Chapter 15

I took a brief nap, then a shower, and by then it was time enough to get over to the Hacienda Motel for my date with Brenda Corey. I was looking forward to it. If she was Philip Young's secretary, she might be able to tell me a little more on the human-interest side concerning Dad's mortgage with the bank for which she worked. I didn't much like the five-year-mortgage deal, and still less bald-headed Philip Young's hint that it contained this trickey little clause about payable on demand at any time. That meant that Fresno's answer to Yul Brynner could move in on my vineyards tomorrow morning, and if I didn't have the cash, out I went.

I sat in the lobby and waited. And then there floated through the swinging door an aching prick's dream. It was Brenda, wearing a blue faille gown which seemed so airy and transparent that I was positive I could see peach-colored panties snugging the oval cheeks of her highset backside. She had delicious long legs, nervously muscled all the way from ankle to upper thigh. And the gown did wonders for calling my attention to her titties, which were like hard, uptilting pears spaced rather narrowly together. She had styled her silver-blonde hair in a tantalizing guiche bob, with a very narrow and high-placed fringe along the top of that high-arching forehead of hers, and two huge pointed curls riding out along her cheeks about midway. It gave her a very sophisticated and chic look, and it was a fairly expensive hairdo. I know about such things because my cute little nurse back at the La Honda Home in Frisco was forever spending her wages on appointments at the beauty parlor, having her hair streaked, and I was dead set against it.

There were silver-lame pumps and charcoal-brown nylons of the very finest gauge, to complete Brenda Corey's ensemble. Also, she wore white gloves just past the elbow, and they were made of lace and net, and they did wonders for her slim, beautifully chiseled arms. Her fine carnation-skin was appreciably enhanced. An outfit like this cost a nice bit of change, and I wondered who Brenda Corey's angel was. On the other hand, she'd remarked she'd been left some money by her mother, and it was possible her getup was honestly come by.

She let me order, and we had blue points, a tossed salad with bleu cheese dressing, the best steaks in the house, and cottage-fried potatoes to go with, ice cream parfaits and cookies, and strong coffee. Again I asked the waitress for a bottle of Venturi wine, and again I got a blank stare, so I settled for another bottle of Beringer Burgundy. With our coffee, however, Brenda had a creme de cacao and I had a pony of twenty-year-old brandy.

Her voice was rich and contralto in range. Her diction was really elegant. As we kept chatting and fencing with each other, I kept wondering what in hell a smart bitch like this was doing in a town like Fresno, and especially working in a bank. She could be secretary to the president himself, and I was willing to bet she still didn't make more than four hundred bucks a month. I didn't know what kind of car she drove, but obviously since she had said she owned one, it must have cost some change somewhere. And no matter where she lived, she'd have to pay a fair to middling rent, unless somebody else paid it for her.

She lit a cigarette, and I asked if I might smoke a cigar, and lit it with her permission. Then very carefully I began to ask her about Dad's business and what she knew about it. It turned out that all she knew was that Dad had come into the bank a couple of years ago and sat down with a Mr. Restori, the fellow who had since gone East, and then her boss had taken over the deal. What surprised me was that there wasn't much more than ten grand left in Dad's bank account, and that didn't make any sense at all. I knew that he wasn't in the same class as Gallo or Beringer yet, but I certainly thought that after all these years he'd have accumulated a little more than that.

Then the conversation got back to the act of heroism which I had pulled off by stopping Tulio Verduga in his lustful attempt to rape her cousin Jane Wilson. I kept protesting that any red-blooded American boy would have done the same thing, but Brenda Corey was looking across the table at me, leaning on her elbows and staring with a rapt little smile. Her icey manner was a thing of the past, and the aura of her very subtle and very expensive perfume, together with the good meal we had consumed, had begun to make my prick throb and ache with longing.

"Well, Miss Corey," I concluded after I had finished my cigar, "you've been very helpful and it's been a very enjoyable evening. Where do you live?"

She looked at me and laughed softly. "You mean you're going to take me back home and not even make a pass at me? That's not in character, you know, Mr. Venturi."

This baby was a little too smart on the uptake. A girl like that could deflate a man's sails and reduce his ego to a great big fat nothing. Maybe that was one reason I didn't see a wedding ring or even an engagement ring on her proper finger. I said to her, "I didn't say that, you did, Miss Corey. But after all, I've only just met you, and for all I know you may be a wife and mother."

I saw a shadow cross her face, and her lips made just a tiny kind of grimace to indicate that the prospect was certainly repugnant to her. Then she shook her head: "I'm sorry to disillusion you, Mr. Venturi, but I'm still unmarried, and I'm also what might be called that rarity among contemporary females, a virgin at twenty-six." So my guess about her age had hit the nail right on the head.

"Don't be ashamed of that. Some of the nicest guys I know have married virgins," I said lightly. But she didn't even crack a smile. She was back to her old vigilant and wary ice-maiden attitude, as if she had gone too far with me already.

"Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Venturi. I just haven't had time for romance, as you might say. I had to work as a waitress in San Diego after Mother's death, and I just barely finished my schooling before she got sick. Mr. Young was very nice to offer me this job and bring me back home. I was born in Fresno, and went to high school here, and then I went to college in Santa Barbara for a while and finished up at San Diego, where my mother lived until she died. Jane Wilson happens to be the only daughter of Mother's sister, who also lived in San Diego-that's of course why Mother went there when she got tired of Fresno."

"Does Jane have a job somewhere?" I wanted to know.

"Not really, Mr. Venturi. Jane hopes to go to the University of California at Berkeley this fall and get her degree in English Literature. She might even go into teaching. She's a very unhappy and restless girl, and her mother died, too, you see, so she didn't want to stay in San Diego when I moved back here."

I nodded. I was mulling over all the facts I had assimilated today. And from the way Brenda Corey's face was tight and hard, I didn't think she wanted to continue the subject about her cousin.

After a while, I paid my check and walked out to my Thunderbird. Brenda Corey got into a new Plymouth parked just behind mine, so I turned to her and gaily proposed, "Want to have a nightcap before you go back to your place?"

"All right, but we'll have it at my place, Mr. Venturi."

I let her take the lead down the highway, and followed at a respectable distance. At night on the main highway of Route 99, the highway patrol boys are out to make more than their quota of tickets. If one of your lights is on the blink, if you seem to be weaving or following too closely, if you use your horn too much, or do a dozen other unmentionable things, you can expect to have a flashing blue light pull up near you and a siren telling everybody you've been a bad boy, and then a booted trooper gets out and pleasantly walks over to the side of your car and asks, very politely, if he may take a look at your driver's license. The Highway Patrol boys are incorruptible, and the worst mistake in the world you can make is to try to bribe em. I once found that out just after I'd got my first car and just after I'd left for Frisco. Dad had to come down to the pokey and bail me out, and then make me listen to a stiff lecture by a tough old sergeant who wouldn't have given a damn even if my father had happened to be mayor of Fresno.

It turned out that Brenda Corey lived about a mile to the east of the bank where she worked. It was in a two-story house, and she lived on the first floor. She told me she was renting it. That was possible. North American Aviation had laid off about three thousand employees in Fresno just before I had gone back to be with Dad on his deathbed. So people who had bought homes and moved here from the East or the Midwest had had to sacrifice everything, and you could rent a beautifully furnished house for a song. Making that song in Fresno, to be able to pay the rent, was another thing, and we won't go into that.

She let me in, turned on the lights, and I had to admire her taste. She had evidently put quite a bit of money into the furnishings, because she told me she had rented the house about three years ago, so it hadn't had anything to do with the layoff at the aviation plant, after all. She had brought hardly anything from San Diego except some silverware and household linens. There was a wonderfully thick wall-to-wall carpeting in the living-room, a magnificent low, wide, and very comfortable couch, several armchairs, a brand-new fireplace set decorating the stone fireplace, and other little touches which indicated that Brenda Corey was a pretty good interior decorator on her own.

She went over to a decanter on a sideboard in the corner of this big room, poured out of the decanter into two glasses, and came back to offer me one. I sipped at it and found it was excellent port. I couldn't quite identify it, however, except to be sure it was domestic and of exceptionally fine quality. She smiled at me as she sat down beside me: "Don't you recognize it, Mr. Venturi? You ought to. Your father made it about five years ago."

I flushed with embarrassment and sipped at the wine, and I understood that Dad had wrought better than he knew. If the old reprobate had been alive and with me in the room, he probably would have thanked Brenda Corey for her appreciation in a very bawdy way. I wasn't to be outdone, and in his spirit and in his memory, I put my left arm around her waist and brushed her cheek with my lips.

She didn't move, and she didn't shift her gaze to look at me, and she didn't say anything. The subtle perfume she was wearing was beginning to make my cock and balls twitch with a desire for action. I wondered how Madge Fryburg was making out, and whether she had decided to stay in her bungalow and postpone her vacation as Dr. Franklin had wanted.

I didn't tighten my arm around her waist, but I kept kissing her lightly all over the cheek and chin and jawbone and ear, and she smiled softly and let me go ahead. Suddenly she turned and let me have her lips. Thin though they were, and ascetic, nevertheless she had plenty of temperament. Her kiss burned me to my very marrow. My right hand groped for and found one of those pear-shaped titties through the blue faille.

"No, please don't, Carl," she said softly. She looked down at my hand and then looked back at me reproachfully. I got the point and took my hand away. Still, in the brief minute I had been allowed to salute her bubbie, my fingers had told me that it was wonderfully resilient and springy.

There was a soft flush to her carnation cheeks. "You have to be slow with me, Mr. Venturi-I mean, Carl," she murmured. "I've been so busy trying to make a living and absorbing myself with trying to learn about the wine industry so I could turn my few acres into something worthwhile, I haven't had much interest in or time for dating."

"No need to apologize. When the time comes for you to cat around, Brenda, you'll have plenty of males to choose from. Maybe there's somebody even at the bank."

"Don't be vulgar." She was key again. "There's nobody at the bank. They hire mostly young people, and the executives are all old and married or on the make, and I'm not at all interested. They're all stuffy. But it's a good place for a girl who's ambitious to get ahead and learn about financial matters."

"Oh, I don't know," I said flippantly, "if you should happen to meet a millionaire there, he could put up the cash for a bottling plant and all the processing you'd need to turn your acres into another Italian Swiss Colony plant. And you could do a lot worse. By the by, that's a very pretty dress you're wearing."

She nodded slightly, to acknowledge this tribute. Then she looked at me and said, "Do you think you could give Jane Wilson a job in your office, Mr. Venturi-I mean, Carl?"

"I don't see why not. I just fired a switchboard operator this morning," I said.

"It would be wonderful if my cousin could be in a real winery, and maybe you or your foreman could show her how wine is made and what's needed in the way of machinery and things like that I've just grown a few grapes so far, and Mr. Verduga said he would get one of his men to harvest them when the time came. I'm going to pay him, of course."

"No need to," I said generously. "I'll just give him an order to do the job on my own payroll. I've probably got labor enough. If need be, I can always put you to work trampling down the grapes in the vats. That's an old Venturi custom, you know. We do it every harvest-time."

She looked at me wide-eyed, and then she giggled a little. It was a sound I hadn't expected to hear, and it made her a lot more feminine. I tightened my grip on her waist, and this time I kissed her right on the mouth. For a moment her eyes flashed fire, and she pushed my face away. Instantly she was contrite.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Carl! I-well, I guess I wasn't used to anything like that. You'll have to put up with me. I told you you'd have to be slow and easy and gentle. I-I had a bad experience some time ago, and I haven't quite gotten over it."

"Sure, I understand."

"You really mean what you say about Jane?"

"Of course. You tell her to come to my office at nine, and I'll put her right on the switchboard. It's easy to learn, in case she doesn't know anything about it, and I'm sure the pay will be as good as I can manage it."

"You're very sweet, Carl," she said huskily. And then she did a simply amazing thing. She turned to me, and she put her right hand between my legs and reached for my zipper and drew it down and pulled out my cock. Then she stuck her other hand in the bodice of her blue faille dress, and came out with a scented lace-trimmed handkerchief. Then she began to frig me with the handkerchief. It was a trick that lots of high-school girls know about before they reach their senior year. It happens lots of times when a wolf goes out with a cute little chick who isn't quite sure enough of herself to let him go all the way, and yet doesn't want to walk home twenty miles by herself, or else get cuffed around if he gets importunate. So she just eases him of his load, and uses her handkerchief and her slim fingers so that she doesn't have to feel distasteful about touching his ugly old thing, and meanwhile he's having his kicks and thinking her the greatest that ever came down the pike. Brenda Corey was trying that trick on me; why, I didn't know, but just the same I liked it. She was looking down at what she was doing, too, absorbed in it, not even looking at me. Her lips were parted and slightly moist and her eyes were wide and humid. That dainty nose of hers was twitching, too. And those magnificent pear-titties were vibrating very nervously.

I set my teeth and closed my eyes and let her do whatever she wanted. I felt my seed gush out of me into the handkerchief, and then I heard a little gasp, and then she was mopping me up and stuffing my cock back into my fly and pulling up the zipper of my pants.

Then she murmured, "There! That's just to show you how grateful I am. I can't do any more than that, and don't ask me to now."

"My God, Brenda," I ejaculated, "I wasn't even thinking you'd go that far. It was wonderful. But you didn't owe me that."

"No, but Jane did. And I've always paid her debts. We went to school together, and we're very close. She's a sweet darling."

I wasn't exactly sure about this going to school together, because Brenda figured to be about six years older than the cutie whose back had been marked up by Tulio Verduga's switch. But I let that pass. I was a little befuddled by now, because I really hadn't expected to make too much of a pass at Brenda Corey, and here I had already had my ashes hauled, and I still didn't know what she looked like naked.

She got up then and poured me another drink, and I had a cigarette, and I thanked her for a very lovely evening and went on back home. I tried to call Madge Fryburg, but her phone didn't answer. Maybe she was out on a case. I had certainly been out on one. And I was more mystified than ever. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, and none of the pieces seemed to fit. And I didn't know how much longer I would have for the game before I could put everything together, and whether if I did, I could forestall the foreclosure. There had been something in Philip Young's manner to lead me to believe he was just the sort of double-dealing bastard that would smile at you while he faced you and try to sneak a dagger in your back at the same time when you least expected it. And don't ask me why, either, but I had the strangest feeling that Brenda Corey had decided to date me because of Philip Young.

Maybe it was just that I was too suspicious of everybody after my reception in Fresno by a guy like Don Foster. Maybe it was because I was lonely and a little homesick for San Francisco and the wonderful restaurants and theaters and museums, and the magnificent view from Twin Peaks, or driving over the Golden Gate Bridge late at night into Sausalito for a late snack at Ondine.

I couldn't get to sleep right away, and I lay on my bed and looked at the walls and the ceiling. Then I had a whimsical idea that appealed to me. When I got my belongings shipped back from Frisco, I meant to go through the issues of CORPORAL and also the Kama Sutra and make my own kind of wallpaper. I was going to put up illustrations from my spicy books, all over the walls of my bedroom. Then I would bring a cute filly up to my bedroom, after the proper preliminaries such as wining and dining and dancing, blindfold her and tell her we were going to play "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." Then I would spin her around, shove her in a direction, and tell her "Go, girl!" Then she would stab with her right forefinger here or there as the inspiration seized her. And when I would whisk off the blindfold, she would have to assume whatever position was indicated by the illustration her dainty finger had indicated. I could foresee countless thrilling possibilities. It was quite possible I could induce Madge Fryburg to get herself her second spanking in short order in the Venturi house, and this would be one which she herself would select. It was a capital idea, and I was so amused by it, I fell asleep.