Not that he cared. He was making good money doing next to nothing. He was getting rich, and in another couple of days they’d be on their way back to New York and he’d have a roll of dough to stash in the bank. If she wanted to be an idiot that was her business. He didn’t give a damn. He was making his profit and the hell with her.
There was only one thing he’d been worried about when she suggested the trip. The feeling persisted that some other guy might beat his time with her and he’d be out in the cold. But that didn’t bother him now. Vegas was swimming with pretty boys who could be made for a price — some of them ready to roll with a man or a woman, whoever asked first. But Moira was barely interested in him, let alone anybody else. The gigolos patently ignored her. They knew well enough that she wasn’t having any. Johnny had no worries.
At least he thought so.
It was Saturday night. It had been a pretty ordinary day for Johnny — breakfast at one in the afternoon, a swim in the hotel pool, an hour at the crap table during which he’d dropped seventeen dollars, dinner with Moira, a floor show at another hotel down the Strip. He’d gone to the show alone — Moira was too busy losing money to be bothered with entertainment. He felt like pointing out that she could spend as much money on the floorshow as she could lose, but didn’t bother. He figured that she might fail to appreciate his wit.
He walked into the lobby of the Calypso House, got his key at the desk and rode upstairs in the elevator. Moira would be downstairs in the casino, he guessed. She seldom quit before two-thirty and it was only a few minutes past one.
When he saw her door ajar he thought her apartment was being frisked. But that didn’t seem logical — what burglar left the door ajar and turned the light on? None he had ever heard of.
His next thought was that she was in her apartment and letting him know that she wanted him. But that didn’t seem too logical either. That wasn’t the way she went about things. It didn’t make any sense.
The third thought, at last, made sense. Moira or a maid had left the door open and the light on by mistake. He decided to kill the light and shut the door.
He opened the door a few more inches so that he could reach the light switch.
Then he saw them.
And froze.
There was sight, and there was recognition, and then there was disbelief. His eyes stared blankly ahead as he watched a scene that made no sense to him at all.
He could have reacted in either of two ways. He could have backed away, very quietly, possibly drawing the door shut as he did so.
Or he could have charged into the room, raising hell as he did so, and causing quite a stir.
He did neither of these things.
Instead he stood right where he was and watched. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing but he went right on watching anyhow. It was a new one on him. He held his breath for several seconds, then let it out.
And went right on staring. This is what he saw:
A girl with red hair lay on her back in the center of the bed. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. She was breathing raggedly. From time to time her body gave a twist of pleasant excitement.
Another person crouched over her. The other person was kissing her breast now while fondling Moira elsewhere.
The other person was a girl.
A very pretty girl. A girl with short black hair and tiny rosebud breasts. A girl with mannish hips.
A girl.
Johnny was staggered. He went on watching as the girl began planting a row of kisses on Moira’s body just as he himself had done so many times, to Moira and to many other women. It was normal for a man to kiss a woman like that. But when a girl did that it wasn’t normal at all. It was sick and twisted.
It was also happening before his eyes.
The girl kissed lower.
She took a long time finding what she was looking for, and all the while Moira’s excitement grew visibly.
And then, amazingly, the brunette was reversing her position on the bed. And then Moira did something Johnny didn’t believe. She drew the girl down to her.
Johnny gasped.
And Moira duplicated the actions of the brunette. They went on and on and on.
I wish I had a camera, Johnny thought.
He sighed. One of those precious moments preserved and immortalized on film would be a damned annuity. Moira had said that interior decorators weren’t supposed to be eccentric, hadn’t she?
Well, this was eccentric enough. And she would pay through the nose until the day she died to keep that kind of picture out of circulation.
Because this was a pretty eccentric taste. And taste was precisely the word for it.
They kept kissing, and Johnny was going out of his mind. Maybe it was never going to end, he thought. Maybe they would just plain go on forever. It was crazy, and it was strangely terrifying and it was sickening. But it was sure as hell happening, and there was no way of getting around it.
In a way, he thought, it explained a lot of things. Moira wanted to be independent from men, and at the same time she needed a lot of sex. So she bought her men and stayed independent that way. But that wasn’t enough.
There was only one real way to stay independent from men. It was simple enough. You gave up men and tried women instead. And that was just what she was doing.
It seemed to be working.
Johnny felt like a fifth wheel. More than that, he felt like a third wheel on a two-wheel bicycle. He wanted to leave but couldn’t.
Then, finally, they were done. They fell apart, exhausted, and Johnny slipped away from the door without being seen, closing it a few inches first so that no one else could look in. He went to his own room next door, took out his key and went inside. He felt sick to his stomach.
Moira didn’t want him again. She barely wanted him around at all, and it wasn’t hard for Johnny to figure out why. She and the brunette were together almost constantly. They gambled together, but now Moira wasn’t throwing her money away quite so recklessly. They ate together and they drank together. They went to shows together. Johnny Wells was left out in the cold, and that suited him fine.
He didn’t want to have anything to do with her if he could help it. He didn’t even want to ride back to New York with her. She didn’t want him and he didn’t want her and to hell with it.
So he went to her.
“I think I’ll go back a day early,” he said. “If it’s okay with you.”
“Do what you like,” she said. “I may stick around an extra week. I’m having a ball, even if I am taking a licking.”
She certainly picked the right words, he thought.
“Well,” he said, “how about my ticket?”
“I bought one-way tickets.”
“Want to give me money, then?”
“Buy your own ticket,” she snapped. “I’ll take care of your bill and that’s all. You’ve milked me for enough dough already, sonny boy. From here on you can fend for yourself.”
It was a complete switch. He could have put up a fight but he didn’t even bother. The plane fare would set him back less than two hundred bucks and it was worth it to him to avoid an argument. She’d changed from an independent woman who paid for her men to a militant dyke who didn’t want anything to do with them. Well, the hell with her.
He packed and caught a plane that landed at Idlewild. He went back to his room at the Ruskin and deposited a pile of dough when his bank opened the next morning. He was free now, out on his own hook again. He decided to stick with free-lancing. A permanent hook-up was a pain in the neck even for two weeks. He tried to imagine living with a broad like Moira for a year. Or one who was worse, for that matter. It would be hell on earth and who needed it?