Chapter 1
C.C. "Bull" Zelman's drive got him the things in life he wanted. Like the naked blonde beauty, whose pink-nippled breasts and lush, weaving cuntlips were practically begging him to fuck them now-quickly. The lovely sensuous lips of Valerie Desmond implored plaintively, "What's keeping you, C.C? Here I am with my pussy waiting impatiently for you to shove your cock in and you haven't even started to undress."
C.C. "Bull" Zelman's dark eyes flashed in his hawk-like face and he began to remove his clothes slowly from his powerful, thick-set body. This was the way he liked it, the broad practically begging him to shove his prick in her when they got to the motel. He gloated, he'd tease her cunt along a little longer ... the way the good-lookers and swingers used to tease and deny him.
But that was before he got to be Discount King of Long Island.. He was celebrating the opening of his seventh discount appliance store in towns scattered through Long Island's prosperous South Shore. Yes, he'd come a long way from that little hole-in-the-wall he'd started with in Oceanport. Now they called him the "Discount Tycoon", and his latest place outside Lynbrook was a regular department store selling everything from color T.V.'s and refrigerators to the newest fashions for men and women.
Yeah, he gloated, as he looked down at the naked Valerie Desmond, he was a big man and getting bigger all the time. He called the tune and these cunts danced to it now. Bull Zelman weaved a little from the river of bourbon he'd been drinking all evening as he took off his elevator shoes. Although very powerfully built, he was shorter than average and used the lift shoes to give him a couple of extra inches. He was a very vain man, and although he loved to taunt and tease others, he couldn't stand being kidded or criticized about any of his own shortcomings. Everyone knew better than to provoke one of Bull Zelman's rages with personal remarks about him. His terrific vanity was a good part of his ambition to become the biggest discount department store owner in the East-and he was well on his way. A man had to have some relaxation, he told himself, and a deluxe showgirl like Valerie Desmond could sure relax a man-cock, balls and all!
Bull slowly got into the motel bed beside Valerie's streamlined naked body. He brushed aside her welcoming arms and started to mouth her lush, ruby-tipped full breasts. He could feel her jutting nipples stiffen and become rigid with desire as his tongue flicked over them. Valerie began to turn her lovely face, framed with long hair the color of burnished gold, from side to side on the pillow. As Zelman continued to kiss and play with her tits, her full thighs began to undulate against him. Soon her whole luscious torso was shuddering with excitement and she began a sexy grind with her belly and hips against Zelman's powerful frame. Zelman's lips found her navel and hungrily mouthed and tongued the hidden, sensitive crevice.
Valerie parted her full thighs slightly and quickly engulfed Zelman's huge, thick cock within her warm moist cunt. His strong hands cupped her satiny asscheeks as Bull lunged into her twat with grunting, rapid thrusts. She frenziedly quickened her pace, moaning aloud as the plunging Bull fucked her writhing cunt. Suddenly a scream broke from Valerie's lips, "Oh, Bull, you're all man! I've never been fucked like this before!" she cried as her thighs went into a wild uncontrolled go-go-go dance.
As Bull felt her cunt go into ecstatic spasms beneath him, sharp pleasure bolts exploded in his balls as hot scum spurted through his cock into her cunt. The blonde clung to him, uttering little cries as the muscles of her vagina and belly kept twitching uncontrollably.
"You're a real man, Bull," she gasped. "You know the kind of hump a woman needs."
Bull Zelman was content for the moment. Valerie had said the right thing at the right time. He'd give her a ten spot in addition to her usual hundred dollars "allowance".
Things had been swell until they were driving in to Valerie's New York apartment. She had asked him for another fifty as they were driving on the deserted beach road from the motel to the main highway. When he stubbornly refused, Valerie committed the unpardonable sin.
"Why Cecil," she said mockingly, "why is Cecil baby being so stingy with me?"
Valerie was one of the few people who knew that "C.C." stood for Cecil Cartwright and that the one way to make him crazy mad was to call him "Cecil".
"Dammit, I told you never to call me that sissy name even when we're alone," Bull growled.
"Stingy Cecil, stingy Cecil," she kept taunting.
Bull Zelman, consumed with blinding rage, braked the car and put his brawny arms to Valerie to shut her up. Valerie tore loose from him and he followed her as she ran drunkenly yelling, "Stingy Cecil, stingy Cecil" to the sand dunes. He was still rather drunk too, which may explain the fact that he took his hands from the too silent Valerie's throat and realized that he had probably crushed her windpipe in his wild fury. Valerie would never tease him again-she was quite dead.
He was scrambling from the depression in the sand dunes where Valerie was lying when he caught sight of a gleaming pair of girl's legs on the tar roadway.
The naked legs of a girl. That was all he saw. He was aware of the fact that the girl wasn't completely naked, however. She had on some kind of abbreviated costume-shorts, he guessed. They were white, as he recalled. But he didn't really see anything of the girl except her naked legs.
In other circumstances Bull would have admired those legs. On this occasion, however, they inspired only an over-powering rush of fear. The legs were facing him, which meant that the girl was facing him and had seen what he had done.
Immediately the legs turned and disappeared from sight. Bull started to scramble up the slope to the road, plowing the loose dirt with his feet. He sweated and puffed against the rising dust, his short legs pistoning. All he could think about was the need to grab the girl, whoever she was, because she could send him to cold storage for good.
But by the time he had reached the top of the slope and stood on the roadside, all he saw was, a disappearing pair of auto tail lights. The girl had gotten away.
He leaped toward his own car, which was angled crazily off the edge of the pavement where he'd stopped it in his rage of several minutes before. Its headlights were stabbing into the dark and its right-front door stood open.
Valerie had lunged through that door with him after her. Then she had run and rolled down the slope into the ditch beside the road, ending on her back with her skirt wound around her hips and her stockinged legs in the air. Bull had leaped at her and had strangled the life out of her voluptuous body.
He hadn't meant to kill her, of course. That is, he hadn't meant to when they'd been fighting in the car. Or even when she'd leaped out and he had gone after her. But when he'd seen her lying there in the dirt-soiled and helpless, her face smudged, her hair tangled, her skirt only a bandanna on her hips, gleaming white above her hose. He had suddenly wanted to. And he had done it.
The fact of killing Valerie hadn't bothered him afterward. She had been a tramp and a whore. She'd been trying to taunt him and make fun of him when he was being good to her.
What concerned him was that his act had been witnessed. It had been witnessed by the girl with the naked legs who had evidently stopped her car when she'd come upon his lighted Continental with its right-front door yawning. Then when she'd seen what he had done, she had run back to her own car and had gotten out of there before he could stop, or even identify her.
There was one peculiar thing Bull had noticed about her, however. She had a mark-a birthmark, he guessed-on the outside of her right leg almost up to her hip. He'd noticed it because of the way she'd been standing. In the moonlight it had formed a vivid contrast to the golden tan of the rest of her flesh. The mark, as he recalled, was in the rough shape of a strawberry and it angled across her leg. He estimated that it was about three inches long.
So all he knew about the girl who had seen him kill his mistress was the fact that she'd been wearing shorts or something of the sort, that she had bare tanned legs, and that she had a strawberry birthmark. He assumed she lived in or around Lynbrook, since the road where he had stopped was strictly a local one.
Bull had turned onto it so that he and Valerie could park where it was quiet and thrash out their argument. But Valerie hadn't given him a chance. She'd become nasty. When he tried to quiet her and started to pull the car to a stop, she had jumped out.
He hadn't followed the girl's car away from the scene.
He had leaped into his own car, intending to do so, but then he'd decided that it would only make things worse if he did. He had figured the girl might pull into a service station or private home for help, and that someone might then take after him. It had seemed best to take advantage of his opportunity to get away.
He wasn't sure how much the girl knew. In her excitement, had she paid any attention to his car? Had she gotten his license number or looked at the registration slip on the steering post? Had she even gotten a very good look at his face? The moon had been out, but he had been standing well below her.
She would have noticed he was a heavy-set man, he presumed. Nobody could have missed that.
Bull Zelman wasn't huge-bellied, but he was short. Being short, his stockiness was more apparent than it would have been on a tall man.
The girl would also have noticed his thinning hair had been mussed from his exertion and from the windy drive from the Sunrise Motel. Moreover, he had been wearing a red-and-gold flowered sport-shirt and that would surely have made an impression on her.
She had undoubtedly seen enough to make a lot of trouble for him, he concluded as he drove the rest of the way to Manhattan alone. He had continued to think about it during the sleepless night he'd spent beside his snoring wife and then later in the privacy of his luxurious fawn-leathered office.
The Daily News had carried a story about the discovery of the woman's body at Lynbrook. It had said the authorities were trying to identify her and were investigating the circumstances of her death.
Did the fact that her body had been discovered so quickly mean that the girl with the birthmark had already talked? If so, she hadn't given the police Bull's license number or he would have been picked up by that time. Probably she hadn't noticed the car very carefully, he thought. Either that or she'd been afraid to talk.
But the girl would certainly be able to identify him if he were ever picked up, and therefore she would always represent a threat. That meant he had to locate her somehow. And then he had to kill her. Strangely, the thought of committing another murder didn't bother him.
Valerie Desmond was the only person he had ever killed of course. He had never even considered committing murder before that night. But he had found it surprisingly easy, and he'd suffered no after-pangs about it. He had wondered about that, but he'd told himself it was because he'd been concerned about the girl who had witnessed the act and who now virtually held his fate in her hands. How could a man worry about what he had done to someone else, when his own life was in jeopardy?
Then, also, Valerie had really asked for what happened.
As far as the girl witness was concerned, his choice was either to kill her or risk the loss of his own life. That made it a simple matter of self-preservation.
Bull Zelman had been an action man all his life. He had always been the sort who, when he saw what had to be done, went out and did it. He had never permitted himself to be bullied or scared off. That's how he had succeeded in building a discount business that now covered a good part of Long Island South Shore. And he had accomplished it in just eight years. It had been a tough job but Bull had been tougher.
The man's appearance of softness was deceiving for he was actually ambitious, hard-working and shrewd. At the same time, however, he was self-indulgent, especially when it came to women, and inclined to be more emotional than was good for him.
That's why he had flown off the handle and killed Valerie.
But what was done was done. The problem was getting out of it.
Find the girl, he told himself.
Even if she'd already talked, the prosecution would need her testimony in court to prove a charge against him. If she were suddenly to disappear, their case would collapse. So Bull had to find her and make her disappear. It was that simple.
But he couldn't go to Lynbrook himself. It was a small town-only a couple of thousand people. What if she saw him on the street and pointed him out to a local cop? Then he'd be in for it for sure. As it was, no one knew where to look for him. Even if they succeeded in identifying Valerie by tracing her clothes, dental work, or something, there was no reason to think they would find out about him.
He'd never dated Valerie in New York. He'd never even picked her up at her apartment. He was a married man and the last thing in the world he'd wanted was for his wife to take him down the line in the divorce court for everything he had. It would have meant he'd have to draw money from his expanding discount chain in order to settle with her, and the business was his whole life, except for his playing around with cunt.
So he had been careful.
He had always met Valerie in public places, where neither one' of them was known, and they had gone on overnight or weekend jaunts to places like Atlantic City, and Asbury Park. They'd registered as husband-and-wife under phony names and, as far as Bull knew, no acquaintance of his from New York had ever seen them together.
Also he was pretty sure his wife, Agnes, didn't know what had been going on.
She was used to his being away from home a lot. He'd kept unusual hours ever since they were married fifteen years ago. At that time he'd been managing a couple of discount stores for someone else. When he bought his first store, his hours became even more erratic. He'd been away from home more than he was home. Now that he ran his own chain and it was big business, with buyers to meet and employees to check on, goods to order. Agnes was resigned to seeing less of him than ever.
Bull felt sure that the only link between himself and Valerie Desmond's death was the girl whose bare legs he had fleetingly seen at the edge of the Lynbrook roadway.
How could he go about finding her? That was the crux of his problem and he was giving it his most careful consideration.
Hire a private detective agency. That had been the first solution which had come to mind. But he had quickly decided against it. It would be too risky to get an outside agency involved in the thing. He could spin them some kind of phony yarn about why he wanted to find the girl. That part would be all right. But then, later, when the girl disappeared and there were write-ups in the papers about it, as there were bound to be, the detective agency would get wise and they'd probably cop out. Why shouldn't they? They would have already earned their fee. Moreover, they would have their license to protect. Telling what they knew would serve to solidify their relations with the police, and Bull figured that was something they would want to do. The agency wouldn't come in for any blame for having found the girl. To them it would have been just an ordinary missing-person problem. In taking the case, how could they have been expected to know it amounted to anything more than that?
No, hiring a detective was out.
And going to Lynbrook himself was out.
So what was the next choice?
Getting some John Doe to do the job for him. Somebody Bull could count on to keep his mouth shut after the job was over. Somebody who could be involved in such a way that he wouldn't dare talk about it.
But who?
Bull raised the La Corona cigar to his mouth and drew on it. It was out. He closed a thick hand around the 8-ball lighter on his desk and flicked its concealed button. He rotated the flame around the burnt end of his cigar and puffed.
He replaced the lighter and leaned back in his chair. Who? What man did he know who could pull off this sort of job?
There were men working for him who might be conned into it. There was one in particular - Vince Nordland - who had a prison record and for that reason would probably be afraid to go the cops afterward. Then, too, Bull had a few things on Vince. But Vince wasn't very smart. Bull doubted if he was smooth enough.
Bull had to choose a man who could go to Lynbrook and spend a little time there-get acquainted and mix with the locals until he found the girl.
It might prove to be easy. If the girl had already blabbed to the local cops, her identity would be common knowledge around town. On the other hand, if she hadn't talked, she'd have to be identified by her birthmark and that might take a bit of doing.
Of course it wasn't as if the man Bull sent to Lynbrook would have to go around lifting girls' dresses. The babe he wanted probably wore shorts a lot of the time. Her legs had been tanned. Still, a knothead like Vince could make a wrong remark that might cause suspicion. If he were to get himself picked up, it would lead the cops right to Bull's door.
Unh-uh. Vince Nordland was out.
So, who else did Bull know?
Reluctantly he was forced to the conclusion that if he used anyone who was connected with him, the guy might lead the cops back to him afterward, even without wanting to.
Hell! he said to himself and mashed the smoldering end of his cigar in a huge onyx ash tray.
He would have to find some outsider for the job. That was the only answer. It would have to be someone who was smart enough, smooth enough, and who needed a fast chunk of dough. Then Bull would have to work things in such a way that the guy wouldn't dare spill his guts about it.
Bull grimaced, twisting his thick lips. Where to find such a man? His problem had resolved itself to that.
He continued to work on it, after a while taking another long cigar from the humidor on his desk. He bit off its tip and spat it at the wastebasket near his swivel chair, then put the cigar between his teeth.
Where to find the man, he asked himself over and over.
Bull Zelman may have been vain and short-tempered, but he could also be shrewd and cunning. When it came to taking care of C.C. Zelman or saving his own skin, he was a positive genius. A rough idea of the strategy he'd use to get himself out of the rough spot he was in because of the late Valerie Desmond began to shape itself in his mind. With a little luck he'd come up smelling like roses.
He had a pretty fair idea of the type of man he needed for the job. There must be a handsome, rugged young prick-pusher in the area who could make out like crazy with broads. Zelman's hawk-like features creased in a sardonic grin. Yes, he had a most interesting assignment for a man who liked to get those twats into bed and was good at it. The guy would have to have plenty of cock-stamina-he would probably have to screw quite a few casts before he got the right one on her ass. A strawberry birthmark would be very visible on a pair of naked legs, writhing in a passionate fuck.