Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6)

by J. J. Henderson

  She spotted Manny’s hat a block away, strolling along. She hurried closer. Manny had a cell phone glued to his head. Jack, at his side, hailed a cab and jumped in. Manny kept walking.

  Lucy followed half a block back as Manny made his way west on Rivington Street. Soon they were on Kenmare in what used to be the heart of Little Italy, now mostly Chinese retail and wholesale on the street level, with the occasional Italian relic. Manny slipped through the door of one such relic, the Blackbird Social Club on Mulberry Street. A little red brick building, curtains drawn, no way to peek in. Lucy watched from across the street. Now what? She checked her cell for messages, thought about smoking, and contemplated the backs of her hands. Only last year she’d thought an ad she saw for cosmetic hand surgery seemed completely absurd—and now as she looked at her own hands she thought, Can they make those veins disappear? Then a black limousine with New Jersey plates pulled up in front of the club. The driver got out and went around and opened the passenger door on the curb side of the car. Three fiftysomething guys slid out, straightened the hats and suits and ties, looked around, one of them eyeballed Lucy, watching, then they opened the door and went into the club. Made guys, she had no doubt. What did this mean? She strolled over to chat up the driver, a skinny guy in an expensive overcoat, leaning against the door. He appeared to be around her age, with squinty eyes and a 1950s hairdo. “Hey,” she said.

  “What?” he said, somewhat surly.

  “I was just wondering—I thought I recognized that guy.”

  “You’ve seen him.” He took on a slightly conspiratorial air. She’d said something right. “On TV I mean.”

  “I knew it! But what was the—”

  “He’s the, uh, what do you call it, consultant for the mafia show. Bags. My boss. Bennie Cantario. Bags’s his nickname.”

  “Right right,” Lucy said. “I saw him interviewed after the premiere. He seemed to know a lot about—“

  “He useta be in the business, but now—no way. It’s all laundromats and pizza joints.”

  Lucy grinned. “No badabing?”

  The guy smirked, checking her out. “Well, maybe somadat too. Hey, you got a smoke?”

  “No, I gave it up, but I’ll watch your car you want to go get some. There’s a deli around the corner.”

  “No way anyone’ll ticket this baby,” he said. “But sure. Anyone scratches it shoot ‘em. He he just kiddin’. Gimme a minute.” He dashed around the corner. A moment later the door of the Blackbird opened, and out came Bags and his two buddies, followed by Manny Carapini. Bags and Manny shook hands as Lucy drifted into a shadow. The driver came around the corner just in time to remote unlock the doors as one of the guys reached for a handle. The three made guys got in. “Thanks,” the driver said, rushing by. Lucy slipped around the corner, and watched Manny make another call, then hail a passing cab.

  She chose not to follow. After all, Manny meeting with his gangster “consultant” didn’t really add up to much. Lucy stopped for a four dollar coffee and a note-writing session at a nouveau retro diner on Grand Street. An hour later she headed homewards, brain buzzing with rewrite possibilities.

  Just before reaching her building, on an impulse she flagged a cab and soon found herself en route to the waterfront bowels of Brooklyn, where a nameless nightclub full of leather-clad demons possibly awaited her. The cab driver wore a turban. Twenty-three dollars later they pulled up in front of a dingy storefront in a neighborhood called Sunset Park. Lucy had never heard of it until the driver named it, adding, “This area now is where the formerly Times Square busyness has come do you understand my meaning?” She did. Times Square, now a gaudily-lit playground for tourist families, once upon a time not so very long ago had been sleaze central. A small neon sign over the big black door identified the place as Club Fetish, the words forming eyebrows over a pair of blinking red eyes, the only light on a dark and dingy block. The driver then wanted to know, “Please, why is a young lady alone going to such a place at this time?”

  “Meeting some friends,” she said, sounding more doubtful than convinced.

  “Would you like that I wait?” he asked. “I will not leave on the meter.”

  “Ten minutes?” Lucy said. “Can you afford to…”

  “It is eight seventeen. I will wait until eight-thirty please.”

  “Thanks.” She got out, took a deep breath, and approached the blinking red eyes and the black door. She could hear throbbing bass-heavy music from within. She looked back at the driver. He gazed at her with concern—and disapproval.

  Lucy considered Paul a good friend but this part of him she didn’t know and didn’t think she wanted to.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DIRTY WORK

  Why then are you doing this? She asked herself, pushing and then tugging at the heavy black door, which didn’t move. She pulled on a cord, neatly finished in a hangman’s noose dangling to the right of the blinking neon eyeballs, then waited as a sepulchral chime sounded inside. After a moment she heard latches undone and the door creaked open a few inches. The music blasted out—Rick James singing Superfreak. A woman’s face peered around the door. “Password?”

  “Password?” Lucy said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No joke, lady,” the woman said. She started to close the door.

  “Wait!” Lucy cried. “My friends invited me but didn’t say a thing about a password.”

  The woman—a girl, really, for she looked quite young—paused. She wore heavy black eye make-up and blue-black lipstick, and sported a predictable array of piercings, but otherwise appeared normal. On the soundtrack, Superfreak gave way to Love Is The Drug. “Your friends?”

  “Paul and Grace Wittgenstein, Chris Wadsworth, and…”

  “Oh, them. The movie people. Yeah, they’re here tonight. Again.” She paused, the door cracked six inches open.

  “Can I come in, check it out?”

  “Admission is twenty dollars.”

  “Twenty bucks!”

  “That gets you access to all the rooms, including the dungeon, plus two drinks and complimentary use of a selection of tools and toys.”

  “Tools?”

  “Yes. And toys. Christ, lady, didn’t your friends tell you what we do here?”

  “Well, sure, but…”

  “So pay up or get lost, honey.” She started to swing the door shut. Lucy had a vision of herself riding home in the cab to her lonesome dog in her quiet loft and…what?

  “I’m in,” she said, fishing a twenty out of her pocket. The door swung open and Lucy stepped inside. The girl closed the door behind her. The music enveloped them.

  “Your first time here, right, lady?” The girl said, taking Lucy’s money and stuffing it down between her large, pushed-up breasts. She wore a tightly-laced black corset with red frills, thigh-high black books, and a spiked collar around her neck. She breathed through her open mouth. She wore heavy rings on all her fingers, and studs, posts, or loops in every possible pierceable place including nose, tongue, lips, ears, and eyebrows. She had many tattoos, including a black cat with red eyes on her left arm, a red dog with black eyes on her right arm, a dark blue bat with sharp red teeth bared in a grin on the right side of her neck, and a smirking red devil over her heart, with his tail sliding down into her cleavage. She looked like a vampire, like a bank clerk gone Goth, like what she was, a chubby kid from Queens all dressed up, a wannabe bad girl. Lucy was glad she’d never been tattooed or pierced.

  “Yes indeed,” Lucy said, casing the joint, not sure yet what her tone should be. Bathed in blacklight, they stood in a small anteroom decorated with naughty old-time French posters of women being spanked on their big, bare bottoms by leering men with waxed mustaches and suspenders. A pair of swinging saloon doors let into the next room, from which came music, the occasional squeal of mingled pain and pleasure, and the intermittent unmistakable sound of flesh being whacked, whipped, or paddled. “My very first time.”

  “We call it BDSM,” she
said. “Just so you know, that refers to…”

  “I know, I know,” Lucy said. “Bondage, domination, sado-masochism.” She checked the girl out. “So which are you into?”

  “Me?” She grinned. “Oh, I play both ways. I like spanking boys, but I like getting spanked by girls.” She twirled around, displaying her large rear end split by a black thong. Giggling, she slapped herself hard on the right buttock. “Ooooh!” She said. She wriggled her white rear, now graced with a red handprint. “Like to give it a whack?”

  “Um, no thanks. Maybe later,” Lucy said, and smiled. The girl’s butt didn’t do a thing for her but the vibe wasn’t so bad. “I kind of need to find my friends.”

  “The movie people? Try the Dungeon.” She pointed. “Through the doors, across the Playroom, and down the red stairs.”

  “The Dungeon, eh?” Lucy said. “Sounds inviting.”

  “Your friends practically live down there, lady.”

  “Lucy. Call me Lucy.”

  “I’m Mistress Dezira,” she said. “And by the way, the password is the same every night. Peace through Pain.”

  “Peace through Pain? Cool, Dezira,” Lucy said, and pushed through the saloon doors into the Playroom.

  The Playroom consisted of a disco ball-lit dance floor ringed with dimly-illuminated alcoves containing people engaged in assorted sordid activities. A bar, currently empty but for a bored-looking shirtless barkeep with a shaved head and many tattoos, occupied the wall to her right. Two couples swayed on the dance floor, carried by the beat of another classic eighties tune, Tainted Love. In the first alcove to the left of the red stairwell beyond the dance floor, a naked man in a black leather hood knelt on the floor with his hands tied behind his back, licking the black boots of a woman standing over him. She wore a thong and a leather officer’s hat and that was all. In one hand she held a whip with which she softly, threateningly tapped out a beat on her other hand. In the alcove to the right of the stairs, a woman sprawled across a low platform, naked but for underwear. Two naked masked men stood over her, dripping wax from burning candles onto her breasts and belly and thighs, causing her to moan with pleasurable pain. In the next alcove a man laid out on his back on another platform, his legs spread. A woman wearing a doctor’s lab coat and white gloves appeared to be attaching pink clothes pins to his genitalia. He let out little piglike squeals. In the next, another naked, hooded bootlicker worked his magic on a pair of tall red boots worn by a blonde in a French maid’s outfit and a black mask. In the next a corseted spanker-girl with a black leather-wrapped paddle swatted a fat hairy naked rear end, spotlit and slung over a leather bench. Yes the beat does go on, Lucy decided as that classic Sonny and Cher tune from deep in the 1960s throbbed into the room. She noticed then how everybody couldn’t help but do their thing to the beat. It made for a strange rhythm, an undercurrent backbeat of slaps and sighs and moans and groans. La-di-da-di-di, la-di-da-di-da!

  All this was to be expected in such a place, Lucy figured, and the whole lurid scenario possibly would have been perversely sexy or at least slightly titillating if only a few of these raunchy people, or any of the other dozen or so observing or engaging in other sordid acts in other alcoves, had not been thick, slabby, flabby, pale, badly dressed, or badly undressed.

  Not that this lascivious crew was grossly unattractive. They simply lacked glamor, style, sensuality, whatever it was that made the sight of people playing at S&M exciting, or at least…interesting. These were not people you wanted to see naked and aroused. In spite of the leather and sex toys and naked flesh throbbing and flapping, this bunch looked like they oughta be standing in lines at fast food restaurants or discount department stores. Instead they licked boots and groveled in black leather and chains, whips and tongues at the ready. It made for a scene utterly devoid of eroticism.

  Then again, who ever said SMBD was only for pretty people? Not lingering long enough to get even one invite to join a single sado-masochistic scenario, although several leering glances came her way, Lucy let that egalitarian notion swiftly carry her across the Playroom’s black-painted dance floor; then she slipped down the luridly glowing, spiraling redlit staircase to…the Dungeon! In the Dungeon, Lucy knew, there would be at least a few pretty people, for Carole Wainwright and Christopher Wadsworth and Grace Wittgenstein frolicked down there, along with her dear friend Paulie, that sexy balding hound dog of the S&M circuit.

  She paused before another heavy black door, this one with The Dungeon scrawled in Goth-style letters over an eye level, wire-gridded view hole. A rancid aroma of mingled sweat, beer, leather, semen, piss, and myriad brands of underarm deodorant, aftershave lotion and perfume thickened the air. Nearly gagging, she peeked through the gridded opening, saw nothing, then tried the door. It opened inwards. She stepped in. Here, cloyingly sweet incense overwhelmed the raunchy odors. Muffled sounds emerged from the indistinct dark: a cello playing somber music; more paddling; and a whispery voice, calling her. “Lucy? Lucy, is that you?” She saw only amorphous shapes in the darkness. Candles flickered, casting wan light.

  “Yes, of course it’s me. Who’s that?”

  She knew, of course, would know his voice anywhere, even here in The Dungeon. “Paul. It’s me. Over here.” It came from her left. She moved that way, eyes adjusting to the weak light.

  There he lay, splayed out face-down on a rectangular, leather-topped table, naked but for a leather thong. Strapped down at wrists and ankles, he also wore a black leather collar attached to a chain held at the other end by his wife; Lucy assumed it was Grace, though the black leather mask completely covered her head and face but for eye and mouth holes. She wore a black corset that stopped just short of covering her nipples, and black bikini underwear. She held a paddle in her hand, with which she abruptly gave Paulie a hard whack on the ass. He grunted, “Ah, ow,” through gritted teeth.

  “I told you no talking,” the masked woman hissed, and Lucy knew the voice: Grace. “Shut up, worm.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Paulie said. Then he looked directly at Lucy, into her eyes. She couldn’t read his eyes in the dim light, but no matter. What she knew he was looking for was a sign that she, Lucy, was aroused, or at least intrigued, by what she saw.

  “I said quiet, slave,” Grace said, and smacked him again. “Curb thy foul tongue.”

  He grinned, then put on a cringing face. “Oooh, hurt me, Mistress. Please hurt me, for I have been bad, I have been very, very bad.” Lucy looked away as she whacked him—Smack!—a third time. Ouch! She couldn’t quite decipher the level of playacting going on, but that had to have hurt like hell.

  Someone barked in the darkness beyond them, and then out of the gloom, on all fours, in a black velvet diaper pinned with gold safety pins came the long, lean and lanky Christopher Wadsworth, collared and leashed. He let out another weirdly high-pitched bark, and scrambled towards Lucy, his tongue hanging out. Carole Wainwright, in your basic dominatrix garb—corset, boots, Nazi officer hat, gloves, whip in left hand, looking very sexy—followed him, holding his leash in her right hand. Her fingernails were painted black and she was naked and shaved down below. “Bad dog,” she hissed, and smiled at Lucy. “What we have here is an extremely bad dog. An utterly worthless cur. A canine who should be sent to the pound, immediately if not sooner.” She jerked on the leash. Wadsworth cringed happily.

  Wadsworth didn’t look up at Lucy. Instead as he approached, crawling, he stared down, at the floor. When he got closer he put his head down and sniffed. And then his tongue came out and he began to lick at her black leather boots.

  “Jesus, Wadsworth,” she said, stepping back. “Get your tongue off my…” She backed to the door. “Damn, Paul, this is too fucking weird for me!” Paulie gave her a look, and rolled his eyes: sorry honey but I’m not allowed to talk. And isn’t this fun!?

  Wadsworth barked at her, bared his teeth, and snarled. Then he grinned, back in normal character for a second before snarling again. Tugging on his leash to restrain him, Carole said,
“Down, boy, down.” Then she gave Lucy a look, shrugged, and offered her the leash. “You care to discipline this bad dog?” Shaking her head, no thanks, Lucy kept her arms tightly crossed on her chest.

  She gave the scene a long, coolly contemptuous glance as she backed towards the dungeon door. The music had shifted to harpsichord, incongruously playing Scarlatti. The two boss women put their hands on their hips. The bad little boys looked up at Lucy, who now read reproach in Paul’s eyes. She had failed to get turned on. This was not her game nor would it ever be. “Fucking perverts,” she said, but her tone was light. This shit wasn’t evil, or scary, or even that interesting. It was simply lame.

  She slipped out the door and up the stairs and across the Playroom and through the saloon doors and the entryway and out onto the street where she grabbed several lungfuls of salty Brooklyn air, then jumped into her waiting taxi.

  “Thirteen minutes, missy,” said the driver. “I was very much about to depart, you see, but then I decide you will be coming soon, yes?”

  “Thanks. Yes, I would be coming soon,” she said. “That has been the longest thirteen minutes I have spent in some time. You have no idea how weird it was in there, my friend.” He gave her an even look in the mirror. He was not amused, her turbaned sentinel. “I need to go back to Manhattan, please,” she said. “Corner of Broome and Broadway.” During the drive home her amusement gave way to anxiety. She pictured those four in their dungeon, and wondered what she would have to say to Paul at their next meeting.

  Now headed home through the anonymous streets of Brooklyn—across the bridge in Manhattan she knew almost every street, and each one had a story, but none of these grim dark Brooklyn boulevards and byways meant anything to her—she pondered the movie, and the other movie she’d just walked into, starring Paul and Grace. How did they incorporate that weirdness into their daily routine? Did it become routine? Like taking out the trash you thrash your husband on the bare bum with a leather paddle while he squalls like a baby. She wondered if Wadsworth had a dog, and if he did, did he and this dog eat from the dog dish together? Lucy sighed, wishing she had someone with whom to share a daily routine other than Claud, her own dog, from whose dish she had never eaten. Then her heart’s undercurrent swept up and over her, and she thought of Harry.