Then he said, “Why don’t you change now?”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she put down her glass and said, “Sure.”
She was in the bathroom for what seemed like a very long time. When she came out again, she was wearing a short black skirt with black pantyhose, a red silk blouse, and high-heeled black patent pumps. Through the open bathroom door, he could see all the garbage man uniforms heaped on the floor near the tub. She sat where she’d been sitting earlier, crossed her legs in the black pantyhose, picked up her champagne glass, lifted it to him in a silent toast, and drank again. He went to where she was sitting, leaned over her, and kissed her.
“The day I interviewed you,” he said.
“Yes?”
Still leaning over her. Her face tilted up to his.
“You asked me what I wanted you to do, do you remember?”
“I remember.”
He kissed her again.
“You have a lovely mouth,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You do remember what you said, don’t you?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Do you remember what I said?”
“Sure.”
“What did I say?”
“You said you didn’t pay women for sex.”
“And what’d you say to that?”
“I said, ‘Good, because I don’t suck cocks for money.’”
“Good,” he said, “because I don’t plan to give you any money.”
“Good,” she said.
“Good,” he repeated, and took her hands, and helped her gently out of the chair. Lifting her into his arms, he carried her to the bed, and put her down on it, and kicked off his loafers and lay down beside her. She rolled into him to meet him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her more fiercely this time, and then his hands were under the short black skirt, easing the pantyhose down over her hips and past the blonde triangle of her pubic patch, rolling them down over the long length of her legs, until they were bunched at her ankles, holding her there like leg cuffs, the black high-heeled pumps just below them.
“I want to tie you to the bed,” he said.
“Sure,” she said.
With leather thongs, he tied her wrists to the headboard posts and her ankles to the footboard posts, leaving her spread-eagled and waiting on the bed while he went into the bathroom to undress. He came to her naked and hard, and kissed her again, and put his hand on her where she was spread and helpless and vulnerable below. He played games with her for an hour or more, the April afternoon drifting slowly by while he teased her first with his hands and his mouth and then with his cock and finally with the Uzi, adding a little danger to the game, the barrel of the gun cool against her thighs, Gloria writhing on the bed beside him. She was still bound when at last he entered her. He did not untie her until twenty minutes later, when they were both exhausted and sweaty and spent.
“Now you,” she said.
“Oh-ho,” he said.
He was lying on his back, his forearm across his eyes, his long muscular body relaxed, his cock limp.
“Sauce for the goose,” she said, and gathered the leather thongs from where he’d tossed them on the floor.
She tied his hands first.
Then his ankles.
Spread-eagled on the bed, he looked at her and smiled.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Same as you did to me,” she said. “Only better.”
She knelt between his spread legs and took him in her mouth. He was erect again within seconds.
“Now suffer,” she said, and got off the bed and put on first the pantyhose and the skirt…
“Reverse strip,” he said, smiling.
“Yep, reverse strip,” she said, and put on her brassiere and the red silk blouse and the high-heeled pumps…
“Come on over here,” he said.
“Nope,” she said, and buttoned the blouse swiftly, button by button, and tucked the blouse into the skirt…
“Come on, bitch.”
“Beg for it,” she said, and went to the dresser and picked up the Uzi.
“Uh-oh,” he said, smiling.
“Yep,” she said, and nodded and fired two quick shots into his chest. She turned away at once, picked up her handbag and the keys to the Chevy, looked back at him again quickly, turned away from the sight of all that blood, and left the room.
14.
THEY DROVE ACROSS THE BRIDGE in the rain because listening to the morning news on the radio, Brown had heard about a motel shooting in the town of Red Point over in the next state. Three garbage men’s uniforms had been found in the motel bathroom. They called the Red Point P. D. and spoke to a detective named Roger Newcastle, who said they were welcome to come on out, but whoever’d got shot was long gone. At first, they thought he was using a euphemism, telling them the victim was dead.
But, no, when they met Newcastle at the Hamilton Motel, as it was called because of its proximity to the bridge, they learned from him that the victim—who had to’ve bled gallons of blood, judging from the looks of the bedclothes here—had somehow got himself loose…
“He must’ve been tied to the bed here with these here leather thongs,” Newcastle said.
…and gone out of here leaving a trail of blood that led straight to where a car must’ve been parked.
“Wasn’t his car, though, cause we got the registration on that from when he checked in. We figure it was somebody else’s car, but not nobody’s who was checked in at the time, cause none of them says their vehicle was stolen. So we guess it was somebody’s car who was with him there in the room, maybe the person who tied him to the bed that way. Either a woman or a man, this might’ve been a homosexual thing, they can sometimes get kinky and fierce. There’s blood all over one of the thongs, he must’ve made his hand bleed tryin’ a work loose, like some animal gnawing off his own paw to get free of a trap.”
“Find any narcotics?” Carella asked.
“Not a trace. Why? You think this was some kinda dope party?”
“Not exactly,” Brown said.
“We dug out two slugs went on through and buried themselves in the wall behind the headboard,” Newcastle said. “There was also a pair of nine-millimeter cartridge cases on the floor near the dresser, they’re with Ballistics, too. Nobody heard any shots, this is a place guys bring girls over from the city, nobody wants to hear nothing. Half of them, if they did hear anything, they prolly got in their cars and ran for the hills. The lab’s going over everything else right this minute, champagne bottles, glasses, the uniforms, who knows what they’ll come up with? The car he drove in with was a Chevy, by the way, gone now, we figure whoever dusted him went off in it later on.
With thirty million dollars’ worth of stolen narcotics, Carella thought.
“We checked the license-plate number he wrote on the motel registration card, it was a rented car,” Newcastle said. “Hertz. Name he used when he rented it was the same one he registered under here at the motel.”
Had to’ve shown a driver’s license, Brown thought, probably a phony. Wouldn’t have given him a car without a license.
“What name was that?” he asked.
“Sonny Sanson,” Newcastle said. “That’s not Samson , it’s Sanson —with an n .”
“Yeah,” Carella said, and sighed. “We know.”
IN THE sunday afternoon gloom of the squadroom, they explored the possibilities.
If the person who’d been tied to that bed was whoever had been with the Deaf Man in the motel room, then the Deaf Man had done the shooting and gone on his merry way with thirty million dollars’ worth of stolen narcotics.