Chapter 1
Judge Austin W. Black leaned back in his chair as his Japanese butler Yoshio proffered a humidor. The white-haired, fat justice selected a Havana panatela, held it to his bulbous nose and sniffed appreciatively, then put it into his mouth, while Yoshio respectfully tendered a silver lighter until the end glowed red.
"An excellent dinner, Yoshio. My compliments to the cook," Judge Austin W. Black drawled. He exhaled a sigh of utter content. The good food and wine circulated delightfully in his system and he began to feel the rewarding sensation of vitality in his loins. Soon there would be exquisitely tantalizing pressures which would need relief. And the instrument of that relief was awaiting his good pleasure, in a little room on the second floor of his elaborately furnished mansion.
"Everything is arranged, Yoshio?" he turned to the wiry little man, with his monkey-like face, big black tortoise shell spectacles and sleek black hair. Yoshio Kimura had been in his service for a decade and knew his tastes and predilections so well that he could readily anticipate them. Yoshio was a treasure, and particularly invaluable for occasions like the one which was about to take place as soon as the justice had digested this fine culinary repast.
The little Japanese valet nodded and his eyes glittered with anticipation. "Whenever master give the word, everything ready," he laconically replied.
"Excellent, Yoshio." Judge Black took a puff at his cigar, examined the panatela critically, and then exhaled a wreath of aromatic blue smoke. Life was indeed good, and it promised to be still better.
He sat there until he had finished his cigar and another cup of coffee, then downed a pony of Grand Marnier which the valet brought him. He made a great ceremonial of taking the wide glass goblet between his hands, raising it to his sensuous, widely flaring nostrils and savoring the bouquet before even sipping. And when he had finished it at last, he belched and rose from the table. He had looked forward for five years to this little reunion with Edith Garvin.
Five years ago, Austin W. Black had been state's attorney of Jurgens County, in the southwestern part of Arkansas. And Edith Garvin had been his secretary. The office force had comprised about a dozen girls, of whom Edith was by far the most tempting. She was petite, about five feet four inches in height, but her body was that of a ripe, full-blown Venus. She was then twenty-five, but from her prudish and reticent behavior and attire, one would have believed her a middle-aged spinster.
Edith Garvin had dark brown hair which, at the time, she had worn in a prim bun at the back of her head. Her face was exquisitely rounded, with large, widely spaced dark brown eyes whose constant expression was always mournful and wistful, as if their owner feared adversity in even the smallest details of the mundane life she pursued in this unexciting and not overly-paid job. Her nose was a trifle snub, with rather broadly spreading wings, and her mouth was small but quite ripe and tremulous.
She wore glasses, which further emphasized the intellectual qualities of her personality, and it was true she was extremely efficient and rarely spoke even to her associate.
But Austin W. Black, even in those years-he was then approaching his fiftieth birthday- was connoisseur enough to see beyond the austerity of Edith Garvin's attire and personality, and to covet the physical treasures of her opulent body. Her skin was warm olive, and even though she wore dresses whose skirts invariably lowered to midcalf or at least below the dimpled round of her knees, they did not quite conceal the ripe jut of round, spacious buttocks nor the closely spaced cantaloupe-like globes of her bosom.
Her application blank had told him very little about her life or habits. She had filled out the dates of schooling and of birth: she was single, she had been born in a small town just west of New York City, and had come to Arkansas after having worked two years in Springfield, Illinois, as a file clerk. Her reasons for this move were to be reunited with a distant second cousin on her mother's side-her parents had died some years before-and she had gone to night school to take up shorthand so as to qualify as a secretary. She had been working for him exactly eight months, and he had attempted on several occasions to invite her to dinner, only to be courteously but firmly rebuffed each time. Then, one never-to-be-forgotten Friday afternoon during vacation time, when most of the other girls in the office were already away, he had found himself alone with Edith Garvin.
He had emerged from his private office and stood transfixed with lustful admiration as he watched her bend over a file cabinet with her skirts drawn tightly over the ripe, full, poutingly inviting cheeks of her behind. Unable to resist the salacious impulse, he had tiptoed up to her and goosed her.
Edith Garvin had let out a wild shriek, literally jumped a foot away, and then whirled and struck him furiously across the face, hysterically exclaiming, "How dare you do a filthy thing like that to me, Mr. Black? I've never been so insulted in my life! I'm giving you my notice right now!" With that, she had walked out of the office, and returned only to pick up her check. She had steadfastly ignored his apologies and his promise that if she remained, he would never give her further cause to be offended. She had turned her face away as she had blurted out that under no circumstances would she ever work for him again.
That had been five years ago. And since then, Austin W. Black had become judge of the Municipal Court of the town of Catayunga, which boasted about six thousand inhabitants, a newspaper known as the Catayunga News-Gazette, and two small but quite modern hotels.
One might wonder why two hotels would be built in this small and not overly attractive Southern town. The answer was that they provided accommodations for many out-of-town guests and visitors, people who came to visit Judge Austin W. Black not only at his home but also at the women's correctional and penal institution known as Welfare Island.
This institution had its name because it had been built on a small strip of land in the midst of a huge and stagnant creek. It was about thirty miles from Catayunga and located in a desolate area; there were no farms around it for a radius of at least ten miles. The creek formed a kind of moat, so deep that only the best swimmers could make it to the island and back to the bank of the creed. This in itself was an excellent recommendation for the construction of a penal institution.
Fortunately for the taxpayers of the vicinity, Welfare Island had cost them very little. There had been a curious edifice greatly resembling a medieval castle which had been built about twenty years ago by an eccentric millionaire who had lived there along with a staff of servants, a lovely young wife and two even more beautiful young maids who were her companions. Strange rumors had floated back from the inhabitants of the then little hamlet of Catayunga, but nothing had really ever been done about investigating them, since the owner of the castle had kept savage dogs patrolling all around the outside of the building. He had also built tall grilled metal fences eight feet high, circling this strip of land completely, sturdy enough to withstand the years and the elements. Some five years after he had acquired the property and built this outlandish and unique edifice, he and his wife had been killed in a plane crash over the Swiss Alps, and after that the castle remained deserted. The owner had had no heirs.
Accordingly, the property reverted to the county, and Judge Austin W Black had acquired it for a virtual song about four years ago, only to sell it back for a staggering profit when the legislature decided to build a new women's prison. The newly elected Judge Black had gone before the state legislature to argue that here was immediately available, with no expenditure necessary for building, a fortified castle which was stronger than any modern prison, protected by the moat-like creek all around it, as well as the high fence. Add to this security guards, and the state would have a ready-made institution which would be escape-proof and also have the further social grace of locating the female criminals and vagrants in an area which would not disturb decent people.
He had ingeniously arranged for the existence of a dummy corporation, which made the state a low bid-but enough to guarantee him a staggering fortune-and the transaction had been affected.
The castle had about the equivalent of six modern floors, together with an enormous cellar that ran throughout the castle, and below that a substantial sub-cellar. Judge Black had spend a good deal of money over the past few years remodeling these two cellars into "recreation rooms," into arenas with loges built all around them on a rising incline, and special experimental chambers, some with one-way glass sections in the wall, so that he and his friends could watch unobserved the sexual antics of the performers in that chamber.
He had also been instrumental in recommending that the legislature approve as superintendent of Welfare Island one Dr. Marjorie Sayers. She was the ideal woman for the job, he argued. And with hardly a dissenting vote, out of gratitude for the money he had saved the state, the legislature approved this singular woman as head of a prison which in reality was being ingeniously and secretly altered into a kind of training school for future bondservants, slaves, and potential prostitutes intended for the many houses of the crime syndicate throughout the country.
For Judge Austin W. Black was venial and corrupt, but he was also shrewd in business affairs. As state's attorney, he had had occasion to prosecute a number of minor hoodlums of the syndicate, and he had come into contact with the higher echelon. When he had been appointed to the bench, he remembered those contacts and had sought out those powerful men and made a deal with them.
An attractive girl upon whom the syndicate had designs could be apprehended in this county, brought before Judge Black and sentenced to ninety days as a vagrant, in this correctional institution. When the ninety days were up, she would go out of there not a free woman but a subjugated hireling of the syndicate, if she were not bought on the auction block by wealthy amateurs who paid a fortune to the corrupt Judge for the privilege of witnessing her debut into as depraved and complex a carnal servitude as ever flourished even in the days of the robber barons and the pre-Civil War era of black bondage.
Thanks to his powerful alliance with the lords of vice and crime, Judge Austin W. Black had been able to trace Edith Garvin five years after she had walked out on him. She had apparently gone to New York City, worked for an insurance company there, and became engaged to a mature and somewhat prissy schoolteacher in his late forties named Ben Rosenzweig. At thirty, Edith Garvin was about to marry, and when Judge Black had heard this news, he had worked out a scheme to bring her back to settle the score and to wipe out the insult of that slap. A private investigator had visited Edith Garvin in New York to inform her that she had become heir to a sizeable fortune and that she would have to go back to Chicago to claim it. The story was plausible and the documentation was convincing: Edith Garvin had had a second cousin, apart from the one she had visited in Arkansas, who had migrated to Australia about ten years ago. Supposedly, it was this cousin who had left her the inheritance.
Suspecting nothing, the beautiful secretary had boarded the train with the investigator. As soon as they arrived in Chicago, he had put her into a cab, and that was all she remembered. The cab driver had been hired to meet that train. Edith Garvin had been chloroformed, the taxi took her to a chartered plane, which in turn conveyed her and the investigator back to Catayunga and thence to the mansion of Judge Austin W. Black.
Edith Garvin, upon awakening from the drug-induced coma, had found herself in a windowless room, absolutely soundproofed, narrow, and whose only furniture had been a hard, narrow cot, a little wooden footstool and a straight backed chair. Yoshio had visited her twice a day to bring her food and water, had entered and left without a word in spite of her frantic and hysterical supplications to be told where she was and why this was being done to her.
A week had passed since Edith Garvin had been abducted and brought back to the house of her former employer, then a state's attorney, now a judge with virtually limitless power in the disposition of delectable female flesh. Tonight she was going to embark upon an adventure which not even her wildest dreams could have conjured up ... an adventure which was to begin the saga of Welfare Island and affect the lives of many in an almost unbelievable way!