Make Out With Murder [= Five Little Rich Girls]

Fifteen

She lived in the same building she had occupied as Jessica’s roommate. Not in the penthouse, however, but in a studio apartment on the third floor. She opened the door for me and motioned me inside. “Excuse the place,” she said. “I haven’t had time to buy any furniture that I like. That chair’s not too bad.”

As I was on my way to the chair that wasn’t too bad she asked me if my leg was bothering me.

“Everything’s bothering me,” I said.

“I mean the way you walk. Did you hurt yourself?”

“I didn’t have to. Someone did it for me.”

“Huh?”

“I was beaten up last night. By professionals, I think. They didn’t break any bones or anything like that. They just beat me to a pulp.”

“Oh, God. Take your shirt off.”

“Huh?”

“Take your shirt off and let me see. Christ, they really did a job on you. You’re going to be stiff. Get undressed, Chip.”

“Huh?”

“Take your clothes off and lie down on my bed. I’m serious, dumbbell. The only thing that’s going to do you any good at this point is a massage. You should get a daily massage for the next week, as a matter of fact. Well, you came to the right place. I happen to be a damned good masseuse.”

“I remember.”

“Most of the girls don’t know anything about muscle groups. I took the trouble to take a decent course. Come on, lie down on your stomach. Oh, you poor baby. They really worked you over, didn’t they?”

“Ouch.”

“Your flesh is very tender and I’ll have to hurt you a little, but you’ll feel a lot better afterward. Just trust me and try to relax.”

“Okay.”

She really knew what she was doing. She hurt me a little from time to time, but I could feel a lot of soreness and tension draining away. I began to feel very drowsy, and she had stopped touching me for a while before I realized the absence of her hands.

I asked if we were finished.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “I’m taking my clothes off. I work better in the nude. Okay, tiger. Roll over.”

I rolled over and opened my eyes. That long lean body was even nicer than I remembered it.

I said, “I don’t know about this.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Just shut up and relax. Does this hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Those rotten bastards. There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

I was beginning to feel a little stirring. You probably don’t find that hard to believe. Her hands were very firm and very gentle, and her body was very beautiful, and she had that nice spicy smell to her skin. When she started touching my thighs with that feathery way she had, I started to sit up. She made me lie down again.

“Hey,” I said.

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I really don’t want to wind up frustrated.”

“That must have been awful the other day. I hated to see you leave like that.”

“I didn’t like it much myself, but I don’t have any money now and I—”

“Who said anything about money, Chip?”

“Huh?”

She grinned wickedly. “Dumbbell. I’m not working now, you jerk. I’m on my own time, and I’m giving you a massage because you can use one. This is just therapy for you, baby. I’m not going to leave you tied up in knots. I’m going to untie knots you never knew you had.”

“Oh.”

“Now you lie still and just enjoy this. I’m going to take my time, and it may seem as though I’m teasing you, but it’ll just make it that much better at the end. You’re going to love this, baby.”

She used her hands and her breasts and her lips and tongue. She found erogenous zones I hadn’t known I had, and at times it did seem as though she was teasing me, and at times I thought I would die if it didn’t end soon, and at times I wanted it to go on forever, and at the very end she turned her sweet mouth into a vacuum cleaner and turned me inside-out.

“Jesus,” I said.

“I told you you were gonna love it.”

“You’re absolutely fantastic.”

“Well, I do this for a living, honey. There’s a lot to be said for professionalism.”

“I guess there is.”

“If I weren’t reasonably competent by now, I’d go into some other line of work. But I don’t get many complaints.”

“You won’t get one from me.”

“Come on,” she said, slapping me lightly on the thigh, “Put some clothes on and I’ll show you what I stole for you. And where do you get off saying I do a lousy impression of Peter Lorre? That wasn’t Peter Lorre. That was Akim Tamiroff, and I do a great Akim Tamiroff.”

There was quite a stack of membership application forms from the two-week period preceding Jessica’s death. Indulgence evidently did a hell of a business, and if all its recreational therapists were like Andrea, I could understand why.

What I couldn’t understand at first was why I was bothering to go through this pile of paper, since every third person seemed to be named John Smith. And most of the others were pretty obvious aliases. I read in one of Haig’s books that amateurs almost always use a first name, or a form of one, as the last name of their alias. So I ran into a high percentage of names like John Richards, Joe Andrews, Sam Joseph, and so on.

Then I hit a name I knew, and then I hit it again, and then I hit it a third time, and I cabbed to Haig’s house with three pieces of paper in my pocket that would wrap up a murderer.