"Are you sure you want to see these?" Dave Hammett asked.
"Why? I paid for them, didn't I?"
"Well, the money hasn't changed hands yet. Mrs. Stillman. But this is pretty graphic tape footage. I mean, it's hardcore. You might not want to see it…"
Melinda sighed. She sipped at the coffee the detective had poured for her, but it was such a strong bitter brew she didn't think she could drink it. "I have to know," she said. "Everything."
Two days ago at this time she'd been blissfully unaware, unsuspecting. Innocent? Innocent. And today, not thirty hours after she'd first talked to Dave Hammett, she was in his office and brutally enlightened.
Neil was indeed having an affair. He had not been working late nights at the office. He'd been lying to her, and his sexual torpor at home? Chalk that up to one Kathy McDonald.
Hammett had shown Melinda a picture of Kathy and a sample of her handwriting. She was definitely the "K" of Neil's pocketed note. Nosing around the company's offices, Hammett had learned that Mr. Stillman seemed to make a lot of specific requests for Miss McDonald when he rang up the typing pool. Perhaps it was only her speed and accuracy on the Electric?
The photograph was then from a distance, with telephoto lens. It showed Neil and a young girl, no more than nineteen or twenty, Melinda guessed. Kathy. She had a perfect heart-shaped face, and it was achingly beautiful. Her figure appeared to be neat, not overstuffed, and she looked up at Neil with something more than a typist's regard for her employer.
But that wasn't all. Hammett was a competent, thorough investigator. He'd managed to bug Miss McDonald's apartment and now, set up and ready, were the videotapes he had made. Did Melinda want to see them? Of course she did. Graphic footage, he'd said. She supposed that he meant the tapes showed her husband fucking Kathy. Weil, she had to know. She had to know it all. Down to the last detail. No matter how much it hurt. "GO ahead," she told Dave Hammett. "I'm paying for them. I want to see the evidence."
"Okay," he said. "So. I got into her place yesterday, while she was at work. I figured the bedroom would be the best bet, and I fixed up a circuit which activated the camera when the bedroom door was opened, then shut. This is silent footage, but I don't think it really needs a soundtrack. It can't be introduced into court as evidence in a divorce case, but with it as leverage, your lawyer can get whatever you want out of court." He pointed to a medium-sized television set. "Just watch there."
Melinda settled in her chair, heart pumping at the base of her throat. She heard clicks and then a color picture appeared on the TV. There was no sound, but Hammett was right. Sound wasn't necessary.
Kathy McDonald, bright blonde, rosy-cheeked, fresh as the cover of a teenage girls' magazine, stood in the center of the screen. She was wearing a clinging halter top which molded the apple-sized perfection of her small round tits. Her flat stomach was bare and creamy-skinned, all the way down to a pair of low-riding denim cutoffs. She had legs to her ears, or so it looked, and they were sleek, shapely legs. They must look quite fetching to a junior executive thrusting from beneath the hem of a short, sexy miniskirt.
Kathy said something and then a hand came into the picture. It touched her bare shoulder, fingers walking across the rounded flesh, and then more of Neil appeared. Oh, it was Neil all right. He looked very attractive on color television, Melinda decided. Of course he looked very nice in the flesh, too, and she felt a pang in her guts to see him onscreen with another woman, to see the way he touched Kathy, the way he stared at her, his eyes devouring her young lovely body.
His hand moved behind her neck. Kathy laughed, and then the top of her halter dropped, revealing bare breasts. Melinda winced. Perfect breasts. Round, coming to delicate pink points. Very good color adjustment, she thought. The pink of Kathy's nipples was so Goddamned natural, yet somehow more than natural, too. Small B-cups, Melinda decided. No sag. No droop. They must look very sweet, braless under a tight sweater or a silk shirt. Who could blame Neil for getting ga-ga over them?
They melted together in a kiss, and Kathy rubbed her bare titties all over Neil's chest. She was short and so Neil had to lift her against him, his hands possessive as hell clutching the denim covered moons of her ass. Short-cut denims, Melinda noticed. Half of Kathy's pink ass showed beneath the frayed shorts. Neil seemed to notice too. At least his flagon did. As he pawed the young girl's butt, his fingertips slid around the exposed buttock flesh, slipping inside. Must have been ticklish, for Kathy began to squirm and wiggle against Neil, her crotch moving up and down his front. When she finally settled onto her feet, there was a large noticeable lump in the front of Neil's pants. Kathy touched it, her lips pursing into an obvious "Ooooohhh" of delight.
Neil's mouth opened. He was speaking. Melinda couldn't read lips, but somehow it didn't seem necessary. Kathy cupped her hands over the bulge and she fondled it, smiling, and her eyes large and limpid-blue. She tiptoed and kissed the tip of Neil's nose. Her nipples were very stiff now, sticking out a mile. Their pink had deepened to a rosy reddish color as they engorged, and Melinda saw her husband's fingers affix themselves to those stiff swollen rosebuds. He rolled his fingers on them, and Kathy's body swayed in a dance like manner.
"They seem to be very good friends," she told Dave Hammett. The detective didn't say anything. There was an angry bite in Melinda's voice. If he'd answered at all, she'd have flown at him in amp, expressing her bitterness toward Neil. And if Neil had been here, she'd have killed him. My God, she thought. The movie's just beginning! How will I foci before it's over?
Neil undressed Kathy. Apparently she wasn't fond of underwear, for she had nothing beneath the halter and cutoffs. Nothing except creamy, peachy skin, and a little puff of golden hair between her legs. Her beaver was small, and her pussy appeared to be a tiny one as well. There wasn't enough hair to mask her slit, but it was only a slit, very neat, very tight-looking. Pale sleek thighs flanked that puff of gold and its slashed contents, and Melinda's groin ached when she saw her husband's hand stroke time and again across that blonde crotch. Damn him, she thought. Damn him.
Undressing Kathy was a slow, sensuous process. Neil spent a long time mouthing and nuzzling hers breasts and even from, the camera's distance Melinda could see tooth marks on Kathy's skin, bubbles of frothy spit decorating the stiff pink nipples. And there was something horrible about the way Kathy ran her fingers through Neil's hair as he licked and kissed and sucked his way down her body. Melinda's hands clenched into fists and she rapped softly but sharply on the arm of her chair.
Neil unbuttoned the cutoffs and pulled them down Kathy's long, undulating thighs as his tongue raced toward the freshly exposed area. He speared into her navel, rimming it while Kathy laughed above him, her fingers curling through his hair. The camera's angle was such that Melinda couldn't really see what Neil was doing when he put his face into the girl's crotch, but she didn't have to see. Kathy's smile broadened, her blue eyes closed, and she eased her head back with an expression of nirvana taking over her face. Neil's head stayed in place a long time indeed, and Melinda crossed her legs, painfully aware of how sweetly her husband could use his lips and tongue on a hot, juicy pussy.
When Kathy was fully nude, she pulled Neil's ears and he stood, grinning like a shit-eating dog. Kathy wrapped her arms around his waist and oozed herself against him, rubbing him up and down with her ripe young figure. She leaned back and started to unbutton his shirt. Neil threw it off while Kathy stooped and let down his pants. Next his shorts. He moved obediently as she denuded him, and his cock lanced up, red and stiff, so throbbingly erect that even the videotaped image made Melinda's saliva start to pool inside her mouth.
"Do you want to see any more?" Dave Hammett suggested. Melinda turned and glared at him, her brown eyes blazing. He shrugged.
When she looked once more at the TV screen, Kathy was on her knees sucking Neil's dick. She had a deep well of a mouth indeed. Nearly all eight inches were firmly trapped between her lips, and her head moved in quick gobbling plunges that sank Neil into her mouth almost to the balls. Melinda felt a lump in her throat as she watched that. She'd never been able to take her husband so deeply, though God knew she'd tried. Kathy seemed to have no trouble whatsoever.
Neil was grinning, even more broadly than before. He had the blonde girl by the head, guiding her, directing her, feeding her his meat stick with a frenzied eagerness. He rocked on his heels, riding high, slamming his dick into Kathy, whose eyes were closed in an expression of almost religious intensity as her cheeks worked in and out on the barreling cock.
Melinda miffed. Smoke. "Please," she told Hammett. "Tobacco nauseates me."
"Sorry." She heard the rubbing as he pound out his cigarette. Distractions like tobacco smoke fouling the air were the best thing she needed right now, when she was viewing the videotaped record of her husband's infidelity.
The picture on the office TV screen was as sharp and precise as anything Melinda had ever seen on television, but she'd never seen anything quite like this. Kathy was still on her knees, sucking Neil's cock greedily. It kept thrusting into her bottomless well of a mouth, thrusting till the balls pressed against Kathy's chin. The blonde girl appeared to be in seventh heaven. Her eyes rolled beneath the lightly-shut lids, her checks pulled in so far it was amazing that Neil's would even fit between their suctioning walls, and her hands slid languidly, erotically, up and down Neil's flanks and thighs.
She let his prick slip out – it was glistening from her saliva – and she opened her eyes, bright eyes, sparkling eyes, laughing what must have been a silvery laugh indeed as her index finger stroked the spit-covered penis' blazing rigidity. She touched it from beneath, making the cock lift at an even sharper angle, and she started to lick its underside, dropping her tongue back every few swipes to bounce and jiggle Neil's scrotum. Neil's face was in the camera's frame too, and Melinda could see that her husband was fully as ecstatic as his paramour. Especially when Kathy's pink tongue laved endlessly, friskily, around and across the bulging, swollen tip of his dick. He groaned, open-mouthed, and Kathy was open-mouthed for a moment, too.
But only for a moment. In the blinking of an eye she had reinserted Neil's dick in her mouth and was sucking as if her life depended on it. Her head moved swiftly, unerringly, and her arms wrapped around Neil's hips, anchoring him in place.
"I don't see why she's wasting her time in a typing pool," Hammett commented from behind Melinda. "She could really make a name for herself in porno movies."
"Perhaps," Melinda said acidly, "but what would you do for a job?"
"Sorry," he replied. "I've gotten a little callous in this racket. For you, it isn't time for jokes."
He was right, all the same. Kathy was a born cocksucker. Or were cocksucker made, rather than born? She's better than I am, Melinda thought. At least, she appears to be. Damn her.
It was Neil's face that gave it away. Melinda had seen that look many times before. He looked toward the ceiling, then at Kathy, and then his eyes snapped shut. His mouth twisted into a tight-lipped grimace, and his head quivered slightly. Melinda saw his stomach began to heave, and almost at once Kathy's eyes opened, very big. Neil was shooting his cum into her sucking mouth.
The videotaped picture was instructive, to say the least. Kathy gulped as she swallowed the offering, but it was a big, rich load, and plenty of it dripped from her mouth as she sucked. She pulled Neil's prick from her mouth and teased it with her hand until another large gob of sperm fell from the cum slit onto her tongue where it thrust out in pink, creamy readiness, and she rubbed the empty cock across her lips and checks, kissing it lavishly, lovingly.
Neil offered Kathy his hands and she stood up, her face a textbook example of simpering. Neil seized her head in his hands and kissed her madly, while Kathy locked her legs around him like a vine and clung to his body. Melinda hadn't seen a kiss as long as that one since that movie with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway – what was the name of it? Must have been eight or nine years ago. McQueen was a debonair thief in Boston.
The effort to remember ceased abruptly. Neil and Kathy had separated, at last, and they looked into one another's faces, and Melinda saw her husband's lips move. There was no sound on the tape but she didn't need sound. She could read lips well enough to understand at once that he was telling his blonde mistress "I love you." And if she knew her husband, after four years of marriage, his facial expression was literally reeking with sincerity.
"Goddamn you," she said softly. "Goddamn you, Neil Stillman."
Naked, they piled onto Kathy's bed. It was an old-fashioned bed, polished brass, and the brass work jiggled as Neil and Kathy settled onto the mattress. There was a moment of joyous kissing and fondling, and Kathy got her fist full of Neil's cock. It erected magnificently, eight inches of throbbing gristle clutched in her hand, and almost immediately she had reversed her mouth once again with the penis that had just furnished her supper. Neil appeared to enjoy it. He put his hand on Kathy's ass, stroking the slim, curvy shape from spine to upper thighs, and his fingers seemed magnetically drawn to the crack dividing Kathy's pert buttocks. He slithered up and down her anal cleavage, dropping lower each time he played with her, and in a moment or two his face set happily and Melinda could just make out that her husband's middle finger was slipping in and out of Kathy's pussy from the rear.
Kathy squirmed friskily, her mouth still gobbling dick, but she was laughing and giggling so energetically she could hardly concentrate much longer on eating him, so it was only to be expected that she and Neil would swiftly change position.
Kathy lay on her side facing Neil, one leg thrown across him as he scooted close. He had his hand between their crotches, adjusting something, it appeared – and Melinda knew what he was adjusting, damn him! Kathy reached in too, her hand active beside his. Her eyes got very large and round. So did her mouth. She slammed her groin against Neil's, her leg shot around him, and the brass frame of the bed began to shake uncontrollably.
Melinda turned round. "I don't think I need to see any more, Mr. Hammett," she said icily. "Please turn it off."
He nodded, flipped a couple of buttons on his playback deck. "I'm sorry," he said, "but you must have expected it would turn out like this, even before you hired me."
She nodded. That tape had been made yesterday evening. Another of Neil's "late nights at the office". He'd come home just after nine, too tired, as always, to do more than kiss his wife goodnight. And now she knew why. "How many times?" she asked Hammett. He lifted his eyebrows. "How many times did my husband fuck this young woman last evening?"
Hammett smiled. He was perhaps a few years older than Melinda's twenty-nine, and he had a pleasant though not a distinguished face. Nose a little too large, chin perhaps too prominent. His eyes were a washed-out blue and his hair was thin and starting to recede. Why, not too tall, wearing a casual suit that had seen its best days circa 1973. He didn't look the kind of man who made his living as a confidential investigator, but perhaps that was the best way to look in his racket.
"Well, I had an hour's worth of tape in the camera. When it ran out, Mr. Stillman and Ms. McDonald were in their fourth encounter. The evidence is pretty sufficient, I believe… I really am sorry. I can see this has been a shock for you. Would you like a drink, maybe? Something to help settle your nerves?"
"Is it showing on my face?" Melinda asked. She supposed it was. There was an ashy, foul taste in her mouth and she wondered how she could crawl into bed with Neil tonight, trio wing what she now knew about how he spent his evenings. "Yes," she said. "I think I would. Some dry sherry, if you…"
He went to his desk, opened a drawer. "This is all I have," he said, holding up a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's. "Besides… I've been through this scene with other ladies. What you need is a shot of Old Jack." He pulled a pair of glasses from the desk drawer and filled them with amber whiskey. Melinda took the one he offered, and she sipped until her mouth was warm and the rotten taste was gone. Hammett came around and sat on the edge of his desk, swirling whiskey in his own glass.
"Why?" Melinda asked, astonished to hear herself addressing the question to a stranger. "Why would my husband do something like that?"
Hammett shrugged, that poured down his whiskey. He filled his glass again. Melinda shook her head, thou nodded, and he refilled hers as well. "It happens," he said. "A guy works all day in an office, he sees this cute young thing from the secretarial pool, she sees him. Next time he needs some dictation or something, he asks for her. I gather that your husband is a mw on his way up with the company. She might figure he's a good catch. Or maybe he just wants some strange…"
"I mean," he went on, "it happens. Men are like that. Somebody said once that women are basically monogamous while men incline to polygamy. Hell, I go through this, two or three times a month. I've gotta admit, though, the wives who come in here wanting the lowdown on hubby usually aren't in your class, Mrs. Stills… They're usually fat and gone to seed. Half the time I can't blame the old man for chasing after a fresher – I'm not being very professional, am I? Well, if I was in your husband's shoes I don't think…"
Dave Hammett finished his second helping of Jack Daniel's, then put down the empty shot glass, shaking his head. "I'd better shut up while I'm ahead. So. Do you want me to deliver the videotape to your lawyer, or would you rather take it yourself? The fee entitles you to a signed deposition from me, as to the facts I've turned up. If I should have to testify in court, there'd be an extra charge…"
Melinda wasn't really listening. Lawyers? Court? Did she want that? "I don't know," she said. "I don't know what I want to do." She stood up. "How much do I owe you?"
Hammett picked up a file folder and extracted a sheet of paper. "Two days' work at one-fifty per comes to three hundred, plus expenses. Rental on the camera was twenty-eight-fifty. Gasoline and meal is eight-twenty-five. And I had to pay the doorman at Ms. McDonald's building fifty bucks to get into her apartment, to set up the camera, and seventy-five to get in this morning and get it out. Doormen's bribe scales are inflationary as hell. Last year I could have gotten by for twenty bucks flat, but… the grand total is $461.75."
Melinda took her checkbook from her purse. "Is a check all right?" she asked. Hammett nodded. She set it on the desk beside his thigh and began to fill out a blank. This was the household expense account. She'd have to come up with a good story when the account ran short before the end of the month. Unless she simply laid it out in front of Neil and told him that she knew about his secret life, that she'd spent four hundred dollars to unravel the lies he'd spun for her. Oh, she didn't know. She just didn't know.
She signed the check and handed it to Dave Hammett. His pale blue eyes seemed to fix upon hers and she couldn't break her own out of the interlock. She felt his fingers brushing her hand as he took the check, and there was a tingly sensation in her skin. Suddenly, instinctively, she knew that he was going to put his other arm around her, that he was going to pull her to him, that he was going to… Just as his lips touched hers and her eyes went shut, Melinda remembered. The name of that movie was The Thomas Crown Affair. As if it mattered.