Chapter 2
A lousy thing to do to a hard working, well meaning young woman for a relatively minor goof, Delaney tells himself, but he was pissed.
Not just at her, but at the whole thing, the whole sordid, rotten mess.
Which, he reminds himself, is why he asked for this particular assignment from the state attorney's office-precisely so that he would be in an environment in which recourse to the courts is a last resort.
Delaney is not interested in piling up a record of convictions; he is not interested in making a name of any kind for himself, of assuming any more responsibility for the workings of a system that doesn't work than he already has.
So that he is quite pleased to be side-tracked, down a path which will help pass the time, prove mildly interesting, and, if not yielding a victory in which he has no interest, then will not hand him a defeat.
Which, he suspects, is his real reason for taking over this case, for relieving the investigator of all responsibility for it, even at the cost of reducing her already low self-esteem.
He feels himself relaxing, feels himself slipping gently down into his own prurience, his own salacious nature, like slipping into a hot tub.
Already, he gazes through eyes more mellow than cynical at the gritty hustle and bustle around him, at the aura of sexuality gone bad which seems to permeate the stale atmosphere of the dingy offices of the County's Sexual Battery Unit, that piece of specialized bureaucracy which acknowledges that every now and again in our society, sex takes a wrong turn.
What has always amazed him in all this is the degree of victim cooperation, almost of victim solicitation.
Which is another good thing about this case; Delaney sees no victims here, only complicity, again, unless this Murray's powers of persuasion are far greater than they appear.
And speaking of powers of persuasion-
"Good afternoon. Zuckerman, Roth and O'Connor."
"Lemme talk to Iz. This is Delaney, assistant state attorney, calling in regard to his client, one Murray Weiner. I really think he'll want to hear what I have to say."
"Howard! Been a long time. What's up? And before you say anything, my client had no knowledge of these girls' being, only seventeen at the time-"
"I know, Izzy. I'm looking at copies of their photo releases. He was lied to. The amazing thing being that they all put down birthdays exactly one year earlier than the actual blessed event."
"How about that for a coincidence?"
"Yes. We were all amazed over'here, let me tell ya. "But okay, he didn't know then, he does know now.
"Two ways we can go on this thing, Isidore, m'friend.
"Either we can pursue with a fresh warrant based on intent to distribute-that being the nature of your client's business, and all-pr, in return for dropping the whole nasty business, your client can cooperate with my office, weeding out those tapes which pertain to the sweet seventeen's and agreeing to their confiscation."
"My client, acting in good faith, has invested considerable time and money in-"
"We'll give him a letter, Izzy. Agreed valuation, and he can write it off his taxes, capital loss. My best offer, Iz, or we try him in the press.
"Remember Lydia Fuiham Halfway House and Sally?"
"He cooperated with the police-"
"But not with the press. Can I help it if some enterprising journalist has a long attention span?
"Come on, Iz. Freedom or trouble, and I hafta know now."
"You got it."
"Okay, set up a hearing, motions and stipulations in front of the judge of your choice, Iz, and lemme know who and when.
"Also, tell Murray to expect me and not to so much as think about being a schmuck about any of this.
"I don't wanna hafta get into non-cooperation."
"I'll put that in the stipulation in support of the motion.
"Besides, he's used to cooperating with the authorities, remember?"
"Fine, Iz. I'll just do the PR with the complainant and be back atcha, or you can get to me tomorrow, since it's kind of late."
"Whatever. Y'know, Delaney, that complaint was so bogus-"
"I know, Iz. That's why I've gotta get over there. Bogus complaints are the worst kind, y'know.
"They get no action when they think they should, next thing y'know, they're callin' Channel Nine Newsline and we got an investigative reporter in our faces."
"Do a good sell job then, Howard. My client's been through enough, lately."
"Poor baby," Delaney responds. "Be in touch. Ciao, Isidore."
One of those hopeless neighborhoods, this. Rows of ugly houses, useless spaces, the width of a man's body between them, wood and shingles, so-called lower middle class, but with price tags like mansions because of the way real estate prices have gone up, up, up, the taxes more like rent, as they keep pace.
Delaney finds the address, goes up on the porch, rings the bell.
"Yes?"
Housecoat over bod, glass in hand, hair combed this morning, probably, but not since, late thirties, Delaney would guess, a woman more sexy than beautiful or even pretty, rapidly going to seed.
"Diedre Collins?"
"Right."
"Howard Delaney, State Attorney's Office, assigned to the County Sexual Battery Unit, regarding your complaint. May I come in?"
She fades back into the doorway and he follows her wide, swaying hips back into the livingroom, where Oprah is holding forth on the tube, saying something with brows knit, making her look like an earnest female gorilla.
"Am I right on this, ladies?"
And of course, she is, as confirmed by the roar of the audience.
Even Diedre manages a muttered, "Damn straight," and this without even hearing the position. But then, Delaney supposes, that's the secret of Oprah's charm, that she is never wrong, whatever the topic under discussion.
"Ms. Collins," Delaney begins, sitting down with her on the couch, a coordinated movement, "as I'm sure you are aware-were aware at the time-your daughter had already passed her eighteenth birthday at the time the ... activity which forms the basis of your complaint took place."
"Yeah, so? What about all those other kids?
"She told me everything, y'know. Rotten situation, lemme tell ya. Somebody oughtta put a stop to it."
"That would be me, Ms. Collins."
"Please. Call me Diedre. After all, we're gonna be fighting crime together."
And she laughs, a throaty, Tallulah Bankhead deep alto, taking a sip from her glass.
"Drink?" she asks.
"Not uh, not when I'm on duty, no thanks."
She puts her glass down on the coffee table, saying, "Then I'm on duty too."
"Yes. Well, the fact is, Jane Rudolph from the unit to whom the complaint was originally referred made all the right moves-showing probable cause, filing an official complaint, getting an arrest warrant issued, and so on, based, as you say, on 'all the other kids.'
"Unfortunately," Delaney sighs, looking away from her, elbows on knees, fingers tented before him, "to a person, their parents or guardians have refused to cooperate."
And he turns to her, trying to gauge her reaction.
She smiles, picking up her glass, saying, "Looks like I'm not on duty after all, huh?"
She gets up off the couch, pacing the floor, elbows cradling her large, full breasts, nipples outlined beneath the thin fabric of the housecoat, glass tilted at a dangerous angle, but for the low level of its contents, saying, "I really thought I could make a difference, y'know? I actually thought that I could get back at the kind of scum who do this, who take young girls and, and make them do ... things."
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Diedre.
"Your daughter was one person, she was of age, she was paid for, for ... she signed a release and accepted payment.
"Surely, you must have known these facts at the time of your complaint.
"As for the others, well, while they are-or were-below statutory age, they were hardly innocent."
"Oh, I can well believe that, Mister, Mister-"
"Please. Call me Howard."
"I can very well believe that, Howard. Just as I can well believe that their parents don't want the matter pursued.
"Here, wanna see something cute?"
She puts her glass down, fumbles among the VCR tapes on the shelf of the TV stand beneath the set itself, inserts it in the tape player above the set, and pushes a button.
Instantly, Oprah is ,rippled out of existence, replaced by hot and heavy action on the screen between a handsome but not particularly well built man and a young woman.
"Know who you're lookin' at?" she asks, rejoining him on the couch.
"I'd guess that that was your daughter."
"And loving hubby number two. And she wasn't eighteen when this was shot, lemme tell ya!
"Check out the action! You just watch. They won't miss a trick."
And Howard watches as the girl on the screen apparently gives the man a blowjob, her head blocking the fixed view of the camera, obviously positioned on a tripod.
But there is no mistaking what happens next, as the girl assumes the classical position, centered on the bed, on her back, legs raised and spread, and the man, first grinning at the camera, mounts her, the pump action of his cock in and out of her pussy clearly revealed.
He fucks her this way, all the way, turning away from her after his climax to reveal, for the benefit of the viewing audience, his cock, long and straight and shiny, as he squeezes a last pearlescent drop out of it.
She stops the tape with the remote.
"And you had knowledge of this tape at the time?"
"Knowledge? Check this out!"
The tape resumes at the push of a button.
A white space, a black space, and then-
Three of them in the bed, there are.
Delaney raises an eyebrow, recognizing the pale, voluptuous form of Dierdre, flanking the man on one side, her daughter on the other, the three of them naked in the bed.
The man turns this way and that, now sucking Dierdre's tits, kneading and fondling them, now those of the girl, his cock growing harder and harder all the time.
They shift around in the bed, now. Diedre centering herself on knees and elbows, mooning the camera.
As the girl, on her knees and to one side, spreads wide the cheeks of Diedre's ass.
The man, grinning and waving into the camera in close-up, strides to the foot of the bed, puts a knee on it, and proceeds to insert his cock into Diedre's ass, the action muddled momentarily, but then made clear at the sight of Diedre's ass hole, now turned into a smoothly rounded orifice which sucks the man's cock.
"Sodomy, right?" Diedre, eyes on the screen, asks.
"That's uh, that's what they call it, all right," Delaney concurs, the crotch of his trousers getting crowded.
"I promised ya they wouldn't miss a trick, didn't I?" she says, sounding oddly pleased.
"They. Right."
"What was I supposed to do, Howard? He was my common-law husband. The house, my alimony-that all comes out of my divorce.
"And this bastard said that if I didn't go along with the program, he'd write and tell number one about all that was going on between him and my daughter.
"So what was I s'posed t'do?"
"I could have had him-"
"You could have had him arrested, tried, convicted, and out on the street in six months.
"Me? I'd be out on the street a helluva lot sooner than that.
"Look at me, Howard! I'm a housewife. No skills, no talents-other than that!"
She nods toward the screen.
"You think my first husband sends me money from the goodness of his heart?
"He divorced me! Y'know what the courts do to a husband who divorces his wife for the ever-popular incompatibility, Howard?
"They make him bleed, is what they do!
"And I loved it, loved every minute of it! It was all I could do t'keep from sending his new wife cards every holiday!
"Alimony plus child support he sent, every month.
"He came up in the world, never sees the checks.
"His accountant sends them, the child support stopping promptly the month Susan turned eighteen."
"Susan?"
"Yeah, Susan. Why?"
"You uh, you didn't actually see these tapes, any of them, that your daughter ... starred in, then?"
"No, why?
"Don't tell me they've got her full name in the opening credits."
"No, no," he replies, thinking that she must be the Susan of 'Staying after School' fame.
"Y'know, Howard, it's very easy to sit there in judgment of me."
That's very true, Howard thinks; but then, how hard could it be since there she is on the screen, getting fucked in the ass by her boyfriend as her daughter stands there beside them on her knees, playing with the cheeks of his ass?
"It's all in your point of view, Howard. Believe me when I tell ya, you had to be there to really understand."
"You went along with it all because he was blackmailing you with his threats," Howard says.
"Yes, that's right, I-"
She cuts herself off in mid-sentence, leaning back on the couch, looking at him, rather than the screen, saying, "You're really good, Howard; I bet when you get up in front of a judge and jury, you get a lot of convictions.
"Howard was blackmailing me, all right, but with more than threats-unless you wanna call being cut out of the action a threat.
"I mean, look at me, Howard, if you can tear your eyes away from the screen for a minute.
"I'm a big, good-looking, sexy woman.
"What was I to do-play housekeeper while my own daughter became Larry's live-in lover, or vice versa?
"So I had my choice there as well.
"Take it or leave it, but Susan was the essential one, the preferred one, and that's the way it was."
"You could have cheated on him."
"Oh, right! And what kind of an example would that be for my daughter? I consider myself a responsible mother, you know."
And Howard can only shake his head, looking down, not daring to glance at the screen, lest he find the contrast between her words of the present and her actions of the very recent past uncontrollably hilarious.
"Again, Howard, it's a question of point of view."
"Where is this Larry now?
"Gone. Long gone. Took his collection of tapes-those are all duplicates, by the way-with him. Went west, or so he mentioned to Susan, when he invited her to go with him."
"Is that where she went then-to join him?"
"I doubt it very much.
"She didn't just turn him down, y'know. It was a really proud moment for me, let me tell ya, when she told him exactly what she thought of him, once she had been with a-how did she put it? Oh yeah-a real man.
"Said if he had a problem with that, she'll call him up, have him come over and show Larry what that means the hard way."
"So he turned her down and took off."
"Then she was ... involved at the high school?"
"Some fucking high school, lemme tell ya. If sex was education, that place'd be a regular goddam university!"
"And she had her friends over?"
"Oh yes! Oh yes indeed! And not for pajama parties, either. Her bedroom was the Grand Central Station of cock."
"And you-"
"Went crazy. I was not gonna let my reputation go down the tubes any more than it was. So I had to stay down here, watching TV, watching-those tapes, while upstairs the real thing was goin' on."
"That must have been very ... frustrating for you, Diedre."
"Frustrating? Frustration is my whole life!"
"That why you filed the complaint?"
"Yes. I mean no. I mean maybe. Probably. I just wanted, I felt I had to do ... something, something to clean up the mess."
"That's ... understandable, Diedre; unfortunately, I have to face certain realities, among them being that your complaint, as it stands, is not actionable, in and of itself, under the law.
"As you say ... I'm a very good prosecutor, so I should know."
"And uh, what else are you good at, Howard?"
"Several things, matter of fact.
"Now, I have here a form, Withdrawal of Complaint."
Howard pulls this out of his briefcase.
"If you will examine it carefully-"
"How's about I examine you carefully, Howard?" Diedre says, placing a palm over the bulge in the crotch of his trousers, face close to his. He pauses, ballpoint pen in mid-air.
"Why don't we take care of this first, Diedre?"
"I will if you will, Howard."
"How can I possibly refuse an offer like that?" Howard asks, the world, reality confirming its yielding voluptuousness, reinforcing that hint of it he gathered, the moment Jane turned the case over to him.
She signs and dates the document unread.
Howard secures it in his briefcase.
Hand in hand, they go upstairs.
Form follows function.
Howard read that, heard that somewhere.
And Dierdre seems to be confirmation of that, her body seemingly created for one purpose, to which it is ideally suited, quite possibly, into the exclusion of all other purposes, all other reasons for existing.
A body in which a man could lose himself, Howard reflects, kneading and fondling her large, firm breasts with both hands, feeding them to himself one at a time, sucking the doorbells of her nipples which almost instantly become stiffly erect, rubbery.
Yes, he cannot seem to get enough of her breasts, even though there is more than enough of them.
Eagerly, hungrily, he devours them, wallowing in their glandular voluptuousness.
Because these are not merely Dierdre's boobs, but the confirmation of nature's sensual abundance, reality's solid support of his imagination.
He leaves his clutching hands behind as he descends her body, helping himself to mouthful after mouthful of her voluptuous flesh, tasting her, chewing her as he descends, going down, down, down-
Into her bush.
And the large but firm thighs raise and spread themselves as Howard places a hand on the backs of them, chewing her large, hairy cunt, even as his tongue traverses the slippery slit through the middle of the forest.
Yes and yes and yes! Howard shouts to himself as he strums her knob of a clit with the vibrating tip of his tongue.
Because this, this! is what it's really all about-all the sweaty, gritty, essentially trivial, intrinsically meaningless struggle of daily existence.
So that he could be doing as he is, so that he could be feeling as he is at this moment.
And if time is an endlessly flowing stream, then Howard wants nothing so much as to rise above the flow, higher and higher above this precise moment, giving it a perpendicular dimension, freezing it in time as he ascends up, up, up the ladder of his arousal.
And of hers.
Because yes, he is taking her with him, is merging with her, is leaving behind her crazy, defective thought process, is leaving behind the glaring flaws in her character, is overlooking, ignoring her rank and rampant stupidity.
Because form follows function, and of this fundamental truth she is the living proof.
And her function has nothing to do with what she has done, with her reasoning processes or lack thereof; rather, it is concerned with the generation of those sensations which even now make themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree within him.
Yes, it is concerned with that type of communication, with that language of raw, sensual feeling which is of the body, which is experienced by the body in behalf of the mind, which has no such facilities in solid reality, and which thus must give place to the body and to the feeling and the feeling and the feeling, which must surrender to the floodtide of lascivious sensation, which must recognize and yield to the rising level of his sexuality.
Which is mirrored in hers.
Which is combining now, fusing with hers, united in the closed circuit of sexual electricity which even now swells stronger and stronger, surging within them again and again.
As his tongue, long, thick, powerful, fucks her, exploring the hot, flowing depths of her cunt, rubbing back and forth over the engorged bulb of her joy buzzer.
Until his hard-on becomes insistent, painful in its intensity.
So that, responding to this physical imperative, he inserts his mighty marauder in, in, into her cunt.
Which sucks it with an articulation worthy of a mouth.
Which welcomes it, caressing it, clinging to it in warm, slippery embrace as he pumps her cunt, as he pistons in and out of her repeatedly, going faster and faster, forcing the both of them up, up, up the rainbow of their shared arousal.
And he rides her, with a dizzy, disoriented sensation of both being in control and of going along for the ride, as a force greater than himself, greater than both of them combined, explodes within him, blossoming outward, its pressure filling every part of him, exquisite, irresistible.
As the pleasure beyond pleasure absorbs, engulfs, sweeps away all that has gone before it.
And they don't have it; it has them.
So that now, they hover together at the peak of their capacity to contain it, and still it keeps coming, keeps welling up within their innermost depths to spread, to propagate, to stretch, to strain their safety valves-and to blow them.
So that they are coming and coming now, the spurts of his thick, hot, copious jism injecting themselves into the depths of her streaming, clinging, sucking cunt, in counterpoint to the spasms of her series of multiple orgasms, which milk his cock of the ultimate pleasure, even as they inspire it within him.
Thus do they zoom and soar together through the rosy empyrean of their shared sexual paradise.
Until, at last, their climax subsides, then ceases altogether, and they float gently back to earth.