Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,54
none of these were. The numbers at the bottom aren’t his numbering system. There were a lot of guys doing these back then. Most, you never heard of. It wasn’t my thing, you gotta understand, but a buck was a buck, then same as now.”
Chelsea pulled out another folder. “What about these?” Steinman flipped through a selection of stills, color and black-and-white, four-by-fives and eight-by-tens. In most of them, Kristi Lane was completely nude, and she was obviously a natural blonde.
“Private stock. You couldn’t do that over the counter back then. Even the nudist magazines had to use an airbrush.”
“Here’s some more.”
Kristi Lane was wearing jackboots, a Nazi armband, an SS hat, and nothing else. The other girl was suspended by her wrists above the floor and wore only a ball gag. Kristi wielded her whip with joyous zeal, the victim’s contorted face hinted at the screams stifled by the rubber ball, and the blood that oozed from the welts across her twisting body looked all too real.
“No. I never did any of this sort of stuff.” Steinman seemed affronted as he handed her back the folder.
“Who did?”
“Lot of guys. Lot of it amateur. Like I say, it wasn’t sold openly. Hey, I’m surprised a girl like you’d even want to know about this kind of stuff, Miss... uh...” He’d forgotten her name since her phone call yesterday.
“Ms. Gayle. Chelsea Gayle.”
“Miss Gayle. I thought all modern girls were feminists. Burning their bras and dressing up like men. I guess you’re not one of them.” His stare was suddenly professional, and somewhere in his beer-soaked brain he was once again focusing his 4 x 5 Speed Graphic camera.
Chelsea tasted her rum and flat cola and tried not to look flustered. After all, she was wearing her wide-shouldered power suit with a silk blouse primly gathered at the neck by a loose bow, and there was no nonsense about her taupe panty hose or low-heeled pumps. Beneath the New Woman exterior, she was confident that her body could as easily slither into a Cosmopolitan party dress. Her face took good close-ups, her blond hair was stylishly tousled, and she wore glasses more for fashion than necessity. Let the old fart stare.
“It’s for an article on yesterday’s pin-up queens,” she said, repeating the lie she had told him over the phone. “Sort of a nostalgic look back as we enter the nineties: The women men dreamed of, and where are they now?”
“Well, I can’t help you there on Kristi Lane.” Steinman waved to the barmaid. “I don’t know of anyone who can.”
“When did you last work with her?”
“Hard to say. She was all over the place for those few years, then she moved out of my league. I’d guess the last time I shot her would have been about 1958. I know it was a cover for one of those Playboy imitations, but I forget the title. Didn’t see much of her after that.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Probably about 1960. Seem to recall that’s about when she dropped out of sight. A guy told me once he’d run into her—at a hippie party in the Village late in the sixties, but he was too strung out to know what he was seeing.”
“Any ideas?”
“Nothing you haven’t heard already. Some said she got religion and entered a convent somewhere. There was some talk that she got pregnant; maybe she married some Joe from Chillico and settled down. There was one story that she was climbing in bed with JFK, and the CIA snuffed her like they did Marilyn Monroe.”
“But what do you think happened to her?”
Steinman chugged his beer. “I think maybe she got a little too wild.”
“Too wild?”
“You know what I mean. Maybe got in too deep. Had to drop out of sight. Or somebody made sure she did.”
Chelsea frowned and dug into her case. “This one is pretty wild.” It was a magazine, and on the front it said, Her Satanic Majesty Requests, and below that, For Sale to Adults Only. The nude woman on the cover was wearing a sort of harness about her hips with a red pointed tail in back and a monstrous red dildo in front. Her face was Kristi Lane’s, blond pageboy and all.
Steinman flipped to the centerfold. A writhing victim was tied to a sacrificial alter. Kristi Lane was astride her spread-eagled body, vigorously screwing her with the dildo.
Steinman slapped the magazine shut, shoved it back to Chelsea. “Not my bag, baby. I never shot any