Chapter 11

After Shirley I was in a strange state. For a few days my horniness was just not there. I called Angie the next morning and told him my mother had just died in California, and I would have to quit immediately to go back home for the funeral; that my father had agreed to support me on my own terms, and that I didn't have to work anymore. I was really sorry to leave him in the lurch and I told him so, but I guess he was used to it, because he just gave a kind of "Oh not again!" moan and agreed that I could stop and pick up my last check right away. I told him I had his books up to date and that everything was square, and that to make up for my cutting out with no notice, I wouldn't charge him anything for that. He said he was sorry that he had to take me up on that, but of course I knew his financial situation as well as anyone. I replied that I would be more than satisfied if he would write me a reference recommending me as both a short order cook and a bookkeeper just in case I ever did have to work again. He agreed good-naturedly.

I managed to get in and out of the place quickly, without running into Robin or Shirley or any of their acquaintances. As I shook hands with Angie and looked around the place one last time I felt a little nostalgic. I'd really been at home with that simple, absorbing kind of manual labor, maybe because it claimed my physical attention and made it a little easier to put up with my perpetual horniness. It was the kind of place I needed. I'd actually developed some affection for those pots and pans and utensils, that stove and griddle and cutting board. Then again, the place had been a gold mine of success for my "blackmail brothel." Very strange, I thought to myself as I pocketed my check and letter of reference and walked out onto the street.

I spent the rest of that morning walking all the way back up to my East Side hotel room. As I wandered up Eighth Avenue past the wholesale florists and then into the Garment District I was taken up with thoughts and memories of Shirley.

Maybe I'd been too hasty. Maybe I should have stayed at least until morning. Would she have made me breakfast before sending me on my way? What would our parting have been like?

I hardly noticed the women in the streets as I neared 42nd street and lunch-hour crowds clogged the sidewalks. For once my eyes did not dart feverishly through the crowds in search of short skirts or transparent dresses or tight pants or naked tits bouncing beneath sheer blouses. It was a great relief not to have to worry, "Can she feel me staring at her? Is she cringing at the gaze of yet another dirty pervert?" When I thought about it, it was the first relief from those worries I had felt in years.

I crossed 42nd Street to amble uptown and passed the $5 strip show that had recently cut its prices to $3. For some reason I felt freer to go in than I had before; as though I could take it for what it was, a strip show, and now spend my time agonizing over the distance between me and those professionally flaunted pussies.

I hesitated for a moment, but decided not to go in. My limbs were still stiff and my lungs wanted more of that fresh autumn air. I decided to walk east on 42nd street and uptown on 5th Avenue.

By the time I got to St. Patrick's and Rockefeller Center I had noticed something interesting. Although the smartly dressed ladies that paraded high-class un-touchability there aroused me no more than the hookers and the hippy-teenagers of 42nd Street, I found them far more appealing. "Because they think they're so unreachable," I decided. They were something like Janet, all of them, but they were un-like her in that she practically advertised her sexuality, and they did their best to keep theirs concealed; to pretend they really didn't have any. I was especially attracted to the middle-aged women-the ones in their late thirties or early forties. What I really wanted to fuck, I realized, was the goddamned holier-than-thou upper-middle-class Establishment. I wanted to take all its prim and prissy prohibitions and shove them right up its ass. These people were the ones who laid down the laws, and they laid them down to their own advantage. They fixed things up so poor slobs like me didn't stand a fucking chance.

By the time I'd crossed Central Park South and, just for nostalgia's sake, taken Fifth up past the Pierre, I'd made my decision. My next "subject" would be a wealthy, uptight middle-aged lady.

I started looking for a job that would put me in contact with people like that. It was a new thing for me, deciding what kind of woman I was going to go after, and it shifted my whole pattern of operation. But after Shirley some shift was needed, and in the growing depression that followed those days of calm satisfaction it proved to be the best way for me to keep the devils out of my head.

The depression came when I fully realized what the outcome of the night with Shirley had meant. If there was ever going to be "a girl" for me, she was going to have to be a lot like Shirley. But a girl who was a lot like Shirley wouldn't want me. So there was never going to be "a girl" for me. I supposed I'd always known that, but now it was plainer than ever. The night with Shirley had been fantastic, but it had just made the ensuing depression inevitable and all the more painful. And it was going to continue to be that way with every new Shirley who came along. I just couldn't afford to fall in love, so I decided I'd better stay away from women who could take me that way. Maybe that was why I'd come to the decision as to what kind of person my next victim would be.

After only ten days of job-hunting I struck it lucky. A private caterer on the East Side advertised for an assistant, and when she heard that I had both cooking and bookkeeping experience and was willing to work for the slave-wages she was offering, she hired me right away. Agnes Blake-that's what I'd call her-did all the imagine cooking herself, and the tasks of her assistants were simple. She needed polite people in starched white uniforms to bow and scrape to the guests at the functions she serviced; parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs. All terribly "high society" events. Her other assistants were Juan, a sharp young Puerto Rican whose childishly sexy smile helped him get enough on the side to pay his way through college, and Frank, a jovial but mildly retarded fatso who'd been with Agnes for ten years. I had a few good laughs with Juan, but of course I couldn't afford to get too close to anybody.

I hung around Agnes's midtown co-op apartment, which she had fitted with commercial stoves and refrigerators and all the equipment of her trade so she could run her business from there, for my first week, learning the niceties of obsequious servitude. It was really funny the things Agnes was so rabid about. Every smile and olive and toothpick had to be right where she wanted them when she wanted them, and if a tart had a slightly crumbled edge, it was into the garbage with it But it was worthwhile putting up with all that, and even with Agnes herself, who was a nasty old hen if I ever saw one, for the rich bonanza of feminine vulnerability that the catering trade opened up to me. If Hardy's had been a little goldmine, Agnes's ushered in a whole golden age. By the time I left her I had half a dozen women set up, and all I had to do was cash in.

The first of the "Agnes-women" was Grace. She was the busty, bustling, oh-so-social wife of a prominent publisher. She was also the worst name-dropper I ever knew. She dropped more big names than a rabbit drops little turds. But despite this irritating habit she was a gorgeous piece and basically, as I saw her, a fine woman. She had silver hair (dyed, of course . . . from blonde!) running down her back like a shimmering mountain stream; a full but foxy-looking face with firm cheeks and cheerful little squint-lines at the corners of her eyes, the result of smiling aggressively all the time; and a pampered, carefully exercised body that made it believable that she was as young as she claimed. (She said she was 34, although I later found out she was 39.)

I got onto her at a party her husband held for his star writers and their agents. There were some pretty big names involved. Grace herself was an interior decorator, and their Brooklyn Heights apartment was a marvel to behold. They'd virtually gutted their brownstone, and doubled the size of the windows on the middle floors. She'd chosen an amazing collection of modern American and Swedish and Japanese furniture to give it a spacious and sleekly elegant look.

Grace was the first woman I got evidence on even before I'd considered going after it. Hers was the third job I went on with Agnes. In the midst of serving London Broil with b'arnaise sauce I overheard Grace talking to one of her husband's writers, who also happened to be a prospective client of hers. They were on the back porch just outside the kitchen where I was working. They talked for a long time about draperies and slip-covers and pieces of sculpture and paintings and so on before my ears perked up to the magic words: "My fee is going to come to around two thousand if you pay by check and twelve hundred if you pay in cash."

"Oh ho!" the writer laughed. "Cheating on your good old Uncle Sam, huh?"

Grace shrugged. "We're in a fifty-percent tax bracket now anyway, and it's getting to the point where it's barely worthwhile for me to work. What kind of a country is this, anyway?"

"I have no idea," the writer said, "but you'll get your money in cash, that's for sure. When do you want to start?"

All I had to do was establish some kind of persona contact with Grace. The chance came toward the end o the party, when the last few guests were straggling out and Agnes had left Frank and me to clean up. Her husband went off to bed and she stayed up to "supervise" us. Undoubtedly to make sure we wouldn't walk of with anything, I started a conversation about her business, and, not have anything better to do, she proved all too happy to tell me about her rich and famous clients and the exquisite and lavish things she had done with their houses apartments, mansions-even their yachts. "It's true!' she assured me proudly over her ninety-seventh Old Grandad and branch water. She was no southern belle, but she liked to drink like a southern gentleman. I thought that was funny. Frank waddled in with trays full of dirty plates and waddled back out in search of more, and I packed them away to be washed in Agnes's commercial dishwasher in the morning. "I once decorated the interior of a seventy-five foot yacht! Did it in genuine Arabian, too. Desert stuff. Hung wineskins on the bulkheads and used camel saddles for seats." She was obviously quite proud of herself. By the time she was done boasting I had a mental list of two dozen famous clients she'd worked for in the past few years, and a pretty good idea of how much she would have got from them in commissions. "You must make a hell of a pile," I said admiringly.

She shrugged, and I could see she didn't suspect me personally, but she made it a policy not to discuss her income with strangers. "Wish I could get into something like that," I went on. "What Agnes pays me is barely enough to keep body and soul together." At that point we were all done and ready to leave. "Say, if you ever need any help, I'm always looking to make a few bucks. Either with the business or anything you might want done around the house. Let me give you my number, okay?"

"Okay," she said in the manner of someone who's used to being asked for favors and doesn't give out many. I wrote my name and number down for her. "I work for Agnes in the evenings mostly, so I'm free during the mornings and early afternoons. I really would like to get into the interior decorating business. I know I couldn't actually be a decorator, that you need all kinds of training for that, but I really like to be around nice things and it would give me a big thrill to see the 'before and after' of some of your places. Your own place is such a showcase-I bet you get a lot of work just from people who come here and see it."

That little bit of flattery obviously made her notice me and remember me, because on the next Saturday morning she called me to ask if I could help her move a few big things around-first at a client's, where she wanted to see whether a breakfront should go on one wall and a desk on the other or vice versa, and then at their own place, where she needed a few things moved up from the cellar and a few others moved down. "I always like to keep my own place changing," she explained. "Gives guests something to talk about, and when guests start talking about decorating, that's good for business."

Things couldn't have worked out more perfectly. I was the model employee at her clients', a penthouse in Washington Heights, and by the time we got back to her place around one-thirty she'd decided I was a great find. While I moved things from study to cellar and cellar to library and library to cellar and cellar to bedroom and so on, I kept my eye out for where some rather special things might be kept, and by the time I left and hurried down to Agnes's, I had a pretty good idea where they were and how I could go about getting them.

Grace had told me that she and her husband were about to leave for a week in the Bahamas, and that took care of the problem of when. When I went down into the cellar for the last time that day I crawled back over an old piano and pushed the black curtains to one of the windows aside and unlatched it

At three in the morning in the middle of the following week I went down to the house and got myself in through the window. After about half an hour of picking locks and searching through file drawers I found what I was after; a copy of Grace's tax return for the previous year, along with the account books she'd cooked up to substantiate it. When I looked at her "gross income" line I knew I'd hit the jackpot. She'd reported $12,000 and just from the clients she told me about I knew her income had to have been at least $25,000. Less than half of the big accounts she'd mentioned to me appeared in the books. I made Xerox copies of everything the next day and put it back where it belonged the next night

The second Agnes-woman was a small-time nightclub singer, the low-cut-dress type whose cleavage got more attention than her voice. She was Italian and dark, and her downfall was that she was married but had a boyfriend who liked to make it in the wild. I got some fabulous pictures of them fucking on the deserted dunes of Fire Island one brisk November weekend. Getting those photos with my new Nikon and its incredible telescopic lens was almost as big a kick as socking it to her with the evidence and then socking it to her with something better. I still have copies of the pictures, although I keep meaning to burn them. They show some of the nicest candid pussy that's ever been filmed; as if Td been kneeling two feet from her curly black jungle with its long firebreak of pouting lips. She had some of the lushest cuntlips I ever tasted. You could suck them half way down your throat and they'd flutter in your gullet-like flags.

Another of my Agnes-women was Laurie, a thirty-eight year old wife of a thirty-one year old doctor who she'd learned had taken to expending his best energies on younger material. Younger like twelve and thirteen. She gladly gave up the ghost of her fidelity to protect him, although scandal caught up with him anyhow in the end. I showed her some lovely pictures of her husband examining the genitals of one of his prettiest pubescent patients with his tongue, and some more of him taking the virginity of another with crazed ardor. (I had to rent the office upstairs from his and rip up the floor and play with light fixtures to get those shots.) She agreed to buy them and my silence with a night of self-sacrifice, although she cursed me under her breath every fucking minute and went away firmly believing that I was the devil himself, while her husband was Gabriel in nothing more than a rather eccentric disguise. Still, I rather liked her, and was sad to read about a month after our encounter that the enraged parents of one of her husband's "patients" were charging him with raping their 14-year-old daughter. "Well," I thought to myself, "doctors are supposed to be more clever than that."

And then there was a housewife and mother of four from New Jersey who-happened to pick the wrong party at which to meet her old childhood sweetheart and start an affair. (She's another one I still have pictures on. There's one terrific one of him coming into her mouth that I got through the keyhole of an old-fashioned hotel room in Connecticut.) She wasn't particularly ravishing-she was in a fire when she was about six, and still had burn scars on one side of her neck-but she had gorgeous wide brown eyes and a very appealing settled-young-mother look. By the time I got around to her I was really going after the forbidden fruit. Only the most untouchable of the untouchable, the real challenges, were of interest to me. It wasn't only my sexual appetite that was at stake every time I fixed my sights on a new victim: it was my masculinity; my very identity. There was only one thing I'd ever really learned to do successfully and well in my life, and cornering big cats was it. I'd become addicted to danger, or at least to risk. That was why I arranged it with the housewife so we could have our little session in her home, and I insisted on keeping my cock in her until five minutes before her children were due home from school. I passed them on my way down the street disguised as a vacuum cleaner salesman.

Then there was a reporter for a prominent New York newspaper who'd taken a bribe to lay off a story about a kick-back scandal in the city government. She was the most touchy of all my cases. She was a little unbalanced to begin with, and when I first confronted her she tried to scratch my eyes out. Fortunately it happened in a deserted corner of Central Park and there were no witnesses. Afterward we went across the street to the Plaza and she suffered the price of my silence stoically. She had the nicest pair of long, coltish legs I'd ever seen, and when she wrapped them around me and started using them for what they were made for I decided all my troubles and a few facial scratches had been worth it

And then, to round things off, there was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy manufacturer who happened to be Catholic, and would have been even more upset than most parents to learn that his daughter had spent part of her Christmas vacation getting rid of an illegitimate baby in a Manhattan abortion clinic. After a run of older women she was just what I needed. I still have vivid memories of the glowing tauntness of her body and the springy tightness of her cunt.

But the most memorable of them all was Grace-not only because she was the first, and not only because she, like relatively few fast-moving New York women, was religiously faithful to her husband, but also because she gave me the hardest time of any of them. She came the closest to being as clever as I was, and she damned near got me killed. She got her husband involved, and in the end I had to get him to agree to let her go to bed with me. In the process, I also forced him to fuck his wife while I watched, and then to watch while I made love to her myself.

During the few months that I worked for Agnes I was totally absorbed in the demanding task of figuring out half a dozen foolproof plots at once. It was a barren time sexually, at least as far as really making it with women was concerned, but it was a rich time as far as fantasies went, and it was also rich with the memories of Shirley and Robin and Janet, and even occasionally Jill. These memories I systematically exploited and refurbished in solitary orgies of masturbation in my East Side hotel room. A few of those orgies were greatly enhanced by the hash I'd got from Shirley, and after that was gone I got some more through Juan. I would work for Agnes in the evenings, sometimes until two or three in the morning, and then I'd sleep six or seven hours, and then I'd spend the mornings and afternoons working on my "cases." I knew I was living a lot of weird illusions, but they were exciting illusions, and I was drawn deeper into them just the way I was drawn deeper into a cunt when I got a hold of one.

I imagined myself a private detective. I was working for a rich and righteous employer, and the success of my missions meant the salvation of society. Or I was working for the FBI or the CIA, and the success of my missions meant the salvation of the American Way of Life. I laughed at that one even as I entertained it, because I had nothing but contempt for the American Way of Life, and deep down for myself when I pursued it so extremely. I went about my business as though I had to prosecute my victims before the Supreme Court, and that particular illusion saved my ass a number of times, especially with Grace and Harold, her husband. I was so well prepared that God Almighty Herself couldn't have fought loose of my traps. In a strange way, all of my illusions were true.

By this time I was planning months ahead, and I was able to give Agnes two weeks notice before I quit with the usual excuse that I had urgent personal business out on the Coast. I had learned to flatter her, to play to her weak points, and the old bag had grown quite attached to me, so she was happy to write me excellent references and wish me good luck when I departed. I'd saved enough money working for her and doing little side jobs to live for a month or so, even though it meant eating rice and beans a lot of the time. My only luxuries were the bare necessities of sex, and I sacrificed everything to get them.

After Grace and her husband got back from the Bahamas I worked for her half a dozen more times, and got her to tell me in great detail about certain jobs I was particularly interested in. I overheard the making of a few more cash-on-the-barrelhead deals, and learned how her pricing system went. Eventually I figured that she was making more like $40,000 a year, and that she had been for years. She owed Uncle Sam something in the neighborhood of $100,000, and she'd committed the cardinal crime of income tax evasion; not reporting all her earnings. She could go to jail for that just the way Al Capone had.

I won't go into the scene when I originally confronted her. It and all the other confrontations were remarkably similar to the ones I've already described, except that , Grace was a little more self-righteous than most when she figured out what I wanted from her and a little less-likely to believe that I wouldn't come back again later for seconds-or for money. I was a little suspicious when she suddenly agreed to entertain me at her place one Thursday night in mid-February when she said her husband was going to be out of town. I checked that out by simply calling his office and asking if he'd be in on Friday. His receptionist told me he would. At first I was tempted to drop the whole deal like a hot potato. But I'd put too much work into Grace, and I had too strong a case against her, to do that. At least I was prepared when her husband came bursting out of the bedroom closet at the first suggestion of Grace removing any clothes. But I wasn't prepared for him to be pointing a .38 at my chest. He was a big guy, an ex-marine, and Ml of that wild-dog macho of the red-blooded American man whose woman has been threatened. Fortunately I read him right: he was just a little too smart to pull the trigger. And since he was that just smart, he turned out only smart enough to make things harder on himself and his wife. Step by step I showed him that his best and only option was to let his wife go through with the $100,000 fuck. After he'd grasped that much I said, "And since you'll want to be assured that I won't mistreat her, you can stay and watch."

The very idea of that drove him crazy. It was like crushing his oversized balls in a nutcracker. He cursed and raved and said he would never do such a thing, that he'd kill himself first. (I'd convinced him he couldn't kill me because I had accomplices who knew where I was who'd jack both of them up for a murder rap. And also forward my information to the IRS anyhow.) I urged Grace to get the gun away from him, and she did. I had her throw the slugs out one window and the gun out another and then told him he didn't have any choice; that he had to watch; that I insisted he be satisfied that his wife was being treated right. In fact, I insisted that he show me how she liked to be treated.

"Are you suggesting that Grace and I put on a sex show for you?"

"A purely educational one, of course," I told him.

His bushy black eyebrows arched in fury and he huffed and puffed around like a bulldozer gone wild. "And for $100,000 and your wife's freedom, it had better be very educational." By this time I knew I was home free, and feeling a little cocky, so I added, "And when I take over, you'll get to see what kind of a student I am. You can even give me a grade, if you like."

That sent him into still another frenzy. He went into the bathroom and smashed a couple of glasses. I had to admit that I sort of admired the genuineness of his emotions, although as a person I despised him. Otherwise I could never have done what I did to him. He was just the kind of Establishment bull I wanted to wave red flags at

While he was throwing his tantrum Grace was staring at me with monstrous hate and bitterness, but I could see she was resigning herself to her fate. "Look," I told her, "you two are really making this a much more traumatic thing than it has to be. Just pretend you're at home alone making love as usual for a while, and then . . . pretend I'm Harold, I don't care. But if you get your shit together the whole thing'll be over in a couple of hours. Fll be out of your life for good, you'll be safe again, and you'll be able to look back on the whole thing as a short bad dream."

"I really can't believe you want to do this, Jim," she said for the thousandth time. "You've always seemed so honest and straightforward."

"Just the way you've seemed to the IRS, I imagine."

She seemed to understand then that what money was for her, sex was for me, and once she understood me in her own terms, I think she believed I really wouldn't be back again, because it wouldn't be clever, and I was clever. She also saw that I wasn't going to move without what I'd come for. She looked at a clock over the bed. "It's eight thirty," she said. "Can this be over by ten thirty."

"By eleven, at least. If.. . "

"Sit down in that chair over there and keep quiet. And try not to bait Harold so much. He knows it would be stupid to hurt you now, but you can see he's got a hell of a temper, and if you get him mad enough he might do something stupid." She got up. "I'll try to get him." She went toward the bathroom. "You might not know what kind of risk you're really taking," she said over her shoulder. "I know you don't realize how close you came to being shot before."

I shrugged. "Blackmail is risky business. My own life isn't so wonderful that I care a whole lot about losing it"

She frowned a little thoughtfully and for the first time took a hard look at me. "I've never known anyone like that."

"It's a different world," I assured her as she disappeared into the bathroom.