But he was human. He was distracted. There was all that Randy nudity to glom just by turning his head to the window. And when it slid into action, Mother Hoover’s little boy neglected his john duty.
The action involved Randy, still naked, still overheated, going to the dog. The dog, who belonged to Tom Swift, was a very old Labrador retriever. Very old indeed—but not too old!
Randy sat down next to him on the floor and began petting him. She chucked him under the chin, scratched his chest, and then his belly. After a moment, the Labrador rolled over.
Randy kept kneading him. She hit a tickle-spot, and the dog’s hind leg jerked uncontrollably. She laughed, which made her breasts bobble, which made the agent stub his nose on the windowsill.
Then Randy scratched lower on the dog’s belly. He began to whine. So, perhaps, did the agent. The Labrador’s excitement became obvious -- and then impressive.
“You old rogue you!” Randy hugged the dog’s head to her bosom.
The dog’s tongue darted out and licked the bright red nipple of her left breast. Fair exchange! Now it was Randy’s leg that jerked uncontrollably.
The agent forced his eyes away to check the outhouse door. All quiet; no sounds of flushing; no signs of Tom Swift emerging. He looked through the window again.
The Labrador was wheezing loudly now. He was on his back, a five-pronged stretch straight up in the air. Randy was kneeling beside him; she had a firm grip on the rear-of-center fifth. As her hand moved up and down, the animal’s panting grew harsher.
Eyes glazed, Randy licked her lips. Her breasts sucked in air, inflating balloons, long nipples straining. It had started out playful, but it was getting to her now.
Still in a kneeling position, she started to squirm. The movement brought her plump, naked bottom closer and closer to the beast’s jaws. The moment had come for the Labrador to do like they say down at the Prostate Clinic, which is: “If you can’t join ’em, lick ’em!”
It was at this point that the agent who’d stayed behind to phone for instructions rejoined his partner. He asked what was happening. The answer was glazed eyes nodding toward the cabin window. The second snoop looked through the window. The way Putnam summed it up for me, the agent’s subsequent report described what he saw there as “canine cunnilingus.”
Finally, growing suspicious at the length of time which had elapsed, the snoop twins tore themselves away from the window and went to check on Tom Swift. The outhouse was empty. Some loose boards ripped away from the rear of it told the story. The bird had flown the shittery.
They followed the trail of the blind man through the woods. It led to a shallow stream and ended there. The duped dicks couldn’t tell which way he’d gone, up- stream or down.
“And that was the last we’ve seen or heard of Tom Swift,” Putnam told me.
“Do you have a description of him?” I asked.
“Late twenties, early thirties. About five-ten, average build. Sandy hair. No distinguishing marks except for his blindness. Last seen wearing a light brown corduroy jacket, dark brown corduroy pants, a brown-and-green-checked flannel sport shirt, and dark glasses. Smokes a pipe and has a preference for a Swedish tobacco called ‘Borkum Riff.’ He left a couple of pipes and a pound canister of the tobacco behind him in the cabin.”
“Not much to go on,” I decided. “What about the girl?”
By the time the agents returned to the cabin, Randy and the dog had both left. The number at which Tom Swift had called her earlier had already been traced. Now agents were dispatched to the address to pick up the girl.
They were too late. The place was a rooming house. The landlady said Randy had told her she was leaving for good earlier in the day. Piecing together the time sequence, the agents determined that Randy must have informed the landlady of her decision just before going to Tom Swift’s cabin.
Randy’s room was searched. The only thing they found was an underground newspaper published in New York with an ad which had been circled by an eye- brow pencil. The ad offered “top pay and interesting work” to “uninhibited young girls with good figures.”
“She certainly sounds as if she was uninhibited enough to qualify,” I remarked to Putnam.
“Yes.” He sighed. “When we checked out the advertisement, we found that the organization which placed it was a front used to recruit sexual performers for skin flicks. That was as far as we got. Such people, operating on the fringes of the law as they do, take refuge in know-nothingness. Nobody would say if Randy Beaver had answered the ad. Nobody knew what had become of her. Nobody remembered the girl. Nobody knew anything.”
“And you want me to find her?”
“Yes. And through her, hopefully, Tom Swift.”
“Finding her shouldn’t be so tough. A girl like that, traveling with a lap dog . . .”
“A lap dog, Mr. Victor? I told you, the animal is a Labrador retriever. Much too large for . . .”
“A pun,” I explained. “Just a pornographic pun.”
“I see.” Putnam winced. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She left the dog behind. Our agents located it a few days later at a roadside kennel. From What the keeper said, she must have dropped it off right after leaving Tom Swift’s cabin. The keeper also saw her pulling her VW onto the highway going to New York when she departed his premises. The logical surmise is that she was going there to answer the advertisement. Incidentally, she left enough money with him to keep the dog for a year -- including regular prostate massages. Although, according to the kennel’s veterinarian, the dog won’t live that long.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Old age. The veterinarian said he’d been trained as a Seeing Eye dog, but then he went blind himself. The girl had been in to see him with the canine before. It was the doctor’s impression that she’d been hired by the dog’s master—whom he’d never met—to guide the dog in its travels after it went blind.”
“You mean she was . . . ?”
“Yes, Mr. Victor.” Charles Putnam confirmed what I’d been thinking. “That is indeed what Randy Beaver was.”
A Seeing Eye girl for a blind dog!
CHAPTER SEVEN
It had taken me a little more than three weeks to track down Randy Beaver, former Seeing Eye girl for a blind pooch. I’d left Paradise Island with a nice chunk of expense money from Putnam wadding out my wallet, and flown directly to New York City. Here I’d spread around some of the green stuff among old acquaintances in the netherworld of porno films.
The largesse I distributed had two immediate results. The first was an explanation of why Putnam’s snoops had drawn “No kapish” looks and amnesiac statements adding up to “Nov shmozz ka pop” when they’d stumble—bummed around trying to find Randy Beaver. The agency which placed the ad circled in the paper found in Randy’s room in Vermont played it cool as a matter of policy. Flesh peddlers operating just this side of the law, their vulnerability was a fact of their business life. They were at the mercy of the changing winds of enforcement of local ordinances; their referrals often resulted in state lines being crossed for possibly “immoral” purposes; who knew how old a girl might really be?—such were some of the nervous-making facts behind their reticence.
Lucre bought me the second result, an “in” with one of the outfit’s placement agents. Still more bread loosened his tongue. I came away with the address of a skin-flick producer who’d paid the outfit a commission after hiring Randy for a job.