Chapter 8

I went out and took it at the desk. I told the operator we'd accept the charges, and Lane came on. "Mr. Chatham?"

"Yes. How did you make out?"

"Okay," he said. "So far, of course, it's mostly just the poop from the newspaper files of last November-"

"Shoot," I said, reaching for something to take notes on.

"Strader's full name was Albert Gentry Strader, he was thirty-five years old at the time he was killed, and if you were looking for a good one-word description of him, bum would probably do as well as any. Not a crook or a hood, however, just sleazy. No criminal record, aside from a few misdemeanors like an occasional D&D, assault and battery, and a drunk driving or two. FBI had nothing on him. His trouble was women-if that's trouble. Big, good-looking guy, probably oversexed, good front, easy manner, and lazy. It's nine hundred miles round-trip from Miami to Galicia, and there's never been any doubt in anybody's mind that when he drove that distance three times in two months, it was a woman. He called himself a salesman, but he wasn't much good at it, from all accounts.

"Came from a pretty good small-town family in upstate Louisiana. Played football in the military school he went to in Pennsylvania for four years. Flunked out his first year at Tulane. Went in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, and got into an electronics school, and was a Radioman Second when he came out at the end of the war."

"He wasn't in subs, by any chance?"

"No. Jeep carriers, it says here. First showed up in Miami in 1946, disc jockey at a small radio station. For a while in 1948 he was shacked up with some racy old girl running a string of horses at Tropical and Hialeah. Apparently lived around here most of the time since, selling cars, real estate, boats, and so on, but not exactly burning up the course, as I said. He wasn't here continuously, you understand. There's one small gap he seems to have been in New Orleans, and he had a couple of traveling jobs for short periods. In the fall of '53 he was selling PA systems and motion picture projectors to lodges, schools, and so on, working for a Jacksonville distributor with a northern Florida territory. Then in '55 and early '56 he was traveling Florida and Georgia for an outfit called Electronics Enterprises, but I don't know what he was selling. Just a boomer, you see. Usually shacked up with some woman who helped support him.

"At the time he was killed he was working for a real estate outfit called Wells & Merritt in the northeast part of town. Dwelling sales, and rentals. So there's practically no chance at all he could have gone to Galicia on business."

"No record he ever knew Lang?"

"None whatever, and they dug into it for weeks. They were in different worlds. Lang was a pretty big wheel, till he smashed, and Strader was a penny-ante type that couldn't have bought his way into that crowd."

"How about the first Mrs. Lang?"

"Another nothing. No connection at all. Don't forget, Miami's a pretty big place. And, of course, where they really went to work was on the second Mrs. Lang, the widow. For obvious reasons. I mean, they had it made. Strader went up there to see a woman, presumably a married woman, and he winds up killing a husband, with a woman known to be with him while he was trying to get rid of the body, so where do you look? And in seven months they've come up with exactly nothing. She simply wasn't his cup of tea. She was a medical lab technician with no money except her salary, and she didn't run with any gay crowd. I think the way she met Lang was clipping those wires to him to take an electrocardiogram."

"Okay," I said. "I suppose they gave up long ago on the angle Strader was hired for the job?"

"Sure. In the first place, they couldn't find anybody who'd want Lang bumped off. The insurance went to his thirteen-year-old daughter. There was some bad feeling between him and his first wife, but what would she stand to gain? She already had the divorce, and a good chunk of the money. He'd made no particularly bitter enemies in business. He wasn't a chaser, and had never figured in any scandal. And even if somebody did want to hire a trigger man, why Strader? He was no hoodlum, and nobody ever starts out in crime as a professional murderer. Also, there's the way Lang was killed, being hit on the head. That's too much work for a pro. No, that angle was out from the first."

"All right," I said. "Right at the moment I don't see any lead to follow, but take another run at him tomorrow. Maybe you can find out what he was up to during those holes in his employment record. See how many old girl friends you can uncover, and where they are now. I gather there were no letters in his stuff, but did they check long-distance calls?"

"That's right; there were no letters. But there were two toll calls from Galicia. And in both cases they were made the day before he drove up there. No lead. They originated at pay phones."

I nodded. "Smart baby. Well, call me back this time tomorrow."

I went back. Ida Lang was sitting up in bed with her arms around her knees. "Have you had anything to eat yet?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I just woke up about a half-hour ago."

"How about having dinner with me?"

She smiled. "I thought you weren't going to let me out of bed."

"I'm not. Do you like steak? That's the only thing I know how to cook."

"That's not exactly the kind of meat I had my mouth set for," she said softly, the pink tip of her tongue appearing and sensuously wetting her lips as she stared pointedly, with unmistakable meaning, at my crotch.

"Jesus," I breathed. I was getting more pussy lately than I knew what to do with. My prick had no such problem, though. It stood right up at attention at the thought of getting inside the one woman I wanted far more than any of the others.

"Don't tell me that living in San Francisco turned your head around, Chatham," she said slyly. "Your eyes might say no-no, but there's yes-yes in that muffin-stabber between your legs."

I laughed. "It's not that-it's just that I tried to avoid coming on with you, knowing how sick-"

"I know precisely what's wrong with me, and you've got the only sure cure."

Maybe she was right. Frustration could take it out of you. And when she opened her robe to reveal her pale nakedness, all thought of refusal or even delay was blown out of my mind. Sick and underweight though she might be, she looked even better to me than the incredible Mrs. Redfield.

Ida's tits were high and firm and perfectly formed, with big nipples that stuck right up and said hello. Her skin was pale as polished marble, and as perfect. As I knelt on the bed beside her and stared in hungry fascination, I could see the fine tracery of blue veins beneath its translucent surface.

"I wanted to talk business...."

"I could suspect you of anything, except being a bore," she sighed, reaching up and pulling down my head for a long, languorous, open-mouthed kiss.

"It's not that," I said, coming up for air. "It's not that-I want you, too, it's just that I don't want to get the two things mixed up, to make you think-"

"I'll talk business with you, I'll be as prim and dignified as you like, if you promise to fuck me. Now!"

It was an offer-an order-I couldn't refuse, and I felt like a dope for wasting so much time when I had what I wanted before me on a silver platter. I shucked my clothes in record time while she peeled her robe all the way off.

While we stripped, I kept my eyes on her furry cunt, just as pink and pretty and desirable as could be. Even though I'd had more than my share of hair pie for one day, this was rare vintage pussy, and my lips went down to it like a hungry dog to his dish. She flung herself back on the bed, groaning and giving herself up completely to the delicious sensations as I tongued my way around the long, leaf-shaped convolutions of her prime pussy. The taste of the slick confection had a special delicate flavor all its own that Josie or Mrs. Redfield couldn't match.

"Oh, God, where did you learn to eat like that?" she moaned, running her fingers through my hair while I ran my tongue through hers.

I knew it was a rhetorical question, and I didn't want to tell her about my recent refresher courses, so I just kept right on eating, lifting her by her ass as a thirsty man might lift a big brimming bowl to his lips.

Good as it was to eat her, much as I would have loved to fuck her lovely face, I was overwhelmed by a burning desire to give it to her properly, long and lovingly, and her wish seemed to be the same. She twisted around in my embrace, presenting her trim rounded rump to me.

"I just love it from the back," she said. "Fuck me from behind-ream me out good-give it to me!"

Before I did, I gave her delicious ass a thorough lip-loving, running my tongue up and down the deep, salty cleavage between her cheeks, around the pink button of her asshole and down to the cleft peach of her cunt again. She wiggled up on her knees, twitching her delightful butt in anticipation.

At last I knelt up behind her and guided the head of my hard cock where my tongue had just gone, down between her buns. I hesitated for a moment at her asshole, knowing from my close examination that she was an anal virgin and wanting desperately to remedy that unfortunate situation, but that could wait until later. I rubbed it with the tip of my tool as if staking out a claim, and something about the way she quivered her delicious ass told me that she approved my claim as I hurried on.

My cock sank into her like a rock into a sea of oil that rapidly formed a second skin, as tight and as comfortable as the first, for a rampaging tool. I jammed it home until my pubic hair was jammed into the crack of her ass and began to give her the reaming she wanted.

I began to realize that this was just what the doctor would have ordered if he'd known his business. Ida was starved for screwing, and each stroke seemed to bring her a renewal of health and strength. Her motions became surer and firmer, her skin began to glow a healthy pink under its fine sheen of sweat, her grunts and groans of deep satisfaction weren't the whimpers of a sick woman.

I started off slowly, still careful of her delicate condition, but I gained confidence from her obvious blossoming under the thrusts of my rigid prick. I built up the tempo until the bedsprings screamed, their chorus supplemented by the rhythmic slap of my belly against her ass and the sucking squish of her hungry cunt as it bubbled its hot juices around my plunging, humping dick.

I had all but forgotten about her luscious breasts in my almost total concentration on her fantastic cunt, but now I remembered them and reached forward to cup them in my eager hands. They were every bit as taut and firm as they looked, and their perfect contours seemed to have been designed for my fingers. It was as if her tits and her cunt had been made for me alone, as if I had at last found what I'd been missing all these years.

"Don't forget my clit," she urged. "Play with that while you fuck me."

It was downright painful, taking one of my hands off those melon-heavy, strawberry crowned breasts, but I made the sacrifice and put my finger on the trigger between her voluptuous thighs. It felt so tight that it might burst at any moment, like a tiny sausage on a red-hot griddle, and the instant my finger caressed the hard little nubbin she began a spasmodic bucking and a bone-jarring vibration that signalled the onset of her first orgasm.

"Don't stop, don't stop!" she urged. "I want to cum and cum until I'm dead or unconscious!"

That was a pretty scary threat, considering my fears for her health, but again I figured she was just being rhetorical, carried away by her own enthusiasm, so I continued to give her what she wanted, fingering her clitoris and alternately feeling her tits while I lashed my stiff rod in and out of her.

As she wandered further and further into her world of orgasmic ecstasy, she drawled all over her former sickbed, bumping and twisting until it was like riding a bucking bronco. I stayed with her, though, and at last she fetched up against the head of the bed, which she gripped with both hands to steady herself as she powered her ass back to meet and match my thrusts with a vigor I wouldn't have believed her capable of.

Our bodies slapped and sweated and juiced and bumped and strummed as we tried to climb inside each other and pull down the lid of our separate identities forever. The experience became psychedelic in its intensity as time stretched out forever and thought and feeling became confused with the blending of bones and nerves and muscles in one new entity, a mindless beast whose only existence was in fucking.

But at last even that great beast staggered and stumbled and exploded in separate bursts of blasting gism as I filled her so full that the backwash of my cum splashed out hotly around my pumping thighs. Collapsed in a tangled heap, I finally realized I had an identity apart from hers, and I pulled away from her.

"Want to talk business now?" she purred.

"You ought to eat first," I said.

"Whatever you say," she giggled, and the next thing I knew she was down at my crotch with my soft but still thick prick in her mouth.

"Cut it out," I said-and believe me, it took a real effort to tear those words out. "You need some real food."

She moved upward and snuggled her head under my arm, utterly content. "After that fantastic fuck, I'll do whatever you say," she sighed.

But I was pretty tired out and had no desire to get up and start cooking. I took her earlier suggestion and talked business. I had some money saved up from my job, plus a comfortable legacy, and I offered to invest in the motel to the amount of half her equity. My capital would go toward a swimming pool, landscaping, and other physical improvements. I would do most of the actual work myself to keep expenses down, to give myself something to do, and to have a reason for sticking around besides slipping it to her regularly, which I also planned to do.

"Now that that's settled, can I eat?" she demanded, and before I could make a move toward the kitchen, she was down there on my prick again, sucking like there was no tomorrow.

I hated to admit it, it seemed disloyal, but Mrs. Redfield could suck rings around Ida. But the burgundy-haired beauty had been a special case, a connoisseur of cocksucking of the sort that happens once in every billion or so women, and so it was unfair to compare Ida's earnest but amateurish efforts.

Besides, Mrs. Redfield's superiority was entirely of a technical nature. That is to say, she knew all the moves, she had all the tricks and twists down pat, but I hadn't mattered to her. I had just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a stiff cock.

With Ida, though, it was different. Her blowjob came from the heart. She was doing it especially to please me; and pleasing me gave her pleasure. Besides, no amount of technique can match the ineffable sensation of having a face whose beauty goes through you like a knife-and Ida's face was like that for me-working on your prick. I lay back and soaked up the fantastic sensation as Ida's lips sucked my prick back to swollen rigidity and her tongue polished it with clumsy but heartfelt eagerness.

I found that I couldn't lie passively beneath her delightful work. As her head bobbed up and down over my stiff meat, I began to move my hips up from the bed to fuck her in the mouth. She nodded her head to tell me it was all right, to urge me on, and her hair wafted tantalizingly across my belly and thighs as I stepped up the pace and slipped my dick more quickly in and out of her lips.

As her blowjob drove up my excitement notch by notch, I rolled her over and got up to straddle her chest with my knees, not letting my cock slip from her mouth for an instant while I executed the maneuver. She lay back and took it, raising her head only slightly to achieve the proper angle as I pushed it down into her lovely sucking mouth. She seemed to love it so much, to want it so much, that I felt as if our roles were strangely reversed, as if I were a mother giving suck to a hungry baby.

I reached back to fondle her cunt, and I was amazed to find that her clit was just as stiff and hard as it had been when I was fucking her. Just giving me this blowjob had driven her excitement up to a feverish pitch.

She nodded encouragement, not wanting to take her mouth off my tool for the time it would take to tell me about it, and I picked up on her signal and began twanging her love-button like a little bowstring, shooting her off into the realm of climactic transcendence. She writhed and squirmed beneath me, her tits rubbing my ass tantalizingly, but she didn't forget the work she was doing on my cock. If anything, it got even better as her tongue began to vibrate as some kind of release for her surging orgasms.

Recalling Mrs. Redfield's incredible demonstration of fist-fucking, I began to wonder how many fingers I could stuff into Ida's delightful cunt. While one hand devoted all its attentions to the tiny pit in the squishy, mashed peach of her cunt, the other went to work fingerfucking her.

I hadn't expected her to take all five, and I wasn't disappointed when I was forced to stop at two. Mrs. Redfield, after all, was a kind of sexual freak. But I did the most I could with those two, pumping them in and out and spreading and contracting them inside her delicious pussy. She appreciated what I was doing, and it boosted the effect of my efforts on her clit until she was thrashing and groaning around the mouthful of cock in the grip of even more violent and exquisite orgasms.

But it wasn't all one-sided, not by a long shot, and that shot boiled up from my balls when I least expected it, sending a tingling glow through my prick that spread throughout my body. In the next instant I was blasting into Ida's sweet mouth like a runaway fire hose. Unlike Mrs. Redfield, she couldn't swallow it all, and I was delighted by the sight of my cream cum trickling down over her full lower lip as she struggled to choke down all she could.

"How was that?" she gasped, when at last I pulled my prick from her mouth.

"We'll have to work on it," I said. "At least three or four times a day, for openers."

I ran out to cook the steaks before she could hit me with a pillow. When she appeared for martinis and supper, she had put on her robe and a touch of make-up. We started talking of more serious things, of Strader and her husband.

I asked her to clear up one item that had puzzled me: why she had been awake when the sheriff knocked on her door that fatal morning. What about the phone call she had received just before?

It was substantially as Ollie had given it to me. I nodded. "She did sound about half-drunk, then? I mean, she had enough of a heat on to want to argue about it, and you had to shuffle through all the registration cards to be sure?"

"That's right," she said.

"Do you remember the name of the man she wanted to talk to?"

"Yes. It was a Mr. Carlson."

"And what did the sheriff and Redfield say when you told them that? Not at first, but later."

"Redfield said I was lying. There was no such person as Carlson."

I nodded. "That's what I wanted to find out. Redfield's too smart a cop to miss the phony ring of that one. So he did check, and found out there wasn't any Mr. Carlson registered anywhere in the county that night."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's almost certain nobody was trying to get hold of a mythical Mr. Carlson at five o'clock in the morning in a country town. That boils it down to only two possibilities. If you were lying, you were obviously guilty. But they should at least have considered the second one. And that is, if you weren't lying, you were probably talking to the woman who did kill your husband."

She stared. "What kind of woman could do a thing like that?"

"A tough one and a smart one," I said. "Take a good look at her. In the space of a little over an hour she'd helped to kill a man, and then she'd seen her lover shot down by a policeman, and still she was able to get herself off the hook and figure out a way to set you up for it so she could stay off. Not exactly a chokeup artist. It was ad lib, you see, because Calhoun gummed up the first plan. I'd say she was about as flighty and hysterical as a cobra."

Ida considered that rather unhappy picture while she sipped her martini. I was keeping the drinks flowing. She looked like she needed them.

She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about it. She was exhausted, true. And no one looks good when the body can't rid itself of its poisons.

But the sleep she'd had already, plus the relaxation caused by the drinks already showed up on her face. She looked five years younger, and I could see that with the proper care, she would be a show-stopper.

She drained her glass and smiled at me. "How about another?" she asked.

"Absolutely," I said. The pitcher was beside me and the gin and vermouth was perfectly chilled. They were going down like water, and it didn't take long for the martinis to work their own special magic.

I refilled her cocktail glass and she laid her hand on my wrist as I poured. It wasn't much-just the touch of flesh to flesh-but it was enough for me to return to my seat with the beginnings of a stout hard-on.

I felt like a dumb teenager, hard as a rock and nowhere to go with it.

She was grinning. Apparently my discomfort had not escaped her attention.

I busied myself pouring my glass full of gin and vermouth and when I looked back she was still grinning. "You sure are an excitable man," she said.

I grinned. There wasn't a damned thing else to do. "Well," I said, "You're a very attractive woman. I guess my imagination just got the better of me."

"Is that right?" Ida said. She moved over next to me and sat down. She directed her gaze to the lump in my trousers. Naturally, all that attention didn't help me out. I was getting harder and harder and bigger and bigger.

"Beats watching television," Ida said. Then she sipped about half of her martini down, placed the glass on the coffee table, and then laid her hand in my lap, palm-down. The warmth of her hand traveled through my pants and bathed my prick in pleasure.

"I like the feel of it," she said. Her eyes were a bit glassy but she was all right. I grinned at her and unzipped my pants.

The time for modesty was over.

As I hauled out my cock, she smiled at me. I wondered how long it had been since she'd been turned loose. Probably since her husband was killed.

Ida knew what she was doing-or at least, she operated on the same sexual principles that I did. She didn't rush and she didn't get stupid, with a lot of giggling. She smiled at me and stroked my cock until it was standing tall, and her warm hand encircled it, jerking it smoothly.

Then Ida sighed. "I guess it's the drinks," she said. Ida looked into my eyes. "I'm not usually this ... open," she added.

But her Hand never left my cock. I placed my own hand atop hers, urging her on.

She began jerking it again, and this time her grip was tighter. Then she leaned forward and encircled the head of my prick with her warm, wet lips.

I froze in total pleasure.

She didn't take much of the shaft into her mouth. In fact, she centered her oral attentions on the head, licking, biting softly, and caressing it with her tongue.

I couldn't believe that this was happening to me. Still, if I'd had one wish for the evening, this would have been it. I knew I was attracted to her as I was to few women. But it was even more than that. I wanted her, all of her, and I wanted to take care of her and live with her and be with her.

As far as I knew, that spelled love, but I couldn't bring myself to face it. I was on my way to Miami, footloose, and I hadn't planned on settling down in a small Florida village.

But here I was.

Ida worked further down my shaft, taking it a half-inch at a time. She was slow and wonderful. She loved doing it, that much was obvious.

Finally I couldn't take it anymore. It was driving me crazy to sit there and be serviced like some Oriental potentate in his harem.

I ran my fingers through her thick hair and gently lifted her head. "Why don't you show me the rest of you?" I asked.

She blushed. Believe it or not, she blushed. Then she stood up. Ida looked uncertain for a moment and then she smiled.

"How about some music?" she asked.

"Just what's lacking," I answered. "How come I didn't think of that myself?"

"Not romantic," she sniffed. "All you men are a-like-interested in only one thing!"

She had me there.

Ida placed a few LP's on the stereo-Latin tunes, soft Cuban sounds. It was relaxing, sensual music. Then she began taking off her clothing.

Again, she wasn't cute or coy about it, but she made it damned interesting. By the time she was down to her panties, I was about out of my mind.

She had the slender body of a teenager, but with the full breasts and lovely thighs of a woman. As I watched her. I realized that my clothing was in the way. I stood up and took it off and threw it all in a corner.

She was still standing there, smiling at me. I knelt in front of her and quickly laid my tongue on her sleek inner thigh.

Ida opened up. She was standing, her feet planted wide apart. I twisted my head and lapped at her soft fragrant lips and she sighed with pleasure.

She was excited, and I turned around and sat down and then leaned back, my head directly between her legs. I turned up my face and she powered down a bit and laid her exciting softness on my mouth.

She loved my tongue and I loved doing it. She was gasping for breath by the time I was finished.

We went directly to the sofa.

She laid down on her back, her legs open, her arms outstretched and inviting.

I was atop her, guiding my throbbing prick in, and then as her soft flesh parted and then encircled my hardness, I relaxed into her arms and began moving my hips, working it in, loving the way she seemed to respond to every bit of movement.

She began to moan and writhe in my arms and I really went into high-gear. Her eyes were fluttering and I leaned down and mouthed a perfect nipple, working it hard, and then she began to come, slowly and quietly at first, but building quickly to a noisy, humping finish that left me totally drained.

It was what we both needed.

"Didn't you say something about a steak?" she finally said.