========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter One
-----------
Everyone has a hobby, and mine happens to be voyeurism. Over the
years I've built up quite an extensive collection of pictures of
unsuspecting women and couples in compromising or revealing positions.
Some I took in my capacity as a private detective, most were just for
fun. It's a dangerous hobby - that's part of the attraction, of
course - and I've gotten myself into some pretty sticky situations and
even been arrested once or twice. Embarrassing, but no big deal.
Until recently, that is. I took some pictures a few weeks ago, some
nice topless pictures on a public beach, and those pictures very
nearly got me killed.
Thinking back on it now makes me feel queasy inside and short of
breath. It would have been a stupid, shitty way to go. Anyway, it's
a long story, and I better start at the beginning if I'm going to get
it all down right. I'm not going to change any of the facts, though
God knows some of the facts make me look pretty bad. I'm the first to
admit I'm not the second coming of Sherlock Holmes, and I've already
admitted to being a sexual voyeur, but I'm not a liar.
I was between cases at the time, a situation I find myself in all
too often, and I had spent the morning moving furniture to make the
rent. I was on the freeway, heading back to my apartment for lunch,
when my cell phone rang. I reached behind me and fumbled through the
mess of packing straps, tools, and boxes that litter the back of my
van, finally coming up with the phone.
"Frank Stern."
"Frankie, there you are. It's Vic. Got a hot one for you,
buddy. I'd take it myself, but I gotta meet my parole officer in
twenty minutes. So naturally I thought of you."
Vic is a fellow voyeur, a lot more hard core than I am. That's
not why he's on parole though - he's a burglar by trade, and a bad
one. "So what's the story?" I asked.
"Two words for you, Frank: Claire Ingleford."
"No kidding, really?"
"Yep. She's on Sparkle Beach right now, catching some rays with
her world-famous hooters on full display."
"As seen in Playboy magazine."
"You got it. So whattya say?"
At the moment I was heading east, away from Sparkle Beach. It
would take me at least half an hour to get there, by which time the
show would probably be over. I was tired and hungry, and I had
another moving job scheduled for this afternoon.
But this was Claire Ingleford, star of the prime-time drama "LA
West," voted "TV's Sexiest Vixen" by People magazine two years
running. Not that I'm a big fan of the show, but the fact that she's
a does add to the attraction.
"I'm all over it, Vic. Wish me luck." I disconnected the phone
and cut across two lanes of traffic toward the next exit. Such is the
pull of the voyeur.
I made it in twenty-five minutes flat, and this time I was lucky.
Claire Ingleford was still there.
Sparkle Beach is one of the less crowded public beaches, since
it's no good for swimming or surfing. The waterline is littered with
jagged rocks, and the incoming waves throw up fountains of salty
spray, often creating rainbows or glittering sheets of luminescence.
Sparkle Beach is also known for another kind of glitter - celebrities.
The unwritten rules here are no autograph requests, no gushing
conversation, and absolutely no cameras. I always followed the first
two.
After taking off my and pulling a faded Dodgers cap down
low over my eyes, I wandered along the beach, scanning my eyes back
and forth. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for: a
loose circle of people standing around trying to look like they
weren't gawking.
I wandered over and joined the group, and got my first look at
Claire Ingleford in real life. She was sitting on a chaise lounge
under a big multicolored beach umbrella, and despite the overcast
weather she was wearing sunglasses and a straw hat and had her nose
painted white with zinc oxide. Next to her was a big, tan with
dark, curly hair. They were both reading magazines, pretending to be
oblivious to the dozen or so gaping onlookers. They were sitting only
about ten yards from the waterline, which was clever positioning,
because anyone who tried to linger in front of them to get a better
view would get wet from the spray.
But you could still see plenty from the side. Claire was wearing
only the bottom half of a bikini, and I could see the firm round curve
of her left extending out past her upper arm. I had my little
Olympus cupped in my hand, covered with a folded towel, and I slid the
shutter open with my thumb and aimed it by feel. I snapped off a few
shots, the towel muffling the snap and whine of the motors.
Some dolt yelled out "Claire, you're beautiful!" She looked up
from her magazine and smiled briefly. This caused a bit of a titter
from the onlookers. Claire has a distinctive smile - the corners of
her mouth turn up sharply, exposing her upper teeth and giving her an
almost feral look. Jack Nicholson smiles the same way. When Claire's
bad-girl character on "LA West" smiles at someone, it's like a Mafia
don giving the kiss of death. With any luck, that smile would now be
part of my personal collection.
As I worked my way along the perimeter, taking pictures as I
went, a throaty voice called out "Claire, how about standing up for a
second?" This was greeted by some nervous laughter.
The Sparkle Beach privacy conventions were obviously going to be
no match for a topless star who had recently posed for Playboy, and
I figured I had only a few minutes left, if that. I decided to cut
between Claire and the ocean, spray be damned, to get some frontal
shots.
But just as I was about to go for it, Claire and her companion
stood up. I shot a rapid-fire series of shots as she took off her hat
and shook out her glossy brown hair and then raised her arms up over
her head in a languorous stretch. A few people clapped and whistled,
and I didn't blame them. Claire Ingleford has a truly first-class
rack: firm, grapefruit-sized capped with pink areola the size
of silver dollars and large, pouting nipples. With her arms raised
over her head and her back arched you'd swear they were fake, but then
when she relaxes and moves around you can see they're all-natural.
The rest of her isn't bad, either, although she was shorter than I had
imagined, maybe five-four or five.
I was in nirvana for thirty seconds or so, as Claire turned this
way and that, taking off her sandals, folding her towel, putting away
her magazine. It was like she was posing just for me, and I fired off
shot after glorious shot. Then two things happened at once. Claire
and her male companion started walking directly toward me, and I ran
out of film. The automatic rewind seemed as loud as a chain saw, and
I swore under my breath and wrapped the towel more firmly around the
little camera.
They passed within a few feet of me, holding hands, and then they
waded into the light surf. I could hear Claire laughing and
shrieking, and I figured they must be frolicking and splashing, but I
was on my knees in the sand, desperately fumbling with the Olympus,
trying to get the roll out and a new roll in.
"Hey, what do you think you're doing? You're not supposed to be
taking pictures on this beach."
A middle-aged woman was looking down at me indignantly from
behind a huge pair of sunglasses. She was wearing one of those modest
one-piece bathing suits with the little ruffle-skirt around the
middle, and she was holding a Judith Krantz novel. I got the
impression she would just love to see a pervert like me strung up from
the nearest lifeguard tower.
I gave her a cold stare, and said "Ma'am, I'm with the FBI. I'm
going to have to ask you to step back and allow me to conduct my
business." She gave me a disbelieving look, but didn't say anything
else. Bold-faced lies like that can be surprisingly effective, if all
you need to do is buy a little time.
The new film loaded, I got to my feet and rejoined the crowd, the
middle-aged woman following behind. Claire was standing knee-deep in
the water with her back to ocean, her legs spread to brace herself
against the waves. Her oiled body was beaded with glistening drops of
water, and the cold Pacific had tightened her skin and made her
nipples even more prominent.
A wave crashed into her at waist level, and seawater gushed up
her back and over her head. She let out a little shriek of surprise,
and then she shook her head back and forth like a dog, her thick, wet
hair whipping around her head. Her swung and wobbled
enticingly.
"Jesus, this water is freezing!" she said.
"We can tell," said one wit.
At this, Claire crossed her arms over her chest and turned
around. Then she looked back over her shoulder at the crowd of
people, as if noticing for the first time that she and her boyfriend
weren't alone. I suddenly realized that I wasn't taking pictures, and
I snapped a few shots.
"Are you all staring at me?" said Claire. Her eyes were wide and
innocent. It was sort of a silly performance, but I was enjoying it
anyway. She turned around and put her hands on her hips, and thrust
her chest out provocatively. I remembered a very similar shot from
the Playboy spread that came out last year. I took another quick shot
and then decided to work my way closer.
"I really shouldn't be doing this," said Claire with a smile.
Her tone was conversational, but her voice was loud enough for
everyone to hear. "I have a opening in a few weeks, a serious
big-budget movie, and the producers told me to behave myself."
"Are there nude scenes?" asked someone. It sounded like the same
guy who had asked her to stand up.
Claire chuckled, not put out at all. "Of course. We shot some
very steamy love scenes, but I'm not sure how much ended up in the
movie. They told me it would be tasteful, but I'm kind of worried
that they'll show too much. I guess we'll all have to go to the
theaters and find out. The title is "Wishing Her Life Away," and it
has Alec Baldwin and Gene Hackman in it too."
Just as she finished her little plug, a big wave smacked her in
the back, knocking her forward onto her hands and knees. As her dark-
haired companion helped her back to her feet, I got some nice unposed
shots of her swinging and swaying. The rush of water had
driven her bathing suit into the cleft between her buttocks, turning
it into a thong, and this had exposed the rose tattoo on her shapely
left buttock. I got a shot of that before the straightened out
her suit for her. Claire was laughing at the little pratfall, but the
man seemed to be upset, and they exchanged a few private words.
"OK, everyone, I've got to get going," said Claire. "Don't tell
the Warner Brothers people I've been running around half-naked, OK?
I'll get in big trouble."
Yeah, right.
As they started walking back towards their umbrella, there was a
little round of applause from the crowd, which had grown to maybe
forty people. The applause seemed appropriate, since the whole thing
had the flavor of a staged event. I wondered if it was a publicity
stunt to promote the movie, but the lack of any media seemed to
preclude that.
Just as the clapping died down, the woman with the Judith Krantz
novel called out "Miss Ingleford, that tall thin right in front of
you has been taking pictures of you all along. I just thought you
should know."
There was a moment of truly dreadful silence. I looked around,
as if trying to spot the shmuck with the camera. A lot of people were
looking right back at me.
"Who? Who's got a camera?" It was the boyfriend, and he sounded
very angry. I started to melt back into the crowd.
"That right there in the baseball cap! He's got it
under that towel."
She was pointing right at me, and a tight circle of curious
people formed around me, marking me as clearly as if I had a target
painted on my chest. I decided that a graceful exit wasn't going to
be in the cards. I barged right between a couple holding hands,
wove through the rest of the crowd like a tailback, and broke into the
clear, heading back toward the parking lot at a sprint.
Once you make the decision to run for it, the best thing to do is
go all out. People are rarely willing to chase after someone on foot,
and a sudden cheetah-like explosion will get you out of a variety of
unpleasant situations.
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the boyfriend giving
determined and athletic chase, his jaw locked with effort and his bare
feet kicking up little sprays of sand. There are exceptions to every
rule, and they are what make life interesting.
My loosely-tied sneakers were sloshing around uncomfortably on my
feet, and I knew the boyfriend was gaining on me. But the parking lot
was in sight, and I still had a good lead. I put my head down and
concentrated on maintaining my form over the last fifty yards or so.
I hurdled the low cement wall separating the beach from the parking
lot, and made a beeline for my van.
I had left the van unlocked for this very reason, and I gave
myself a mental pat on the back for my crafty foresight as I wrestled
the rusty door open and slid inside. I fumbled the key into the
ignition and started it up, and wasted no time heading for the exit.
In the side mirror I saw the aggrieved escort picking his way gingerly
along the hot asphalt, staring angrily at me. I resisted the impulse
to thumb my nose.
Back on the freeway, I cranked up the radio and wailed along with
the Stones as they complained about the Honkytonk Blues. The brief,
heart-pounding chase had sent a cleansing flood of adrenaline through
my body, temporarily washing away the malaise and irritation that had
dogged me for the past few weeks. I patted the little cylinder of
film in my pocket like a druggie who has just scored a week's worth of
his favorite potion.
I showed up at my afternoon moving job right on time, and for
once everything went smoothly. A guy with a giant china cabinet
in his dining room, a hideous piece in ink-dark mahogany with
ornate carvings of stags and boars all along the top. Probably worth
at least ten grand.
The thing had been looming against that dining room wall for
something like forty years, but now the owner was moving into a
smaller place and putting it up for auction. The brawny meatheads
from Atlas movers had told the guy it was all one piece, and that he'd
have to call in a specialist mover.
So I show up with my partner, a wily Italian guy by the name of
Alonzo, and we see right away that unless they built the house around
the thing, it has to come apart. Alonzo knows his furniture, and he
remembers that these German cabinets have a special inside
attachment holding them together. He takes out a few drawers, pokes
around with a flashlight and a screwdriver, and ten minutes later we
have the thing in two pieces and the job is a piece of cake.
There's a moral there somewhere, but damned if I know what it is.
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Two
-----------
By the time I got home it was after seven, and I was famished. I
live in Jasmine Heights, in a one-bedroom apartment. It's a nice
building, all brick with a swimming pool in the courtyard, with
sixteen units in all. I live in one of the garden apartments, which
is a polite way of saying the basement. I really can't afford to
live here the way things have been going the past couple years, but I
hate to move now that I've got the darkroom set up.
I made myself a sloppy ham and cheese sandwich and ate it in
front of the computer while I checked my email. Six messages with
words like "Opportunity," "$$$," and "Cash" in the header that I
deleted unread. I get a kick out of the ones hawking bulk email
programs - it's like trying to sell guns by going around shooting
people. A message from Vic asking if anything happened on Sparkle
Beach. I composed a reply, hitting the highlights, and then I went
into my cozy bathroom and took a shower.
The anticipation of developing the pictures of Claire was making
my skin tingle. As I toweled off after the shower, the damp
terrycloth rubbing across my cock sent a shock of pleasure through my
body, and I had an overwhelming urge to jerk off. On the theory that
self-deprivation was good for me, I put on a loose pair of shorts and
a T-shirt, and then I took the roll of film into the darkroom.
I built the darkroom myself, by walling off a corner of the
living room with fiberboard paneling. The hardest part was the
plumbing. I had to break into the living-room wall and tap into the
cold water pipe which heads to the bathroom. The building manager
wasn't too thrilled when he found out, but since I'm already in the
basement I can't flood anyone but myself, and he let it go.
I closed the door behind me, and for a second before I
turned on the dim light I was in absolute darkness. The inside
space is about eight feet by six, and most of that is taken up by a
row of sinks, metal shelves for supplies, and a big developing table.
It's kind of cozy in there, with the dim lighting, the burbling flow
of water in the sinks, and the familiar smell of the chemicals. I
often spend hours in there fooling around with negatives, losing track
of the time as I try to get the perfect print. Then I come stumbling
out, disoriented and blinking against the sudden light, like a
submariner surfacing and opening the hatch after a long cruise.
I turned on the little radio to a classic rock station, keeping
the volume low, and got to work. First I quickly make a set of small
working prints, skipping only the frames that were completely out of
focus or misaimed. Then I turned on the light and spent a few minutes
going through them, marking where I would crop and picking out the
best shots for enlargement. Usually when I shoot a roll under such
difficult conditions there will only be a few decent shots, but out of
the twenty-two frames of Claire Ingleford fifteen were of usable
quality. I winnowed that down to eleven by eliminating repeats, and
then turned off the light.
An hour later I had about a dozen good-quality five-by-seven
prints hanging from the drying clips on the outside wall of the
darkroom. I sat on the couch with a beer in my hand and gazed at them
fondly. The little Olympus has a terrific autofocus, and all the
shots were crisp and clear. Claire turning in her chaise with a smile
on her face, one exposed. Claire with her back arched and her
hands over her head, her thrust out proudly as she stretched.
A close-up from the side, as she walked by me toward the beach, with
her large nipple outlined against the blue water.
A door slammed on the other side of the courtyard, a sound I had
been unconsciously listening for. I went to the kitchen window and
looked out. Sure enough, the lights had gone on in Gerri's apartment.
Gerri Imbasi is a woman I did a favor for a while back, and we're now
on good terms, if not exactly close friends. I don't think Gerri has
friends. She's a stunning African woman, an immigrant from Liberia.
She's a call girl, and a very expensive one. I could never afford a
date with her at her going rate, but I get a sort of discount service.
I called her up and invited her over, telling her I had some
pictures to show her. Gerri has an improbable voyeuristic streak, and
enjoys my collection almost as much as I do.
She walked into my kitchen a few minutes later without knocking,
dressed casually in white jeans and a tight yellow top. Gerri is six
feet tall, with long, slim legs, a firm round ass, and small high
breasts which are always braless. Her skin is the color of milk
chocolate. I would describe her face as exotic rather than beautiful,
but that's just a matter of taste. She was wearing gold sandals with
two-inch heels, which put her almost eye-to-eye with me.
"Hello Frank." She gave me a cool smile and went over to the
refrigerator and took out a diet coke.
"Busy day?" I asked.
"No, not really. The ad executive took me out to dinner, and
then he got called back to the office before I could earn my money."
Gerri has four or five regular clients. There's the managing
partner, the rock musician, the rich playboy, and the ad
executive, who is her least favorite. There's also the private dick,
I guess, although I don't really pay enough to be considered a client.
"Lucky you," I said.
"I suppose. So you have some new pictures?"
"Yep. Took them this afternoon on Sparkle Beach."
She walked by me into the living room, and I followed her,
catching a faint whiff of her musky perfume. She went over to the
pictures drying on the darkroom wall and studied them carefully for a
few minutes without comment, her hands on her hips. I fondled myself
discreetly through my shorts as I watched her.
"She's beautiful," she said finally, in her precise, faintly-
accented English. "Very nice breasts. They are real. But she is just
sunbathing, yes? Not very exciting. I can see this every day in the
changing room at the gym."
"Yeah, but I can't."
She raised an eyebrow. "Yes, I see your point. But you sounded
so excited about these pictures..."
"Doesn't she look familiar?" I prodded.
Gerri turned back to the pictures and then her eyes got wide.
"Oh! Of course...this is the one from that show - the one who is
always doing mean things to her employees. I would have known, but
she has the sun cream on her nose. She is very well known. What is
her name?"
"Claire Ingleford."
"Yes. OK, Frank, you are right. These are good pictures. You
don't usually get pictures of people."
"Right, I don't really do celebrities. They have professional
photographers stalking them, not to mention fans, so they're usually
pretty wary. I'd rather just get regular people doing nasty things,
anyway. But this one fell into my lap."
"It would be nice if she was this other man's cock
instead of just walking around. But the pictures are very good. Nice
and sharp."
She took a sip of her diet coke, and gave me a look of faint
amusement.
I took my hand out of my pocket, cleared my throat, and said "So
how would you like to make twenty dollars the hard way?"
She shook her head. "Such a charming man. Such a way with the
ladies."
I felt myself flush. Gerri always makes it difficult for me.
She knows I'm nervous around her, and I think she's enjoys the
feeling. Or maybe she figures if she doesn't needle me a little, I'd
be bugging her all the time.
"If it's a bad time..."
"No, it's not a bad time. Come over in ten minutes, all right?"
"OK, great."
I knocked on her back door eleven minutes later. Gerri had
changed into cotton shorts, a tank top, and sneakers. She had a small
tattoo on her upper arm, a geometric shape that was barely visible
against her dark skin.
"Going to exercise?" I asked.
"Yes. I am going to ride the bicycle for a while. Make yourself
comfortable, I'll be right with you."
From the inside, it's hard to believe Gerri's apartment is in the
same building as mine. Her kitchen is spotless and shiny, with a
noticeable lack of any sort of cooking equipment. The living and
dining rooms are also neat and clean, not to mention well decorated.
I've never seen the bedroom, but I imagine it's the same way. The
hardwood floors have been recently refinished, and they gleam with
polish. Mine look like a hockey game has been played on them. The
couch and chairs are in matching white leather. African art hangs on
the walls. An incense candle is always burning, giving off some sort
of pleasant scent, sandalwood maybe.
I stood waiting in the living room, watching the muted
television, which was tuned to CNN. Stock quotes flowed along under
an attractive woman in a business suit. My cock was rigid and
pulsing, but I forced myself not to touch it.
Gerri came back in and spread a large towel on the couch. I took
off my shoes and socks, and then slowly took off my and then my
shorts. It isn't necessary that I be completely naked, but I consider
it part of the experience. There is something faintly humiliating but
very erotic about being naked in the presence of a fully dressed woman
who is going to stay that way.
I lay down on the couch and watched Gerri as she moved a small
rug next to the couch and then kneeled on it.
"You have a nice cock, Frank. It has a very nice shape."
"Thanks," I said, looking down at my organ. It's a little
longer and a little thinner than average, and very straight. At the
moment the head was dark and swollen, and a drop of clear liquid
was beaded at the tip.
Gerri took a clear bottle of oil and poured a thin stream into
her hand. Then she poured some directly onto my cock and balls, and
the faint tickle of it made me suck in my breath and clench my
stomach. She worked the oil in gently with her long fingers, spending
a long time on my balls before finally taking my shaft in her hand.
She stroked the shaft, squeezing it firmly and moving it around
in slow circles, but avoiding the head. She could make me come in
about three seconds by just rubbing the head of my cock, but she
didn't.
I looked up at her, and felt an overwhelming surge of desire. I
wanted to do unspeakably nasty things to her, to lick every crevice of
her body. Somehow I remained still.
"Are you thinking about Claire Ingleford?" She had moved up over
me and was slowly pulling my slippery cock upward through her fists,
one fist at a time, like she was pulling weeds out of a garden.
"No. Well, yes." I was now.
"She has lovely breasts."
"Her nipples are incredible," I said. "I'd love to suck on them,
bite them."
"Hmm, I bet you would. I might even enjoy that too." Gerri is
mildly bisexual. She occasionally participates in threesomes with
very rich, very lucky who like their women two at a time. God, I
wish I was rich.
She smiled as if she knew what I was thinking. "All right...I
want you to close your eyes."
I complied.
"Claire Ingleford is kneeling between your legs, leaning forward
with her hanging on either side of your cock." Gerri's voice
was smooth and lilting in my ear. She was massaging my cock between
the palms of her hands, and it did feel a little like breasts.
"She pushes her together around your cock, and you start
sliding in and out of her cleavage."
I was getting close now. She was rubbing and squeezing the head
of my cock, and the semen was starting to move north. I thought about
the way Claire's had swung from side to side as she leaned
over in the ocean, and a little groan escaped me.
"Keep going," I muttered. "Don't stop."
"All right, Frank," she said solicitously. "Gerri is not a
tease."
She suddenly started to stroke me full-bore, her hand pumping up
and down rapidly with a lighter pressure. I let out a long moan and
then came like a geyser, bucking my hips up into the air. When it was
finally over, I lay there panting, my body a boneless mass of jello.
I felt quite literally drained, as if my balls had pumped themselves
dry. I've slept with a lot of women in a lot of ways (usually paying
for it, in case you think I'm bragging), and a hand job from Gerri is
the only thing that leaves me this way.
Gerri went to the kitchen and returned with a warm washcloth.
She cleaned me gently and thoroughly, removing all the semen and oil.
"Thank you," I said, when she was done. "You're incredible. If
you can do that with your hands, it's scary to think what you can do
with your mouth and your pussy."
She shrugged. "It is a skill, like playing the piano, or
juggling. And also you have to understand the human nature a little.
To know what will work at the certain moment, you know?"
"I guess. Don't ruin it for me by getting all clinical. It
would be like finding out how the magician saws the lady in half."
I put my clothes on, expecting to leave. Gerri usually
disappeared at this point, as if afraid I might want to cuddle or
something. But today she sat next to me on the couch and watched me
thoughtfully as I put on my shoes.
"Frank, how are you?"
"Thirty-four. Why?"
"Don't you think you should have a relationship? Have a
friend, I mean?"
"Wait, I thought you were my girlfriend."
"Very funny. You could have a girlfriend, Frank. You are tall
and you have a nice face. It would be better if you lifted weights,
of course, but still..."
This sudden maternal interest in my personal life was way out of
character. "Gerri, what exactly are you getting at?"
She shrugged and crossed her long slim legs. "You and I, we are
all alone. Sometimes it is nice, sometimes not so nice, right?"
"Aha."
"What do you mean, aha?"
"I mean, aha, this isn't about me, it's about you."
She looked embarrassed. "OK, yes, it is about me. Today one of
my clients asked me to marry him."
"Really? Which one, the managing partner?" I knew he was her
favorite.
"Yes. He even bought me a diamond ring, but I didn't take it. I
told him I would think about it."
"Do you love him?"
"Do I love him?" She smiled warily, as if afraid I was joking.
"No. I am not big for love. But he is a nice man, and he likes me a
lot. And he is very rich."
"Sounds like a match made in heaven," I said, standing up.
"Gerri, I'm the last person in the world who should be giving
relationship advice. But I think it would be very weird getting
married to a guy who has been paying you thousands of dollars to tie
him up and spank him for the past two years."
She walked me to the back door. "Yes, that is what I think too.
Also, he has a and children."
"That's another factor to consider."
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Three
-------------
The next morning I got up late and ran some errands on the way to
my office. I work out of a small windowless room that is part of a
dry cleaning establishment in a strip mall. The rent is minimal, but
I still have problems paying it. It's really just a place to have an
answering machine and to meet with clients. I could easily work out
of my apartment, but people expect a detective to have an office.
I parked my van and bought a big cup of regular drip coffee at
the Starbuck's and took it with me to the Busy Bee dry cleaners. Mr.
Han, the proprietor, was sitting behind the cash register like
a statue. I said hello and he lifted one hand without changing
expression. I'm not sure he fully appreciates the romance and
excitement of having a genuine private eye on his premises.
To get to my office, you go through the doorway at the left of
the front counter and then turn right down a narrow hallway that ends
in a fire exit at the back of the building My office is on the left,
halfway down the hall. The solid wooden door says "Frank Stern,
Licensed Private Detective," in gold stick-on letters. Otherwise it
could easily be mistaken for a supply closet.
The inside is pretty drab. A huge, battered wood desk with
drawers that stick, two dusty metal file cabinets, a few chairs.
I do have a decent computer, which looks out of place. The answering
machine was flashing one message, which is more than I get on most
mornings. I punched the message button and dropped into my swivel
chair.
Ten seconds later I was back on my feet and heading out the door,
my coffee left steaming on the desk. It was from Larry, the manager
of my apartment building - someone had just broken into my apartment.
It only took me fifteen minutes to get back home, but it seemed
like forever. I don't have renter's insurance, and I have a lot of
stuff in my apartment. It seemed quite likely that this was going to
be a very costly morning.
Larry was standing at the head of the little staircase that leads
down to my back door. He's a short, round guy who I've never seen
wearing a shirt. He looked up at me with a scowl and said "Gerri
called me a little while ago. Said she saw a guy leaving your
apartment, looked kinda suspicious. I went over, saw the door was
busted. I didn't call the cops yet."
He scratched a hairy armpit and glared at me, as if it was my
fault that someone had broken down my door. I didn't let the glare
bother me. Building managers always look at tenants that way,
otherwise they get bugged constantly about fixing things.
"Let's go take a look, see what's missing," I said, trying to
breath evenly.
I went down the stairs and looked at the door, which was ajar.
Judging from the splinters around the lock, it had been forced open
with a prybar. With a feeling of dread, I pushed it open and went
inside. My first impression wasn't a good one. My place had been
tossed, and it had been done roughly, by someone in a hurry. The
floors were covered with books, CDs, cushions, and whatever else had
been on my shelves and in my drawers.
"Motherfucker," said Larry. "They really messed the place up."
"Thanks for the observation."
I picked my way through the debris and went into the bedroom. I
have a safe in the back of my closet which contains my
collection and other miscellaneous small valuables. It had been
discovered, but was undamaged.
I went back to the living room. Larry was putting the couch
cushions back.
"Your and VCR and stereo are all still here," he said. "Not
busted or anything."
I nodded. It was starting to look like it wasn't too bad. It's
not like I have an expensive art collection or a drawer full of
jewelry. Then I remembered the pictures of Claire Ingleford, which I
had rather foolishly left on the coffee table.
"Shit. You see any pictures around? Five by sevens of a topless
brunette?"
Larry knows about my hobby, so he took this in stride. "Nope.
Think they got nicked?"
"Probably." I went into the darkroom and turned on the light.
It was also in complete disarray. My expensive enlarger was tipped
over on it its side, and I felt a stab of fresh anger. It didn't take
long to figure out that the negatives of Claire Ingleford had also
been stolen.
"I guess a thief sees a stack of topless pictures, he's gonna
grab them," said Larry. "Human nature."
"Makes sense," I agreed. I didn't mention that the negatives
were also missing, which made less sense for a burglar to bother with.
I started putting the darkroom back in order, and Larry went back
to straightening up the living room. Despite the scowl and gruff
attitude, he's not a bad guy.
An hour later the place was almost presentable, which is to say
it looked better than it did before the break-in.
"So what's the damage?" asked Larry.
"A Nikon body and a pair of binoculars," I said. "Plus
the pictures. That's all I can say for sure."
"Coulda been worse. Gerri said the guy wasn't carrying anything
big. Some balls, busting into a place in the middle of the morning."
"Did Gerri get a good look at him?"
"Nope. Said he was on the big side, was dressed pretty nice. He
had a hat, and she didn't see his face."
I chewed on that for a few seconds.
Larry said "So you wanna call the cops?"
"What do you think?"
He shrugged. "What they do is come out, poke around for a while,
ask you a bunch of stupid questions, make you fill out a buncha forms,
and then tell you to put on a stronger lock. It ain't like they're
gonna catch the guy or get your stuff back. On the other hand, if you
want your insurance to pay for the and binocs, you gotta file a
report."
"I don't have insurance. Forget the police. Maybe I'll look
into it myself."
"Hey, there you go. You gotcher self a new case. Lemme know if
I can help - I'd love to see you catch the bastard."
I nodded numbly, the utter futility of launching a one-man
investigation into an apartment break-in washing over me. If I was
serious, I should have dusted around for fingerprints before Larry and
I straightened up. The feeling of helplessness and anger that
accompanies a gross violation of one's personal space was keeping me
from thinking straight.
"You OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"I'll get your door fixed today. I'll see if I can put on
something that doesn't pry open so easy. We got insurance that covers
that sorta thing."
"Great. Thanks, Larry."
He patted me on the back in an awkward gesture of brotherhood and
waddled away. I decided I might as well head back to the office.
On my way, I remembered something that had been nagging at me
since I discovered the pictures were missing. I had never developed
the second roll of film, the one that had shots of Claire frolicking
in the ocean. I knew those pictures wouldn't be as good as the other
ones, but now they would be better than nothing. The film was still
in the little Olympus, which I hadn't seen in my apartment, and for a
bad moment I thought that it must have been stolen. Then I reached
behind me and found it on a folded blanket where I had hastily tossed
it during my ignomius retreat from Sparkle Beach.
I was feeling a little more cheerful as I parked in the strip
mall for the second time that day. Exercising more caution than
usual, I took the with me rather than leaving it in the van.
It was already past one, and I stopped at the Subway for a turkey sub
to go. It's actually pretty convenient working in a strip mall.
I ate the sub at my desk, washing it down with the tepid
Starbuck's coffee, and pondered the break-in. I was going to have to
become more security conscious, maybe install an alarm. I allowed
myself to luxuriate in a Charles Bronson fantasy of a silent alarm
that would allow me to show up at my apartment with a baseball bat and
a pair of pruning shears while a burglary was in progress. Then I
forced myself to get real.
The fact that the negatives had been taken from the darkroom
seemed very odd. You can't really see what's on negatives unless you
hold them up to the light and squint hard or load them into the
lightbox, and I had a hard time imagining a nervous burglar who was
ransacking the place for valuables bothering to do that.
My gut instinct was telling me that it wasn't a random burglary
at all, but that someone had broken in just to get the pictures. The
problem with this scenario is that it's just the sort of paranoid
fantasy that a down-and-out private eye would cook up in his head to
give himself something to do. I decided I would run it by someone who
would give me an unbiased opinion. Like maybe Gerri. My cock
twitched at the thought.
As it turned out, that wasn't necessary. I was scanning through
some newsgroups on the computer when my warning buzzer went off,
informing me that someone had opened the door at the other end of the
little corridor that led to my office. I installed the circuit to
give me a little warning when I'm going to have a visitor. Sort of a
nice private-eye touch, I think. It gives me just enough time to
sweep a pile of diamonds off the desktop into a drawer, or to make
sure my gun is loaded and in my shoulder holster, that sort of thing.
More realistically, it gives me a chance to zip up and put on the
screen saver.
This time I just spent the extra ten seconds trying to guess who
it might be. I didn't even get close, although I might have if I had
trusted my gut a little more. I opened the door in response to the
sharp knock and found myself facing a beautiful dark-haired woman
wearing a baseball cap and expensive-looking sunglasses. It was
Claire Ingleford.
"Come on in," I said, after gaping for a moment. "Have a seat."
To my relief, my voice didn't quaver or break. I sat back down in my
chair and she took the straight-back chair across from the desk.
We stared at each other coldly for several seconds. The fact
that she was here confirmed beyond a doubt that she was behind the
break-in, and or no, I was pissed. Not so pissed that I
couldn't appreciate her looks, however. She was dressed simply in
black slacks and a silver silk that clung enticingly to her
breasts. The top three buttons were undone, exposing a few inches of
smooth tan cleavage.
She took off her cap and sunglasses, put the sunglasses in the
cap, and set them next to her chair, staring at me all the while. Her
eyes were a beautiful shade of dark green, and very wide. With her
makeup on and her hair pulled back, she was much more recognizable
than she had been on the beach. She wasn't quite a classic beauty,
but the little imperfections in her features only enhanced her
powerful sex appeal. Her face was a smidgen too wide, which made her
look playful and catlike. Her lower lip was maybe a fraction too
full, which just added to her sensuality.
Finally the silence began to seem ridiculous. "Claire Ingleford,
the actress, right?"
She nodded. "Would you be surprised to hear that I recognize you
too, Mr. Stern?"
"I can't imagine from where."
"Sparkle Beach. Yesterday afternoon you were taking pictures of
me, sneaking around with a little under a towel. Enrico
chased you off and got your license plate."
Nothing like getting right to the point. I didn't want to
confirm this directly, but it seemed childish to deny it.
"Enrico - he would be your friend the burglar?"
"I don't know what your talking about," she said, with a complete
lack of conviction.
We stared at each other again. This time it was Claire who broke
the silence.
"I want to buy back the pictures. I'll give you two thousand
dollars for the negatives and any prints you've already made. And if
you're stalking me, I want you to stop immediately."
"I'm not stalking you."
She shrugged. "Then you won't have any problem leaving me alone
in the future." I noticed she was tapping her foot nervously against
the leg of the chair. She seemed to be very tightly wound, as if she
was holding herself together by force of will. It took a certain
amount of guts to show up alone at the office of a creep who had been
sneaking pictures of her, I had to give her that.
"I did have the pictures at one point," I said. "But they were
stolen out of my apartment this morning. If I'd known that someone
was willing to pay two grand for them, I guess I would have been more
careful."
I wanted her to admit, at least indirectly, that she was behind
the break-in. What I really wanted to know was why she was so anxious
to get the pictures.
"All right, lets stop playing games," she said. "We both know
some of the pictures are still in your possession. The ones of me in
the water."
I nodded. "OK, no more games. Do you mind if I ask why you're
so anxious to have the pictures?"
"Not that it's any of your business, Mr. Stern, but I don't want
to see them in a sleazy tabloid. I'm trying to clean up my image.
But don't get any ideas about raising the price. Two thousand dollars
is more than fair."
It hadn't occurred to me that a tabloid would be interested. But
since the pictures were taken while she was cavorting in public, it
would be perfectly legal to publish them.
"You posed in Playboy six months ago. How is this any
different?"
I could see her jaw muscles working as she gritted her teeth.
"It's complicated. It has to do with my deal. And it's really
none of your business."
"All right, forget I asked. I don't have the pictures here in my
office, but I can get them to you by tomorrow." Actually they were in
the which was sitting on the desk right in front of her, but
there was no way I was turning over the film before I had a chance to
look at it myself.
"I want them as soon as possible. I don't want you shopping
around for a better offer, showing them to everyone in town in the
process."
She was deliberately trying to annoy me, and I tried not to let
my irritation show. "If we strike a deal for the pictures, then
you'll have my word that I won't do that. If that's not enough, I can
give you a signed contract for the pictures."
I opened a file drawer and took out a blank contract with my
letterhead. "If I break a contract you can complain to the state and
get my license revoked."
She waved the back of her hand at the contract. "Forget that.
Can you get me the negatives and pictures by tonight? Say ten or
eleven?"
"Yes. The price is two thousand dollars cash plus a Nikon 3800
camera body and a pair of 8x10 binoculars."
She looked genuinely confused.
"It's OK if they're used," I added. "It's just that the
is hard to replace, and has sentimental value."
Comprehension dawned. "He didn't."
"Oh yes, he did. He also left my apartment looking like the
inside of a dumpster."
"Oh fuck, did he really? If that's true, I'm sorry." She
sounded sincere, and I suspected Enrico was going to experience a
sudden decrease in nookie. Poor guy.
She said "I'll see what I can do. If I can't recover those
items, will you accept an extra five hundred instead?"
"All right."
"Then we have a deal." She stood up and held out a card with a
Beverly Hills address hand-printed on it. "Bring them by tonight."
I stood up and as I took the card, I couldn't resist peeking into
her cleavage. I caught a glimpse of a full curve of and black
lace trim. It hit home that I was standing a few feet away from a
famous actress and sex symbol, and I was suddenly star struck.
"I'm looking forward to seeing your movie, Ms. Ingleford. What
was the name of it again?"
She gave me a tight smile. "Wishing Her Life Away."
I nodded knowingly, as if the title had been on the tip of my
tongue. I couldn't think of a single thing to say.
She put on her hat and sunglasses and said "So you're really a
private detective?"
"That's right - Frank Stern, P.I., at your service. If there's
ever anything you need help with, just let me know."
She looked around my shabby office with an expression of
emasculating disdain.
"Sure. If I lose a or something, maybe I'll give you call.
See you tonight." She walked out, closing the door quietly behind
her.
I cupped my balls at the door and said "Bite me." It didn't make
me feel much better.
I paced around the office, trying to think. It had been quite a
day, and it was still only early afternoon. Eventually a few synapses
managed to fire, and I went to the computer and looked up the number
for a guy I know at the Enquirer. I don't think you'll be surprised
to hear that they have a lot of voyeurs on their staff.
He answered on the first ring.
"Chuck Werner, what have you got for me?" His voice sounded like
he was gargling gravel chips, the result of getting punched in the
throat some years ago.
"Chuck, it's Frank Stern. How's it going?"
"Frank, good to hear from you. Heard about that mess you got
yourself into last month- you lookin' to borrow money for bail?" He
laughed, and I held the phone away from my ear until he was finished.
"No, the charges were dropped."
"Great, great. So what can I do you for?"
"I'm trying to get an idea of how much some pictures might be
worth. Let's say I had topless shots of a well-known actress.
Close-up and sharp, and taken on a public beach so no legal problems."
"We might be able to use that. You don't want to tell me who?"
"Sorry."
"No, that's OK. Would you say this goes against her reputation?
Like is this going to surprise people?"
"No, she's posed nude in the past. Great tits."
"Hmm. See, we have to block off the nipples for our rag. So it
would just be like her in a bathing suit. If the fact that she's
topless isn't a shocker, like with a princess or something, it's not a
huge deal. We might put a shot like that in our 'Celebrities about
Town' section. That would pay from two to four hunnert bucks."
"OK, that's sort of what I figured. Thanks, Chuck."
"You bet."
I sat on the edge of my desk and reviewed the situation for a few
minutes. Obviously I would take the two thousand. I would have taken
it even if I could sell the pictures to a tabloid for more. I do have
some scruples, and my strict personal rule against exploiting the
people I take pictures of lets me sleep better at night. But Claire
Ingleford had no way of knowing that, and she had clearly made a
highball offer. The question was why. I didn't find her explanation
particularly convincing, to say the least.
My thoughts were interrupted when the warning buzzer sounded
again. This time I used the extra ten seconds to stash the little
Olympus with its valuable cargo in a hiding place I have behind one of
the file cabinets.
No knock came, so after a minute I opened the door. A clean-cut
young wearing a blue uniform was standing there, his knuckles
raised as if in mid-knock. I suspected he had been listening at my
door.
"Are you Frank Stern?" he asked politely.
I admitted it.
"Sergeant Martinez, fourth precinct." He flashed his shield at
me.
"Come on in, Martinez," I said reluctantly. Fourth precinct cops
weren't my favorite people in the world.
He shook his head. "Actually, they want to talk to you back at
the station. I'm supposed to drive you over right now."
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Four
------------
I followed Sergeant Martinez out of the Busy Bee dry cleaners and
into the bright sunlight. I had briefly considered refusing to
cooperate, but you just can't win that game, especially if you're a
private dick. Besides, I was curious to know what they wanted.
I got into the passenger side of the white Ford LTD, which was
easily recognizable as a police car without the decals and light bar.
They still haven't quite figured out the plainclothes/undercover thing
yet when it comes to cars.
"Who exactly wants to talk to me?" I asked as we pulled out of
the lot.
"Detectives Rank and Callahan."
"Wonderful. So Rank has nothing better to do than to stake out
my office. What sort of lame excuse did he give for hassling me?"
Martinez gave me an apologetic glance. "I'm really not supposed
to say anything."
"So Tina Callahan made detective?" I asked.
"Yep. Just last month." He gave me a sidelong look. "Say, you
got busted a few months back, didn't you?"
"Who, me?"
"Yeah, I remember hearing about something. A private dick busted
for indecent."
"Stop playing around Martinez. I know everyone in the Fourth is
aware of all the details. Thanks to my buddy Barry Rank."
A grin appeared on his face, which he quickly smothered. "I got
Rank's side of the story, yeah. I wouldn't mind getting your side."
I sighed. "There's not much to tell. I was on the job, working
an adultery case. I had the wife's lover's house staked out, and I
hit paydirt. They were going at it in the bedroom with the light on
and the shade up six inches or so. I was taking pictures from my car
from about twenty yards away. Then I got greedy and decided to go in
for some closeups."
"Uh-huh. Rank didn't mention you were working a case."
"I'm not surprised. Anyway, it just wasn't my night. A beat cop
had spotted my van parked on the street in a nice area and run my
plates. When it came up as me, Rank drove out himself, snuck up on
me, took pictures, and then arrested me for trespassing."
"And indecent."
"That came later, when the lover understandably decided not to
press charges."
Martinez shook his head. "Between you and me, I think it was
shitty what he did with those pictures."
I didn't say anything. Rank had caught me dead to rights with my
dick in my hand under the bedroom window, and had taken Polaroids.
That much I couldn't really fault. But then he had put the Polaroids
up on a bulletin board over his desk, complete with my name and a
funny caption contest that everyone was encouraged to participate in.
My face was flushed just thinking about it. The fact that he had been
forced to drop the indecent exposure charges because of the stunt had
been a very small consolation.
"If it makes you feel any better, he got an official
reprimand," Martinez told me. "Didn't do his career much good."
I hadn't known that. In a sense it was bad news. like
Barry Rank never blame themselves for anything bad that happens to
them. Now he would have it in for me even worse than before.
Martinez pulled into the precinct house and stopped in front of
the entrance.
"I'm just droppin' you off, Stern. See ya later."
I got out and walked into the modern brick building. Tina
Callahan spotted me from her desk and waved me over. I had dealt with
her a few times over the past few years, and we were on friendly
terms. She was a woman about my age, with light hair
and eyebrows and Nordic features. She was very sharp and very
ambitious, and I wasn't surprised to hear that she had been promoted.
She and Rank were an odd couple indeed.
"Hello Frank." She stood up and shook my hand. Her grip was
surprisingly strong. "Thanks for coming in. Let's go somewhere we
can talk."
She led me down the hall to a pleasant, brightly-lit room with
comfortable chairs arranged around a formica table. This was where
they questioned witnesses and took complaints - suspects were
interviewed in slightly more grim surroundings. Although I hadn't
done anything illegal recently, I was still relieved.
I took a seat and eyed Tina as she sat down next to me and
carefully arranged her short skirt. She had very nice legs. In fact,
she was more attractive than I had remembered, having seen her only in
uniform before now.
"Congratulations on your promotion, Detective."
"Thanks. The best part is getting out of that ugly uniform," she
said with a smile, as if reading my mind. "How's business these
days?"
"Picking up a little. I'm keeping afloat. So what's up?"
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. "Barry should be here
any minute. Why don't we wait."
"So you and Rank are partners."
She nodded, not meeting my eyes. "Yeah. You know, you don't get
to pick who you work with when you first make detective."
That was a pretty clear statement of what she thought of Rank,
and I had to grin. I found myself wondering whether Tina Callahan had
contributed to the caption contest.
Rank walked in, carrying stack of folders. He's a thickset,
jowly in his fifties, with a nose like a potato. He was wearing a
wrinkled brown suit and a stained tie. His macho persona surrounded
him like cheap cologne.
He made an ominous show of closing and locking the door, and then
he leaned his back against the wall and said "How's my favorite
pervert?"
I saw Tina cringe out of the corner of my eye. I didn't say
anything.
"Let's get started," said Tina, her voice neutral and
businesslike. "Stern, a woman named Claire Ingleford, a well known
actress, was seen entering your office inside the Busy Bee dry
cleaners about an hour ago. We're interested in finding out what why
she was there."
"To discuss a business matter."
"Don't play games with us, Stern," said Rank. "What did she
want?"
I said "Are you aware that as a licensed private investigator,
I'm not required to divulge private information about a client unless
you show due cause?"
"We're aware of that," said Tina quickly, before Rank could say
anything. "Had Claire Ingleford been your client previous to today?"
"No."
"Had you ever met her before today?"
"No." I was skating on thin ice, but telling the truth.
"Bullshit," said Rank. You're telling me this star
just waltzed into your grimy little office and hired you out of the
blue?"
"I was pretty surprised when she knocked on my door, I'll tell
you that much."
Tina smiled. "I'll bet. Can you give us some idea of the nature
of her case?"
I shifted uncomfortably on my chair, unsure of what to do. If I
told them the truth, I ran the risk of having the undeveloped film of
Claire confiscated by the police. Bye-bye to the two grand. On the
other hand, I could get in big trouble by holding out. I had an
uneasy suspicion that Claire had complained to the police about my
taking pictures of her, in which case they knew everything.
"You put me in a difficult position, legally speaking," I said.
Rank let out a snort, which I ignored. "If you could tell me why
you're interested in the activities of Ms. Ingleford, that would be
very helpful. For example, if I knew she was a suspect in a criminal
investigation, that would untie my hands and let me cooperate."
The suggestion that Claire was a criminal suspect was meant to be
a bit of ridiculous hyperbole, but to my surprise Tina and Rank
exchanged a serious look.
"All right," said Tina. "A named George Cahn was found shot
and killed in his home outside San Diego yesterday. Mr. Cahn was a
well-known producer of adult movies. He was also Claire Ingleford's
ex-husband."
I knew that spouses and ex-spouses were always potential suspects
in murder cases. Suspecting Claire seemed a little far-fetched, but
the police liked to cover all the bases.
"So the San Diego police asked you to keep an eye on Claire for a
few days, see if she did anything suspicious," I said.
"Right," said Rank. It was first remotely civil thing he had
said to me. I realized that although it was good police procedure,
the fact that they were tailing a well-known actress who wasn't an
official suspect wouldn't make for good publicity. Rank must be
eating his guts out with curiosity over how I was involved.
"Why are you smiling?" asked Tina.
"When your Martinez showed up right after Claire Ingleford
left, I figured you must have been watching me. It never
occurred to me that you might have been following her."
Rank said "We got better things to do than follow you around
waiting for you to jerk off."
"Jesus, Barry," said Tina, giving him an annoyed look.
I had a sudden thought. "You said Cahn was killed yesterday,
right? When?"
Tina opened a folder and said "In the middle of the day. The
body was discovered at 2 pm, and he had been dead for maybe an hour."
"In that case, I can tell you that Claire Ingleford didn't do it.
I saw her here in LA at about that time."
"Did you now," said Rank. "Where was that, exactly?"
"Sparkle Beach."
They exchanged a significant look.
"I guess you heard that before," I observed.
"That's what she told the San Diego police when they called her
to tell her ex-husband had been killed," said Tina. "We haven't been
able to find an eyewitness yet, though. Until now, I guess."
"Sorry to rain on your parade, but I definitely saw her on
Sparkle Beach at about 1 pm yesterday. So did dozens of other
people."
"I guess that settles it, then," said Tina with a shrug.
"Hang on," said Rank. "That don't explain why she was at Stern's
office. Maybe she was hiring him to be her alibi."
This was so idiotic that Tina turned away from Rank to hide a
smile.
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were out to get me,
Detective Rank." My tone was light, but I was worried. I didn't see
how I was going to be able to avoid mentioning the pictures, now that
they had bearing on a murder investigation.
To my surprise, Tina said "At this point, I don't think we can
ask Mr. Stern to violate his client's privacy. Claire Ingleford can't
really be considered a suspect any longer."
This hung in the air for a moment, and I held my breath. Rank
scowled at Tina and finally mumbled something under his breath and
left the room, slamming the door behind him.
"Thanks," I said.
She gave me a wry smile. "Come on, I'll give you a ride back to
your office."
I followed her out to a side lot surrounded by a chain-link
fence, and we got into another Ford LTD, this one blue. The interior
was hot from sitting in the sun, and we rolled the windows all the way
down.
I said "As long as I'm your new best friend, maybe you could fix
some parking tickets for me?"
She laughed. "How much money did I just save you? I want half."
I had to smile. "So you know?"
"I talked to some people on Sparkle Beach this morning. A couple
people told me they heard a guy was taking pictures of Claire
yesterday, and ended up getting chased away. Then she shows up at
your office."
"OK, but why did you protect me back there?"
"First of all, because Barry Rank is an asshole."
"No argument there."
We were on the highway now, and she was weaving expertly in and
out of traffic, sitting very straight on the seat to see over the
dash. I could see the muscles flexing in her right leg as she worked
the pedals, and I decided that Tina Callahan was probably a lot
stronger than she appeared at first glance. I noticed she wasn't
wearing a wedding ring, although I was pretty sure she had been
wearing one last time I had seen her.
"What you may not know about Rank," she continued, "is that he's
lazy. You didn't hear that from me, of course. This isn't our case,
we're just helping out the San Diego people. So despite the fact that
it's a juicy murder case with the potential for credit all around, he
can't be bothered to put in any extra effort. Rank was out sick
yesterday, and I worked up a whole plan on how we could attack the
case. But this morning he gives me a whole speech about how we should
just stay out of the way, let the San Diego handle it."
"I'd think Rank would jump at the chance to break a big case."
Tina shook her head. "No, he's just counting the days until he
can retire with his pension. He's got this bodyguard thing going on
the side - he hangs out with Hollywood has-beens like Edward Burke and
Rod Steiger, telling them cop and making them feel important.
Rank told me these don't even get recognized anymore in public,
but they still like to move around with a bodyguard - an ego thing."
"I see. So you're going to look into Cahn's murder on your own?"
She shot me an appraising glance. "I'm not going to get anywhere
on my own. I've got a full caseload, and people looking over my
shoulder. But if you're working for Claire, maybe we could help each
other out. Share information, I mean."
"Ah. That explains the ride. I was starting to wonder if you
were trying to pick me up."
"Stern, if I ever try to pick you up, you'll know it right away."
"I'll remember that. Anyway, I'm not working for Claire, I'm
just selling her the pictures. Why on earth would she hire me? If
she's involved in the case in some way she needs a lawyer, not a P.I."
"I guess I see your point. Are you going to see her again?"
"Tonight. I'm supposed to bring the pictures by and collect."
She thought this over for a little while. As we pulled into the
lot in front of my office, she said "Can you make a copy of the
pictures for me?"
"Sure."
"Also, I want to hear how your meeting with her goes tonight.
Can you call me afterwards? I'm in the book."
I got out of the car and shut the door. Through the open window,
I said "There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?"
She gave me a sunny smile. "Take it easy, Frank."
"Yeah, you too. Thanks for the ride, Detective."
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Five
------------
I went into my office to collect the with the pictures of
Claire, and then I headed straight home. There was a note from Larry
on the back door, telling me that he had installed a new lock and left
the keys in my mailbox. I opened the door and examined the lock. It
looked strong enough to stop a charging rhino.
I went into the darkroom straight away and started working on the
negatives. After all that had happened, I was worried that they might
not come out, like maybe I had misloaded the film while hastily
loading it on the beach. But they were fine. Out of ten shots, six
were decent. I made three sets of 4 by 6 prints: one for me, one for
Tina Callahan, and one for Claire, since she would be assuming that I
had developed the film already.
I spent some time making enlargements of the best shots, but my
heart wasn't in it. I was thinking about all that had happened today,
and worrying about my two grand. It occurred to me that I might be
putting myself in danger tonight. I could easily imagine Enrico
showing up instead of Claire and beating me senseless. I decided to
bring along my gun.
By the time I showered and ate dinner it was after nine, and I
decided to leave. I had dressed up a little more than usual, in tan
slacks, loafers, and a open-necked linen shirt. I told myself that I
needed to wear the loose slacks to make sure I could quickly get the
small automatic out of the ankle holster. But when I found myself
slapping on Drakkar Noir, I had to admit it was bothering me that
Claire Ingleford thought I was a complete loser. Not that dressing
nicely or smelling good was likely to change that.
Claire lived up in the rocky hills overlooking the Valley, and I
almost got lost more than once on the narrow, winding roads that
connect the homes of people rich enough to escape the humdrum smog-
ridden existence below. Her address was a small house set well back
from the road that couldn't have been worth more than two or three
million.
I backed into the driveway and then got out and spent a few
minutes watching the house. The place was lit up by outside
floodlights, but there was no activity that I could see. I finally
walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Claire answered the
door herself. She was dressed casually in stylishly torn jeans and a
halter top, and was barefoot. Her hair was piled on top of her
head and held in place with clips.
Not wasting any time, she said "Do you have the pictures?"
I held up a manila envelope.
"OK, come on in." She closed the door behind me and led me into
the living room. It was of modest proportions but was elaborately
furnished and decorated. I didn't much care for her taste. What made
the room special was the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a pool
and beyond that the skyline of LA shimmering in the humid night air.
"I was just having a snack. Help yourself." She gestured toward
a plate of crackers covered with some kind of pink spread.
"Thanks." I took one and popped it in my mouth. It was awful.
"Can I see the pictures?"
I handed her the envelope. She opened it and took out the stack
of prints, and thumbed through them carefully. Then she held the
negatives up to a floor lamp and spent a few minutes studying those.
"Naturally you made some extra prints for yourself," she said
finally. "You don't have to admit it. All I ask is that you keep
them to yourself."
"Noted and logged."
"Wait here and I'll get your money." She went out of the room
and came back moments later with a white envelope. She also had my
Nikon and binoculars. I pretended to be happy to see them, although I
had actually been hoping for the extra five hundred.
"I got these back for you," she said. "Enrico says to tell you
he's sorry." I thought I saw a little twinkle in her eye at that.
I opened the envelope and riffled through the stack of hundreds
with my thumb. Then I casually put the envelope in the pocket
of my jacket.
I said "By the way, my condolences on the death of your ex-
husband."
She looked up sharply. "How did you hear about that?"
"I hear things," I said vaguely. I had no intention of
mentioning my unscheduled visit to the police station.
"It's just sort of funny that you would mention it. Actually,
one of the reasons I need the pictures is that..." She looked
flustered.
"Yes?"
"The police seem to think I might be involved. As it happened,
George was killed at about the time I was on the beach yesterday. The
pictures you took can confirm that."
"So I'm providing your alibi." I chuckled at the irony of it
all.
She walked over to the big window and stared out moodily
at the City of Angels. I used the opportunity to stare moodily at her
body. Her ass looked good enough to eat, and she wasn't wearing
anything under the halter top. Finally she said "Are you a good
detective, Mr. Stern?"
"The best."
"Really?"
"Well, no. But I'm quite competent. Why, did your run
away?"
She turned her head and looked at me through narrowed eyes, then
returned her gaze to the window. "That was a mean-spirited comment,
and I apologize. I haven't been myself."
"Understandable. For what it's worth, I apologize for taking
those pictures."
"Oh hell, I was flattered. Mr. Stern, would you describe
yourself as completely law-abiding? By the book, and all that?"
"No," I said carefully. "I've never thought of myself that way."
"I've never hired a detective before."
My heart jumped. "Most people haven't had the pleasure."
She turned around and said "I have a problem, and I need some
help from someone who can be discreet. Are you interested?
I was interested. I declined her offer of another cracker, and
accepted her offer of something to drink. She got a couple of bottles
of Coors Light out of the fridge and brought them over. I sat down in
a yellow leather armchair, and she curled up across from me on the
matching couch, tucking her legs underneath her in a position I
couldn't get into without yoga lessons.
"Let me give you some background first," she said. "I came to
Hollywood when I was seventeen. That was...jeez, twelve years ago. I
ran away from home. Ever since I was a little all I wanted to do
was be an actress. Of course things didn't work out right away. I
had to do some unpleasant things to survive, and one of those things
was porn movies."
"I've heard rumors about that."
"Well, they're true. I made about a dozen of them between 1986
and 1987, mostly small parts. Toward the end I did a few where I was
one of the stars, and if George Cahn hadn't come along I might have
made that my career. In those days George specialized in low-budget
R-rated features with a lot of nudity, what they used to call B-
movies. We met when I was just nineteen, and he started giving me
parts in his movies. I'm sure he did it just so he could sleep with
me, but I turned out to be a pretty decent actress, so it worked out
well for both of us. We got married, and George took over my career.
One of the things he did that I'll always be grateful for - maybe the
only thing - is buy the rights to the last two porn I starred
in before they were released."
"So they were never released?"
"Right. He destroyed all the existing copies. Or at least he
said he did." She leaned down to pick up her beer, giving me a long,
delicious look at her breasts. She took a dainty swig and then gave
me another thrill as she set the bottle back down.
"But you think he kept copies?" I prompted. I was starting to
see where this was headed.
"I know he did. George and I divorced five years ago, just about
the time my career was starting to take off. He was very resentful
of my success, especially since his own career as a director and
producer was on the skids. He went into making adult movies, which
was a humiliating career move for him, even though it turned out to be
a great decision from a financial point of view."
"I'm familiar with his name in that regard."
She looked faintly amused. "Are you an adult buff, then?"
"I suppose you could say that."
"Yeah, well, who isn't. At least you're not ashamed to admit it.
Anyway, have gotten back to me for the past few years about
wild parties at George Cahn's house where he would show those
with me in them. The ones that were supposedly destroyed. I can't
say it surprised me that he kept copies."
"And now that he's dead, you're worried about those tapes falling
into the wrong hands?"
"Exactly. I know it must seem selfish and cold-hearted. Believe
me, I hope the police find out who killed him. But I need to think
about my career. I need someone to find those tapes and return them
to me, and do it quietly. I'll pay you your going rate for your time
and expenses, and I'll give you a fifty thousand dollar bonus if
you're successful."
I tried to force the image of a briefcase full of bills out of my
head. "I have a few questions."
"Go ahead."
"Would these tapes really be so damaging? They can't be released
without your permission, since Cahn bought the rights. And they were
made, what, ten years ago? The public is pretty forgiving about that
sort of thing. Your an actress, not a politician."
She looked uncomfortable. "These tapes are a lot more explicit
than my earlier films. Or at least my own activities in them are.
Specifically, there's one that features a lot of sex. I'm
sure you know how it goes. clips show up on the internet, and
everyone in the country gets to take a peek. And maybe copies of the
tape get passed around, like with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. I
guess it wouldn't my career. The assholes who write "LA West"
would probably work it into the show. But it would kill my
career before it even starts. Not to mention the humiliation."
I could only imagine how pictures of Claire Ingleford eating
pussy would capture the imagination of America. I said "OK, second
question: do you think it's possible that George Cahn's murder is
related to these tapes?"
She looked surprised. "God, I hope not. That never occurred to
me. I guess it's possible, in which case I'm really fucked." She
worried at a fingernail as she thought about it. Finally she shook
her head. "I don't see that being likely. But I don't know much
about what George was up to lately. Basically, I was hoping that he
kept the tapes in a safe place somewhere in his house. I was thinking
you could get in somehow and find them. That's why I asked you if you
might do something sort of illegal."
I chewed that over. George Cahn's house was a crime scene, of
course - the location of an unsolved murder, unless the San Diego
police had made an arrest. It would be off limits to anyone but the
police. But it wouldn't be impossible to get in and search it. It
would be risky, but for a chance at fifty big ones it might be worth
it.
"It's possible that the police have already collected the tapes
as evidence," I said, thinking out loud.
"He's probably got a million porno tapes in his house. And these
tapes wouldn't have my name on them. I hope not, anyway. Also, my
suspicion is that he had them somewhere. George was always big
on hiding things."
"If the police searched Cahn's place carefully and found them
hidden away somewhere, I imagine they would have impounded them on the
theory that they must be important if Cahn hid them."
"Shit."
"Yeah, that wouldn't be good."
"Would the police be discreet about something like that?"
I thought about the Polaroids of me tacked up over Barry Rank's
desk. "Hard to say. They wouldn't post pictures on the internet.
But it would be hard to get the tapes back from them."
I finished my beer, and set the empty bottle on a coaster. It
sounded like there was a good chance the tapes were in Cahn's house.
The possibility of making fifty grand was making my hands sweat, but I
didn't want to appear too eager.
I said "If the tapes were well-hidden, maybe the police didn't
find them. So let's assume they're there. If they aren't, things get
more complicated, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it."
"Agreed."
We discussed specifics for a few minutes. There would be no
paperwork connecting us, and if I was caught in Cahn's house Claire
would deny any involvement. Claire gave me another three thousand
dollars in cash as a retainer. Apparently she didn't believe in
keeping her money in the bank.
As she opened the front door to let me out, she said "I hope I
don't regret this."
I gave her a reassuring smile. "I can't guarantee I'll recover
the tapes. But you can trust me to keep to our agreement if I do."
She moistened her lips and put her hand on my upper arm. Then
she moved against me so that her right was pressed gently
against my forearm, just below the elbow. Looking up into my eyes,
she said "Stern, if you bring me those tapes, I'll give you an extra
reward above and beyond the fifty thousand. Something a lot more
personal."
Time seemed to stand still. I was completely aware of the
pressure of each one of her fingers, and of the faint mixture of
smells of her, and above all of the warm, loose weight of her
separated from my skin by a thin layer of fabric. I'm quite sure she
knew the effect she was having on me, and that she was enjoying my
reaction.
Finally I cleared my throat and said "You're quite a motivator,
Ms. Ingleford."
"Claire."
"All right, Claire. Like I said, I'll do my best."
She gave me a knowing smile and shut the door behind me.
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Six
-----------
As I drove back to Jasmine Heights, I found myself thinking as
much about Detetctive Tina Callahan as I did about Claire Ingleford.
I had promised to report back to her on my visit, but now I had to
think things through. Claire really was my official client now, which
meant I wasn't supposed to discuss her case. On the other hand, Tina
could potentially help me out, especially if the San Diego police had
already collected the tapes in question. On the third hand, Tina had
a really great set of legs, and didn't seem to think I was pond scum.
When I got back to my place, I looked up Tina's number in the
phone book and dialed it.
"Hello?"
"Hey, it's Frank Stern. Did you still want to talk about my
visit with Claire?"
"Sure, why not. Did you get your money?"
"Yep."
"Good for you. How did she seem? Nervous, excited?"
"She hired me, Tina. I'm working for her now."
"What! Really? To do what? Track down her ex-husbands killer?"
She let out a high-pitched laugh..
"You don't think I'm qualified?"
"Well, come on Stern, no offense, but..."
"Never mind. She hired me on different matter. That's where it
gets awkward, my discussing it with you."
"You know, I looked up your address - you live pretty close to
me. Can we get together and talk about this?"
"Sure. I can give you the pictures I promised you."
She named a bar I knew of but had never been in: Harry's Lounge,
on Recondido. She was waiting in a booth when I got there. It really
wasn't my kind of place - quiet and chilly, with lots of leather and
walnut, and not a lap dancer in sight - but it was nice enough. Tina
had a drink in front of her, and when she saw me coming she signaled
the bartender. Since I was flush for once, I splurged and ordered a
Bombay gin and tonic.
"So...detective to the stars, eh?"
I slid in across from her. "Right. I see a whole new niche
opening up." I handed her an envelope with the pictures. She opened
it and sifted through the prints, chewing on her lower lip. I took
the opportunity to look at her closely. Her fine white-blond hair was
cut short, a practical style made feminine by soft bangs. Cool blue
eyes, a strong nose that probably had been in her for
generations. Her skin was fine-grained and smooth. I knew she had
to be at least thirty, but she looked enough to get carded. She
was wearing a thin white sweater that hugged her small breasts.
My drink came, and I tossed back half. It was strong and
delicious.
"Nice tits," commented Tina. "Oh, hey, cute tattoo. This guy
with her, he's the one who chased you away?"
"Yep. She referred to him later as Enrico. I get the feeling he
comes running when Claire snaps her fingers."
She closed up the envelope. "You know, you're not in any of
these."
"I left out the one where I dropped the on my foot and it
went off in my face."
"Really?"
"No, not really. I took the pictures, why would I be in any of
them?"
"It's just that anyone could have taken these shots, right? I
mean, we've tracked down several people who recognized Claire, but all
we have for the photographer is a vague description. You can't really
prove it was you, can you?"
"But why would I need to..." She was laughing silently, her
shoulders shaking.
I asked "How many drinks have you had?"
"A few, but that's not the problem. The previous line of
questioning is courtesy of the tortured mind of Barry Rank. He's got
a theory. He doesn't come up with many original ideas, so he's pretty
proud of it. According to my brilliant partner, Claire hired you to
kill her ex-husband. To set up an alibi for both of you, you had
someone with a passing resemblance to you take pictures of her on
Sparkle Beach while you were in San Diego committing the murder. When
she showed up at your office earlier today, it was to pay you for
whacking Cahn, and to make sure you had your straight."
I finished my drink in one long and signaled for another.
"The voyeur detective lookalike trick, eh?"
"Just for the record, I don't believe it's possible. Could you
blow a in it for me?"
The bartender brought another round. Tina was drinking whiskey
sours, and she started by eating the cherry, sliding it delicately off
the toothpick with her small white teeth and then chewing it
thoughtfully as she waited for me to respond.
"I was working here in LA both before and after. Moving
furniture, with a partner." But I was working out the timing in my
head, and I wasn't really sure if it was impossible for me to have
pulled off a quick hit in San Diego.
"I don't think it's going to come to anything unless Rank turns
up some solid evidence. The thing is, your continued association with
Claire Ingleford is going to look suspicious to him. If he finds
out."
"You mean, it will give him an excuse to keep hassling me. He
can't really think I did it."
"Probably not. Anyway, consider yourself warned. Just remember
you didn't hear it from me."
"Thanks, Tina."
"Now, let's talk about your meeting with Claire."
"I see. My back has been scratched, and now I have to scratch
yours."
She smiled, taking no offense. "If you want to put it that way."
I gave her an abbreviated description of what had taken place,
leaving out Claire's pep talk at the end and reducing the bonus to ten
thousand in case I ended up having to it with Tina.
She stirred her drink thoughtfully. "I'm sure the San Diego
police would be interested to hear this."
"They haven't solved the case yet, I take it?"
She shook her head. "Here's what they have, or at least what
they've told me. Cahn was discovered with a single gunshot wound to
the chest, not self-inflicted. He was lying on his bed, partially
nude. He had had sexual intercourse recently. Apparently Cahn had a
long-standing habit of taking recreational lunch breaks back at his
house with porn actresses. As a director, he could pretty much take
his pick. So one of them killed him after sex, or maybe he was killed
later by an intruder. No one has come forward and admitted to
sleeping with him that day."
"Interesting. Any motive?"
"Not yet. Seems like Cahn was pretty well-liked within the
industry. These tapes you're talking about might be the motive."
"Was the place searched?"
"Yep. Score one for you. It was messed up pretty good, like
someone had gone through in a big hurry looking for valuables. You
thinking maybe whoever killed him was looking for the tapes?"
"I'm not working on any assumptions," I said. "Except the
assumption that ten grand will keep me solvent for months." In fact,
fifty grand in tax-free income would keep me afloat a lot longer than
that.
"Well, all I can say is that Claire Ingleford would be a tempting
suspect if she didn't have an airtight alibi. Lots of motive, with
this porno tape thing."
I nodded. "True. Maybe she hired some thug to kill Cahn and get
the tape back, but the guy couldn't find it."
"Possible. That would be pretty stupid of her, though. A hired
hit would roll over on her for sure if he was caught. The risk
would far outweigh any potential benefit."
"Claire doesn't strike me as stupid. But this is beside the
point as far as I'm concerned. I'm not trying to crack the case, I'm
just trying to recover the tapes."
She gave me a playful smile. "And how are you planning to do
that? Put in an official request to search Cahn's house?"
"Yeah, right. You wouldn't rat me out, would you?"
This was an obvious opening for her to ask for a cut of the "ten
grand" bonus. I was pleased in more ways than one when she shook her
head and said "You better be careful, Stern. You get caught in Cahn's
house, you'll lose your license and maybe even do a little time. Not
to mention, Rank could fit it nicely into his pet theory."
"A UFO could be sighted over the Hollywood sign, and Rank would
work it into his theory."
She snorted a quick laugh, then held up her hand. "Let's drop
it. I gotta work with the guy, so I better not get too carried away
with this."
"Speaking of which, how'd you manage to get bumped up to
detective?"
"Several factors, I guess. Being a woman doesn't hurt, to be
perfectly honest. I got lucky on a drug bust, got some good pub for
the department and my ended up in the paper. Funny the way
things go sometimes. My marriage was imploding just when my career
was looking up."
"I thought you used to wear a ring."
"For three lovely, magical years. Getting was a really
stupid idea."
"In general, or to your ex-husband?"
"Both."
"But at least you're not bitter."
"Right, that's the important thing."
She stretched her arms over her head and arched her back, causing
her nipples to poke at the fabric of her sweater. At the same time,
she turned her head to the side to examine something behind the bar.
It was a pretty obvious invitation to stare, so I did. When I go into
one of the strip joints where I'm a regular, I get this sort of thing
lot. In that case, there's no mystery at the motivation - I'm known
as a guy with a wad of small bills burning a in his pocket.
Claire Ingleford's motivation for rubbing up against me like a in
heat was also pretty clear - extra incentive to find the tapes and
stick to our deal. But what Tina wanted from me was harder to figure.
She turned her head back to me with a little smile that seemed
to be asking me if I liked what I saw.
"You ever been married, Stern?"
"Not even close."
"That's right, you're a little different, aren't you?" She
gestured at the envelope with the pictures of Claire. "What's with
the hobby?"
Normally the question would give me hives, especially coming from
a woman I was trying to flirt with. But three high-octane gin and
tonics had dulled my sense of shame. I said "It combines my love of
photography, my sincere admiration for the female form, and the thrill
of the chase."
She laughed longer and harder than the comment deserved. Two
little spots of color had appeared high on her cheeks.
"You're pretty funny, Frank. You know, you make women laugh like
that, you'll get yourself a ball and chain before you know it."
I smiled modestly.
She looked me in the eye and asked "You wanna get out of here?"
I swallowed hard. When you get used to paying for sex, you
forget that women occasionally enjoy doing it for free. It had been a
long time since I had done it this way.
I said "Sure - I saw an all-night bowling alley nearby. You
bowl?"
She giggled. "No, do you?
"God no."
Her foot rubbed my calf, then moved up toward my thigh. My leg
twitched spastically, and I pushed down on my knee to hold it in
place.
"Do I make you nervous, Frank?"
"Don't be silly." I drained my drink. There was more left than I
had realized, and it went down the wrong tube, almost giving me a
coughing fit. I stood up, and with watering eyes I dug my new
roll out of my pocket, peeled off a hundred dollar bill, and gave it
to the bartender. He nodded appreciatively, but made no move to get
change. I made a mental note to stay away from money pits like
Harry's in the future.
As we walked out together, we both noticed our height
differential and laughed. I was easily a foot taller.
"I should have worn my platform heels."
"I think I prefer looking down at you. Does for my self
confidence."
"Uh huh. Listen, I'm kinda tipsy. Can you drive me home?" She
was leaning against me, her hip pressed against my thigh.
"When you see my wheels," I said, pointing to the white panel van
with bald tires, "you may not even want to leave the parking lot."
She laughed heartily again, making me feel like I was on a roll.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was wondering why this was
happening, but I didn't really care. She lived less than a mile away,
and she led me inside her small, neat townhouse by the hand.
She tossed her purse on the kitchen table and said "Do you want a
drink?"
"No thanks."
"Good. Neither do I."
She came into my arms, reaching up on tiptoes, and I gathered her
in and pressed my lips down on hers. She kissed me hard for a few
seconds, then her mouth softened and opened. She tasted faintly of
whisky and maraschino cherries, and her body felt lean and firm in my
arms.
"Give me two minutes," she whispered in my ear. "The bedroom is
that way." She disappeared into the bathroom.
Her bedroom was crowded with exercise equipment, the bed jammed
into one corner like an afterthought. Someone once said that you can
find out all you need to know about a person by looking at their
bookshelf. The one next to the bed was filled with hard-boiled crime
fiction and manuals on advanced police techniques, with a few
relationship self-help books lurking near the bottom. I unbuttoned my
shirt and slipped it off, then kicked off my shoes and socks. I
started to unbuckle my pants, then wondered if I would look too eager
and buckled them again. I heard soft footsteps behind me, and I
turned around.
Tina stood facing me, completely naked, her arms held loosely at
her sides and her feet slightly apart. Her body was firm and trim,
with small, pert and narrow hips. She looked athletic, fit,
and confident. I didn't feel like any of those things.
"What's the matter, you never seen a naked woman before?"
"You look great," I said. I tried to keep my eyes from straying
to the little fluff of hair at her pubis. I knew I should be
doing something, taking control of the situation, but I just stood
there, feeling indecisive. My hands were sweaty and ice-cold, and I
had this mental image of Tina yelping and recoiling in disgust when I
touched her.
"You look nervous," she said. "What's the matter, am I coming on
too strong?" She went over to the bed and sat on the edge, crossing
her legs modestly.
I took off my pants and sat next to her in my boxers, close but
not touching. "No. I'm just out of practice at this. I don't
date much."
"Uh huh. So how long has it been?"
"Well...the last time I was expected to uh...to satisfy a woman,
I mean...I guess about three years."
"Three years since you've had sex without paying for it, you
mean."
"Right."
"I'm not expecting you to perform any superhuman feats, Stern.
Just five or ten minutes of the standard physical act that mammals
have been doing for millions of years." She sounded a bit
exasperated, and I couldn't really blame her.
I said "Look, I'm sorry. I've never felt comfortable dealing
with women on a straight ahead level like this. It's my problem,
nothing to do with you."
"So what are you comfortable with, Stern? I'm flexible. You
want me to stand out at the end of my driveway in a vinyl miniskirt,
so you can cruise by with your window rolled down and negotiate a
quick hump in the back of your van?"
I didn't say anything. Instead of preparing for action, my cock
was trying to crawl into my pubic hair and hide.
Tina put her hand on my shoulder and sighed. "I'm sorry, Stern.
That was uncalled for. You're not the only one with some baggage in
the sexual area. My marriage was a real horror show towards the end,
and I haven't been with a since the divorce."
"My hands are cold."
"What?"
"My hands are cold - that's part of the problem."
She started laughing. "Well, that we can fix. You see, now
we're really communicating."
She took my hand and pressed it against her right breast. It was
firm and velvety-soft, and her nipple tickled my palm as it expanded.
"Not too bad," she said bravely.
I reached around her back and cupped her left in my other
hand. She turned away from me slightly, making it easier, and I
squeezed the double-handful of her gently.
"Pinch them," she said softly.
She leaned back against me, and I rolled her nipples between my
fingers. She twitched and squirmed silently in my embrace like a
captured bird, her mouth set in a firm line and breathing through her
nose. I somehow knew to do it harder than seemed right.
Finally she relaxed and gasped, putting her hands over mine to
stop me.
"Yes," she said simply, and she tilted back for a long kiss. Her
hand slid into my lap and grasped my cock gently, then gave it a firm
squeeze.
"Nice to meet you, little Frank."
"Likewise."
She shifted position on the bed, and I caught the scent of her
pussy for the first time.
"You smell good," I said.
She gave me a knowing glance. "Thanks."
She lowered head down into my lap, and my cock was now raising up
valiantly to meet her. She licked delicately around the head at
first, until I was blatantly thrusting up at her, stiff as a board.
Then she put her lips around my shaft and slid her mouth slowly
downward, taking the full length into her mouth, and then slowly
pulled her head back up.
"Mmm. I'd almost forgotten how much I love having a cock in my
mouth. It's been too long." She lowered her head again and engulfed
me again in her hot mouth.
"You can borrow this one whenever you want," I said.
I could feel her lips form into a brief smile. Then she started
really sucking, pulling me in and out of her mouth in a nice, slow
rhythm. I leaned back and closed my eyes, concentrating on the
pleasure.
"You're really good at this," I said.
She lifted her head up, and stroked my wet cock with her hand.
"Like a pro, you mean?"
"Yeah, but it always feels better when it's free."
She chuckled, obviously enjoying the verbal sparring. "I always
thought, if the police thing didn't work out..."
I think she was kidding, but I didn't ask. She was busy working
on my cock again, and it wasn't really a great conversational line
anyway.
A few very enjoyable minutes passed, then she lifted her head and
looked at me.
"You feeling any better?"
"Much, thanks. Circulation is improved in all extremities."
"Great. Think we could have sex now?"
"Almost certainly. I assume you want to be on top."
She smiled. "You better watch your lip, Stern. But yeah, if I
let you get on top, I'll just have my face smooshed into your chest."
She pushed me onto my back and straddled me, took my cock in her hand
and adjusted it to the right angle. As she sunk down onto my rigid
shaft, I discovered that she was tight and muscular on the inside,
too.
"Oh my God," I said, after three or four tentative thrusts. "Do
you do like, special exercises or something?"
"You mean like shove a tennis ball up my and squeeze it?
No, but thanks for asking."
"Christ, you take everything I say the wrong way..."
She was smiling. "Yeah, I know - sorry about that. I have been
told I'm on the tight side."
I smiled up at her. "This is fun - I've never had an argument
with someone while fucking. Just before and just after fucking it's
quite usual, but never during."
"Haggling over price?"
I made a face. "I know what you're doing - trying to humiliate
me so I'll last longer."
"Oh, great, don't tell me you're one of those quick-draw types."
"The first time, yes. The second time, it's much better."
She shook her head. "I've heard that one before. Guy blows his
load in ten seconds, then a few minutes later he's banging away at me
with an erection like an uncooked hotdog, and I'm supposed to be awed
and grateful."
"I'm starting to wonder how anyone gets it up at all for you."
Tina leaned forward and put her face close to mine. Her
protruding nipples brushed against my chest. "Because I'm really
good, that's how."
She contracted herself around me to make her point - it was like
a hand in a velvet glove squeezing down on my cock.
"Jesus," I moaned.
"Tell you what," she said. "You fuck me as hard as you want, and
when you feel yourself getting close to coming tell me."
"So you can get in a few nasty digs as I wrap things up early?"
"Nope - just trust me." She sat back up and we continued to
screw. She sat astride me with her back straight and her eyes closed,
a look of concentration on her face as she gyrated her hips with a
graceful rhythm.
"Remember how you pinched my nipples before?" she asked.
"Yep. Did I you?"
She smiled. "A little. When I tell you to, I want you to reach
up and do it even harder, OK?"
I reached up and cupped her small in my hands, and
tweaked her nipples gently. "OK."
She leaned into my hands to brace herself, and increased the
tempo, sliding her hips forward and back so that my cock was sliding
almost out of her tight before diving back in.
"Oh shit," I said. "Tina..."
She stopped moving and reached around behind her back. Her hand
closed around my scrotum, and for an awful moment I thought she was
going to give my nuts a good hard squeeze. Instead, she pinched my
scrotum above my balls and pulled down firmly. I felt an odd
stretching sensation, not unpleasant, and the urgency faded away. I
began to thrust into her again, and found that I was back where I was
a few minutes ago.
"Neat trick," I said. "You had me worried for a second there."
She smiled. "In order to ejaculate, your balls have to pull all
the way up tight against the base of your cock. Pull them back down,
and you interrupt the process. It's a little tricky doing it just
right, but I've had a lot of practice."
"Well, just be careful."
She chuckled. "And you better be nice."
"Did I mention how beautiful you look tonight?"
"Why thank you. Now come on, lets fuck."
The next twenty minutes were some of the most sexually intense of
my life. Tina and I went at it like a pair of rutting wolves, and
every few minutes she would repeat the scrotal pull to keep me from
coming. I've never been with a woman who took such uninhibited
physical pleasure from sex. We settled into a fast-paced rhythm, my
hips slapping up against her thighs as she ground herself around my
straining cock. Her fine hair became dampened with sweat, and a
pink flush spread across her chest.
"OK," she gasped finally. "Pinch my fucking nipples, dammit."
I reached up and cupped her again, caught her swollen
nipples in my fingers, and squeezed hard. Tina writhed against my
hands as I drove up into her, and she stared into my eyes as she
moaned and gasped her way through a long, draw-out orgasm. Somewhere
in the middle of it, I felt the semen finally shoot up along my shaft,
spilling out into her convulsing pussy. I continued banging my cock
up into her until I was sure every drop was gone. When I was done,
Tina draped herself limply along my chest, breathing heavily.
"I'm impressed, Stern," she said in my ear. "That was pretty
damn good."
"Thanks. You too. Just out of curiosity, are my
balls going to hang down to my knees now?"
She laughed silently, her ribcage shaking. "No permanent damage,
I promise."
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Seven
-------------
I woke up the next morning to the sight of Tina Callahan doing
situps on a padded incline bench that was tilted up like the roof of a
Swiss chalet. Sweat trickled down her neck and chest. Whatever body
fat she possessed was covered by two small pieces of black lycra. She
was counting off the situps with explosive little grunts, which must
be what woke me up.
"When's the big title fight, champ?"
She smiled through gritted teeth and did four more situps, then
unhooked her ankles and slid to the floor. Her abdominal muscles,
pumped full of blood, stood out like a relief map of the sea floor.
"Would you believe I used to be an aerobics instructor?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorta addicted to exercise. How about you?"
"Last night was more exercise than I've had in months." I sat
up, realizing as I did so that I was naked. My head felt fuzzy and
thick.
"Last night was fun," she said. "I'm going to grab a shower and
then I've got to get to work. Help yourself to some breakfast." She
got to her feet and went into the bathroom, stripping off her bra top
as she walked.
I found my shorts and put them on, then went into the kitchen and
snooped around with out much hope. There was orange juice and skim
milk and four different kinds of bran cereal. No eggs or bacon or
donuts. I poured myself a bowl of flakes and sat down at her little
dinette to crunch away.
In less time than I would have thought possible, she appeared in
the doorway, dressed for work in jeans and a blouse.
"Just shut the door behind you when you leave," she said.
"What about your car?"
"I jogged over and got it this morning while you were asleep."
"Ah."
"Hey, be careful in San Diego, OK? Lemme know if you find the
tapes."
"OK. Have a nice day at work, honey."
She smiled and went out the door. I heard her Accord start up
and drive away. I'm sure I wasn't looking very kissable at the
moment, but it would have been a nice gesture.
Her was staring at me with undisguised hostility, back arched
and fur standing up. I can take a hint. I put on the rest of my
clothes, made Tina's bed, and then headed back home. It was Saturday,
so I took a long shower and then put on a big pot of coffee. After
the third cup, I started cheering up. I started thinking of reasons
why Tina and I were incompatible, and came up with ten off the top of
my head. Then I tried to think of good reasons for us to get
together, and couldn't think of half that many. I decided it was time
to put her out of my mind, and start doing some detecting.
I gathered up all the equipment and supplies I thought I might
need, loaded them into my van, and headed south toward San Diego.
The late George Cahn's house turned out to be a modern,
sprawling, structure that would probably be described in a real estate
listing as a ranch. It was very white and very angular, and had a U-
shaped footprint that surrounded a big pool. It wasn't exactly ugly,
but it seemed a bit tacky and outdated, like it was trying too hard to
be cool. You sort of expected to see Don Johnson leaning against a
palm tree, wearing white shoes and Ray-bans.
I parked on the street across from the open front gate and took a
closer look. The elaborate landscaping looked neglected, particularly
the lawn, which had no doubt been trampled over by hordes of heavy-
footed cops. There were leaves and bugs floating in the pool. There
weren't any obvious signs that it was a crime scene, just a notice
taped to the front door which I couldn't read from the street. I
supposed the physical evidence teams had finished up and the yellow
tape had been taken down. I wondered if prospective buyers would be
aware that the previous owner had been killed inside the house.
Probably. In fact, it might increase the asking price.
I climbed over the seat into the back of the van and put on a
pair of white coveralls and a light blue cap. Then I parked a little
ways farther up the street and walked back, turning up Cahn's driveway
with a confident heads-up stride, like I had every right to be there.
There didn't seem to be anyone else around, but you never know when
someone might be watching from afar. Someone like me, for instance.
There was a long-handled skimmer mounted on brackets near the
pool, and I grabbed it and went to work. For ten or fifteen minutes I
idly skimmed the pool while I studied the house and surrounding yard
and got comfortable with the environment. There was plenty of privacy
- the neighboring houses were blocked by tall hedges and by the U-
shape of the house itself. Carrying the skimmer, I walked along the
inside perimeter of the house, looking for possible ways to get in.
The back door was locked, and so was the sliding glass door near the
pool. The front door I knew would be locked, and I didn't want to
expose myself to the street. I concentrated on the windows.
Unfortunately they were the kind that swing open from the top about a
foot, and that's it. Nobody opens windows in southern California
except maybe to clean them.
No basement windows to wriggle into, no secluded doors with
substandard locks. The place might be tacky, but it was secure. As I
walked past the sliding glass door a second time, I realized that
something hadn't felt quite right when I had tried it. A locked
sliding door will generally slide a fraction of an inch before
stopping, but this one hadn't budged. I tried it again, giving it a
harder yank, and it made a loud popping sound and clattered halfway
open. Not locked, just a tight seal.
Startled, I slid it shut again and looked around guiltily. My
plan had been to scout out possible points of entry for when I came
back under cover of darkness. But plans were made to be changed. I
put down the skimmer, popped the door open again, slipped inside, and
shut it behind me.
I was standing in a little tiled area which separated the kitchen
from the living room. The house was completely silent - no
refrigerator or air conditioner sounds to provide the usual background
noise. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see that all the
exposed surfaces were coated with the bluish-gray smudging of
fingerprint powder. Apparently the police had straightened the place
up as they investigated, because there was little sign of a violent
search.
I took a few deep breaths to settle myself, and then I took a
pair of thin plastic gloves out of my pocket and pulled them on.
There are several hiding places people use so often that they are
almost cliches to those of us in the business of finding things,
probably because everyone reads the same novels and watches the same
movies. In the kitchen, people hide things inside the stove and
refrigerator, and inside canisters of flour and sugar. I opened the
fridge and saw that it had been cleaned out so that the food wouldn't
spoil. I found a few canisters, but they had already been emptied
out.
The pattern continued through the rest of the first floor - every
hiding place I checked showed signs of being previously searched.
Lamps had been opened, light fixtures had been pulled out to look
above the ceiling, tanks had been pried open and checked,
cushions had been unzipped or sliced open. I got the distinct
impression that I was wasting my time.
While I was performing my fruitless search, I did notice a couple
interesting things. The location of the murder, for one thing. In a
small first-floor bedroom that appeared to be a guest suite, there was
a bed with a blood-covered mattress. Every square inch of hard
surface in the room had powder on it, and the smell of forensic
chemicals lingered in the air. From the amount of blood, I imagined
that the bullet had ripped open an artery, and that George Cahn had
"bled out," as the paramedics call it. In any case, he hadn't bought
it in the master bedroom - that would help the real estate agents.
The other interesting thing was the photographs. The walls were
filled with framed snapshots of Cahn and his friends, most taken right
here at his home. The standard pose was Cahn standing with his right
arm draped chummily around another person. If it was a man, his hand
was on the guy's shoulder, and Cahn wore a serious look. If it was a
woman, he had his hand on her ass or cupping her tit, and he had a
shit-eating grin on his face. Cahn himself was a well-tanned, bald
man of medium height and lean build, with a big nose and a neatly-
trimmed gray beard. Not bad looking for a guy in his fifties.
A wild party seemed to be going on at all times - in the
background of every you could see people frolicking in the
pool, crowding into the hot tub, or milling around half-naked in the
big living room. There seemed to be more women than men, and the
women were all dressed like sluts, if they were dressed at all.
Claire's comments about Cahn's party lifestyle certainly seemed to be
on target.
I recognized a few of the women as porn actresses, which was no
surprise. What did surprise me was that I recognized some of the
as well. It appeared that Cahn's circle of friends extended outside
the adult film industry to mainstream Hollywood. Burt Reynolds and
George Hamilton were there. Some of the younger looked familiar
as well, but their names didn't come to me. They all looked to be
enjoying themselves, and why not? I'm sure I would have enjoyed
Cahn's parties too.
I found the stairs and went up to the second floor. Up here the
place was less of a mess. It seemed that the police had focused on
the first floor. Maybe the killer hadn't tossed the second floor, so
the police hadn't bothered with the forensics. They had continued
their search, of course. Every room bore the unmistakable signs of a
thorough going-over.
The long hall that connected the bedrooms was lined with
pictures, but a few of them were missing. Official police souvenirs,
or maybe the people in them were considered potential suspects. I
spotted a of Cahn with his arm around Edward Burke, and I had
to laugh. Burke was wearing a Hawaiian unbuttoned to the waist,
and his trademark bushy gray eyebrows looked even more unkempt than
usual. The nubile he was with might have been a third of his
age. I wondered if Barry Rank knew that his good buddy liked to party
with porn stars.
The master bedroom was at the end of the hall, and it was huge.
A wall of windows overlooked the pool. The other wall was lined with
floor-to-ceiling cabinets made of polished, expensive-looking wood.
In the middle of the room was a big, round bed. The ceiling was
mirrored and had track lighting that could no doubt be adjusted to
suit any mood. I could see where the mirrors and fixtures had been
removed and then sloppily replaced by the police search team.
I went over to the windows and looked out. From here Cahn could
have kept an eye on the action in the pool and hot tub while he
entertained his choice of the female guests. They would have been
eager to sleep with him, of course. Oversexed in their late
teens and early twenties, trying to make it in a competitive business
- a powerful producer like Cahn probably had to fight them off with a
stick.
I found myself daydreaming, imagining a group sex scene in the
hot tub below me. Three or four sitting around the edge with
their legs in the water, holding drinks in their hands and laughing
while wet-haired, big-breasted in the tub on their cocks.
There would be more action in and around the pool, maybe even a
lesbian show on the diving board. George Cahn would have stood where
I was standing right now, making sure everyone was having a good time
before he dove back into the tangle of sweaty flesh waiting for him on
the circular bed. Maybe my imagination is overactive, but I didn't
think I was stretching too far.
It was starting to get dark out, so I dropped the aluminum blinds
on all the windows and pulled the heavy curtains across. Then I
turned on a few lights and sat down on the bed to think. The police
had been here first and had searched the place carefully. But I had
an advantage over the police: I knew what I was looking for. If Cahn
had the tapes of Claire Ingleford, the police would have found
them, and they would have been impounded on the assumption that they
had been for a reason.
But what if the tapes weren't hidden? I opened up the cabinets
along the wall. As, I suspected, they contained a home-theater system
with a wide-screen TV, along with a large collection of laser disks,
music CDs, and videocassettes.
Cahn had about forty on tape, everything from porn to
action to comedies. I remembered reading a novel where a guy
had a tape by it onto a commercial cassette, leaving
some of the original at the beginning. Maybe Cahn had done the
same thing. As I scanned the titles again, I felt my pulse quicken.
Would Cahn really want to own a copy of "Weekend at Bernies," or
"Rocky IV"? Would anyone?
I turned on the and VCR and figured out how to fast-forward
through a tape so the still appeared on screen. It took about
five minutes to go through one tape. I selected them from the shelf
at random, tossing them on the floor afterwards to keep from
repeating.
An hour or so later, after the tenth movie, I had a headache from
looking at the flickering fast-forward and I was sure I wasn't
going to find anything this way. Apparently Cahn really did have bad
taste in movies. I rubbed my eyes and went into the master bathroom,
a luxurious, masculine enclave tiled in black marble. I found some
Nuprin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed a couple. Then I went
over to the to take a leak.
Cahn had hung a framed over the toilet, and I studied it
as I relieved myself. This one had been taken here in the bedroom -
on the bed, in fact. Cahn was sitting between a pair of top-heavy
blondes who were virtually indistinguishable due to a layer of
identically-applied makeup. They were wearing matching pink bikinis,
and each had pulled her bikini top aside to reveal one immense,
globular breast. The was signed, with the inscription "You're
the best, Georgie! Love, the San Diego Bikini Team."
Then I noticed something odd about the picture. I leaned forward
to get a closer look, almost outside the bowl. The bed seemed
to be several inches higher than it was right now, and the bottom of
the base was black instead of the light-colored wood that I
remembered.
I finished up quickly and went back to the bed. There was no
black on the outside, just wood all the way down to the carpet. I
felt around the base, pulling away the shag. There was a tight-
fitting rim through which the bed could apparently be raised or
lowered. But how?
It took me several minutes to figure it out. There was a
decorative wooden box next to the that must have had a dozen
remotes in it. One of them was a Sony, which struck me as odd because
Cahn's home theater system didn't have any Sony components. I pressed
a few buttons, and suddenly there was a low pitched whine and the bed
levitated out of the floor and started rotating. I pressed more
buttons, trying to get it to stop, but succeeded only in dimmed the
lights and making it spin faster. When the bed started to vibrate,
accompanied by an obscene, undulating humming noise, I sat down on the
floor and had a good laugh.
Eventually I managed to get the multi-talented bed to heel, and I
saw there was a wide drawer located at what would be the foot of a
normal bed. It opened easily, revealing a jumbled assortment of
condoms, vibrators, latex gloves, lubricants, and other brightly
colored plastic objects whose use wasn't immediately apparent. What
it didn't contain was videotapes, but my disappointment was brief
because I quickly noticed that the drawer was much shallower that it
needed to be. Feeling around inside, I located one of the stops which
kept the drawer from rolling out completely. I worked at it, and
voila - the drawer separated completely from the bed. I dug my little
maglight out of my pool-boy coveralls and shone it into the in
the bed. There was a cardboard box behind the drawer.
I slid it out and sure enough, it was full of tapes.
"So that's where you've been hiding, you little bastards," I
said.
There were sixteen of them, stacked in two rows of eight, all in
generic plastic cases. When I found cassettes with the typewritten
titles "Samantha's Diary," and "Double Cross," each labeled "Pre-
production copy - not for resale," it was almost an anticlimax. When
you finally hit paydirt, you know it. The other tapes had handwritten
labels, each containing a list of names, dates, and cryptic notations.
I popped "Samantha's Diary," into the VCR. The opening credits
hadn't been added yet, so the tape jumped right into the opening
scene. I fast-forwarded until I spotted Claire. She didn't appear
until more than halfway through the movie, giving a guy a in
the front seat of a car. I popped out the tape and put in "Double
Cross." The opening scene showed Claire Ingleford sitting at a desk
in her underwear, writing a letter with an nasty smirk on her face.
I sat down on the bed to watch. Claire's hair was a lighter
shade of brown, and longer, and her face had the soft, unlined
contours of a just out of her teens, but she was clearly
recognizable. She finished the letter, sealing the envelope with a
sensuous stroke of her tongue, and then she leaned back in the swivel
chair and pushed her hand down into the front of her and
started masturbating.
It startled me, which it shouldn't have since I knew what kind of
movie it was. I realized that the sound effects hadn't been added
yet, and so there was no pulsing crescendo of bad synthesizer music to
cue in the sex.
It hit me all of a sudden that I was alone in a room watching a
hot porno tape starring a and sexy woman who had promised me a
private reward if I delivered the to her. The look on my face
can't have been flattering. I stripped off my clothes, leaving just
my shirt, and grabbed a tube of lubricant from the handy selection in
the drawer.
On screen, Claire had taken her off and was digging into
her with both hands. She was groaning and gyrating her hips on
the chair like a woman possessed, snapping her mane of hair around. I
could see why she had been on the brink of making it big in the
biz - she was a natural. Her raw sexuality reached out through the
lens like few women I've seen.
The scene changed abruptly, to my disappointment. This time it
was an office, and I was treated with a dose of the stiff acting and
dialogue that is the bane of the genre. I fast-forwarded until Claire
appeared again. This time she was dressed conservatively in a dark
business suit, and I gathered that this was actually a different
character - Claire was playing twin sisters, one wild, the other
straightlaced. The seemed to have more plot than was really
good for it, and I hit fast forward again until I saw Claire on her
knees cock, her beautiful swaying in counterpoint to the
bobbing of her head.
Did I mention that she was a natural? The closed in on
her face as she worked over the guy's meat, and I squirted on
some lube and started stroking my own cock as I watched her moist lips
traveling up and down the guy's shaft, her eyes rolling back in her
head with pleasure as if her clit was located at the back of her
throat.
It wasn't long before I was ready to come. I briefly
contemplated pulling down my balls to make myself last longer, but
decided that would be pointless and decadent. So as not to leave any
genetic evidence on the carpet, I paused briefly to put on a condom.
On screen, the guy was holding Claire's legs up in the air as he
pounded away furiously at her snatch. When he pulled out and sprayed
a generous, sticky load all over Claire's breasts, I was right there
with him, wishing it was me.
The afterglow faded fast, and I had a sudden desire to get the
hell out of there. I cleaned up in the bathroom, and then I put
everything back where I had found it, except for the box of tapes.
When the bedroom looked pretty much the same way I found it, I picked
up the box, went back downstairs, and slipped out through the sliding
glass door into the humid night air. I stood in the shadows for a few
minutes, watching my van to see if it had attracted any interest. The
neighborhood was as quiet as death - everyone was sealed into their
air-conditioned habitats. I put the box in the back of the van and
drove off, victorious for once.
When I got back to my apartment I put the box of tapes in my safe
and called Claire Ingleford. The phone rang several times, and when
she answered her voice was groggy from sleep.
"What?"
"Hi Claire - it's Frank Stern. I guess I woke you, huh?"
"What time is it?"
"Uh, almost midnight. Sorry, I didn't figure you were the early-
to-bed type."
"I've got to be on the set getting my hair and makeup done by six
a.m. What's going on?"
"I found the tapes."
"Your kidding!" I heard some shuffling and thumping, and the
sound of a lamp being switched on. "Where were they?"
"In a compartment below his bed. Took me forever to find
them."
"Shit. I didn't think to... good for you, Stern. Which ones are
they?"
"The titles are 'Double Cross' and 'Samantha's Diary'."
"Those are the ones! Did you watch them?"
"Um, just a little. Just to make sure you were in them, that
they were the right ones."
She chuckled. "Of course. So what did you think?"
"I think you would have ended up even if you had stayed in
porn."
She laughed. "Infamous, you mean. But thanks. God, this is
great...can you bring them to my house tomorrow night? I'll be back
by about eight."
"You going to have the cash ready?"
"Of course."
"OK, I'll be there around nine."
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Eight
-------------
I woke up at seven the next morning, which is unheard of for me,
and I was too excited to get back to sleep. I lay in bed, smiling at
the ceiling, luxuriating in my good fortune.
Fifty thousand dollars, tax free. That was almost five years
rent on my apartment. Seventeen years rent on my office. Twenty-five
hundred lap dances. You get the idea.
I got up and took a quick shower. When I was done, it was still
too early to call Tina Callahan on a Sunday morning. I made myself
some scrambled eggs, and as I was finishing them up, I remembered the
other tapes I had found in Cahn's hidey-hole.
Curious, I took the box out of my safe and brought it into the
living room. I selected one of the tapes with the cryptic handwritten
labels and popped it into the VCR.
The tape started immediately - a was sitting on a couch,
fidgeting nervously. It was obviously an amateur video, but pretty
good quality. The was steady, probably on a tripod, and the
lighting was decent. The didn't really look like someone you
would select for a porno film. She had a round, uninteresting face,
and a painfully thin body. She kept running her hand mechanically
through her stringy brown hair, as if she had recently read a book on
flirting. Her legs stuck out from her short skirt like pipe cleaners.
The most enticing way to describe her, from a porno point of view,
would be "barely legal."
A standing behind the started asking her questions.
The interview format reminded me of a wildly popular series of adult
videos featuring women having sex on camera, supposedly for the
first time, in a set that looked like a truck driver's living room.
After establishing that the was nineteen, liked sex, and
didn't have a boyfriend, the questions got a little more interesting.
Here's a sample:
Man: "Do you consider yourself kinky?"
Girl: "Um...yeah, I guess."
Man: "Have you ever been tied up?"
Girl: "Yeah, I went out with a guy that liked to tie me up."
Man: "And you liked it?"
Girl: (shrugs) "It was OK. Yeah."
Man: "What would he do to you while you were tied up?"
Girl: "You know...have sex with me. Spank me a little."
Man: "Great, great. So you understand what we're going to do
today?"
Girl: (Glances nervously to the side at something off camera.)
"Yeah."
Man: "Why don't you take off your clothes, and let me see your
body."
The stood up and mechanically removed her clothes. The male
voice behind the - I was thinking of him as George Cahn, but of
course I didn't know that - lied to her about what a great body she
had. Then the screen turned blue for a few seconds, and when the
picture came back the had been placed into a mediaeval-looking
wooden device which I believed was called a "stocks."
Her neck and wrists were held firmly in place by a single long
board which had three holes of the appropriate size, so that her head
and hands protruded on one side, and the rest of her body on the
other. The board was mounted on its side on top of a sawhorse, so
that the was bent over sharply at the waist. Her ankles were
held apart by a pair of cuffs attached to a metal bar about three feet
long. It was hard to imagine a more helpless and exposed position,
which, of course, was the point.
What happened next was not very pleasant to watch, although I
know there are people who would disagree. The behind the
stepped out into view and spent the next hour or so whipping,
paddling, pinching, and sodomizing the girl. There was no cameraman.
Instead, the would just move the and tripod to a different
location every once in a while. I still didn't know if it was George
Cahn, because he was wearing a leather hood that covered everything
but his eyes and mouth, but the body type seemed to match the I
had seen in all the pictures.
Whether it was consensual or not was difficult to tell.
Sometimes the would scream for him to stop what he was doing and
let her out, and the would talk to her in a low, reassuring voice
for a few minutes, and the would calm down. The guy would then
pick up where he left off, and a few minutes later she would be
screaming again. I found myself mesmerized, unable to look away or
fast-forward, and yet hating myself for watching. My best guess is
that Cahn had promised to pay the a generous bonus if she
successfully survived all the pain and indignity he wanted to inflict.
The finally finished up by coming in the girl's ass, treating
the viewer to a lingering close-up shot of his semen oozing out of
her red, swollen anus. There was a jump, and then Cahn inflicted
the final indignity, all over the girl's face and hair while she
screamed thrashed and swore at him.
The final scene on the tape was, in a sense, the most shocking.
Cahn, without the hood, and the were sitting in his outdoor hot
tub, drinking beer out bottles and chatting like friends. At one
point the stood up, displaying the fresh stripes across her
thighs and stomach, and they both laughed. I got up and turned off
the tape, feeling like I had been tricked somehow.
I looked at the rest of the tapes briefly - they were all of a
similar nature. girls, perhaps underage, submitting to a
variety of vicious and humiliating indignities.
I had a sudden desire to talk to Tina Callahan. I put the tapes
back in my safe and called her. The phone was busy, and I was
transferred to her voice mail. I left a brief message and hung up.
Just hearing her voice on the message caused some vivid flashbacks of
the previous night.
I called back a few minutes later, got another busy signal, and
hung up. On the spur of the moment, I decided to drive over to her
place - after all, I knew she was home. I locked up carefully and got
back in my van.
As I approached Tina's townhouse, she was backing her Honda out
of her driveway. What I should have done, is tapped the horn as I
came up behind her. Maybe I thought she would recognize my van in her
mirror and stop. But she just accelerated away down the street. I
kept going, and caught up with her at the next light, which was Linden
- a busy commercial highway. I could have honked then, I suppose, but
it would have been awkward communicating in the street. I was curious
about where she was going. I was interested in Tina Callahan, and so
I made the childish decision to follow her.
She turned right on Linden, and so did I. I figured she would be
going to the supermarket, or to the mall, and I would just see her
pull into the lot and keep going - no harm done. I had no intention
of shadowing her through a department store or arranging a cute little
coincidental meeting in front of the frozen peas.
But she went by a mall and a couple supermarkets, and a lot of
other places that a woman might visit on a Sunday afternoon, and then
we were in another residential neighborhood. The traffic thinned out,
and I let a little more distance open up between us. When she pulled
into the driveway of a yellow ranch with a neatly trimmed yard, I kept
going and then parked on the street a good block away.
This would have been a really excellent time to turn around and
go home, dignity more or less intact. Two things prevented it. The
first was the way Tina was dressed, which I observed as she walked up
to the front door. White overalls, the kind that are shorts on the
bottom. Under that, a very brief bra top. A lot of skin was showing
along the sides of the overalls. It wasn't as if she looked like a
hooker, but it seemed a little scanty for visiting and Dad, or
shooting the breeze with a girlfriend. What clinched it for me was
what she did after the front door opened. Instead of going inside,
she went back to her car and got in. The garage door opened, and then
closed behind her as soon as she drove inside.
I've got a few different uniforms in the back of my van - you've
already heard about my pool-boy getup. For knocking on front doors to
see who's home, you can't beat the brown UPS outfit. For general
snooping around from the street, I might choose a versatile white
short-sleeved dress and tie. Add a clipboard and horn-rimmed
glasses, and I'm taking a survey. Contort my face into a happy smile
and carry a pack of leaflets, and I'm a religious proselytizer.
To poke around in one residential area, which is what the current
situation called for, is tricky - it's always easier if you keep
moving. I decided to be a meter reader - light-blue shirt, dark blue
pants, heavy boots, a tool box, and a cap that said "SoCal Utility
Co."
I selected a house on the next street over that had a backyard
adjoining the yellow ranch Tina had gone into. I knocked on the front
door, and when no one answered I went around to the back and located
the meter. I picked the little padlock that secured the front panel
and opened it up. None of the little dials were moving, which
suggested that the occupants of the house were on vacation.
This is where it gets tricky, of course. As long as I was
looking inside the meter box, I was well-nigh invisible, but I wasn't
going to see anything that way. If I was staring into the next yard
through a pair of binoculars, I would arouse well-founded suspicion.
I looked over at the back of the yellow ranch. There was a large deck
in back, reached by sliding glass doors, and windows on either side,
probably kitchen and bedroom.
You have to get lucky in a situation like this. In the daytime,
it's almost impossible to see into a house unless the windows are
open. I was thinking about giving up, when the sliding glass door
opened and Tina came out onto the deck, followed by an attractive,
solidly-built in her twenties. Both were wearing bikinis.
They settled into a pair of chaise lounges, each with a drink in her
hand. I kept my back to them, checking on them every few seconds out
of the corner of my eye.
I was assuming that it was just a couple friends chatting, but
something started telling me there was more to it than that. Maybe it
was how close they set the chairs together, or the way the dark-haired
woman kept touching Tina's arm.
Then Tina leaned over and gave her friend a lingering kiss on the
lips, and I really started getting suspicious, as the joke goes.
Just to the left of the meter I was checking was a screened-in
porch. I had spotted it when I first came into the yard, but it was a
risk. Seeing the woman I had slept with last night kissing another
woman put me in a risk-taking mood. I sidled over to the porch door
with my toolbox and tried it. It opened, and I slipped inside. It
was dim and musty inside, and I knew I would be invisible from the
outside. I found a tear in one of the screens and peered through.
Tina had moved over to her friend's lounge chair, and they were
necking like a couple of teenagers at a drive-in. I was surprised
that they would carry on in the yard like that, until I noticed that
the one side of the deck was covered by a lattice, and the other side
was protected by a hedge that ran along the edge of the yard. I had
lucked into pretty much the only suitable spot for peeping.
If you could call it luck. I was getting turned on, of course -
any enjoys seeing two women kissing and feeling each other up.
But in the back of my mind there was a sinking feeling. I had been
hoping for something to develop between Tina and me, and this didn't
really strike me as a positive development in the relationship.
I took my digital camcorder out of the toolbox and started
filming. I had wiped out my saving buying it last month, so I was
damn well going to get some use out of it.
Although Tina was shorter and more petite, she was clearly the
aggressor in the tryst. She had a hand worked into the brunette's
bikini top, and I could see the firm muscles in her arm flex as she
massaged the other woman's breast.
Then Tina moved her hand down to the dark-haired woman's lap, and
this generated some token resistance accompanied by a lot of giggling
and blushing on both sides. I couldn't imagine anyone with a pulse
rejecting Tina's advances, and so I wasn't surprised when the hand
returned and Tina started massaging the other woman's groin through
her bikini bottom.
I continued to film, taking advantage of the digital as I
alternated between close-up shots of the groin massage and the look of
guilty pleasure on the face of its recipient. After a while, when the
brunette was sleepy-eyed and breathing heavily, Tina pushed the suit
bottom down a few inches and slid her slim hand down the front. At
the same time, she stretched out next to her on the chaise, snuggling
up close with her lips to her ear. The spread her legs a bit
to give Tina better access.
I pulled back the to take in the whole scene, liking the
way the two women were intertwined on the lounge. Tina's hand
remained busy under the suit bottom, and the other woman began to buck
and pant. Judging the moment nicely, Tina put her hand over her
friend's mouth just as she started to cry out. A few seconds she went
limp.
After a brief consultation, they made what I assumed was the
logical decision to move it to the bedroom. The went back
into the house first, and as Tina followed her l saw her furtively put
her fingers in her mouth and lick them clean. It was a very sexy
moment, and it brought a familiar mix of emotions. It was sexy
primarily because of how private it was. Put another way, it was sexy
because of how humiliated Tina would be if she knew someone was
watching These are the voyeuristic thrills that I'm least proud of.
The sliding door closed, and the show was officially over.
Driving back to my apartment, I found myself irrationally angry
at Tina. Knowing the anger was irrational didn't really diminish it.
When I got home it was mid-afternoon, and I was hungry and tired.
I made myself a sloppy sandwich and ate it in front of the computer
while I deleted the spam from my email accounts. Then I went back to
bed.
The phone woke me up two hours later. I fumbled for it and
pulled the receiver under the covers where I was huddled against the
late afternoon sun like a vampire.
"Stern," I muttered.
"Hi Frank, it's Tina. I just got your message. Did I wake you
up or something?"
I had forgotten that I had left a message on her voice mail, and
I was flustered to suddenly be talking to her.
"I was napping, but I needed to wake up anyway."
"I was just curious how your little trip down to San Diego went."
"Oh, right. It went well - I found the tapes."
"You did! No way, that's great. Where was it?"
"Hidden in his bed. Took me forever to find it."
"You don't sound that happy about it. I'd think you'd be dancing
around your apartment. Aren't you going to get your money?"
"Oh sure, I think so - I'm going to Claire's place tonight to
make the exchange."
"Terrific. Hey, guess what I did last night while you were
breaking and entering."
"I give up."
"Having dinner at Barry Rank's house. Are you upset about
something, Stern?"
"No, I'm just groggy, that's all. You had dinner with Rank?
That sounds like pure torture."
"Well, he was actually moderately pleasant. Also, his
was there, and we got along well. So it wasn't too bad."
Something started tickling the back of my brain. Two or three
random thoughts had collided, and instead of bouncing off each other
they had stuck together like wet snowballs. Tina was still talking,
telling me something about her dinner with Rank, but I wasn't paying
attention. More thoughts kept hitting the original clump and
sticking, and I felt my pulse quicken. I pulled the sheet off my head
and sat up.
"Hey," I said, interrupting her.
"What?"
"How is Rank's daughter?"
"Jeez, you're in a strange mood. Rank has three daughters. I'm
going to guess between twenty and twenty-eight. The one at dinner was
the oldest one. Why?"
"One thing I didn't mention yet - I found a stash of amateur
tapes along with the ones I was looking for. I took them with me, and
looked at them this morning. Real kinky stuff, like bondage,
whipping, stuff like that. Cahn was in most of them. The all
seemed very young, and they didn't seem to be enjoying themselves, to
say the least. I've seen some nasty stuff before, and these tapes
really made me uncomfortable."
"Well, that is disturbing," said Tina. "But what's your point?
I mean, Cahn is dead."
"That is my point, actually. Listen carefully to the following
facts and see if they add up to anything. One: Rank is a friend of
Edward Burke. Two: Burke used to go to George Cahn's parties, and
might well have seen some of Cahn's privately-made porno tapes.
Three: against all common sense, Rank has been trying to make me a
suspect, which could be interpreted as a diversionary tactic. Four:
Rank has three daughters."
Tina was silent for several seconds. "Rank was out sick the day
Cahn got shot," she said finally. "Jesus Christ. You think Barry
Rank killed George Cahn?"
"Edward Burke presumably knows what Rank's daughters look like,"
I said. "He could have been watching a tape at Cahn's house, and
surprise, surprise, a familiar face pops up."
Tina picked it up. "So Burke tips off Barry Rank, and Rank
reacts like any would - he's devastated and furious. But as a
cop he has the stomach and the experience to do something about it.
He calls in sick, drives down to San Diego...maybe he was just going
to scare Cahn or something, demand the tape, but Cahn ends up dead.
Then Rank makes a hurried search for the tape."
I felt the skin on my back trying to crawl up to my neck.
I said "If Rank finds out I discovered a stash of tapes in Cahn's
house, and that I saw a of Burke and Cahn together, he's going
to know that eventually I'll put it all together and realize what
happened."
"Not necessarily. Rank thinks you're an idiot."
"That's comforting, but I still think I'm in danger."
Tina was quiet for a few seconds. "Despite his faults, I'm
having a hard time imagining him as a murderer, but I guess its
possible," she said reluctantly. "Maybe I should look at those tapes,
see if I recognize one of Barry's daughters."
"Good idea. I can drop them off at your place in a few hours on
my way to see Claire."
"OK. Or you could bring them now and hang out here for a
while... sometimes watching bondage makes me hot."
I had a flashback of Tina with her hand in the other woman's
bathing suit, and felt a rush of confused guilt.
"I need to prepare some things before I go over there," I said
somewhat lamely.
"Oh, right. Well, I'll see you in a few hours then."
I hung up the phone and rested my head in my hands. Tina seemed
interested in me after all, but I had blown my chances by on
her. If I didn't confess what I had done it would always be on my
mind. If I did...better not to speculate. It was like bad joke.
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
========================================================
The following piece of fiction contains strong sexual
content and is meant to be read only by adults. If you
are not at least 18 years old, or if you are offended by
this type of material, please do not read any further.
========================================================
"Double Cross"
A Frank Stern Mystery
(c) 1999 by DG (dionysian1@hotmail.com)
Chapter Nine
------------
I left my apartment at a little after eight pm and found myself
nervously scanning the streets for police cars as I drove. The idea
that Barry Rank was after me definitely had me spooked. It's no fun
being on the wrong side of a cop, let me tell you - especially a cop
as nasty as Rank.
I left George Cahn's distasteful amateur productions with Tina,
and then drove up into the hills, arriving at Claire's house at a
little after nine. As before, it was silent and still under the
bright wash of the outside floodlights. I parked on the street and
watched my mirrors for a while, in case I had been followed. There
was no traffic at all.
Claire took a long time to answer her front door. When it
finally opened, she was wearing only a blue silk robe, and her hair
was damp at the ends.
"Hi Frank. Sorry to keep you waiting - I was in the tub, soaking
the kinks out. Today's script called for me to get pushed to the
ground and spit on, and it took us five takes. "
Her big green eyes settled on the tapes I was carrying as she
shut the door behind us. "God, I really thought I'd never see those
again."
"Do you want to take some time to verify them?" I noticed a
large gap in the front of her robe, and then I saw her noticing me
noticing.
Smiling, she took the tapes and looked at them closely. "At
least you had the decency to rewind," she joked. "No, I don't need to
watch them, I recognize the labels."
She moved toward the living room, talking to me over shoulder.
"I want you to do two things for me, Frank. First, open that
champagne. Then I want to hear all about how you found the tapes."
A bottle of Dom Perignon was sitting in an ice bucket on the
coffee table, along with two glasses. I pulled it out and started
peeling away the foil, feeling like Cary Grant.
"A beautiful star and French champagne...I should have worn
a tux."
She chuckled. "I'm just a star right now. But thanks to you
I've got a fighting chance to be a star."
I pulled the cork, and champagne gushed out of the bottle and
onto the table. I guided the flow at the glasses, almost dropping the
bottle in the process.
"Sorry - I'm a little out of practice."
"That reminds me," she said dryly. "I also owe you a personal
reward, don't I?"
"Um...I wouldn't want you to do anything that made you
uncomfortable just out of obligation, Claire."
I handed her a glass, and we drank. I'm not a real connoisseur
of fine wine, but it certainly hit the spot.
We sat down next to each other on the couch, and I told her how I
found the tapes. Claire was a good listener, laughing when I said
something funny, nodding in all the right places. I told it pretty
much straight, just leaving out my impromptu masturbation session at
the end.
"Somebody could have searched forever and not found the tapes,"
she said admiringly. "The police never found it, and they ripped the
place apart."
"It was just luck that I happened to look closely at the
in the bathroom," I said modestly.
Smiling at me, Claire loosened the sash of her robe and let it fall
open.
"I guess these must look familiar," she said, letting the robe
slide down off her shoulders.
I reached over and gently cupped the soft, warm weight of her
left breast. Some sort of comment was no doubt called for, but I was
speechless. Claire leaned back and dribbled champagne over her
breasts. I licked it off, tentatively at first and then eagerly as
she purred with pleasure. Her nipples hardened under my tongue,
growing into fleshy points as I on them like baby. Her skin was
sweet with the scent of bath oil.
After several minutes of this she pushed me away gently and sat
up. "Let's see if I can still give a nice messy porn star blow job."
"You talked me into it," I said, loosening my pants. I pried my
rigid cock out of my tangled boxer shorts and Claire kneeled on the
carpet between my legs and inhaled it with a throaty groan of
pleasure, it to the back of her throat. She pumped up and
down a few times, and I almost shot my wad right then, but fortunately
she slowed down and began teasing me with gentle nibbles and wet
smacking sounds. Let me tell you, might look sort of cheesy when you
watch it in the movies, but when it's happening to you in real life
its a different story.
She pulled my out of the back of my pants, and I felt her
fingernails scrape across the bare skin of my back. She took her
mouth away from my cock and looked up at me, her gaze suddenly narrow
and calculating. All the misgivings and suspicions that I had
conveniently been repressing suddenly flooded back. In that single
instant I knew I was fucked, and that there was no time.
Pain exploded into my lower back, and my body jerked violently as
every muscle suddenly contracted. A flashbulb went off inside my
head, and then darkness.
When I woke up, I was staring up at the ceiling, and my whole
body felt like it was on fire. I couldn't move. I couldn't even
figure out how to try to move. I was sure I was dying, or maybe I was
already dead.
Claire was standing over me, her robe belted back in place.
"Can you hear me? Blink once if you can hear me."
To my surprise, my eyelids went down, and then up again.
"The pain will go away in a couple minutes. In about half an
hour, you'll be able to get up." She took a little device out of her
pocket and showed it to me. It looked like an electric razor with two
short antenna on the front.
"I tasered you," she informed me. "Fifty thousand volts."
I stared at her blankly.
"I'm sorry, Stern. I can't afford any loose ends. Maybe you saw
the whole tape, and maybe you didn't."
I thought about this for a few seconds. What the fuck difference
did it make whether I watched the tapes all the way through or not?
"If you had watched the final scene in 'Double Cross'," she
continued, "you would have seen the evil twin sister, played by me,
having sex with the good twin sister.
Claire let me think about that one for a few seconds. Filming an
entire sex scene with a body double would have been logistically
difficult and time consuming, two things porn producers avoid
like the plague. Unless, of course, you didn't need a body double.
Light started to dawn.
Claire said "So if you had watched the scene, you would have
realized that I must have a real-life twin sister."
I closed my eyes. It all made sense now. Claire Ingleford
really did kill George Cahn, while I was taking pictures of her twin
sister on Sparkle Beach, unwittingly helping her with her alibi. I
opened my eyes again, tried to form a question, and couldn't. But
Claire seemed to understand.
"Twelve years ago, my twin Christine and I ran away from
home. We grew up in Iowa, so its not like we needed much excuse. We
came out to LA, to make it big. I loved the fast-paced life out here,
the parties, the sex, all of it, but Christine hated it. She
developed a serious drug problem, then she kicked the habit, went back
to Iowa, worked her way through as a waitress. She's a lawyer
now, has a nice husband, a good life.
"That was the only porno scene she ever did, the one with me.
She was drugged out of her mind when we filmed it, you can tell when
you see it."
She laughed mirthlessly.
"The only scene she ever did, but it was a hell of a scene. Sex
with your sister. It sounds disgusting, doesn't it? But at the time
it seemed like no big deal. Christine and I had both slept with women
before."
She was silent for a few seconds.
"Anyway, a few months ago my ex-husband started blackmailing me by
threatening to show that scene to the world. He was in big financial
trouble, and he kept asking for more and more money. I've got a big
movie coming out, my career is about to take off, so his position was
just getting stronger. He was bleeding me dry, and at the same time I
felt like he might release the tape just out of spite, or that someone
would find it at his house during one of his parties. Poor Christine,
she would have been caught in the crossfire. Can you imagine what
they would think of all this in Iowa?"
"Mmph," I said. Or something like that. I could make sounds and
move my lips a bit, which was an improvement.
Claire nodded as if I had asked a probing question.
"You're wondering why I wanted to buy those pictures back.
Christine and I had hatched what we thought was a perfect plan. She
would pretend to be me in public while I went to San Diego and forced
Cahn give me the tape. But when she showed up here at my house, there
was a problem..."
Her voice trailed off. She was staring across the room at something
out of my range of vision, her eyes wide.
"She put the tattoo on the wrong ass cheek," said Tina Callahan.
She walked over to where I could see her. She was dressed in tight,
dark clothes, and she looked athletic and dangerous despite her small
size. The gun in her hand helped, of course.
Tina said "Your twin Christine used the centerfold
from your Playboy spread as a guide for the rose tattoo, didn't she?
She had no idea that the negative had been reversed. When you
discovered the mistake it was too late, and you figured she could just
keep the tattoo covered up. But a wave knocked her bikini bottom up
into her ass crack, and Frankie here caught the tattoo on film. Bad
luck for you."
"Right," said Claire, after a pause. "So who the fuck are you?"
She tried to sound tough, but couldn't quite pull it off.
"Detective Tina Callahan, LAPD. Off duty at the moment. I'm
Frank's partner. Right Frank?"
I opened my mouth and managed to croak out "Nice timing,
partner."
"Glad I could help. Sorry I let her taser you, though. I
thought I was doing you a favor by not interrupting the blow job."
I made a noncommittal sound.
"So what do you think we should do, Frank? I could call it in,
get a bunch of cops out here right away. Be a nice bust for me. On
the other hand, maybe we could shake down Claire for some cold hard
cash and let her off with a warning. I don't think she'll be doing
any more killing, now that we've got the goods on her. Blink once if
you want to-"
"I can talk," I mumbled irritably. I was getting sick of staring
up at the two of them from the floor, but I still couldn't move my
limbs. "Why don't you shoot her, and then we'll take all her money.
Make it look like a burglary."
"Not a bad idea," said Tina.
"Oh God," said Claire, turning pale. "Please. Don't... Take all
the money, I've got a lot here...I can get you more."
"How much have you got lying around the house?" asked Tina
curiously.
Claire licked her lips. "Fifty thousand in a briefcase, for
Stern. And another thirty in the safe. It's all blackmail money I
was supposed to pay George."
Tina looked down at me. "Fifty grand? You told me it was ten."
"So sue me. It's not like she was going to let me leave with
it."
"Well, that's a point. Can you live with forty, partner? If she
can really give us eighty big ones right now, I think we'd be stupid
to pass it up. She won't be tempted to talk about it, that's for
sure. Of course, that's easy for me to say, since I'm not the one she
was about to kill."
Claire said "I wasn't going to..."
Tina eyed Claire coldly, cutting her off with a look. "Oh,
really? Didn't I hear you say something about Frank being a loose
end you couldn't afford?"
Claire didn't say anything.
Tina looked at me and said "What she was probably going to do was
wait until you had recovered enough to move a little, and then she'd
help you into your van, drive it to a nice steep cliff, and send it
over with you in the driver's seat. The autopsy wouldn't find
anything to suggest you were incapacitated at the time of the
accident."
"Bitch," I said.
Tina walked over to Claire and stood facing her eye to eye. "On
your knees."
Claire dropped to her knees, all pretense of toughness gone.
"Please...For God's sake...don't...."
Tina put the barrel of her service revolver in Claire's mouth and
pulled back the hammer with her thumb. Claire made a little whimpering
sound in her throat.
Tina winked down at me and said "Just say the word, Stern, and I'll
spray her brains all over the carpet."
There was a soft spattering sound, which puzzled me until I saw
the puddle forming between Claire's knees. The sharp smell of
hit my nostrils, and I felt sick to my stomach.
"Let's get her money and get out of here," I said.
Tina nodded, and said "Yeah. Let's do that." She looked a
little ashamed. She took the gun out of Claire's mouth and said "OK,
get up, I'm not going to shoot you. Let's see what you've got in your
safe."
Ten minutes later, while Tina was busy looting Claire's safe, I
took stock of my situation. I wasn't in pain anymore, and I could
move my arms and my head, but I couldn't sit up or feel my legs. On
the bright side, I had something interesting to look at. Claire
Ingleford was sitting next to me in a chair, handcuffed, completely
naked, and tied firmly in place with the sash from her robe.
"The ironic thing," I said to her from the floor, "is that I
really didn't see the end of 'Double Cross.' In fact, it's quite
possible that no has ever seen the end of a porn movie."
"I shouldn't have tasered you. I'm sorry." Her voice was dull
and flat, and her eyes were glassy with shock.
"If you had only finished the blow job first, I could forgive
you."
That met with nothing but silence.
Tina came back into the living room carrying a small suitcase.
"Up and at 'em, partner. Time to make our getaway."
I made a brief attempt to get up. From the look on Tina's face,
it must have been a pretty pathetic sight.
"OK, Plan B then. I'll pull your van up close and Claire and I
will carry you into the back. Right, Claire?"
Claire rolled her eyes up at Tina and moaned " Please don't kill
me." I must say, she wasn't nearly the same life of the party she had
been an hour ago.
So that's how I left the house: with one arm around each of their
shoulders, my feet dragging limply along behind me. Not exactly a
march of triumph. They pushed me into the back of my van like a
rolled-up carpet, and that was that.
Tina had some final words with Claire, and then we were off. She
drove carefully on the winding road that led back down out of the hills,
but I still kept sliding from one side of the van to the other.
"This really sucks," I said, after my head bounced off my
toolbox.
"Hang in there, Stern. You're handling all this adversity very
well."
"You saved my life."
"Yep. And I made forty thousand bucks doing it. It's been quite
a night."
"That it has. How did you figure it out, anyway?"
"Well, it didn't take long to figure out that Rank's daughters
weren't on those tapes. With that theory blown, and in all honesty it
was pretty far-fetched, I started wondering what else might have
happened. I kept coming back to Claire - she had a big motive. Plus,
its just the sort of thing her character on "LA West" would do, you
know?"
"Now there's a real brainstorm."
"Well, maybe being such a bitch on for all these years has
warped her sense of judgement. Anyway, I got out the pictures you
took on the beach and her recent Playboy spread and looked at them
side by side, to see if it might have been someone who just looks like
her. It was her, but yet it wasn't. Her nose for one thing - on the
beach it was covered with sunblock, but it definitely seemed bigger than
in Playboy. It was weird, let me tell you - I kept going back and
forth on it. I started looking for little stuff, like moles and
freckles, and then I suddenly noticed that the tattoo was jumping from
cheek to cheek. I figured out the centerfold had been reversed, and
that was it."
"Wild. So you came out to rescue me."
"It didn't necessarily mean you were in danger. But I had a bad
feeling."
Tina parked the van somewhere dark and switched off the engine.
I craned my head trying to see where we were.
"Stevenson Park," she said. "I think we better lay low for a
while until you can walk. Might look suspicious, me dragging you into
my townhouse by your ankles." She got out of the driver's seat and
sat down next to me on the floor of the van.
"I'm definitely recovering," I said. "I can feel everything
now."
"Everything?" She put her hand on my crotch. "Can you feel
that?"
I laughed. "You really are a horny gal, aren't you?"
"What can I say - danger makes me wet. Not to mention that I
spent half an hour watching you and Claire depositing saliva all over
each other."
"God, how humiliating. She opened her robe, and my IQ dropped by
fifty points."
"Well, I'm sorry I spied on you," she said, continuing to rub me.
From the growing bulge in my pants it appeared that my nervous system
was still operational.
I took a deep breath. "Tina..."
"Mmm?"
"It's actually kind of ironic that you were watching me. Because
I spied on you too."
She stopped rubbing. "What do you mean?"
"I followed you this afternoon, and saw you with the other women
on the deck."
Her jaw dropped. "How..."
"I was coming over to see you, and you were just pulling out of
your driveway. After that it just sort of happened. I'm really,
really sorry. Honestly."
She was quiet for a little while. I couldn't read her expression
in the dim light, and it occurred to me that thanking her for saving
my life might well have been premature.
"Well, I guess I knew you were a voyeur," she said finally.
"Talk about humiliating."
"I'll give you the tape," I said.
"Oh Jesus...you filmed it?"
"Look, I said I was sorry."
"Yeah, so you did. OK, I forgive you."
"Really?" I was so grateful that I actually felt tears forming
in my eyes. In my own defense, it had been a traumatic few hours.
She said "So now you know I'm bisexual."
"No big deal. I won't tell anyone. As long as you don't spill
the beans about me getting zapped and almost killed by a actress."
She chuckled. "It's a deal. You know, when you were on
her tits, I was pretty jealous."
I laughed. "They were delicious."
"It's going to kill you not to be able to tell anyone
you got a blow job from Claire Ingleford."
"I guess. But appeal aside, you do it a lot better."
She leaned over and kissed me. "Thanks. Now I really forgive
you."
I raised my right arm and managed to squeeze her ass.
Smiling, she unzipped and lowered my pants, shimmied out of her
jeans and her underwear, and straddled me. We fumbled awkwardly in
the darkness until we finally connected, and I slid slowly into her
warm slippery depths until she was sitting astride my hips.
"Ohhhh, that's nice," she said. "Girls are fun, but I'd always
miss this."
We made love slowly, with Tina doing most of the work. It was
sort of a surreal experience, the way I was feeling, but it was fun.
I wasn't sure I would be able to come, but I did, and so did Tina.
After it was over, I realized that I could sit up. I opened the
back of the van and carefully slid my feet to the ground and stood up,
breathing the cool night air and enjoying the feeling of being
vertical. Moving on wobbly spaghetti legs, I made my way around to
the passenger door and clambered clumsily inside, almost sliding back
out onto my ass at one point.
Watching with amusement, Tina said "Thank God for designated
drivers, eh?"
"Very funny. Let's go home and count our money."
Tina revved the engine and pulled out of the park onto the
highway. "Your place or mine?"
"My place is a mess, and there's no food."
"Oh God...single men. You know, Cassandra's place was spotless,
and she made me a terrific ham and mushroom omelet when we were done."
"Cassandra is the woman from this afternoon, I take it?"
Tina gave me a sideways look of surprise, and then threw back her
head and yelped with laughter. "That's right, I didn't tell you, did
I?"
"Tell me what?"
"Some detective. That was Cassandra Rank, Barry's oldest
daughter. I told you we got along well at dinner."
I thought about it for a few seconds and felt a chuckle bubbling
up inside my chest. "You seduced his - that's beautiful. It
couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."
"There wasn't much seducing that had to be done," said Tina. "She was
flirting with me all through dinner. And Barry's not going to find out
about it, either."
"Not from me, he won't. I'm not about to off my new partner."
She reached over and gave my thigh a squeeze. "Stern, I think this
is going to be the start of a beautiful and profitable friendship."
The End
* This is a copyrighted work. Reposting or archiving this requires the written permission of the author.*
Comments are welcome.
DG
dionysian1@hotmail.com
DG's Page: http://baird.pair.com/dg.htm
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