Chapter 12
Henry Wadsworth had begun to do some checking in the immediate area of the Weirath mansion. A private eye has to be something of a student of human nature and at least an amateur psychologist, and Henry Wadsworth more than qualified. If it had not been for his alert mind on the night he visited Rose Marks just to get his ashes hauled, he could easily have been much farther away from solving the case of Sally's disappearing sister than he now was.
It was his theory that anyone as rich as Dr. Weirath certainly couldn't live like a hermit without someone's keeping some kind of tabs on him, even if it was only the newspaper boy or the milkman or the policeman on the beat or the neighborhood laundry. So, the very day that Weirath was changing fucking partners in favor of Ernestine Helms and to the disregard of his trusting private secretary Jan, Sally Durmont's handsome new boss was pounding the pavements within a radius of two miles of the Weirath estate.
He put out a few dollars here and there as bribes, and at the end of the day, foot weary and aching and in need of a good bath, a steak and a drink, though not necessarily in that order, he had gleaned an assortment of facts. Put together, they made an even more interesting pattern.
Dr. Weirath used a neighborhood laundry, and sent it out regularly every week, but there were certain weeks when the laundry seemed to be two or three times as heavy, and then there would be a period of maybe a month when it was minimal. So much for that.
The bald, bespectacled and rather grumpy newsstand vendor on the corner two blocks away from the Weirath house, after a two-dollar tip, relinquished the information that a very pretty red-haired young woman came out several times a week and bought up the various editions of the San Francisco and Oakland papers, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. The vendor smirked and winked as he mentioned the beauty of the girl, indicating that he wouldn't mind a piece of that "nifty, high-priced twat."
The nearest super mart also reported that the same attractive red-haired woman did the marketing for Dr. Weirath. The manager beamed when he spoke the name, almost with reverence. Oh yes, Dr. Weirath was an excellent customer, the very best. Always paid cash, often left a tip for the butcher or for the bagger in helping the young lady-his secretary, of course-get the packages out to the car. Bought only the finest brands, and had a lot of parties.
"Parties?" Henry Wadsworth repeated. "Well, I suppose he has a lot of friends."
The store manager had beamed again and nodded: "I should say so. Only the finest meat and brands in canned goods for Dr. Weirath and his friends. Why, only the other day, I got a call from the Doctor himself and he talked to my meat man, Leon. He's having a friend up from Texas, a real wealthy gentleman, and he wants to show this man we've got pretty good beef here too, you know. We'll have a standing rib roast for Dr. Weirath next week, and I'm going out of my way to tell Leon to ask the supply house to give us some prime stuff for a change-you know, the sort they have at the big restaurants here and in Frisco. Nothing but the best for Dr. Weirath."
All these facts, when totaled up, indicated perhaps nothing except that he had a pretty red-haired secretary whom he was probably fucking, and that he had a lot of wealthy friends whom he entertained in a lavish manner. And yet, beneath the surface, having already backed his hunch that maybe white slavery or even something worse was involved, Henry Wadsworth was just about sure that something was going on in that house when all those imagine people got together. It was a perfect setup. Oh sure, he could be quiet and respectable and buy his way around the neighborhood and win goodwill from the merchants, but who was to say what took place, maybe even in the basement of that big house? Henry had been reading a lot of lurid magazines and books lately, partly because his mind was on pussy ever since Sally Durmont had walked into his office. There were lots of kooky clubs around, and there were plenty in California. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility at all that possibly Dr. Weirath, the upstanding pillar of the community, was staging a few little private orgies for the amusement of himself and his well-heeled friends. It was an angle worth looking into.
There was still one more angle he wanted to check. It was too late on this particular day to go to the Hall of Justice in San Francisco and check with the Bureau of Missing Persons, but he was going to make a point of doing it tomorrow morning early.
He walked over to a public phone booth, dialed his office, and Sally's lovely voice responded, "Wadsworth Detective Agency, Miss Durmont speaking."
"Hi, Sally honey. It's me, Henry."
"Oh, Henry, is everything all right?"
"Just fine, honey. Now don't get your hopes up too high. I'm working on something and I don't even want to tell you about it, cause there's no use upsetting you till I get the facts. But I'm on to some guy who spends a lot of dough and has a lot of out-of-town friends and has a red-haired secretary that's a doll."
"Maybe that's Laura!" Sally excitedly came back at him from the other end of the phone.
"Nope. Sorry, honey. I took your sister's snapshots around with me today and showed them to everybody I talked to. It's not the same girl at all. I suppose he's got another redhead on the string, and they're probably palsy-walsies besides her working for him, is my guess. Why don't you call it a day and go home now? By the way, any messages?"
"Yes. Mr. Driner called and wondered if you had anything to report."
"That's great," he groaned. "I've already given him one report that his tramp of a wife was shacked up in a motel out in San Raphael with some guy young enough to be her son, but he still wants more evidence. What did you tell him?"
"That you weren't expected back until tomorrow."
"Good girl! And the first thing in the morning, right from my apartment, I'm going to the Hall of Justice. You just keep up the front, honey. Oh, that reminds me-give Mrs. Porter a call and tell her that I think I've got a lead on the brooch and Swiss watch that somebody stole during a party she was giving. A fence I know says he saw a brooch like that offered to him by some brown-haired gal, and as I recall, Mrs. Porter fired a maid who answers to that description a couple of days after she reported the theft. I wouldn't be surprised if that maid had hooked the stuff and was trying to peddle it. Translate that into English baby. Goodnight."
He smiled, and after he had hung up, he made the sign of a kiss with his lips. If he didn't feel so tired, he would have propositioned her for dinner and maybe a nightcap at his place. But it wasn't the time now. Maybe if he found Laura, she'd fall into his arms. Just thinking about her made his cock stand to attention, but he had already learned there was pleasure in prolongation and waiting. And if ever he did get Sally alone on a bed with no holds barred and the door locked behind them, neither of them was ever going to forget it.. . . .
When Henry Wadsworth visited the Hall of Justice the following morning, he spent three arduous and rather dusty hours going over stacks of reports on missing persons. Happily, he had a photographic eye and was able to wade through and discard most of the files. He'd done a favor for old Sergeant MacGrindrow a couple of years back, and the promise of a bottle of Haig and Haig Pinchbottle did the trick and gave him access to much more than the ordinary private eye would have been allowed to see.
At the end of three hours, he had two names, and the circumstances of the disappearance of both of these two girls, both extremely lovely, plus a curious feeling up and down his spine. The feeling was part of his hunch. One of the girls was named Ella Crandon. She'd come from Omaha about a year and a half ago, sent her aunt and uncle a couple of postcards from a sleazy rooming house on O'Farrell Street, and then there'd been nothing at all. Her aunt had been confined to the hospital and had finally died, and the uncle had continued to look around for Ella, with no success at all. The only thing that had given the uncle any clue was that Ella had written him on the last postcard about thinking she might have a chance at a job with a doctor, a retired doctor who was going to write a book about human nature. Ella had been a pretty good typist back in Omaha, she was twenty-two, dark-brown-haired, and had a very trusting disposition, the uncle had mournfully told the Missing Persons Bureau.
Too trusting, Henry Wadsworth thought to himself as he made some quick notes on a pad he'd brought along. That bit about the doctor made his Extrasensory Perception start working overtime. Dr. Weirath was listed both as a doctor of medicine and as a psychiatrist. Now, a psychiatrist might know a lot about human nature, and he might write a book about it. He might also hire a very pretty small-town girl who would be overjoyed about her job and who had only an aunt and uncle, and now only an uncle left. Once she got the job, there would be ways of getting rid of Ella, particularly since she hadn't revealed the name of the doctor whom she thought was going to be her boss.
The second case was just as intriguing. It concerned a girl by the name of Mavis Young, age twenty-one, from Abilene, Kansas, Mavis was tall, black-haired, had had two years of business school and an excellent record in high school. Her mother had remarried about a year before Mavis left home, and apparently Mavis didn't get along any too well with her stepfather. So one day she picked up and left, and the stepfather had found that he was about a thousand dollars short. One night Mavis had called her mother long-distance, after having made two previous attempts at calling station-to-station, when her stepfather had answered the phone both times, on both of which occasions she had hung up at once. But that one call had been completed and had left her mother reasonably sure that Mavis was calling from San Francisco. She had urged her mother not to worry because she was going to get a job as a private secretary to a fascinating man who had retired and who wanted to write his memoirs. He had lived in Europe for a time, Mavis had told her mother, and he spoke several languages, and was ever so considerate. She would write later on as soon as the job was hers. She had also pleaded with her mother to get rid of the stepfather and join her in San Francisco.
After that nothing. Both Mavis and Ella had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up. And here again the linking pattern was that from what little biographical information Henry Wadsworth had been able to find, according to the medical records Dr. Weirath had practiced in Vienna; a cultured Viennese was sure to speak a couple of languages.
They could just be coincidences, but the more he thought about those two cases, the more he got that tingling feeling up and down his spine that told him he was right. But you couldn't walk into Homicide or Vice and tell the hardboiled cops in charge that you were positive that a certain Dr. Weirath had made away with Ella and Mavis just on the strength of what he had picked up yesterday and what he had found wading through all these files of disappearances of attractive girls. And you couldn't get a warrant on such flimsy evidence, and still less could you go before a grand jury. No, he was going to have to have to catch Dr. Weirath with the goods, or maybe with his pants down literally . . .
Ernestine Helms had asked her wonderful new lover what he planned on doing with the red-haired girl who persisted in calling herself "Vilma." He had patted her on the bottom, winked, and said, "I'm going to see if a certain very wealthy friend of mine from Houston is interested in redheads, my dear. Don't you worry your pretty head about her. And then there's a certain owner of half a dozen dress shops in Dallas, who's just dying to buy a well-trained little slave, because she hates men worse than poison."
"Silly woman," Ernestine Helms had giggled, and then she pressed her body against his and gave him a long Frenchkiss.
After she had driven herself back home, Dr. Weirath went up to his bedroom to take a nap. Jan, biting her nails and pacing the floor, had waited for him to summon her to his study to continue giving dictation and discuss the plans for the forthcoming spectacle at which Jason Barnes would be an honored spectator. But he hadn't. Half a dozen times she was on the verge of impetuously bursting in on him and demanding to know just how much Ernestine meant to him, and just as many times she told herself she was acting like a little jealous fool, like a high school girl with her first crush. Finally, she was able to convince herself that perhaps, after all, he being such a sophisticated and much-traveled man, he was inclined to want a little variety now and then. Well, that was understandable. She would have to play her cards right and get him to marry her. Then she could dictate with whom he would do any fucking. She would see to it that such a girl was a slave, captive, forced to fuck under the lash and torture, not doing it of her own volition, not posing any threat to her, Jan Caldwell.
When he awoke refreshed from his nap, Dr. Weirath put on his robe and sandals, after having taken a quick shower and shaved himself. Then he telephoned his beautiful red-haired secretary on one of the intercom house phones, there being at least a dozen extensions throughout the house. He soothed her, told her that he would take her out to dinner at Fleur de Lys at about eight o'clock and that she could telephone for reservations. Jan Caldwell's suspicions were mollified, and at the end of the conversation she was whispering to him, "Oh darling, I've been so upset all day, you know-but maybe after tonight, we can be together more than we are? I said I was your slave, don't you remember?"
"Yes, did, my darling. I haven't forgotten that. I'm going to make your wish come true," he had replied. And after she had hung up, he chuckled to himself and lit a cigar. Oh yes, Jan Caldwell was going to be a slave all right. But only until he could get legal title transferred to a certain Houston multimillionaire.
He was in the cellar now, unlocking the store room in which the naked red-haired "Vilma" had been incarcerated. He lifted her up in his arms, and then carried her into the partitioned-off section of the huge cellar in which the loge seats and the stage and the paraphernalia of torture and whipping devices were located. Quickly he tied her wrists to the peak of a metal isosceles triangle, then squatted down and fixed her ankles to the widely-spread legs of the apparatus. She was thus spread-eagled, stretched tautly, her magnificent body shuddering, and as he removed the blindfold and then the gag, he murmured, "Now then, you stubborn little bitch, you're going to tell me more about yourself. You know, when you came here applying for the job as secretary, you told me a cock-and-bull story about your background. I didn't believe it for a minute. All you said was that you're from Los Angeles, but you didn't give your rightful name, and you didn't tell me who your parents are. Now you're going to tell me all these things, my dear, or I'm going to have to be very severe with you. You've had a taste of what can be done with you already, I think. Now then, in about nine days we're going to have quite a gala celebration here. A very select party of my particular friends. And if you don't tell me what I want to know now, I'm going to put you up on a stage, this very one you're on now, and you're going to be punished. Then you're going to be auctioned off and sold. Just the way they did in Europe and the Orient centuries ago. A slave who has to do whatever her master and mistress tells her, or else be whipped and tortured. Now then, my dear, let's start all over again. What's your name?"
"You can kill me, but I won't tell you anything," the coppery-haired, weary young woman gasped. She hadn't been fed since breakfast and she was thirsty, as well as weak from the tortures which Harold Buttridge and his niece Ernestine had inflicted upon her during that hellish weekend following her presentation on Dr. Weirath's stage. But she was still courageous and defiant.
"I'm sorry you persist in such stupidity, my dear. I know your name isn't Vilma. I'm much older than you, and I have a pretty good memory. I'm sure you picked up the name from that silent-screen actress who was with John Gilbert, didn't you? Vilma Banky. Very ingenious, my dear, but now the time for all this pretense is over."
Flinging off his robe, standing there naked, his prick beginning to harden at the sight of her voluptuous beauty, even though he had paid several tributes to Ernestine's insatiable cunt, Dr. Weirath now strode to a low teakwood table on which lay several instruments of flagellation. He stood there scrutinizing them carefully, then reached out his hand and picked up a long-handled bath-brush with extremely hard bristles, and gloatingly showed it to the shuddering young woman, then approached her and patted it lightly over her titties. The girl closed her eyes and stiffened herself, catching her breath.
Very carefully he began to pat each of her nipples, first the left, then the right, alternating in a monotonously regular pattern of horrid pain. The stiff bristles picked the dainty buds till they became dark and swollen with the afflux of blood. In about four minutes the naked young woman was groaning aloud, her fingers clawing the air and the metal peak of the triangle, and sweat rivuleted down her body from her armpits.
"Still stubborn? Well, I'm not tired at all, and you've such a lovely body and it's such a joy to punish it." His voice was husky and throbbing with rut now. He put the brush to her navel and began to pat it, with quicker and harsher blows. Soon the captive could not suppress her cries, and her face twisted restlessly from side to side, her eyes glassy and hugely dilated, her nostrils flaring and shrinking.
Pausing a moment, he lit a cigarette and considered her. To him, a woman's body was most beautiful when it was under the duress of a whipping or torure. To dominate and conquer, to subjugate and brutalize a sensitive and intelligent female, above all else, thrilled him as nothing else could. In his early practice, he had been fawning and servile, and many a wealthy woman had snubbed him and sneered at him, treated him like a servant even though he had had the title of "Arzt" (Doctor). Now things were different. Now they grovelled at his feet, pleaded with him, swore they would do anything in the world, endure the most ingenious torments he could devise for them. Just as he would punish Jan Caldwell for spying on him, thinking that just because he had given her the privilege of lending her cunt to his strong prick, she was his equal. Bah! She was a bitch like all the others.
Crushing out his cigarette under his heel, he now resumed the torture of the shuddering, groaning naked redhead. He began to spank the inside of her thighs from the knee to the crotch and back again with the bristled side of the brush. Sometimes the blows were quick, sometimes he paused interminably before applying the next one, and sometimes they were hard, with full force. Five minutes more of this, and the captive was shrieking aloud, twisting and jerking and writhing, all her nerves in flux, exacerbated and agonized.
"Well now, my dear, so far I've been rather lenient with you. I appreciate that dear Ernestine and her stupid uncle were a bit harsh with you, and that's why I spared you so far." His face hardened. "But unless you tell me what I really want to know, I'm going to have to hurt you. It won't mar your beauty, don't worry about that, but you'll feel real pain. It won't be the whip-you've had enough of that, I think. Have you ever heard of what the French did with their Algerian female prisoners when they wouldn't tell them what they wanted to know? Especially when it was about where the guerrilla forces were hidden. No? Well, my dear, I'm going to supplement your knowledge of history, then, shall we say?"
Chuckling to himself, he lifted the brush and gave her a last bang on her right tittie, right over the nipple and the aureole, and the victim shrieked and lunged, twisting her body in the most salacious way imaginable. Then, casting the brush aside, Dr. Weirath went to the back of the stage and brought back what looked like an electrician's toolkit. Opening it, he took out a small black box with several dials and levers, set it up at the back of the wall and taking its cords, plugged the prongs of the connecting fixture into a light socket at the base of the stage wall. This done, he delved into the kit again and came out with pair of metal clamps with tiny spiked jaws, attached to green-covered wires about ten feet long, which ended in jack plugs. These plugs he at once thrust into two receptacle holes in the black box, and then straightened and came towards the trembling, moaning naked redhead tethered to the triangle.
'These, my dear, are electrodes," he explained as if he were a professor lecturing back in the University of Vienna. "They can be fastened to any portion of the anatomy desired, as you see. One or both. That black box is a regulator of electricity. I set an indicator to a certain voltage, pull a switch, and after another dial has been set to regulate how long the duration of the shock will last, the person to whom these electrodes are fixed will suffer unspeakable pain. It isn't fatal, unless you've got a bad heart, and I've determined that you have not."
"Oh, you monster!" the girl groaned. "You horrible, unspeakable insane monster!"
His lips tightened, and his eyes blazed with savage fury. "You're going to apologize for those words, my dear. The name of Doctor Weirath is still highly thought of back in Vienna. My book on the law of the emotional synapses is still referred to by young students in the field of psychiatry, believe me. Oh yes, you're going to regret those words. Let's see now, where shall we place those electrodes. Oh yes, and there's another feature of the box. I set still another dial, and you won't know whether you'll be infused with electricity from one or both or none of the electrodes. It makes it something of a game, don't you think?"
He raised his right hand and applied the electrode's jaws, opening them wide, towards the young woman's left nipple. With a shriek she tried to throw herself backward, and failing to do so, twisted and writhed, while he cackled with joy. But she could not escape, tethered as she was, and at last the electrode clamped its vicious biting kiss against the already darkly swollen, bruised and pain-wracked nipple bud. A wild cry indicated the pain of that preparation.
"Now the other. Let me see. An even more sensitive place, of course. I have it-right here!" his left hand forced the jaws of the horrid metal clamp toward the soft pouting, delicately gaping lips of the captive's defenseless cunthole!
"Owwawwaahrrreeeeoyeowwww!! ! " The red-haired victim's shriek was clamorous, prolonged, till her throat choked with it, as she stared down at the long green wire extending to the black box beyond, and arched and squirmed, for the biting of the tiny spikes in the electrode clamp were probing the tender flesh of one of the labia minora.
"Your last chance, my dear," he chuckled as he straightened, his prick monstrously erect now, a blue vein throbbing in his left temple. "No? Well, you've only yourself to blame. I'm going to start it for five seconds. I'll tell you this now, and it will be the only time. After that, you'll have to guess, and whether I use both of them or just one. If that doesn't work, we can try putting both the electrodes in that dainty little brown hole of yours, my dear."
He walked back to the box, and the young woman shuddered, making mewling little sounds that were hardly human. Her mouth gaped, her eyes bulged, and they were glazed from all the merciless torment she had already endured and from this new horror which was almost too much for her mind to cope with.
He squatted down beside the box, glanced back at her with a mocking little smile, then moved the dial to the time-five seconds of current. A strong, healthy bitch like this could take up to about seventy-five watts before it became really serious. One girl-what was her name, oh yes, Ella something-had taken as many as a hundred in two ten-second bursts. He had to give her adrenalin, injected into the vein nearest the heart, before she'd come around. Well, she'd died anyway, after what she'd been through with that retired hunter and fisherman who'd had a little ranch in Doranda and who had bought her to work in the fields by day and to be fucked and whipped by night.
He thought he would begin on this little slut who called herself Vilma with just one of the electrodes, the one biting her nipple would do very nicely. He touched the switch and a low hum was heard. Instantly the young woman stiffened, her head flung back, and then with all her might she tried to jerk at her bound wrists high above her head and a thin, strident scream was torn from her, a scream that did not end until the current was turned off. Her body was bathed in sweat, and by now Dr. Weirath's prick was nigh unto bursting.
"I'll give you about a minute of rest, my dear, then we'll begin our little game. See if you can guess how long it's going to be next time and which, or both or none of the electrodes is going to carry the juice to you." Then he laughed bawdily. "I imagine you'll prefer the juice of a man's cock to this kind, you slut. But you've brought it on yourself, you know. And you've insulted me, a master in the psychiatric field, whose genius hasn't yet been recognized as it deserves by the world."
Grinding his teeth with fury in reminiscence over the thoughts his last words caused him, Dr. Weirath went back to the box and reset the dials. This time it would be ten seconds, and in her cunt, but only twenty-five watts. He touched the switch, and once again the purring, softly whirring sound was heard. And this time the naked redhead lunged like a dervish, swinging, twisting, tossing her hips, her eyes showing the whites as they rolled back, her nostrils shrinking and expanding hugely, her mouth gaping until it seemed as if the lips themselves must crack, while a raucous yell, bestial and inhuman, was torn from her. Her thighs made very effort to clench, as if by so doing they could shake away the spiked jaws of the electrode pinching her tender cunt lip. And then the whirring sound stopped and she sagged in her bonds, her bubbies rising and falling in a violent turbulence.
He came towards her slowly, lighting another cigarette from the pack lying on the table with all the whips. He raised the lighted tip towards her, and with his left hand raised her chin until her head was erect. Slowly, listlessly, her vacant, maddened gaze crystallized and fixed on him. Then she uttered a shriek and tried to lunge back. The smell of her sweat and of her urine came to his nostrils now. He chuckled again: "A very interesting reaction, my dear. Yes, that was just one, and it was less current, too. The next time it's going to be both, I promise you that, and I'll give you sixty watts through each electrode. You'll have it for ten seconds, and it won't be pleasant for you."
"Oh God, No! I can't-I can't bear it-it's too much-have pity-kill me no please-don't-not anymore-" her voice was faint now, panting, sometimes unintelligible.
He put the cigarette to her navel, just for a moment, and this time she jerked away, shrieking shrilly.
"Your reactions are just fine. You're a healthy bitch, and you'll bring a healthy price at the auction. It's this next Friday week," Dr. Weirath smiled. "Well, I'm going back to the box and reset the dials, my dear."
"Oh no-I'll talk-I'll tell you-oh my God, what a fool I've been-just because I ran awa-yand from him-he couldn't ever be so cruel-no matter what he was-as you-oh, you horrid insane beast-I'll tell-I'll tell!"
"Then do so without these insults of yours, you slut, or I'll let you have the current just the same," he hissed. He put his cigarette to the pulse-hollow of her throat, just enough to singe the soft, warm skin. Once again she cried out, and then she babbled.
"My name is Laura-Laura-and I ran away-from-my-from my stepfather in Los Angeles and you can kill me-but I don't want to hurt her-oh my poor sister-how could I do it to her-"
'That's enough for now, my dear. I'll let you rest a little. And I'll give you some food and wine. Later on, perhaps we'll go back to this. Just a stepfather and a sister, eh? Well, I'm patient. But first, you know, I really must have a little payment for all the trouble I've taken with you. You've really been very stubborn."
He crushed the cigarette under his heel again, then seized her by the titties and with a shout of overpowering rut, thrust his prick against her tortured cunt. She moaned and closed her eyes, whimpering, as Dr. Weirath forced himself into her to the hilt, then fucked her brutally.