It was blond, well-bred, and glassy-eyed. It had an empty wine bottle in one hand and its mouth was smiling lustily. It got to its feet and swayed there, then pitched forward slightly. I caught it and it burrowed its head against my chest.
“You keep late hours,” it said.
It was very soft and very warm. It rubbed its hips against me and purred like a kitten, I growled like a randy old tomcat.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” it said. “I’ve been wanting to go to bed. Take me to bed, Ed London.”
Its name, in case you haven’t guessed, was Lynn Farwell.
We were a pair of iron filings and my bed was a magnet. I opened the door and we hurried inside. I closed the door and slid the bolt. We moved quickly through the living room and along a hall to the bedroom. Along the way we discarded clothing.
She left her skirt on my couch, her sweater on one of my leather chairs. Her bra and slip and shoes landed in various spots on the hall floor. In the bedroom she got rid of her stockings and garter belt and panties. She was naked and beautiful and hungry…and there was no time to waste on words.
Her body welcomed me. Her breasts, firm little cones of happiness, quivered against me. Her thighs enveloped me in the lust-heat of desire. Her face twisted in a blind agony of need.
We were both pretty well stoned. This didn’t matter. We could never have done better sober. There was a beginning, bittersweet and almost painful. There was a middle, fast and furious, a scherzo movement in a symphony of fire. And there was an ending, gasping, spent, two bodies washed up on a lonely barren beach.
At the end she used words that girls are not supposed to learn in the schools she had attended. She screamed them out in a frenzy of completion, a song of obscenity offered as a coda.
And afterward, when the rhythm was gone and only the glow remained, she talked. “I needed that,” she told me. “Needed it badly. But you could tell that, couldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re good, Ed.” She caressed me. “Very good.”
“Sure. I win blue ribbons.”
“Was I good?”
I told her she was fine.
“Mmmmm,” she said.
SEVEN
I rolled out of bed just as the noon whistles started going off all over town. Lynn was gone. I listened to bells from a nearby church ring twelve times; then I showered, shaved, and swallowed aspirin. Lynn had left. Living proof of indiscretions makes bad company on the morning after.
I caught a cab, and the driver and I prowled Third Avenue for my car. It was still there. I drove it back to the garage and tucked it away. Then I called Donahue, but hung up before the phone had a chance to ring. Not that I expected to reach him anyway, since calling him on the phone didn’t seem to produce much in the way of concrete results. But I didn’t feel like talking to him just then.
A few hours ago I had been busy coupling with his bride-to-be. It seemed an unlikely prelude to a conversation.
Darcy & Bates wasn’t really on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner on 48th Street, a suite of offices on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-two-story building. I got out of the elevator and stood before a reception desk.
“Phil Abeles,” I said.
“May I ask your name?”
“Go right ahead.” I smiled. She looked unhappily snowed. “Ed London,” I finally said. She smiled gratefully and pressed one of twenty buttons and spoke softly into a tube.
“If you’ll have a seat, Mr. London,” she said.
I didn’t have a seat. I stood instead and loaded up a pipe. I finished lighting it as Abeles emerged from an office and came over to meet me. He motioned for me to follow him. We went into his air-cooled office and he closed the door.
“What’s up, Ed?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I want some help.” I drew on the pipe. “I’ll need a private office for an hour or two,” I told him. “And I want to see all of the men who were at Mark Donahue’s bachelor dinner. One at a time.”
“All of us?” He grinned. “Even Lloyd and Kenneth?”
“I suppose we can pass them for the time being. Just you and the other five then. Can you arrange it?”
He nodded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. “You can use this office,” he said. “And everybody’s around today, so you won’t have any