Chapter 2
There seems to be, in every good girl's life, a guy like Chet Larkin. They come along, a friend of a friend, and they hang around and ask favors, and one thing leads to another and before the unsuspecting victim realizes it, he or she is deeply involved with a person they not only don't know too well, they don't even like. So it was with Cynthia Barret and Chet Larkin.
Chet was so smooth, so charming. Just when Cynthia felt he was getting too nervy, he seemed to sense it and would slip behind a smile and a laugh. "Just stopping by," he'd say, gallant and grinning. "like I promised Mike I would. If I make myself a nuisance, just say so."
Far from it, he made himself useful, replacing a leaking faucet in the kitchen when Cynthia didn't have the vaguest idea how to go about it. He willingly ran errands and gave her advice when something went wrong with her car. "Needs a tuning, that's all. Listen, if you'll pay for the plugs, I'll do it for you. I've got a tuning kit and guide. Take it to some garage and they'll really sock it to you. Come on," he would protest in an appealing way, "it gives me something to do."
He won Cynthia's trust in so many little ways. After a while, she began to relax around him, feeling that he really was a friend of her husband's and that he wanted nothing more than to be a good friend of the family. Gradually, Cynthia got to know him as a nice guy who was all alone in a big city. All alone and on duty watching the G.I. coffeehouses and other leftist activity in San Diego.
During the nights he sat and had a beer with Cynthia, he explained why he had to let his sideburns grow and why he had to dress as he did: in order to infiltrate. "I'm undercover for a while," he would say. "But it's got to be done. Never mind about me. Tell me what do you hear from old Mike?"
But always the conversation would get back to Chet and what he was doing. He would talk quite freely about some aspects of his work: just enough to excite the curiosity of Cynthia. He would make references to having spent the previous night at a party.
"What kind of a party?" Cynthia would ask, cocking an eyebrow. After all, Cynthia was young and attractive and except for such activities like bowling night for officers' wives, or an occasional card game with the girls, Cynthia's social life was sharply curtailed since Mike had been sent to Vietnam. She felt that she lived in a kind of limbo, except for his R and R in Japan when she had flown to Tokyo and met him and they had a second honeymoon.
But Chet would be annoyingly vague about just what kind of party it had been. However, he was always careful to plant two thoughts in her mind: it was the kind of party a girl like Cynthia would never go to, and it was because of his undercover work that he went to these parties. Then several nights would go by and Cynthia would neither see nor hear from him. Finally he would call, casually asking, "Hi. What do you hear from Mike?"
"The same things. Where have you been?"
"Around. What did Mike say?"
"First tell me why I haven't heard from you," she would demand with growing curiosity.
"Been busy. When is Mike coming stateside? Did he say?"
"Chet Larkin or whatever your name is," she would scold, thinking of him as a younger brother who was an enjoyable problem, "you tell me where you've been and what you've been up to or I'm going to hang up on you."
His laugh on the other end of the phone was easy and friendly. "I don't want to talk anymore where I am, how about if I stop by?"
Cynthia felt a thrill go through her body. She realized, even at that moment, he might be talking from some place where he was in physical danger or ... at one of those parties. And, at the thought of those "parties" he kept mentioning, Cynthia felt a thrill she hadn't anticipated. She felt it deep in her groin and it was not unpleasant. The teasing thought made her lips twitch in a smile: just what kind of parties did he go to "in the line of duty" and just what went on there?
A lonely girl, certainly not unattractive and constantly being propositioned or offered dates, she had to be on her toes. When Chet first came around, she had viewed his whole story with good-natured doubt. What harm would there be in her writing her husband asking about the existence of one Chester Larkin? She posed the question to Chet one night.
"Okay," he had responded softly, in a voice quiet and serious. "If you really have to know, I mean, really, you just write him a simple question. Ask him if he has ever known a Captain William Evers. Just ask him a simple yes or no. You just write him that," he went on, just as quiet and gravely as before, looking her in the eye as he said, "and remember his mail gets read and I'll be blowing my cover. He'll tell you about Bill Evers all right."
Cynthia had been impressed into silence and admiration for the way Chet seemed to trust her. It was a week before she saw him again. He'd stopped by to fix the venting on her dryer and she had said, "I wrote Mike asking him about you."
"Oh?" Chet took a long time taking out a cigarette and lighting it with a steady hand before he looked her in the eyes and asked, "What did he say?"
"He said that Captain William Evers was the best friend he had in Vietnam," she said, staring back at him.
Chet took a slow and even drag. "That all he said?"
"No," Cynthia said, "he told me that Captain William Evers-"
"-was missing in action," Chet cut in, finishing the sentence for her. "And that's the way it is, officially, anyway. You know," he said, smiling up at her, "fixing a dryer can work up a thirst. I think I earned a beer."
Chet, or Bill, or whatever his real name and identity was, became more like a younger brother as time passed. His admiration for Mike was boundless and he spent long nights over a beer, raving about him, telling Cynthia stories of her husband's heroics. Soon, any doubts Cynthia had about Chet or Bill was gone, forgotten behind a barrage of nice evenings when he had been helpful and kind. He listened to her whenever she admitted she was lonely and reassured her that Mike would come through his tour of duty unscathed.
And so their relationship grew and Chet began spending more and more time with Cynthia, coming over almost every other night. In her own mind, she decided not to make any further mention of Bill or Chet or whatever his real name was to her husband. For the record, he was missing in action.
Yet her natural feminine curiosity almost drove her crazy. She wondered about what kind of "undercover work" Chet did and if Mike would do any such work when he returned to the states, or even if he was doing any such work now. His letters seemed pretty routine. He spent his days at various airfields, flew some missions that he was vague about, and kept a billet in Saigon with another friend and officer. Each letter seemed like the last, except for a few minor changes about how much he missed Cynthia and guesses on how soon he'd be rotated back home.
Cynthia told Chet of Mike's letters, saying, "He wrote me asking why I asked about Captain William Evers. What do I tell him?" she asked, biting her lower lip prettily. She was afraid she had betrayed some military intelligence in some vague way.
"Just say that one of the wives was asking because her hubby wanted to know, or something vague and complicated and let the whole thing die on the vine," Chet suggested in a bored voice, glancing at his watch. "Time for me to split. I gotta get to one of those parties again."
"Yeah," Cynthia said jokingly, "and just what kind of a party is it you have to go to?"
Chet gave her a slow smile. "Kinda party I hope I never find you at."
"Why?" Cynthia asked, hand on hip, suddenly brazen, shocking herself with the way she was acting. She thrust one well-curved hip out and slowly shook it like a stripper. "Little hanky-panky go on? Something you're afraid to tell me about?"
The slow smile stayed on Chet's face as he put his jacket on. "Interested, aren't you?"
"Who, me?" she asked, suddenly self-conscious. "No, of course not. It's just that you're so mysterious about them, that's all."
He lowered his voice, even though there was no one listening. "Someday, when I know you better, I'll tell you all about them."
Chet Larkin, Captain William Evers-neither one was his real name. But if Cynthia had written Mike asking who Willy Catrano was, she would have gotten a quick reply. Willy Catrano was an army deserter and smalltime hood and black-market operator known to traffic in drugs and women. Chet, William, Willy, was really a pimp. Willy Catrano supplied girls for parties for a variety of reasons: it was lucrative and got him a lot of favors which had paid off well. He found it easy because he seemed to have a natural talent for creating a situation where a girl would let herself go a little. He had a natural flair for leading a girl on, interesting her, reeling her in slowly, easily, taking his time.
Also, he found he liked it. He couldn't give any logical reason-any reason that made sense, but he liked to see a girl get herself in a jam by exposing a little of her real nature and then exploiting and exposing that real nature for what it was: lewd obscene pleasure. Above all, more than anything in this world there was the type of person who loved and valued pleasure more than anything else. There was a type of girl who would do anything, debase herself in any way asked if she thought it would bring her some sexual pleasure.
Cynthia Barret was such a girl. Chet-William-Willy knew this. How he knew this was pure instinct. He didn't have a shred of evidence to go on, yet experience and a strong surge of instinct that told him Cynthia Barret was a case of walking wiggling dynamite. Properly ignited, she could be exploded into a sex bomb of megaton proportions.
Willy-William-Chet felt that it was going to be easy pickings with her, and so he took his diabolical time with her, stirring her sexual fantasies while stoking her gossip-prone mind. Bored, having little of interest in her daily life, she found herself hanging onto every word of Chet-William-Willy as he "let slip" a few things like-"Last night when the stripper got carried away..." or "I forgot. We walked in this room, see, and, like I say, I was pretending I was stoned so I didn't say anything when she turned the light on and there on the bed was these two chicks and this guy I recognize from the demonstrations and I almost laughed out loud."
Cynthia would wet her lips before asking, "What were they doing in bed?"
"Who? The guy from the demonstrations and the two chicks?" Chet would ask innocently.
"Yes," Cynthia would answer testily, "Who else?"
Chet shook his head in disbelief. "I don't know, baby, there was a lot going on there. I keep forgetting what I told you and what I didn't."
"You haven't told me a thing."
"like what?"
"like what was the friend doing in bed in the dark with those two girls?"
Chet would give her a smirk, reeling her in just a little more. "Same thing most everybody else was doing at the party."
Cynthia would give him a playful punch in the arm. "Come on, what were they doing?"
He would laugh. "Come on, want me to get dirty?"
Willy Catrano had been given a dishonorable discharge from the United States Army. He purposely worked servicemen's wives because they were, as he said, "easy pickings." Also because he had been in the service and because he knew of Captain William "Bill" Evers who was missing in action and was admired by all who knew him. He quizzed service wives constantly, picking up any and all information he could on what was happening in Vietnam. Once he zeroed in on a girl, he rarely missed recruiting her. Once he took her through the initial steps, once he tested her sensual response and started teasing their imaginations and set their curiosity and sensuality in motion, it was only a matter of time before he had them crawling the walls with all kinds of questions, each one more smutty than the first. Before they knew it, they'd find themselves with too much to drink and asking, "Take me to one of those parties-just to watch."