She looked at me. It was a look that would have scared hell out of Barshter but Crowley knew how to handle it.
“There’s a fifty-dollar bill in my wallet,” I said lazily. “Wouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes to earn it.”
Her eyes narrowed as she thought it over. She said, “Fifty?”
“Yeah.”
“Anybody finds out, my butt is in a sling.”
“Lock the door and close the drapes.”
She locked the door and closed the drapes. She turned to me, her eyes uncertain, and said her name was Brenda. I grinned at her.
“Now let’s see what’s under that uniform, Brenda.”
There was a lot of pretty brown skin under that uniform. She undressed quickly and I lay there watching her, enjoying the show. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which I had suspected from the happy way she had bounced as she moved around. She didn’t need a bra. Her breasts were young and upstanding examples of the form, coral at their tips. They were just a shade lighter than the rest of her, as if she’d lain out in the sun on her day off with the top of a bikini swimsuit covering them.
She stepped out of her panties and came over to me. She sat down on the edge of the bed and helped me out of my clothes. I smelled the hot female redolence of her. The girl stretched out on the bed beside me and our naked flesh touched. I let my hands enjoy the contours of her body. She lay obediently still, submissive, while I touched her breasts, cupped them, felt their weight. I ran my hands over her sweetly rounded buttocks and then traced them up the insides of her thighs where, for all that she was doing this for money, there already was the evidence of passion. My fingers found that tender spot and played their cunning game.
She purred like a lusty cat.
And then, because I was not Donald Barshter trying to coax love from his wife, because I was Nat Crowley being professionally serviced by an accommodating sweetness just out of uniform, I showed her how she would earn her money — to begin with. I put my hand on the top of her pretty head and eased her gently downward until she lay with her fine brown chest over my legs.
Then her eyes sought mine.
“Pretend you’re a French girl, honey.”
She knew the game as though she’d played it since kindergarten. Her lips were angel’s wings, her tongue a ribbon of fire, her mouth a bowl of hot honey. She made it last a long time. And then I took over — Brenda had primed me. If she had primed me a moment more I wouldn’t have been able to take anything over. As it was, I had to exert great control even though I was now taking Brenda in the most conventional of ways.
I wanted to end it up conventionally. The French stuff was fine for a long preliminary, but for the payoff I wanted to be strictly in control, strictly in the saddle.
It was some saddle. It bucked and slipped all over the place and drove me nearly crazy. Which is the same as saying that Brenda wouldn’t rest. Her hips were constantly in motion. Molten motion — and I think we were both practically delirious by that point.
We groaned together — and then we both lost control.
It was a moon shot with the softest of landings, and the last of it was an earth shot with an even softer landing because by then we had both had it.
When she was dressed and ready to go I grinned at her and gave her the fifty-dollar bill and an extra twenty. “For being so good,” I told her.
Brenda paused at the door. “I make this room up the same time every day,” she said.
“I’ll remember that.”
She started to open the door, hesitated and turned to face me. “I don’t usually do this,” she said.
“I know.”
I showered, dressed and went down for lunch. I thought about the girl, how good she had been, how easily I had had her. And I thought about her last remark, that she didn’t usually play for money. I believed her. Because not many men would have propositioned her that way. They would have thought of it, they would have wanted her, they would have formed the words of the proposition in their minds, but the words would never have been spoken and the girl would never have been possessed.
Donald Barshter would have ached for her. He’d have had her a thousand times in his mind and not once in the flesh.
It was a hell of a lot more fun being Nat Crowley.
After lunch I killed a few afternoon hours in a barbershop a few doors from City Hall. Donald Barshter used to save money on barbers — a haircut every three weeks, two bits for a tip and that was that. Nat Crowley ordered the works. The barber improved on my own shave, cut my hair, baked my face with hot towels. The manicurist held my hands and buffed my pretty nails. The shoeshine lad shined my shoes. It was a kick.
Then, Wednesday night, I found the bar.
It had taken a little looking but was worth the search because sooner or later I was going to make connections and the odds were good that this was going to happen in a bar. The right bar, the bar where Nat Crowley’s kind of people hung out.
Well, this bar was called Cassino’s. Red neon told me this. A slab of cardboard in the window supplied additional information — a jazz trio made noise weekends starting at nine-thirty, there was no minimum or cover charge, and Canadians were welcome.
And there we were. It was a quiet hole in the wall, an unobtrusive ginmill two blocks off the main drag. If you weren’t looking closely, Cassino’s was the same as bars on either side — nothing special, nothing remotely sinister.
I was looking closely. I saw four people inside. The bartender, a fat man who polished glasses as though they were the queen’s jewels. A big flat-faced type who could only be a cop. Two thin dark knifeblades in flat black suits who could have played adjoining roles in Hollywood’s latest exposé of the Mafia.
I went inside and took a stool at the bar. I ordered rye and soda and nursed it when it arrived. At nine-thirty a few more quiet little men filtered through the door from the street and took stools at the bar. At a quarter to ten the flat-faced cop stood up abruptly and left. At ten the bartender turned on the television and we watched the fights. Two welterweights were fighting at Saint Nick’s in New York. I watched two dull rounds, then turned my attention back to my drink.
“You ought to watch this round,” the voice said.
I looked up at the man talking to me. He was maybe forty-five, with soft, tired gray eyes, and he was twenty or thirty pounds overweight.
“There’s no action,” I said.
“This round,” he told me. “The third. Porter gets to him in the third and the Mex goes to bed.”
I lit a cigarette.
“The Mex dives,” he explained. “And all I could get down is two C’s on Porter. Watch. It ought to be cute.”
It was very cute. We both glued our eyes to the set and watched Porter and the Mexican slide neatly into their act. I watched the Mexican miss a right cross and catch a left jab with his face. He stepped back sharply, looked shaky — and Porter went in for the kill. An overhand right put the Mexican down once for an automatic eight count. He got up, managed to wander into a left and two more rights and then go down and out gracefully.
The crowd loved it.
I said, “Pretty.”
My friend turned and nodded thoughtfully at me. “So now my two bills is three-fifty,” he said. “I had to give four-to-three. Porter’s going places. They’re moving him along slow, setting him up to keep the pot boiling. He ought to be ready for a title shot in eighteen, twenty months.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I think I missed your name,” he said.
“Nat Crowley.”
“Tony Quince,” he said. We didn’t bother shaking hands. “You new in town, Nat? I never saw you around.”
“I’m new.”
“New York?”
“I’ve been there,” I said.