Chapter 1

Jack Donovan said, "I don't know if this sort of thing interests you or not, Fred. But I got the number of the sweetest little tootsie you could imagine, last week. She's expensive, but worth every penny. If you go in for that sort of thing, that is."

Seated across the table from Donovan at the expensive restaurant, Fred Markell toyed with his cocktail glass and said, in a voice that tried to be casual, "What's she like, Jack?"

Donovan shrugged. He was a big man, heavy-set and fleshy, almost oppressively big in the eyes of the smaller, leaner Markell. Donovan's eyes seemed to narrow as though he were looking off into a vast distance to visualize the appearance of the girl he was touting.

"She's blonde," Donovan said. "Tall. Twenty-one, twenty-two. She hasn't been in the business long, no more than six or eight months. She was married for a while when she was around eighteen, but she went into the call girl business after the marriage split up."

Markell nodded. He began to sweat a little, and his left leg started to tremble uncontrollably. He tried to hide the inner stab of desire from his lunch companion, but he doubted he was succeeding.

"Stacked?"

"God, yes! But she isn't a cow, mind you." Donovan laughed amiably. "She's bosomy without being sloppy. Big and firm, even when she's stripped. And everything else in proportion. I tell you, Fred, this girl is strictly calendar-girl stuff."

"What about the bedroom department?"

"She's a pro, isn't she?" Donovan replied. Markell nodded again and took a quick drink, and his fingers tightened on the stem of the cocktail glass until he thought it might break. He felt himself bursting out into a cold sweat of lust. He had always envied Jack Donovan's freedom to make his way gaily from one bedroom to the next. Donovan had never let marriage tie him down, the way Markell had.

Markell said cautiously, "What's the rate?"

"Say, you really are interested, aren't you?" Donavan said, leering.

Markell's voice was tight and thin and tense. "Sure I'm interested, Jack. What's the matter? Don't I have a right to be?"

"I thought you were a good faithful husband, Fred."

"Most of the time," Markell said. "But it isn't worth it. It just isn't worth it." He hunkered down over his drink and said in a confidential, you-and-me voice, "Janet and I have been miles away from each other psychologically for a good two years now. If I had one more drink in me, I'd tell you all about our sex life. Hell, I'll tell you anyway. It's been lousy lately. Lousy. Lousy t"

"That so?" Donovan said sympathetically. "God, Fred, I'm sorry to hear that!"

Markell leaned forward across the table and stared at the oval, pudgy face of the man opposite him. Whispering hoarsely, conspiratorially, Markell said, "I tell you confidentially, Jack, we aren't getting along at all. Not at all. Something's happening to Janet. She's turning frigid. I don't know what it is. But it's driving me crazy, Jack. Absolutely crazy."

"Maybe she's just worried about getting old," Donovan suggested. "That can sometimes foul up a woman's nervous system."

Markell laughed. "Old? Hell, she's thirty-three. Thirty-three, Jack! She hardly has a wrinkle. She's still got her figure. If she's old, what am I? What are you? We're forty, for Christ's sake! No, it isn't that. It's-I don't know. Some kind of neurosis. All I know is she hardly seems to like sex any mare."

"So you're in the market for a call girl?"

Markell nodded. He reddened at having to make the admission. "Yes," he said. "I figure it's simpler that way than starting a love affair with somebody. Love affairs lead to complications. Call girls don't."

"You're so right, buddy-boy. So very right."

They had another drink apiece. Markell was starting to feel relaxed, now that he had finally managed to confess to a sympathetic friend what had been bothering him for so many months. He had always been devoted to Janet, had not, like so many businessmen in his income bracket, gone on from one extramarital affair to the next. Oh, he had slipped, now and then, but not often enough to really matter. By and large he was a faithful husband.

But he couldn't go on that way any longer. He was a virile man. He had certain healthy desires that his wife was failing to satisfy.

He had to look elsewhere.

He closed his eyes briefly and tried to imagine this girl Donovan was dangling before him. This youthful blonde with the big boobs.

She danced into his feverish brain. She was nude, her golden hair flowing down to her shoulders. Her breasts were big ripe cones, swaying gently with every motion of her body. The nipples were high and small and very pink, sticking up stiffly out of reddish-brown aureoles the size of half-dollar pieces. Below her breasts, her body swept away to sudden breathtaking flatness, and then flared again at her hips, and there were the firm pillars oi her thighs, and he was holding her, his hands splayed out over the hard but satin-smooth rounds of her buttocks. Then, magically, he was naked too, and she was smiling, her lips full and firm and red, moist and parted, and his mouth was on hers and their tongues were touching and he was covering her with his body and she was reacting almost the instant he pressed his body to hers, quivering and thrashing and leaping as though a jolt of electricity had passed through her.

And then they were together on the bed, her soft body active and eager and hungry, and he took her again and again, and each time he took her she went through the full frenzy of excitement, until finally, in the small hours of the morning, he lay back against the cushions, drowsy and exhausted and happy. He opened his eyes to see her standing naked above him, her breasts rising and falling gently, and she was smiling, and she leaned forward and looked at him out of sparkling eyes, and the tips of her breasts touched him and he was alive again, and then they were making love while he lay back and dreamed a dream of everlasting passion-

Markell mopped the sweat from his forehead and the vision vanished.

He said, "What does she charge?"

"Twenty-five bucks for the regular thing," Donovan said. "She'll give you an hour of her time for that. There's a sliding scale for specialties, if you happen to go in for stuff like that. And it's a hundred bucks for all night. That's pretty much a standard rate for a New York call girl."

"Fine," Markell said. "Give me her telephone number, will you?"

Donovan took a page from his notepad and laboriously printed the number. "Here," he said. "It's an answering service. What you do is, you call up and leave your telephone number, and then when she gets around to it she calls you back."

Markell carefully pocketed the slip. "You won't say a word to Janet about this?"

"Are you kidding? Me, double-cross a fellow husband?" Donovan asked indignantly.

Markell laughed. "I didn't think you would, really. But I'm sort of new at this kind of operation. You've got to keep that in mind."

"How long have you and Jan been married?" Donovan asked. "Ten years, is it?"

"Nine years last June."

"Nine years of marriage and you never stepped out on her once?" Donovan asked incredulously. "Come off it, Fred. I just don't believe it."

Markell shrugged in an offhand way. "Oh, there were one or two little incidents at summer resorts. But they were sort of things that just happened, you know. Quick impulses. It isn't like this. It isn't like all this cold-blooded planning in advance, and then actually paying for it."

"But it's simpler, this way," Donovan said. "And easier, too When you need a woman in a hurry, you can't wait around for a little incident to happen."

"Yes," Markell said. "Simpler this way."

They left the restaurant at a quarter past two With a solid, substantial meal in his belly and a tingle oi desire in him, Fred Markell walked the six long blocks up Fifth Avenue to his office, thinking about the call girl whose number Jack Donovan had given him.

She danced in his brain. She capered back and forth, lips moist, thighs inviting, heavy breasts tolling like bells. She was light and slender and slim, in his passion dream, all but at her breasts, where two firm globes sprouted with unexpected lushness, and at her buttocks and hips, where the flesh was firm and lovely to behold.

At forty, Fred Markell was unquestionably a successful man. As the head of a medium-sized real estate brokerage firm, he had already piled up a personal fortune comfortably along in six figures. He had an annual take-home pay in five figures-five high figures. He owned a fine Tudor-style mansion in one of the better Westchester towns. He had a beautiful wife.

The only flaws in his existence concerned the matter of the beautiful wife. She was unable to have children, for one thing. A tumor eight years ago had settled that for keeps. Adoption didn't appeal to her, so .they were childless. And she seemed to have lost all interest in sex, lately, as well.

It puzzled and bewildered Markell. He could remember the early years of their marriage, before the money came. Janet had been warm, loving, passionate. Those days, he was hardly able to wait for the day to end, so he could be together with her in bed.

But things had changed.

As he had grown wealthier, Janet had surrounded herself with a high wall of hobbies and outside interests, and somehow the hobbies and outside interests had drained off all her energies. She was so busy these days with the Garden Club and the United Nations Association and the Symphonic League and the Library Drive and the City Cleanup Campaign and all her myriad other organizations that she seemed to have no time left for the basic matter of making love to her husband.

Markell resented it. He tried to complain to her, but she shrugged it off. She was seeing a psychiatrist, these days-it cost him $60 a week-but so far the head-shrinker had told her nothing except that her nothing except that her frigidity was a "hostility phase" that would require several years of intensive therapy to remove. The therapy had been going on for six months now, and the only result Markell observed was that Janet now had a fine new vocabulary to use when she explained why she didn't care to sleep with him on a particular night Now she could talk about "resistances" and "negative transferences" and a lot of other fancy things.

But the fundamental fact was unaltered. Their marriage was at a standstill. And, as a healthy and vigorous man still in the prime of his life, Fred Markell was determined to do something about it.

Lunch with Jack Donovan today was the first step. Donovan was always philandering. He was famous for it, infamous. It hadn't been hard to get him to bring the conversation around to a specific girl who was available to anybody who had the price.

And now Markell had her number.

He slid in behind his broad desk. His secretary came bustling up to him with the list of messages taken during his absence. Markell waved her aside.

"In a moment, Miss Falk, in a moment. I've got an important phone call to make first."

He spread the sheet of notepaper out in front of him on his desk. Donovan had printed the name ANITA, and a telephone number.

Anita.

Markell closed his eyes for an instant and saw her again, the dream-Anita, the girl with the pink-tipped breasts and the firm buttocks, the girl with the delightful thighs. The girl with the moist lips, the soft voice, the talented body. He bit his lip in desire.

Did the real Anita look at all like this dream-Anita, he wondered?

There was only one way to find out.

Markell picked up the receiver. He began to dial the number.

Jack Donovan's expression was a thoughtful one as he returned to his office, just east of Madison Avenue in the mid-forties. He hadn't expected quite that load of revelation from Fred Markell. They had been friends for many years, of course-since college days, as a matter-of-fact But still-

There were some things you didn't even tell a friend, no matter of how many years' standings. Like the business of your wife's being frigid. Of her not wanting to sleep with you. Of your needing someone else to find a hired mistress for you.

Those were things a man kept to himself. Unless, oi course, he was very desperate.

Donovan entered his office. His secretary, Judy, came into the room. Judy was a dark-haired girl of about twenty-five, who had been with him for two and a half years, and who had been his part-time mistress for all but about six weeks of that time. She had very large, solemn eyes, very large, interesting breasts, and the cutest Little bottom Donovan had ever seen.

She said, "Dick Sansom called you, Mr. Donovan. He'd like you to call back at-"

"I'll get around to it," Donovan said. "Later. Right now I want two favors from you."

"Sure."

"The first is to come over here."

The girl grinned, knowing what was on Donovan's mind. She came to him. He put his hands on her breasts, feeling the firm hillocks of flesh lying just beneath the thin fabric. He squeezed. He stroked her back, letting his hand roam downward. He put his lips to her cheek, and nuzzled along the line of her jaw, and playfully nibbled her earlobe.

The girl began to pant. "Shall I lock the door, Mr. Donovan?"

He let go of her. "No," he said. "I just wanted to fool around a little. Now you can do that second favor for me."

"Of course, Mr. Donovan."

"Go back into your office," he said. "And stay there. And keep my line clear for the next five minutes."

The girl looked a little hurt, and no wonder, since he had built up her expectations and then disappointed her. But she was smart enough to know that Donovan was no man to be crossed. Modeling, she picked up her pad and went out of the room.

Donovan lowered himself heavily into his swivd chair He delivered himself of a small belch. He had eaten too much and he knew it, but it was a pleasant feeling all the same. There was time to start reducing next week, he thought. Or the week after.

He thought about the things Fred Markell had revealed to him.

Janet is frigid, Markell had said. Janet is so busy with her outside hobbies that she has not time to sleep with me, Markell had said. That's why I need a mistress.

Donovan smiled. He knew enough about women to realize that when a woman stopped sleeping with her husband, it wasn't just a one-sided business. She usually had some good reason for it. Maybe she was tired of her husband's inept and amateurish lovemaking. Maybe she had grown bored with his bungling.

A frigid wife, Donovan knew, was a sure set-up for another man. Especially Janet.

He knew Janet. He had been best man at her wedding to Markell. He had suffered the agonies of the wedding night in his mind.

He wanted Janet. For ten years, he had wanted Janet. But she was his friend's wife.

Now that marriage seemed to be in trouble. At long last, Donovan felt free to make his move. He hadn't dared, until now. He hadn't been able to gauge the real situation between the Markells. But now he knew, knew that things were not well, knew that there was an opening into which he could move. Janet would be his. He was sure oi it.

There was a constricting band of tension across his fleshy belly as he thought of Janet Markell, nude in his arms; beautiful Janet, slim, dark-haired Janet-

He picked up the phone. He dialed the area code, dialed the home number of the Markells.

He listened.

One ring, two, three. Five. Eight.

On the tenth ring he hung up, and, out of characteristic cautiousness, dialed again, just to be sure. There was no answer this time, either.

Donovan shrugged off his disappointment. Janet was out-maybe at one of her organizations, a meeting of the City Cleanup Campaign or something. Or perhaps paying a visit to her psychoanalyst. No matter. He'd find her home eventually, if he just kept calling.

And in the meantime-

He pushed the buzzer on the intercom. "Judy! Judy!"

The dark-haired, big-eyed secretary came into the room. "Yes, Mr. Donovan?"

"I want a third favor now."

"Of course, Mr. Donovan."

He moistened his lips. "The couch-"

She smiled and nodded This was an old routine between them, now She carefully locked the door to his office She kicked off her shoes She lay down on the broad leather couch along the wall.

Donovan approached her He drew her skirt up, up over her waist She was wearing black, shiny panties monogrammed with a bright red heart.

Gently, Donovan drew the panties oil her. There was the paleness of her bare thighs and the straps of her garters. Judy smiled twinkingly at him She was a love machine, available at any time, and she knew she was important to him in that capacity. He lowered his heavy body to hers. He slipped his hands up under her sweater. She had loosened her bra, and he could put his hands right over the heavy globes of her breasts. He caressed them, and she started to sigh It didn't take much at all to awaken her, and he lowered himself still farther, possessing her.

Donovan closed his eyes, as he made love to her, but his mind was full of thoughts of Janet Markell.