My name is Jack Warren. I'm thirty-four, sturdily built, brown-haired, and reasonably uninhibited, thanks to my previous work as an insurance claims investigator for Duron Casualty-Assurance Company, with headquarters in the Insurance Exchange Building on West Jackson Boulevard in the Windy City.
My parents had been killed in an automobile accident, and so I'd gone to live at the age of seventeen with my Aunt Henrietta and my Uncle Cyrus on the North Side. They had two kids of their own, a boy of nine and a girl of twelve, and they ran an imported linens shop in the old University Club Building on Michigan Avenue.
Because they traveled to Europe a great deal to commission hand-woven linen for their store, they had a German governess to take care of their kids, a thirty-one year old flaxen-haired, willowy piece by the name of Barbara Gungol.
Barbara had come to Chicago four years before to marry a friend of her cousin's, who had promptly got himself run over by a truck. So, the bereaved beauty took to domestic service to earn a living while awaiting her chance to marry someone with a better longevity record. She was about to be engaged to a truck driver who bought a big bottle of Chippewa Spring Water to Aunt Henrietta's house every ten days or so.
It was to Barbara Gungol that I owed my initiation into fucking. I'd already found in an attic trunk a couple of real lurid French books which Uncle Cyrus had picked up on his travels, and since I was studying French in high school I made it my business to understand every word. I used my left hand to hold the book open and my right hand to jack off when I got to some of the exciting parts where the hero was fucking the heroine to a faretheewell.
Barbara Gungol had a delightful habit of combing out her long flaxen hair and going around in a thick white nightie, though it wasn't always thick enough to hide the dark blonde muff of pussy hair between those long, luscious thighs of hers.
She also had a habit of visiting the two little stinkers who were my cousins, tucking them in bed and telling them a fairy tale so they could dream sweet dreams. I was dreaming dreams, too, but they had nothing to do with fairies.
So one night I left my door open. I hugged my pillow and I pretended to be dreaming, and I was kissing the pillow and calling out, Barbara, meine Liebchen, ich liebe dich so viel, which means, Barbara sweetheart, I love you so much. Being reasonably curious, the governess came into my room and sure enough, she had on her nightie and a robe over it, and her hair was cascading all the way down her supple back to her springy hips.
I rolled over onto my side, clutched my pillow to my chest, sighed loudly, and repeated the one line of German I knew. I kissed the pillow again.
I heard the door close very softly, and then she came back to me. I rolled over on my back, moaned again, and mumbled her name.
She bent over me and stroked my forehead.
I sighed like a dying calf. All I had on was my pajama trousers, and a single thin sheet covering me gave evidence that I was already mature for my age.
A moment later, Barbara's soft hand discovered that for herself. I opened my eyes, pretended to have just awakened and stammered, "Oh, M-Miss Gungol, it's you. I was just dreaming--"
"Shh, you must be very quiet," she whispered back. Then, to my amazed delight, she slipped off her bathrobe and crept into bed with me. Then she kissed me and giggled, "What a naughty boy you are to dream about me. And just what did you dream?"
"About, about your loving me Fraulein Barbara," I sighed as I snuggled closer and began to stroke her long hair, not forgetting in the process to feel the pliant, delectably shaped contours of her willowy body.
Of course I didn't go about it too boldly, lest she suspect I was far from being an utter virginal innocent. But by the time my fingers slyly closed over the impudently round, compact cheeks of her voluptuous ass, Barbara Gungol was herself beginning to moan and to tug off my pajama trousers the way you strip off an ear of corn at harvest time.
After insisting that I must promise her that I would never tell anyone about this, she pulled her nightie well above her lusciously mobile hips. I pantingly reassured her. I ran my fingers through her thick long hair while she planted her elbows on either side of me, knees astride mine, rousing me wildly with the way her warm satiny bare abdomen and that thick-fleeced pussy of hers were rubbing my adolescent weapon.
"I ought not to do this, you wicked boy. I bet you have done this already with many other Madeleins!" she whispered.
I told her that she was the first girl I'd ever loved, and that was the truth. It was the right answer, too. Her mouth sealed mine and she lowered herself onto my cock and for the first time in my life I felt the wonderful thrill of feeling my shaft clutched in a tight, warm, eager cunt hole.
I was glad to take the passive role. Barbara did all the work, and I'm proud to say that I made her come. She also came back for seconds for several weeks until she finally decided to get married and get it regular from her truck driver, because there was too much danger that my aunt or uncle or those two little stinkers might happen to blunder into my room at a critical moment.
Anyway, I just cited this case to show you that I knew all about pussy before I came of age, and I appreciated it, too.
I went to Northeastern University, tried out for football, and that's when I met Matt Hollister who became my boss at Duron.
Matt was a senior when I was a lonely sophomore; he was first-string left halfback while the coach wisely used me sparingly as a substitute end.
Finally, I got my chance at the traditional Purdue game which ended the season. I had seen a gorgeous blonde on the fifty-yard line.
and sort of hinted to her that I'd like a date with her. She told me to go out and cover myself with glory and she'd see. So I tried.
What happened was that in about the middle of the third quarter, while we were tied 7-7 with Purdue, Matt shot me a pass, dropping back out of the pocket and spotting me down field.
Unfortunately, I was taking a look at that blonde and figuring out just what position I was going to make or take when we got together for our fucking that night, and so I juggled the pass, a Purdue defender grabbed it and ran it back through everybody else for a touchdown.
The coach yanked me right away and bawled me out. Fortunately, Matt was able to complete two passes to guys that didn't have pussy on their mind, and we finally managed to win by six points.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, after bumming around in a few small advertising agencies, I met Matt Hollister in a bar about five years ago and he offered me the job of investigator on his staff because he was the head man in that department.
Lots of people try to rook insurance companies, by arson, fake thefts, and sometimes even by trickily planned murders. My job was to see that scoundrels like that didn't hook onto our dough.
One of my first cases had to do with an Evanston book dealer who was selling first editions to substantial citizens in the suburbs and the far South Side of Chicago, then having his two cute female assistants steal them back, give the elderly clients a little pussy or frenching, and then split the dough between himself and the client after the latter had put in a claim with us.
I broke up that case and I managed to enjoy both of the book dealer's mistresses before they all went off to the penitentiary.
In the process, I got myself a couple of quickies from the wives and daughters of some of these crooked book collectors. Also, I had a more or less steady mistress in Kathy Murnow, a twenty-six-year-old dark-brown-haired divorcee with big full titties, creamy skin, and old dark brown-haired divorcee with big full titties, creamy skin, and a splendid bottom for spanking or buggering. The trouble was, at the end of that case Kathy decided she would shack up with Matt Hollister because he looked like Sean Connery, who plays James Bond on the silver screen.
Then I had a really AC/DC case, in which I had to track down a stolen Stradivarius owned by a slinky dyke by the name of Mona Wilhelm, the leader of an all-girl orchestra. She was trying to get a quarter of a million bucks from Duron because she'd insured the fiddle for that much.
But by the time I got finished, the violin wound up in Mexico with a fortune in heroin stashed away in it, and I had practically had to screw my way through the entire contingent of fourteen female musicians to find out who was a dyke and who wasn't before I tracked down the real culprit I got a substantial bonus for that, took myself off to Honolulu for a month, and that's about the time I decided to go into business for myself as a kind of private eye.
Kathy Murnow had come back to me just before I went to Hawaii, but she was too fickle, and besides I like variety in bed. I had no inclination towards marriage, but I had discovered that I enjoyed spanking beautiful female naked bottoms not only to get the truth out of their owners, but also to warm them up for fucking. The company frowned on my methods, although dear old Stanley Duron himself thought that I was a whizbang as an investigator, considering how much money I had saved his company during my period of employment.
My parents had left me about ten or fifteen grand and I had stashed it away in a bank and let it pile up interest while I added to it from my own earnings. There was plenty of money for me to take the gamble of working at least a year or two for myself and enjoying the luxury of being my own boss and sleeping with whom I pleased.
So, on this lovely early January day in Honolulu, I had just about come to a decision to go into what I call the hairbrush caper. Yours truly was going to track down nefarious criminals, get himself involved with all the luscious sirens along the way and use the hairbrush on their bare asses to wrest confessions out of them.
This particular evening, I had a date with Lani Corrado. She was a twenty-six-year-old half-Hawaiian, half-Portuguese singer who played some of the small restaurant-nightclubs along Waikiki.
I had met her the second day of my vacation in Sea Life Park, watching an absolutely breathtaking piece of pussy in a short tight bathing suit feeding fish to the playful dolphins. This was a halcyon vacation spot, and I didn't intend to go without pussy for an entire month. I knew that when I got back I would only have to start chasing to find myself a replacement for Kathy Murnow, who had shed Matt Hollister for somebody else that looked like Kirk Douglas.
Me, I've got a somewhat crooked nose as the result of a break while playing football. I don't look like a movie star, but what I have to offer a girl is a good stiff virile and insatiable prick and the knowledge of quite a number of methods calculated to make them squirm in ecstasy, not the least important of which is my spanking technique.
Lani Corrado was late to our dinner date at the Monarch Room of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Honolulu has been building like crazy for the last couple of years, and there isn't much room left on beautiful Waikiki Beach. In fact, right next to the cottage-type Halekulani, one of the three original hotels on the beach when Pearl Harbor came along, there happens to be a thirty-one story 1900-room hotel which you might call a sort of "extra wing" to the pink stucco palace (a nostalgic name which tourists give the Royal Hawaiian.) But there are some marvelous restaurants there and there is Paradise Park, a natural aviary that makes up for all the crowding and smog and high-rises which are turning Honolulu into just an ordinary big city that you can find anywhere on the mainland.
My choice of late December and January for my vacation was ideal because the weather hits around 78 degrees, not too warm and not too cool. The restaurants are air-conditioned and so are the bedrooms. I like to feel cool while I eat and to have cool breezes fanning me while I fuck so the combination was just perfect.
Only this evening, as I cooled my heels in the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian, I was getting a little annoyed at luscious Lani. I had sent her flowers backstage after catching her act at the Canton Puka in the International Marketplace and then I had bought her a shell necklace with a very passionate little note requesting a date, and we'd had one a couple of nights ago.
Lani was between husbands, and I could tell just by looking at her that she wanted it regularly. She had those dilating nostrils and that sexy, richly ripe mouth which gives a clue to a woman's bedroom temperament. She also had sultry dark brown eyes and jet black hair that tumbled to her luscious, upstandingly rounded, resilient ass. Her skin was a sort of golden tan, although I hadn't seen it all over. Tonight would be the night, I fervently hoped.
About forty minutes after the time she had promised to meet me, she hurried into the lobby, flushed and perspiring, her big brown eyes wide and shadowed with a kind of fear. She had a right to be afraid.
For standing me up like this on an empty stomach, luscious Lani was going to get the hairbrush, and I had already vowed it. But the moment she saw me and hurried towards me, her first words made me change my mind.
"Oh Jack, I'm so awfully sorry to be so late, but I had a terrible scare just now."
"You poor darling," I soothed her. "No harm done. Let's go in to dinner. If we eat real fast, we can catch the Ed Kenney Show. You can tell me all about it while we eat."
The handsome maitre d' graciously welcomed us and led us to a table that was near the stage. One thing I liked about Honolulu, overcrowded or not, practically all the hotels and restaurants make you feel wanted, almost as if you were a friend of the family. That's something a lot of these spiffy places even in my own home town could stand learning.
I can't abide the snobbish French restaurants that think you have to be born a masochist to tolerate their insolence, high prices, lousy service and dubiously prepared cuisine. Anyway, we ordered quickly and then, after telling our pleasant, bespectacled little Filipino waiter to bring both of us a drink as quickly as he could, I leaned over the table and asked Lani what the trouble was.
It seemed that she'd written the lyrics to a song and had another musician set the words to music. She'd forgotten to take out a copyright, and all of a sudden she'd found out that another singer had grabbed onto the song and was going to record it for a small local company.
This singer had a powerful Oriental "angel" who was backing her both in her career and in the bedroom, I gathered, and he was ready to send all the deejays copies of the album and a little payola to get them to make the song No.1 on the Hit Parade.
But what had scared her was that as she was dressing to keep our date this particular evening, somebody had thrown a stone through her window with a note wrapped around it, and the note told her to forget about the song and lay off the girl who was going to sing it or else. She showed me the note.
It was spelled out in capital letters to disguise the handwriting, but it happened to have an elusive perfume to it. I sniffed at it, and then I remembered. It came from the plumeria, that lovely white flower they make leis out of.
Some brown-skinned wahine had draped one of those leis around my neck when I got off the United Airlines 747 jet on the non-stop flight from Chicago, and I had already fallen in love with that particular flower, and could have as easily have done the same with the gal who had draped it around my neck.
"Why don't you let me handle this for you, Lani?" I suggested as we sipped our drinks.
I had ordered a Tropical Itch for us both, a tall glass with various kinds of rums, sticks of pineapple, and some sweet mango juice. In each of those drinks, the management put a bamboo backscratcher, which gave me some ideas for bedtime. I made sure that the backscratchers didn't go back with the glasses when the waiter took them away and brought our onion soup.
The chef here had gone over to the new monster hotel, but his successor was almost as good, and I did full justice to my mahimahi and my chocolate souffle, and so did Lani. I liked to watch a girl eat, because if she has an appetite, it suggests that she's got the same kind in bed.
"You mean you actually will help me, Jack?" She had the huskiest voice I'd ever heard, and it sent tingles up and down my spine and down into my balls.
"Of course I will. I'll be here for at least another three weeks, and I might just as well got some practice for my new job. I told you I was an insurance investigator, but I'm going to start my own detective agency back in Chicago when I go home, Lani," I told her.
Well, the show was terrific and when everything was over, the doorman got us a cab and Lani gave the driver her address. She snuggled close to me, gave me some of those sultry looks which were calculated to raise my blood pressure and also my prick, and pretty soon we were taking the self-service elevator to the tenth floor of her apartment on Kapiolani Boulevard.
Lani Corrado had done all right for herself. She got married when she was sixteen, and the guy had turned out to be a real louse who liked to beat up his women with his fists. That had lasted about a year, and then she'd married again when she was twenty. Her second hubby had been her musical arranger, a hippie type from L. A. This marriage had lasted four years, surprisingly enough, because it happened that he was pretty good in bed; Lani had already filled me in during the dinner as to her background, and her candid way of putting it left me no doubt that a guy could score with her if he just had the know-how.
The trouble with husband number two was that she had caught him cheating with a couple of cute tricks in the chorus of a revue she was going to have the lead in, and then discovered that he was going into the dope racket to make money enough to pay for pads for the other chicks he kept on the side. So for the last eighteen months, she'd had no really steady boyfriend to give it to her. I hoped to fill that role tonight in my most consummate manner.
"But I'm afraid, Jack," she said as she took her key out of her purse and opened the door of her apartment. "That awful girl has a very powerful fellow behind her. He's very rich and he has lots of influence here in Honolulu."
"You've got the song copyrighted by now, so you could sue," I pointed out in my most logical manner as I closed the door behind her and turned the lock without her noticing. "Money or no money, influence or no influence, this chick's boyfriend can't very well pull off an illegal deal like that. What I've got in mind is meeting this rival of yours and getting that song away from her. I have ways and means. And before I'm finished with her, Lani, I promise you she'll never bother you again."
"Do you mean that, really?" she turned to me, starry-eyed, and her lips were trembling.
"Word of honor," I nodded.
"Oh Jack, darling, if you could. I'd be so grateful. I know that song is going to be a hit, I know it. Not just because I wrote it. The music is so lovely and it could give me a new career. But I don't have any money to fight that man in court or any of those things, Jack."
"You won't need to. I'll take care of everything, baby."
She impulsively hugged me and the next thing I knew, our lips met. She had moist, warm lips, and they parted. My tongue slipped instinctively inside, and the next thing I knew she was grinding her crotch against me. She had worn one of those formal muu-muus, and my guess was that she didn't have much underneath. A few minutes later, in the bedroom when I disrobed her, I found I was right. Just a skimpy white nylon bra and matching panties, sandals and no stockings.
I made her let down her long hair because I happen to be a long-hair fetishist. Not the pathological kind, you understand. Just a guy who loves to fuck a girl who's wearing nothing but her own natural hair. And needless to say, the color of Lani's pussy hair was exactly that on her lovely head.
She was hungry for fucking. She reached for me with a groan, and I slipped my cock right inside. She was already lubricated from anticipation, and she cleaved unto me until I felt as if she was trying to get inside my very skin. Her fingernails raked my back, and her voracious mouth and tongue did their work well. I humped her fervently, and we exploded together.
As we lay panting with exhaustion and delight, I reached over to get a cigarette, lit it for her, and started cupping her titties while I waited for her to get back her composure.
"Darling," she at last breathed, "how do you think you can scare that awful girl into giving me back my song?"
"You really want to know?" I teased.
"Oh, yes."
"You finish your cigarette and I'll show you."
A few minutes later I pulled the astonished beauty across my lap and began to spank her saucily rounded, satiny, resilient naked ass until it reddened delightfully and until she kicked and squealed in the most enchanting way. Before she could protest too much, I rolled her over onto her back, mounted her, and our second fuck was even more thrilling than our first.
"That's how," I told her when we had expired in ecstasy.
"All right," she sighed happily, as she reached down to feel my now-limp prick. "But just don't you do it to her more than once. She's a real bitch, and I hate her terribly. I hate her all the more now because I'll be jealous of thinking what you'll do to her. So, you'll have to do it to me again just to remind me that you like me best."
CHAPTER TWO
So this was to be my first assignment on my own, and I welcomed the challenge. I was going to do it for love, you might say, because after the wonderful night of fucking which luscious Lani Corrado had given me, I owed her.
Our first step was to find where I could locate this sexy singer who apparently had stolen Lani's song. Before I left her apartment the next morning, I borrowed her copy of the copyright to that song, whose title was, "My Love Will Wear Plumeria," and I also got a lead sheet which gave me the melody and the words.
I hummed the melody and I liked it, and then I thought about the note that had been thrown through Lani's window, because the paper had had that same wonderful fragrance of this flower. It was a giveaway clue and I had taken the note along too, which I had put in a plastic wrapper to preserve the fragrance as well as the handwriting, though of course it was done in printing with block capitals to disguise it. But a handwriting expert will tell you that even when a guy tries to print, he reveals things about himself which can be traced.
The name of the chick who had stolen away the song was Alura Kameino, which sounded pure Hawaiian. I was sure it wasn't. This chick, Lani told me, was singing in the Canoe House over at the Ilikai Hotel, one of the swankiest in all Honolulu. It had a terrific restaurant at the very top called The Top of the I, with a glass elevator going up all the way and exposed so that if you were out in the street miles away, you could see it, and the people in the elevator could see all of Honolulu with its colored lights and mountains and ocean all around. It was a romantic spot for courting a girl you wanted to take to bed with you, and I had it down in my little black book for future exploration before I went back to Chicago.
Lani had found out about her boo-boo in not sending the copywriter the song when it was first published, so a couple of weeks ago she had shot a copy to Washington, D. C., with the requisite fee. The only problem was, this other chick might already have turned hers in ahead of Lani's, and first come, first served, just like inventors with their patents. This was one of the things I was going to have to find out.
I lazed around all afternoon at the beach, did a little body surfing, had dinner all by myself at The Top of the I, and then it was about time to catch Alura Kameino's show.
I got myself a table up close to the intimate little stage, and a sexy blonde waitress who looked as if she had just been graduated from a California college, took my order for a Missionary's Downfall. In Honolulu they had lots of picturesque names for drinks, most of which have rum as the main ingredient. I have a feeling these days that the real natives wish the missionaries really had had a downfall before they grabbed all the land and started building. But that's another story. There were five musicians in the combo, two of them Chinese, one a white guy with a moustache and spade beard, a clever little Filipino at the piano, and a big fat Hawaiian on drums.
The local natives, I'm told, eat a lot of poi, which is made from the taro root and is awfully nutritious, but it's also awfully starchy and you put on pounds and pounds and pounds. This drummer had a big opu okele, which means a big pot and a big can, so his poi consumption must have been enormous. But he could sure play the drums and he moved around as gracefully as a gazelle while the boys were running through their warm-up.
Then the lights darkened, my cute little blonde waitress brushed against me with a long slinky thigh and she was wearing a sarong-like outfit that left very little to the imagination as she set my second drink before me and gave me a beaming smile. I tossed a five-dollar bill onto her tray and told her to keep the change and not to forget me.
Then I settled back as a spotlight beamed from the back of the room at the bar onto one of the most delectable pieces of pussy I had seen in many a day. She was even sexier than luscious Lani.
I was sure she had chosen the name--or somebody had chosen it for her, maybe her Oriental "angel"--of Alura because it's from the old Persian word meaning lord or light, and from it you get the adjective alluring, which fancy writers use to tell you that a piece of pussy is really hot stuff in bed.
Well, I'm here to tell you that Alura Kameino stirred my gonads to action the minute she walked into that baby spotlight, took the mike, and said in a soft, husky bedroom voice, "Aloha everybody." And of course, the room yelled back aloha, and drew the syllables out just to show that they were old Ramaiinas, which means it wasn't their first trip to Hawaii, though it probably was. Everybody reads the guide books so as to behave like a native, they tell me.
She had black hair, but it was piled on top of her head like a sort of upstanding crown, if you know what I mean. She had a heart-shaped face, and great big brown eyes, and she was about two inches taller than Lani, with long sexy legs and highset pear-shaped titties and a slinky ass.
Her skin was sort of a burnished ivory, and I was sure that somewhere along the line she had some white blood in her. She could have been Portuguese, and of course she could have been an Eurasian, too.
She started us all off in the proper exotic mood by singing "I'll Remember You," that wonderful song by the Chinese composer, Kui Lee, who died tragically young of cancer, a song made famous by the illustrious Don Ho.
As I stared passionately at Alura's titties, I knew that I would remember her for a long, long time. She had a kind of shortie muu-muu on, with red and purple and green and orange all mixed, and the patterns of the hibiscus flower all over. There was a big hibiscus flower outlined on the cheeks of her ass, and I know that because she turned around to the boys in the combo and led them through the concluding bars by waving her slim, long hand at them while she crooned the final words.
There was thunderous applause, and I found my little blonde waitress beside me asking anxiously if she could get me anything else.
I would have had my face slapped for sure if I had told her what I wanted at that moment. It was a good thing it was dark and that the big wide table hid my lap because I already had a hard-on from staring at Alura's ass and titties.
And the round, pantyhosed thighs of my little waitress didn't diminish my prick the least little bit either. I told her later, and she went away after flashing me another one of those dazzling toothpaste smiles.
Well, the show was a great success, and the very last number happened to be the song which Lani told me she had written. Alura did it beautifully, and then she modestly bowed her head to the applause and murmured, "Mahalo, all you kind people. I'm so glad you liked my last song because that was my very own. And now we're going to take a break and then we'll be back to play some of your favorite Hawaiian melodies. If you've any requests, please give them to your waitress and we'll do our best to honor them."
I took out my ballpoint pen and my little memo book. I scribbled a note to Alura. I told her that I was a musical producer from Chicago and I'd like to see her after she was finished with her stint tonight.
I intimated that I had access to a couple of big mainland record companies and that I might be able to do her some good on that last song of hers.
Then I beckoned to the blonde, gave her another five and told her to take the note to Alura.
She looked wistful, as if she figured that I was trying to get an amorous assignation and wished it had been with her instead. That was very flattering, because when a guy is working, it's good for his ego to know that cute chicks are finding him appealing. Most of my success on the cases I had investigated for Duron had come about through my, shall we say, sexual magnetism. If I had any left, I would need all I had plus a prayer to get next to alluring Alura.
Because I had already made up my mind, I was going to fuck this sweet piece and maybe introduce her to the hot sting of the hairbrush, if I discovered that she had really pulled this sneaker and cheated luscious Lani out of that lovely song.
I don't know whether it was my magic charm or the five-dollar bill I had handed my cute blonde waitress, or whether Alura Kameino was interested in a stranger who had recording contracts back on the mainland, but I do know that about three minutes after I had slipped the note and the tip to my fair Hebe, the sexy torchsinger herself came to my table and I invited her to sit down. All the males were gawking from their tables, and I could hear the murmur of envy and curiosity.
"Mr. Warren? How nice of you to write me that note," she said.
In the flesh right across from my narrow table she was even more mouthwatering than up there on the stage. And her body was, I had to admit in all justice, much more enticing than that of Lani. I know they say that a gentleman shouldn't tell tales out of the bedroom, but it's always been part of my nature to be candid. I have no doubt that some of the girls I've fucked may have compared notes and discredited my phallic prowess from time to time.
"I liked your singing very much, Alura," I told her, and the smile she gave me showed teeth that would make a dentist no money for a few more years. "Especially that last song, the one about the plumeria."
"Isn't it lovely? Of course I shouldn't say that because I wrote it, but I'm so glad you enjoyed it," she said, giving me that toothpaste smile. "You say you're from Chicago and you know a lot of recording companies. Do you think you could help get my song recorded back there? It's a big town and it would certainly help a lot and make a lot of money. I'd be very grateful. Of course you'd get a percentage, Mr. Warren."
"Why don't we talk about it after you've finished your last show, Alura? I'm on vacation now and I'm sort of lonesome and I don't have anybody to show me paradise. Maybe you could help me tonight. Are there any spots we could go to where I can buy you a good dinner and the best wine that's come through the recent dock strike?" I asked.
"I'd like very much to talk with you some more about this. I finish about eleven-thirty. And there are still some very good restaurants open."
"In that case, I'll make reservations and then I'll see you here after the show."
She glanced around somewhat nervously, I thought, and then she whispered quickly, "No, why don't you write a note and tell me what restaurant you want me to meet you at and then just go ahead there? It's really better that way. You see, I have a, well, a sort of manager and I don't always like to have him snooping on what I'm doing."
I wondered if this, by any chance, could be her famous Oriental "angel" about whom Lani had told me. But I played it smart and cool and I told her I would do just that, and then I took her hand and kissed it. That wasn't just a play to show off, that was really the beginning of my campaign to get her into a horizontal position where I could start kissing a great deal more than her hand especially those pear-shaped titties of hers and those long slinky thighs and that flat tummy and a few other things that gentlemen really ought not to talk about.
After she had gone away from my table, I hurried outside into the lobby restaurant. This restaurant was located on the very top of the tall, more than twenty-story high building which was right next to the La Moana.
Shopping Center, the world's biggest, with room to park about ten thousand cars, three levels of stores and restaurants and beautiful fountains and sculptuary.
I was able to talk the manager into letting the chef work a little extra overtime, for which I would be happy to pay, to cook Alura and me a dinner. The restaurant revolved in a complete circle every hour, and it gave you a view of all Honolulu at night which alone would have been worth the price of admission, but it so happened that the cuisine was terrific, too.
The second phone call was to a fellow named Abe Beinstock, a vacationing tourist like myself, whom I had met in the lobby of my hotel the day before and with whom I had struck up a conversation. He happened to be from my home town of Chicago too, and he also happened to be a patent lawyer.
I've often written paperback books as a sort of hobby, especially after I've finished a case of claims investigation which had a lot of sex and action in it, and I was just curious about copyrights myself.
So I asked Abe about some of the basic laws, and he volunteered a little information. Fortunately, he was back at the hotel after a day at the beach and a good dinner at the Ship's Tavern in the Surfrider Hotel run by Jimmy Cockett, one of the finest men I've ever known and not only the descendant of an actual prince of the Island of Kauai but in his own right a prince of a host and warm-hearted friend even to the lowliest stranger. If the world had a few more people like Jimmy Cockett, we might not be plagued by cold wars and bigotry and all the frenzied little counterplots whereby somebody tries to screw somebody else.
"Hi there, Jack, glad to hear from you. What's on your mind? Don't tell me you're going back to Chicago already," Abe chuckled.
"Not for a couple of weeks, old buddy. I just want to ask you one good question, and you can bill me, I mean it. I'm sort of doing some private eye work and so this will go on the expense account and it's tax deductible. Look, Abe, let's take a hypothetical case. Suppose a singer writes a song, words and music, and then some rival singer steals it from her and sends a copy in to Washington with the copyright fee. Meanwhile, our first girl who really wrote the song just remembered that she had forgotten to do that and sends hers in. What happens?"
"Well, in general, the validity of a copyright is a matter of simple registration, Jack. Let's face it this way. So these two girls both send in copyrights. The registrar in Washington couldn't care less and isn't going to check. When it gets to the courts, the person that has the earlier copyright is naturally going to be upheld. So your job is to find out which is which. Anybody can put their name on a piece of paper and copyright it, but it's a matter of what agreement has been made and it goes deeper than just the filing, remember that, too."
"Thanks, Counselor, and don't forget to send me a bill," I told him and then I hung up.
I went back to my table and the sweet little blonde waitress couldn't do enough for me. She freshened my drink, gave me a new place mat, and brushed her thigh against me. She rolled her eyes and intimated that she wouldn't slap my face if I asked her for a date. Of course I had a date with Alura, so I sat through the second show and enjoyed it just as much as the first one. I gave the blonde another five at the end of the evening as a sort of investment for the future. It's always good to have at least one sweet pussy hanging around just in case your dream girls go out of circulation on you.
Then I went out into the balmy air and got into a cab and went over to La Ronde.
When I got upstairs out of the elevator, Alura was waiting for me, looking a little frightened. She smiled when she saw me and the head waiter led us to a table by the window. It was really a terrific sight.
We were looking out over the shopping center, the big Sears and Penney stores, and we could see the ocean beyond, the twinkling lights of the planes flying between the islands. We could see the mountains to our left and the little lights hidden up there on those winding roads where about one car can go at a time. There is something magical about Honolulu at night, way out there the Pacific about twenty-five hundred miles away from Frisco and L. A., and you really think you're in paradise. And sitting there with Alura made me feel even more so.
There weren't too many people there, so we had the place all to ourselves. I started making a play for Alura, putting my hand under the table and rubbing it very lightly against her thighs. She didn't draw hers back, either. She put her hand out across the table and squeezed mine. Then she said to me, breathlessly after we'd given the waiter our order, "Do you really think you can have my song recorded on the mainland, Jack, dear?"
"I can certainly try, baby. I've got lots of contacts. Of course, there's one little problem."
"Oh? What's that?"
"Well, you have to be sure that it's your song," I socked it to her out of left field.
Her eyes widened, and she looked angry. "What sort of talk is that? Didn't you hear me tell everybody that it's my song? Didn't I sing it? Didn't I know the music?"
"Honey," I said patiently, "I can sing the Hawaiian Wedding Song and I know the words and the tune, but that doesn't make it my song. When it comes to dividing up the royalties and the profits, I would be out in the cold forever on that basis. You've got to have r a copyright to prove it's yours, and there can't be any doubt about it."
"I do have a copyright."
"How's chances on seeing it?"
"Well, if you have to, but let's not quarrel. You're awfully nice and good-looking. Tell me about yourself."
So I told her about myself through dinner, and when it was all over and we had this wonderful Cafe La Ronde, which is coffee and whipped cream and Grand Marnier and maybe some other secret ingredients I don't know, I felt that the night had just started. Alura had put on a red satin evening gown and it was cut low between her titties, and almost to her ; chinkbone at the back. I was beginning to feel randy again, so I had to be noble and tell myself that it was all in the course of luscious Lani.
"Why don't you take me over to your place and show me the copyright and then we can really talk business," I slyly suggested.
She glanced at her watch, frowned, and then looked at me and said, "All right, but we have to leave right away and we can't spend too much time. He's frightfully jealous, you know."
"Who is?"
"Kojo. He's my manager and agent. He's a big brute and he's terribly jealous, especially of j a guy as handsome as you, Jack dear."
So I had an hour, give or take some time in transportation to her pad, to boff her and soften her up and find out the date of her copyright and compare it with Lani's. I had tackled tougher cases, but I certainly had never tackled a sexier piece of quiff than this one.
"Let's go, baby, time's a-wastin'," I said as I lifted her up from the chair and pulled her to me and kissed her right smack on the mouth in front of everyone.
We went down in the elevator to the lower level of the Ala Mona Building and there was a cab waiting. I gallantly opened the door for Alura, and she wriggled herself in, giving me an intoxicating view of her saucy bottom. I settled myself beside her, and she told the driver to take us down Likelike Boulevard and to turn off before we got to the Pali Highway.
The Pali, by the way, happens to be the highest mountain range on the island of Oahu, and legend has it that Kamehameha the Great, the king who united all Hawaii, fought a rival king and his men and forced them to fall to their death over the cliff. When you get up to the top, you can look out all over downtown Honolulu and see the ocean beyond, a really breathtaking sight. But this was night time and the only breathtaking sight I wanted to see was Alura Kameino stripped to the buff and doing some wriggling in bed to welcome yours truly.
It was a long ride, but it was well worth it. I put my hand on hers and she squeezed it, and pretty soon she had guided it up to her thigh, near her lil' pussy, and I was squeezing her leg and finding it wonderfully supple. She was squirming closer to me and I knew I was going to score.
The cabdriver turned off and went down a long narrow street with only a few houses on it, and finally came to what was a dead end where there was a white cottage and garage. This was it.
I paid the driver and tipped him, and then I escorted Alura out of the cab and we walked to her cottage together. I thought it was funny that if she had a garage and a car, she didn't have it down at the place where she worked, but it wasn't any of my business.
She took out her purse, extracted the key and opened the door, and I moved in with her. As soon as she had the door closed, I grabbed her and gave her a long passionate kiss on the mouth.
"I've wanted to do this ever since I first heard you sing, Alura baby," I muttered.
"My goodness, you really surprise a girl," she giggled. "We won't turn on any lights because I don't want Kojo to think I'm home in case he drives over here and snoops around."
"If you're so afraid of this manager of yours, why do you keep him around?"
"I've got a contract with him, and he's done a lot for me. He was the one who helped me put over my song. He told me all about the copyright and how to file it."
"I'd like to meet this Kojo," I said, "but not right now. First of all, why don't you T show it to me, and then we can get down to something more important."
"Like what?" she giggled, pressing herself tightly against me until I could feel the tips of her pear-shaped titties prod against my chest. I slipped my hands down her back and to her saucy bottom and I squeezed the cheeks ant they were nice and firm and resilient. She moaned a little, gave me her mouth and thrust her tongue between my lips. And just about then the lights went out.
I came to I don't know how many hour later, and I found myself lying on the soft shoulder of a road. When I stumbled to my feet, I groped forward and I grabbed a wooden rail, and it was a good thing I did because below me was the same cliff over which the Hawaiian king had flung his enemies. I had a goose egg at the back of my head which I felt gingerly, and I knew that I had been set-up b; none other than luscious Alura. I was curious to know why she had done it, and I took an oath of vengeance in true Hawaiian style. He bottom was going to pay dearly for that cute little trick.
Fortunately, there was a pay phone not toe far away and I called a cab. I had to give him a long spiel about who I was and where I was staying and I promised the driver a five-dollar bonus if he'd hurry. He did.
It took him about half an hour, which driving from downtown wasn't too bad. When I looked at my wristwatch, the crystal o which was smashed, it wasn't much help, because it had stopped at about one in the morning. And there was just the faint glimmering of dawn in the sky.
I went back to my hotel, which was the Reef Towers. This hotel, along with the bigger Reef on the Beach and a couple of other small and very neat hotels, had been built by an imaginative architect named Roy Kelley, probably the first hotel man in Hawaii to give the average tourist a budget break on rates.
Everybody figured he had retired when he sold his group of hotels, but lo and behold, if he didn't build a twenty-two story building right across from where I was staying. I'll say one thing for his hotels, and that's that the Japanese maids are the sweetest and most efficient I ever found in any hotel anywhere in the world.
I tumbled into bed and slept until about lunch time. My head still ached, but I had already promised that Alura was going to ache in a more southern part of her delectable anatomy. After I had some coffee and pineapple and a hamburger at Porgy's across the street, I phoned Lani and told her what had happened.
She was frightened for me, which was a nice feeling. It meant she cared. I told her I was going to come over and look at the date on her copyright, and I did.
I saw that it was dated in June of last year the minute she handed me the lead sheet. Now all I had to do was compare it with Alura's, if I could get my hands on it and next on her in about that order. I asked Lani who this Kojo was. She gasped, shook her head and said, "Big pilikia. For you, Jack honey."
"Big trouble, you mean?" I was picking up Hawaiian fast. "How so, baby?"
"He's really her angel. They say he runs a couple of gambling houses in Chinatown, and he owns a very expensive little hotel on the other side of the island, and a lot of real estate in Waikiki. He's half-Chinese, half-Japanese."
"That really makes him dangerous. I didn't think those two races intermarried, hating each other the way they traditionally did," I said.
"Sometimes it happens. In Hawaii, anything happens when people like each other," Lani murmured huskily as she fitted into my arms and gave me a hot kiss.
At least she was honest and direct about it. I began to like her better in many ways. When the kiss was ended, she went on, moving over to the couch and crossing her legs. She had on a micro-mini-skirt, and on her it looked particularly tempting. She had pantyhose on too and I started to have that good old feeling in my balls just looking at her.
So I stood where I was and admired the view. "You see, Kojo Wong, that's his name really, had lots of influence in the wrong places, and he's very rich. Johnny Sing, my drummer, told me that Kojo and Alura started going together about a year ago. He bought her an apartment in the Hilton Lagoon Apartments, and that takes an awful lot of money."
"She took me out to her cottage near the Pali," I said, cautiously reaching back and feeling the somewhat diminished bump on my head.
"That must be one of his places, then. She always lives at Waikiki, ever since I've known her."
"You're sure?"
"Oh, yes. You see, last September, she invited me over to a cocktail party at her place, and Kojo was there. He couldn't take his eyes off her for a minute, but he still made a play for me. I told him I wasn't interested. By then I had a feeling she had already stolen my song, but I couldn't prove it."
"I think, baby," I said as I reached for her titties with both hands and pushed her back along the couch, "I'm going to pay a visit to where this broad really lives and see if I can't find what her copyright says. But there's some unfinished business I've got to do first."
"You're awful," she giggled. But she didn't stop me. In fact, she reached down and pulled up her mini-skirt and arched her lovely bottom up from the couch so I could snug down her pantyhose.
I didn't bother undressing. I already had a tremendous hard-on. After all, I had been set for boffing the night before and instead of banging Alura, I had got banged myself, if you remember.
It was really terrific. Just one dig, and I felt my cock practically being crushed to death. She was ready from the word go, and her long legs wound round me and held me tight. We nearly fell off the couch in our frenzied passion, and I felt that Lani was giving herself out of gratitude for the danger I had incurred by trying to protect her best interests.
When it was over, I told her I'd try to catch her show at night and that I'd let her know as soon as I found out any news about the copyright.
Then I took a cab over to the Hilton Lagoon Apartments on glamorous Waikiki Beach. There was a supercilious doorman at a desk, and he coldly informed me that Alura was in, but that she had left orders that she wouldn't see anybody.
I happened to squint at the list of tenants he had when the phone suddenly made him turn to one side, and I saw that she was on the twelfth floor. Some gorgeous broad was just getting out of an elevator, and I almost knocked her down getting into it before it closed, and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. I heard the doorman bellow after me, but it was too late.
When I stepped out of the elevator, I headed straight for her apartment and it was a lucky thing I had found what the number was on the doorman's roster.
As I came to the door, I heard voices. I recognized Alura's, and then there was a man's deep and resonant, very much a man's. This might be a little difficult. His voice seemed to be getting closer to the door, so I quickly moved around the comer and waited.
The door opened, then closed again, and I peeked around the corner to see a bulky man with slicked-down hair in a white linen suit with spats, no less, heading for the elevator. I waited until he disappeared and then I knocked on the door. It was opened at once by Alura, and the minute she saw me, she let out a yell and tried to push the door shut. I had my foot wedged into it, however, and I forced my way in, then closed and locked the door behind me.
All she had on was a black nylon bra and matching panties and fluffy blue mules. Her hair was tumbled, and her lipstick was smeared. But there wasn't any lovelight in her eyes for me.
"You get out of here, right away! He'll kill you the next time!" she hissed.
"Was that Kojo?" I wanted to know.
"Yes! And he knows that you've got nothing to do with the music business, Mr. Warren!"
"Now how did he find all that out in such a short time, baby?" I wanted to know.
She tilted back her head and sneered at me, her hands akimbo.
"You're really very stupid, Mr. Warren. Kojo is a very smart man. You see, I showed him your note, the one you sent me in the Canoe House. He made some long distance phone calls to some friends he has in your home town and one of them said he had read about you in the newspaper. You were an insurance claims investigator and you solved a case about some stolen violin, didn't you?"
I had to hand it to this babe. Also to her big Chinese-Japanese angel. He must have had some pretty good contacts because it's about four hours between Chicago and Honolulu when daylight saving time is off, so he was able to get back to Chicago in the late afternoon and just stumble on one of his pals who happened to have read about that Stradivarius which wound up in Mexico with a cache of heroin in it. Winding up that little caper had got me my big bonus from the president of the firm, and that bonus had taken me to paradise for my vacation. Yes, it was pretty smart work.
But I had two debts to settle. One of them was to repay Lani for her trust in me to say nothing of the comfort she had given my cock, and the other one was to settle Alura's hash for setting me up as a patsy. And I've always believed in the old saying that you might as well kill two birds with one stone.
She really had a swanky apartment. There was a lobby, which you might call a foyer, and then there was a big living room with a lanai looking out onto the beach and the building across the way, and a couple of more rooms.
But in that living room there was a concert grand piano and some music scores set up on the rack.
I strode towards it. She grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
"You get out of here, or I'll call the police!" she yelled at me.
Her face was all screwed up with hate, and she didn't look beautiful anymore. Her face, that is. As for her body, I already had a hard-on.
I pushed her away because I had work to do first. I went over to the piano, grabbed the music sheets and glanced through them, and sure enough there was a lead sheet of "My Love Will Wear Plumeria." And at the bottom it said, "Copyrighted July 1970 by Alura Kameino." That was all I had to know. I stuffed it into my trousers pocket and she came at me with a vase she had picked up from the table in the foyer. I ducked and it went smashing into the concert grand. It was an expensive Ming vase, too. I was willing to bet that Kojo had given it to her as a present for pussy.
"I'll kill you, you bastard," she yelled, and her voice didn't have that sweet Hawaiian tone anymore.
"You already tried, and in my book you get just one chance, baby."
I grabbed her by the wrists and I hauled her over to the couch opposite the concert grand and pulled her down and over my lap. There was a glass-covered coffee table in front of me, and
on it was one of those wooden backscratchers I had had with one of my rum drinks. It was perfect.
I clamped my right leg over her calves and I ripped off her panties. She really had a gorgeous ass. It was rounder than I had imagined, and the cheeks were set very tightly so that you couldn't even see the shadowy cleft between them. They were firm and satiny, and they were paler than the rest of her body.
I grabbed hold of the backscratcher. I gripped both her wrists in my left hand and lifted up the long wooden implement and brought it down with a nice loud smack across the broadest part of her stern.
She let out a yell and then started to curse me, relating my ancestry back to pigs and reptiles. I ignored the insults to my genealogy and just kept whacking her behind with the back of the backscratcher. She was screeching to beat the band, and hitting high C with earsplitting regularity. But it was nothing compared with what her lungs were able to produce when I turned the instrument over and began to smack with the pointed tips of the scratching part.
They dug into her naked behind and left angry blotches, and her hips wriggled and swerved and twisted every which way, and she twisted her contorted face around and began to beg me to stop. I kept whacking her relentlessly and I gave her a few right into that tight crease of hers so that the wooden tips gouged where it was the tenderest.
"Oh, stop it, please! I can't stand it!" she howled.
I was almost out of breath and it was all I could do to maintain my grip on her wrists and to keep my leg over her legs. She was squirming like an eel now and her bottom was a most interesting pattern of varying colors.
"All right now," I told her. "I'll stop if you answer a couple of questions truthfully, Alura."
"What is it? Oh stop, you've killed me! I'll have marks forever, you big brute, you bastard!"
At that last insult, I had given her a couple of good hard stinging smacks on her thighs and then I added one which sent the tips of the scratcher end right into her bottom groove.
"Watch your tongue, baby and just use it to tell me what I want to know," I threatened. "Now, I saw that lead sheet, and you're about a month late for copyright on that song that Lani Corrado wrote, aren't you? Your friend Kojo wasn't as smart as your thought, it appears. Lani has the legal rights to that song, and I'll testify to it. You better drop it from your repertory, or she'll be able to sue you."
"I don't know what you're talking about--oh no, not anymore--oh please--" I flung away the backscratcher, and I started to use my good right palm. I wished I had a hairbrush, but I didn't have time to let her go and look for one. Besides, girls don't generally have the good old-fashioned black wooden type that I prefer when it's time to spank a beautiful bare ass. But my palm was quite satisfactory. Alura's piercing wails attested to it without any doubt. And pretty soon there was a knocking on the door and some worried female voice called out, "What's going on in there? Should we call the police?"
"No, honey, it's just a lover's quarrel!" I yelled. Then I heard a giggle and then there wasn't anymore noise for a while, except Alura's sobbing.
"Now, if I have to, I'll gag you and whip your bottom raw, you tricky bitch," I snarled. I gave one of her ass cheeks a good hard pinch. "Now tell me the truth, did you or didn't you write that song?"
"All right--oww--oh please stop--oh not anymore, yes, yes, it is Lani's. But Kojo was showing interest in her, and I wanted to fix her good, so I stole the lead sheet and I had a copy made and I did copyright it. And I told him that maybe we could make a lot of money--"
"And I know what he thought," I finished for her. "He thought maybe he'd play the big hero when he got tired of you and go around to Lani and tell her that he knew it all the time and now he was ready to set her up in a nice pad and pay attention to her instead of you. Boy. the two of you are really meant for each other. All right. I'm going back and tell Lani it's her song again. And I'm also going to call a friend of mine over at the Honolulu Advertiser so that if there's anymore news about
this song coming under your sponsorship, he'll know what a little liar you are. And maybe he'd like to print a few news notes about you and Kojo."
"Oh no, don't do that--oh he'd kill me--"
"My advice to you, baby, is to find a maybe less wealthy and also less overweight boyfriend," I told her. "Someone like me, for instance."
"You? I hate you, I wish he'd killed you--"
"Oh yes, that reminds me." I gave her another smack on the butt as a reminder that I was still in control, and she yelled again and started to cry. "Last night you and I were all set for a little of loving, weren't we? That was the idea, when you lured me over to your place. And of course Kojo was waiting there all the time. However, I said to myself then that I'd take a raincheck on our being together, and I'm taking it right now."
"What--what do you mean?" she sniffled. "That you're going to get fucked right now, baby. You owe me that."
"Oh no--don't you dare--oh stop it--ouch, oh you're hurting me I'll scream--"
"No you won't," I chuckled. I had ripped her bra off and all she had on were her mules. Technically, just one, because the other she had kicked off during the spanking. I grabbed hold of her pearshaped titties, dragged her up, lifted my leg off hers, and then flung her down on her back on the couch and mounted over her. With one hand I pulled a handkerchief out of my trouser's pocket and stuffed it into her mouth to gag her. She tried to claw at my eyes, but I cracked her one on the jaw that sort of stunned her. Then I grabbed her wrists and pinned them behind her back with my right hand, and then I used my left to tug my zipper down and get my cock out for action.
Her sore bottom was rubbing against the couch, and the way she wriggled herself now gave me the lovely illusion that she was in heat and wanted a banging very badly. And she was certainly going to get it.
She tried to wriggle away from the harpooning I had in store for her, but I had pinned her very effectively. With her hands behind her back, those gorgeous pear-titties of hers jutting up at me, and I just pressed my cheek against one of them and used my left hand to squeeze the other while I foraged for her furry snatch with my rooting prick. Try as she would, she couldn't keep me away for long, and in a few moments I felt myself pry between the lips of her cunt and I gave it a good lunge and was in her to the balls.
Then I really began to fuck her. I remembered how sweet and enticing she had been to get me to come out to that bungalow with her, and I remembered that big bruiser who had probably been lurking in wait for me in a closet and had gone ahead to prepare the reception committee, and then I also remembered what a slinky body she had. All these things combined, together with my having been denied pussy the night before when I had really been expecting it, to put me up to peak performance.
She was gasping and twisting her head this way and that, and her eyes were bulging, as I released her tittie and slipped my left hand down to her crotch and began to finger for her tickler. When I found it, and I began to combine prick thrusts with tickler-rubbing, she just about went crazy. She forgot all about the way her bottom hurt and the rudeness of my breaking in on her, and she began to moan and whimper, and her eyes were filled not with hate but with a kind of passionate yearning. I guess that's what she liked about Kojo, the rough treatment.
So I pulled the handkerchief out of her mouth and I muttered to her, "If you start yelling again, baby, I'll gag you for good and then I'll really whip the ass off you, you understand?"
"Oh yes--oh give it to me--oh it's so good, oh how you hurt me, but it's so good--oh Jack honey, mmmmm, oh give it to me!" she panted.
You can never tell what a woman's going to be like until you are actually fucking her. Sometimes you can't even tell then, especially if she's a very talented callgirl. But I didn't go in for any psychoanalysis right then and there. I concentrated on really giving it to her. She was wailing and squealing by the time I was ready to gush, and she had a climax long before I did, and then another one when she felt my bubbling spunk gush into her womb.
I let go of her arms, and then this time she wound them around my neck and began to kiss me hard and rapidly and squirm up against me and pant, "Oh lover, you're what I need, not Kojo--why don't you be my agent, why don't you take me over?"
"Because you're a treacherous, two-timing bitch, that's why, Alura," I whispered as I gave her back her kiss. "I might wake up some night and find a knife in my ribs, or your ex-boyfriend waiting for me in the closet with another Ming vase. You're welcome to him. All I wanted was the song. And you better not try anything, and you better pull him off this little caper, or there'll be something of a scandal for your influential boyfriend. Get me?" She nodded, and she looked scared. So finally I let her go, and I used her bathroom for a minute, and then she was all peaches and cream. She stood there naked and she had put her mules back on, and she had her hands on her hips, and she was giving me the onceover. "Oh Jack, you're not going to go and leave me like this, are you, darling?" she purred. "You're such a man, you're what I need--oh why don't you stay here and take care of me?"
"For one thing, baby, because I'm going ! back home in a couple of weeks. For another, as I told you, I can't trust you. You were jealous because your boyfriend had a yen for Lani. So you figured that maybe if you stole her song and got famous on it, and then he'd go there and try to make it up with her, then you could take off to her apartment and bust in as a put-up job. The two of you happen to be a couple of misplaced sadists, and you're certainly welcome to each other, but as for me, baby, I don't want any part of it. Well, thanks for the entertainment, sweetheart. I don't think I'll be seeing you around." As I left, there was another crash at the door behind me. She had probably found another Ming vase to break in her spleen.
I took a cab over to Lani's place, and I shoed her the lead sheet. I told her that she had every legal right to the song and that she had beaten Alura by a good month.
"But next time you compose something, baby, don't put it off until the next day, shoot it right in with the fee and get it copyrighted before somebody like Alura beats you to it," I told her.
Well, there's not much left to tell you about my Hawaiian vacation, because I spent most of it with Lani Corrado. I found that she was just as masochistic as Alura in some ways, real loving ways. She told me she'd been a bad girl to involve me, and she was awfully scared when she had heard that I was going to go up against Kojo. So what did she do the next night but go into her bedroom while I sat in the living room, come out in just a black nylon nightie holding a black wooden hairbrush. She came towards me, barefooted, head bowed, and she handed me the hairbrush and said that she had been an awfully bad girl and wouldn't her Daddy spank her good and hard to teach her a lesson.
It was a love spanking, that time. I gave her about forty swats with the back of the brush, twenty of them over the nightie, and the other twenty after she had obligingly pulled it up to show me her lovely bare ass. Then I consoled her, and we rolled off the couch again and we didn't care.
And so, after a month in paradise, I flew back to Chicago to start my own private investigation office and to embark on some even sexier and more mystifying adventures. But I had certainly got into practice for what I whimsically call the hairbrush caper.
CHAPTER THREE
I was sorry to leave Honolulu, and I actually prolonged my vacation until the very last week in January, especially after reading in my hometown newspaper that Chicago was suffering from heavy snowfalls and subzero temperatures. Lani Corrado and I were inseparable, and she even went so far as to accompany me to the airport in the evening to take the United Airlines 747 nonstop jet back home. In a way, I almost wished she were coming back with me, but she didn't like cold weather for one thing, and I wasn't yet ready to settle down and marry, for another. I had the satisfaction, however, of hearing her do her song and hearing it played on the radio quite a few times, and although I didn't charge a cent for my services in making sure that she was the legal owner of that beautiful song; I was more than compensated with the hottest nights of fucking I had had in many a moon.
I got back to O'Hare a little after six the next morning, and the cold wave was still on. I got a cab, stopped off at my post office to pick up several sacks of mail, and then on to my East View Park apartment by the lake. I slept till midafternoon, and then I made a couple of phone calls. One was to my ex-boss Matt Hollister, just to let him know that I was back and to tell him to thank good old Stanley Duron, the big boss of the firm I had worked for, for how much I had enjoyed my vacation on the bonus he had so generously provided. I couldn't help asking Matt how he and Kathie Mumow were getting along, and he almost hung up on me. It seems that she'd gone back to him for a brief time, and then she'd finally found a guy she was going to marry and announced it to him without warning. So he was left high and dry and looking for replacement pussy. I suggested his secretary, and then he did hang up on me.
The next call was to Abe Beinstock, a patent lawyer whom I'd met in Honolulu and who had given me the lowdown on copyrights. I told him that everything had come out just fine, and he thanked me for the check he had got before he left Honolulu. He only charged me, twenty-five bucks, which was tax deductible. It's a good thing the IRS doesn't consider free pussy as taxable income, or I would have been in hock to the government for quite a long time, considering how much of it Lani had given me.
But now it was time to get back to work. I had finally made the break and was going to do business on my own. I had a few business associates from the old days who had promised to give me any sleuthing assignments their firms happened to need, and the next step was to find an office and a secretary.
There wasn't any sense in getting a downtown office because the rent would be much too high. I scouted around and found a ground-floor shop vacant for about six months in my own neighborhood, on 55th Street, right near the Mayfair Hotel. I signed the lease the next day, made a few more phone calls to get some furniture in there pronto, and then I called the phone company to have a phone installed, and finally I began to think about a secretary.
There was a real dish working in an insurance office next door to me, and I had been giving her the eye for a couple of years. Her name was Liz Parminter, and I guessed her to be about twenty-six, and in her prime. She had dark-brown hair cut helmet style with a thin fringe along the top of a very high-arching forehead. Her face was vivacious and not just pretty. She had a straight nose with delicately flaring nostrils, a firm, decisive mouth, and equally firm and also deliciously dimpled chin, highset cheekbones, sparkling dark blue eyes and a tawny complexion. More than that, she had an absolutely mouthwatering figure. She was about five feet six, on the supple side, with long sleek legs, highset calves and slender, nervously muscled thighs. She had a firm, compact upstandingly rounded bottom, ideal for spanking. Of course, it was too early in the game to contemplate using that bottom for the purpose nature intended--my nature, of course--and first I had to lure her away from the insurance agency.
That proved to be easier than I thought. Business had been bad, and her boss was considering closing down the agency and besides she had been done out of a summer vacation. I found this out my third day back from Honolulu when I happened to go into the corner drugstore for coffee and Danish and found her sitting on a stool next to a vacant one which I swiftly occupied.
"How'd you like to work for me, Liz?" I asked her.
She looked at me with a kind of derisive smile. "You're kidding. Aren't you in the insurance business yourself?"
"I was. I just got back from Honolulu and I'm going into business on my own as sort of a private eye, Liz. I'm serious. I need a good secretary, and I'll pay you more than you're getting where you are now."
"You know, it's funny, Mr. Warren, because only today I was starting to wonder where I was going to find another job." And she proceeded to tell me about the lost vacation and the imminent threat of unemployment. The timing was absolutely perfect.
So the upshot of it was that I told her to take her two-weeks vacation and consider herself on salary to me while she was taking it, and then report back for work about the 20th of February. By then, I promised, I'd have drummed up some business for her.
She was going to Acapulco, and the thought occurred to me that I had been to Mexico just once in a very unforgettable way. That was the time I had tracked down that stolen Stradivarius and found it loaded with very profitable dope, and had to screw about fourteen members of an all-girl orchestra to find out which one of them was secretly a dyke and who had been a bed partner of the swinging chick who owned the violin and conducted the orchestra.
But there wasn't any sense in reviving memories of the past, because now I was unemployed myself and even though I had had tucked away plenty of dough in my savings account and still had a considerable amount left from Stanley Duron's bonus, it was time to get cutting.
I was pretty sure that Liz Parminter wasn't a virgin, but the important thing was that she was a big girl and past the age of consent. I hoped to train her to the point where, if she made any mistakes transcribing letters for me or misplacing telephone messages, I could sentence her to a hairbrush spanking on the bare, and then console her in my inimitable way. I had no way of knowing that fate was about to grant me the realization of my secret yearning, but in a way that even my own inventive mind couldn't have dreamed up.
The two weeks of Liz Parminter's vacation passed swiftly, and it was February 20th before I knew it. Actually, I had only one quick case during that period, but it was a lulu. There was a handsome gal of about thirty, a Mrs. Estelle Munson, who lived over on Hyde Park Boulevard near the Museum of Science and Industry, who engaged my services as a sleuth. What it boiled down to was that she wanted me to keep tabs on her errant husband, whom she suspected of sleeping in other beds without her permission.
The community newspaper carried a little squib about my setting up my office right in the neighborhood, and that's where Mrs. Munson got my phone number. I went over there on a Wednesday afternoon, and I was received by a really stunning dish in a quilted blue housecoat with gold lame sandals. She had wavy light-brown hair, diamond earrings clipped to her lobes, and a rather snooty face. The kind with the up-turned nose and the disapproving mouth who is still so delicious that the first time you lay eyes on her, you have the irresistible impulse to turn her over on your lap and whale some sense into her gorgeous ass until she comes down off her pedestal. I had it figured out exactly right. She was very unhappy about Delmar, her black-haired, debonair forty-year-old hubby, who was an accounts supervisor in a North Michigan Avenue ad agency. It appeared that Delmar had been rather diffident to her the last couple of years and all of a sudden had developed a habit of staying downtown for conferences, something he hadn't done previously on the job. She wanted to know what it was all about.
I trailed Delmar Munson on Friday evening after he left the agency building. He got into a cab and went over to Ricardo's, just across the river on North Rush Street. It's an Italian restaurant where they play boccie, and it's a nice quiet little place where bosses and their secretaries meet and also wife swappers, among others. Sure enough, the cab let him out there, he went on into the restaurant, and I saw a tall willowy honey-haired blonde in a beaver coat and hat get up from the bar and come towards him with lovelight in her eyes.
I got out of my cab and went in and had a drink at the bar, and I watched them smooching all through dinner. Their legs were rubbing under the table, and a couple of times his hand disappeared and stayed for quite some time out of my sight. The blonde seemed to get squirmy when that happened, and her eyes rolled and got misty. I was quite certain that he had slid his hand on up to her pussy and was tickling her to get her in the mood for fucking.
When they'd finished dinner, he paid the check and left a generous tip and then hailed a cab and put her into it. I was already paid up with my tab, so all I had to do was catch the next cab and tell the driver the standard old line, "Follow that cab!"
I followed until we got out to North Lincoln Avenue, and then Delmar Munson's cab stopped and he and the blonde got out and went up a narrow flight of stairs in an old brownstone building with three stories to it. It was near The Bakery, one of Chicago's best restaurants. I didn't figure that they were going to have another dinner, but this was not exactly the sort of pad I had expected Delmar Munson to keep a sexy blonde in.
I paid off my driver and walked up the stairs and listened. When I got to the third floor I heard giggling, and then I heard a sound that I could never mistake even if I were blindfolded and tied up and gagged for two weeks. It was the sound of a hand meeting bare girl flesh. And the squeals and the giggles and the gasps and the "Ohh, darling!" that came to my ears told me that Blondie was getting fantailed as a kind of warm-up for fucking. Because very soon the smacking stopped and then I heard Blondie start to groan along with the creaking of the mattress.
I didn't have to break in and I didn't have a warrant anyway. He was a pretty husky guy, and I wasn't exactly in the mood for fisticuffs. I suddenly hit upon a dramatic way to bring the point and lesson home to Mrs. Estelle Munson. I went back into the street, got a cab and went right to her apartment. She was still in that quilted robe, and I had a feeling she didn't have anything on under it.
"What did you find out, Mr. Warren?" she eagerly demanded.
"It's true that your husband has another girl, Mrs. Munson, but he doesn't have to have one," I told her.
She had gray-green eyes, and they sort of widened and stared me down with that hostile, I'm-better-than-you look a lot of women always get when they think they're talking to menials. "Just what do you mean by that?"
"It's very simple. How long have you two been married?"
"Ten years, not that it's any of your business, Mr. Warren. Why do you ask?" She was getting huffier by the minute.
"And you say he's been sort of distant the last couple of years, is that right?" I pursued.
"I told you that already, Mr. Warren. Now what are you trying to tell me?"
"Just that if you'd let your husband have more fun in bed, Mrs. Munson, and maybe give you the spanking which your arrogance calls for, the two of you could be a lot happier than you now are," was my cold-blooded reply.
She uttered a gasp, then her face turned a rich crimson, and then she slapped my face as hard as she could. "You get out of here! Send me a bill, and just get out of here!" she exclaimed in a choked voice.
"There isn't going to be a bill. Instead, I'm going to render you a service. And I recommend that you tell your husband all about it and suggest that he imitate me, Mrs. Munson," was my reply. With this, I grabbed hold of her and dragged her back over to the couch. She uttered a yell and tried to kick and squirm and hit me again, but by then I had her over my lap. The quilted robe had a zipper and I pulled it. I was right--she didn't have a thing on under it. She was olive-skinned, and her long legs had that glossy look to them which I like best. As if they were wet and shiny, and ready for love and wrapping round a guy to hold him tight to pussy.
Her butt was a joy to spank and to squeeze and feel. It consisted of a pair of broadly spacious but very firm ovals, with a gradually widening furrow that led to both her orifices. I clamped my right leg over her calves, I palmed the small of her back with my left hand, and then I went to work on that juicy ass of hers with my right palm. She started threatening me, and she got huffier and huffier. Her husband was going to kill me, I was a louse, she was going to get my license if it was the last thing she ever did, but I just went on spanking. When my hand got tired, I tumbled her off onto the floor and walked into her bedroom and there I found what I was looking for: a long-handled bath brush. She didn't have the old-fashioned kind of hairbrush, but this was even better. I came back just as she was struggling up off the floor and trying to zip her quilted robe back into place. She uttered a scream when she saw me, and made a beeline for the door, but I grabbed her, and back to the couch we went. She kicked me on the shin, and so she got a couple of extras. Back she went over my lap, down came the zipper, and her reddened ass was up for grabs again. This time, gripping her wrists with my left hand, I started to paddle her very slowly and emphatically. The smacks were music to my ears, and her piercing screams were even more delicious.
"Ahrrr--oh stop it--I'll do anything you want only stop it--oh my God, you're killing me--oh Mr. Warren, please, please, I didn't mean to slap you, oh please let me off now, you hurt me so! I'll do anything, anything!"
"Now if your hubby did that to you a couple of times, Estelle," I told her, "I don't think you'd have to worry about his chasing after other women. I heard what he was doing. He was spanking a blonde girl he picked up in a restaurant on the North Side. It's not only that you've probably not only doled out your favors but you've let him think that he was just a condescension on your part. I'd change that if I were you."
She lay sobbing over my lap and her bottom was a vivid scarlet. I let go of her, tossed the bath brush to the floor, and again unceremoniously pushed her off my lap so that she landed on the floor with a bump and a yell.
But as I was starting for the door, she was on her knees, and she was whimpering, "Oh don't go, Jack, please don't go! You're right--I deserve this--oh please--please, come back, I'm sorry!"
I moved towards her, wondering what she had in mind. What she had in mind was something that really dazed me delightfully. She grabbed for my zipper, yanked it down and took out my prick. Then she began to suck it, and her arms wound round my behind and she was frenching me as expertly as I have ever been frenched.
I didn't want to lose it in her mouth, though. Midway through, I stopped her, pulled her up by her elbows, and hauled her back over to the couch. She was crying then, begging me not to spank her any more, saying she wanted me to love her up. I laughed and told her to shut up because that's exactly what I had in mind.
I pulled off her robe completely, and she really had a gorgeous body. Her titties were sort of small, like oranges, but they had nice perky nipples and were firm and satiny to the touch. And once I got my prong into her, she practically went mad. She bit and clawed me, she drummed a tattoo on my bottom with her heels, and she had at least four or five climaxes before I could shoot off.
The next morning, I called Delmar Munson at his office and I told him anonymously that I had a couple of suggestions to offer. One was that he ought to spank his wife more regularly and two, the next time he met a girl friend, he not meet her in a restaurant where everybody knew everybody else. He gasped, and then he said he was grateful. And the upshot of the story is that just a week after that Mrs. Munson called me at my office and, amid giggles, told me that she was ever so grateful to me because she and her husband were reunited and going on a second honeymoon and maybe even going to have a baby.
This was the lighter side of the capers that I had got myself into, and it was just as well. Because my next caper was going to be a little more grim, a little more real, and a little more for keeps.
CHAPTER FOUR
Liz Parminter came bouncing back looking delightfully tanned--and I was looking forward to giving her another kind of tanning before too much longer, I might add!--and so you might say that officially my new career as a private investigator was underway. On Tuesday, the second day of Liz's tenure with me, I got a phone call from my ex-landlord, Reuben Greening. Before I had moved into East View Park, I had lived for a couple of years on Cornell Avenue and rented from Greening, who owned an insurance company, a fuel company, and wrote his own credit paper, floating it through his insurance agency, to handle transactions at a big department store at Sixty-third and Woodlawn. He was a man nearing sixty, gray-haired, short and stocky, with a perpetual sneer on his face. He didn't like people, and he judged everybody by money. His wife only spoke to the richest tenants, and she always went around with her nose in the air too. I knew he had a daughter, though I rarely saw her. But this was what the call was all about.
"Warren? This is Reuben Greening," he began as if he expected me to bow towards Mecca at the mere sound of his voice. "I see in the local paper that you've become a private investigator."
"Yes, Mr. Greening. Can I be of service?"
"It's not something I want to discuss on the phone. If you could come see me at my office downtown, or better yet this evening in my apartment, say around eight-thirty, I'd like to talk it over with you then."
"We'll make it tonight, Mr. Greening." I hung up and looked at Liz who was busy typing away. I had put her to work sending out letters announcing the fact that I now had my own private office and was ready willing and able to handle cases ranging from divorce to embezzlement, wherever a private eye would come in handy. My private office was glass-enclosed, so I could raise my head from my desk and look out at Liz as she sat with her back towards me at a table towards the rear of the place. When she got up and leaned over to the filing cabinet, I could also see her rear, and it was really an inspiring sight. But it was still too early in the game to get her broken into my way of life and lust.
In the afternoon I got another phone call from Larry Horzly, the sales manager for a big food company on the Southwest Side. He had a sneaky hunch that one of his employees had engineered a pretty nifty scheme for sneaking out some of his canned soups and specialty items to a friendly and collusive truck driver, selling the goods and pocketing the dough, and he wanted me to clear it up for him. I told him I'd be out to see him in the morning, and I had Liz write it down in my appointment book. One of the joys in having a private secretary is so that she can come in early in the morning when you're still bleary eyed from not enough sleep, look bright and cheerful and tell you what your schedule is for the day. Liz had a way of standing in the doorway and reaching above her head with both hands to grip the sides of the door, a gesture which thrust out her bubbies in the most delicious way.
When the working day was over, I decided not to cook a bachelor dinner, but instead have a strip steak from Morry's near the I.C. at Fifty-fifth street. Morry, hardworking, irascible but lovable, had the best take-out dinner value in Chicago, for my money. For about a buck and a half, you got a good pound or more of strip steak, crisp French fries, coleslaw, a hard roll, and a plastic dish of jello or maybe chocolate pudding. You also got some of Morry's astute, though often scathing comments on the foibles of mankind. Morry had a perfectly gorgeous blonde daughter named Suzy, but unhappily she was off to college and wouldn't be back for at least six months. Besides, I was pretty sure he wouldn't approve of me as a son-in-law. So I walked over to his place, had him wrap up a take-out dinner and took it back over to the office, thought about my vacation and the future, and then went back to my apartment to freshen up for my date with Reuben Greening.
When I got to his apartment, his basset hound almost took a bite of my ankle. He snarled something at the door and gave him a kick and then ushered me to a seat in the living room. He took out a cigar, struck four or five matches before he got it lighted, and then looked around to see that nobody else was there except the two of us. "This is sort of a touchy matter, Warren," he told me gruffly. "My wife's in the hospital and might have to have serious major surgery. What I want you to do is to find my daughter, Carol. She's been missing for about three weeks."
"Just how much missing, Mr. Greening?"
"Well, she goes to the University of Chicago. We had a sort of quarrel, you might say, about a month ago, and a week after that she didn't come home from school, and I didn't hear from her all that night, so the next day I phoned the University. They didn't have anything to tell me. I just got a note from her in the mail saying she was well and not to try and find her because she was going to try to work things out. I tell you, Warren, it's got me half crazy. And then there's her mother. You'd think that kids who get every advantage, like I've given Carol, would have more respect and affection for their parents. But everybody's lost their morality these days."
"Maybe not, if they didn't have any to start with," I couldn't help slipping in. He gave me a dirty look. "What I mean is, Mr. Greening, a lot of kids have a persecution complex these days and they've had it much too soft and they've been pampered by their parents, so they think they want to escape it all. And there's also the possibility that your daughter might have found a boyfriend and is shacking up with him."
"I don't like your tone, Warren. However, if that happens to be the case, I don't want anybody to know about it, you understand me? I want you to do some investigating. I'll pay your regular charges, but I want some results fast. I haven't called the police because Delores would be much too upset. In fact, she doesn't even know that Carol's missing. I just told her that I sent Carol off to New York to be with my son and have herself a vacation. But I can't go on telling her that forever because she expects Carol back this week, you see."
For him, it was quite a long speech. I could see that he was torn between his arrogance and his real concern for his daughter and probably his wife, so maybe he was a human being after all. As a tenant, I'd had a very hard time with him. He never wanted to do anything for the building, and he always made me feel as if I were a criminal because I needed a new window screen or a washer in the bathroom faucet.
"All right, Mr. Greening. Why don't you start by giving me a photograph of Carol? Then, if you know what they are, the classes she was taking over there. I'll do some checking around."
He showed up with a snapshot showing a nineteen-year-old girl with long honey colored hair that hung down past her shoulder blades, an insolent expression--which she probably inherited from him--and calfskin boots to the knees. This was all the vogue these days. I had the feeling that Carol Greening, judging from that snapshot, was exactly the sort of girl who would get a great kick out of trampling a guy into the dust. That's what they call male domination by the female. Personally, I go for the reverse bit in which the male dominates the female. It's more fun for me that way.
He took out his wallet, gave me two fifty-dollar bills and told me to come back when I needed more. It was too late to do anything that evening, so I went back home, poured myself a couple of glasses of Chablis, listened to a symphony on my favorite radio station, and hit the sack early.
In the morning, I stuck a note under my office door for Liz, telling her I would be out at the University of Chicago and to check with the registrar's office if there were any urgent calls. I walked over there because, although it was cold, there wasn't any snow--and also, I needed the exercise after the way I had been gorging myself in Honolulu. I was a good five pounds overweight.
When I got to the registrar's office a pretty girl with glasses and prim hair done up in a thick bun was kind enough to check Carol's classes and tell me who her professors and advisors were. I went on my way. Carol had five professors, and all of them reported that she hadn't shown up for class for at least two weeks. One of them, who taught Social Sciences, remarked that she had appeared to be extremely close to another young lady in his class who was still attending. He told me that her name was Madge Freiberg.
Back I went to the registrar's office where I found that Madge Freiberg had an apartment all her own in the University Apartments. It's sort of a bandbox with tiny apartments and high rent, standing in the middle of 55th Street, a couple of blocks west of Lake Park. I decided the best way to tackle Madge Freiberg was at her place rather than to try and pump any information out of her during the day when she was busy with class. So I phoned Horzly and told him I was on my way, took a cab and spent the rest of the morning getting the lowdown about the merchandise lifted from his warehouse. I spent the better part of the afternoon there too, and had a lousy lunch in the company cafeteria. I found right away that his main problem was lack of proper security. There was an old foreman of the shipping department who probably ought to have been retired by now, and he wouldn't look at the bills of lading or see that the merchandise was stamped and labeled for a specific address that jibed with the bills. I pointed this out to Horzly, and he thanked me and said that he was going to take immediate steps and he'd get in touch with me in a couple of days to see how it was working out.
By the time I got back to the office it was just about five o'clock and Liz was tidying up and getting ready to leave.
As I came in, she was bending over her desk, and her skirt had hiked up to show me a pair of very bewitching thighs. Also, her position made her jouncy bottom stick out temptingly against her tight skirt. My palm was itching to deliver a couple of smacks, but this wasn't the time or place. I wasn't going to be able to do anything in my office because, as I said, my place was glass-enclosed and then there was the front window on 55th Street and everybody could see what was going on in my office when they walked by, even the bus driver.
I told her to send Horzly a bill for a hundred bucks, and in the morning to transcribe some of the notes I had made over at the University of Chicago. Then I bade her goodnight, I went over to Walgreen's for a couple of hamburgers, coffee, and raisin pie a la mode and walked slowly over to the University Apartments.
Madge Freiberg lived in the first of the three buildings which were all one big complex. She was on the ninth floor, and her name was listed simply as M. Freiberg. I rang the bell, and I got a buzz back almost at once. I got off at the right floor and found that her apartment was at the end of the hall. She was standing in the doorway waiting for me. I blinked because she was really a vision. She was about twenty, I should say, petite, not more than five feet one, and her jet-black hair was shaped in a coronet braid around the top of her head. She had gray-green eyes, big and catlike, and her face was pouty. A small but very full mouth and very red and moist. A snubnose with very thin, flaring wings, and a pale-cream complexion that was really devastating.
Her body was just as good as her face. She wore a red miniskirt that went almost to the tops of her thighs, and they were luscious and beautifully rounded, with saucy highset calves to set them off. She wore a white blouse, quite transparent so that I could see the white nylon bra beneath, and her bubbies were big round globes set closely together and with wide aurolae and quite well developed nipples. She had a silver chain around her neck and a little locket dangling from it. Also, she was shod to the knee in white calfskin boots with high heels.
"Yes?" she snippily inquired. "If you're a salesman, didn't you read the sign downstairs?"
"The answer must be no, and it so happens that I'm not a salesman, Miss Freiberg. I wonder if I could have a minute of your time?"
"What's it all about?"
"About Carol Greening."
"Who are you anyway?" All of a sudden she was hostile, her eyes were narrowed and she looked me up and down as if I were something the cat had just dragged in. And with that she made a movement to close the door.
Here was an ideal candidate for the hairbrush. I stuck my foot inside the door before she could slam it shut, pushed hard, and got inside, then closed the door behind me.
"You better get out of here or I'll call the police!" she stormed.
"Take it easy, Miss Freiberg. I happen to be a private investigator and Carol's father is worried about her. Her mother's in the hospital in very serious condition, and she thinks that Carol's in New York and she wants to see her. Professor Danton told me that you and she were pretty thick. I'm just asking you in a nice friendly way to tell me what you can about her."
"I see. You could have said that earlier."
"You didn't give me much of a chance," I reminded her. Then I walked over to her leather-padded couch, sat down and lit a cigarette. She stood there looking at me, her hands on her hips, her eyes blazing. Her beautiful titties were rising and falling fast, and she was a very very tempting sight. It was cold outside, but the temperature was at least a hundred degrees hotter where I was and it was getting hotter by the minute. I could feel my prick stirring and demanding action.
"He's got a lot of nerve, that man," she finally said. "If I tell you something in confidence, will you promise not to tell him?"
"That's rather hard to ask of me, Madge, if I may call you that," I told her. "After all, he did pay me a retainer fee to find her for him. And it's a matter of sentiment, too. If her mother happens to be dying, which I suspect is happening, the decent thing to do would be to let Carol know about it, don't you think?"
She thought it over for a minute, then nodded, and came to sit down beside me. She leaned back, put both hands on her knees, and her skirt slid still farther up. I could see the tops of her pantyhose, and she didn't have any panties on under the sheath. The thick black curls of her pussyhair were plainly visible. I had to cross my legs too to hide my hard-on.
Finally she spoke. "Carol and her father had a pretty bad quarrel. He didn't like the crowd she was running around with. The fact is, she left school about two weeks ago and she's in Old Town. She's very much in love with a fellow, and she's going to marry him. She knows her father wouldn't let her, so that's why she just disappeared. Now please promise me you're not going to tell him all this."
"All right. Here's my card, by the way. My name is Jack and I wish you'd call me by it. You know where I can find her?"
"You better let me think it over, Jack." She had stuffed my card into her blouse, and I could see it nestling just inside the bra cup which held her left titty in such tight check. "I'm going to have to get in touch with her and tell her what you just told me. Then why don't you call me in a day or so and we'll see what she says?"
"Fair enough. I think I can stall her father until then."
"That's very nice of you. I--I'm sorry if I gave you a hard time. Would you like a drink?"
"Yes, very much."
She got up, gave me a sudden dazzling smile, and went back into the kitchen. I looked around. The usual FM set, a magazine rack, lithographs on the wall, and a green hostess robe lying over the back of a big white leather armchair. The window view was out towards the University of Chicago. But there was something else I noticed. On a low tabouret next to the magazine rack, there was an ashtray and one of those fancy lighters that looks like an Aladdin's lamp. It was in teakwood with gold trim. I picked it up and looked at it, and then my eyes widened a little. At the bottom, there were two initials. "R.G."
Those initials happened to be the very ones of Reuben Greening's name. Of course, it was probably coincidence.
She came back with two brimming glasses of Scotch. I took mine, clinked it to hers, and wished her happier days. She sat next to me, and I could feel her warm thighs pressing hard against mine. All of a sudden she had gotten kittenish.
The Scotch was good, smoky, and aged. I felt nice and drowsy. I had a feeling I would love to stay in this place and get this cute little brunette on top of me shagging away for dear life while I lay there like a sultan and let her do all the work, staring up at her titties bouncing merrily as she fucked. Her lips were getting redder and redder and moister and moister, and I felt myself getting harder and harder. I kept staring at her titties, and it was all I could do to keep from ripping of her blouse and bra and burying my face in them.
"You know, you're an awfully handsome fellow, Jack," her voice seemed to come from a distance.
"Thanks. You're not so bad yourself, Madge."
Then she giggled. "I sort of go for older men. And I like masterful men too. I like the way you got into my apartment when I didn't want to let you in, Jack."
"You did?"
"Mmmmmmm." She moved still closer. "Do you have a girl right now?"
"To be honest with you, no. I just came back from Honolulu, but I don't have any steady girl in Chicago."
"That's awful. And all those cold nights we still have ahead of us, too. You really ought to do something about it."
Her voice sounded particularly seductive. It almost sounded as if it came from a distance. My eyes were getting heavy, and I had to blink them to keep looking at her. Then she began to blur, until there were two of her.
All of a sudden I felt my prick practically tear out of my pants. I was breathing hard. And she kept pressing her thigh into mine until I thought the two of us would merge. The best way I knew was fucking.
"Go ahead and kiss me if you want to," she whispered huskily, as she set her glass down on the coffee table.
I did exactly that. I grabbed hold of her shoulders, and the flesh was soft and luscious. I kissed her hard on the mouth, and her lips parted and then her little tongue thrust out between my lips. Electricity was surging through me, and I knew I was going to fuck her if it was the last thing I did.
Then she put her hand on my fly and yanked down the zipper. I then let out a groan, and her soft little fingers took hold of my prick and took it out to begin to fondle it. "Do you like that, Jack?" she whispered again.
"That's the sweetest and also silliest question I ever heard, Madge baby," I said hoarsely. "Shall we do it here or in the bedroom?"
"This is the bedroom," she giggled. "It's just a studio apartment, and there's an in-a-door bed. But the couch here is fine, if that's all right with you, lover. And you don't have to worry about anything, I'm all set for love."
This was quite a girl. And her sudden conversion from hostility to passion was bothering me. I was getting fuzzier and fuzzier. And then I knew what had happened. The little bitch had slipped a Mickey into my Scotch.
"What was that stuff you made me drink, baby?" I suddenly asked while I still had my senses left. My fingers dug hard into her shoulders and she winced.
"Ouch--you--you're hurting me, Jack dear--what stuff? I don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh yes you do. I'm getting woozy, and at the same time I feel like a rapist. Maybe it wasn't a Mickey. Maybe it was something else."
"How you do talk! Why don't you love me?"
"Because I don't like tricky bitches, that's why. I think I'll find out just what it was you gave me, Madge," I told her. Then I suddenly pulled her over my lap. She let out a squeal of fright because she hadn't expected it. Up went the miniskirt, down went the pantyhose, and as she grabbed for both her luscious, compactly-rounded bare ass cheeks, I seized her wrists with my left hand and gave her a couple of hard swats with my right palm.
"Oww--why are you doing this to me? Stop it, that's not fair--I want to be loved, not spanked--ouch, it hurts--stop it!" she squealed.
"Not till you tell me what you put in my drink!" I let her have a couple of more hard swats and she really yelled.
"Ahrrr--oh don't--I'll tell you--oh please stop, you're hurting me awfully--it was--it was LSD. But only a tiny bit. I wanted to get you sexed up."
"That's great," I snarled, and I let her have another half dozen till she really kicked and yelled. "I've never used any drug in my life, and you have to start me off because you want to get me sexed up. Didn't you take a look at my prick when you sat down next to me to see how sexed up I was just by being near you, Madge baby? That's a hell of an insult to my male prowess. And your ass is going to pay dearly for it."
Then I really went to work on her. I kept spanking until her bottom was tossing all over the place. She almost rolled off the couch at one point. Her pale creamy skin turned first a bright pink, then an angry red, and then a little purplish. She was hoarse from yelling, and I didn't even care if the neighbors heard. I was going to get to the bottom of her bottom and find out her motives if it was the last thing I ever did.
Finally, when my hand was tired, I stopped. She lay sprawled and sobbing over my lap, and her face was red and stained with tears.
"Now tell me," I insisted. "What was the reason for that cute little trick of yours?"
"I--I thought it would knock you out--I thought--I thought you wouldn't ask so many questions," she sobbed.
"I see. Well, I think that's an honest answer. And now you're going to get yours, baby, for leading me on. I didn't need that LSD to fuck you. Maybe it will help me do an even better job. Let's fuck and find out, shall we?" I growled.
Then I rolled her over onto her back, and I didn't have much to do. She had already accommodatingly pulled out my prick, and it was about to burst. I grabbed her by the titties, crammed myself into her snatch, and found she wasn't a virgin. I hadn't expected her to be. She let out a wail, and wrapped her legs over my ass, and hugged me hard and then she bit me on the shoulder just as I pulled back for a second hard dig into her tight warm moist little snatch.
I gave that girl one of the most violent fuckings of my erotic career. She loved every minute of it. The heels of her boots were drumming a tattoo on my behind as I socked it to her.
I felt her come under me twice before I, at last, gushed my essence deep into her cunt.
And when I straightened up and leaned back against the couch and blinked my eyes and tried to get my bearings, she was whimpering, "Oh Daddy, it was so good, oh how you sent me! Oh Daddy, I want to be your girl, your ownie own girl from now on."
"You do?"
"Oh yes!" she breathed with a kind of wistful adoration. She put her arms around me and hugged me hard and kissed me in the mouth again.
"Wait. You can be, if you tell me where Carol's hidden away," I told her.
And so she told me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Fucking Madge Freiberg had helped clear my head a little, and it was damned lucky for me that she hadn't put much LSD into my Scotch. Some years ago, an Oklahoma newspaper carried the story that an elephant had died from getting so many milligrams of that hallucinogenic drug, and I'm no elephant. I was still mad at her for trying a stunt like that. When I got off her, I went to her kitchen and heated up some strong black coffee and drank two cups, and walked around and then drank a third cup. I was still getting blurs before my eyes, and my heart was pounding, but I had shaken off the worst of it, thank heaven.
When I went back to the living room, Madge was still lying sprawled, but this time on her tummy, and both hands were feverishly rubbing her sore ass. She was an entrancing sight, her panty hose pulled down around her ankles, her miniskirt pulled back up, and her flaming bottom wriggling and weaving as she tried to shake off the heat I had kindled in that sweet tail of hers.
"If you ever try a stunt like that, baby," I warned, "I'll string you up by the heels and take a switch to your backside and right between your legs, so help me!"
She giggled and looked up at me, her cat-green eyes huge and misty. "Ooooh, that sounds like it might be fun," she purred.
"We'll see if you still think that way when it happens, baby. I'm going to go over and find Carol Greening."
"Now wait a minute, Jack," she protested, scrambling to her feet, not without a grimace of pain, and hastily pulling down her skirt to cover her sore ass, "I told you I was going to call her and see if it's all right."
"No thanks. I don't like the smell of this whole thing. If you hadn't tried to slip me that LSD, I might have gone for your deal."
"What has that got to do with it?"
"A lot. I want to know how you get hold of this stuff, and if Carol is a good friend of yours as Professor Danton seemed to think, I'll bet she knows about narcotics, too. Maybe you don't know it, but that stuff is illegal. I've been reading reports in the Chicago papers when I was in Honolulu of a drug racket in this town, particularly on the South Side."
"Now that's ridiculous! Anybody can get LSD. I just happened to have a little bit left, and I thought it might be fun. You came in so strong, I wanted to see if it maybe wouldn't make you real masterful."
"Well, you saw. So did your ass. And it's a good thing for you that you didn't knock me out of condition. I'd have you lodged in a cell and the key thrown away. I don't go for drugs at all, baby. I don't need that kind of stimulation. Your body is quite enough for me. And the people who get others addicted to drugs are the worst louses in the world, in my estimation, in about the same category as Hitler and his henchmen who exterminated all those decent people."
"Oh come off it, Jack," she giggled again. "Don't sound so square, Besides, LSD can't hurt you. Neither can marijuana. It just makes your mind clear and everything clicks into place."
"Don't give me that," I told her angrily. "I've read all the arguments, Madge. Sure, the doctors haven't all come out and said that marijuana is harmful. But you get in that sort of atmosphere and you don't get any kicks from a reefer, the next thing you know, you and the gang are trying the hard-core drugs like the big H and speed."
When I said that last word I saw her eyes flicker a little. It rang a bell, but I couldn't quite place it. Speed, of course, is nothing less than methamphetamine. It's known as "speed,"
"crystals," or "meth," and it's often taken intravenously. Users often build up to doses more than a hundred times the medical dose, several times a day. They get into an acute toxic state. Oh sure, while they're on it they look perfectly healthy, they're full of piss and vinegar, but they don't have judgment or consideration. They get irritable easily, are often confused, they want to fight, and then they have delirium followed by depression and fatigue. It's one of the deadliest drugs known to man. And if you mainline it, there is always the chance you'll get infection and hepatitis from t he use of non-sterile injection equipment.
I'd also read that a lot of kids used speed to get sexed up, which was the phrase Madge had used to apologize for giving me the stuff she had put into my Scotch. Oh sure, once again, speed can make you peppy as hell and full of desires to fuck, but when you get down to it, you'll find that you're impotent. It's an abusive drug, like anything that's used where it shouldn't be used. Personally, I'd like to see the death penalty inflicted on the big pushers and all the crumbums who try to make a dishonest buck by peddling it and getting decent people hooked on it. And that's enough moralizing for a while.
"Look, baby, you're supposed to be quite a hep chick from all I've heard around the University," I told her. "If that's the case, you know damn well that you can make about a gallon of speed for maybe fifty bucks and sell a spoonful for five or even ten. Anything that has that much profit potential is going to attract a lot of greedy vultures. And anybody who touches that sort of money, in my books, is scum. I don't want to see a cute chick like you having a little LSD as you put it, or anything else like that. I want to get to the source and stop it."
"My, you're really a hero, aren't you?" she jeered at me.
"Watch your language, Madge, because your ass is in no position for seconds, you know."
My little speech had the opposite effect on her. She hurried up to me, after first pulling off her panty hose, pressed herself tightly against me, wound her arms around me and whispered, "Oh I just love it when you get so cross and mad like that, Jack honey! I told you I go for older men. Why don't you stay here and take care of me?"
"I'll take a raincheck on you, baby. Whether I come back and string you up by the heels and use that switch depends upon what I'm going to find out from Carol Greening," I told her. And with that I gave her a hard kiss on the mouth and a good smack on the bottom that made her jump and yell, and left the University Apartments.
Hailing a cab, I got out to Old Town. It's between about Schiller and North Avenues on Wells Street. It's a cluster of interesting shops and restaurants, but it's drawn an awful lot of hippies, drug abusers, and muggers of late. You can find prostitutes, drag queens, and just about anything that money will buy if you have the right connections. You can also buy drugs.
I had Reuben Greening's picture in my pocket, and I stopped off at a discotheque near Goethe Street. The racket just about destroyed my eardrums, but when I handed a five-dollar bill to the cute red-haired bartender who was wearing a buckskin jacket and red leather boots high on her long slinky thighs, she got awfully chummy. As soon as the record stopped, there was a couple minutes of silence, blessed silence, and I showed her the picture and told her I was looking for the girl in it. She recognized Carol Greening right away, "Oh sure, I know her. She comes in here with a guy from Montana. Big tall rawboned guy, his name's Hal Busby." Then she gave me a wink and sidled up a little closer to the bar so that her big titties practically stuck right over towards me. "For a little more of that long green, lover. I could even tell you where they hang out."
This time I gave her a ten spot. "There's a couple of studio apartments over The Crazy Poodle down by North Avenue, honey," she told me. "You'll find them up in one of those. t In case you're the law, don't let on to them I told you, huh? I close up at two, and my name's Myra. Do you go for the leather bit, lover?"
What the beauteous bartender Myra was asking me was whether I liked to be tied up and trampled by leather boots and given a leather-whip thrashing on the bare ass. I gavee her a hard cold look: "I dig it, Myra," was my answer, "and I'd just love to take you to my place and bind you up with rawhide and then use a nice carriage whip on those sweet titties of yours."
She gulped, turned red, and then hurried to the other end of the bar without so much as a second look at me.
I walked on down Wells Street. I had my hand over my wallet just in case. I had never seen so many hippies in all my life. Dirty, long-haired, torn jeans and jackets and levis, chattering volubly, all with desperate looks on their faces as if they didn't know what would come next when the fun and games were over.
They were a kind of new race of remittance men, and I'll bet that most of them came from out of state and that their parents sent them monthly checks and told them never to darken their door again. A hundred years or so ago, fine English families would send the black sheep of the family off to India to fight for the honor of the regiment. Those were remittance men too. Only half of these modem punks, for all their loud talk, wouldn't even fight for the right to be decent citizens.
I found The Crazy Poodle, and it was a swinging, blaring discotheque just like the one I had come from. They even had a girl in a cage who had on pasties and a silver G-string to cover her pussy, doing a crouch and wiggle that was half-Watusi, half-invitation to a fuck. I used the narrow, urine-smelling stairway beside this emporium of pleasure to climb a long rickety flight of steps up to the three apartments. At the far one in the rear I found a dirty white name card pasted just over the bell and the name Busby scribbled on it.
I was about to ring the bell when I suddenly heard a sound that I knew only too well. The smack of leather on bare girl-flesh. I heard a long shuddering, "Ohhhh!" followed by an "Ohhh, dammit, harder, give it to me harder!" And then there was the smack of the whip again. And this time a long piercing cry, "Aahhhrrr--ohhhh--it's so lovely, more, give me more, I've been bad, punish me!"
I turned the knob of the door and of course it was locked. Then I did ring the bell. I heard someone swear, and then a suspicious, "Who is it?"
"Police!" I said, and then I hammered on the door. "Let me in!"
"Shit--what next?" I heard the fellow growl. And then I heard a girl's voice call to him, "Don't leave me like this, I don't want him to see me, for heaven's sake, Hal, get me down!"
He was already unlocking the door when she yelled, and I pushed forward. I threw him off balance and I went on in.
It was a dirty studio apartment, all right, as small as they come. There was Carol Greening, the girl with the honey-colored hair and the calfskin boots. There was an imitation fireplace, and she was standing there, her arms in cross along the mantelpiece of that fireplace, and two big nails had been driven into the wood and cords tied from the nails round her wrists. It was a kind of improvised whipping post. She was naked except for those boots, and there were dark, angry lines on her saucy oval-shaped ass and long slinky thighs and shoulder blades. And there were a couple of marks along her ribcages, and one of them went as far as the side of her left tittie. It must have hurt like hell. A leather carriage whip lay on the floor, about three feet long, with a heavy stock handle. And the guy whom I had taken by surprise, evidently Hal Busby, was wearing only leather trousers and leather slippers, and he was sweating like a horse and I smelled something sweet like hashish. There was one more thing about Hal Busby: his zipper was pulled down and his big bony cock was sticking out.
"Who the fuck are you, jerk?" he snarled.
He was about twenty-five, though you couldn't always tell with a hippie. He was sort of emaciated, with a nervous face and a twitch to his lips and eyelids which bespoke the habitual drug user. He had a sort of nasal twang which I didn't associate with Montana, though he might have come from there. A long time, a long time of hell ago, I might say. There was hatred in his eyes and sex and cruelty and a lot of other things, but right now, mostly the savage hatred of me who had broken up his cute little orgy.
"I happen to represent Carol Greening's father, punk," I told him. "So why don't you cut her down and let her put some clothes on?"
"Because I'm not going anywhere, you jack-off," Carol fiercely retorted, turning her head and giving me a hateful look. She was really a dish. She was sweating, and the lashmarks were glistening as if they had been painted on. And she was panting for breath, and her boobies were rising and falling furiously. She twisted herself so I could get a good look at the thick dark-blonde pussy curls between her long legs. And she gave me a jeering smile: "Don't you wish you were man enough?" she challenged. "If you're from my father, you can tell him to go to hell."
"I'd do that willingly enough if your mother were all right, Carol," I told her. "But she's in the hospital after major surgery, and I've got a hunch it's cancer. She's worried about you. Your dad told her that you said you'd come on to New York to visit the family, but she's expecting you back. I'd sort of look in on her if I were you."
Her face changed a little. "Untie me, Hal," she hissed.
"Aw, Carol, don't let this punk stop our fun," Hal Busby pleaded as he ambled towards her. I grabbed for the whip he had discarded when I had identified myself as the police. I drew it back and coiled it round his lean waist, with a nice loud "Crackkk!" He yelled, grabbed for his body and tried to pull the whip off, but I had already beaten him to it. "Now untie her, and watch out whom you call a punk," I told him.
He swore at me, so I just uncoiled the whip again and pretended to hit him, and he ran to Carol and took a penknife out of his pocket and started to cut her loose. She went over to the armchair by the window, pulled on a dirty yellow cotton blouse and a pair of red hotpants. I could see her wince as she put those clothes on, and the lashing must really have hurt. The pupils of her eyes were dilated. Both of them were high as a kite on drugs, and sex was to have come next.
"Where's my mother?" she wanted to know.
"He didn't tell me what hospital, but I'll find out and take you there," I told her. "Your friend Madge didn't want to tell me where you were, but I made it my business to find out."
"That bitch!" her face got mad again. "What right has she got to talk about me? We used to be friends up till--well, never mind that. All right. There's a pay phone downstairs, go call that bastard of a father of mine and find out where my mother is."
Hal Busby gave me a look that wished me in my grave even without memorial services. "Now you come right back," he told her petulantly. "And I don't believe he's from the police, either."
"Private investigator, which is about the same thing. I've got connections with the police force, so don't make me use them and rat on you, punk," I snarled. "I can smell hash around here and I'll bet there are other interesting things for the narcotics bureau to check up on if they have the news about you," I added.
He looked scared then, and he started whining that it wasn't his fault and that this was a free country and that I didn't have a search warrant. I took Carol by the arm and led her out, and I threw him back his whip. "Go play with yourself," I said to him.
Carol giggled. It was a nervous reaction, born out of drugs and the whipping and her sexed-up condition. "Say, you're not so bad for a square, honey," she whispered in my ear as we negotiated those rickety stairs on our way out. "I could sort of go for you. Hal gets a little tiresome once in a while."
"Only once in a while? Now me, I'm always good for new laughs every night. Seriously, Carol, what the hell is it between your old man and you?"
"I don't want to talk about it. Why don't you go ask Madge, she knows so much." She looked angry and distant again.
I didn't press my luck. I put in a call to Reuben Greening, found out that his wife was at Michael Reese Hospital in the intensive care ward, and we hailed a cab and went right there. And a half an hour afterwards, Carol came out of her mother's room looking very scared and little-girlish. Her attire had drawn a considerable amount of staring from the nurses. She didn't have on panties or bra under the blouse and hotpants, and there were a couple of lashmarks on her lower thighs which were plainly evident on the soft pink flesh.
One young nurse came forward and started looking at Carol's legs, so I stared at her and said, "She fell into a swimming pool full of electric eels, if you must know," and she gasped, turned red, and beat it.
"She's awfully bad," Carol told me. "What are we going to do? I don't ever want to see him again, but I do happen to love my mother."
"Then go over to see her every day and say some prayers for her. It's none of my business, but are you serious about that punk?"
"Yes I am. His father has a ranch back in Montana, and he came here to do some painting in the Art Institute. I met him there no one afternoon and we got to talking. He couldn't stand his parents. Well, I can't stand my father, so we've got something in common."
"That's not the only thing you've got in common. There's the whipping and then the hash. And I think you're hooked on both of them, baby. The whipping might not be so bad except that pretty soon, when the drugs don't work any more, you might try other things which would get you a ticket into the psychotic ward."
"Quit preaching." Then all of a sudden, she gave me a great big smile and hugged my arm and whispered, "I bet you're jealous. I bet what you really want to do is tie me up and whip me hard and then fuck me, isn't that right?"
"How did you guess? But if I do that, I want you in full command of your senses and not half-crazy from a dose of hash or big H or speed," I said.
Once again that haunted, frightened look came into her eyes, the same one I had momentarily seen in Madge's.
"Shut up," was all she said. "I'm going back to him. You can tell my father I'm going to marry him in a couple of weeks. That's all you can tell my father."
I left her at that, called a cab and went back home. I didn't sleep too well, and I was dreaming of Carol being tied up to the imitation fireplace at my apartment, wearing nothing except those calfskin boots and her long hair and sobbing as the whip curled round her loins and bottom and begging me to fuck her.
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning, after I had showered and shaved and made a quick breakfast, I went over to Reuben Greening's apartment to tell him the bad news. I caught him just as he was getting into his car to drive out either to the hospital where his wife was or his office, and he looked startled when I hailed him. I told him the facts of life, how Carol was going to get married and didn't want to see him, but had gone to visit her mother. I told him I didn't know what Carol had said to her mother, but that he better be content to let things stand the way they were.
He seemed a little relieved, and told me to mail him a bill. I figured that was the last I'd have to do with him, and I couldn't have been more wrong.
When I got back to the office, Liz Parminter was bustling around and looking as if she were already a permanent fixture. I had the thrill of watching her bend over to reach the filing cabinet just as I entered, and again I admired that saucy bottom of hers. When she heard me come in, she whirled around and blushed a little and then told me she had a couple of phone calls for me. The answering service started after the two of us left the office, and all she had to do was dial them the next morning and find out what had happened.
One of the calls was from none other than Madge Freiberg. The other was from David Henshaw, who ran the insurance agency that Liz had worked for. I thought it was funny he should call me, unless he wanted her back. There wouldn't be a chance of that. But I called him first, anyway, just to see what was on his mind.
"Mr. Warren? Nice of you to call. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes this morning," he told me.
"What's it about, Mr. Henshaw?"
"I'd rather discuss it when you come over here. I'm only a few blocks away, you know."
"I'll be there," I told him, and hung up. His office was at 53rd Street, in the Hyde Park Bank and Trust Company building. He was on the sixth floor, and when I opened the door, I stopped dead in my tracks. Right inside at the reception desk was a girl who doubled as switchboard operator, secretary and general morale-builder. She had fluffy silver-blonde hair, a saucy, mocking face with big dark-brown eyes, and uptilted little nose, and a ripe, lush mouth. She wore a black knit dress which did wonders for both my blood pressure and her figure. She had a pair of the most excitingly protruding, tempting pearshaped bobbies I had ever seen, narrowly spaced and sticking their nipples right out at me. She couldn't have been wearing a very thick bra, not the way I could make out the outline of those sweet love buds. And when she got up to announce me to her boss, I could see that the skirt clung lovingly to her highplaced, tightly spaced round ass cheeks and long supple thighs. Her calves weren't bad, either. She wore an off-black pair of nylons and I could see the muscles in her calves flexing delightfully as she walked with mincing steps, knocked on the opaque glass door and was told to come in. A moment later, she called to me in a sort of husky, sexy voice that I should come right in.
David Henshaw was about forty-five, I should say, stocky but tall, with a broad nose that had once been broken, a jutting jaw and a thin mouth. He wore a pair of plastic spectacles, and he looked very professorial.
He gestured me to a chair opposite his desk, lit his cigar, offered me one which I declined, and then got right to the point. "I see that you hired my former secretary, Miss Parminter. How's she doing?"
"Quite well, thanks. But you didn't call me over just to talk about Liz, did you?" I shot at him.
"Not quite," he gave me a dry chuckle. "The fact is, Mr. Warren, I wonder if your services include those of a kind of protective bodyguard?"
"Are you serious? Of course they include that, but I shouldn't think you'd need one in your line of business, Mr. Henshaw," was my answer.
"It's not so much for my sake as it is for my wife's, you see," he explained. "We live over at 57th and Dorchester, in an old house. There are lots of young hippies lurking around the neighborhood in the evening, and I have to go out quite a few times and leave my wife alone. She gets easily frightened. I was thinking that maybe you could do some patrolling nights for me, and of course I'd pay you a fee."
"What's happened lately to make you think you need a bodyguard or a kind of night watchman, Mr. Henshaw?" I wanted to know.
"Well, you see, my wife has had a couple of obscene letters in the mail. And a couple of phone calls, too, along the same direction. She's had the calls when I've been out in the evening, and she's worried about them. We've been married about ten years, and I suppose--well, you know how women are when they reach a certain age. My wife's going on thirty-eight."
That was a little early for the menopause, I thought to myself, but I listened to him. He went on, nervously crushing out one cigarette and then lighting another one right away: "You see, my business makes it essential for me to go calling on clients on the other side of town, and I can usually reach them best when they're home at night."
"I understand. But you don't expect me to watch over your house permanently, do you?"
"Oh no!" he quickly retorted. "Just for the next week, perhaps. I realize it's a sort of imposition on you, though I'd be very grateful, and I'll pay you your regular fee and overtime--whatever you want."
I glanced back over my shoulder at the silver-blonde who was sitting at her desk right next to the office door, and I just happened to wonder if David Henshaw might not want me to watch over his wife while he was watching over his secretary in a different part of town. It was quite possible. I could have gone for that babe myself. She certainly looked sexy, and I was willing to bet that if I ever got a chance to take down her panties, the hair over her quim wouldn't be the same shade as what she had on her head. But I figured that David Henshaw wasn't ever going to give me that chance. For all I knew, he had probably tried to get into Liz's panties and been rebuffed, and it might just be that he had fired her because she wouldn't say yes and then hired this girl who did.
"As it happens, I'm free for the next week or so, Mr. Henshaw," I finally told him. "Shall we say from around eight o'clock through midnight?"
"That would be good. If you could even make it one in the morning, I'd like it even better."
"I think that can be arranged. It's not a far walk from where you live to where I am in East View Park. And I don't have any girlfriends who are demanding my nights, not at the moment," I told him with a wink just to let him know that I was a man of the world like himself. He got a little red in the face, pushed around some papers on the top of his desk as if to look busy, and then hastily concluded the interview by saying that he would pay me two hundred and fifty bucks for the week. It was easy money and I wasn't about to hold him up. But what really interested me was to find out whether he was going to be away from home during that week of my vigilance.
When I left him, we had come to the agreement that I would start this very night. I walked back to my office, and Liz told me that Madge Freiberg had called again. She was over at her apartment, and it appeared that she didn't have any classes today at the University. Rather than call her, I decided to walk over there.
I was quickly admitted as soon as I rang her bell in the lobby, and when I got to her place, I was awake for the day for damn sure. Madge Freiberg was really breathtaking. Petite as she was, she made herself look taller and sexier by wearing a pair of red calfskin boots halfway up her thighs, and all she had on besides that was a black leotard which snugged her between the legs and just left enough of the base of her ass to make me remember what fun it had been paddling it for her that time she had slipped some LSD into my Scotch. Her arms were bare, but her hands were in red leather gloves that just went as far as her slim wrists. She smelled of perfume, and she looked properly dewy-eyed.
"It's so nice of you to come over, what a lovely surprise!" she exclaimed, taking hold of my hand and leading me in. She closed and then locked the door and then told me to make myself at home while she got me a drink. It was a little early in the day for that, and I said no, remembering also that the last drink I had had from her had really been loaded. She remembered it too, because she blushed and then giggled: "Oh yes, I forgot--I don't blame you for being distrustful, Jack dear. Well, can I make you a sandwich and some coffee?"
"No thanks. What's on your mind, Madge?"
"You know what I said--that other night, you know, about going for older men.."
"I remember. What about it?"
"You made an awfully lasting impression on me, Jack dear, and I sort of hoped you'd want to see more of me."
"The idea had occurred to me also, Madge. But it's a little early for sex, isn't it?"
"Oh no! Anytime's the right time when you're nuts about a guy." She came up to me and put her arms around me, and started rubbing her crotch up against mine. Her gray-green eyes were humid and dilated, but I didn't think that she was high on drugs this time. She was just a nymph, and a masochistic one at that.
"Tell me something about yourself, Madge. I'll have a cigarette and sit down here on the couch," I said to her. She sat down right beside me, hand on my knee, smiling at me very provocatively. Then she said in a little-girl voice, "I'll tell you anything you want to know, darling."
"Well, what about your family and your background, where did you come from?" was my first question.
"From Boston. I couldn't stand my parents, and my mother was just about ready to get a divorce and remarry. They were always having fights, and I got sick of it. So I just split the scene about a year ago and came to Chicago.
My aunt left me some money in trust, and it was okay for me to have it when I was eighteen, so I'm using it for my studies over at the University. I get the rest of the money when I'm twenty-one, and then maybe I'll teach or something. I'm never going back to Boston."
"I don't blame you. They'd probably ban you there if any of the city fathers saw your present outfit," I joked.
She giggled again, then linked her arms round my neck and pulled me down towards her. "As long as you like it, that's all I care about, Jack. Kiss me, I want you to. I want you to do everything to me. Even if you want to spank my butt again. You really sent me that other night, honey."
I really didn't get it. There was something as phony as a three-dollar bill about this collegiate broad, but I couldn't yet put my finger on it. It was quite likely that she had come from the East, that she had money to support herself and go on to school, and yet I hadn't forgotten that cigarette lighter with the initials R.G. on it. But anyway, I kissed her. I put my hands on her bottom while I was doing it and I pulled her tight up against me so that she could feel my growing hard-on.
"Oh my, who said he didn't want sex this early in the day?" she teased in a husky voice as she felt my manhood prod against her cunt. That leotard was like a second skin, and the smell of her perfume didn't hurt her chances for a good poking, either.
"Nobody said anything. But I just wonder why you suddenly went for me all out, baby." My hands kept massaging her jouncy ass cheeks and she moaned and started to rub against me. "Surely over at that school of yours, there must be lots of younger and better-looking guys than myself who'd give their right arm just to be here with you the way I am now."
"But I don't want younger men. Didn't I tell you? I go for guys like you, Jack. Even older, if you want to know something. I guess maybe it's a father complex, or at least that's what the psychiatrists would say if they knew about it. That's why I was so upset when Dad and Mom got to having fights and breaking up the home. I couldn't stand it any more, because I love my father. I think he's going to get a divorce very soon and maybe remarry and move to the West Coast, and I won't see him again. Oh Jack," now her voice grew almost desperate and her eyes were swimming with tears of self-pity, "I want you to make love to me!"
I had no objection to that at all, of course. What I just couldn't figure was her sudden infatuation for me. I mean, I've got an ego like any man, and I know I'm pretty good in bed, but this chick was a long way from being a virgin and she had undoubtedly had plenty of experience before that first boffing I gave her. Why all of a sudden was she ready to put out? She hadn't even expected me to drop over, only left a couple of messages for me to call. And here she was giving me her all as if I were the last man on earth.
I kissed her and my hands continued to squeeze her bottom because, no matter what her character was, her ass was really tempting. She pressed her tongue between my lips, pressed hard against me, and then she whispered, "Did you find Carol?"
"I did. I also met her boyfriend, Hal Busby. I think the two of them are going to get hitched. At least that's what she told me to tell her father," I told her.
"You did see her? And Hal too? You mean it?"
"Of course I mean it. What's all the mystery about?" I was getting irritated now. I pulled her back down beside me on the couch, put my hand on her titties, and gave her a really hard kiss that bruised her lips against her teeth. "Why don't you fill me in on what you're really thinking, baby?"
"I envy her, that's why," she breathed. "I sort of wish Hal was my guy."
"Hey now, Madge, that's not exactly in character," I reminded her as my fingers wandered over her swelling bobbies. "You're supposed to go for older guys, remember?"
"I know. But Hal is such a thrilling lover. Carol told me lots of times."
"You mean she knew him before she left home?"
"Of course she did. Only her father never wanted anyone like that to come around to the apartment. She's known him for about a year. But things got so bad at home she just had to leave, and so she went to him."
It was much too pat. "But tell me what makes him such an outstanding lover, baby. Maybe I can learn something from him," I quipped.
She shivered then, and she put her arms around my neck and pressed herself very close to me and then she whispered, "you are already, if you'd only be as strong and cruel as he is. He uses the whip, and it sends me. Only you wouldn't ever use it on me. Not even the older men--well, never mind. But they won't, they haven't got the guts. But you do, don't you? You spanked me, you could whip me, too, and I'd be your slave forever. And we could make a lot of money together and I'd be your girl all the time. Wouldn't you like that, darling?"
She was getting excited again, and I recognized all the signs. But this time, it wasn't from dope, just sex. It was an interesting theory. How did she know so much about Carol and Hal's mania for the whip? Why were the two of them no longer friends--at least, that was Carol's statement. Where did that lighter with "R.G." fit in?
CHAPTER SEVEN
There was something here which, if I could put all the pieces together, would add up to something rotten in the state of Denmark.
"How do you know Hal uses a whip?" I countered as my hands continued their squeezing and rubbing Madge Freiberg's now frantically swelling bubbies.
"Because," she breathed, "Carol used to tell me. When we were in the gym shower over at school, she'd show me the marks, and then she'd tease me and tell me what he did to her afterwards and how it thrilled her. Once I had a date with him, just once, but he wouldn't do it to me. He said he didn't want to come between us."
"I see. Now what's this little proposition of yours about making money and being my girl?" was my next question.
"There's lots of money to be made. I know how. But I have to trust you first. And you have to love me the way I want to be loved. I want you to be my Daddy and thrash me for being so naughty. I deserve it, I've been awfully bad."
That had a familiar ring to it. It reminded me of Estelle Munson who I hoped was now living happily ever after. "You mean you want me to tie you up and whip you before I fuck you, Madge, is that it?" I pursued.
She closed her eyes and shivered and nodded. I could feel her fingernails biting into the back of my neck, and I could hear the sharp, sibilant intake of breath as she pressed herself even closer to me, offering all she had as sacrifice.
"And if I do, you'll let me in on this secret for making a mint, is that the idea?" I persisted.
"Oh yes!" she burst out almost impatiently, staring at me with humid, dilated eyes. "Just do it to me first, oh you don't know how I need it! Oh please Jack, darling, fuck me-I want you so badly! I'll bet you saw them, doing it. Didn't you, Jack? I bet when you went in there, he was whipping Carol, wasn't he?"
She had all the unhealthy instincts of a voyeuse, which is a female Peeping Tom. This chick hadn't even finished university, and yet she had probably had more deviate experiences in many fields of endeavor than women who live the full allotted three score and ten.
But all this talk of whipping naturally excited me. I had never really been cruel to any of the girls I had spanked. And I sensed that Madge Freiberg was almost on the verge of being pathological. But I had to find out because I was getting a few suspicions in my naturally suspicious mind.
"All right, baby, just remember that you asked for it. But you've got to promise me that when I've finished with you, you'll let me in on this moneymaking deal of yours," I told her.
"Oh, I will, I will, I'll tell you everything! Oh it's going to be so wonderful, just the two of us, Jack! Are you going to do it now? I'm at your mercy, I'm your slave. I've been wicked, and I need a good sound whipping till I can't stand it, oh please!" She sank down on her knees on the floor, clasped her arms round my legs and laid her head on my knees and looked up at me with the most sultry, lascivious abandon I had ever seen on a girl's face.
I looked very slowly around the apartment, remembering how Hal Busby had tied up Carol Greening. Then I remembered the heavy bathroom shower fixture she had. That would make an ideal whipping post. I stood up, grabbed her by the wrists and snarled, "Come on, then you're going to get it for sure!"
"Oh darling!" she moaned. She came with me the way a faithful dog follows its master. When I got her to the bathroom, she looked somewhat startled, but when I tore off her leotard and left her in just her boots and gloves, she sank down on her knees again, bowed her head to my feet and started kissing my shoes. She was really a dish, and I wondered who had broken her in this way and led her to take drugs and prefer older men. Maybe the whipping would help me find out. It would also cure the ache in my balls which was now starting to grow monumental.
I lifted her up by yanking at her hair, then I gripped her under the armpits and lifted her again and stood her in the bathtub-shower stall. I grabbed two thin long hand towels, and proceeded to tie each around one of her wrists and the other end to the heavy fixture. It made her stretch on tiptoe, and all her lovely body was tightly exposed and ready. She faced the shower-stall wall, with her bottom towards me. Then I took the heavier towel you use after a bath or a shower and I dipped it in the washbasin in cold water until it was wringing wet.
I used one end of it as a handle, and I stepped back, measured my distance, and gave her a good hard swipe across her jutting bare ass. She groaned softly, tilting her head up towards the ceiling, and her fingers clawed the air. She was teetering in her boots, and I could see the long nervous ripples of muscular spasms pass along her lovely thighs and bottom cheeks, visit the smooth estuary of her naked back. Where the towel had caught her right across the plumpest part of her behind, a bright pink band was imprinted.
"Oh harder, oh please, harder, Jack, whip me good!" she gasped, looking back over her shoulder with those catlike eyes all swimming in mist and her lips trembling and red and moist.
I obliged her. I gave her about a dozen slowly spaced and vigorously administered cuts across the ass with the wet towel, and the smacking, moist "Thuckkk!" was music to both our ears. She gasped and wriggled, twisted and weaved her ass, kept looking back over her shoulder and her face was ecstatic. "Oh please, harder than that, please," she begged.
I remembered from my schooldays how the fellows in the locker room used to wet towels and flick them at one another's bare asses. I tried the method on Madge, and it was highly satisfactory. When the tip of the wet towel smacked against the base of her left bottom cheek, she uttered a gurgling cry and lunged forward, tilting back her head and bending her beautiful back till I thought she was made of rubber. Her gloved fingers continued to claw the air, and she shifted from booted heel to heel. "That's it, oh yes, oh darling, I need it so, I've been so bad," she panted.
I began to flick her bottom, alternating on the cheeks and amusing myself to see what kind of colorful pattern I could paint on her already well splotched bottom. She squealed, sobbed aloud, gasped and groaned, and the tears ran down her cheeks, but every time she turned her face back to me, it was to implore me to whip her harder. Finally, taking careful aim, I flicked the end of the towel right into the crease between her bottom cheeks, and she let out a wild yell and plunged forward, almost breaking three of her bonds. As she was coming back into position, I sent another flick at the apex of her straddled, shaking thighs, and it found its mark at her pussy. Her piercing shriek was deafening, and she tugged at her wrists, stamped her booted feet, and moaned. "Oh yes, oh darling, now I know you want me, oh I'm yours, I'm your slave, whip me there again, oh whip my pussy good!"
I preferred to whip her pussy with my bulging prick, however. I untied her wrists, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her to the couch in the living room. I flung her down on it, and then, without bothering to undress, I tugged down my zipper and let my prick come out in all its might.
When I flung myself down on her, she was a dynamo of sexual energy. She seized me with her gloved hands, and she bruised my mouth with the frenzy of her kiss. Her tongue dove in and out between my lips, and her booted legs wrapped round my ass, and we began to fuck.
She came at least twice before I felt myself burst inside of her, and she let out a wild cry when she felt my juice and then sank back, panting and shuddering in violent aftermath.
As I slowly emerged, she uttered a whimpering little cry and looked at me, tears running down her cheeks, but her eyes were shining and very wide. "Ohh--that--that--that was just w--wonderful, Jack," she gasped in a husky, trembling voice.
"I can do better over at my place sometime," I told her. "Now let me in on this secret way you've got of making a fortune. I could stand replenishing my bank account."
I seated myself on the end of the couch, and I began to fondle her panting naked titties. I could see that the lips of her quim were puffed and dark-red where the tip of the towel had stung them. Her body was still quivering violently from her frenzied climaxes.
"Yes I will tell you, darling, I'll tell you everything," she whispered. "Stay close to me, don't leave me. I want to hold you, I want to feel you inside of me ail the time. Please, Jack."
It wasn't much to ask, but the fact was that I was just about limp from that violent fucking I had given her. However, I managed to mount over her again and once again she grabbed me with her arms and legs and kissed me hard. Magically, I felt my cock come back to life, so I could stick it into her slit and feel the moist quaking walls of her cunt hole clamp themselves around my weapon.
"You know I told you that I had a little of that LSD, darling," she confided after several frantic tongue-kisses. "But there's lots of other stuff I know where to get. You know all these kids over at school and in Old Town, they'd pay a fortune for pills and speed and stuff. Not heroin or cocaine, that's too dangerous. But there's lots of other stuff you can make a terrific profit on, Jack, I know--I think I know, that is--how to go about making contacts. We could build up a business, and we could make lots of money very quickly. And I'd give you most of it, if you'd stay with me and be my guy. Oh that was just wonderful, how you whipped me and then fucked me--oh Jack, I want you do to it again before you g�"
"I told you what I thought about drugs, baby," my voice got hard, just like my prick. "That's dirty money. Anyhow, where does a schoolgirl like you get access to all this dope? Is there a source in Hyde Park?"
"You bastard!" Now her eyes were blazing, and she started to push me away with her gloved hands. "Here I thought you really wanted me. It was so lovely, then you had to go and spoil it. I'm not going to tell you another thing. And you can get the hell out of here, too. You're just a fool, Jack Warren. There are lots of people and they don't sell hard drugs, and they make lots of money, and the kids need stuff like pills and hash and speed to forget this damned war in Viet Nam and all the rest of the things that are happening to this unhappy country under the Establishment."
"It seems to me I've heard that line before, Madge." I got up and stuffed my prick back into my pants and zipped down my fly. "You'd better pick yourself a much older guy who doesn't have scruples about the way he makes his money so he can keep you in great style. Anyway, thanks for the experience. I don't imagine I'll be seeing you again, because I told Carol's father where she was and what she was going to do. Have fun."
I took a last look at her lying there naked in gloves and boots on the couch, her pussy hair stickied from my spunk, squirming from the pain of those towel lashes I had given her, and her body lax and quivering after her climax. But her eyes were narrowed and full of hate and contempt, and I got the message. So I got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I had a bite of lunch at Walgreen's and then got back to my office. I felt conked out, and no wonder. I knew I just couldn't stomach the deal that sexy Marge Freiberg had offered me along with her voluptuous, petite and very whippable body. Liz Parminter was just going to lunch. There was a little mail, but no phone calls. I told her I was going to take the afternoon off and that I'd see her. What I needed now was plenty of sleep so I could be a night owl and look after Betty Henshaw.
I slept till about six o'clock, and then because I didn't feel like going out again, I phoned Morry and ordered another one of his very filling and very inexpensive strip-steak dinners. He didn't deliver, so about twenty minutes later I walked over and picked it up and exchanged a few words of banter with my favorite restaurateur. The walk did me good, and the cold air revived my flagging spirits and got rid of my drowsiness.
When I got home, I ate the dinner and accompanied it with a couple of glasses of Paul Masson Rubion, a very nice California red wine which reminded me of an excellent Medoc I had once had in a fine restaurant in New York. That done, I felt like a new man. So it was about eight o'clock when I got over to Betty Henshaw's house at 57th and Dorchester. As a private detective, I had already got my license just before I had gone to Hawaii, because even though I hadn't then thought of leaving Duron, I wanted to be on the safe side in case I suddenly made up my mind, and of course the little caper with Lani Corrado had decided me to pursue this career on my own.
But as a private eye, you're not allowed to carry a gun unless you get a special license and permit from the police. I didn't see any need for taking it out, but at night in Hyde Park, as in every other city, it's wise to have some sort of protection with you, just in case. What with the juvenile gangs and the racial hatreds that are fomenting all over the nation, you never know who's going to try to mug you when you're not looking. I did have a blackjack, which of all things I found in a Honolulu pawnshop. It was going to come in very handy.
The first thing I did was to ring the bell and introduce myself to Betty Henshaw. She had peeked timidly through the crack in the door when she had opened it on a chain, and when I introduced myself, she let me in very quickly.
My own personal opinion was that David Henshaw was a damn fool to leave a piece like this on the loose at night, even if it meant passing up some insurance business. Her hair was bobbed with guiche points coming forward on each side, and it was a lustrous dark brown. She had a round, sweet face, with great big dark brown eyes, a Grecian nose with flaring wings, and tremulous mouth. She also had a body that made me a little tremulous too. She was wearing a quilted blue bathrobe over what I guessed to be a slip and probably bra and panties, and Indian moccasins, which was a little incongruous. But there was certainly nothing incongruous about her big, widely spaced boobies or the equally spacious and solid, meaty cheeks of her luscious ass. She had pale white skin, and she looked frightened. Even when we sat down in the living room, she kept glancing around as if to make sure the shades were down, and she asked me if I had seen anyone hanging around.
I tried to put her at her ease by telling her that her husband had hired me for a week, and that I was going to patrol the neighborhood from about eight in the evening until about one in the morning. Then I asked her about the obscene notes and phone calls. She blushed violently, then left the room and very quickly came back with about four notes and envelopes. They were all in pencil and crudely printed in capitals. Each had her name and address on it, and even the zip code. Inside each envelope was a sheet of paper tom out of a stenographer's note pad, and a couple of lines to each letter. One of them read: "YOUR HUBBY'S NEGLECTING YOU, HONEY. I'D LIKE TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED. MAYBE WE CAN HAVE A DATE NEXT TIME I PHONE." There wasn't any signature, of course.
"Your unknown admirer has good taste, I'll say that for him," I joked, to try to make her feel less nervous.
It didn't work. She squirmed, blushed some more, and then faltered, "But it's so terrifying, Mr. Warren! This awful person, whoever he is, seems to know exactly when my husband isn't around. He's always breathing hard, and his voice is soft, and he's telling me that he knows I'm alone and he wonders if I'm playing with myself, or what I'm wearing, or if I'd like him to come right over and give me what I need. Things like that, and dirtier things, too."
And damned if the phone didn't ring just then. I almost fell out of my chair, and then I told her to go and answer it and not to say that I was around. The phone was in the hall just outside the living room, and I followed her. She picked it up, blinked her eyes a couple of times, gasped. Finally she slammed the phone down, put her hands to her face and burst into tears.
"Was it the same guy?" I asked.
"Y--yes, Mr. Warren. It's so filthy, so awful. This time he said he saw someone going into my house and he wondered if he had interrupted me while we were--you know--" I knew. Fucking. And it wasn't a bad idea, not with a piece like Betty Henshaw. For all her thirty-six years, she had still plenty of fucking potential, and I never in the world would have kicked her out of bed.
"Tell me something about the voice," I urged. "Does he still breathe hard and is the voice soft? Would you say it's a young man or an old man?"
She shook her head. "I--I just can't tell. I'm so upset I'm nearly sick."
"When did it start?"
"About eight months ago, Mr. Warren. And Dave just laughs it off. I--I've told him, but he doesn't seem to think it's very serious. He says every woman is bound to get calls like that every so often."
That didn't exactly jibe with what Dave Henshaw had told me in his office that morning, but I let it pass.
"What you ought to do is to call the telephone company and have them start tracing that. They've got a special procedure for nuts like the one that's been bothering you, Mrs. Henshaw. Meanwhile, if it'll help any or make you feel any better, I'll stay here until your husband comes back. That's what he's paying me for, anyway. He asked me to stay until one in the morning, and of course I shall."
"Oh, thank you! Yes, I would like it much better if you would stay. I--I get scared at night so easily. It didn't always use to be this way, and you mustn't think I'm a hysterical woman, not really, Mr. Warren, because I'm not," she hastened to explain. She looked up at me pathetically; she was trying to justify her terror, as if she felt guilty for putting herself in a situation like this where she needed a bodyguard.
"So all this started about eight months ago?" I asked her. She nodded.
"Dave was just about ready to take an underwriter's job and give up his agency," she explained, "and then all of a sudden he got a lot of new business, from very wealthy people in the suburbs. Like Glencoe and Winnetka. So he used to go out a lot, and he was making such good money and having his own hours, of course, that he decided not to take the company's offer. You see, he's representing them, selling their policies."
I nodded, as a sign for her to go ahead.
Being talkative always helps when you're nervous and highstrung. She smiled almost gratefully at me, and then continued, "I--I sometimes wish we had kids so I'd have something to occupy my mind when Dave's away like this."
"Never mind. Sometimes when a man doesn't want children, it means he loves his wife so much he doesn't want anything else to take his attention away from her," I tried to cheer her up.
She blushed again, and then she got up and walked over to me. "Would you like a drink?"
"If you'll have one with me," I suggested.
She got up and went to the kitchen, returning with two glasses of bourbon and ginger ale. She even clinked glasses with me, and I could see color coming back into her cheeks. Then all of a sudden the phone rang again.
She uttered a cry, dropped her glass and spilled it all over. Then she stood wringing her hands until I told her to answer the phone, and she did.
It was the same caller. This time he wanted to know if we were both naked, and if we were starting on the second bout of intercourse. Only he didn't use words like that, according to sobbing Betty Henshaw. And when she hung up, she stood there with her head bowed, covering her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking with hysterical sobs. I put my arms around her to soothe her, and the next thing I knew, she had her arms around me and was hugging me tight and whispering, "All right, all right, if that's what he thinks, then why don't you make love to me, Mr. Warren. It's been so long since Dave did anyway--I feel so alone and neglected--oh, I can't tell you how awful it's been for me these past months, please, please want me, want me--please!"
And then, before I could do anything to stop her, Betty Henshaw had pulled off her robe and she wasn't wearing a slip at all, but just a thin white petticoat, a bra, but no panties. And there in front of my eyes was the thick, dark-brown fleece of her cunt and the white nylon bra showed me splendid bit round boobies, with wide brownish-orange aurolae and dark coral, ripe nipples.
Before I could stop her, she had undone the last button of the robe and let it fall to her feet. Then she reached behind her and took off the bra, too. And then, trembling, she seized me by the wrist and practically dragged me into her bedroom.
"Hey now," I protested half-heartedly, "I don't think your husband exactly paid me to render a service like this, Mrs. Henshaw."
"I need you, I want you, don't you understand? Dave's driving me neurotic by staying away from me. Am I so bad, then? Don't I still have a figure? Don't you want to have me?" She flung them at me hysterically. Then she flung herself on the bed, her knees up and widely parted, showing me the full pink lips of her cunt. She waited there for my appraisal, and I couldn't resist the temptation.
She had a simply glorious body, with pale white skin that made her look a helluva lot younger than thirty-six. My prick was already starting to bulge in my fly, in spite of the tribute to Venus I had paid that morning in Madge Freiberg's apartment.
Again, I didn't undress, just pulled down my zipper and let nature take its course. The moment I pressed myself into her, I felt that she was moist and hot and ready. And she, like Madge, engulfed me with her arms and legs and her entire body. Then her mouth was frantically begging kisses from mine, and it wasn't long before our tongues were rapiering together. Finally, I slipped a hand under her satiny ass, and goosed her, and she just about went crazy. She was bucking and weaving and moaning for me to give it to her hard, to make her come. Oh, how she needed it, she hadn't had sex like this for ever so long, and she'd forgotten what it was like to be a woman.
So I obliged her. There was nothing wrong with her womanhood that a little regular fucking wouldn't cure, believe you me!
And when it was over, she blushed and began to sob and again covered her face with her hands. "I've been so awful, I ought to be thrashed," she sobbed. "What must you think of me!"
"That you're gorgeous and that your husband's a fool to neglect you, that's what. I haven't seduced you, and let's forget all about this," I snapped, getting a little irritated at her continued weeping.
When she didn't stop, I thought I'd give her a reason to cry. I hauled her over onto her tummy, sat astride her shoulders and began to smack her bottom with both hands, first right and then left. And damned if she wasn't tossing her lovely ass and pantingly begging for me. So when I got through, she had a red ass and a fiery cunt again, and she pantingly begged, "Oh, do it to me again, just like before, Oh, I need it so!"
There weren't any more obscene phone calls that night. I didn't take a chance on thirds. Seconds was plenty. By the time we'd finished, it was nearly ten o'clock, and there was just the odds-on chance that David Henshaw might be coming back after selling a big policy. I'd had all the fucking and spanking I could take for one day. I swear, if Liz Parminter herself had come over to my apartment when I got home and stripped herself and offered her body for a thrashing and then a screwing, I would have had to turn her down.
CHAPTER NINE
David Henshaw didn't come back until a few minutes after one in the morning. I told Betty that I'd stay outside the house and wait up for him and that she was to go on to bed alone. Our unexpected conclave was certainly something I hadn't planned or counted on, and being alone with her in that house and knowing that he wouldn't get back for another hour or so might have led me to want to put another set of horns on his head. He drove up in an Impala, and when he got out of his car, he looked tired and drawn. I wondered if he had a girlfriend the way Delmar Munson had, which of course would explain his long evenings away from home. Of course it wasn't any of my business. He was hiring me to keep tabs on his wife.
I quickly told him about the obscene phone calls and he swore under his breath. And then he clapped me on the back and thanked me and told me to keep up the good work and report for duty about the same time tomorrow night. He was kind enough to offer me a lift home, and I didn't mind taking it. Even though I liked my neighborhood and it's pretty well integrated, it's still not a good idea to walk the streets by yourself at one in the morning in the big cities.
I overslept past the alarm the next morning, and with justifiable reason. I had fucked Madge Freiberg and whipped hell out of her sweet ass the previous morning, and then I had had an equally stimulating bout with Betty Henshaw that night. Today was going to be a quiet, quiescent day if I had anything to say about it, I determined.
Liz Parminter was a little worried about me when I came to the office, because I hadn't bothered to call that I'd be late. She looked particularly delightful in a formfitting brown woolen dress and beige nylons, and the way the wool hugged her thighs and ass and titties made me remember that I originally hired her with dishonorable intentions in mind. They could wait for the moment, however. There was something going on in Hyde Park, and I wasn't going to find the answer by fucking Liz Parminter, I didn't think. And yet it all tied up. Madge Freiberg's lighter, Carol Greening's passion for being tied up and whipped, and finally Madge's offer to me to go into the drug racket and be her lover into the bargain. Somewhere in Hyde Park, there was a nice little cache of mind-shattering drugs, and both those girls knew about it, I was convinced. Where the source was and who the guy or gal behind it was, was something else again. For the next six nights, however, I was on a case, even though it was nothing more than being a bodyguard for a rather neurotic and certainly frustrated housewife. I excused myself to Liz by telling her that I was just breaking in on the Henshaw job. "How is my ex-boss?" she asked with a gay tone in her voice.
"Working nights signing up prospects, I imagine," I told her. "But I never yet met an insurance man who had to be out every night in the week. I'm just wondering if I'm his alibi. Tell me, Liz, you worked for him long enough to know some of his habits. Do you think he's got a girlfriend on the side? I've got the feeling I'm just the excuse he needs to stay away from home and have some extramarital fun."
"I really wouldn't know. He behaved very decently to me, except that he told me that he was letting me go because business had fallen off and he just didn't need me full-time anymore. And he wouldn't give me pay for my missed vacation, because I'd worked last summer when he asked me to, and he never had made it up to me," was her laconic answer.
That was more food for thought. If business had been so bad at the insurance agency that David Henshaw had been thinking of closing it down and had fired Liz Parminter to cut down expenses, how had it suddenly got so good that he had to be out every night all this week seeing prospects? And why at night instead of during the daytime?
When it was time for lunch, and that was about an hour after I walked in, I decided to run downtown, grab a bite and talk to one of my friends at the Narcotics Bureau, Henry Weams. Henry had helped me before on that stolen Stradivarius case, and I thought I'd get the lowdown from him on what was really happening in Hyde Park.
As luck would have it, he'd been working late and hadn't had a chance to go out to lunch yet, so when I phoned him he accepted my invitation and we went to the Berghof for sauerbraten and big steins of dark German beer. Without mentioning any names, I told him I had run into two young ladies who knew all about LSD, hash, and might even know something about speed. Henry Weams was easy-going, plump, about five years older than myself, and his light-brown hair was getting wispy and sparse. He had a good sense of humor and you never would have taken him for a Federal man, except that about ten years before he got mixed up in a shoot-out with a gang of heroin passers near O'Hare Airport, got wounded, killed two of the four and put the other two out of commission until the police could pick them up and uncover at least a million dollars' worth of the big H.
"We know there's a lot of speed in town, Jack," he told me as we were finishing our sauerbraten. "But we don't think it's being shipped in. It's easy enough to make, and anybody who had any chemistry and could rig up a quick lab could make it and get rich doing it-unless, of course, we found him first. What have you got in mind?"
"You could inject it intravenously, or I suppose you could drink it down in liquid. I've heard that some people sell a spoonful for anywhere from five to ten bucks," I told him.
"Yes, that's right. Mostly we see in crystals or tablets. Of course it's chemically related to the amphetamines, but it has a much more terrifying psychological effect. In my book, it's one of the deadliest of all drugs."
"You don't have to tell me anything officially, and of course you won't, Henry, but do you think there might be some sources of supply around the University of Chicago?" I put it to him.
"I'm pretty sure there might be. We know that a lot of young kids are getting hold of it and college students too. All you have to do is go over to Gateway House and you'll meet some of the pathetic users who started with marijuana and didn't get enough kick out of that, so they went for the more dangerous stuff. I've talked to a few of them myself, and one of them was a fellow who lost about fifty pounds in about six weeks using speed. If somebody hadn't turned him in, he probably would have been dead in another week or two. That's how deadly it is."
"I see. But it would be easy to plant somebody in a college or a school, like one of the pupils, who would have contact with all the others, and could build new customers for the lousy stuff," I speculated.
"That's what happens lots of times. Often the big pushers will hook a kid on speed or the other drugs, provide him enough free stuff to encourage him to get others started on it. Then his future fixes will depend on what sort of sales job he can do for them. Boys like that are potential murderers, but the ones behind them furnishing the stuff to them are the real malefactures."
"You and I are on agreement there, Henry. Well, I'd better be getting back to work. And I'll take the check, too. If I hear of anything in my bailiwick, I'll give you a ring."
"Do that. And don't try to play hero all by yourself, Jack. People in the drug business have everything to lose as well as everything to gain. If they figure you for a threat in stopping their little racket, they'll just as soon kill you as spit at you," were his parting words... My second night at Betty Henshaw's house was uneventful, mainly because I spent it on the porch and with her safely in the house. It wasn't a good idea to get paid by a client and shag his wife for a week while he was out catting on his own. Not that Betty didn't want to lure me back for more of the same, because she certainly tried. Half a dozen times she came out onto the porch to offer me a cup of coffee or some cookies or to ask me if I wasn't getting too cold and wouldn't I like to come in just for a few minutes. It was cold, all right, but I had on a heavy topcoat and long underwear and woolen gloves, and I've got a good vasomotor system so that I can stand zero temperatures. Besides, it was good for my strength of character.
But the third night wasn't quite so easy to take. There was a blustering northeast wind and sleet, so I finally succumbed to Betty Henshaw's solicitude and went inside. About ten minutes after I'd done that, the phone rang and she was getting one of her obscene calls again. I told her that the next time she did, I wanted to listen in on the extension upstairs.
And about half an hour later, the phone rang again. I got myself upstairs into the hallway, carefully picked up the phone and listened carefully. I was just in time to hear this obviously disguised voice say, "I'm sorry if I interrupted a good fucking, honey. It's really cold outside tonight, isn't it? Tell me, when you fuck, Betty, do you go to bed raw and do you have your lover do the same, or do you wear some clothes? What's your favorite position when you screw? Have you ever tried the one where the man pushes the girl's knees up against her titties and kneels in front of her and shoves his prick into that hairy little slit of hers? You ought to try it sometimes, honey, he can scrape the sides and touch the bottom of your cunt. I'll be talking to you again, baby."
There was something about that voice that I couldn't quite place, and yet it was familiar. Obviously it was somebody who knew her very well. I asked her if she had any admirers or any old boyfriends, and she shook her head. She was really scared and trembling. She snuggled next to me on the couch and then she started to cry. I guess I'm a sucker when it comes to tears, unless of course I'm arousing them by administering a good sound spanking on a girl's bare ass, because those kind of tears make me randy. But I found out that the other kind did, too. Before I knew it, I had one hand in one of those big round firm bubbies of hers and my mouth was fused to hers and she was reaching for my underwear which she had to unbutton to get at my stiff ramrod.
So I fucked her. She was really hot and ready to trot. She moaned, she sobbed, she wrapped her arms and legs around me and she bucked up to receive every one of my digs as if she'd never been fucked before and was afraid she never might again. David Henshaw was really a horse's ass for not staying home and tending to the fires blazing in his wife's sweet stoker.
Of course, when it was over she had the usual recriminations. "You must think I'm just awful, we oughtn't to have done it, darling," she sobbed as she dabbed at her eyes and straightened up, tying the belt of her bathrobe and after having pulled down her slip, which was all she wore. "But I just have to have affection, and Dave has just about ignored me for so long I was beginning to feel that I wasn't a woman any more, Jack darling."
While this was good for my ego, it was also very dangerous. There were four more nights to go and I wondered if maybe David Henshaw might not show up a little earlier than expected and find us in what fiction writers call a compromising situation.
He got back a few minutes later and I told him that there had been two calls and that I had myself heard the second one and was trying to figure out whom the voice belonged to. He went right to his wife and kissed her and made a fuss over her and then he told her she ought to get to bed and get some rest. He thanked me and said he was expecting me the next night.
I gave him a very quick onceover. I can usually tell after a guy has had an enjoyable fuck, because there's a certain laxness to his facial muscles and to the way he looks and talks. Full of comfort and easygoing tolerance and all that sort of thing. But on this particular evening, I couldn't really be sure that he had had extramarital satisfaction, as the saying goes. He did look excited and sort of happy, as if he had just pulled off a big business deal. Maybe he had, for all I knew.
When I got to the office the next morning, Liz wasn't around, and about a half hour later I got a call from her. She wasn't feeling too well and she asked if it was all right if she came in after lunch. I told her to stay home if she didn't feel quite up to it, but there wasn't much doing and I could handle things myself. She showed up about three, looking rather peaked, and I joshed her a little about maybe being out on the town with her boyfriend. She turned red as a beet, and gasped, "That isn't a nice thing to say about me, Mr. Warren! I don't have any boyfriend, I'll have you know!"
"No? Well maybe that's just what you need. If you don't have any attachments, you know I'm single and I've always liked the cut of your jib. Maybe you don't remember, but I used to stare at you through the window of that insurance agency where you used to work. I had all sorts of ideas about you."
"Yes, I saw you lots of times. I thought you were just a fresh face."
"There's a little more to me than that, if you ever feel like trying to find out, Liz," I chuckled. "But seriously, you're a gorgeous girl and I don't want you to get run down. There are a lot of colds going around this time of year, so if you just don't feel up to snuff, stay home a couple of days at my expense."
She smiled wanly. "You're very nice. I didn't mean to flare up at you like that, Mr. Warren."
"Why this Mr. Warren all of a sudden, honey? The name is Jack. You make me feel much too old when you put a Mister to my name. Okay?" She nodded and gave me a little smile and then went back to typing. Things were getting stranger and stranger by the minute. The thought entered my mind that maybe Liz Parminter, for all that she had condemned David Henshaw for screwing her out of a vacation, might just have a yen for him. Maybe she was even the mysterious girlfriend he visited nights while I was watching the house for his wife. It was in the realm of possibility, to be sure. But she had just given me to understand that she wasn't ready for me to make a pass at her yet, so there wasn't any sense in pursuing my objective in having hired her in the first place. Not yet, anyway.
It was practically a blizzard on the fourth night of my sojourn at the Henshaw house. I couldn't very well sit on the porch, even with my long underwear and my heavy overcoat, so I had to go inside. And sure enough, the phone rang a few minutes after I had divested myself of my coat and hat and parked myself on the couch near innocent, blushing, dewy-eyed Betty Henshaw.
This time I got to the phone first, and I picked it up and I said, "Hello," in a sort of womanish voice, hesitant and soft. I heard a soft chuckle at the other end of the line. Then that same voice came on with, "Is that you, Betty darling? Tell me, have you two started fucking yet, or are you just getting ready? Does he believe in working you up to a lather before he takes your clothes off and slips it to you, baby?"
"Yes, I do believe in loveplay, Buddy," I broke in, in my natural voice, "but not with somebody else's wife. Now why the hell don't you get off the line and stay off before I get this call traced and have you put out of commission and locked up in a cell where you can diddle yourself twenty-four hours a day?"
I heard a gasp, and then a click. My obscene caller had rung off. Maybe he got the message for the first time, and maybe it would work. But I was certain that whoever was calling Betty Henshaw knew her well and was trying to harass her into maybe going off the deep end. If I could find out the reason for that, maybe I could understand a few more things about the drug case.
"Was it that same awful man again?" she wanted to know when I came back to the couch. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, and she had just a slip on under it, like that other time. The way her big bubbies thrust out against the bathrobe and slip and the way her plump bottom cheeks were outlined by the scanty clothing she was wearing made my prick eager again, but I manfully quelled the impulse. "It sure was, Betty," I told her. "Now tell me, did these obscene phone calls start about the time Dave took it to his head to spend his evenings going out after insurance business? They didn't ever happen before or during your marriage, did they?"
"Why, no. Come to think of it, they started about the first week Dave told me he was going to go out after some big group policies and see executives that lived in the suburbs. Oh my goodness--do you mean to say--" she gasped, putting her hand to her mouth. "I don't mean to say anything yet. I just want to think about it for a while. Now how about some hot strong coffee?"
"Jack?"
"Yes?"
"I want you to have me tonight again. I feel so blue and upset. I don't even feel like a wife anymore. I wish--I sort of wish you were my husband instead of Dave," she said wistfully.
If it hadn't been for my strength of character, she would have gotten herself the hottest fucking she'd ever had. I don't think any virile man can fail to heed the appeal of a gorgeous dish who confesses that her husband isn't any good for her in bed and who much prefers his own brand of screwing. It gives you the feeling that the babe is helpless and is throwing herself entirely on your mercy or lack of it. But it was getting too dangerous to keep this adulterous affair burning brightly. So I said, "Betty, we both got carried away, and I shouldn't have taken advantage of you. I'm going to say that we ought to pretend it never happened and let's just be friends. And I'm going to try my best to keep it that way. That's no insult to you, because you're really a gorgeous woman and you're wonderful in bed. Only you happen to be married and I'm being paid by your husband to take care of you--not that way, I'm sure. Understand?"
She nodded and started to cry a little. I patted her on the shoulder, and then she hugged me. Again I had to resort to all my self-control to disengage her arms from my neck and to tell her gently that I wanted some coffee.
There weren't any more phone calls that night. David Henshaw came back about a quarter of one in the morning, looking rather grim. He hardly even said hello to me, kissed his wife, and said he was tired and going off to bed. Then he turned and looked at me and asked, "Did you get any more phone calls tonight?"
"Just one. And I told the son of a bitch off, Dave," was my answer.
"Fine. Let's hope it works. Goodnight."
CHAPTER TEN
I got to the office the next morning about ten, and as I walked in, I saw Liz Parminter bending over the file cabinet with her bottom towards me. She was wearing a dark woolen skirt, and it snuggled over her luscious ass in the most prickwarming manner. "Good morning, Liz," I called. She gave a little gasp, and then I heard a thump as if she had dropped something into the drawer. She pushed it shut, straightened, and turned to face me, somewhat startled, judging from the way her face had reddened and her eyes gone very wide. "Oh--gee--good morning, J--Jack," she stammered.
"You look as if you'd seen a ghost, Liz," I chuckled as I walked into my office. "Come on in and let me give you some dictation. We'll do a report for David Henshaw on the obscene phone calls his wife has been receiving. They have been getting worse and worse."
"Oh?" she said in a tone of surprise. She turned from her desk, leaned over until I could see her bubbies thrusting against the white satin blouse she wore, and then she came into my office, sat down, and crossed those neat legs of hers, poised her pencil over her steno book and waited for me to begin.
I dictated for about half an hour. I told David Henshaw that I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn't be quite sure. It was obviously somebody who knew his wife, knew something about her habits, and wanted to bother her and throw her into a tizzy. I recommended that he have Illinois Bell Telephone people set up their special procedure for tracing obscene phone calls. I told him I didn't think it was necessary to keep my services for more than this week, which I intended to finish out as agreed.
When I had finished, I asked Liz to type it up and make a copy for the files. Then I made a few phone calls. One was to my friend Henry Weams at the Narcotics Bureau. He told me that they had just had a couple of people hospitalized with overdoses of speed, and that they came from the South Side. He asked me if I had found out anything in my own campaign, and I said that I had a few ideas and that I would get back to him in a few days.
Next, I called Reuben Greening. His wife was coming back from the hospital in a few days, he told me. He sounded very down in the mouth, and I found out that the doctor at the hospital had told him that it was just about a hopeless case and that the best bet his wife had was to come home and spend her last days on earth being around her husband. It was a hell of a thing to happen even to a nasty guy like Reuben Greening, and I felt sorry for the guy. No, he hadn't heard a word from Carol, apart from what I had told him. I volunteered to get in touch with Carol and let her know that her mother was in the last stages and that it was a good idea for her to get herself over there and make up with her mother. He thanked me and we let it go at that.
Liz brought in the typed-up transcript of what I had dictated earlier, and said that she was going to lunch. She seemed very self-contained, and I could see that she wasn't in a joshing mood. I really wondered if she had a boyfriend. I wanted to be the one, no two ways about it, but this wasn't the time. After she had left the office, I got up and walked over to the file cabinet and just on a hunch, pulled open the drawer. At first I didn't see anything, and then I reached to the back and my hand encountered something smooth that felt like plastic. I pulled it out, and it was a hairbrush. Stiff nylon bristles, oval shaped, and not too heavy. It would make an ideal implement for spanking. Now what was Liz Parminter doing with a hairbrush, and why had she got so flustered when I had walked in on her, and why was she hiding it away in the drawer? I looked it over carefully, and I couldn't see anything. It looked like an ordinary hairbrush. The only thing was that the handle seemed extremely light, a little lighter than the brush part itself. I jiggled the handle a little, and suddenly it came off. It was hollow and it fitted into two little pegs with a sort of groove which locked the handle in, it was evident.
Again on a hunch, I took the handle and tapped it against the desk. Suddenly, I saw a little bag fall out, full of white crystals. And then a terrible suspicion came over me. This was very much like speed, because Henry Weams had shown me some full-color pictures of speed crystals and the other paraphernalia which addicts used to shoot the stuff. You could dissolve the crystals in a glass of water and drink it down and get high as a kite.
Of course I didn't have any proof and I had no way of testing the stuff myself. I stuffed the bag back into the handle, locked the handle back into place, and put the brush back in the drawer where Liz had left it. But my mind was full of questions, and they were getting stronger all the time.
I left a note on her desk that I was going out to Old Town, and I took a cab out to The Crazy Poodle. I went up those old rickety steps in the building right next to it, and I hammered on Carol's door. In a few minutes, the door was opened and there was Carol, looking very drowsy, her hair disheveled, wearing just a man's plaid shirt and jeans, and barefooted. "What do you want?" she challenged.
"Nothing, really, Carol. I just wanted to let you know that your mother's coming home in a couple of days. I think it would be a good idea if you went back and gave her what comfort you could. They don't think she's got very much longer to live."
She stared at me as if she didn't understand what I was saying. Then she began to sob, great racking sobs that shook her shoulders and boobies and then finally she covered her face with her hands.
"I'm sorry, kid," I said gruffly. "I didn't mean to give you a hard time the other night."
"It's not your fault. I only wish things had been different. Is it--is it cancer?"
"Most likely. Your father's pretty shaken up, Carol, and I'd try to be nice to him even if you hate his guts. He happens to love your mother too." Coming from me, all this moralizing sounded pretty stuffy, but I really meant it. Just seeing Carol now in her present state made me think how Reuben Greening had missed the boat in his life in spite of all the money he had made. He was going to lose his wife and he had probably already lost his daughter. The worst of it was, she was hooked on drugs as well as sex.
Finally she dropped her hands and sniffled. "Wait a minute. I--I want you to take a message back to my father. I'll go write it. You want to come in a minute?" she said dully.
I stepped inside, and I saw that whip Hal Busby had used on her that night I had tracked her down. It was lying on the couch, and Hal was lying beside it, sort of cuddling it up against his prick. He was snoring, sound asleep, and wearing just levis and nothing else. Carol walked over to the mantelpiece to which she had been tied for that whipping, and picked up a hairbrush and started to brush her honey colored hair. I took a closer look at the hairbrush, and damned if it wasn't an exact replica of the one I had found in Liz Parminter's drawer.
"Can I see that for a minute? The wind outside is pretty rough and I could stand a little brushing myself," I made a joke of it.
She finished brushing her hair into some semblance of order, and then she walked over to me and handed it to me. I had my hat off already, and I started to brush my hair just a little. Then suddenly I grabbed it in both hands and yanked at the handle. Sure enough, it came out. And when I shook the handle, a little bag full of white crystals fell onto die floor.
"You--you give me that--what are you doing!" Carol gasped, squatted down and made a grab for the bag. But I had gotten there first. "No you don't, honey," I said to her. "I want to see what this stuff is. I've got a pretty good idea already, but I want to be sure. Where did you get it?"
"None of your goddamned business! What sort of troublemaker are you, anyway?" she blazed at me.
And then, as I made to put the hairbrush back into my overcoat pocket, she started hitting me with her clenched fist and screaming, "I'll kill you, I'll kill you!"
Hal Busby wasn't any help. He kept right on snoring. I had a beautiful berserk girl on my hands, and there was only one way to handle her. I grabbed both her wrists, hauled her over to the broken-down overstuffed armchair, sat down on it rather cautiously, and then pulled her over my lap. I took the hairbrush out of my pocket, I clamped my right leg over her calves, and then I went to work on her bottom. She wasn't wearing anything under the jeans, judging from the way the hairbrush smacked when it hit those saucy ass cheeks of hers. She started yelling right away, trying to cover up, trying to twist herself off my lap, swearing at me in very unladylike language.
Finally, since she was keeping it up and getting dirtier and dirtier by the minute, I stopped, put the hairbrush down beside me, and then I yanked off her jeans. It took some doing because they were skintight, but at last I had them down to her knees.
Then all of a sudden she changed personality. She looked up at me and giggled, and she took her hands away from her bottom which was already quite red. "Go ahead, get your kicks," she huskily whispered. "Spank me and then fuck me! That's what you really want to do, isn't it? I saw the way you were looking at me when Hal used the whip. Or maybe you would like to use that instead."
"The hairbrush will do fine, baby. When you've had enough, just let me know. And you're going to come along with me when I finish and go right back to your dad," I told her.
"You lousy son of a bitch, I won't! I'd rather die!" she yelled. She tried to hit me again, but she was already lying over my lap with her jeans down and my right leg pinning her calves, so she wasn't very effective. I grabbed both her wrists in my left hand, I picked up the hairbrush, and this time I used the bristled side. It made a nice "Thuckkkk!" every time it landed, and as it did, her naked ass jerked up in the air and twisted from side to side. She began to yell then, but this time it was for real. It hurt. I aimed a few of the spanks right down the groove between her asscheeks, and these really hurt. I gave her a few on the tops of her thighs, and this seemed to bother her even more. Soon she was screaming, "All right, all right, stop it, I'll do anything you want, only stop it!"
"You can get up, put on some decent clothes, and then you're coming with me," I said to her.
Once again she tried the sex act on me. "Oh honey, not right now. You hurt me good, and I'm so hot. Don't you want to fuck me, really, lover?"
"To be honest with you, the answer is yes. But I don't want a bitch who's hopped up on drugs and pain. I still believe in old-fashioned love. A fuck is not always a fuck, Carol, as I hope some day you'll live long enough to find out. Now get up and take those dirty jeans off and that blouse, go take a shower, and come out looking something like a lady." I unpinned her legs, gave her a shove, and she sprawled on the floor. She crouched there on all fours looking up at me. Her eyes were humid and wide, her lips were working convulsively, and her beautiful bare ass was flaming like an Oriental sunset. Then suddenly she crawled to me, plunged her hand to my crotch, yanked down my fly, took out my stiff prick and began to suck at it.
"Oh darling," she panted between sucks, "we don't have to go right away. He'll be at his office, anyhow. I want you so, Jack. I want you to give it to me. You can't leave me like this, you just can't. There, you see how nice I can be to you? Come on and fuck me!"
"With your intended husband lying there over on the couch snoring away? No thanks, baby. Now do you want to go back over my lap for another dose of bristles, or do you do what I tell you to?" I said hoarsely as I pushed her away and stood up. That took some doing too. She was delicious and she certainly knew how to french a guy.
She got up sulking. She rubbed her bare ass, then she made a face at me. "Go fuck yourself, then. All right. I'll be out when I get done. And that's the last time I offer myself to you, you jerk!"
I sat back down on the broken-down armchair, lit a cigarette and then I opened the hairbrush up again and took out the plastic bag. I put that in my coat lapel pocket, and then I fixed the hairbrush and tossed it onto the floor.
In about fifteen minutes, Carol Greening came out in a short skirt and blouse, overcoat and felt turban hat. She had pumps and stockings on, and she was an entirely different girl. Her eyes were still red from crying, and she didn't look at me, but at least she didn't look hopped up.
We got a cab on Wells Street, and we went right to Reuben Greening's office. As luck had it, he was there, and he came out and stared at her as if he couldn't believe his eyes. Then he said in a choking voice, "Carol, honey, I'm sorry. I really am."
She burst into tears and flung herself into his arms. I left them there and then I went back to Old Town. Because, just as I had hailed a cab, I had seen the shop window of a little store across the street from The Crazy Poodle. And I was ready to swear that I had seen a display of hairbrushes that looked exactly like the ones I had found in Liz' drawer and used on Carol Greening's lovely naked ass.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I got out of the cab, walked into the little shop which had all sorts of haberdashery items, colognes and spices and shaving stuff for men and all that sort of junk. It was a cluttered-up shop and there was just one person in it, a mournful-faced, dirty little hippie girl with long helmet-cut, sandy-colored hair down almost to her titties, wearing one of those prayer shawls and levis and hobnail shoes, the kind a construction worker uses on the job. She was thin and she didn't have much in the way of titties, but she had really lovely legs. And her voice was seductive as all hell, slurred and soft and low. "Can I help you?" she wanted to know.
"I was looking for a hairbrush," I said to her.
"We have quite a few, sir. Is there anything particular you were looking for in that line?"
"I like to brush my hair with speed," I said.
I was making up a little slogan, just to try it on her for size. She gave me the onceover, and then she said, "Maybe you would like something from our exclusive stock. It's expensive, though. Ten dollars."
"That's not too much for a fast brush, baby. Say, what's your name?"
"Lily Anderson. Why do you ask?"
"I just like pretty girls and I like to know their names, that's all. How about going to dinner with me tonight?"
She froze up right away and her face turned angry. "I'm sorry," she said stiffly, "I just work here, and I have a boyfriend. Now I'll get you that hairbrush. You're sure you want a speedy one?"
"That's the only kind I use, honey."
She went to the back of the shop and came back with a little box. The hairbrush was wrapped in tissue, and she didn't show it to me. I asked her to do it, and again she got nasty. "I'd like to see some identification, if you don't mind," she told me.
"To buy a hairbrush with? Now that's a crazy thing to say," I said to her.
"Maybe you really don't want that. I think you'd better get out of here, Mister." She took the box away and shoved it on a lower shelf behind her at the counter.
I went right after it. She let out a yell and said, "Wait a minute, you can't come back here! You go away or I'll call the police."
"Maybe I'll call them myself, sister," I said grimly. I grabbed the box, opened it, tore away the tissue paper, and sure enough, there was one of those brown plastic hairbrushes. Then I yanked it apart. And right inside was a nice little plastic bag full of white crystals. There weren't too many, but then there didn't have to be. Just a few crystals would send you on a long trip and sometimes you wouldn't get back. The profit was enormous on that sort of junk. You earned just about as much as selling it by the spoonful, Henry Weams had told me.
I stuffed the hairbrush into my overcoat pocket. Lily Anderson was screaming and stamping her feet and she was trying to hit me with her little fists. Out of the back came a hulking brute with a low forehead and closely-cropped black hair, and a paunch. "What's the trouble, Lily baby?" he wanted to know.
"This man stole one of our hairbrushes. He said speed--"
"Keep your mouth shut, you stupid bitch! I'll handle him," Fatso grumbled. Then he came towards me menacingly, his fists clenched and ready. I took the initiative. I stepped forward under his guard, and I sent my right fist right into that fat gut of his. All the wind and energy went out of him, he doubled up, and sank down on his knees on the floor crying like a baby.
"As for you, Lily, you better get out of this racket before the Feds start rounding all you people up," I told her. "Where did you come from, anyway?"
"Iowa, not that it's any of your business," she snapped.
"Well, baby, you better rob the cash register and buy yourself a one-way bus ticket back home. Otherwise you're going to land up in the clink for a long time. And here's a little reminder," I said to her. I grabbed her, sat down on the counter, pulled her over my lap and went to work on her jouncy little ass with the hairbrush. She started to cry pretty soon and to kick her lovely legs, and she pleaded with me to stop.
When I let her up, she bent over the counter, rubbing her ass and with the tears running down her face. "That's what your parents ought to have done a long time ago, Lily," I said as I left the shop.
I took a cab right down to the Federal Building and went on up to Henry Weams' office. He was in, and I tossed the little plastic bag of crystals right on his desk. "I'd like to have your chemist analyze that, Henry," I said to him.
I told him where I had found it, and I also told him about the hairbrush I had found in Liz' drawer and in Carol's crummy apartment. He looked thoughtful, and then he said to me, "I'm pretty sure this is speed. You say you told that girl at the shop that you wanted a speedy hairbrush. That must have been the password. It's a novel idea, I must say. Somewhere in Chicago there's a little manufacturing plant that makes up these hairbrushes, hollows out the handle, and sticks the bags inside. Nobody would ever think to look for it there. You've done us a service, Jack."
"Well, let's stop the racket before it claims a few more victims, Henry. I've got work to do now, I'll be seeing you," I said to him.
When I got back to the office, it was almost closing time. Liz Parminter was getting ready to tidy up and go. "How about having dinner with me tonight, Liz?" I said to her.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Jack, but I can't. I--I already have a date."
"With whom?"
Her face colored hotly, and then she said coolly, "I don't really think that's your business, Jack."
"I'm making it mine. Now are you coming along with me or do I take you down to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics?"
She went white as a sheet, leaned back against the file cabinet and stared at me as if she had just seen a ghost. "What--what are you talking about?" she managed weakly.
"I'm talking about that hairbrush in the drawer, baby. You see, I opened it up and found something inside. I found a hairbrush in Carol Greening's place, and then there's a shop across the street from where she's shacked up with Hal Busby, and they sell them too. You know what I think the stuff inside the hairbrush is? Speed, or methamphetamine to you."
She was trembling now. She put her hands to her face, uttered a long sigh, and then she said softly, "Oh my God!"
"You're going to come along to my apartment and I'm going to make you a quick dinner, Liz. Then you're going to tell me all about this. Because if you don't, the Feds are going to pick you up along with the others in this filthy racket."
She came along without an argument. We walked over to my apartment in East View Park, I put a couple of TV dinners on the baker on top of the stove, and then I went back to the living room and sat down beside her on the couch. "Tell me all about it now," I encouraged.
"I--I can't--he--he told me not to," she whispered. She was pale and shaking.
"You aren't on the stuff yourself, are you?"
"I--I tried it once or twice. I don't want to do it again. He--he said it would make me forget everything. He was going to divorce his wife and marry me, but he hasn't done it yet. That's really why I left him."
"He, of course, meaning David Henshaw," I said.
She nodded.
It was all very clear to me now. David Henshaw and Liz Parminter had evidently been lovers. He had found a way to make an awful lot of money without working very hard, dirty money, death money. He was making speed, putting it into these hairbrushes of his, and then somebody in his organization was finding outlets where if you knew the password, you could buy a hairbrush and go on a long trip. Maybe it cost about forty-five cents to make the hairbrush, and you paid ten bucks for it, and the crystals you got were worth at most about two or three bucks. That was a very nice profit, much more than he would make on commissions from selling insurance policies.
And it was our friend David Henshaw who had made those obscene phone calls to his wife, just to drive her nuts, so that finally she might have a nervous breakdown and he would be able to get rid of her and take Liz Parminter to his manly arms in the open. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorrier for myself. I wanted to fuck that girl more than any other girl I had ever met. But right now she was one of the untouchables for me. She was mixed up in a death-dealing racket, and she had gone into it with both eyes open.
"Look," I said to her as kindly as I could.
"You're working for me now and that's the way it's going to be. Just don't see him again, don't have anything to do with the stuff, and when the Feds pick him up and all the rest of his gang, I'll do my best to keep you out of it. Fair enough?"
She burst into tears, flung her arms around my neck and sobbed that she was awfully sorry, that she didn't mean to get me involved, and that she had just been so in love with him that she had lost her better judgement. A lot of famous women down through history have done just that, so I couldn't condemn her too much.
I told her to stay at my place until I got back. I still had a job to do for which I had been paid: I had to watch over Betty Henshaw. And in doing it, I was going to nab her husband with the goods.
As soon as I had called Henry Weams at a private number he had given me, I gave Liz a fatherly kiss on the forehead and left the apartment.
EPILOGUE
I'd known that all hell would break loose that night, and I was right. Madge was a peach of a bitch when I surprised her at her apartment and pulled apart the hairbrush full of dope that she'd forgetfully flung at me. She gave me the lowdown on how she'd become Carol's father's lover, and I manage to rip off a .22 pistol from one of her drawers. Even though I knew I had no license to carry it, I knew I would need it that night when I blew open the caper.
I went out to the Henshaw's to confirm that which I'd suspected all along. I tiptoed past the storage rooms and passed the big boiler, and then I saw what I had just about expected to see.
David Henshaw was naked to the waist and wearing just his jocky shorts, and he'd tied Betty by the wrists and ankles with a heavy cord. The blacksnake whip he held in his hands was terrifying, and Betty was writhing and twisting frantically as she tried to break loose.
I walked in to surprise them, but Liz Parminter surprised me-with a .45. Luckily I had a quicker aim, and shot her nips with my pistol so that she bled painfully and fell forward onto the floor.
It was almost over, but not quite. Reuben Greening was picked up the next morning at his investment company, and arraigned before a Federal commissioner.
I went back to Madge, forgiving person that I am, and took her in hand, so to speak. I was going to need a new secretary, and I'd found her. And this secretary was going to be one who would readily drop her panties for a fantailing anytime I caught her in error and condemned her to expiation. In a way, then, the hairbrush caper was just beginning.
