by Troy Conway
She asked, “Now I know—what?”
“You know you’re dealing with a bunch of solid gold heels. They pay you off for trying to murder Wanda Weaver Yule, then they try to kill you and take the money back. Great bunch, all right.”
“For trying to kill Wanda Weaver Yule? I did kill her. I saw her fall.” Midge was shivering while she ran the big towel over her naked breasts. She had forgotten her garterbelt, panties and stockings that were dripping wet.
I was damn cold myself, but I knelt down and unfastened her garters and slid her nylons down. The wet envelope with its greenbacks I handed up to her. She tossed it to one side.
“You only thought you killed her,” I told her, and explained how the whole thing had been a trap.
She was silent for a few minutes while I eased the stockings off. I was reaching for her panties when I realized the submersible was still above the surface.
“Oooops! I have things to do, honey.”
I opened the valves to the main ballast tank. The reassuring gurgle of incoming water told me that we would be submerging in a few seconds. I waited until the gauges showed me we were at the sixty-foot mark. Then I closed the valves. The submersible would hang here while I finished the job of stripping Midge Priest.
I went back to her. She had not changed position, she just stood there shivering with the towel wrapped about her above the navel. I knelt down. Through the wet transparency of her panties I could see her golden pubic hairs. I sighed and fastened my fingers in the panty elastic.
Down came the panties. Up went her left leg so I could draw her foot through the leg opening. Then the right leg lifted. I draped the panties over a valve handle.
“How did you get out of the cellar?” she whispered.
I explained about that while I was removing her garterbelt. Naked, she posed for me as I knelt before her like a slave.
“I’m glad,” she said when I was finished. “I didn’t want to kill you. I thought that leaving you locked up would be enough. It was Laura who insisted.”
I took the towel and rubbed its fluffiness over her hips. “After that, you hired two hoodlums to kill Wanda Weaver Yule at the country club.”
She nodded, eyes wide. “You tumbled to that?”
I grinned, slapping her flank so she would turn and show me her bare buttocks. I dried them slowly, watching the soft flesh shake to my ministrations. She was looking back over her left shoulder at me while I went on talking.
“I was acting as her bodyguard.”
When her buttocks were dry, I leaned forward and kissed her on each cheek. Midge giggled and pushed her softness back into my face.
“You’d better stop that. I’m feeling pretty grateful to you right now and it wouldn’t take much to turn me on.” I dried the backs of her thighs and calves. Then I told her to turn and face me. Her soft white belly made an outward bulge below her navel. I ran the towel over it.
“Did you hear what I said?” she smiled, moving her thighs together. Her hand touched the back of my head, urging me forward.
“I heard; I’m not made of wood.”
I kissed her bellyflesh. She hissed breath in between her teeth. I whispered against her skin, “This is a case of business before pleasure, sweets.”
She sighed and drew back, giving her loins to the towel in my fingers. I dried her slowly, carefully. Her voice murmured, “I suppose you want to know everything. Well, I don’t owe any loyalty to Doctor Howard—not after what she tried to do to me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
I dried her feet last
Then I got to my own feet and stripped off my bathing trunks. Midge stared, saying, “Oh, yes! You are excited.”
“It’s my priapism,” I chuckled.
“Oh, yes. You mentioned that last time we met. Still bothered by it, aren’t you? I’m glad.”
I dried myself and reached for my shorts.
Midge was there ahead of me, drawing my Jockeys away from my fingers. Her face was gleeful as she stared down at me. “Oh, now, it’s so nice and warm in here—don’t let’s cover up.”
“Who is Doctor Howard?” I asked.
She giggled, reaching for me. Her hand was warm and soft as it surrounded my personal problem. “Do you want to talk business?” she whispered.
“I’m afraid I do, hon. To tell the truth, I’m dying of curiosity. How in hell did you and Laura levitate up to that helicopter?”
“You saw that, did you? Oh—from the cellar window. We were wearing anti-gravity belts. You know, like in the science-fiction stories.”
“It figured to be something like that,” I remarked drily. “You were wearing one when you shot our girl agent in the Yule suit at the Waldorf too.”
“I was.”
Midge was sinking down to a squatting position in front of me. She let go her grip only long enough to play her long red fingernails across my groin in that tickling process the erotic experts call “playing at spiders’ legs.” My body shuddered to the pleasure she was feeding into my flesh.
“Still want to talk business?” she murmured.
“I do.” Curse my will power, I thought. “Did Doctor Howard invent it?”
“Oh, my no. Harold Hayes Yule was the inventor.”
“Who?” I screamed.
Midge looked up at me, her hands feathery as they stilled their movements. Her eyes were open wide in surprise. “Why, yes. Wanda’s husband. He was an electronics genius, you know. He inherited his textiles business, I’ve been told, but he invented a couple of machines that worked electronically to speed up a few processes and improve the method of weaving, that tripled his millions.”
Her fingers went on moving.
To her fingernails she added the fillip of a moist tongue dragging across my swollen flesh. Her gurgling laugh told me she heard my gasp and stifled moan. I stared down at her pouting red mouth, the saliva-glistening tonguetip.
“Easy,” I growled. “Easy, there.”
“Liar! You want it hard. Like this!’”
I groaned, shaking all over. Nobody could resist the treatment Midge Priest was giving me. I tried to be stoical about it, I reached up and gripped the iron steel struts that strengthened the rounded hull. I sought to pull away from her hands and mouth. I lacked the ability, I found. Instead, I was thrusting my hips forward.
“I won’t tell you any more,” she murmured. “I’m going to be like a Sphinx when it comes to talking about the organization. Unless you cooperate, darling.”
“Yeah,” I breathed. “Yeah, I guess you won’t.”
I took a handful of her long blonde hair and yanked her head back. I leaned down and kissed her with open lips. Our tongues toyed together in that artful caress known as the ferame by the Arabs, in which the tongue of the male trades places with that of the female, while the female tongue remains within the male mouth.
Midge added a new spice to this ferame. My penis had lodged in the vale between her bulging breasts by my bent-over position. Midge brought her hands up and caught her breasts in her palms, shoving them together, entrapping my manhood. Slowly and lazily she rubbed her breasts together against me, as Ottavia did to her lovers as recorded by Aloysia Sigaea in her Dialogues.
Her palms left her bulging breasts, slipped forward onto my rockhard thighs and traveled upward. My own hands went beneath her armpits, drew her from her squatting position to a standing one. Naked, we pressed our loins together, her soft belly pillowing itself against my muscled front, her thighs moving lazily against my most sensitive spot.
Midge was moaning, head back so her long blonde hair fell down to the rise of her plump buttocks. My hands were stroking her back from her shoulders to those quivering buttocks. When my fingers grasped her behind, she opened her lips and cried out in her delight.
“Please,” she whimpered. “Please, Rod—please!”
“Have you ever formed the way of the monkey on a stick?”
“No. Ohhh, no! But do it—do it!”
My
hands under her arms lifted her. She sensed what I would do, her hand went down to clasp and guide me as I lowered her. When she rested on me, fitting me as the piston does the cylinder, Midge gasped, wriggling. Her breathing through her wide-open mouth was that of a bellows.
“Put your feet on the backs of my knees,” I directed, bending my legs slightly. I felt the scrape of an instep on my calf, then her right foot slipped into its living stirrup. The left foot planted itself.
Midge cooed, understanding bursting inside her with the pleasure our genitals aroused in each other. Her soles gave her a purchase on my legs, she could raise and lower herself with ease, as one raises and lowers a toy monkey on a stick. Up and down, up and down, without a break or pause in the rhythm of her movement
“This must be—hard on you,” she sobbed, convulsing in her ecstasy.
“It is,” I said, panting slightly. “A man has to be in pretty good shape for this one.”
“Why not—make it easier?”
I walked her contorting body to the pilot seat of the submersible. I sank downward as Midge unlocked her legs. The seat was low. She could thrust her legs through the seat-arm openings so her soles rested flat on the cabin floor.
“I’ve never made love underwater before,” she gasped. “We’re in a little world all our own. We could be the only ones on Earth.”
She swung her hips to invisible music.
Her hips were performing that quivery, side to side motion of the hula dance, the flesh jiggling in tiny ripples as her movements grew faster, faster. I don’t know whether a female has ever danced the hula on your body, but believe me, this is an experience.
“You are to watch the hands,” she breathed, hips sliding back and forth in that jerk-jerk-jerk rhythm which somehow pulses with the heartbeat of the onlooker. “Not the breastworks. The hands tell the story. The hips and feet just beat out the rhythm.”
“Yeah,” I moaned. Whatever you say, honey.”
“The word is wahine u’i. That means a really gorgeous girl. Or you could say, oluolua, man, oluolua. Cool, man cool!”
“Where’d you learn so much about Hawaii and the hula?”
“I had a governess when I was young, in San Francisco. She ta-taught me the da-dance.”
Midge was stuttering now in her erotic convulsions. Her head bowed forward, her breasts swung wildly, but her hips kept up that jerking hula movement so swiftly that her rippling flesh seemed almost to blur before my eyes. She began to chant Hawaiian words in tune with her movements until she gasped suddenly and collapsed on me, eyes closed, breathing harshly through her kiss-swollen lips.
“Oh my God,” she whimpered after a time. “You’re not human.”
She fell away from me, sinking onto the cabin floor and resting her flushed cheek on my thigh. After a time she sighed, “I’d do anything for you. Back on the Outer Banks, I knew what I was doing when I tried to keep Laura from killing you.”
Her hand pushed her damp blonde hair from her eyes as she stared up at me. “Well? What’s the program now?” Her eyes touched the evidence of my priapism, and her red lips smiled faintly. “I can’t do anything about that, I’m too tired. You really wear a girl out, you know. So what else do you have in mind?”
“I’m taking you to Bermuda,” I said suddenly.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Why Bermuda?”
“There’s a friend of mine there I want you to meet.”
Bermuda lies roughly eight hundred miles northeast of the Bahamas. In the submersible it would take me forever and a day to reach it, even assuming there was enough fuel in its tank to propel me that far. We had to go back to Grand Bahama and find another way to travel.
After we were clothed—Midge wore my jockey shorts and sports jacket, I was clad in my slacks and shirt—I asked her if she could fly an airplane. She shook her golden hair back and forth, spreading her hands in a helpless gesture.
“So we’ll hire a private plane and a pilot,” I shrugged.
I have flown planes upon occasion. In an emergency, I could do it again, but I’d feel a lot safer if a regular pilot were sitting at the controls. I put my hands to the controls of the submersible. First things, first. My job right now was to get Midge and myself safely back to shore, then figure out some way of hiding her so Doctor Howard wouldn’t find her.
It was close to dawn when I docked the submersible and tied its mooring ropes about the pilings. Midge was hopping up and down on her bare feet to keep warm, making a rather startling picture in my jockey shorts and sports jacket. Since my own chest had only a thin turtleneck over it, I could understand why she felt cold.
Inside the blue Marcos it would be warmer.
We drove to the hotel parking lot. I made Midge give me my sports jacket and left her huddled on the tonneau floor in just my shorts.
“Stay there until I find a friend of mine.”
“Female, no doubt?”
“What else? Besides, since you wear female clothes, only a female will be able to supply them.”
Redhead was sound asleep when I rang her room. She was grumpy at first but she came alive after I clued her in on the night’s events. She promised instant action. She would take Midge a dress and some shoes, and she would hide her in her room. There was a hotel clerk on duty at the registry desk, so my redhead would slip Midge in the back way.
I got into my pajamas and walked around the room smoking cigarettes. I didn’t dare sit down on the bed, because I was so pooped I’d have lain back and gone to sleep. And I wanted to be awake when Redhead called.
It seemed an eternity, but the telephone jangled at last. Midge was safe in her room, Redhead told me. She would get a good sleep, she would be undisturbed.
“I need a private plane to fly to Bermuda,” I told her.
“The Foundation keeps a Beechcraft Queen Air on call. I’ll give her pilot a buzz in the morning, then call you.”
I was so tired I forgot to say good-night. I just fell back on the bed and faded into oblivion for about eight hours. My stomach woke me, telling me it needed sustenance.
For once I had no fear of meeting Midge Priest in the hotel dining room. I gorged on flapjacks and sausages, crumb cakes and three cups of hot Java. Refreshed by my repast, I went back to my room.
The call came at ten minutes to three.
Redhead told me Midge Priest was at the airport, all set to hop. All I had to do was drive there. The Beechcraft was revving its engines at this very moment.
“Take a taxi,” my girl Friday ordered. “That way, the opposition will see the blue Marcos in the hotel parking lot and will think you’re up in your room.”
That Redhead, she thought of everything.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Walrus-moustache was at the airport to meet us.
As the Beechcraft taxied to a halt on the tarmac at Kindley Field, I could see him sitting upright in a jeep as it sped out to meet us. His right hand was on his hat, he was swathed in a topcoat against the cold wind. His face was set like stone, and it looked unhappy.
His first words fitted his mood, when he saw me.
“You blew it, didn’t you?” he asked bitterly.
“Blew it? Don’t put me down, Chief. I’ve got a visitor.”
He blinked when I turned back to the Queen Air and told Midge to stir her stumps. She came to the open door and waved a hand at Walrus-moustache. He blinked in disbelief.
“That’s the girl who tried to kill Wanda Weaver Yule,” he snapped. His eyes swung to me. “What is this?”
“Didn’t Redhead tell you? My, my! The girl isn’t quite as efficient as I thought. Or maybe she’s playing games.”
I turned back to the landing ladder to give Midge a hand. The cold wind that was whipping around the field was almost a gale. It blew the mini-skirt Midge was wearing almost to her hips so I got a marvelous view of her leg structure. Midge giggled and fought her skirt and the wind until the chief coughed behind my back.
I introduced them, and added, “Do you
mean to say Redhead didn’t tell you what happened?”
“I imagine she felt you wanted to tell me yourself. I have a car waiting, so come along.”
The Bermudan who drove the little Austin set us down before an old house with a sign in front of it reading:
THE WATERLOT. I gathered it was a place to eat. I was right. It was situated just below the Gibbs Hill lighthouse in a setting that drew a delighted gurgle from Midge Priest.
Inside the Waterlot, under the big cedar beams that ran across the dining room ceiling, Walrus-moustache got down to business. We were alone in the room; the Chief had probably seen to that with a preposterous tip. This was a small room off the main one, which was filled with customers. The waitress even went so far as to close the door behind her when she left, so as to hide us from view, as well as keep our voices unheard. “Now we can talk,” growled the Chief. I told him everything I’d done since arriving on Grand Bahama island, except for those wild moments in the submersible with Midge. He listened quietly, hunched forward, motioning me to break off my recital only when the waitress knocked on the door.
When I was done, the boss-man turned to the girl. “Is this true? Will you help us nail this Doctor Howard?”
“Of course,” Midge said simply. “Rod saved my life; it belongs to him.” Her eyes told me something besides her life was mine too, any time I wanted it.
“Well, now. That’s fine. It you turn state’s evidence, if this case ever comes to trial, I’ll see you don’t have anything to worry about. So if you’ll tell me what you know—never mind what Rod’s told me—you tell me.”
Over the frog’s legs that are very much the specialty of the house at the Waterlot, Midge explained that Howard Hayes Yule had discovered a metallic compound by a form of electrolysis which, when an electric current was shot through it, reacted to the force of gravity.
“I can’t explain it any more than that,” Midge said apologetically. “I’m not a scientist. All I know is that the heart of the operation is a sealed cylinder set into some sort of ray machine. The cylinder controls the ray process by which the metallic compound is readied for its final use. Once irradiated by the cylinder-ray machine, it becomes capable of reacting to gravity when an electric impulse is shot through it.”
