CHAPTER TEN

There was nothing about Marilyn in the paper the next day. It was yesterday's murder, already stale. And, in any event, it was a very small tragedy, meaning nothing to anyone, except for one mourner at the other side of the city who could not tell anyone why she felt grief for an unimportant dead whore. Laura flipped bleakly through the papers and, finding nothing, threw them away. Marilyn had ceased to matter to the world.

The worst of it all, Laura thought, is that the victim didn't necessarily have had to been Marilyn. It could have been any of the girls who worked the 59th Street-Central Park region.

It could have been me, she thought with a little quiver of horror.

It could have been, so easily. Unbidden, the scene formed on the screen of her imagination. There she was, dressed shabbily—not the way she dressed these days—standing in front of the park, waiting, waiting. It was late in the day; she had a few dollars in her handbag, and she was tired and sweaty from a long day's work. As the twilight shadows fall, a client approaches—a big man in a stevedore's cap, hulking, unshaven. She wants to refuse him, but he is insistent, picking her up with a quick line, plenty of filthy words. They go to the hotel. He orders her to undress, standing back and admiring the pink-tipped globes of her breasts, the white soft skin of her thighs, the gently rippling flesh of her full buttocks. He drops his trousers: he throws himself down on her, squeezing her tender breasts with calloused hands, thrusting his body against her, taking her with brutal speed and lack of tenderness.

And then, afterward, rising from her naked body with his lust satisfied, he reaches for her handbag, takes out the money she had earned that day. From the dresser, he takes the bill he had given to her only a few minutes before. She rises, protests, shouts shrill abuse at him. He laughs, turns toward her with a cruel smile on his face, seizes her. Thick fingers bite into the soft flesh around her throat. The heavy paws contract. She claws at the tightening hands, unable to remove them, and he shakes her like a doll, and the pain goes ripping down like a red-hot ingot thrust into her breasts, like a bolt of lightning in her loins, and her legs grow weak and her eyes begin to bulge and she hears his booming laughter as life slowly ebbs from her....

Laura shuddered.

It might have been me. Marilyn used to talk about perverts who enjoyed hitting or choking prostitutes. I was lucky, that's all. I got out in time, into a different league where they don't play so rough.

The telephone rang. Laura snatched it up eagerly, grateful for anything that would serve to interrupt her mood of morbid depression.

It was Spinelli.

"How's my favorite redhead this morning, eh?"

"Surviving," Laura said cheerlessly. She wasn't in a mood to make conversation.

"That's all? Just surviving? Chick, you know it's against the house rules just to survive. You've got to live, live, live!"

"Not today, Phil. I'm not in a very lively mood, I guess."

"After a day off?"

"I'll perk up. I—I've got a headache. That's it, a terrible headache."

"You going to be okay by tonight? Take some aspirin, or something. You've got to be your old sparkling self this evening."

"Where am I supposed to be working?"

"Hotel Whittier. There's a banker named McDermott in Suite 1411 who wants company."

"Dinner date?"

"No," Spinelli said. "You go to his room around nine o'clock. No dinner, no show. As long as you've got a headache, it's just as well that way, yes?"

"I suppose so," Laura agreed. "You know anything about this McDermott that I ought to know?"

"Not much. Just that he's loaded with dough, and you stand to pick up a nice bit of change. The last time I supplied him with a girl, he tipped her two bills. I'm not guaranteeing a repeat, but keep it in mind."

"Don't worry, I will!"

"He's going to be in town for a week," Spinelli added. "When he contacted me, he implied that he might be interested in making use of the same girl for several nights. Be nice to him and you may have earned yourself a fat piece of change by the time the week's over."

Spinelli hung up. Laura walked to the window and stared out onto the river. She thought about Dan. He was so good, so gentle—and in for such a shock when and if he found out the truth.

Maybe there's a way out, she thought. Maybe I can slide out of this filthy profession and talk Dan into moving far away, to San Francisco maybe, or Seattle, or someplace else thousands of miles from here. Thousands of miles from these terrible memories.

She went into the bathroom and stripped for her morning shower. Her body, reflected in the full-length mirror against the bathroom door, looked young and vibrantly healthy. Her breasts seemed to have grown more ripe since the loss of her virginity; the two full globes jutted proudly forward, heavy bowls of soft flesh tipped with dark reddish-pink. It was a wide-hipped, strong body she had. A woman's body, a body built for childbearing, with those big breasts and broad hips.

But call-girls don't have children, she thought.

They take precautions. And in the rare instances when the precautions fail, they employ the best abortionists money can buy to deal with the little accident. Spinelli kept a little book in which he recorded the dates of each of his girls' menstrual periods, and when the period started getting a couple of days overdue he began asking questions, and if it got as much as ten days overdue he would whisk the girl off to his doctor for an examination and tests. Spinelli didn't want any of his prize livestock being put out of commission for a year or so by a pregnancy. He didn't want to run the risk that childbirth would alter the firm roundness of a valuable pair of breasts, or paint blue vein-lines on a much-admired pair of thighs. He didn't want his girls busy with diapers and perambulators when they should be earning money.

No, Laura thought. Call-girls don't have children.

She wondered what it would be like to have life swelling in her womb, to have her breasts grow stiff and heavy with milk, to experience the hundred inner changes of pregnancy. She wondered what it would be like to be the mother of Dan's children.

I could swing it, she thought. It's only three months since McCarten raped me. I could manage somehow to forget all the things I've done in those three months. I could wipe the slate clean and start all over again, fresh ... with Dan....

She stepped under the shower, setting the controls for a fine needle-spray of cold water. The little needles lanced her skin with exquisite pinpoint pain. The trick, she thought, was to get out—to draw the line and say, After tonight no more, and to stick with it. To resist the lure of the $500-a-week salary and the hundred-dollar tips. To quit before it became too late ever to break the bond.

She had a good reason now. Dan. A decent, honest man who loved her, or who seemed to.

Get out now, she told herself. You've got the best motive for quitting that you'll ever have, and you haven't been in it so long that it's changed you.

She turned off the water and left the shower and towelled herself vigorously dry. Decision crystalized; she walked to the phone, grabbed up the receiver, began to dial Spinelli's number, to tell him it was all over, that he would have to send some other girl to amuse Banker McDermott this evening at the Whittier.

She got as far as the second letter of Spinelli's telephone number. Then, weakening, she paused, staring at the dial.

What am I doing? she asked herself in horror. Suppose Dan isn't interested in marrying me? I can't assume anything. I mustn't rush blindly ahead.

Slowly, Laura replaced the receiver. Before she burned all the bridges that linked her with Spinelli, she would have to make sure of Dan's intentions. In the meantime, she would have to continue taking assignments as usual.

She walked through the livingroom, out onto her terrace, spread out her robe and lay down nude on top of it. At this hour of the day, the diagonal rays of the sun slanted over the terrace wall. No one could see her as she sunbathed here, and she had come to enjoy the daily hour in the sun.

Stretching out comfortably, Laura turned her breasts and loins to the sun and basked in the warm radiance. She had tanned quickly, all over her body. It gave her a pantherishly sensual appearance that attracted much approval from her clients. Men accustomed to women whose skins were fishbelly-white between their breasts and their thighs were delighted with Laura's golden-brown breasts and buttocks and belly.

After a while, she turned over, lying on her stomach while the sun caressed her buttocks. There in the warmth, all tension departed. She knew what her direction was, now. As soon as she was sure of Dan's intentions, she would sever all connection with Spinelli. And they would go far, far away, and she would bear him children.

She even became reconciled to the death of Marilyn. The poor girl was out of her misery, now—no more walking the streets, no more days of humiliation and loneliness. Marilyn would have been a prostitute to the end of her days, and life would have become more and more of a bitter struggle for her as what little erotic appeal she had dwindled inexorably with the years. Now she was spared the anguish of age.

After an hour of sunbathing, Laura came in, feeling relaxed and glowing. Her maid had arrived and was tidying up the apartment. Laura prepared a light lunch for herself.

It was a relaxing day. She had awakened early, and she did not have to begin work until nine in the evening, so she had a full day for shopping and reading and decorating her apartment. She went out to eat around seven, dressed in slacks and a blouse, and had a light meal at a delicatessen on Second Avenue. By seven-thirty she was back in her apartment, and an hour and a quarter later she was in a taxi on the way to the Whittier and her rendezvous with Mr. McDermott.

The Whittier was an old-line hotel on Fifth Avenue, very elegant, very tasteful. Laura entered the lobby as though she were a visiting member of the Royal Family, as Spinelli had instructed her long ago. ("Never walk into a fancy hotel as though you're a whore, or they'll throw you out. Make them think you're Queen Victoria herself and you'll get a warm welcome.")

Regally entering the elevator, Laura said in loftily sophisticated tones, "Fourteen, please."

The elevator boy practically bowed. The car rose swiftly.

The hallway was floored with plush carpeting that seemed to be a foot deep. Laura walked briskly along the corridor, watching the numbers descend, until she came to 1411. She knocked.

The door opened. "Hello," McDermott said. "You're Laura, I take it?"

"That's right."

"I'm Robert McDermott. Call me Bob. And come in, do, come in!"

Laura stepped in and let McDermott help her off with her jacket. He was a man of medium height, probably about fifty; his hair was thin, and what there was of it was white, but his face was unlined and his pink cheeks were pleasantly plump. He had pale blue eyes and the friendly, open look of an aging cherub.

He hung up the jacket and turned to survey her. Laura had dressed well for the occasion, in a tailored suit over a tight silk blouse. Everything tasteful, nothing on vulgar display. When the time came for McDermott to see her body, he would see it, but she was determined not to flaunt acres of bare bosom at him as an appetizer beforehand.

"I've taken the liberty of ordering some liquor," McDermott said. "Would you care for a highball, Laura?"

"If you do."

"By all means! Will it be Scotch, rye, bourbon? I've got a very well-stocked little bar here, as you see. Or if you prefer some liqueur or brandy, we could ask room service—"

"Rye will do," Laura said, smiling. "And some ginger ale, please."

McDermott fixed the drink for her. She waited while he prepared his own.

"To a wonderful evening," she said, lifting the glass toward his.

"Amen to that," McDermott said. "Cheers."

She took a shallow sip. He drank more deeply. Putting the glass down, he stared with sudden intensity at her.

"How old are you?" he asked abruptly.

"Over twenty-one, Mr. McDermott."

"I should hope so. But not very far over, eh? And call me Bob. How old do you think I am, eh?"

"I'm sure I couldn't guess."

"I'm sure you can. Come on, girl, don't be so afraid of offending me! Take a guess!"

"Fifty?"

"Fifty-eight!" he crowed. "You wouldn't believe it, would you? Not a wrinkle on my face. If I still had my hair I could pass for forty, I bet." He took another deep gulp of the highball. "I'm still a young man in many ways," he said with sudden seriousness. "But my wife is an old woman. Two years younger than I am, but you'd think she was seventy. It's a terrible thing, Laura, when a wife grows old faster than her husband does. It's made my life miserable. Miserable."

Laura said nothing. She had been through this sort of thing before—the unhappy middle-aged man who took almost as great a pleasure in baring his personal problems to his mistress-for-a-night as he did in making love to her. The best tactic, she had discovered, was to remain sympathetically silent. Men love a good listener.

McDermott went on, "We've been married thirty-six years. Can you imagine that? I married her the day I graduated from Harvard. Look—here's her picture, one that I took in the spring of that year. Tell me what you think of her."

McDermott groped in his wallet and delicately pulled out a snapshot. Laura took it from him. It was old and faded, turning brown with the years, but the smiling girl it showed still had kept the beauty of that day nearly forty years ago. She was slender, with a classic serenity of feature and elegant posture.

"She's lovely," Laura said quietly.

"Yes. Wasn't she? Take a look at this one now. On a cruise ship in the Caribbean last winter."

The second picture showed McDermott and an elderly woman standing at the rail of the ship. McDermott, wearing a polo shirt and Bermuda shorts, looked gay and youthful. But the woman—!

It was possible to detect the underlying features of the girl of that time-browned snapshot. But only barely possible. Thirty-six years had wrapped a layer of wrinkled, sagging flesh around the classic chin. They had rounded the square shoulders, had thickened the Grecian nose, had made coarse flabby lumps of flesh out of the smiling lips. The eyes had lost their sparkle; the hair was frizzy and unkempt. The woman looked like McDermott's mother, not his wife. Laura shuddered.

"It's hard to believe," she whispered, as she gave the picture back.

"Of course, it's a lot more striking to you, seeing the two pictures side by side. I've watched it happen gradually, so I'm not as rocked by the contrast. But it's an awful thing. Awful." He gulped down his drink. "How about a refill?"

"Not yet, thanks," Laura smiled. "I've still got a way to go on this one."

"Of course. Mind if I—?"

"Not at all," Laura said.

As he prepared a second drink for himself, McDermott said, "We've got three children. Bob Junior, he's thirty-three, a vice-president at the bank. A little too snobbish, but otherwise a fine boy. And my son Richard, he's thirty, an Air Force officer. Joined the ROTC in college and liked it so well he made a career out of it. I don't see much of him. The girl's name is Elaine. She's twenty-seven, I think. Her husband's a professor at Yale. What a bitch she is! I think she's slept with half the student body in New Haven. Well, that's her business—hers and her husband's. But those are my children. There was a fourth one, too. Donald. Also an Air Force man. Killed in Korea, he was. He'd be almost twenty-nine, if he'd lived. My wife turned into an old woman the day we got the telegram about him from the Defense Department." McDermott scowled. "Well, I was upset too. But it's almost eight years, now! I'm used to the idea that Don is dead. Elizabeth isn't. She still wakes up at night and goes into his room." McDermott looked up, sudden anguish in the baby-blue eyes. In a hoarse voice he said, "Do you know how long it's been since my own wife has slept with me? Not since the day Don died. Not since the middle of the Korean War. You probably weren't even going to High School yet, back then. And she hasn't let me touch her since that day. Not that she'd been any ball of fire in the bedroom for years. Not that she ever was. You know how New England girls are raised, or at least how they were raised back then? The mothers tell them that sex is evil. They tell them that no good woman possibly can enjoy sex. They tell the girls to sleep with their husbands and make children, but once the children are all born you don't have to sleep with the dope you married any more. God, I'd like to strangle that old bitch, Elizabeth's mother!" McDermott shook his head heavily. "I'm talking too damn much, I guess."

"I don't mind," Laura said softly. "If it makes you feel better to get these things off your chest, I don't mind listening at all."

"You're a good girl," McDermott said. His voice was getting a little thick, and his pink face was growing flushed. Laura suspected that he had begun drinking long before her arrival. "You see why I live for these visits to New York? I can't do anything up in Boston, oh, God, no! If I ever got caught there, they'd practically crucify me on the Common. But four times a year I come to New York and I can live again." His eyes sought hers eagerly. "Four times a year I can have some genuine affection and sympathy. Sure, I have to pay for it, but that's better than not having it at all."

He gulped down the second drink and put the glass on the table. "Don't let me have any more," he said. "I want to stay sober enough to appreciate you. You're a very beautiful girl, Laura. I need some beauty in my life. I earn a hundred thousand a year, you know? More than some people make their whole lives. And I'm unhappy. Funny, isn't it?"

"Money doesn't always make people happy."

"Damn right it doesn't! I see these people who work for me—tellers, they make $60 a week maybe. And they go home to their wives and lay them every night. Every goddam night!" He reddened. "Sorry if I get a little coarse. It's the drinks. But these people, they bang their wives all night long, on their lousy $60 a week. It's all they have, is fun in bed, but I don't even have that. I just have my Cadillac and my big house and my coupons to clip and my stone-cold bitch of a wife. Come here, Laura."

She put her glass down and walked across the room toward the couch. He rose, a little unsteadily, as she came close.

He let his hands rest lightly on her shoulders, and smiled at her.

"While I was waiting for you," he said, "I made up my mind that I wasn't going to exploit you tonight. We both know why you're here, but I promised myself I wouldn't hop into bed with you before eleven o'clock at the earliest. I'd show some restraint. I'd sit around and make polite conversation, and pretend that we were good friends who had known each other for years. But I can't do it. It isn't even ten o'clock, but I can't hold out."

Laura smiled tenderly. "I understand," she said.

"I really believe you do. Let's go into the bedroom, shall we?"

They went in together, hand-in-hand. Laura felt a tremendous wave of pity for this man, this millionaire whose life was so lonely. She almost forgot that this was a cold business transaction, that he was buying her for a night at a fixed price. She felt almost like an angel of mercy, performing an act of kindness.

They stood by the bed, and she pressed her body against his and he kissed her, hesitantly at first, then more passionately as his desire mounted and his natural reserve diminished. She realized he was hesitant, and she took his hands and put them on her blouse, and he cupped her breasts for a moment before beginning to unbutton her. He removed her blouse and, with shaking hands, unhooked her bra, and she heard his little sharp indrawn hiss of delight at the first sight of her bare breasts. He kissed her stiffening nipples tenderly.

"Lovely," he muttered. "Lovely."

She helped him undress her, and within moments further she was nude and he was undressing too. His body was fleshy without being fat; he had obviously taken pains to keep himself in trim, and it certainly did not seem like the body of a man of fifty-eight.

Naked, they embraced, and he carried her down to the bed.

"Be kind to me, Laura," he whispered. A little shuddering sigh of longing burst from him, and with sudden frenzy he clasped her, his hands gripping her breasts tightly, and she surrendered to him. He gave one deep-throated gasp of delight and uncontrollable desire, and almost immediately reached his release and sank down limply between her breasts, his breath coming in harsh bursts, and he said apologetically, "It happened so fast, Laura. It happened so fast!"

She stroked his back consolingly.