Chapter 5
Charlie Aiken switched off his car radio and came to a stop in the motel parking lot. The lights on the huge neon sign blinked on and off like flame against the snowflakes. He shivered although he felt no chill.
He walked through the snow to the office. Rita, her teeth chattering, was waiting for him in front. She stepped into the light and put her hand on his arm. "I already registered us, your honor."
He grinned. "That's fast thinking, Missus Grimek. Which bungalow is ours?"
"I have the keys." She opened her purse and came up with them. "The bungalow keys were easy," she said levelly. "The car keys were a little harder, as you know. I hope I didn't embarrass you at that meeting."
Some comment was called for. "Not at all. I, eh, don't embarrass easily."
"I'm glad to hear it," she said, smiling vaguely.
The room was modern and clean. Charlie was pleased with the swift draft of warm air that met them at the open door. He held the door for Rita, then shut it behind them.
She wasted no time or words. After drawing the drapes and dumping her purse and overnight case on the bed, she took off her dress and folded it over the back of a chair. She drew out a negligee from her little bag and folded it over her arm. In the panties, bra and long silk stockings she wore, she suggested, suddenly, a high-class call girl. Why, Charlie wondered, had she been so eager for him? Was the manslaughter charge the whole explanation? He noticed again that her breasts were larger than he had at first imagined. Their fullness threatened to burst over the top of her tight bra.
"Let me make myself presentable, Judge," she said.
He nodded in fascination, watching her walk past him to the bathroom. The soft black hair rolled and shivered down her back with every step she took. Her rounded buttocks jiggled beneath the panties. She would be fat some day, but tonight she was ripe and lovely.
With faint amazement, he realized that he could hardly control himself. He felt simple physical lust with no involvement of spirit and hoped vaguely that the lust would see him through.
He stood in front of the mirror to undress. Not too bad, he said silently to his own familiar image. He tried to picture himself old, really old, but he could not. Part of him seemed to believe that he would be young forever. He credited abstinence from the aging vices-liquor, gluttony, laziness.
But beautiful women were different-they could keep a man young.
He hung up his coat and folded his trousers across the bar of a wooden valet. Even after he had stripped to his shorts, the room felt comfortably warm.
The mirror told him that some of the hairs on his chest, if not on his head, were turning gray. He frowned thoughtfully-he hadn't noticed the change before tonight. His eyes were cold and blue-except that now the cold look was somewhat in abeyance. Well, this was a date, not a trial of justice.
He sat down on the bed to wait for Rita Grimek, fretfully rose again, his flurry of lust on the wane. Odd that she should take so long. He peered through the window and saw flakes of falling snow. Just the beginning of winter-the end seemed years rather than months away. Charlie had never liked the cold.
Fifty yards away a car rolled into the parking lot and a man with a large commercial camera stepped out and locked the door. In the arc light, he read the name of the local paper on the sedan door. It's a trap, he thought in panic.
He turned with alarm just as Rita Grimek emerged from the bathroom.
The light behind her streamed around her luscious body, making her half-woman and half-goddess in the transparent negligee. He felt his breath catch as she walked toward him, her pointed breasts bobbing provocatively, her long black hair framing her sinfully beautiful face. The emotion he felt was part desire and part terror. Once more he glanced at the window.
The man with the camera was walking in the opposite direction, his attitude casual and rather tired, as though he had come to the end of a hard day's work. He didn't seem to have anything to do with Charlie's misadventure and Charlie slowly allowed his pent-up breath to escape his lungs.
Rita Grimek laughed with a soft hint of superiority. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were more interested in the weather than in me, Judge." She moved closer to him, scraping his chest with her nipples in a deliberate teasing movement of her round shoulders. "Do we really have to waste time talking about where I was last night and who I was with and what I was doing?"
Charlie trembled as she continued to tease him with her fingertips and lips and breasts. "No, I suppose not," he murmured, reaching up to part the front of the negligee and expose the twin peaks of her amazing breasts. He touched the nipples with his hands and then took firm hold, lifting them to meet his descending lips. He tasted lipstick and realized that she must have tinted them. The flesh was very warm and very firm and very musky in scent.
She leaned back, her fingers in his hair. "You're nice," she breathed, guiding his kisses. "I like a man who knows how to take his time and treat a woman the way she likes to be treated."
After a few moments of feasting on her ripeness, of ridding her wanton body of the negligee, of provoking her elongated nipples to rigid awareness, Charlie guided the naked brunette over to the bed. His lust had returned in force and with it, a searing impersonal sorrow. This incredibly lush and willing body had come into his experience but could never be a real part of his life. His work and his pleasure and his family and his sinning consisted of disconnected cases, appearing and disappearing one by one. There should have been a pattern, a continuity, but there was not. He was a disorganized man and he was living a disorderly life and he could neither change nor control either it or himself.
He tried to stop thinking and content himself in the wicked splendor of her legs and breasts and mouth. Rita Grimek was a most experienced woman and one who obviously had learned well from men the things that men most enjoyed. He found himself locked in erotic experiments that he'd never known existed and enjoying every moment of his abandon.
She was expert in everything she attempted and in everything she encouraged and he felt consumed by her, stripped of all volition and judgment, of everything but the capacity for pure physical feeling.
She made him change position constantly and her heated words goaded him to heights of virility that astounded him. The world became hungry red lips and silken black hair and moist pulsing flesh and guiding goading hands. Deep within her, he sensed a chill, like the snow falling beyond the cabin window, but the surface of her was red hot so he really didn't care that she might be feigning her pagan passion.
Afterward, he fell asleep for a while, comforted by her warm softness and fragrance. He awoke to the gentle caress of her hand and he lowered his mouth hungrily to her breasts instinctively. She allowed him the pleasure for a few moments before pushing him away from the glowing mounds. "No more, lover," she murmured smilingly. "It's getting late. Won't somebody miss you at home?"
"Sure," he bragged. "Everybody misses Charlie."
"Good for Charlie," she laughed, leaning over him so that her naked breasts hung down against his chest. "You know something? You don't look much like a judge right now."
He laughed and put his arms around her and drew her to him. "I don't feel much like a judge right now." He felt a need to know her better and he tried to show it in his kiss. When their mouths parted, he looked into her eyes. "Tell me about yourself, Rita. I want to know you."
She laughed and pushed the loose black hair away from her face. "I'd say you already know plenty."
"What does your husband do?"
"Stocks and bonds. He was in New York ail this week."
"Any children?"
"Two."
"Oh, I see."
She smiled mockingly. "Disappointed in me?"
"Who were you with last night?"
She ran her hands lightly and seductively over his naked body, her mouth teasing his chest. "A man. Want to know what we did? Want me to show you?"
Charlie started to speak but the words died in his throat as she slid her hot mouth slowly down his chest. He turned his head on the pillow and looked over at the mirror attached to the wall above the dresser. He saw himself and he saw Rita Grimek and the combined sensation of seeing as well as feeling ignited the fire of his passion. In the midst of it all, she paused to push at her black hair again and their eyes met via the mirror. The smile she gave him was the most wicked and sensual thing he had ever seen. Then her face was hidden from view again by the black hair and he knew he'd been foolish to bother asking her any questions. She'd told him no more than she'd wanted to tell and there was no point in her having told him any more. They were strangers and they would remain strangers after he dismissed the charges and set her free to return to her unsuspecting husband.
But in the meantime....
Charlie Aiken closed his eyes and surrendered himself to the newly discovered fringe benefit of his legal position. Beyond the window and hissing radiator, the snow kept falling on the motel grounds and nearby highway. It was growing colder as the night drew on but inside the motel cabin, the room temperature was mounting rapidly. Quite rapidly.
"Now!" she commanded, moving hungrily in the shadows. "Together!"
Charlie Aiken realized what was being asked of him. And he was only too happy to comply. It was only right that he reciprocate. The only thing that bothered him was that she hadn't given him very much choice in the matter.
But she was giving him pleasure ... every bit as much as she was forcing him to give to her ... so what did it matter who was master and who was slave ... what did it matter whose idea it had been as long as it was so delightful an idea ... what did it matter that somewhere along the line he'd lost control of the situation ... no, it didn't matter at all ... not at all ... not one ... tiny ... bit!
A wild hunch plus a cop's instinctive curiosity had brought Ben Argon out Route Twenty to the glorified roadhouse recently renamed Club Nocturne. He was out of uniform and he tried his best to remain as inconspicuous as possible as he weaved through the crowded and smoke-filled room to a corner table.
A youthful waitress in an abbreviated costume took his order while leaning over the table so he couldn't miss appreciating the plump fullness of her girlish breasts. She smiled and fluttered her artificial lashes and gave him a look of interest before easing away toward the bar. Argon tagged her for an out-of-town import and one who obviously supplemented her earnings as a waitress with an after-hour private enterprise. When she brought him the drink, he paid her and asked if Julie Miller was around. The waitress froze and then stated that she was due on stage in a few minutes. Ben scribbled a note, asking Julie Miller to join him for a drink after her number, and paid the waitress to deliver it. The young girl seemed unsure and unhappy but she disappeared into the crowd with the note stuck deep in the cleft of her powdered breasts.
Argon turned his attention to the floor show.
There was a redhead on stage, doing her version of the bump-and-grind to a blues number. She was short and flashy-looking and her belly undulations showed lots of practice, both professional and personal. The men in attendance expressed noisy approval but the women in the audience looked rather embarrassed as the redhead lost time with the music and struggled wildly to catch up.
As Argon looked away and lifted his glass, a small hand caught his wrist. It was the waitress. She smiled apologetically and set another drink in front of him. "I made a mistake," she explained, taking away the original drink. "Gets kind of confused in here on nights like this. Sorry." She was gone before he had the chance to ask her if she'd delivered his note.
The redhead finished her number and the emcee came onstage with a hand-microphone. Argon sipped the drink as he listened to the spiel introducing Julie Miller's specialty number. The lights dimmed and the music beat into a crescendo and the golden-haired Julie came into view, framed by a blue spotlight. She was wearing a white brocade gown that shimmered with her every step and her heavy breasts bubbled flirtingly at the plunging bodice.
Argon watched her dance movements grow increasingly more passionate and felt the audience moving forward to the edges of their chairs. Even before her fingers began to work at the hidden hooks of the gown, she had the men in the crowd frothing at the mouth. The music swelled and she turned her back to the room as the gown slid seductively down to the floor.
Argon grudgingly admitted to himself that she was good. He never would have believed that a stripper could have excited him but Julie Miller was doing a pretty damned good job of it. Watching the rhythmic undulations of her gem-studded buttocks, he found it difficult to justify the wild hunch and instinctive suspicions that had brought him to the club. They seemed totally impossible and he cursed himself for being a fool.
He drank steadily, never taking his eyes from the lovely young girl he'd arrested on a marijuana charge only a couple of months ago. She had turned again and her golden breasts stood out from her sinuous body like two unbelievably ripe fruits. Tassels dangled and danced from their tips and from her navel, adding to the illusion of sensuous movement. He forced himself to look at her face and decided he'd been right in arresting her. She looked high as a kite, stoned on either marijuana or something stronger. The pretty face was contorted in an agony of passion but the eyes were glazed and out of focus and remotely distant from what was happening on the stage. She seemed oblivious to the shouts of the men in the crowd, oblivious to the thumping accompaniment of the music, oblivious to everything but her own little fantasy.
She started moving toward the climax of the number and Argon wondered if it would give him grounds to close down the joint on a charge of indecent performance and illicit exposure. Then, even as Julie Miller began to sink backwards to the floor, her hips jerking to the music, the room began to spin and Argon felt himself losing contact with reality.
The last thing he saw was the floor coming up to hit him in the face.