Strange Embrace Page 7

  He nodded. He was not getting anywhere with Sondra and the place was beginning to get on his nerves. He wondered what would happen if he wanted a cup of coffee. Nobody seemed to be interested in taking an order from him. How did the place show a profit?

  “Anything else, Sondra?”

  “Hey,” she said unsteadily. “Hey, why are you pushing me? Who are you, anyway? Who the hell are you, dad?”

  “A friend of Elaine’s.”

  “A friend? Okay, friend. That’s all for now. On your way, friend.”

  “Look,” Johnny said. “I was interested in her. I thought she was the greatest. I was starting her on her career, understand? I’m the producer of the play she was rehearsing for, and…”

  “Producer!” Sondra lost, or half lost, her stoned expression. The violet eyes narrowed, actually focused, carefully measured Johnny as if he had registered on them for the first time.

  “That interest you?” he queried.

  “Sort of.”

  “You an actress too? You after a part, is that it?” Johnny figured he might be able to offer her work in exchange for information, in a pinch.

  “I’m no actress. I don’t want a part. And I have nothing to trade.” She was still measuring him with those violet orbs. “Wish I did, though.”

  “Try hard. Maybe you’ll think of something. Why should Elaine’s killer get away with it? Let’s nail him.”

  “I’d help you if I could,” Sondra said. Her expression went foggy again, and then she seemed to come to a sudden decision. “Would you help me?”

  “Sure. How?”

  “Well, you’re a producer. That means you must make it with the very best chicks. Lots of them. I mean—you know about women. You know how to handle them. Dig?”

  “I’m not sure,” Johnny admitted.

  “Well, Mr. Producer, I’d appreciate it if you would handle me.”

  It took him a few seconds to get the idea. When it sank in, he said levelly, “For money?”

  “Kicks,” she said. “Just kicks.”

  “All right,” Johnny said. “But you’ve got to think of something. I’ll do my best to deliver for you—if you do your best to deliver for me. Any little thing. Search your memory.”

  “It’s a deal,” Sondra said. “Come on.”

  She led him out of the Gila Monster and into the fresh air. Now that she was on her feet, he had a chance to look her over.

  Pretty good stuff, he had to admit. Tall, and on the slender side. But a beautiful, heavy bosom. A bottom enticingly conforming to the classical pear shape. Long, lively legs. His gaze returned to her face. The cheeks were too hollow. The mouth was too full. But it was an intriguing face, and her hair, falling in red-gold waves to her slim shoulders, was an absolute glory.

  This was a deal, he told himself, that could turn out to be a bargain.

  He could use a few kicks, himself. And he was pretty confident that she knew more than she had yet told, that in the grip of intimacy she could be persuaded to give him more information about Elaine.

  She tapped along on her stick heels, guiding him to her place. Climbing the stairs behind her, he was fascinated by her leg action, gawky yet somehow delightfully graceful, like that of a thoroughbred filly walking up to the post.

  Her door was not locked. She just pushed on it, and it yielded.

  “Welcome to the pad,” she said. She looked up at him out of the foggy violet eyes. “It’s true, isn’t it? You really do know about women? You really know what to do with a woman?”

  “I’d say it was true,” Johnny assured her.

  She stepped aside to let him pass.

  He found himself in a dingy one-room flat, but, unexpectedly, it was neat as a pin. A tailored curtain hung over the one window. The furniture consisted of an unpainted wooden chair, a bridge table, a neat lamp on the table, a small unpainted chest of drawers, and a mattress on the floor. The mattress was neatly covered with a plain brown bedspread. There was no kitchen or icebox. Johnny pushed open a second door, saw a small lavatory. He pushed the door shut. A faint sweet smell, like a whiff of burning hay, came to his nostrils. Tea, he thought. Marijuana.

  Sondra walked slowly toward him, the violet eyes wide, misty, and gazing into his eyes with a curious fixity.

  “You think I’m turned on,” she said. “I’m not. Not very. Had myself a little tea, a while ago, but for me that’s not very turned on. So don’t be afraid.”

  “Who’s afraid?” Johnny said, the shivers running up and down his spine. Her gaze was like the gaze of a blind woman. Her voice was the voice of a ghost. But she was neat, he reminded himself. Which meant that probably she was clean, also. Then he remembered what she expected of him. She expected him to be a polished, highly competent lover. He reached out and took her hand. It was a surprisingly warm and vibrant hand, not a ghost hand at all. He let his fingers caress her palm.

  “Oh, you don’t have to force yourself,” she said. “I’ll take care of that. I know that much.”

  She danced away from him.

  “You just watch me.” Sondra laughed shrilly and eerily. “Just watch!”

  Johnny sat down on the wooden chair and watched.

  Sondra began to strip, making a graceful, fetching game of it. The first move was to lift off her black sweater. As her arms crossed and the garment went up over her head, past the red-gold hair, a pair of generous crimson-tipped breasts came into Johnny’s view. Sondra wore no bra. Carefully she folded the sweater and tucked it into a drawer of the chest. Then she straightened up, marched about the room a little, strutting, showing off the breasts. She did not seem particularly proud about them or anything; it was just that she was working on Johnny.

  He lit a cigarette, and watched.

  With a languorous gesture, Sondra fluffed the red-gold hair. Then she took hold of her loose wool skirt, lifted it, lifted it some more, until the hem rose past her hips. Johnny caught a glimpse of shocking-pink panties before she let the skirt fall.

  She moved closer to him. Standing a few inches from him, she repeated the gesture a couple of times, lifting the skirt and letting it fall, lifting and…

  He reached for her.

  She danced away. Standing on the other side of the room, she fumbled with slim fingers at the waistband of the skirt. The skirt suddenly seemed to disintegrate, and slipped to her feet.

  She straightened, stood poised for a moment like a lovely figurine, red-gold hair gracefully caressing her shoulders, generous breasts taut and inviting, shocking-pink fluff girding her loins like a ribbon around a piece of candy. Around her hips was a slim garter belt. It held up coarse cotton stockings, black as coal, that made the slim shapeliness of her long legs seem all the more enticing.

  She folded the skirt, deposited it on the top of the wooden chest. Then she lifted one of those legs, kicked off a shoe and, bracing herself against the chest, drew off a stocking.

  The way she did it was a treat. Johnny’s mouth opened as he watched her slender red-tipped fingers roll down the stockings, first denuding one leg and then the other. Twice during the operation she turned her head to smile at him. He felt his heart begin to pound.

  She made such a production of removing the garter belt that he found his chair could not hold him. He exploded out of it, as her thumb went inside the waistband of her panties.

  “I’ll do that,” he said hoarsely. “Let me do that!”

  “See? I was sure I could excite you, daddy. You dig Sondra now…you really want Sondra. Right?”

  Johnny answered by taking both her hands and drawing her toward the mattress on the floor. He squatted on it, his head rising as high as her navel. She stood straight and confidently before him as he drew the shocking-pink rayon down over her hips, past her knees and calves. For the first time, he felt the warm, silky skin of her body, breathed in the delicate fragrance of her milky flesh.

  “Fold it up,” she said.

  That was peculiar. To fold a pair of underpants and lay them fastidiou
sly on a chair. Oh, well—neatness. Johnny shrugged mentally, turned back to the mattress and the girl.

  It was he who stood now, and she who kneeled. And kneeling, lifting her arms, busying her fingers, she helped him into a state as nude as her own. And then her soft cheek was rubbing itself on his solar plexus. Her hair tumbled along his skin. Her mouth puckered and began to emit small sibilant sounds. It was as if her lips were inviting him, begging him. He flung himself to the mattress, drawing her with him.

  And then they went after their kicks.

  Both knew what they were doing. Both had been through it before. So they took their time about it. They made the most of it.

  They exchanged plenty of kisses in the process. Short kisses. Long kisses. Busy-tongued kisses. But none of them on the mouth.

  That did not come until later, quite a bit later. When everything that had gone before suddenly blended and coalesced into a passion that completely possessed Johnny Lane, possessed him and shook him. It was then that they quit playing games. His arms went around her like bands of iron. He did pause to kiss one breast and then the other, sniffing the soft flesh, tonguing the rich nipples. But at last the culmination was at hand. He raised his head, found her mouth waiting, covered her satiny lips with his. Their tongues met, caressed, made love. Johnny’s hands were full of her breasts, her luscious buttocks. With a heave, he swung her over. She responded eagerly, hotly, her wet lips clinging to him, her fingers trickling fire.

  And then, plunged into the secret darknesses, filling the clutching viscous void, he remembered what she wanted of him. He did not exactly control himself. His blood was too whipped up for that. His every nerve was screaming. But he did manage to preserve his virtuosity, to utilize the skills acquired in the beds of the skilled.

  Thus it was that as he climbed to ecstasy, he drew on every device that could carry Sondra along with him. The measured movement, the secondary appassionata of lips and fingers playing their sensual obbligato. Like a rocket, his spirit soared. He rolled and panted, racked by tortures of passion, riding her thrashing legs, lifting on fiery fuel to the skies, the heavens. Then the bomb-burst. In a crashing, blinding detonation of impossible grandeur, Johnny sailed into spasms of rapture, hung suspended for swift seconds on the corners of the universe, then dropped in a long slow arc, like a coasting gull, back to the mattress and to his senses.

  He lay still. Sondra lay still.

  His nostrils drew in the scent of her hair as he waited for his heartbeat to return to normal.

  “Thanks,” said Sondra, “for nothing.”

  “What!”

  “I didn’t feel a thing. Not a damn thing. Think I’d better go and turn myself on.”

  Johnny sat up. He was clipped where it hurt, right in his vanity. He tried to pull himself together.

  “I don’t usually get complaints,” he said.

  “Not your fault. I never feel a thing—from you male types. See, dad, I thought that if a real smart operator, an experienced guy like you, would go to work on me, I might feel something. But I didn’t. No hard feelings.”

  Still wounded, Johnny sputtered, “I guess our deal is off, then.”

  “I’m dealing. I just have nothing more to tell you.”

  “If you knew Elaine, you must remember something. Any little thing.”

  Sondra sat up too, crossed her hands virginally over her breasts, bit her lower lip with white teeth.

  “No,” she said finally. “I have nothing to tell you.” She sighed. “Poor Elaine. She almost had the bull by the horns. She was going to be rich, you dig? All the money, and no work at all. All the money and hardly any lines to speak. And then someone carved her—” Sondra began to laugh.

  Johnny stared at her. Did it mean anything? He stood up, lit himself a cigarette, gave one to Sondra, and started getting into his clothes.

  More laughter from Sondra. Then a sudden, sharp break, and the laughter gave way to hysterical tears. Sondra Barr had her face cradled in her arms and was crying her heart out.

  Johnny tiptoed out. He knew that he could not help her.

  He got the hell away from Sondra’s place and the Gila Monster and found a bar, a nice ordinary bar where the customers were quiet, clean-shaven alcoholics and liquor was the only poison used on the premises. He picked out a stool in the rear and ordered bourbon, a double. He threw the shot straight down and passed the glass back for a refill.

  Where the hell was he, anyway? Hunting the wild goose with gun and camera, he thought. Chasing down leads that weren’t even there, wasting his time and holding up Haig. The lieutenant had already figured things out—Elaine James had been killed by Carter Tracy for one reason or another and everything else was just frosting on the cake, trimmings that didn’t alter the basic facts at all. So what was he accomplishing?

  Nothing, he answered himself. Nothing at all. It was an ugly gray day in an ugly gray part of town and he had been spending it with crazy kids who had grown up too soon or not at all. That boy, that neighbor of Sondra Barr’s. Sondra herself, flying to hell on a fuzzy pink cloud, laughing and crying almost on cue. Maybe it was time to call Haig and scoop up Tracy in the net. Then Johnny could drop the show fast and hard, return the backers’ money, and look around for another script.

  But something stopped him halfway to the phone. He was not sure what it was—maybe nothing more than a producer’s reluctance to bury a package that looked promising, maybe a stupid refusal to accept the obvious. He could still ask a few more questions. There was that boy with the beard, that neighbor.

  Johnny went back to the bar, finished his drink and left. He ambled once more to Fifth Street and again walked up the stairs of Sondra Barr’s tenement building. He found the apartment where the bearded kid lived and raised his eyebrows at the sign over the door, a sign Johnny had not previously bothered to read. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, it proclaimed. Quite a switch from a Welcome mat.

  He knocked gently. “Enter here,” a male voice called. Johnny winced, then eased the door open. The boy with the beard—he was about twenty, Johnny guessed, although it was hard to tell because of that chin foliage—was sitting on the floor with his hands clasped behind his neck. His long thin legs seemed tied in a knot, each foot on the opposite knee. The position looked about as comfortable as a bed of rusty nails.

  “So you’re back,” the boy said. “I don’t think I caught your name last time around.”

  “Johnny Lane.”

  “Lennie Schwerner,” the boy said. “Excuse the condition of the pad. It’s a mess and I know it. And excuse my not getting up. I couldn’t make it. I’m in full lotus posture. It’s hard to get in and out of it until you’ve had a little practice, and I haven’t. But it’s the best position for meditation.”

  “You’re—uh—meditating?”

  “No,” the boy said. “Just getting used to the position. You have to be able to sit like this comfortably before you can get anywhere. Comfortable I’m not. You find Sonny?”

  “I found her.”

  “The Gila?”

  Johnny nodded. “And on cloud nine-and-a-half. She didn’t have a hell of a lot to say.”

  “So you thought I might,” Lennie Schwerner said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me about Elaine James.”

  The boy whistled softly. “You some kind of fuzz? A plainclothes character? You don’t look the part.”

  “I was Elaine’s producer.”

  The boy nodded vigorously. With his hands behind his neck, it seemed to Johnny as though he were manipulating his head like a puppet. An illusion, of course, but an unsettling one. “That’s right,” he said. “I remember the name now. Johnny Lane. What can I tell you?”

  “Was Elaine a friend of yours?”

  “I knew her. A swinging chick in a number of ways. I woulda dug knowing her better. But there was a limit to knowing Elaine. You couldn’t get too close.”

  “You mean sex?”

  Schwerner chuckl
ed. “You could put it that way,” he said. “She was like stacked, man. So I gave her a try—oh, maybe three months ago. She wasn’t having any. She didn’t have eyes much for men.”

  “Sondra told me that Elaine had a mystic attitude toward sex.”

  “De mortuis,” the boy said, “Nil nisi bonum, and all. I guess Sonny knows more about it than I do. About Elaine and sex. I guess she does.”

  Johnny lit a cigarette, offered one to Schwerner. The boy shook his head. Johnny wondered where he was getting. Well, the kid was communicative at least, even if most of what he said did not shed too much light on anything. Hell, he seemed a bright enough lad. Even quoted in Latin. What was he doing living like a bum in a Lower East Side dump?

  “Sondra—Sonny, that is—said one thing that didn’t add up. She said Elaine was planning on coming into a lot of money soon. I thought Elaine meant she would be making money from the show but I’m not so sure anymore. Sonny gave me the impression that Elaine expected to get the money without working for it.” Johnny hesitated. “Did you hear anything about it?”

  “I hear lots of things.”

  “But—”

  “De mortuis,” Schwerner said reverently. “Speak well of the dead. You knew Elaine well, man?”

  “Not too well. I liked her. She seemed a sweet kid.”

  “Then I knew her a little better. I liked her, too. But she wasn’t a sweet kid, man. She was too hungry, too anxious. She was—” He broke off and hung his head. “She’s dead,” he said heavily. “And this is a hell of a way to talk about somebody who’s dead.”

  “Go on.”

  “Look, I liked her too. You dig? But she was a grasping little bitch. She liked to brag—that’s how I got the word on a thing or two. She was figuring on the big payoff, like you said. And not from the show gig. She was looking for hush money.”

  “Blackmail?” It astounded Johnny. “That—that child?”

  Schwerner nodded. “Blackmail. She had a shakedown working on somebody in your show. Don’t ask me who. But whoever it was had something to hide. And Elaine wasn’t the type of chick to pass up a scene like that. She was gonna milk it for all it was worth.” He sighed. “Which was plenty, according to her. She didn’t mention numbers but she wasn’t talking about nickels and dimes. She meant long bread.”