Chapter 5
Henry Wadsworth, the handsome, good-natured private eye who had just hired Sally Durmont to be his secretary after accepting her case and helping her find her missing sister Laura, had been heated up by the appearance of the beautiful creamy-skinned, black-haired young woman. It had reminded him that since his breakup with Peggy Follansbee, about three weeks ago, he hadn't had a piece of pussy at all. And the way Sally had walked out of his office, her lovely bottom undulating against her tight skirt, had left him with a very considerable hard-on. So that evening, he decided to accord himself a treat. First he had dinner at Grison's Steak House on the corner of Pacific and Van Ness Avenues. Grison's had the very finest beef in town, but it wasn't California beef. Out there, they served at the butcher shop what they called "Manteca," which simply meant that it was fed on grass or on whiskey mash, and what you have to do is cook it by steam, not by boiling. It was tough and unpalatable and expensive. Not that Henry felt that he was in the chips right now, but somehow he had a premonition that from now on in, everything was going to turn up roses for him. Sally's unexpected appearance in his office had given him that very inspiration.
But the trouble was finding pussy when you wanted it, not when you could get it. With Peggy, that Southern bitch had been prone to stand in front of him, wearing just her bra and panties, her arms around his neck, arguing that he was a damned fool to stand up for "Niggers" and "Jew-boys," and all the time she was rubbing her crotch up against his crotch and driving him crazy. Up until their breakup, he had tried to be practical and realistic about the matter. He knew she wanted it as badly as badly as he did, so he had just shrugged and said that maybe he would learn, and finally he had talked his way into getting her to take off those panties and give him pussy.
What he really wanted to do and never had had the guts to do it, was to take her over his lap, pull those panties down and spank that sweet ass of Peggy's until she howled and apologized for all her nasty racist cracks. There was enough trouble in the world without having a pretty girl add to it by mouthing lies and ancient prejudices which she had probably picked up in school or maybe even from her parents without realizing the implications of them. If people would be more careful about what they said, this might be a better world in which to live.
But that was enough philosophy tonight for Henry Wadsworth. After enjoying a magnificent steak, a bottle of wine, some cheese shortcake covered with strawberries and two cups of scalding black coffee and a strong Havana cigar, he walked out into the foggy night of San Francisco and looked around hopefully. Naturally he didn't expect to see a hooker walking along the street. The police had just about run those out of town. But there was one place, he knew, where he might just be lucky enough to get a tip that would lead him to a girl's apartment, and that girl would be working for the syndicate and he would have to pay for it, but he needed it bad right now. His prick was already aching fit to kill, just remembering how Sally had looked, so hopeful and grateful, when he told her he was going to hire her while at the same time working on her sister's case and not costing her all the money she had left.
Then he thought of a still better idea. He had a contact, a florist named Rudy Chipender. Rudy had a little shop over on Judah, near Ninth Avenue. Rudy was almost bald, short, with a constant twang to his voice, and when he wasn't selling flowers, he was in the back of his shop playing a guitar and trying to make up a song which he hoped one day would make him famous and get him out of the rut of penny sales and nasty customers who always wanted something he didn't have and didn't have the money to pay for what he did have.
Rudy owed him a few favors. A gang of toughs had tried to break up Rudy's store about a month ago, and he had been passing by and had had a blackjack in his pocket from another case in which he had almost gotten mugged himself by the angry lover of the wife whose husband was paying him to track her down and catch the two of them being naughty together so he could get a divorce and marry his secretary. It was a nice cosh, as the English called it, and he had got it from some wino on Mission Street for the price of a bottle of cheap muscatel. It had come in very handy, especially in a dark alley on a foggy night like this.
So he had gone into the store and routed two of the hoodlums and the others had run away, and Rudy had been almost weepingly grateful. He had said that if ever Henry needed a favor, just call on him.
Well, tonight was the night. He needed a favor very badly. He needed to be steered to a willing girl with warm and yet muscular thighs who could house his hard-on and haul his ashes and leave him with a certain peace of mind he had lost ever since Sally Durmont had entered his office.
Rudy was just closing up to put out the "gone to supper" sign when Henry Wadsworth walked in, puffing at a cigar. Rudy always ate late, because there was last-minute business for newspapers, which he also handled as well as flowers, and Henry suspected that Rudy ran a bookie joint on the side. It was true. Rudy had a friend downtown on Turk Street who worked upstairs of a massage parlor and rented a little cubbyhole with a couple of phone lines to the tracks. Rudy got two percent commission for all the bets he took in, and every bit helped, what with rent going up the way it did.
"Come on, I'll buy you a hamburger and coffee, Rudy," he greeted the bald little florist. "I want to talk to you anyway."
"Sure, Henry, anytime. Gosh, I still can't get over how you made all those hoodlums leave my store. I'll bet they were armed. What if they'd had guns and knives?"
Henry Wadsworth shrugged good-naturedly. "Then I might not be here to buy you a hamburger and coffee, that's all. Come on, dope, time's a'-wasting!"
Two blocks down on Parnassus, there was a little Italian all night restaurant, and soon Henry and Rudy were installed in a booth at the back. Rudy sighed nostalgically as the cute little black-haired waitress took their order and hurried toward the kitchen. Her bottom-cheeks were jiggling under the tight black short satin skirt that she wore, and her saucily rounded calves jiggled too. "Man, what wouldn't I give for a roll in the hay with that one!" Rudy was saying.
"Friend, you've touched on a nerve," Henry chuckled. "You remember you promised me a favor?"
"Just ask it, Henry, you've got it."
"All right. I know this sounds as if I'm trying to make you out to be a pimp, but what I need right now is a girl. I've got the hots, Rudy, and
I've got them bad. Some girl came in from Los Angeles, wanted me to find a missing sister. Thinks there might be foul play or something like that. I wound up hiring her."
"You dope!"
"Oh no, she's got dough in the bank. Half of it belonged to her sister, though, and the bank doesn't really want to divey it up until they find her. That's part of my job. The other part is, with a girl like that around me all the time, I might just get the notion to make it something permanent. Is she a looker!"
"So because she's a looker, you got a hard-on and you want your ashes hauled, is that it, Henry?"
"Rudy, you oughtn't have been a florist, but a mind reader with a crystal ball," Henry Wadsworth laughed as he offered his friend a cigar. "Now listen, I'm serious. I'm really hot. You remember Peggy? Well, that was a long time ago and I haven't had a piece since. Know anybody who could be available?"
"Most of it's paid stuff," Rudy complained. "But wait a minute, there's just one girl I know, she's in the shop a couple of times, I know she's a hooker. Only she's not a streetwalker, don't misunderstand me. I'm pretty sure she happened to mention that she lived in some nice new building down on Green Street near Van Ness. Her name's Rose. On the bell it's R. Marks."
"You're a lifesaver, Rudy," Henry Wadsworth chuckled as he rose, crushing out his own cigar. "I better get cutting because she might just be dated for the rest of the night. Here, I'll take that check, I told you I would."
"Thanks a lot, Henry," Rudy Chipender called gratefully after him. But Henry Wadsworth had already paid his check and was walking swiftly out of the restaurant in search of a cab that would take him to Green Street and Rose Marks.. . . .
He was in great good luck. The apartment was a five-story and reasonably new building, not too far from the Marina District where all the rich swells lived. He had rung her doorbell, and after a minute a voice filtered down to him, "who is it?" He had called back, "Business, and I'm heeled." That had been the magic password. The buzzer had sounded, he had gone up on the self-service elevator, and now he was inside Rose Marks' apartment. She was wearing just a blue satin quilt robe and flurry blue mules to match. She was also delicious. Even though her dark-brown eyes showed a kind of boredom with the world because of her ancient profession. She couldn't have been more than about twenty-four, and she had a gorgeous figure. The quilt hugged it, shaped it out. Her titties were widely spaced, almost great big pears. Her bottom was enticing, with widely oval, firm cheeks and a quite sinuous crease between them. She wore a hairpiece and it seemed to match the rest of her naturally chestnut hair, but he wasn't so fond of that. Henry loved to run his fingers through a girl's hair-now Peggy, for one, had had really wonderful long hair. It was an advantage too for the male when he was wooing a girl. All he had to do was grab her by the hair and drag her off to bed for a fuck when the argument got too heated. The only trouble was, he hadn't practiced what he preached so far as Peggy was concerned.
"I don't know you, Mister," Rose Marks's face seemed to freeze and her eyes were colder than ever.
"There's a fellow by the name of Rudy, a florist, an old buddy of mine," he began.
"Oh yes, him! Well, you're lucky, I'm not booked for the next hour. How do you want it, straight, or French or maybe even a little Greek culture?"
"Let's play it straight to start with." Henry Wadsworth dove out his wallet, made a few mental calculations, and then took out three twenty-dollar bills. "Will this cover for an hour or so?"
"I'm pretty sure it will. If I need more, I'll just ask you," was her practical answer.
Henry Wadsworth laughed. He liked this girl, she was open and honest and aboveboard.
"Or maybe," she went on as she held out a pack of Pall Malls to him, "you'd like to get your kicks by spanking my butt. Or maybe my spanking yours."
"No thanks, but I'll save that idea for future reference," he said good-naturedly.
You know, Mister, I don't think that all the kooks are up in Los Angeles. I think a few of 'em have drifted down here. Do you know, last week, I had a couple of wealthy Johns, both the same time, they paid me double. They wanted to double hole me as I stood between them. So I let them. But they started to talk about a certain special house out in Oakland, something with Masks to it-I didn't get it all. Seems they could go there and get just about anything in the world they wanted and they didn't even have to pay for it, except dues. And there they said they could whip girls whenever they wanted to."
Henry Wadsworth felt his heart beat to bursting point. This was really his lucky day. A brilliant idea just entered his head. If there were organizations which practiced white slavery, what was to prevent them taking advantage of a naive young girl who didn't know her way around San Francisco and of luring her to work at the place they were hiding out at just to get their hands on her. Stranger things than that happened in the detective business.
"You know, Rose, you're really terrific. Until I got up here, I didn't really realize how much. Will this help me realize it more?" he asked now as he again took out his wallet and added two more twenties.
"Honey, for this sort of dough, I'll lock and bolt the door and nobody will come in, not even the Mayor, till midnight. That do you any good?"
"We can only try," he chuckled. A few minutes later, Rose had shed her bra and panty set, and stood in just a black narrow satin-elastic garter-belt whose narrow tabs clung lovingly to the tops of her black opera-length mesh hose.
"Tell me about those customers you had, the ones who talked about a club and masks," he urged as he stretched on his side before her, his hands going at once to her bare titties and beginning to love them up.
"I didn't get too much, see, Mister? The one fellow was sort of old and the other was sort of young, and they were talking something about letting a girl go on and not worry about anything, and then one night to take her down in the rec room and give her the works and see just what made her tick."
"Masks," he repeated. It was bothering him. Because he had a blinding hunch that here he was on to something, on the track that would lead him to Laura Durmont. "I don't suppose they mentioned their names or where they lived?"
"Well, one fellow's name was Bruno, I know he must have been a Nazi, the way he talked about how wonderful Hitler was for the German people. I almost spat right in his face. Only that I'd been in the hospital with the flu and I had a lot of expenses, you understand?"
Henry Wadsworth stood up, took out his wallet from his trousers pocket, the trousers having been neatly draped over a chair beside the bed, and took out still another twenty-dollar bill which he laid on the top of the table. "That's for you, Rose baby. Now try and see if you can't remember something about those guys. Their names or what they were doing or whatever. It's really important."
She studied him a moment. "You know, I think you're telling the truth. All right. I guess maybe either the fellows related or they knew themselves from business or something, but anyway the older fellows was saying that Friday nights were really big in Oakland and that some doctor-darn it-I can't remember his name. I'd remember it in a minute because it's so unusual, if somebody only said it."
"What about this doctor?"
"Well, he owns the house. And he has also some cute girls down there in that house, wherever it is, and from what I gathered, the older fellow said that those girls could give them whatever they wanted and it was funny to have to pay for pussy in a place like this. That sort of got me mad. Oh, they paid me good, but there was a messy bother to the whole deal. Now who are you trying to find, cop?"
"I'm not a cop, Rose, I'm a private eye." His hands fondled her big opulent naked titties and he exchanged a long passionate kiss with her.
"You sure you couldn't remember this doctor's name they were talking about?" he pursued. Rose Marks shook her head, then reached out her hand and took his prick and cuddled it gently in her soft warm palm. "For the life of me I can't right now. You show me a phone book and say some names, though, I bet I could get it right off. It's unusual," she murmured.
"My gosh!" Henry Wadsworth gasped as he sprang up out of bed, naked except in socks though he was, and hurried over to the telephone table. Rose sat up, frowning at him: "What the hell are you doing, honey? Don't you want pussy?"
"Later. Pussy I can always get. But I want a fellow that has stolen a kidnapped girl-and she's probably a virgin."
"Lot's of luck," Rose said sarcastically.
Henry Wadsworth had picked up the classified section of the Oakland phone directory and was thumbing through the yellow pages for "Physicians." His practiced eyes ran down the columns, looking for unusual names. As it chanced, Dr. Helmuth Weirath had, out of his own ego, had himself listed under that category as well as under the heading "Psychiatrist," otherwise it is theoretically possible that Henry Wadsworth's luck wouldn't have been recorded on this particular night in Rose Marks's pad. Suddenly he stopped, put his thumb against a name, and turned to the naked call girl. "Hey, baby-how does this sound-Dr. Helmuth Weirath."
'That's it! Now I remember, it was so foreign-that's it-how in the world did you pick it?"
"From your lots of luck wish, that's how. And baby, just for that, not only are you going to get the fucking of your sweet young life, but I shouldn't at all be surprised if you earned a little tip besides. Get yourself ready, I can feel myself ready to burst!" Grinning from ear to ear, he strode masterfully towards the bed.