The Archaeologist's Mistress

by Jamie MacFrey

  “Hary Xu’s dead.”

  “I know. Saw it on the news. Neuro den, huh?”

  “Yeah, he got fried. Clerk said ex-military type in a suit and tie killed him just before I got there,” I said, emphasizing the tie. I didn’t want to tip my hand, exactly, but if Theed had been the one to set me up, I wanted him to worry that I was onto him. He wasn’t the type to spook, but a little pressure never hurt anyone’s chances of making a mistake. On the desk, Theed pulled Peppy’s legs tight and high over his shoulders. This had a beautiful side effect of revealing some of his thick cock to me when he pumped his hips away from hers on each thrust, the shaft wet from her juice. Peppy moaned, kneading one of her wonderful breasts through her shirt.

  “Well, stay on it. Job’s changed. Find me that mistress and find out what she knows. Anything else? I talked to our old comrade-in-arms Chief Inspector King. He said two cops got a trip to hospital while in pursuit of a suspect.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about that. Daav always liked to downplay SPD’s failures, if I recall, so if he mentioned it to you it must be true. What I do know is I’m going to go talk to the widow tomorrow, see if she’ll let me toss Xu’s home office after the police get done with her.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Theed. “I think Daav’s probably got her for questioning now, so I’ll find out from him when she’s out and message you. Have a goodnight.” His hand reached to hang up the call.

  “Can’t I stay and watch?” I asked.

  Theed glanced at Peppy, who gave an almost imperceptible nod, then reached for Theed’s wrist, dragging his hand to her breast.

  I went to sleep that night dreaming of Peppy laughing in delight as Theed filled her cunt with his cum and then her turning herself to the holo to give me a good look at the mess he’d made of her bald pussy as she cleaned herself off his cock and I frigged myself into oblivion.

  Chapter 4

  T he next morning Theed’s message alerting me that Chief Inspector Daav King had released the widow came through as I was drinking my coffee. I was quick to shoot him one back.

  “Neuro den was a setup. You trying to kill me?”

  “What? NO”

  “Then we need to talk.”

  “Not at office. Not safe. Talk to widow. Then at my place. I’ll send the address.”

  “Ok.”

  As an afterthought, I sent him the photo of my chest after Murado’d finished using my body.

  “Fuck. JUST TALK” the reply came back.

  Yeah, that’s what I thought.

  A widow wasn’t going to appreciate my normal attire, so today it was all business, like I was a plainclothes police officer. Well, a plainclothes police officer with style. Nice pumps, a nice pair of grey pants that were admittedly a little tight, a sleeveless cream blouse with a frilly collar cut so low that only someone with my tits could wear it without being in danger of spilling out of the cut, and a crop-top suit jacket that matched the pants. And a pair of tinted shooting glasses I’d filched from the SPD’s outdoor shooting range years ago because they looked so good on me.

  Too bad my ride was my nearly dead Zond V.

  I had the flimsy Theed had given me and pulled up everything GJS had on the widow Xu. Landa Xu, nee Beinhart. 35. Also had graduated from Galilei University, but only with a Master’s in xenoarchaeology. It seemed a little like Hary had married a student. She’d joined a local nonprofit, helping poor Martian kids in New Angeles stay out of the gangs shortly after that. She hadn’t gone with Hary to Harvard, or to the Ganymede dig. Committed to her job, apparently. Despite that, and despite the lack of children, she’d stopped working once Hary had been hired by GJS. The company profile also suggested that she was morally opposed to the way GJS conducted its business. She might be a tough nut to crack.

  The Xu house was one of those minor mansions, the type they’d thrown up shortly after terraforming made the planet habitable to be a replica of the 1980s and 1990s suburban excesses. The Zond settled down in the gravel drive, and I dashed up the steps and rang the bell, listening as a series of chimes and gong announced my presence at the front door.

  After what seemed like ages, the door opened a slight crack, a chain holding it from going any further. Really, a chain! What a throwback. A pointless affectation these days.

  “I’m sorry, no solicitors,” said the woman from inside.

  “Landa Xu?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear any sales pitches at the moment.”

  “M. Xu, I work for GalaxJonesStein. The company hired me to investigate your husband’s death,” I lied, sort of.

  “The police are already looking into that M…?”

  “Jeffries, M. Xu. But please call me Sare,” I gave her a soft smile, the kind that told a person I was here to give, not to take. “And the police can’t always go where a PI like myself can in the pursuit of justice. The company’s hired me to make sure your husband gets justice. That you get justice.”

  Through the crack in the door, all I could see were a pair of big brown eyes, sizing me up.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  The door closed, and I heard the chain get undone, and then it opened. I stepped into the house.

  Landa Xu was the sort of woman that made you doubt Hary Xu’s sanity for getting take out when he had a warm steak dinner with a side of creamy mashed potatoes waiting for him at home. She was petite and fit, with long curly black hair, a round ass and a pair of breasts that, while not likely to grab the cover of any men’s e-mag should her competition be someone built like me, still managed to fill out a shirt (and I imagined a pair of hands) nicely. Suddenly I wished I’d been an at-risk New Angelino youth seven years ago instead of a cop. I could’ve been looking at this five days a week instead of drug dealers and naked old men who took too many drugs from their dealer and jacked off in fountains.

  She was dressed in black, but it didn’t seem like she’d gone too hard on it, just some dark pants and a simple blouse. And she either hadn’t been crying or she’d just applied fresh mascara.

  “I told the police everything I knew last night,” she told me as I came into the foyer. In front of us, a winding staircase went up to the second floor and I could see doors to individual rooms there. If Hary Xu had a home office, it’d be up there. The decor was eclectic. There were a lot of what I assumed were reproductions of relics from Earth. An ancient Egyptian burial mask, a statue of a Greek discus thrower, a suit of samurai armor, an American baseball and bat.

  On one wall there was an arrangement of hung FlimsyFilms, showing pictures of Landa and Hary. Or rather Landa or Hary.

  “So I’m not sure what ‘justice’ GJS can provide that they can’t,” said Landa, her tone heavy and laden with disdain.

  “The police don’t always know what to ask,” I told her. I looked at a picture of a younger Landa, in her late twenties, standing before the Northern Ocean, the massive body of water they’d created over most of the northern hemisphere during the terraforming of Mars. She was hugging two teenagers, a girl and boy. The image changed and it was Landa again with the same two kids, but everyone was older, and the kids were dressed in gowns and holding diplomas from Olympus State College. Hary Xu was nowhere to be found in either picture.

  I took off my sunglasses and hung them at the neck of my blouse, turning to her.

  It might have just been my oversexed imagination, but I could have sworn that her eyes followed my glasses down to my cleavage, lingering slightly on my tits.

  “Did you and M. Xu have a happy marriage?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “That’s what you told the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “No kids though, in your happy marriage.”

  “Not in our plans.”

  “Any reason?

  “I love my job. It wouldn’t have been fair to leave my job and abandon the kids I was working with. And Hary traveled so much for work. It wouldn’t have been fair
to our kids, even.”

  “Or to us,” she added, although it seemed mostly for her benefit.

  I turned away, investigating the flimsies again. Hary winning some sort of award. Another of him giving a talk speech in front of a podium. At last, a picture of the two of them together, standing together at a party, laughing at something the third person in the photo was saying, but neither of them touching the other. It was one of the more recent photos. I glanced at Landa.

  “How long have you known Hary was having an affair?” I asked.

  She froze and looked at me, her eyes trying to figure me out for a moment. How had I known? I didn’t, but her reaction confirmed it.

  “My husband was not having an affair,” she said, flatly.

  “Please, M. Xu,” I said. “Your husband died naked in a neuro den in one of NA’s less-than-trendy neighborhoods. He had a transmitter hooked in, getting him on the web, even though it was a closed-circuit den. Were you on a chair somewhere else when he was dying? Was he jacking in to meet you in cyberspace? Did you and he have some kink that couldn’t be satisfied in real space?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then he wasn’t with you. But he was with someone. And even if we didn’t have the proof of his death, we do have other proof. Did you know GJS keeps tabs on its employees, M. Xu? Hary was having an affair.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re lying to me, M. Xu. I don’t like being lied to. And it doesn’t help me find his killer. There’s no proof, but I think he was on with the other woman when he died. I need to find her.”

  My ruse was having its intended effect.

  “And what help am I going to be, if that’s true?” she asked.

  “You can tell me how it started so I know where to start looking.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  She walked into the living room and I followed her, watching her collapse on the sofa. “I’ll get you some water,” I told her. “Where’s the kitchen?”

  She pointed it out for me and I went in and opened up cabinet after cabinet finding the glasses. I poured her some tap water when my eyes caught the short wine rack above the refrigerator. The first bottle I pulled was a 2009 Bordeaux. Old fancy Earth wine. Didn’t see that every day.

  An idea occurred to me, and I pulled open some drawers. Of course, the Xus had an expensive corkscrew, one of those hypodermic needle types that goes right through the cork to the wine so that you don’t have pop it out. It also had an aerator in the spout. It took me a minute to realize what the hell it was. I went back through the cabinets until I found the stemware, and then went back to the living room with the bottle of wine tucked under my arm, the glass of water in my right hand and the empty wineglass in my left. I deposited them on the table in front of me.

  “Here’s the water, but I thought you might need something a little stronger,” I said.

  Landa looked at the water glass, then turned the bottle of wine to read the label.

  “This is Hary’s wine,” she said. “He got it as a gift for being on the Ganymede discovery team.”

  “Well, then maybe it’s appropriate to drink it when talking about him,” I said. I half-filled the wine glass and handed it to her. She took a long sip.

  “How long did you know Hary was cheating on you?” I asked when she was done.

  She laughed a mirthful little laugh. “From the start. He wasn’t cheating. I knew the whole time.”

  “You let him have an affair?”

  “It’s so fucking stupid,” she said, catching me off-guard with the curse. I swear all the time, but from her it felt a little rude. She was that kind of girl.

  “We used to have a great sex life, you know? When we first got married, we were like rabbits. You know how it goes. Are you married?”

  “No. Almost, but it didn’t work out.”

  “Oh, what happened?”

  “She died,” I explained.

  “I’m so sorry,” Landa said. She reached out and placed her hand on mine.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It happened a few years ago. But I can guess how you might have felt.”

  She smiled at me a little, removing the hand.

  “Well, it didn’t last. Even if he was here, which wasn’t often until the GJS job, we didn’t do it much. I wanted more. I wanted things Hary couldn’t give me.”

  “Like what? Two men?”

  “A woman,” she said. Her eyes bored into me as I processed this.

  “You’d been with a woman before?” I asked.

  “Sort of? One of my friends in college was gay. Is gay. She’s gay and back then I was...exploring. I let her do things. I really enjoyed it, but I never reciprocated.”

  “How’d you figure you liked girls midway through your marriage then?”

  “For a while, I didn’t. I just wanted Hary. But he was away a lot, and I used to fantasize, and sometimes it’d be about women. And then it was mostly about women. And then I wanted to try it. But without Hary. So I told him.”

  “How’d he take it?” I asked. Her wine glass was getting low, and I poured her a little more.

  “Terribly,” she said, pulling the refreshed glass close to her. “He was hurt, of course, felt like he couldn’t satisfy me, which was true, but I told him otherwise, that I just wanted to try it every once in a while. And then I told him that if I could have sex with other women, he could too.”

  “So you agreed to both have affairs.”

  Again that mirthful little laugh. “That’s the fucking stupid part. I gave him permission and bam! Out he went and found some hussy to suck his dick regularly. And I never worked up the nerve, so I got left high and dry.”

  “You didn’t have someone in mind when you suggested it?”

  “No! I just wanted to see what it would be like to have sex with a girl.”

  Landa paused and she seemed to be thinking for a moment. She blushed a little.

  “There was a friend in the fundraising office at work I’d been flirting with. But she got a job in New Beijing and moved away.” Landa paused and drank some more wine, savoring what looked to be both wine and the memory. “And I don’t know if an inter-office relationship would have been wise.”

  I couldn’t say the same. There’d been Theed, for one. And when Mari had finally convinced me to quit the force and join her as a private investigator, she’d often demand that, as the junior partner, I get down on all fours, climb under the desk, and eat her out. After I did that, well...let’s just say if there was any client work, it didn’t get done. Inter-office relationships were great, in my book.

  “Were you jealous of Hary’s success?” I asked.

  “A little,” she admitted, her eyes not meeting mine. She really was a looker, especially with this faint embarrassment coloring her cheeks. I was a little surprised that, in this day and age, a girl hadn’t just found her. But I supposed if you thought your husband was the love of your life, you might not know where to look for women who were looking. It might take a more direct approach to flush her out of her shell.

  I scooted a little closer to her on the couch.

  “Do you mind if I have a drink?” I asked, pointing at the one wineglass in her hand.

  “Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” she said, as though she’d brought the wine out instead of me. She handed me the glass and then picked up the bottle and poured me the remainder of the wine. I took a sip, and then “accidentally” dribbled some of the wine down my chin and onto my blouse.

  “Oh, shit!” I said, leaping up, fishing the sunglasses out of the blouse. “I’m so clumsy!”

  No one has ever accused me of this.

  “Oh, let me get a towel,” said Landa, rising to her feet with me.

  “I should really pour some water on it,” I said, following her into the kitchen. “Do you mind?”

  Landa followed my gesture down to my cleavage, and realized that I was talking about taking my shirt off.

  “No…” she said. She
seemed a little worried, but I ignored it. Off came the crop-top jacket, and then the blouse. I flipped on the faucet and ran the blouse under it. I didn’t really care too much. At least it wasn’t a bloodstain.

  When I looked up, Landa was staring at my chest. I’d worn a push up bra that matched the blouse, and I guess I didn’t blame her. If I didn’t see my tits every day, I would have stared too.

  “Do you like them?” I asked her, laughing. Landa’s face flushed a deep crimson at being caught.

  “They’re very...nice,” she said.

  “They’d better be, they were expensive,” I said. I wrung out the blouse. Most of the wine was gone. “Is there a place to put this? It’s thin, it should dry quick.”

  “Over here,” said Landa. She took the blouse from my hands and draped it over a chair that got a lot of sunlight from the bay windows in the kitchen. When she turned around to face me, I caught her looking at my tits again.

  “Those are fake?” she asked.

  “Yep. Gene therapy, years ago. They feel completely real, though. Both for me, and, well…”

  “Would you like to touch them?” I finished.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t! I would—” she said.

  “It wouldn’t bother me,” I interrupted. “It actually would be a little fun. A woman hasn’t touched me, since...well.”

  I didn’t finish the thought. Landa still looked hesitant, and I stepped forward, thrusting my chest out. “Go on.”

  She reached out a hand, looking awkward as all hell, and gave my right tit a little rub. I grabbed her left hand and dragged it to me, encouraging her to use both.

  “Mmm, that’s nice,” I said.

  “You’re very soft,” she murmured. I laughed.

  “I’m glad you like them,” I told her. “Here, this’ll be better.”

  I shrugged out of the shoulder straps of my bra, pulling my breasts free of the cups, letting the bra slip down and rest just above my waist. Landa framed my breasts with her hands, rubbing her thumbs across them, until they made contact with my nipples, which hardened under her touch. She rubbed her thumbs in little circles, and I groaned. I wasn’t really sure who was seducing who, now.