Sex Between, The (15 page)

"I am not a pimp," Tony spat. "I am a husband. You have defiled my wife and my home."

Lee grinned. "Come off it, buddy. You know as well as I do what your wife is."

"Oh! You pig!" Cleo screamed behind her. "Tony, you know this is not true."

Curiously Lee glanced at Tony's face and watched the questions come and go behind his eyes. She could not believe that he did not know the story of Cleo's little hobby, wouldn't even believe she was the first sucker he had nailed in Cleo's bed. Yet...

Then she glanced back to Cleo and the whole scene began to make sense. For dear little Cleo had been planning a neat double-cross. Had planned to move out on Tony, go home with Lee and have the whole ripe plum to herself. Lee could see it in her eyes. Yet she could see too that Cleo was frightened, that she dared not let Tony discover what she had planned.

"Well," Lee said, talking directly to Cleo now, "it almost worked. I was going to take you home with me tonight." She laughed then and shrugged. "If you'd had sense enough to tell me he was coming, we could have been out of here before he arrived."

She watched Cleo's facade of rage begin to crumble. And she waited, knowing that the girl would betray herself.

"I did not believe you would do that," Cleo said. "You did not love me."

Lee knew then why Cleo had not warned her off. "But I needed you," she said. "If you had trusted me..."

"What the hell's going on here?" Tony said, moving to get between them. He grabbed his wife's arm. "You didn't tell me..."

Furiously, Cleo pulled away from him. "Let me go," she screamed. "I can't stand you to touch me."

And Lee smiled, watching the pendulum of Cleo's attention swing back to her. In a minute, Cleo would be begging Lee to take her away..
.

Tony's big hand shot out and caught Cleo full in the stomach. The girl went down in a heap, sobbing, tearing at the legs of his trousers.

Lee glanced down at her dispassionately, not caring if Cleo lived through it or died on the spot. At the moment, not really caring much about herself either. She had been a fool to mess around with a married woman. She had known it. Now, all she wanted was out. Any war she could get there.

"Fifty thousand," she said. "It'll take me a couple of days..."

Tony's right hand balled into a fist. "The price has gone up," he said. "I have been even more offended than I knew."

Lee kept an eye on the fist. "Collect the rest from Cleo," she said. "She's the one who owes you."

She ducked, but not fast enough. Tony's fist caught her cheek bone and spun her backwards. She felt her shoulder hit the windowsill and her head cracked into the wall.

She doubled over, clutching her shoulder against the barbs of pain. "Queer!" Tony came toward her, moving like a snow plow, ready to finish her.

And suddenly she was filled with a rage bigger than her fear and a hatred bigger than her guilt. She grabbed the foot arching toward her head and twisted it to the side. She wasn't heavy enough to throw him, but he was off-balance. Before he could charge again, she was on her feet and ready to kill.

It was the old one-two she had learned from a book. She had never tried it before. But she nailed him in the groin with one knee and slashed the side of her hand down on the back of his neck as he doubled over. The breath went out of him like a sigh. She leaned over him and grabbed hold of his lapel to roll him onto his back.

He blinked once, then closed bis eyes. She blinked back at him.

"He is dead," Cleo said from beside her shoulder.

Lee turned her head. "No," she said. She heard the surprise, the something like awe in her tone.

"You are very strong," Cleo said, her palm moving up the muscle of Lee's arm.

Lee caught Cleo's hand with her fingers. "No," she said again. "Just lucky." She shook her head. "I never would have believed it." She laughed. "But when you're a little squirt like me, it pays to know a couple of tricks."

Cleo put her forehead against Lee's shoulder. "I love you," she murmured.

Lee laughed. She jerked her head toward Tony. "For that?"

"No," Cleo said. "For you. I have loved you..."

Lee patted the hand Cleo had started roving along her thigh. "You'll get over it," she said.

"You do not believe me."

"No," Lee said. "I do not believe you."

She got up then and went into the bedroom. She glanced at her reflection in the dresser mirror and saw the lump beneath her right eye. Before long, she'd have a good shiner. It would go well with the ache in her head. She pulled on her jacket and stuffed her wallet into the pocket. Then she reached for the bottle of scotch and took one last swallow.

"Lee," Cleo wailed as she came back into the living room, "take me with you."

Tony had not moved. Lee gave him a shove with her foot. "Better see what you can do about him."

Cleo came across the floor toward Lee on her knees, "please take me with you," she begged. "He will kill me."

Lee looked at her for a moment. Then she said, "It wouldn't be much of a loss."

Without glancing back, she strode across the living room and banged out the front door.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Where do you run, when you're running away from yourself? How far? Where do you hide, when you can't stand to look at yourself? Is there any place big enough, dark enough?

She took the ticket out from under the windshield wiper and got into the car. What the hell was a ticket more or less? A few bucks she would never miss, an envelope, a stamp. And what the hell would it have mattered, paying Tony fifty thousand dollars? It was only money and she had made mistakes that had cost Kate more. But it wouldn't have stopped there with Tony Amato. He would have been on her neck for the rest of her life. Wanting money...

Money. She had heard from people like Helga what it meant to be without the stuff. How a woman would sometimes do anything for the sake of a buck. For herself, she had never known. There had always been money. To buy cars, to buy whisky, to buy women. To buy anything she could think of, anything she might want. And always before, there had been something she could think of. Something to make her a little less lonely, a little less aware of the nagging restlessness.

Now, she could think of nothing. Wherever she went, Maggie would not be there. Wherever she went, whoever she found, it would be like Cleo. In one way or another, it would be like Cleo. A dame out to get whatever she could and with nothing to give in return. And Lee couldn't take that now. Not now..
.

Gingerly she touched her fingertips to the growing knob on her cheek. It hurt, but not enough to penetrate the other pain. The pain that was Maggie and the guilt. She could clobber a fool like Tony Amato, a bastard who didn't matter a damn. But when it came to something important, when it came to Maggie, she just stood there like an impotent fool..
.

She could go home and listen to the quiet, but she knew that she would go insane if she had to sit in that house by herself. She could go to Helga, but that wouldn't be much of an improvement. She could go to a bar—finish off the drunk she had gotten started on. Take herself a nice long, lost weekend and wake up in a strange bed beside a strange body. She had done it often before. It never helped anything much, but for a few hours..
.

She headed south, driving slowly, almost aimlessly. She hated the Village, she hated the bars. There was something stigmatizing, almost dirty about hanging around downtown, obviously looking for a make. But she was wearing pants and sporting a black eye. Her mood didn't belong uptown either. It was an ugly thing, nasty and sadistic. A thing that wanted to get even... with herself and with all women, for the ones like Cleo. A thing that forgot, for the moment, that now and then a Maggie appeared.

By the time she found a parking space, she could have left the car at home and walked downtown. But it didn't matter. Filled with rage, with disgust, she did not expect anything to go right, wouldn't have known what to do with it if it had.

She hadn't made the rounds for a long, long time. But she had heard the rumors. Knew that the city had been cleaned up and had supposedly remained that way. It happened every few years, around election time. For a few weeks or months, the movement went underground, the bars becoming restaurants or dress shops, the dykes and the fags hanging around on street corners like lost birds without a nest. Then somebody would find a quiet little bar that felt like home. The word would get out.

The word was out about a place she wouldn't have been caught dead in a couple of years ago. It had been a posh place then, expensive, loud with jazz and very, very straight. Now, it was the place to go... the only place.

Lee could smell the stench of beer and pizza even before she shoved open the leather-trimmed, nail-studded door. And she knew, from too many years of experience, what she would find inside. The kids—eager, too anxious, hair shorn to a bristle, fat behinds stuffed into Brooks Brothers suits. The regulars—drunk before they got there, blasé and bored. The old timers—bent, hollow-eyed and lonely over their drinks, too tired, too bored, unable to care or even to get drunk any more. The pattern didn't change. Just the bars and the faces.

She pushed past the kids, standing three deep and noisy at the bar, and went on into the back room. A waitress in a tight black uniform waved her to a corner table.

"Scotch," Lee said. She spread a ten-dollar bill on the spotty white cloth. "Bring me a bottle."

The girl snatched up the bill and went out toward the bar.

The back room, big and brassy and filled with couples gazing into each other's eyes, was like many she had seen. But with a difference that jarred. Most of the places were so dark you needed a guide to get to the john. But here, a candle burned too brightly on each table and orange bulbs flickered near the ceiling. She turned her head to watch an elderly woman, sleek in black with a tight knotted bun of blonde hair, approach a couple sitting close together on the padded leather seat. The woman held up thumb and forefinger, stretched as far as she could get them. Sheepishly the girls grinned and moved apart.

She let her eyes rove over the room, looking at faces that were nothing but faces, bodies that were nothing but bodies. She saw the big signs plastered around die wall. NO DANCING. NO TABLE HOPPING. And she sighed, almost wistful, remembering the old days when bars had been dark, and women, in the darkness, had seemed mysterious. There was no mystery now, nothing to lure her out of the morbid depression rapidly creeping over her.

The waitress came back after what seemed hours and banged the bottle down on the table. "The bartender didn't like it," she said, holding the change clutched tight in her left hand.

Lee smiled. "Of course not," she said. "He makes more of a profit when he gets to water it down." She nodded toward the fistful of singles. "Keep it."

Deftly, the girl folded the bills around two fingers and stuffed the wad down the front of her dress. "Thanks," she grinned. "I'm Julie."

"Julie," Lee repeated. Carefully she worked the cork out of the bottle and set it into the ashtray While she did so, she let her eyes move slowly up Julie's frame to the pale white face.

It was an okay body. An okay face. Nothing you'd flip a lid about, but it would do just fine once you got too drunk to care anyhow. She poured herself a drink, aware that Julie had not moved, except to take the cork out of the ashtray.

"Look," Lee said after a moment, "I haven't been in the Village for a couple of years. What's a person supposed to do for fun?"

Julie laughed. "Same thing you always did, butch," she teased. "Pick up a girl and...
"

"I didn't mean that," Lee said quickly. "I mean, well, this place is like a morgue. I'm used to... " She shrugged.

Julie tilted her head, then sighed deeply. "Yeah," she said. "It used to be great, wasn't it? But you know the damned cops. They never let anybody have any fun."

Lee laughed. "Anyhow, where's to go in this town?"

"No place," Julie said. She picked up the ashtray and wiped out the inside with a napkin. "Unless... "

"Unless what?"

"Well, I'm finished here at three, unless you've got something better to do."

Very slowly, Lee emptied her glass, letting the scotch burn over the surface of her tongue. It was barely eleven o'clock. By three, she might be out under the table. By three, she might be dead. By three...

"Why not?" she said finally. She cocked an eyebrow and frowned. "But I'm warning you, Julie. You might have to carry me out of here. I aim to get very, very—"

"I know," Julie said abruptly. "Your behind was dragging when you walked in here."

She grinned suddenly and Lee saw the glint of gold caps on her back teeth. But they could have been solid brick for all she cared. Julie was just another body, after all. Just another night she had nothing better to do with.

"But that's okay," Julie went on. She patted the hollow between her breasts. "Besides, I've got enough for a cab."

Lee felt her eyebrows jerk hard. It didn't take a genius to add up the score with Julie. Julie liked to get knocked around. And Lee didn't blame the girl for the conclusion she had jumped to. By now, her right eye must look like it was wearing a disguise.

But that was fine. Just fine. She could use Julie tonight. And she leaned back, watching the girl go off to another table. Feeling the itch in her fingers, the need to smash, to beat, to hurt. She would give Julie what she wanted. And more.

She tilted the bottle over her glass and poured it full. Then she drank and smoked and tilted the bottle again. It felt like hours, the minutes between drinks. It felt like hours that she sat, getting stiff in the behind and achier in the head. People came, people went. Julie bustled around the smoky room, ignoring Lee except once to brush against her knee when she stopped at the adjacent table.

Still Lee sat and still she drank. And she knew after a while that she couldn't make it as far as the ladies' room if she had to. And she had to... But she waited, shifting uncomfortably, feeling like a swimmer beyond his depth.