go as he said it, and she dove forward swiftly to swim away from him, but he simply moved easily under the surface and came up again face to face with her and put his arms around her waist. He tightened his grip around her as he held her that way, crushing the softness of her breasts against his chest, and he put his eager mouth on hers.
For a split second, she tried to resist him, tried to turn her mouth away from his. And then the hunger which was as strong in her as it was in him won out completely, and she moaned softly and returned his kiss fiercely, and her arms slipped up around his neck.
She became a wild woman, then, once she had let herself go, and all fear of her husband and of the possible loss of her share of the Lattimore fortune vanished in the thrashing, churning water as completely as if had never existed. Her full-lipped red mouth thrust and ground against his mouth with an eagerness close to desperation, and her soft body clung and moved against his in her hunger to become a part of him, and one of her hands around his neck moved down to touch and caress the hard muscles of his back and the contours of his buttocks. Their mouths remained tight together as their bodies moved with their passion and with the surging flow of the ocean, and their tongues met and joined inside Ronnie's mouth.
They continued to kiss hungrily, and after a moment, Sky's hands moved over Ronnie's lovely body as eagerly as she was moving over his. One of his hands touched first one upthrust breast and then the other, and then both of them together, holding them pressed into a single pulsing, yielding mass of loveliness; and his other hand strayed over her back and finally found her buttocks and squeezed their softness and moved down to stroke the cool crevice between them. He touched and squeezed the lush curves of her hips, and the full flesh of her thighs, and finally his hand moved to the front of her and caressed the beauty of her.
Then he kicked back in the water and moved a little away from her, and he dipped his head forward, sending streaming beads of water across her skin, and he put his face against the womanly softness of her body. Her hands reached out to stroke his dripping, close-cropped dark hair, and he put a hand under her right breast and lifted it to touch his mouth. He kissed her dark-red nipple lightly as it moved against his lips, and then he bit the nipple gently and then less gently and finally with fierce sharpness.
He heard her cry out in what he had long ago begun to label in his mind as the ecstasy of pain, and he opened his mouth wider to let her breast slide more deeply inside. It had a curious taste, an odd mixture of the sweetness of her flesh and the streaked saltiness of the ocean, but he found it pleasant. He began to caress the smooth mound with his lips, kiss at the yielding flesh, and he saw her slim body begin to twist and turn in violent excitement in the water.
He continued to caress her soft, full breast, kissing it with greater and greater ferocity, and her hands on his head tensed and held him more and more tightly against her. He reached his other hand up and caught hold of her other breast and began to squeeze it and rub and stroke her nipple, and her moans ceased being intermittent and became a constant sound of wildness.
Then, as he continued to make love to her that way, her fingers moved down from his hair to his shoulders and his back, and she began to dig at him with her nails. She tore at his skin and his flesh, creating thin trails which did not bleed but which stung as the salt water touched them. And her teeth bit sharply into the lobe of his ear, and she said, her voice a gasping, straining whisper, "Please. Please. Now...."
He did not take her there, but he moved his mouth away from her breast and reached down to put his arms under buttocks, and he began to swim smoothly and easily toward the shore. She put her arms around his neck and clung to him as he held and carried her that way, and her mouth touched the skin of his neck and her white teeth bit deeply into him as he swam.
He reached the beach in less than a minute, and he walked a dozen feet onto it and put her slim body down on the warm white sand. And then he loomed over her.
She looked up at him as he moved down toward her, her eyes bright and glistening and live with open, naked hunger for him, and her hands moved up to touch him and her legs moved wide apart. But he did not thrust his body down to crush against her; he put his palms against the sand to brace himself so that he did not quite touch her, and he pwt his hot mouth tight against her ear.
She shivered at the touch of his mouth against her, and she caught hold of his shoulders and tried to pull him down against her. But he held himself back, and he said, very softly in her ear, "Do you know my full name, Ronnie?"
She stared up at him in a mixture of bewilderment and frustration; she did not want conversation now. She shook her head almost frantically, and she said, "No. What difference does it make?"
"A lot of difference," Sky said softly, and he moved his body down a little to touch her lightly now, watching her slimness twist and turn in hunger against the sand. "It's Peter Schuyler Benton. Sky Benton...."
He saw her dark eyes widen, and she said, hoarsely, "Benton! You're J. B.'s son...."
"That's right, Ronnie," he said, and he let the weight of his body touch her a little more heavily. "I'm J. B.'s son. That's why I took this job with you, Ronnie. I want to find out the truth about my father...."
He was taking a chance, and he knew it; the things he was telling her might well snap her back to reality and rob her of her overwhelming passion. But he was in luck: she was too far gone for that, and her body continued to writhe and move under him, and she reached up again to try to pull him down completely upon her. And she said, her voice ragged with heat, "Please, Sky. Can't we talk later? Please, Sky..
He hid the smile of triumph, his feeling of impending success at her complete loss of control and resistance now. Again he moved his body down to touch her a little more sharply, and he said, "Now, Ronnie. Right now." And then he went on, "I searched your house today, Ronnie, when you were all over at the Hathaway party-looking for some kind of paper which would tell me the truth about my father. I didn't find anything, but there is a paper like that somewhere, isn't there? Isn't there, Ronnie?"
And there, then, was his final try-because if she answered in the negative, he would believe that she was telling the truth in her eagerness to get the conversation ended, and that would be that. He did not know if such a paper actually existed, but it was his final desperate try, and he said it as firmly and certainly as if he was positive of it. And his heart leaped wildly inside him when she nodded....
Her arms were around him again, then, pulling him down to her with a strength he would not have believed she possessed. And she gasped, "Yes, Sky, yes. I'll give you the paper afterward-I swear it. But not now, Sky-for God's sakes, not now...."
And he had won, and suddenly he could no longer hold himself back, either. He plunged his body down against her with a wild, animal fierceness, and his mouth crushed against hers and his hands held her buttocks. And for a long time afterward the silence of the night was torn apart by their cries and embraces of love.
He did not ask her at once after it was over; he held her in his arms for a long time afterward, and she lay there in silent contentment, their glistening bodies touched by the occasional whisper of breeze. And then he said, very quietly, "Where's the paper, Ronnie?"
He was surprised to see sudden moisture in her beautiful dark eyes. And he felt suddenly and sharply wrenched with illness as she said, "I tricked you, Sky."
He sat up, then, and he looked down at her with savage fury. "You'd better be fooling," he said. "Because I swear I'll kill you if you told me there was a paper when there isn't...."
She sat up, too, very close to him, and the sadness within her was deep and real and visible. "It isn't that, Sky," she said. "There's a paper, all right-the reason you didn't find it is that I've been carrying it around with me ever since I got it. But it isn't going to give you what you want...."
"Why not?" he asked.
She shook her head, and her voice was suddenly full of pity for him. "I know what you want," she said. "You want something to prove that J. B. was innocent-and my paper isn't going to give you that. I'm afraid it proves exactly the opposite."
He said fiercely, "I don't believe it!"
"You'll have to believe it," Ronnie said. "You'll have to believe it when you see it for yourself. I've got it right in my handbag."
She stood up and walked over to her little pile of clothes a few feet away, and he felt sharp, sick fear as he watched her pick up her bag and take a long, crumpled piece of paper out of it. And a minute later, when she handed the paper silently to him, he knew that she had been telling the truth.
The paper was not a legal document or an affidavit or anything like that; it was a long, passionate letter, John Barclay Benton's last letter, written in prison just before he killed himself and smuggled out somehow to reach Ronnie. And there was no possibility at all that it might be a forgery: there was no question about this long example of J. B.'s familiar, cramped handwriting, and even the special turn of phrase was J. B.'s and no one else's.
Ronnie, my dearest love, the letter was headed, and he stared up at the dark-haired woman in surprise, and she saw that he was looking at that top line and she nodded. "That's right," she said bitterly, and he knew that the bitterness was directed at herself. "You might say that I've been the Benton family's private tramp-you tonight, and your father for two years up to the time he was arrested. Tramp's the word, Sky: one of a long line of women on whom J. B. spent all of his own money and then some of Hugh's. The latest and the last."
And now Sky's eyes were filled with moistness, too, and the letter confirmed completely what Ronnie had said. It was a letter completely typical of J. B. and yet entirely different: typical in its meticulous, almost prissy choice of words and of language, and absolutely different in the picture of his father it presented to Sky. For J. B., Sky realized now, was not at all, at the end, a man who was almost fanatic in his care to protect the property of other people: he had become, in his last years, a man who'd enjoyed so much the abandoned wildness of his life that he hadn't given a damn where he got the money to support it just as long as he got it. And, his letter told Ronnie as it concluded, it had all been so much fun that he was proceeding almost contentedly to death at hk own hand now that he had been caught....
Sky handed the letter back to Ronnie in silence a little later, and neither of them spoke as they dressed and went back to the car. And as he drove through the darkness to the Lattimore cottage, thinking of the stranger named John Barclay Benton who had been his father, a single thought kept repeating itself over and over again in his mind: He didn't even mention my name once in his letter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He was packing his bags when Leigh came suddenly into his room. He had told her what he'd learned and had then gone upstairs to pack, and she'd followed him just a few minutes later.
"All of a sudden I was afraid," she said. "I thought-"
"Thought what?" he asked. "That I'd be sunk enough about all this to kill myself too?" He shook his head, and he smiled grimly. "No, there's not much chance of that, Leigh. One suicide in the Benton family is plenty."
"I'm glad of that, anyway," she said.
He went on packing silently for a while, and then he said, "You know what hurts most about all this, Leigh? Not the fact that he managed to squander every cent of the Benton money-and the fact that he's turned out to be a thief after all. It's the fact that he didn't even think of me and mention me when he was writing his last letter...."
She looked at him in silence for a moment. And then she said, very quietly, "Is that so surprising, Sky? Did you ever think of him once the last couple of years when you were running around Europe having a great time?"
And the truth of her statement was so obvious and evident that he had no answer at all.
They were silent for a long time after that, the room dead-still except for the faint thud as he tossed clothing into his suitcases. Then she asked, in her low, sweet voice, "What are your plans, Sky? Where do you go from here?"
"Where do I go?" he said. "Back to Europe, I guess, if I've saved enough from my salary to swing the fare, or if I can scrape it up somewhere else if I haven't. Back to bumming around in Rome and Paris...."
She put a hand on his sleeve. "Can you tell me why?" she said. "Can you tell me why you want to waste your life doing that? You've already seen one Benton life thrown away over nothing. Do you have to make it two?"
He looked at her hopelessly. "What else is there for me to do?" he asked. "I certainly can't stay on here. What am I supposed to do-get another job as a chauffeur for some other rich people and spend my days thinking that I used to be as loaded as they are?"
"There are a lot of other things you can do," Leigh said. "Your father didn't start out with his millions-he made it all himself in Wall Street. And you're bright enough to do the same thing...."
"Sure," Sky said ironically. "They'll welcome me with open arms in the financial district. They'll fall all over themselves offering jobs to the son of John Barclay Benton...."
"I'm not saying it'll be easy," Leigh said. "I'm saying you can do it." She added quietly, "And I'd like to be along to help you...."
He turned to look at her, at her slim blonde loveliness, and he felt a surge of love and affection for her so strong that it was overwhelming. He took a step toward her-but then he stopped himself.
He hadn't shown any greater thoughtfulness and strength of character toward her than-as Leigh had pointed out-he'd shown toward his father: he'd realized he was in love with her and had promised himself to remain faithful to her, and then he'd turned right around and gone after another woman. And he'd kept right on with the chase even when he'd realized that it had stopped being necessity and had become just plain heat. That, he knew, was a manifestation of the weakness which had wrecked his father and was working inside him to wreck him, too; and he felt certain suddenly that he'd be able to control it after this and remain faithful to her if they did tie up together. But that was impossible right now for all the other reasons....
He said gently, "No, Leigh. That's not in the cards for now, either. Maybe later on, if I stay in the States, and if I do manage to make something of myself. But not right now-not when I haven't got anything...."
"That's wrong, too," Leigh said. "Because you have got something, the most important thing of all, and so have I. We've got each other."
They stood there for a moment very close together, their bodies almost touching, and then all at once they were in each other's arms. And as they kissed, Sky felt a sudden strong feeling of assurance and confidence, and he thought wonderingly about how often Leigh seemed to turn out to be right. Because they did have each other and, when you got right down to it, that was all that really counted. Everything else, he felt suddenly sure, would take care of itself in time.