Chapter 3
Charlie Aiken let himself into his house as quietly as he could. He dropped his coat on a chair and walked up the stairs. Once upstairs in the bedroom he put on his pajamas, feeling shamelessly pleased with himself. At least he was no stuffed shirt. The girl had been a wildcat. He flattered himself that he was a different class from the usual man she met. Perhaps he would have to warn her that their alliance could lead to nothing. Poor kid.
After tonight, of course, there would never be a similar incident with another woman. He had noticed pretty faces before in his courtroom. There were class distinctions even among prostitutes-in fact, especially among prostitutes. He could get some very fancy stuff if he let down the bars. Sometimes inherently decent women were caught breaking the law. And for their sake as well as his own he had better watch his step. A housewife booked for drunken driving and terrified of her husband's reaction, a career girl who could not afford to jeopardize her job-they needed all the understanding that a judge could offer, not his basest weakness.
There were so many laws that no one could go long without breaking one. There were laws against doing something and there were laws against doing nothing. You couldn't make a move without breaking a law. He supposed he himself had broken one tonight.
"Is that you, dear?"
He watched his wife turn over in bed. There was a splendor about her even in the shadows. Not an ounce of fat on her anywhere. A cloud moved somewhere and moonlight glowed across her breasts, molding their contours and highlighting the soft hollow between. Once those breasts had inflamed him and he still thought them among the loveliest on earth.
"Yes, Helen. What is it? I was trying not to wake you."
"I just wanted to talk to you. Kathy came home tonight."
He echoed, "Kathy? But she wasn't due home till Thanksgiving. She isn't in trouble, is she?" Trouble. In his present frame of mind, he was not quite sure what the word meant.
"I'm not sure," Helen said. "You can have a talk with her tomorrow."
Charlie Aiken nodded and continued preparing for bed, his thoughts still centering more on his wife than his college sophomore daughter. Helen was quite a beautiful woman in something of an old-fashioned way. Full-bodied even when in her teens, her figure had never lost its firmness. As could be expected by Whitebank standards and customs, she had never cut her thick brown hair until years after their marriage and then, reluctantly so.
As he sat down on the edge of the bed, her perfume rose to meet him and reminded him of Helen's penchant for oiling and creaming her body all over. At times, she literally glistened from the delicate ointments she used for tone and fragrance. During the early years of their union, she had often allowed him the pleasure and privilege of oiling her naked body after her long baths and it had been a wondrously exciting task. "Charlie?"
He turned and saw that her eyes were open and that her lips had a reddish-purple color. "Yes, dear?"
"I've been thinking."
"About Kathy?"
"No. About us."
"Us?"
A bare arm rose toward him. "It's been a long time, hasn't it? Weeks."
Charlie felt his head being drawn down to the grape-hued mouth and a terrible panic gripped him. The episode with Julie Miller had depleted his energies, both mentally and physically, and it seemed cruelly ironic that this should be the night when Helen would seek out his love. He was also afraid that she might somehow be able to tell that he'd been with another female and it was this fear that prompted him to avoid her seeking lips and target his kiss on the hollow of her throat.
The scented and creamed breasts beckoned and he moved lower to them, unable to avoid a comparison with those he had briefly known in the privacy of his chambers during the night. Helen's breasts were larger and rounder and softer than Julie's, but of course, due to the age difference, not nearly as firmly resilient. Still, they were wonderfully comforting and pleasurable to kiss and nuzzle.
"Oh, Charlie, darling," Helen breathed languidly, "you know exactly how to kiss a woman."
Charlie Aiken smiled unseen, taking pride in having received two such similar testimonials in one evening. "Thank you, my dear."
Helen Aiken was reacting to impulse and she knew it. Less than an hour ago, the off-duty policeman had accompanied Kathy into the house and his very bigness had both startled and excited her. Playing the part of the worried mother and grateful parent, she'd asked him to stay for coffee but he had refused and she'd felt a very tangible disappointment.
He had just wanted to be sure, he said, that the young lady was safely home. His calm brown eyes in his strangely attractive face had been gently, but totally accusing. He had stripped from her every shred of pretense. She had felt naked before him, guilty of neglecting her difficult stepdaughter.
And, even as her husband groped for her, she tried to imagine what it would be like with the big policeman. What a brute he must be, with wonderfully hairy chest and long, powerful legs, and muscular arms that could crush the breath out of her.
She was being childish, she realized. She was getting even with Charlie for being Kathy's father, by the phantom infidelity-and she was answering the policeman's tacit accusation by making him a partner in moral turpitude.
Meanwhile her physical being was snug and happy and lawful in her husband's embrace. She could not help but wonder what had made him so late tonight but thought it best not to ask. She listened to Charlie's labored breathing as he worked over her, caressing, squeezing and kissing her sinless body. His lips on her breast, his fingers on her warm thighs, delighted her and served her in the simple carnal dream.
His body moved to hers. In an explosion of sensual pleasure she closed her eyes and clung to the stranger's image, all the way to the end, her loins filled with quaking need. She was being possessed by Ben Argon but when she cried out softly, she was clutching Charlie Aiken's body.
She remembered Argon's brutal face. Marked with old scars, lips twisting as he spoke, eyes brooding and dangerous. She wondered if he'd be as good a lover as he was a good policeman.
Across the hall, Kathy Aiken gave up trying to sleep. Her mind was spinning, the grooves and the tune familiar. The blues ... the way-out blues.
She sat up, lit a cigarette and turned on her bed lamp, in exactly that order. There was a certain impudence to smoking in bed in the dark. She might fall asleep and set the mattress on fire. She always started to take the chance, then turned on the light. She leaned back against the headboard and let smoke rise around her head like a restless halo.
What a disturbing man. It had been amusing at first to tease him. Finally she had read the seriousness in his eyes. He actually had believed that she needed an escort and he had really given a damn about what happened to her. She hugged her dimpled knees, saying his name to herself. Argon. Ben Argon. Probably her father would feel that an ordinary policeman was not good enough for her. No one would make a fuss about the classes she had cut to hitchhike home from college, but they might fuss about Argon.
Kathy Aiken was nineteen, a student starting her second year at Avery College, with less sense of direction than she had started the first. She no longer assumed, for instance, that she would fall in love some day, get married and be happy, all as a matter of course.
She had gone with many boys and was now theoretically going steady with Arthur Jamison, a successful contractor's son. Occasionally of late, she had found herself hopelessly bored with Arthur. His boyish pawing was a nuisance. He was presentable everywhere-but after you presented him, what did you do next?
A girl had to feel she was cherished. She leaned back, staring at the ceiling. If sometimes Arthur's kiss seemed to have tenderness in it, she half suspected that her own imagination was responsible. She touched her breasts, remembering when Arthur had touched them-and had a feeling of impatience even with the memory. Argon would be something else ... those hands of his ... huge, strong, frightening.
What was the use? She would probably never see him again.
She looked critically across the room at the dresser mirror. Her eyes showed her lack of sleep. She released the red ribbon that held her ponytail and her blonde hair fell to her shoulders. The hair was a legacy from her mother, the real mother who had married someone more important than Charlie Aiken when Kathy was five years old-and who now was beyond both Charlie's and Kathy's spheres. She supposed she loved Helen, her stepmother. But it was her real mother whom she admired and envied and hated and felt divorced from-and longed for.
More sleepily than she realized, she returned in thought to childhood. How odd, as a small child, to feel you were unworthy of your mother, no matter how well you behaved, how hard you tried. But part of Kathy's mother, the physical resemblance, could never be taken away. The finely molded breasts, the long thigh muscles, the golden hair.
Half-awake, half-dreaming, she stubbed out her cigarette and slipped out of bed. She whirled, her hair swirling in the light from the bed lamp, as she performed a silent dance with an imagined partner.
Her bedroom was generous in size, comfortable in a standard walnut-and-ruffled way. Her stepmother had taken good care of Kathy.
Nineteen and still a virgin. Many of her girl friends had known men and were intimate with their current steadies. She envied them in a way. Passion was still locked inside her, yearning to be free. The right man could have reached her-still might reach her-if she ever met him-and if he wanted, really wanted her.
She fell back to the bed, stretching tautly. Soon something would have to replace the empty loneliness within her. Arthur Jamison was no answer, he simply did not know the real texture and meaning of love. And she had so much love to give, she sensed. It would have to be matched in return in order for her to be truly satisfied. But what if that kind of love escaped her? Could and would sex be a substitute?
Ben Argon's brand of sex, for example?
He'd be rough and masterful and domineering and there would almost certainly have to be pain mingled with the pleasure. Kathy shivered uncontrollably and rolled over to lay on her stomach and hug her pillow, feeling a bit ashamed of her thoughts. Perhaps it wouldn't be at all that way? His eyes had been so wise and his voice so firm and gentle at times. Without even trying, he had reached her, created an unexpected longing in her.
One reason was that she believed the things he said. She believed in so few people lately, her father and stepmother, her professors, her friends at school. They said whatever it was convenient to say, letting the end justify the tiny falsehoods. But Ben Argon was incapable of falsehood, that much she had sensed almost from the moment he'd approached her on the shadowed street.
Kathy sighed tremulously and closed her eyes and thought again of his hands and of how they might feel on her body, rough and heavy and yet capable and exciting. He'd be able to lift her as easily as he would a doll. He'd be able to toy with her as though she was a plaything. And if she displeased him, he'd be able to punish her as thoroughly as if she was a small child again.
With her mind still lingering on the imagery of being spanked and then loved by Ben Argon, nineteen-year-old Kathy Aiken slipped into a troubled and restless sleep.
Far across town, in a neighborhood not at all similar to Tennyson Circle, a middle-aged man woke earlier than he'd intended. And knowing that he would not sleep again, he rose from bed and padded downstairs to an old-fashioned kitchen in the house where he and all his brothers had been born and raised. He prepared coffee, scratching at his scalp, feeling a weary depression as the silence of the old house pressed down on him.
Al Rudd figured he had to be the loneliest man in the world. His folks were dead and his brothers had all moved away and he didn't have any real friends to speak of. The house was too big for him and his job too small. Every year he told himself he'd buy a new tidy house with a new tidy woman to match and yet every year he watched his dream grow more desperate and impossible. He didn't have enough money for a house and he didn't have enough to offer a woman.
He was dead and he didn't know enough to lay down.
Still, as long as he kept moving, kept dreaming, maybe there was hope. Miracles were known to happen, even in a town like Whitebank. He might still get that house and that woman ... maybe even a woman like that young Julie Miller he saw that night in court ... pretty and soft and juicy and....
Al Rudd sighed tiredly, wiped his palms on his soiled flannel bathrobe, and poured himself a cup of black coffee.